Fingers

by William Sleator

  The room was so crammed with junk that getting across it was a labyrinthine proposition. There was no straight path. No matter which way you went, you could take no more than two or three steps before being confronted by some obstacle. Everywhere there were crates and bookcases piled with yellowed newspapers and magazines or stacks of dirty dishes or heaps of clothes. There did seem to be a sofa and an armchair, each draped haphazardly with a variety of printed fabrics, but since they were both pressed tightly against the back of a large chest of drawers, it seemed unlikely that any human being could be agile enough to sit down on them. That was probably just as well. For as I watched, what I had first thought to be a lot of fuzzy little pillows began to squirm and stretch and nuzzle one another. A couple of the cats made their way over the chest of drawers and jumped down to rub against the old man’s ankles.

  “Where’s Humphrey?”

  “Huh?” The man was bending over very slowly to pet the animals. “Oh, yeh, I understand. Is brother, who write music.”

  “I have to make sure he’s all right,” I said, meaning, “I have to make sure he’s really here.”

  “Yeh, sure, sure, I take you. But first I want show—”

  “No. First I see Humphrey. Just tell me where he is.”

  The old man flapped his hand impatiently. “But he sleep! Is nothing to see, to say to him. And I want show—”

  “Tell me where he is!”

  “Oh, yeh, yeh, I take,” he said irritably, pushed the cats away and tottered toward me. “Is up above. Follow.”

  The stairway was just opposite the door, so I did not have to thread my way across the room to reach it. I let the old man go first. I was burning with impatience now, but he took his time. The stairway was so steep that he literally had to crawl, pulling himself up with hands and feet, inch by trembling inch. At the top, we were again in complete darkness. With one hand against the wall, I followed what I thought was the gentle rasp of the old man’s breathing—until it stopped.

  “Hey, come on, let’s keep going,” I said, reaching forward to push him. Nothing was there.

  “Hey, what’s the matter? Where are you?” I blurted out. Then I shut up, to try to hear where he had gone. But the house itself made so many sighing and shuffling noises that I could not isolate his breathing, or even his footsteps. I began to panic and cursed my own stupidity. He didn’t have Humphrey at all. He had lured me here, had put me into this helpless position, and was now going to stab or shoot me in the darkness to get revenge for what we had done. “Hey, come on! Say something!” I called hollowly. It occurred to me, as I waited for an answer, that the medicinal odor was more pronounced up here. There was no answer. Then I recognized the odor. It was formaldehyde, the chemical used for preserving dead things in bottles. He wasn’t merely going to kill me. He was a maniac with a collection. After the murder he would can me in big glass Ball jars. Would the first jab of the knife be in my back or my stomach—or perhaps the side, just under my rib cage? As I thought of each location, the skin there began to itch. “Hey, where are you?” I called again. The hallway was miserably cold and damp, but I was sweating nonetheless. Probably the next thing I would feel would be a razor blade slicing through my jugular.

  “Is bloody stupidness!” shrieked the old man from somewhere off to the left. There was the sound of shattering glass and then a low moan. I must have jumped about a foot. “Aha! Is find at last,” he went on. A yellow light splashed across the wall, complete with the old man’s bent, flickering shadow. There was a doorway just ahead of me on the left. I hurried through.

  The old man was fussing with an oil lamp on a cluttered wooden table. In trying to find it in the darkness, he had knocked off some dirty teacups; I could see their fragments on the floor. More piles of old periodicals took up most of the space in the tiny room. There were many gaping wounds in the hideous flowered wallpaper, revealing the wooden lath underneath. A thin, grimy towel was tacked up over the one small window. Beneath the window, on a narrow and sagging institutional-type bed that could barely contain him, lay Humphrey, just waking up. “What’s that noise?” he grunted.

  In a moment I was kneeling beside the bed, awkwardly attempting to embrace him. “Humphrey,” I said. “It’s me, Sammy. I’m sorry, Humphrey, I’m so sorry.”

  He blinked his groggy little eyes and wiped his hand across his face. “Do you serve towels with your showers, Sam?” he said.

  12

  HE MUST have developed a slight tolerance to the drug. Bridget had certainly dosed him often enough. But the pill still had some effect. Humphrey was only half awake, and definitely not his normal self.

  I pulled away from him slightly. “But I mean it, Humphrey,” I said. “I truly am sorry about all the horrible things I’ve ever done, and especially about the way I told you about what was happening. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, and yawned.

  “Listen to me, Humphrey!” I screamed, shaking him. “I love you. Do you hear me? I love you.” The shake had turned into another awkward embrace. “I love you more than anything, Humphrey. Don’t you understand?”

  “Sure, Sam,” he said, smacking his lips in a familiar, irritating way. His eyelids began to slide shut “You’re my brother. I’m supposed to love you, too.”

  I was appalled. Where was the passionate outpouring of emotions I had imagined, the remorse, the tearful explanations, and finally the forgiveness I craved? I felt like a wanderer in the desert who had finally reached the distant oasis, my body poised in anticipation of the first life-saving drink. Humphrey was offering me the dry dust of a mirage. I squeezed his face between my two hands, forgetting about the old man. “But Humphrey, don’t you even care? After what I told you about the whole thing being just a trick, remember? How I make up the Magyar pieces and then we drug you and just plant them? Don’t you even want to know how I feel, how sorry I am? Don’t you even want to tell me how you feel?”

  “I tol’ you, I don’ wanna talk about it now,” he mumbled, rolling over on the bed to face away from me. Whether it was the drug, or some kind of avoidance mechanism on his part, or a combination of both, the result was the same. I shook him, I slapped him, I pulled his hair. And he refused to be conscious.

  Finally I pushed him away and stood up. I saw the filthy towel and smelled the formaldehyde, and the fact of where I was registered. But it seemed insignificant compared to the unsatisfied emotions that pierced me. I could have been an addict on withdrawal. The practical importance of what I had just done did not begin to dawn on me until, in the distance, I heard a voice say, “So is you who are composing and not Humpy at all.”

  “Huh?” I said slowly, turning around.

  A funny-looking little old man stood in a wretchedly squalid room. “So is you who are composing the Magyar, yes?” he asked me through a big grin, lamplight glittering in his excited eyes.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, and sank down onto the bed. What a pathetic ass I was! Even after the blow he’d received, Humphrey had resisted whatever urge he might have had to give us all away. And then I had stepped in and let the whole story gush hysterically out of me. “God, what a dope!” I said.

  “But I no understand. You are compose the Magyar, yeh?”

  On the other hand, why shouldn’t I tell him? The scheme was finished now, I saw with relief—neither Humphrey nor I would be able to keep it up any longer. And probably the old guy had already been planning to expose us anyway. “But … oh, well, I guess it doesn’t matter any more. Yeah, I’m the one who cranks out the crap,” I told him. “The whole thing …” I gulped. “Well, it’s just a fake. You must have known it was.”

  “Fake … I knew?” He was closer, leaning over me.

  “Sure. If anybody could see it was phony, it would be you. You’re the authority on his life and work, the writer of his biography; you knew everything about him.” It was all falling into place now as I spoke. I hardly had to do any thinking at all. “I me
an look.” I gestured bleakly at the room. “You’re his only son and obviously not making any money from his music. And then we come along with these fake concoctions and start raking in the cash. No wonder you followed us around; no wonder you said things to try to frighten us. Of course it was unfair, and you wanted to stop it. Well, now you don’t have to. I stopped it for you.”

  “I … see,” he said, his head maintaining that tremble of permanent assent, his eyes still excited. “So newspaper is wrong? My father no come to talk with one who compose?”

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t rub it in. I already feel guilty enough about Humphrey and everything else.”

  “Ah, is too bad then.” He rubbed his hands, gazing past me with a faraway look. “And I so anticipate to ask what he say about … oh, about so many things.” He laughed. “Even about his … how you say? … oh, yes, about his love life on other side. I am so sure he mention that thing, yeh.”

  “Oh, come on!” I pleaded, and pushed myself up from the bed. “I understand how you must feel. You want to get revenge, to take it out on somebody. But it’s not really my fault Bridget made me do it. That’s our mother, Bridget, you know.”

  “She make you do compose?”

  “Yes. And I know that sounds like passing the buck, but it isn’t really. I tried to get out of it I didn’t want to do it, but she’s like … How can I describe it? She’s like a force of nature or something. I mean once she makes up her mind, no one can stop her.”

  “Yeh. Is all very interest, how happen.” He beckoned to me to follow him, turning to leave the room. “Come. I show.”

  I felt a curious reluctance. “But … but I should stay with Humphrey?”

  “Why? He fine, he safe. He sleep. No can forgive you when he sleep. In morning when he wake, can forgive you then. Come.”

  Now I felt more foolish. He made my profound emotions sound so petty. I followed him, more to explain myself than for any other reason. “You have to understand how it was,” I said, feeling a certain relief in letting it all pour out, even though he probably comprehended only half of what I was saying. “The whole thing was Bridget’s idea. And until just a few hours ago, Humphrey didn’t know anything. He thought it was real. There was a reason for that …”

  I went on talking as I followed him up another ladderlike flight of stairs. I told him about Bridget’s idea of fooling Humphrey and then being skeptical ourselves, in order to make the story less implausibly. “And it worked,” I said, as we reached the top and were confronted with darkness again: he couldn’t climb holding the lamp, and I hadn’t thought to bring it. “We even fooled the experts.”

  “Yeh, but if music no good, no fool nobody,” he said, invisible ahead of me. “How you do that, make the music?”

  “You mean you liked it? You didn’t think it was … an insult to your father’s name?”

  “Yeh, yeh, sure I like.” This floor had the same layout as the one below. I still couldn’t see anything, but I sensed him turning off to the left and followed close behind. “So tell me,” he said impatiently, making a lot of noise as he fumbled for another lamp. “How you do music, I ask you!”

  The unexpected praise, and the darkness vibrating before my eyes, made me curiously lightheaded Or perhaps it was the poisonous reek of formaldehyde, so strong now it was intoxicating. “I just did it!” I said gaily. It felt good to be recognized at last. “I just sat down and scribbled. I used some American folk tunes, the way he used Gypsy songs. And I put in sounds I heard around me, like weather sounds or traffic noises.” I laughed. “Or people blowing their noses or going to the bath—”

  Curses interrupted me as more breakable objects met the floor. He was amazingly clumsy; one would have thought he would be less inept at lighting the lamps, since he had to do it every day. “Ah, is here!” he said, and struck a match. The flame lit his face eerily from below; his eyes sparkled at me out of deep, shadowy pits. “Yeh, now I show.” He chuckled and touched the wick.

  For the first time it occurred to me to wonder just what it was he kept babbling about showing me. Some battered old trinkets of his father’s no doubt. I wanted him to get it over with so I could go on bragging about my compositions. The wick flared.

  “After the first one or two, I wasn’t even trying to copy him,” I said, as the room appeared. The style of the decor remained consistent: more junk blackened by the grime of decades, more tattered piles of books and papers, more peeling wallpaper and rags and crumbling plaster. Only here there was an old upright piano instead of a bed, its black enameled finish blistered and cracked. The top was littered with falling-apart volumes of music, except for the space occupied by a large cylindrical glass jar, sealed with a cork. The pale objects float ing inside were obscured by a thick coat of dust on the glass. “Hey, what’s in that jar?” I asked.

  “I no understand,” he mumbled without turning around, preoccupied with stacks of papers on a small desk.

  “Forget it, I can look for myself,” I said. I went over to the piano and rubbed some of the dust off the glass. Then I swallowed, hard. All of a sudden I was sitting down on the piano bench.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, when I was able to talk. My voice was so weak that the old man didn’t hear or respond. I went on sitting there and staring dumbly at the hands in the jar.

  They were a uniform waxen beige color, except for the long black hairs that sprouted from the knuckles and undulated lazily in the formaldehyde. They seemed shrunken somehow, shriveled, and there was a little grime under the fingernails—Diisseldorf dirt? The skin hung in ragged wisps where they had been severed at the wrist, and a limp blood vessel protruded wormlike from one of them. But the most disturbing thing about them was the unusual bone structure, the broad flat palms, the long, widely-spaced fingers that thickened toward the first joint and then tapered curiously toward the nails. They could have been Humphrey’s hands.

  “I thought … In the book, you said they were lost,” I said at last.

  “What is lost?” Now he was poking around on his hands and knees in the mess underneath the desk.

  “The hands! Magyar’s hands, of course. Isn’t that what you wanted to show me?”

  “Oh, hands!” He smiled jovially up at me. “Is interesting, yeh?”

  “I thought you said they had been lost”

  “Oh, no, no.” He flapped his hand as though dismissing a foolish question. “That just story I make up. I like make up stories. I tell them. They believe. But what really happen …” He gave me a conspiratorial wink “I take. But why let world know I take? Keep secret, yeh?”

  “What about the … the head? Is that just a story, too?”

  “No. Damn Sister got,” he said heatedly. “She come say God tell her; they give. Not give to me. Me not big importance. Damn Sister take. So I put in book. Many people go perhaps see, make nuisance at bloody convent” He shrugged and went back to his search.

  What did he want with these grisly relics? And if he had simply invented the story about the missing hands, then how much else in the book was invented? “Your father’s hands,” I said. “They look just like Humphrey’s hands.”

  “Huh?” he said from the floor.

  “The hands, they look just like Humphrey’s!” I repeated. “I’ve never seen any other hands shaped like that.”

  “Aha, yeh, this I notice when Humpy write in program,” he said, not turning around. “I tell you that before. Is interesting, yeh?”

  I was beginning to be irritated by his preoccupation with the floor. “What are you doing, anyway?” I demanded.

  “Is what I want show,” he said. “I search to find.”

  I stood up. “Isn’t that what you wanted to show me?” I cried, waving at the hands.

  “Aha, is here, at last long,” he said, and slowly struggled to his feet; beaming, an ancient leather satchel clasped to his chest.

  “Who says I want to see any more?” I muttered. “Maybe I’ve seen enough already.” The hands had been a shock.
I didn’t like the way the dead things resembled Humphrey’s hands. I didn’t like this cold and filthy house. I didn’t like the old man’s unpredictability. Instead of clearing up my problems, he was only making everything more confusing.

  Now he was searching through the drawers of the desk. “Is key, I know somewhere is key,” he murmured. The satchel had an old metal lock on it, I noticed.

  “What is this thing you want to show me, anyway?”

  “Aha, is interesting, yeh. You see.”

  At least I could assure myself that it wasn’t going to be Magyar’s head. Even if the story about the convent was a lie, there was no cranial bulge in that satchel.

  I might have considered getting Humphrey and myself away from the old lunatic immediately, except that it was too much trouble to try to figure out where we would go when we left the house. I wondered vaguely about Bridget and Luc and looked at my watch. It was one-thirty. I tried to imagine what they were doing at this moment and couldn’t. Their predicament might have been amusing, only they seemed so terribly distant from me—probably because I assumed that they would never be able to find us here …

  “Aha, is key! Now I show.” He could have been a genial Christmas gnome chortling over some marvelous toy. His hands trembling, he struggled with the lock. There seemed to be absolutely nothing of a mechanical nature that he didn’t have trouble with. He tried the key one way and then the other; he pulled and jiggled the clasp; he swore and he drooled and finally he handed the thing to me.

  “I’m no good with locks either,” I said. But at least I knew enough to set the satchel down on the desk before trying to open it. The problem was that the lock and key were both so rusty. “This thing hasn’t been opened in years,” I said.

  He shrugged. “No need. I know is there.”

  In the unlikely event that there was something valuable here, it would have been safe, camouflaged by all the obviously worthless junk. “But it’s impossible!” I said after a few minutes. “Just tell me what’s in it.”