The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Afterword:

  On The Crawling Hand

  by Montese Crandall

  The Crawling Hand, as directed by Herbert L. Strock and released in 1963, has to be one of the finest films ever made, in this or any other century. Though it cannot be disputed that the acting is somewhat rudimentary, though the sets are ridiculous and look as if they were just pasted up, though the story is capable of causing spasms of laughter, it is, I intend to argue, a masterpiece. Yes, the dialogue is so awkward that it nearly, through ironistic transformation, disarms you into believing that it is something else entirely. Because I have now seen the film twenty-one or twenty-two times, I can recall portions of this dialogue, and because repetition and attention and commitment to even the worst examples of entertainment improve them considerably, these lines have come to assume, for me, yes, the dimensions of poetry:

  It’s the press

  What do we tell them?

  Tell them we just sent

  Our second man

  To the moon

  And he’s not coming back either…

  Even the credit sequence is sloppy, in which a mostly dead astronaut, upon returning from the moon, is poised, is frozen, like an unused marionette, before the enormous viewing window of his capsule. There is the crashing of the orchestral cymbals on the soundtrack to indicate the shooting of stars. From a distance of half a century, this credit sequence looks remarkably clumsy, like a film as you might make it at home, except that of course these days homemade films are often widely distributed, and they are some of the most popular and successful films being made in this country.

  We don’t pretend to know all the answers…

  Apparently no one does.

  The sound is dreadful too. Did I say that already? You can scarcely hear what’s being said. Did they not try to improve on that? Did they loop nothing? Everyone smokes too much. Nonstop smoking. The point is this. If The Crawling Hand is one of the sloppiest and most ill-conceived pieces of cinema, which it arguably is, what accounts for its enduring cultural value? Why is it that the film has never vanished into obscurity the way, for example, C.H.U.D. (1984) has vanished into obscurity, or the way Sunspots (2017), that big-budget extravaganza about diaphanous beings from the sun leading the citizens of Earth to their spiritual redemption, has disappeared from cultural memory?

  The success of The Crawling Hand has, it should be said, something to do with the arm itself, with the plangent qualities of that sightless limb, and this is just what I was saying to my chess-playing friend D. Tyrannosaurus the day on which we were finally concluding our chess match. The game had proceeded by telephone initially, but in time it became clear that weeks were going to pass before one of us proved victorious. I don’t know who D. was calling for strategic counsel, some working girl perhaps, but he seemed to require much preparation in order to make his moves. We therefore determined that despite the earlier agreements on the subject, we were going to bring the match to fruition in person once again, at the café called Ho Chi Minh.

  It was a rout, I don’t have to tell you, because I am really the much better player, though clearly D. Tyrannosaurus, whose actual name was Tyrone (as he had belatedly admitted), had misrepresented his inabilities in order to attempt to throw me off. I had felt, as one often feels in life, let down by Tyrone, and not only because of his name or his chess skills. For example, I once suggested that we go to a minor league baseball game in the Rio Blanco area, where the local affiliate was doing rather well, and that isn’t the sort of thing I would have done had I known his only purpose was to swindle.

  I was being taken, you see; that was what it was all about, and I didn’t appreciate being taken, and who would? When I encountered him at the Ho Chi Minh, for the purposes of the endgame, I should say, he had lost much of his luster. Tyrone was no longer attempting to straighten himself up in the way he had before. He had let himself slide. He was just another dreamy con artist. Is it the way of all obsessions that they consume their subjects? Was Tyrone simply tired out from his long boondoggle in the Southwest, attempting to persuade a reputable dealer of baseball cards to give him that one last precious item?

  Liftoff from the moon

  Perfect.

  One hour later

  Nothing.

  Our match was completed in candlelight, and there was not much to it, and I wish that I could give you an exciting account of the game, in which there was psychological maneuvering in order to gain the upper hand. But this would be to descend into the blandly technical. I will say, though, that I have spent some time considering the sighing of chess players, and have wondered if it might be possible to somehow codify these chess-playing sighs, as though to indicate that certain kinds of sighs can, in particular circumstances, have a strategic role. For example, I noticed that one of the younger Hungarian grand masters, whose name escapes me, was given to a sigh that I came to name the Slow Leak. It didn’t really count as a sigh exactly, and perhaps I am overreaching by even using this word to refer to it. But the Slow Leak is really the perfect description. You know the way some people release a little bit of air, under a certain amount of compression between their teeth, and it’s really exactly like a balloon deflating? This Hungarian grand master had perfected, above all, the deployment of the Slow Leak, which he would use especially when the other player was just about to move, was, perhaps, reaching out to move the piece. In the Hungarian’s matches, the video simulcast would always have a close-up of the faces of the players; you could see the frustration in some of his opponents during the Slow Leak. Their heads rested in their hands.

  I did not sigh this particular sigh while playing against Tyrone, but there’s another that is very effective, and this sigh is known as the Appaloosa. This, my friends, is the ugliest of all sighs. It involves letting the lips go free as the air is forced out of the mouth. The Appaloosa is a disruptive, nearly violent sigh in the context of a chess match. It is likely that the first chess player to make use of the Appaloosa was a man from some Western milieu such as the one in which I am writing these lines, where freight trains pass on the half hour and horses are as common as jet packs. This chess player, in whatever century he existed, was used to the snorting of the horses he regularly bred, and perhaps he was acquainted with the Nez Percé and their particular breed, the Appaloosa, and perhaps he had fallen in love with the idiosyncrasies of this particular Appaloosa, its nickering, and despite its tremendous ugliness and the whites of its eyes, which are so arresting, this chess player realized that the snorts of the Appaloosa would be perfect in a very close chess match. The results had to have been good, and so the Appaloosa, the chess-related sigh, went into more common usage, from which it has never since disappeared.

  There are other varieties of sighs that work very well in amateur chess, and which have on occasion led to major victories. But the sighs do not work on chess automata, which take no notice of the less-becoming aspects of human behavior. Still, it’s what happens alongside the chessboard that’s interesting; it’s all the gestures that would seem routine or uninteresting to anyone who happened by, that’s where the action is in the chess match. Chess is human relations. But if I must: Tyrone’s opening was the so-called Nimzo-Larsen opening, which, when commonly practiced among, especially, Sino-Indian players, starts first with the knight on the king’s side (to F3), followed by (when an advanced player, like yours truly, elects to develop the center in reply) the pawn at B3, after which we get the fianchetto, or “little flanking.”

  Perhaps Tyrone believed he was playing an original game, because he was not developing the pawns in front of the king or queen (D4 and E4), as in the conventional opening, and, probably, he imagined that I would somehow be unwitting about the Nimzo-Larsen or Nimzo-Indian opening, but my knowledge of the world is broad.

  Can’t make it

  Losing control

  It makes my arm move…

  Kill! Kill!

  Between rhinoviral sighs, and while Tyrone was laboring try
ing to understand my strategy, I began to speak to the symbolism of The Crawling Hand.

  “Have you actually seen the film? Have you seen the original?”

  “Interesting question,” Tyrone mumbled, and in taking up this interesting question I intuited that he would be prevented from seeing how my knight inclined toward B4, which in turn threatened his queen’s bishop. “I guess,” he went on, “you’re asking whether you really need the film at all in order to make a, you know, a decent novelization? Now that I’ve done a few, actually, now that I’ve done a lot of them, I’d say that I’ve done them in different kinds of ways. You know, sometimes I’ve taken a shine to the material, even though most of the time these films are very bad. Sometimes something just comes over you, and you resonate with the product, you feel it, you find something from your own life that makes it resonate. Those are actually the harder ones to write, though. These days, they send me the script, I don’t even see the film. I retype the script, insert some he saids and she saids, descriptions. Not that I want to give away the trade secrets. But, you know, keep a fashion magazine around for the—”

  Moving his pawn forward, soon to be blocked by one of my own.

  “—for the sake of the descriptive parts, that kind of thing.”

  I attempted to interrupt: “So you haven’t seen—”

  “I didn’t even know there was an earlier film, really. Until you mentioned it that time. The horror thing, I don’t know.”

  Coffee futures being what they were, the price had again risen while we were playing, and when the robotic purveyor arrived, we asked for the popular substitute made of toasted hickory. Tasted like pencil shavings. I didn’t want the jittery feeling. I needed to stay calm for the prize at hand.

  “Would you like to know some more of the things that I find so wonderful about the original film?”

  “One… second.”

  Kindnesses, flatteries, dishonest intellectual exchanges that I now presumed were part of our acquaintance, precluded any genuine elaboration on my enthusiasms. However, with an Appaloosa sigh, I launched into some exegetical remarks about The Crawling Hand just the same, remarking that it was important to think of the film in the context of the Manichaean era in which it was produced, the time of the very earthly and very flawed struggle between economic models, the time of the global Cold War, the outcome of which we know, of course, from our modern historical analyses. But if the film was produced in the context of that Manichaean structure, it also had Manichaean dialectical notions implicit within. As when Augustine of Hippo inveighed against the passivity of a knowledge-based relationship with God, I told Tyrone, The Crawling Hand promoted a death-is-not-the-end version of human life in which a man falls from the sky, or at least a portion of him does, and because he has fallen away from the struggle for good, he is portrayed as already given over to malevolence or sin. I also mentioned to Tyrone that he should read, if he had any time, Mani’s book of Secrets, which is alluded to by Paul, the leading man in the original film. Paul, in the film, speaks to the importance of secrets, because, I said, Paul tries to conceal the presence of the arm and, later, the fact that he has been infected by it.

  Tyrone was not listening. I took his rook at F7, and the game began to collapse from under him.

  Naturally, I said, I understood that horror films did not move a preponderance of right-thinking folks to wonderment, especially not those high-end dealers in antiquities who attempted to filch from the lowly regional bottom-feeders, those who have made a livelihood out of collecting with patience and vision over decades. Did Tyrone ever have a box full of doubles under his bed that he knew would come in handy in thirty years’ time? I imagined that he only understood the blue book value of the very rarest cards, and had been employed by some rich guy to make these acquisitions, and that was his job now. Perhaps he only enjoyed the theater of his attempts, the getting up close, the deceiving, the leaving town. Maybe there were a number of varieties of flattery that he’d used on me that could be codified into some kind of rule book for dealers in antiquity. Chapter One: Finding the mark. Settling in. How to make conversation with a person who has never had a fulfilling social life.

  “I love the scene at the soda shop, or is it a diner, with the two girls, where there’s some kind of doo-wop music playing in the background that the teenagers are attempting to dance to. The proprietor of the store comes in and indicates that there should be no dancing in the burger joint, no dancing, and of course it always reminds me of Cotton Mather’s injunctions against Terpsichore, you know, young people dance and go down to hell. The scene proceeds,” I went on, “and we get our first shot of the leading male, Paul Lawrence, and he has a sort of sullen, learning-disabled aspect to him, which makes his later bacterial infection seem all the more convincing, and as he and his girlfriend, Marta, are about to leave for the beach, the jukebox kicks in with ‘The Bird’s the Word,’ by the Rivingtons, later reconfigured into that classic of early rock and roll ‘Surfin’ Bird.’ ”

  “Why—”

  “Still, the best sequences in the film are those in which the arm attacks people. I just love that stuff. There are two different ways to film the arm. Or this is how I reconstruct it. In general, the black-and-white horror film is, I’d agree, completely superior to its Technicolor relative, which was already, by 1963, edging out the competition. So anyway, the two ways to film the arm are, first, with a live actor just out of frame, where the arm can wiggle its fingers, you know, and then, second, there are the sequences with the rubberized severed arm that the actors need to hold flush to their own throats as they mime strangulation. The rubber arm is great in the case of Mrs. Hotchkiss, the woman who rents out Paul Lawrence’s room to him,” I explained. “She gives a wooden, monotonous performance, especially in the delivery of her lines, until the moment when the arm somehow jumps up from the floor in order to attack her. Then she sputters and flails around before falling to the ground so that they can cut between the rubberized arm and the live actor’s arm. Mrs. Hotchkiss gives the performance her all. A memorable bit, right? The filmmakers get down to business. It’s not like The Blob, where you have to wait so long for the blob to turn up.”

  You’ve just got to trust me!

  If this is what I think it is,

  It could be very important for me!

  A number of strategic exchanges had taken place on the chessboard, and I must confess that the rather long time between moves made it hard for me to concentrate effectively. This was perhaps Tyrone’s only path to victory, to bore me sufficiently. This match should not have reached the endgame stage, I warrant, because Tyrone was mistaken about his talents, but I wanted to allow Tyrone to believe that he had been in the hunt for a long time, not simply plowed under, so that I would appear to have won the novelization fair and square. This required skillful playing. As I say, I offered a few pieces. He couldn’t have known, however, that we were coming to one of my favorite endgames, the bishop and pawn endgame.

  It was for chess-related reasons that the conversation took a turn into a kind of terrain that I would refer to as provocative, or mean-spirited, even mildly abusive, and I suppose it did so because when competition rears its head, when the loser perceives that he is the loser—in the ghastly moment of zugzwang, the moment in which any move is a bad move—then it is axiomatic that the outcome can no longer be delayed. The hand-to-hand begins, the mano a mano. Thus it was that Tyrone said:

  “What makes you think you’re going to be able to write the novelization anyway? It’s not like you have any experience.”

  The blackout had begun again, as I say, and now Ho Chi Minh had all but emptied of its excessively tanned and underemployed counterculturalists and university dropouts. The musty smell of snuffed candles was much in the air, a smell that anyone can love. I might have riposted to the dinosaur that I had written plenty of things, that the implications of my kind of story went beyond the margin of the page into my spectacularly boiled-down evocations of psychology.
But what I said was:

  “The same thing that probably makes you think that you are a fine chess player.”

  What was it that Tyrone wanted? The interloper? As he blew a move with his bishop that would have, were he more adept, perhaps kept my king from heading boldly to the center of the board. Did Tyrone not want me to massacre him? Was there not some wish to be laid low by such as I, a small white man, with modest expectations for the last couple of decades of his life, in a forgotten corner of NAFTA? Tyrone could have done many things, he was brilliant, he was affable, he was usually sharply turned out, he’d had a spectacular education. Was he, too, just another one of the people who never managed to turn promise into anything concrete?

  He held his great, dark brow in his hands as though it were made of crystal, as if the position of his men would somehow shatter his very brow. I had no conviction about where, when his hand flew from his temple, it would alight. But as it swept toward the king, his white king, my heart lifted up, and I felt in myself a great lofting into the skies, as he toppled the king onto its side.

  And then the cocksure exterior that Tyrone had exhibited over the weeks seemed to vanish away. He became almost mute, he murmured a few syllables that I couldn’t make out, and then he reached into his valise, the valise he had brought to the café, claiming that he would soon have to fly anyway, and produced the flash drive containing the screenplay, entitled The Four Fingers of Death. He fetched it out like it was just a trifle—without any sense of what the thing meant to me.

  “One of us goes away with the prize,” Tyrone said, “and one of us goes back to the airport, and flies on to, uh, Dayton.”

  “Well, I want to say,” I told him, “that this has been a very agreeable transaction.”

  I sure could use a beer…

  Me, too, but we can’t stop now.

  I bet there’s one in the kitchen.