The White Hands and Other Weird Tales

by Mark Samuels

  Inside the box were fashioned recesses in which the black pieces rested. But I could find no white pieces, and no recesses in the box for them. I looked up at the assistant, who was eyeing me with barely concealed boredom.

  ‘How much?’ I asked, wondering why I was bothering with the thing at all.

  ‘As it’s only half-complete, say £10.’

  I nodded my assent, put the black queen into my pocket and wrote out a cheque. When she took it from me her expression was distasteful, perhaps as a consequence of my banking at Coutts in the Strand. I suspect that she regretted not having asked for more.

  When I left the shop it was raining outside and I hastily buttoned up my mackintosh. The edge of the chess box dug uncomfortably into my ribs as I walked along the deserted, rain-sodden streets. I put my free hand into my pocket and found the queen that I had slipped in there.

  As I drew it out I dropped the thing on the pavement. It lay in a puddle, and I hesitated before retrieving it. I was sure that the piece had wriggled sharply in my hand like a worm. . . .

  By the time I got back to my house I’d managed to convince myself that the writhing chess piece had been an hallucination brought on by mental strain. I slumped down in a chair and took the chess set from the plastic bag provided by the assistant, opened the box and let the contents spill onto my desk. It occurred to me that in order to test my mental sharpness, it might be a good exercise to play a game against myself.

  I gathered the scattered black pieces and put them in place on the board opposite some ordinary white pieces from another set. The black ones looked like a regiment of misshapen demons. At that moment it did not seem quite so ridiculous to believe that the queen had actually squirmed in my fist. I began with white, moving a pawn to e4. But before my fingers reached the black pawn it moved of its own accord to c6. The movement was swift and I heard a little thump as the piece settled forcefully on the square. I stared in disbelief.

  After some hesitation, I stretched out a trembling hand and played d4. My eyes focused and unfocused as I awaited a reply. Another black pawn thumped down aggressively on d5. I bit my fist and drew blood. My brain was swimming. The room seemed to be closing in around me, the shadows lengthening. I reached over to my cigarettes and stuck one in my mouth, lit it, and sucked the smoke greedily into my lungs, rapidly inhaling and exhaling as I struggled to get a grip on my sanity.

  Black was playing an outrageous variation on the Caro-Kann. I spotted its significance after two more of my own moves. It was a strategy of titanic deviousness. Unless I could recover I was bound to lose a knight. Suddenly I knew that I must not lose this game. I did not know what losing would mean, but the mere thought of it filled me with unfathomable dread.

  The cigarette I held had burnt down to a drooping finger of ash. The debris detached itself and fell onto the board.

  Something blew it away. I heard a rasping, hollow wheeze, an asthmatic exhalation fading gradually to silence.

  I played on, moving the pieces with slippery fingers from which I was periodically forced to wipe the sweat with a handkerchief. Five moves later black broke through and his misshapen pieces gradually scrabbled towards my surrounded king. And finally, when black delivered checkmate, I felt a searing, intolerable pain shooting into my face and left hand. The pain was so great that I toppled sideways and writhed on the floor in agony. Half an hour later, though it seemed like an eternity, the sensation ebbed away and I got to my feet.

  I was changed.

  ***

  Father Mooney sat patiently during the hiatus that followed. Leonard Hughes seemed to be fighting for breath and his heavy gasps fell and rose disturbingly.

  ‘Can you continue?’ The priest said.

  ‘I think . . . it’s best . . . if I show . . . you, Father.’ Hughes said between breaths.

  The effort involved in recounting the tale seemed to have exhausted him. Father Mooney heard the door of the confessional being opened. Hughes staggered out, and Father Mooney followed. He stood there in the church, facing the stranger, still unable to make out his features clearly due to the scarf wrapped high around the chin, and the turned-down hat. Father Mooney had experienced nothing like this before. It was an encounter with the sort of problem that had previously seemed safely confined solely to medieval theology. Could something beyond God’s mercy have really entered the portals of his church?

  Slowly, reluctantly, Hughes removed his hat and scarf. He was still fighting for breath, but seemed to have gained at least a modicum of control over his lungs.

  The man was obviously still in agony for his face was constantly contorting from grimace to scowl. As his expressions changed it was as though his features altered, and although it unsettled Father Mooney, it also intrigued him that at times the stranger’s visage appeared familiar.

  ‘You recognise the face? I can see it in your eyes, Father.’ Hughes said.

  Now that his memory had been jogged Father Mooney also began to feel that the wheezing breath was familiar to him.

  It all came back.

  Father Mooney remembered Boris Petrovski. He remembered the chess player’s devilish face across the board during the 1964 Masters’ Tournament in Kiev: the tortured brow, the ferocious eyes glaring beneath shaggy eyebrows, the sardonically curling lip, the way he ran his tongue across his long teeth in a feral manner and, above all, the heaving of his weak lungs, deafeningly asthmatic, during play. He had been a player of immense deviousness. Mooney had taken only a single game from him, but this, coupled with a series of three draws, was ranked as brilliance against a player then considered to be one of the greatest ever to have graced the world of chess. There was absolutely no doubt that Petrovski possessed a genius of the first order but there was also something very disturbing about him. He had an uncanny skill, virtually telepathic, of unsettling his opponent and ruining their concentration. It was as if one were being contaminated by malevolence.

  Petrovski socialised with no one. At tournaments he was avoided and detested. For this reason he did not achieve the recognition that he felt was due from his peers and from commentators on the game. His ability to alienate even admirers of his play was remarkable. Such was the animosity he aroused that records of his matches were extremely sketchy. Petrovski’s own notes were never published and he made sure that they were destroyed shortly before his death. He hated the thought of anyone else benefiting from his genius. It was even said by his detractors that Petrovski dabbled in dubious occult practices, and that this was responsible for his serpentine deviousness and his frighteningly accurate power of anticipation.

  When Mooney had defeated him that one time it had been due to a continuous shifting of his strategy requiring almost intolerable mental gymnastics. He had proved that it was possible to counter Petrovski, but one risked forfeiting the game by exceeding the time limit. Relying on this utterly draining method of play was thus hazardous, but no other tactic had ever succeeded.

  Some said that it was the mental strain of playing Petrovski that had caused Mooney to abandon his career as a professional chess player. It was after this that he had pursued the private study of theology that eventually culminated in his reception into the priesthood some years later.

  ‘Will you come with me Father?’ Hughes said.

  ‘I know what I have to do.’ The priest replied. He turned to the altar, genuflected, and went to fetch his hat and coat.

  ***

  Hughes’ house in Highgate was littered with newspaper clippings of chess columns, scribbled chess notation and pages torn from chess manuals. There were piles of chess books jammed into corners. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke. In the centre of his study stood a large table topped with a chessboard: with a start Father Mooney recognised it as Petrovski’s purple and gold board. The room was lit by a profusion of candles that, in the gathering twilight, cast flickering shadows on the walls.

  Father Mooney crossed the study and looked down at the misshapen chess pieces. They were eve
n more horrible than the mental images Hughes’ narrative had formed in his imagination. The white pieces were from an ordinary modern set. Father Mooney ran his fingers over the chess clock.

  ‘Sit down and play Father.’ Hughes gasped, his words breaking the train of Father Mooney’s thoughts. Could it really be Petrovski who addressed Father Mooney now? The priest noted that Petrovski’s accent had shifted to thick, guttural Russian. It seemed that all this was leading up inexorably to a rematch between himself and the Russian. But why?

  The most likely explanation was also the most outrageous. There had been those rumours about Petrovski’s interest in the occult. There were some who had believed that Petrovski had found a way of employing the forces of the Qlippoth, the reverse structure of the universe in Kabbalistic magic. It supposedly gave black an almost irresistible advantage in play over the board. The rumours had been that Petrovski had gone so far as to create his own chess set based on this arcanum. But the Russian was dead, wasn’t he?

  ‘Play.’ The voice said.

  ***

  Father Mooney leaned over the board, looked at it for the fifth time and then glanced at his clock. If he continued playing at such a slow rate he would forfeit the game. His mouth was painfully dry and he longed for a glass of cool water. He didn’t dare look at his opponent’s face again. He’d made that mistake once before. He thanked God that candles rather than electricity lighted the room and that the shadowy horror across the board was only partially visible. There was a wolfish gleam in Petrovski’s eyes as he played and a mocking sneer on his lips despite the continuous, painful wheezing of his lungs.

  The game was going very badly for the priest. And yet he was undoubtedly playing the best chess of his life. His multifaceted strategy was even more brilliant than the one he’d used when he defeated Petrovski all those years ago. But his opponent was playing with contemptuous speed and power. He made Father Mooney’s moves seem like the fumblings of a beginner.

  Father Mooney checked to see how many minutes had passed and pushed his queen forward. He stopped the clock on his side.

  Petrovski replied instantly and, to the priest’s horror, he realised he must lose the piece.

  Father Mooney countered, only staving off absolute disaster by forfeiting one of his bishops in addition to the queen. Of course he could not resign. But now he teetered on the brink of the pit. He found his concentration failing. The wheezing of Petrovski’s lungs was becoming louder.

  Nothing came to Father Mooney. He sat staring at the board. The clock was ticking away. His time was virtually up. Every possible counter-move seemed to lead inevitably to black’s victory. It seemed utterly hopeless.

  In his despair, the priest felt his faith falling away. He was coming to believe that his vocation to the priesthood was a sham. It seemed but a feeble self-justification of his inability to form a meaningful relationship with a woman. He was an impotent, terrified old hypocrite. Hollow and afraid. Suddenly he thought of the people that were being snuffed out like candle flames all across the world at that very moment. Those dying alone in hospital beds, bundled up beside dirty syringes, on roads smeared with their own blood and guts, or in brilliant sunshine with empty bellies, in the oceans with lungs filled by sea water, or in stinking alleyways with knife wounds; and all those who simply waste away, day by day, bit by bit, in the clutches of an intolerable sense of loneliness, unshriven and cursing the God in whom they did not believe, who could not deliver them from their pain.

  But then, in a flash, Father Mooney moved his remaining bishop, flinging it triumphantly across the board in a huge diagonal sweep.

  ‘Mate in three!’ He cried.

  His opponent howled, glanced at the board, and scattered all the pieces across it. A transformation took place in the flickering shadows. The figure opposite arched its back and stretched itself in the way that a huge cat would after awakening from a deep sleep. But the stretching went on and on until the body elongated and twisted beyond its limits. Its asthmatic breathing was as loud as waves crashing against rocks and it stretched out clawed hands towards Father Mooney.

  The candles flickered uncertainly. Finally they blew out and the howling form leapt at him in the darkness.

  ***

  Leonard Hughes awoke feeling a sense of blissful release. It was as if he had suddenly recovered from an agonising sickness. He knew at once that, whatever the thing was that had taken him over, it was gone; he was himself again. Yet still some lingering trace of the thing’s memory remained in his brain, a stench of brimstone trailing in its wake. He got up and fumbled towards the nearest of the candles, lit it and peered around the room.

  The chess set was a blackened, burnt mass. And on the floor, in a crumpled heap with his head twisted backward at a hideous angle, lay the corpse of Father Mooney. His body appeared to have been flung back and forth across the room like a rag-doll at the mercy of an enraged child. Hughes bent over and examined its features. There was no sign of any intrusion upon them.

  Then, just before the very last of the beast’s memories had finally dissipated, he remembered its awful rage at having lost the game.

  It had realised, too late, that Father Mooney had placed his bishop on a square that could only be reached by cheating.

  Mannequins in Aspects of Terror

  Your eyes did see my unformed substance

  Psalm 139

  The office tower had long fascinated me.

  I would gaze at it from the windows of Barlow and Barlow Associates, the architectural firm that employed me. Over the course of the last four years I had watched the tower becoming gradually deserted. One company after another had left the premises and, once darkness fell, the number of windows that were lit up became gradually less. Businesses whose offices were located there seemed unable to achieve commercial success. From what I could gather, those working within its confines complained of a general malaise and a progressive worsening of staff morale over time. There were rumours about the air-conditioning system carrying some form of Legionnaires’ disease, but extensive tests showed no trace of its presence. In the end the inconclusive reason given was that those working there were subject to ‘sick building syndrome.’

  The tower consisted of twenty-seven floors with an exterior of dark green glass. Its appearance had worsened as the years passed and it stood as an obvious indictment of 1960s architecture: a decaying monument to inhuman design that dominated the skyline for miles around.

  And then one night I realised that the last of the businesses in the building must have relocated. The single floor that had been lit during the hours of darkness now had windows as black as the rest. The building was untenanted and desolate. Nothing moved within its confines and I imagined in my mind’s eye the abandoned and silent spaces, the empty rooms, and the labyrinth of dusty corridors. In the teeming metropolis, whose streets and buildings were crawling with people, like insects in a hive, this tower was vacant: a void.

  The building had a profound effect upon my own work. The architectural designs upon which I was working for my firm gave me little satisfaction. My realised projects had consisted only of nondescript houses, public utilities and the updating of an unremarkable bus depot in the north of the country. I longed for the opportunity to work on a larger, grander scale, on some construction that would be appreciated, that would be seen from far away, my own pinnacle amongst the office towers scattered across the city. In idle moments I would sketch designs for the tower that I would build and invariably its lines echoed the empty building that dominated the view from my drawing board.

  I wanted so badly to wander around inside the building and I told myself that it was for the purposes of my pet architectural project. Yet perhaps it was really a fascination for solitude that drew me to it. Certainly I had been conscious of its appeal becoming stronger as fewer and fewer windows had been left lit in the evenings. So completely abandoned, it seemed to me a consummation of a terrible beauty. For what was it now but a vacuum, an oa
sis of nothing, where all else around it was but the maddening whirl of asinine human activity? I viewed it as a vertical desert, closed off from the outside, a region without the distractions of the commonplace. I did wonder for a while whether it would be feasible to employ the designs for my own tower in a radical refurbishment of the existing building, but in the end I resisted this idea. It was not just that my ego preferred the potential of an entirely new project; I also did not want to see the building changed. I was fascinated by the tower because of its very abandonment.

  Yet if it was my ambition to be the designer of a similar tower with the same starkness of design, a construction looming high above the teeming streets and framed by the sky, one whose very presence caused men’s views to be drawn upwards by its smooth lines and uncluttered simplicity, then it would make sense for me to see the original from the inside, to study it fully.

  A few days after the lights on that last occupied floor were extinguished, I attempted to gain entry. I finished at work and walked through the few streets that lay between my place of employment and the tower. It was a dark winter’s afternoon, even though it wasn’t late, and although I knew that my expedition was likely to end in failure, I needed to at least try to get into the building, if only for my own peace of mind.

  I finally stood at its base. The gigantic monolith seemed almost to blot out the sky. It was immediately obvious that I was not going to be able to get inside. The foyer had been boarded up and padlocked and the first two floors were protected by corrugated iron sheets. Higher up, the windows were completely dark. For a brief moment I fancied that I saw a pale, white face at one of them, but quickly realised that it must have been a trick of the early evening light. The whole building was obviously deserted.