Fingers of a Hand by H. D. Everett
“Fingers of a Hand” is taken from Everett’s anthology The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts, first published by Philip Allan in 1920, and later republished by Ghost Story Press, in 1995.
A tale that is unlikely to be familiar to most modern-day readers, “Fingers of a Hand” is rarely reprinted, but is included in 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment (1998), Great Ghost Stories: 101 Terrifying Tales (2016), and The Haunted Library: Classic Ghost Stories (2016).
About H. D. Everett (1851 – 1923)
Henrietta Dorothy Everett (née Huskisson) was a popular author during the late 1800s to early 1900s. However, her work has since fallen into obscurity, and most people are unlikely to be familiar with her name. The daughter of John Huskisson, a Royal Marines Lieutenant, little is known about her life, including her date of birth. However, church records show she was baptized 4 March 1851.
In 1869, she married Isaac Edward Everett, a solicitor; and began writing in 1896, when she was aged 44. Between then and 1920, she published 22 books, with 17 different publishers, using her pen-name Theo Douglas. Although Everett wrote three historical novels, more than half of her books had fantasy or supernatural themes. For instance, her novel Iras: A Mystery (1896) is about an Egyptologist who revives an ancient mummy and falls in love with the beautiful Iras he has unwrapped.
In 1920, when she published The Death-Mask and Other Stories, for reasons unknown, she discarded her pen-name and published the collection as H. D. Everett. However, her identity had already been revealed in 1910, so using a pseudonym probably no longer offered any advantages.
The Death-Mask and Other Stories earned the praise of both M. R. James and H.P. Lovecraft. In his essay “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” (1929) [paragraph 16], James described Everett’s anthology as having “a rather quieter tone on the whole” and “some excellently conceived stories”. Meanwhile, in his essay essay Supernatural Horror in Literature [Chapter 9, paragraph 9], Lovecraft stated: “Mrs. H. D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories.”
The Death-Mask and Other Stories was Everett’s only story collection. However, in 2006, Wordsworth Editions republished an expanded versions of the collection under the title The Crimson Blind & Other Stories. The expanded version contained all 14 stories from the original collection, along with two additional tales: “The Pipers of Mallory” and “The Whispering Wall”. It’s interesting to note the author published both of these stories in magazines, prior to putting together her anthology, and either she or her publisher must have decided not to include them in original anthology.
Fingers of a Hand
By H. D. Everett
(Online Text)
“In the same hour came forth the fingers of a man’s hand and wrote….and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” [1]
The children were supposed to need a sea-side change, and I daresay they did, poor wee things, as they had had whooping-cough in the spring, and measles to follow. As you know, we are taking care of them for Bernard, who is in India with his wife, and so we are even more anxious about them than if they were our own. That is one great use of unmarried aunts—to shoulder other people’s responsibilities; and I, for one, think the world would be a poorer place if the “million of unwanted women” were, by some convulsion of nature, to be swept away. I only mention the children’s measles as the reason why we took those lodgings at Cove at the beginning of July, for, now one has to economise, we should not have gone in for a seaside change as a luxury for ourselves.
The lodgings were clean and fairly comfortable, and we took them for two months certain, letting our own pretty cottage in the midlands for a similar term. And that was why we had no home of our own to retreat to when—But I am telling my story upside down, as Sara says I always do. You would not be likely to understand, if I did not begin in the right place, with what went before.
The house was Number Seven, Cliff Terrace, a row of detached villas above the road, on the other side of which was the esplanade and the sea. There were no other lodgers, as we took both Mrs. Mills’s “sets”; nobody in the house but ourselves and the bairns [2], and that important person Nurse, except Mrs. Mills herself, and her daughter who waited on us. So you see there was no one who could have played tricks—But again I am getting on too fast.
We had never been to Cove before, or to St. Eanswyth either, the larger watering-place which lies to the east of Cove; but we thought our choice of place for a summer holiday was amply justified by the pretty inland neighbourhood and the sweet air, and a safe beach close at hand, where the children could be out playing early and late under the guardian wing of Nurse. For the first fortnight we were all satisfied and happy, and, both in metaphor and actually, there was not a cloud in the sky. Then the rain began, not brief summer showers and sunshine in between, but the worst weather of a wet July—a continuous downpour with hardly ten minutes intermission, and going on for days: such rain as Noah must have witnessed before the beginning of the Flood.
Of course the poor children had to keep the house, and, though they and Nurse had the dining room set to themselves, there was but little space for them to play about. Sara and I occupied the drawing-room, and she had been sketching from the window—not that there was much visible to make into a picture: a leaden sea and slanting lines of rain, and boats drawn up on the beach. At last she pushed away colour-box and pencils.
“I can’t stand this any longer,” she said. “Rain or no rain, I am going out. It will be a good opportunity to test the resisting powers of my new cloak. You must stay in to-day, as I believe you have caught cold.”
I did not dispute her fiat. Sara always decides what is, or what is not to be done, and I, who am a biddable person, submit to be ruled. And, to say the truth, I was not particularly anxious to get wet. I went on with my sewing till it was nearly time for Miss Mills to appear with the luncheon-tray, and then I began to clear the table of Sara’s scattered possessions. Some blank sheets of paper were lying about, besides the one pinned to her board with the half-finished sketch; and on one of these I noticed some large scrawled writing. Not Sara’s writing, which is particularly small and neat; not the writing of any one I knew. The words were quite legible, but they were very odd. GO—by itself at the top of the sheet; and the same word repeated twice below, followed by GET OUT AT ONCE.
Of course I showed Sara this when she came in to luncheon, and she could not account for it any more than I. The sheets were unmarked when she took them out of her portfolio; of that she seemed to be certain.
“Some one has been playing a trick on us,” she said. “If it is Mrs. Mills, it is an odd sort of notice”; and at this very mild witticism both of us laughed.
But the idea of a trick being played was absurd: I had been in the room the whole time, as I said.
“Unless you think I dozed off while you were out, and did it in my sleep!”
Sara laughed again, and began to sort the loose papers back into place.
“Why, here is more of it,” she exclaimed; and I saw on the sheet she held out, in the same large scrawl, a repetition of the words—GET OUT—GET OUT AT ONCE.
Now I could have sworn—had swearing been of any use—that I had looked those papers over on both sides after finding the first writing, and with that sole exception they bore no mark whatever. So these last words must have been written after my discovery and before Sara’s return, and while I was beside them in the room. Surely they had been traced by no mortal hand!
You will not wonder that such a curious happening was the subject of discussion between us during the rest of that wet day. “I’d give anything to know who did it,” Sara was saying, while I added: “I should like better still to know what it means.” I am more credulous than Sara, and it seemed to me there must be some meaning in anything so unaccountable. I had this feeling from the very first, and, as you will see, both the conviction and the reason for it grew.
I pass on to the following Sunday. The weather was still wet, and the children were kept mainly to the house. For the sake of variety for them, Sara had little Dick and Nancy upstairs in our sitting-room for their Sunday lessons, which as a rule devolve on her to give, as she is a cleverer teacher than I. Lessons of the simplest, as they generally consist of showing pictures and giving explanations; and to be allowed to look at Sara’s illustrated Bible is a frequent Sabbath treat. The children had gone down again to Nurse, and Sara was about to tidy the book away, when she gave a sharp exclamation.
“Grace, look here. Who can have done this?”
The volume was lying open at the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, and these words in the twenty-second verse were scored under blackly in pencil—Haste thee: escape.
Now Sara, who is particular in everything, is especially so about her books. She hates any soil or mark upon them, and nothing irritates her more than to have a lent volume returned with “purple passages” scored beside in the margin, whether in approval or otherwise. “Tut-tut,” she was saying, at the usual pitch of exasperation. “It is really unpardonable. Where is my india-rubber? I must see if I can take it out. It could not have been the children. And the Millses would never—! But there is nobody else.”
“You would have seen, had it been the children. They are good little things, and would not: besides, they had not a pencil”—(thus I weakened an argument based on their righteousness). “And what odd words to have chosen to mark, when you think of the other scrawls. I wonder if this is all. It is possible there may be more.”
“I shall look the book right through and see, and then I shall lock it in my box.”
Sara sat down to her task armed with the piece of rubber, and by no means in a Sabbath spirit of peace and good-will. She did find two other texts scored under, and these were the marked words:
2 Kings, ninth chapter and third verse. Open the door and flee and tarry not.
St. Matthew, seventh chapter and twenty-seventh verse. The … house …fell, and great was the fall thereof.
I was superstitious, because disturbed by these happenings. So I was told, yet who would not have been affected in my place? I believe Sara too was disquieted in her secret mind, though she would not allow it. But then she was used to pride herself on being an esprit fort [3].
I kept saying to myself. What next?—and the next came quickly. I did not tell Sara what I purposed doing, but I left a couple of sheets of paper and a freshly-cut pencil displayed on the table when we were going out. More writing might be done with the opportunity given, and “it” might vouchsafe to make clear “its” meaning. I could not then have analysed what I meant by the convenient impersonal pronoun, nor am I clear of the exact meaning now.
We were about to do some shopping in the town, and I had stupidly left my purse on the mantelshelf in the sitting-room, so I was obliged to turn back to get it. As I opened the door, my eyes fell at once upon the papers, and I saw some dark object moving across the white surface, and then quickly disappearing over the table edge. It was too big for a mouse; could it have been a rat? The thought of a rat gave me a nervous shiver; I think I would have a greater terror of rats than of ghosts. I looked at the papers though I did not touch them; yes, a vague scrawl was begun upon the upper one, not developed into legible words. I had disturbed the writer too soon. But what could the writer be, coming in the form of a rat, or the shadow of a rat, and yet able to write words which appeared to convey a message? I left the papers as they were, but the scrawl was not continued; no doubt that unexpected first return had scared away the writer.
I said nothing to Sara of my failed experiment; but next day about the same time I laid my trap again, this time staying in the room, but retired into a distant corner, where I set myself to watch.
For a long while there was nothing. Then an object ill-defined and shadowy crept across the paper, stealing towards the pencil as it lay. I hardly dared breathe, the excitement was so tense. Over the pencil this shadow paused, and now became denser, taking solid form. It was not the whole of a hand, but a thumb and two fingers, forming something like a claw. But, if you consider, a thumb and two fingers are all a hand needs to manipulate a pencil, and “it” may not have cared to materialise anything superfluous. The pencil now slanted upwards between these fingers and the thumb, and—yes, no doubt remained—the claw was writing. Now we would know all, such was my sanguine thought, not forecasting how deep the mystery would remain.
It was Sara this time who interrupted, coming in. The pencil dropped, the claw from a solid form became a shadow, and slipped away over the edge of the table, as I had seen it vanish before. Sara noticed nothing; she was too full of her news, and of the letter open in her hand.
“Look at this. We ought to have had it two days ago, but there was a mistake in the address. It is from Mrs. Bernard’s mother” (Mrs. Bernard is our brother’s wife). “She is at Diplake for ten days before they go to Scotland, and she wants one of us to bring the children there just for the time they stay. She says she is sorry she cannot have us both, but it is a case of single room, as the house is full. She is expecting us to-morrow, so I shall have to wire, and tell Nurse to get ready. Will you go, Grace, or shall I?”
“Of course you must be the one. I should never get on at Diplake, and with a large, gay party. You must go, Sara, and put your best foot foremost, for Bernard’s sake. And—I’m glad you have to take the children. For look what is written here!”
I showed her the paper on which the claw had scrawled. Over and over again the word DANGER, as if it could not be too often insisted on. Then, also repeated: GO. GET OUT. Then an attempt at children, afterwards clearly written: DANGER. CHILDREN MUST GO.
I think Sara was impressed at last, though she hardly believed in the claw I had seen writing. As to that, I must—she said—have been hallucinated, or else slept and dreamed. But little time remained for argument, as all was in a hurry of preparation—boxes to be packed, and the children to be consoled, for their enjoyment of the seaside pleasures was very keen, and the attraction small of going to stay with an almost unknown grandmother. “But we are coming back?” said little Nancy. “We are coming back again here?” I believe I told her yes, but as to what will happen in the future, who can say?
They set out early next morning, Sara and the three children and Nurse, and I saw them off at the station. Sara said almost at the last:
“I don’t half like leaving you alone here, Grace. If you find the lodgings too solitary, why not take a room at the hotel for the days I am away?”
I said I would think of it, but in truth I felt no special nervousness or concern, only an intense curiosity to see what would happen now we had (by pure accident) obeyed the dictation of the writing, and sent the children away.
The lonely evening passed for me without disturbance; Miss Mills came at the usual time to carry down my supper tray, and wished me good-night, and shortly after this I went to bed.
I slept, and do not remember any warning dreams. But in the very early daylight I was suddenly startled broad awake—not I think by any noise, but by an alteration in the level of my bed. My head was low, almost on the floor, and my feet were high in air. Everything in the room was sliding and altering; basin and ewer [4] slipped from the washstand [5], crashed and broke, and pictures flapped from the wall. Then came a greater crash like the jolting of a thunder-clap, and it was close at hand; chimney-pots falling, walls and roofs collapsing: was it an earthquake that had happened? I heard screams and shouts, but the sliding movement had stopped.
I struggled up and to my feet, for I had been half buried by the bedclothes falling back upon me; and there opposite was a great crack or rent in the outer wall, wide enough to admit my arm, with the new morning looking through, and a waft of air blowing in keenly from the sea. It was as if the house had broken in two. What but an earthquake could have caused such a disaster?—and again I heard people screaming. The often repeated warning, the scored words in the Bible ran in my head. I could be thankful indeed that Sara and the children were safe at Diplake out of the way: what an agony had they been still here, and those screams possibly theirs!
I do not know how long it took me to scramble up the slanting floor, to find my clothes, my shoes, where all was confusion, so that if it were possible to get out of the house I might go forth clad. Then I tried the door.
It was in some way jammed, and it seemed as if ages passed before I could wrench it open. When at last it gave way, the wreck revealed without was worse than the wreck within. The staircase was a heap of broken wood, and the back wall had fallen inwards; there was no getting down that way. What had become, I wondered, of Mrs. Mills and her daughter, and was it their screams that I heard? I called to them by name, but there was no answer.
Baffled so, I looked from the window, which had hardly a whole pane left. It was as if the terrace had disappeared: the road was broken up, and the house had been carried down with the sliding earth, many yards nearer the sea. A crowd had assembled, staring at this phenomenon, but at a safe distance. I shouted to them, and a man called up to me instructions to stay where I was, as a ladder would presently be brought. I knew later that they feared at first to touch the house, lest it should collapse in total ruin like the one next on the terrace, where, alas! Two people had been killed, overwhelmed and buried in their sleep.
This was a danger indeed, about which that warning came. The part of our house which fell, was where the children would have been sleeping. I was told that tons and tons of masonry had crushed in their little beds; even now it makes me sick to think of what we so narrowly escaped. The Millses, mother and daughter, were dug out of the basement quite unharmed, but I am afraid, poor people, they are heavy losers. I myself had not a scratch. The great landslip at Cove, with all its damage and disaster, will surely pass into history: the slide of the undercliff down into the sea, the gaping fissure torn above, hundreds of feet in length—the alteration of the ground below, heaped into mounds and billows like the waves of the sea, while the buildings in the course of the slide are broken up and displaced like a set of children’s toys, playthings in the hands of a giant. People who are wise about the geological formation, talk of a bed of slippery clay underlying the upper strata, and say water had percolated down to it owing to the wet spring, and, following upon that, the heavy rains of that dismal week in July. But they are wise after the event and did not forecast it: indeed it was anticipated by no one other than the writer of those mysterious words.
H. D. Everett (1851 – 1923)
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1. The quote the precedes the story in taken from The Bible (King James Version). It appears in Daniel: chapter 5, verse 5. The author may have included the quote because it inspired her to write the story.
2. Bairns is the plural of bairn—a word that is often used in parts of Scotland and Northern England. A bairn is a child. Although “bairns” can be used to refer to children in general, bairn is also often used as a substitute for “son” or “daughter”.
3. Esprit fort is a French term that’s used to indicate someone of strong character.
4. During the 17th and 18th centuries, most people would have had a ewer and basin in their bedroom, or elsewhere in their homes. They were necessary for cleanliness and personal hygiene. The ewer was a jug, that was kept filled with water and used to fill the basin prior to washing the hands, face, or other body area. The choice of material was often an indication of social status, with wealthy families using ewers and basisn made from gilded silver. At the other end of the scale, poor families were more likely to own and use ceramic ewers and basins.
5. Also called a basin stand, a washstand is a small table of cabinet that used to be common in most Victorian and Edwardian homes. The design varied, as did the material used for their construction, but mahogany, walnut, and rosewood washstands were quite common. The washstand was specifically designed to support the ewer and basin [4]. As with ewers and basins, washstands became unnecessary after homes were fitted with indoor plumbing.