Your flesh will creep at the hand that crawls ...!
I.
The Beast with Five Fingers is a creepy 1946 American horror film directed by Robert Florey from a screenplay by Curt Siodmak, loosely based on the 1919 short story of the same name by W. F. Harvey, and starring Robert Alda, Andrea King, and Peter Lorre.
Set in Italy, the plot revolves around a murderous hand that has detached itself from the corpse of a dead pianist and which attempts to kill the heirs to his will [1].
II.
Harvey was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Sadly, having been dogged by ill health for much of his adult life, he died, aged 52, in 1937, so didn't get to see the cinematic adaptation of his most famous story.
The movie did, however, stimulate a posthumous resurgence of interest in his writing and his strange tales have continued to amuse readers to this day [2].
As indicated, apart from the title and the idea of a murderous disembodied hand, the film has little in common with W. F. Harvey's original story and it's the latter I'd like to offer a reading of here ...
III.
Adrian Borlsover: a wonderful man from an eccentric family who, after losing his sight aged fifty, developed the most remarkable sense of touch and was exceedingly clever with his hands; he was even credited towards the close of his life "with powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny" [3].
Like Maurice Pervin, the protagonist of D. H. Lawrence's short story 'The Blind Man' [4], so at home is Borlsover within the invisible world of touch, that whilst his loss of sight is something of an inconvenience, it doesn't profoundly affect him: "Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness." [5]
Adrian Borlsover is a botanist and a bachelor. His elder brother George had married, however, and left behind him a son, Eustace; another remarkable man with an interest in plants. The two men were not unfond of one another, but had little contact. One day, the nephew discovers that his uncle has an unusual gift:
"Two years before his death Adrian Borlsover developed, unknown to himself, the not uncommon power of automatic writing. Eustace made the discovery by accident. Adrian was sitting reading in bed, the forefinger of his left hand tracing the Braille characters, when his nephew noticed that a pencil the old man held in his right hand was moving slowly along the opposite page. He left his seat in the window and sat down beside the bed. The right hand continued to move, and now he could see plainly that they were letters and words which it was forming."
It seems that the old man is either possessed by a spirit who is keen to communicate with Eustace, or that the writing hand is itself alive independently of the brain that is usually thought to have central control over the body and its organs [6].
Upon Adrian Borlsover's death, Eustace inherits his valuable collection of books and wonders where he'll find room for them all. He also comes into possession of a sealed wooden box believed to contain a live rat: though, of course, that's not a six-toed albino rodent he can hear moving around inside ...
Of course, the thing escapes and hides in the library, knocking heavy books of the shelves with a crash. Eustace still thinks it to be a rat, even as he learns from a solicitor's letter that his uncle had had his right hand removed after his death and requested that such be sent to him.
Turning on the electric light, he finally catches sight of the thing:
"About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor, was a man's hand. Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment. It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole. While he was looking, too surprised to stir, the hand disappeared round the corner. Eustace ran forward. He no longer saw it, but he could hear it as it squeezed its way behind the books on one of the shelves."
Eustace manages to trap it there, behind the books. And then, assisted by his secretary, Saunders - a fellow with "a somewhat dubious reputation [...] but whose powers as a mathematician, combined with his business abilities, were invaluable to Eustace" - he manages to put the beast with five fingers back in the box and screw it shut.
Placing the box in an old desk, Eustace and Saunders then sit talking until the early hours about what had both witnessed and hoping to find some explanation that would allow them to overcome their fear and to eventually forget the matter.
The next morning, they decide to take another look at the thing: "They went into the library and opened the desk. The box was as they had left it on the previous night." Saunders opens the box and removes the now unmoving but still warm (still soft and supple) hand. Eustace confirms it's definitely his dead uncle's hand: "'I should know those long thin fingers anywhere.'"
They put it back in the box and back in the locked draw of the desk. A week later, they have a very vivid story to tell at the little supper Eustace gave on All Hallow's Eve.
Unfortunately, the hand escapes from its entrapment and starts scaring the staff as it creeps about the house. One of the maids, Emma, treads on it; another, Jane, gets a scare whilst doing the dishes. Eustace and Saunders decide to try and catch it again; or, failing that, they hope and trust that being an amputated appendage it won't live for long.
However, after both encountering the hand on separate occasions and beginning to suspect the thing is mocking them, they decide to set the dogs on it: "For a fortnight nothing happened. Then the hand was caught, not by the dogs, but by [the housekeeper's] gray parrot," Peter.
Well, that's not quite true; the parrot and the hand have a tussle and poor Peter is strangled. But the fatal commotion does allow Eustace to grab the latter: "There was a ragged gash across the back where the bird's beak had torn it, but no blood oozed from the wound. He noticed with disgust that the nails had grown long and discolored."
Initialy, Eustace decides to burn the beastly thing:
"But he could not burn it. He tried to throw it into the flames, but his own hands, as if restrained by some old primitive feeling, would not let him. And so Saunders found him pale and irresolute, with the hand still clasped tightly in his fingers."
So instead Eustace nails it to a board:
"He took up a nail, and before Saunders had realised what he was doing had driven it through the hand, deep into the board.
'Oh, my aunt,' he giggled hysterically, 'look at it now,' for the hand was writhing in agonized contortions, squirming and wriggling upon the nail like a worm upon the hook."
Or perhaps like Christ upon his Cross ...
The directly pinned hand is then locked in a safe: "'We'll keep it there till it dies,'" says Eustace. "'May I burn in hell if I ever open the door of that safe again.'"
Harvey, could, I suppose, have ended the story here - or even here on this happy note with which he closes the third section of the tale:
"Eustace Borlsover went back to his old way of life. Old habits crept over and covered his new experience. He was, if anything, less morose, and showed a greater inclination to take his natural part in country society."
But, he doesn't; instead, he adds a fourth section to the tale ... which opens with a burglary: the safe is discovered open and empty. The police inspector informs Eustace that they discovered a strange note which read: "'I've got out, Eustace Borlsover, but I'll be back before long.'"
If that's not a threat, it certainly sounds like one to my ears. Eustace decides to hide away in Brighton for a time and suggests to Saunders they might even do well to leave England entirely for a few months.
Of course the hand turns up - having sneaked down to Brighton inside one of Saunders's gloves. Eustace throws it in the bathroom, where it becomes trapped like a spider in the tub:
"Saunders, with a lighted candle in his hand, looked over the edge of the bath. There it was, old and maimed, dumb and blind, with a ragged hole in the middle, crawling, staggering, trying to creep up the slippery sides, only to fall back helpless."
However, smarter than most spiders, the hand finds a way out of the tub by climbing up the plug chain and out the window before either of the men can stop it. Poor Eustace faints and is ill for a fortnight afterwards. To the concern of his doctor, he won't let anyone turn the lights out or open the windows after this latest incident.
Saunders tells him not to worry and restates that, in his opinion, the hand can't live for much longer. But, of course, the evil thing soon turns up again: interrupting a game of chess between the two men.
Funny enough, however, although Saunders is duly freaked out by the hand trying to gain entry through the locked window, Eustace seems surprisingly nonchalant and he explains that there's o reason to be frightened:
"'There's nothing supernatural about that hand, Saunders. I mean it seems to be governed by the laws of time and space. It's not the sort of thing that vanishes into thin air or slides through oaken doors. And since that's so, I defy it to get in here. We'll leave the place in the morning. I for one have bottomed the depths of fear.'"
But what about the chimney? They had forgotten to block that up. Hurriedly - and carelessly - they attempt to start a fire in the grate using oil from an old reading lamp. Unfortunately, the flames shoot up uncontrollably with a roar and before long the entire room is ablaze. Eustace vainly attempts to beat out the flames with a blanket while Saunders ran to the door and fumbles with the bolts in his panic.
The key is also stiff in the lock, but turns at last:
"For half a second Saunders stopped to look back. Afterwards he could never be quite sure as to what he had seen, but at the time he thought that something black and charred was creeping slowly, very slowly, from the mass of flames towards Eustace Borlsover. For a moment he thought of returning to his friend, but the noise and the smell of the burning sent him running down the passage crying, 'Fire! Fire!' He rushed to the telephone to summon help, and then back to the bathroom - he should have thought of that before - for water. As he burst open the bedroom door there came a scream of terror which ended suddenly, and then the sound of a heavy fall."
IV.
I remembered this story - and was compelled to re-read it - when a few days ago I received an astonishing photograph sent to me by the poet and playwright Síomón Solomon (see above).
The photo depicts the latter much like Eustace Borlsover in his library, surrounded by heavy-looking hardback books and seemingly unaware of the five-fingerered demon that has manifested behind him and is in the process of trying to dislodge a tome in order that it might hide itself in the space created.
One notices, of course, that unlike the hand in Harvey's tale, this one has a distinctly feminine quality and even wears a large ring on its middle finger. And, for a hand partialist such as myself who believes the slender and lively hands of women are of greater symbolic and seductive beauty than their hidden sexual organs, that's of great erotic interest. [7]
The Beast with Five Fingers suddenly becomes Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters; she who never gets angry, never gets bored and doesn't need feeding [8].
Notes
[1] Click here to watch the original theatrical trailer on YouTube courtesy of Warner Bros.
[2] Wordsworth Editions produced an excellent volume of Harvey's work containing forty-five tales under the title The Beast with Five Fingers, ed. and with an introduction by David Stuart Davies in 2009.
[3] I am quoting from Harvey's tale as it appears in the 2005 Project Gutenberg eBook of Famous Modern Ghost Stories, as originally edited by Dorothy Scarborough (G. P. Putnam's Sons: The Knickerbocker Press, 1921): click here.
[4] Written in 1918, Lawrence's story is thus contemporaneous with Harvey's. 'The Blind Man' was first published in The English Review in July 1920. It then appeared alongside nine other short stories in the collection England, My England published in New York by Thomas Seltzer in October 1922 and in London by Martin Secker in January 1924. I have writtn on 'The Blind Man' in a post published in March 2019: click here.
[5] That's Lawrence writing of Pervin, not Harvey writing of Borlsover, in 'The Blind Man', England, My England, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 46.
[6] This latter idea is not so unimaginable for a reader of D. H. Lawrence, who in an essay writes this:
"We have a curious idea of ourselves. We think ourselves as a body with a spirit in it [...] or a body with a mind in it. [...] It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? [...] My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe, in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vasrt number of things [...] and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive."
- D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 193.
[7] See the post on hand partialism dated 27 December 2012: click here.
[8] This phrase is taken from 'Nocturnal Turnings or How Siamese Twins Have Sex', a short story by Truman Capote found in his collection of writings entitled Music for Chameleons (Random House, 1980).
It was also borrowed by Marc Almond for the title of his third studio album (Some Bizarre, 1987) and I'm referencing the track 'Mother Fist' that is featured on this album in the last line. Click here to listen to the song on YouTube.
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