HANDS

(FICTION – HORROR) To be published in my wonderful friend Aitor’s zine with some sick illustrations that I’ll upload once available. This is the 1500 words version.

“Don’t be precious”, Steve had told her, “this is as good a place as any”.

Ella looked around the vast, dilapidated space. The building used to be a prosperous ice cream factory back the 1950s, Steve had told her. All that was left now was its hollow red-bricked skeleton, covered with grime, graffiti and human waste. The machinery had been torn out and sold a while back; ripped out cables and pipes were prodding out of the walls, like the dead roots of felled trees. They had climbed up one of the busted-up staircases, carefully skipping every missing step they could discern, and had reached the first floor. The floorboards creaked under Steve’s weight as they advanced in the darkness. He was much heavier, and much older, than her. At least people left her alone when she was with him, so she stuck by his side, even though she had long ago come to the conclusion that she hated everything else about him. Lost in her thoughts, Ella walked right into Steve’s back. He spun around and slapped her across the cheek.

“Didn’t I tell you to watch where you’re fucking going?”

Night had fallen. Even when it was not engulfed in obscurity, the place was a death-trap; the only light peering through the broken windows came from the sparse street lamps. Ella could hear hushed voices and lighters clicking throughout the building, testament to its temporary occupants who also had sought shelter from the freezing streets. Eventually, the pair reached the end of the space. Steve jumped up and down to make sure the floor would not collapse before throwing his bags down. Ella followed suit and dropped her sleeping bag at her feet; the rest of her stuff was bundled into a ripped Sainsbury’s plastic bag she had tied to it. Steve picked up the dirty paper cup that was tucked in to the side of his rucksack and announced that he would be back later, once he had made some money, and he left. Ella kneeled on the dusty floorboards and spread out her thin sleeping bag. She shuddered. Don’t be precious – Steve’s words, his leitmotif since they met really, echoed in her head. She could still feel the imprint of his hand throbbing on her cheek.

Ella slid into the sleeping bag, fully dressed in all her clothes and coat, and she zipped the sides all the way up, pulling it above her head like a hood as much as she could. She had always done this, ever since she was little. Winter like summer: she could not sleep if an inch of her skin was exposed, even if it meant she had to sweat and asphyxiate the whole night through.

The routine had started when she was six years old. Ella and her mum had been staying at her grandparents’ house ever since the accident. They had put her up on an old army cot in the attic, and her mum would pass out on the couch downstairs when or if the sleeping pills could knock her out. It was a clammy summer night, maybe two weeks or so after the crash. Her mother had not been able to go back to their house, she could not bear it – Ella did not think her mum ever did set foot there again. Only Ella and her grandparents had occasionally gone back to the family home over the years; she had tried to live there on her own when she moved out aged fourteen, but the yellowed photos on the walls, their mouldy stench, the untouched boy’s room, with its soft toys and plastic soldiers still placed into position for an imaginary battle, the drawings and crayons on the kitchen table…the whole place was crystallised in the past. Ella did not like to revisit it too often.

That night, like every night, her mum had put her to bed upstairs and made her say her nighttime prayer. To this day, Ella could not work out if she was religious herself. If there had been a God, then why did It take her father and her brother and left her alive? If there were a God, there would be retributions, there would be payback. The accident was her fault, after all. She had been picking on her brother since the moment they had left home and both were screaming at the top of their lungs. Ella was in the process of unfastening her seatbelt so she could hit him better when her dad let go of the wheel to turn around in an attempt to discipline them. Ella could not remember the collision itself, just the blinding lights, the shouts, the smell of rubber and flesh burning, and then, nothing. If there were a God, then there would be punishment. That is why she believed in a God, on most days.

So Ella and her mum had prayed together; her mum absently kissed her forehead, turned the nightlight on and went back down to the living room. The heat was unbearable under the roof; the air was heavy and smelt of imminent thunderstorms. Ella was twisting and turning on the rusty army cot, trying to find a comfortable position where the metal bars would not dig into her spine through the flimsy mattress. Ella pushed the bedsheets back to her feet and laid sprawled over the bed. She had begun to drift away when suddenly she felt a presence near the bed. Ella leaned on her elbow and listened out attentively. She could only hear cicadas and the faint purring of cars zooming down the nearby highway. She called for her mum but she hardly heard her reply: her drowsy voice barely reached the attic and ordered Ella to go back to sleep. Ella laid back down but this time, she kept one eye open, ready to catch whatever it was she thought she sensed nearby. Eventually, her eyelid got heavy and she started to doze off again.

She was startled awake once more when she felt a cold touch briefly stroke her uncovered leg. As she sat up, Ella moved the sheets across both of her legs and called out to her mum again. No answer. Ella shouted, louder, over and over, before eventually giving up – her mum was not coming, the Valiums had vanquished her. Ella had this familiar, uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach; her mouth was dry. She pulled the covers up to her chin and laid awake for a while, not knowing who or what to pray for, before sleep thankfully overpowered her when she was not paying attention.

When the hand touched her again, it covered her mouth. Jolted awake, her eyes wide in terror, Ella tried to let out what would have been a blood-curdling scream, but no sound came out. For a split second, she saw decaying, eyeless faces in every corner of the attic. Her ears rang with the agonising cries of tortured souls echoing around the room. She burst into silent, uncontrollable tears. Since then, whenever she slept alone, Ella always wrapped up her whole body in the bedding, head included.

At the squat, a decade later, mummified in her sleeping bag and with only the street lamps for nightlights, Ella was trying to fall asleep. She hated the whole process of falling asleep, the wait, the anxiety of not knowing whether she would be able to or not, the leap into the unknown, the recurrent nightmares. It was never the peaceful respite she hoped it would be. The drugs, whenever she could afford them, had stopped working a long time ago. But at least now she had stopped shivering and was warming up; the old factory offered better shielding from the wind than the tombstones in-between which Steve would pitch his tent on the nights they could not find anywhere to stay. She could barely sleep a wink when they slept in the graveyard, with the wind swaying the tent between mausoleums, the overwhelming silence only interrupted by the cracking of branches and the nightbirds’ cries.

Ella was nodding off when she felt something briskly touch her arm through the sleeping bag. With her heart pounding in her chest, she called out for Steve in the vain hope that he would be back. The wind was howling through the cracked windowpanes that had not been taped up with cardboard. Under the duvet, Ella put her knees to her chin and tried to control her erratic breathing. Two breaths in, one out. She was starting to feel light-headed. She silently repeated her nighttime prayers, over and over, praying that her gut feeling was wrong. It had not happened in years, not since she had left home to come to London. Nothing was working – if anything, she was hyperventilating and suffocating in the sleeping bag, so she reluctantly poked her head out her cocoon to get some fresh air. The cold hurt her lungs and she let out a gasp. Small clouds of condensation were coming out of her mouth with every exhalation. That was when a pair of glacial hands took ahold of her face, one over her mouth, one covering her eyes. All she could do was desperately, wordlessly weep as they pulled her away.