The Hand

      It was a crisp autumn night in the small town of Charlton, Massachusetts. You could smell the wood from the burning fireplace. Its warm scent scattered in the midnight air. I was a little girl at the time  “the big accident" happened. It was the talk of the town for months. I remember going to sleep that night and waking in horror to the searing sound of my father’s agonizing screams. I jumped from my bed, cold sweat dripping from my brow, wondering if it was a dream. I rolled out of bed and walked down the narrow hallway to my mother’s room to find it empty. I could hear her muffled cries coming from downstairs. I bolted down the stairs and into the kitchen to find my father sprawled out on the kitchen table.  His eyes were wide and full of pain. There was blood shooting from the stump that was once his hand.  My mother was trying to stay calm but you could see the panic start creeping into her eyes. There was so much blood! It was like watching the movie Carrie, when she gets the blood dumped on her head.  What had happened was my father had been cleaning out an old rusty corn husker machine when something went awfully wrong. The machine started while his had was inside, ripping off his limb from the wrist down.  This is where the real horror’s started.
      We searched the field to see if we could find any remnants of his lost limb but there was nothing!  No remaining part was left.  Once my father had come home from the hospital things had started to get back to normal on the farm until people started to turn up dead.  No one saw anything out of the ordinary, until one day.
My brother Larry had been walking home from the market in town when he saw something from the corner of his eye.  He turned in the direction of the unknown “thing” but saw nothing.  He kept walking but had this sick sensation that something or someone was following him.  He looked over his shoulder a couple times but as always nothing was there.  Once he got home he dismissed the feeling and went on doing his daily routine.  That evening we were all sitting by the fireplace listening to one of my father’s stories he always told, when we heard a scraping noise.  My father looked out the window but nothing was there. He told us it was probably just a branch scraping across the house, and went on telling his story.  There it was again the scraping noise. This time it was like fingernails on a chalk board. A long high pitched noise that sent shivers down my spine.  My father went into the pantry and grabbed his shotgun out of his gun case.  The house was silent except for our shallow breathing.  That’s when we heard the scraping again but this time it sounded like it was coming from inside the house.  My father told us to go down into the basement and barricade the door.
    We did as we were told and went into the basement. But we didn’t barricade the door like we were told to do.  From then on it was silence. You could cut the tension with a knife. Our silhouettes bounced in the candlelight as we sat holding each other waiting for father to come back. About twenty minutes had passed when we heard something coming down the stairs.  It was like something was being dragged down the stairs and along the floor. We waited and looked to the door for any signs that things were ok. Again it was silent.  I saw the door knob start turning, so my mother got up and walked to the bottom of the basement steps to see if it was father. You could hear the locking mechanism of the door working becasue it was so quiet. The door slowly opened. To our horror we looked up and saw the severed head of my father resting at the top of the basement steps with The Hand!