AN IDLE HAND

Chapter Five: What the Hands Remember

I woke before dawn with my right hand aching.

Not a dull ache, the kind you get from sleeping on a limb wrong — this was sharper, more specific, a deep throb centered in my palm like a bruise forming from the inside out. I lay there for a moment in the gray almost-light, willing it to fade, telling myself it was nothing. A cramp. Bad circulation. The kind of thing that happened to a body that hadn't moved much in weeks.

But it didn't fade. If anything, it got worse — a slow, pulsing heat that spread from the center of my palm out toward my fingers, like something under the skin was trying to push its way out.

I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, and I looked at my hand, and for a long moment I simply couldn't make sense of what I was seeing.

There was a mark on my palm. Faint — so faint that at first I thought it might just be a crease, a fold in the skin from how I'd been sleeping. But the longer I looked, the more it resolved into something else. A curve. A line branching from it at a sharp angle, then another, smaller lines radiating outward like the legs of some delicate insect.

A symbol.

*The* symbol — or one very like it. One of the shapes carved into the box. One of the shapes burned into the dirt floor of the barn.

I turned my hand under the lamp, angling it, telling myself it was a trick of the light, a shadow, *anything* but what it actually looked like — which was a mark that had been drawn directly onto my skin, in a color that was almost but not quite the color of a bruise. Not blue. Not purple. A strange, deep gray-black, like the carved grooves in the box, like ash pressed into the lines of my palm.

I scrubbed at it in the bathroom sink until my skin was raw and pink all around it, and the mark didn't fade. If anything, scrubbing seemed to bring it into sharper focus, the lines darkening slightly, as though my own blood rising to the surface was helping to define it.

I stood there at the sink for a long time, gripping the edge of the basin, staring at my own reflection in the spotted mirror. My face looked wrong to me — too pale, eyes too dark underneath, like I'd aged five years in a single night. Behind me, through the bathroom door, I could see down the hall toward my grandmother's room.

The door was open again.

I hadn't opened it. I was almost certain of that — *almost*, because the certainty of the last twenty-four hours had become a slippery thing, sliding out of my grip every time I tried to hold onto it. But I remembered closing it. I remembered my hand flat against the wood, feeling that heartbeat-thing on the other side.

Now it stood open, maybe six inches, a dark gap leading into a darker room, and I could not see anything inside it except a faint, faint gleam — low to the floor, where the writing desk would be.

Like something catching the light.

Like a blade.

---

I didn't go in. I want that on record, because what happened next makes it sound like I did, like I went looking for whatever came after — but I didn't. I went downstairs instead. I made tea I didn't drink. I sat at the kitchen table with my marked hand pressed flat against the cool wood, as if the table itself might draw the heat out of it, and I tried to think.

*Coincidence,* I told myself. *Some kind of rash. An allergic reaction to something in the house — dust, mold, the old fabric on the furniture.* People got strange rashes from old houses all the time. It was probably nothing. It was *probably* —

The pen was already in my hand before I consciously decided to pick it up.

I don't know how to explain it any better than that. One moment my hand was flat on the table, and the next, my fingers had closed around an old ballpoint pen from the drawer — I hadn't opened the drawer, or rather, I had, but I had no memory of doing it, the way you sometimes find yourself standing in a doorway with no memory of crossing the room to get there — and the pen was moving.

Not randomly. Not a scribble, not a tremor.

It was drawing.

I watched my own hand move across the back of an old envelope with a kind of horrified fascination, like watching someone else's hand through a window. Smooth, confident strokes. Curves and angles I recognized immediately, because I'd been staring at them for two days now — the symbols from the box, from the barn floor, from my own palm — except this was different. This wasn't a copy of something. This was *more.* New shapes branching off the familiar ones, additional lines and angles that felt, even as I watched them appear, like they were completing something. Filling in gaps I hadn't known were there.

My hand moved for almost a full minute before I managed to make it stop — and "made it stop" isn't quite right either, because it didn't feel like effort, exactly. It felt like *interruption.* Like grabbing the steering wheel from someone else mid-turn. The pen clattered out of my fingers and rolled off the table, and I shoved my chair back so hard it scraped a long white gouge into the floorboards, and I stood there in the kitchen breathing like I'd run a mile, staring down at the envelope.

The symbols covered nearly the entire surface. Dense, interlocking, *correct* in a way I had no business recognizing — the way you can look at a sentence in a language you don't speak and somehow know, on some animal level, that the grammar is right.

At the very center of the design, where all the lines converged, was a shape I recognized instantly, because I had been looking at it in the mirror an hour before.

A hand. Palm out. Fingers spread.

And in the center of that drawn palm, my pen — *my hand* — had pressed down so hard it had torn through the paper. A small, ragged hole, right where the mark on my own palm was centered.

I looked down at my hand. The mark had darkened. It was no longer gray-black.

It was the color of fresh ink.

---

Outside, the wind had picked up again — that same wrongness from the first evening, a wind with no source, rattling the bare branches of the dead oak I could just see through the kitchen window, half a mile down the road. And underneath the sound of the wind, so faint I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it, came something else.

A voice. Not words, not quite — more like the *shape* of words, heard from underwater, muffled and warm and almost, almost familiar.

It was coming from upstairs.

From her room.

And it sounded — God help me, it sounded *grateful.*

I picked the pen up off the floor. I don't remember deciding to do that either.

And I found, as I held it, that some small, distant part of me — a part that had been quiet for a very long time, buried under months of numbness and gray, empty days — was *curious* what it might draw next.

That part of me wanted to go upstairs.

That part of me wanted to open the door the rest of the way.

I put the pen down. I went and sat on the porch instead, in the cold, until the sun came all the way up — because for the first time since I'd arrived at Hollow Creek, I was afraid not of the house.

I was afraid of myself.