Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:
"Beware of Big Hands"
Submitted by Anonymous
It's strange what time does to your
memories.
When I was a child, I told my parents
about the signs and the hidden alleys and parks, and they would tell
me that these were just memories of nightmares. Growing older, I am
inclined to believe that: after ten, twenty years, my former
certitude is starting to fade, as my childhood itself seems more and
more like a distant dream.
And yet, sometimes, with a smell, a
sound, a feeling, it's pulling me right back in. At these moments,
I am once again ten or twelve years old, my skin covered in
goosebumps as I rush through our door and into the living room, where
it is light and warm, the things I have seen still so very present in
my mind. Things I didn't remember from a nightmare. Things I had
just seen with my own eyes.
I grew up in a small town, you see.
Small in every way- we didn't even have any tall buildings besides
the bell tower of our church, and even that tower didn't prove to
be a reliable landmark.
On foot, I could make it to school in
little more than twenty minutes. That's why I went to school by
myself.
Even as a child, I realized that I
probably wasn't very smart. I tended to get lost. Sometimes, I
would walk up a hill or turn around a corner, in utter confidence
that I was merely prolonging my way home by ten minutes or so for a
little stroll in the evening sun. I liked to think to myself, dream
to myself, and I still do. It works best when I walk. My mind cannot
wander if my body is still. That's why I did this over and over
again. When I ended up in the hidden places, it always took me by
surprise.
I called them hidden places, but at
first glance they didn't look any different from any other area in
my home town. The architecture was the same. I never encountered any
people or vehicles, but that wasn't surprising in itself. Even my
own neighbourhood resembled a ghost town most of the day.
The special thing about the hidden
places was that I would only see them once. Whenever I would try to
find them again, even on a map, they just weren't there. Not that I
felt bad about that. On the contrary. But I always managed to run
into new hidden places.
It were small things that made me
notice I was in a hidden place. Street signs. Posters. Flyers
sticking out of garbage cans.
I remember walking down a little
street, with houses to my left and a large hedge to my right. There
is this yellow sign, and it doesn't look like any sign I have
encountered before. It is a yellow rectangle. There is a little human
figure on it, you know the kind. The stick figure is grabbed by a
giant hand that is coming out of a hedge. Needless to say that the
hedge and the hand are on the right side of the sign. Quite
accurately, the sign reads: 'Beware of big hands'. There was
rustling in the leaves to my right.
I remember seeing three posters stuck
to the wall of a building. One said:
'Get your teeth in a bag! A bag full
with your teeth, it is never empty! You will never run out of
teeth!'. It had a hand on it that was reaching into a hole that was
drawn in a way that it looked like it was ripped out of the paper,
revealing the darkness beneath.
And the other: 'You have children? We
will make your children YOU! Children will never be not-you ever
again!' Underneath the text, there was a picture of two eyeballs of
different size, rotated in a way that they seemed to be looking at
one another.
And the last one, without any
illustration, assuring me that:
But the worst thing I ever saw was the
sign with the racoons. It was a little sign in a park, white, with a
racoon on it, just like those signs that say 'don't feed the
animals' or something along these lines. But this sign said:
'The behaviour of the racoons will
change.'