Bob Beagrie

The Making of The Witch

‘Let those who rest more deeply sleep,
Let those awake their vigils keep.
O Hand of Glory shed thy light;
Direct us to our spoil tonight.
Flash out thy blaze, O skeletal hand,
And guide the feet of our trusty band.’

            About Yorkshire (1883) by Thomas and Catherine Macquoid.


Believe me, if woken in the dead of night, in the vicinity of Gibbet Howe, by a tapping or a scratching on your window don't fling wide the shutter to take a look. Most would call it horror. Here in Yorkshire, the beggar, the parson, the milkmaid, the blacksmith, the widow and spinster all seem sinister, where those in the know rub their thresholds and sills with an unguent composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, the blood of a screech owl; reduced in the noontide sun during the dog days.

I would rub it on my lips. It was like a kiss from Death to say he would hold off a little longer. When I drew my curtain the Hand of Glory beckoned with its flaming fingers. At first, silly romantic that I was, I thought it had come to ask for my hand. Then I realised it had come to wake me from my walking-sleep-eating-sleep-talking-sleep-working-sleep, to show me the distance between my life and whatever stories had been spun for me. Some from the moment of my first bird-breath, some from before I was born. 

For like the hand, I too was true won having been pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, buried at a crossroads for two nights, then hung on a church door for one night while my maker kept watch in the porch. It is like I am a candle made with the fat of a hanged man, my own father - God forgive him.

The Hand, out of pure love, unlocked the door to reveal my own darkly miraculous powers. Something inside my body detached itself and I heard receding footsteps as if someone was descending the spiral staircase of my spine. Free of mortal wrappings I painted my gibbous face with ash and soot, carried a quail's egg in my mouth until it hatched, then fixed my goat to my trap and rode it to the market place.


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The Clairvoyant's Claim

When the hand first rocked up in Whitby, Europe teetered, once again, on the brink of war. In cinemas Pathé News presented their flickering truth to the free peoples of the world in a home counties accent, but the crowds of tourists arriving by train were there for sun, sea and sand. The hand blended in among the swathes of nondescript gentlemen, took in the view from the top of the 199 steps, strolled along the pier, relished the smell of the smoke-house on Henrietta Street, but despite never having visited the seaside town before it experienced a disturbing sense of deja vu and an uncanny magnetism to specific locations: Bagdale Hall, Arguments Yard, the foot tunnel through the Khyber Pass - a peculiar tug as if its phalangers formed a divining rod. It pondered the footsteps of previous visitors, conjuring their musings and imaginings: Stoker's gristly visions of poor Lucy's decline into vampirism, Dodgson's curious nonsensical conundrums in a caucus race, Gaskell's projection of sibling rivalry and eventual tragedy, Cook's steely stare at the horizon as if reading a destiny that was already penned there, Scoresby's glacial glare threaded through a telescope from a crows nest scanning ice-floes for the sign of a whale - a spy hop, breach or spray, but spots, instead, a great white bear watching the ship from an iceberg and hears its bone-chilling bellow. The sensations of uncanny familiarity grew until the hand decided to pay a visit to Alita Lee in her gypsy caravan on the quay, nestled among the ganseyed fishermen, half-cut sailors, pipe-smoking skippers, herring lasses and stalls of cockles and mussels. Inside the clairvoyant's cramped scrying space, with one glance at the palm she welcomed its return and began to spin a story of the press gang riots of 1793. How this hand was the hand that hurled the brick through window of the ale house on Haggersgate where the officers sought refuge from the mob, how this hand was one of the ring leaders of the insurrection against His Majesty's Royal Navy's recruiting officials, how this hand was indeed the reanimated hand of William Atkinson who was found guilty and hanged for the crimes of unlawful assembly, unlawful violence, aggravated assault, destruction of property and endangerment of life and limb.

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Cave of Hands
 
Italian missionary and explorer, Alberto Maria de Agostini, goes searching for the whiskers of God in the remote mountains of Patagonia. As if it were a divining rod, he trusts the hollow feeling in his chest, the terrible and beautiful ache of grace that has existed within him since he gave his heart to Christ, back home in Pallone. Stumbling over ice fields as blue as the holy mother’s robe, skirting around sea sounds that sing the sweetest psalms of stoicism and tooth-grinding worship, he follows the shrugged-off, tobacco-spat directions of locals who confessed to having visited Cueva de las Manos as el niño, to spook one another with ghost stories and eerie tales of bargains with chthonic beings. He was the first to officially discover the site in 1941 when the breath clogged in his throat as he held aloft in a trembling fist his oil lamp to view the swirling, spiralling vortex of Early Holocene, hunter-gathering hands sweeping around him, wafting, brushing, weaving, plucking, skinning, casting, sewing, kneading, sharpening, scraping, climbing, praying, clapping, clicking, tapping, flapping up into the darkness of the roof. Executed in natural mineral pigments – iron oxides (red and purple), kaolin (white), natrojarosite (yellow), manganese oxide (black) – ground and mixed with some form of binder, Alberto felt himself drowning as if in a fire-flue or geyser. All he could do to ground himself was cover his gawping fish-gob with his own weathered hand to stop his soul from leaping out and following the spirit dance into the fabric of the rock.
 
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Hand Over Fist

It wasn’t as if there was an overabundance of animate dismembered hands in the film industry, but then there was always going to be a limited number of parts to play. Back in ’73, pre-empting Stan Lee’s cameo appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the hand played itself in all its flaming abomination with the intent to send Sergeant Neil Howie to sleep in the folk horror classic. In ‘81 Oliver Stone cast the hand as a murderous marauder on a killing spree in a mediocre psychological thriller, starring opposite Michael Caine. In Happy Gilmore, 1996, the hand blacked up to blend in with Carl Weathers’ skin tone after an alligator supposedly snapped his real hand off while playing golf. While the movie was a commercial success it was not a versatile nor rewarding role and the hand caught some flak from critics linking it to the racist history of blackface in cinema, pointing out how often black characters are portrayed as stiff stereotypes and how black actors are so regularly overlooked. Afterwards, the mainstream movie work vanished like a line of nose candy at an after-show party in Santa Monica. In 2000, during a brief come-back to the public eye, London Fashion Week saw the hand sauntering sassy along the catwalk to The Smiths in a variety of swanky, nifty, swinging, ritzy full-fingered and fingerless gloves,  and if the people stare, then the people stare, oh, I really don't know and I really don't care…Then came a spot of nude modelling which led it into the seedy, Soho-centred world of the disembodied hand fetish, a specialist sub-genre of pornography which brought in some bread and butter for a while until the hand found itself bang on the zeitgeist with the stratospheric rise of social media. There it was cast in a brand-new role, as a symbol of artisanal craftsmanship and entrepreneurial zeal. There it became the helping hand, influencer extraordinaire, demonstrating its dexterities in countless instructional videos for cooking, DIY, crafting and inventive money-saving household hacks. In a world saturated by pouting lip-plumped pseudo-celebrity selfies the hand-only video sooths through its anonymity. The hand appears as a ubiquitous stand-in for everyone’s true creative self, even emerging as an icon of YouTube children’s content: toy unboxing footage, where playthings are removed from their packages and taken for a spin. In the small screen era of the “Thumbelina Generation” the world witnessed the long-awaited re-enchantment of the hand.
 
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The Red Hand of Ulaid
 
O Sing unto the Lord a new song;
For he hath done marvellous things:
His right hand and his holy arm,
Hath gotten him the Victory
 
Psalm 98:1
 
Forced into a corner by a staged intervention where the unmistakable evidence of its condition was presented calmly and uncontroversially, the hand had to admit the damage to its psyche from the dark-side of fame, wealth and celebrity. You're not the first and won't be the last to go off the rails and lose a grip on reality, said Nicola McChiaveli, the hand's trusted agent, Hell, she added, its part of the course for so many stars on my list, but darling, I have the perfect therapist in mind.
 
Reluctantly the hand began a course of talking therapy with Dr Galvez, who asked about the panic attacks, the paranoia, the slide into reclusiveness, the sudden pangs of jealousy, the violent outbursts. Initially, the hand was guarded, evasive, distracted and resistant but Dr Galvez's patience and soft, comforting voice, her apparent, genuine interest in who the hand was beneath the trappings of stardom and sexual fetish opened a chink in its gauntlet of protective withdrawal. Before long the hand became fixated on the way Dr Galvez licked her lower lip then swallowed before following up with a particularly penetrating question, how she did not look away when the hand wrestled with the complex feelings of addiction and revulsion to the lifestyle of unbridled entitlement and comfort to which it had grown accustomed to. The consultancy room began to swill in undercurrents of transference and projection. The hand began to recount rose-tinted stories of the days when it had nothing, those lean-times, those hard-times, those scraping-by-on-torn-fingernails-times, and long dormant memories sprang up from nowhere, vivid, desperate and bloody:
 
The lush green embrace of Inis Fáil in the distance, hills rolling like the waves, the longboat rocking under a square, woollen sail. Salted lips, eyes squinting from the sun, hungry for the rich monasteries just waiting to be pillaged. Old Turgesius, with a voice like a strangled crow yells, The first to touch the soil shall be granted kingship over this land! Whereupon, the Irish mercenary Heremon O'Neill raises his battle axe and hacks off his own hand, then, still pumping spurts of blood, fingers writhing in shock, hurls it out across the bay's sparkling waters to thud onto the shingle like a skinned seal pup. A triumph which, through cunning and unflinching sacrifice that extends human reach beyond physical limits, transformed the turn-coat hireling into the first King of Ulster.

**
 
Nemesis

The undoing was inevitable. The good life with its exotic pleasures and ever-diminishing returns of happiness, dulls the savage acumen that first secured the position. Cadillacs, a Rothko ‘Sectional’, Faberge eggs, gold leaf etched glassware and cocaine snorted off genitals. The cracks weren’t even noticed at first, then they were covered by denial. Hubris was a pair of slippers once worn by Sher-e-Mysore or "Tiger of Mysore” with leather soles and red velvet uppers, densely ornamented with salma sitara work, in gold and silver wire, with spangles and glass beads. By then things had got sloppy, coyotes were sniffing around the territory, they padded around the four posted bed at the dead at night. The dissolution of the short marriage was anything but amicable, involving accusations of mistreatment, allegations of abuse, public denouncements, open letters and restraining orders. The hand punched a mirror, paranoid of its own reflection, and it was only a surprise to itself that it was caught in flagrante delicto in the cookie jar. Publicly exposed and indefensible, the press had a field day, the distracted boyfriend meme resurfaced, and all the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand.
 
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Disclaimer

Given the highly publicised separation and bitter divorce wranglings between the contesting parties, the doubling down of victimhood, the unprofessional and mutually malicious character assassinations, and the resultant speculation over the hand’s involvement in previous unsavoury incidents The Hand of Glory™ firmly and legally assert that the hand, despite its supposed, although unsubstantiated longevity, was not connected in any way to The Black Hand (Serbian: Crna ruka), the covert military society formed in 1901 by officers in the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia, which gained global notoriety for its alleged involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the start of World War I. Nor was our friend and principle client in any way connected to the Black Hand Society (Italian: La Mano Nera), and its heinous methods of extortion in major US cities during the early years of the 20th century, including Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Detroit. There is no provable association between our client and the formation of the original Black Hand Society in the Kingdom of Naples in the 1750s. Nor does there exist any evidence of involvement with The Society of the Black Hand (Spanish: La Mano Negra), the secret, organization based in Andalusia during the 1880s, best known as perpetrators of murders, arson, and crop fires amidst the period of class struggle, and the spread of anarcho-communism, with its differences from collectivist-anarchism, and the conflict between’ legalists’ and ‘illegalists’ in The Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region; and which quickly transformed into a network of desperadoes involved in the black market. While it became an extensive and numerous society, especially in the provinces, each having its own centre and out branches with a total of affiliated members exceeding 40,000, The Hand of Glory™ once again vehemently asserts no affiliation whatsoever with this or with any of the other historic organisations listed above. Any slur, slander or libel against the good name of our patron will be met by immediate legal action.
 
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Author's note: "These prose poems are from The Hand of Glory: a biography, an absurdist imagining of the exploits and adventures of the Hand of Glory which is on display in Whitby Museum and purports to be one of the last surviving examples of theses arcane, macabre and enchanted artifacts. The collection will be released in Autumn 2025 by Yaffle Press."
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Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough, in Northeast England and has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Romanceros (Drunk Muse Press 2024), Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023). When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, journals and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He also writes short stories and plays.