Chapter Forty. Your Touch is Unwelcome Here

Your Touch is Unwelcome Here

The day before Derby left for Hong Kong, his daughter Barbie had just finished her fourth 5K run. Barbie hadn't shown an interest in fitness until last Fall when she enrolled in cross-country in the junior high at Tiny Town.

Derby had thought that since Barbie and he had started running together that maybe this would provide an opportunity for the pair to get closer. Funny how you so freely distribute love to the rest of the world but seem to be the hardest on the ones you love the most. Well, I don't know that it is funny at all. Sad, I guess is a better word.

Now his wife Pam and daughter Barbie were thousands of miles away and would not have a clue what the Patriarch was living through. He hoped they were having fun and that they were safe. He knew that he had left when times were difficult. The Ripleys desperately needed the money which had been dangled in front of him like a dog biscuit for a starving greyhound just before the race.

As he reflected on it now, he was very glad that the ten thousand dollars had been transferred to their account. But would he ever return to see them? Would the story of Zol really be published or had their lives been ruined as a result of his telling the fractured fairy tale? As it is, Zol is written in an experimental medium, integrating social media devices such as videos and Wikipedia and phony websites and even a style of music--can that type of writing be successfully translated to print?

All of this and a lifetime of other questions and mysteries seemed to crowd into the dark space of his mind as Derby shivered in the drafty confines of the pitch black last step, below the vase apartment.

With his foot used as a tester of solid ground, Derby explored the floor with the soul of his shiny slippers. "Aha," he said to himself when he encountered the round hard object under his foot. "The marble!"

"Should I take it back up stairs to confirm it is the black marble as Umpa had suggested?," he wondered.

"Maybe I should just swallow it now? After all, it was the black marble that Fredalnte had originally forced out of me," Derby thought to himself as he reached down and toward the round sphere near his foot.

He wasn't sure exactly in what order the disturbing incidents which followed occurred. Had he touched the marble first or had the hand grabbed his wrist? At the very moment it happened, it didn't really matter because Derby was already besides himself with fear after the slow descent into the black abyss.

Either the tips of his fingers had made contact with the marble when the boney fingers wrapped themselves around his feminine carpus or the grip of the hand around his wrist grabbed him just before he touched the marble. He wasn't sure which. But a hand reached out from somewhere and had a firm grip on his wrist.

"Who or what has ahold of me?," Derby wondered in the racing seconds as his own fingers closed tightly around the marble. And as he wondered this another set of hands grabbed the opposite ankle.

Wildly, Derby swung and kicked with all of his might, occasionally hitting or kicking the stairwell and the wall of the vase, which seemed more at the moment to be a rock wall of a prison cell. It was cold and dark and extremely scary because all of his effort seemed useless. He never once connected with an animal or a being of any kind!

Still, the hands kept coming. First on the calves of his legs, hands seemed to be reaching up from a pit further below, clawing at him with wet slimy fingers. His arms too were invaded by hands reaching from nowhere pulling him first to the left then to the right.

His groin, his belly, his breasts, his neck and face. Nothing was immune to the ceaseless struggle of bony wet claws, not of animal flesh but of skin, of hands, desperately climbing all over his body. But all seemed to be reaching from some void in the darkness.

Derby realized his struggle was pointless as the hands tore at him and stretched him in all directions. If it was possible that the room could be darker, Derby was sure it seemed to be plunged into impossible blackness.

"What am I to do with this marble?," Derby asked himself as the hands pulled him to the floor.




Swarming him like snakes or spiders the hands were now like legions of desperate beings covering him and touching him in every possible inch of his body. Derby tried to move but felt as if he were tied to the floor with ropes and stakes and the hands continued to comb him and crawl on him as if they were thousands of creeping insects.

His eyes were held wide open by these slimy hands, though he couldn't see a thing. Some probed his nostrils and ears. Even his anus was violated by the fingers from Hell. Finally, as if a team of the hands were working in concert, his mouth was pried open. Derby concentrated on the fingers in his mouth.

"What is that awful taste?," Derby wondered as the boney phalanges probed inside his mouth. "Is there more than one hand in my mouth?," he asked himself. He could move his eyeballs and his tongue, but wasn't able to physically move any other part of his body.

Darting to the left and right, his eyes could see nothing, even though they were being held wide open by these mysterious creeping fingers.

"No," he screamed as the army of hands and fingers forced open his hand which held the marble. "Nooooooooo!," he screamed louder as he felt it taken away.

Wide his mouth was open. Perhaps three or four sets of hands were ripping his mouth wider, as if to tear it away from his face.

The plop of the marble against the back of his throat was actually a relief. Because all the struggle ended, and for a brief moment, Derby was at peace.