Rickys hand, p.1
Ricky's Hand, page 1
Contents
Cover
Praise for the Author
Also by David Quantick and available from Titan Books
Title Page
Leave Us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Interlude
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Thanks
About The Author
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR
“David Quantick is one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing.”
NEIL GAIMAN
“If you choose to only live in one alternative reality make sure it’s the one in which you read Sparks by David Quantick.”
BEN AARONOVITCH
“A Kurt Vonnegut for a new generation.”
SARAH PINBOROUGH
“Ricky’s Hand [is] like nothing I've ever read before – the literary equivalent of sticking your head out the window while driving 100 MPH on the highway: an absolute rush, wild and exhilarating.”
RIO YOUERS
“I hadn’t planned to read all of Night Train in one sitting, but I found myself doing just that. David Quantick’s novel sets up a vast mystery and barrels deliriously toward a conclusion you’ll never see coming like, I don’t know, some kind of railed vehicle that operates in the dark.”
JASON PARGIN
“A dark, nightmarish journey into a brand new sort of Twilight Zone, David Quantick’s Night Train is breathless, frantic, and creepy as hell. You’ll never see the twists coming.”
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
“Night Train is pacy, amusing and gory and an entertaining companion on a dark journey.”
LOUIS GREENBERG
“David Quantick has a medical condition whereby he literally cannot be unfunny.”
CAITLIN MORAN
“Darkly funny.”
THE INDEPENDENT
“Revels in strangeness and snarky dialogue.”
FINANCIAL TIMES
“An unnerving horror story... Quantick delivers a fine sense of mystery.”
MORNING STAR
“Ingenious, likeable, funny and entertaining.”
THE SPECTATOR
Also by David Quantick
and available from Titan Books
All My Colors
Night Train
Leave Us a Review
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Ricky’s Hand
Print edition ISBN: 9781803360461
E-book edition ISBN: 9781803360478
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: August 2022
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© David Quantick 2022
David Quantick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
To Matthew
ONE
One morning Ricky Smart looked down at his hand and screamed.
Ricky thought of himself as an observant guy. It went with the job, which was taking photographs of people who didn’t know he was taking photographs of them. Ricky called himself a paparazzi, although the right word was paparazzo, and everyone else just called him a creep. But he made money selling the pictures to websites and newspapers, although it wasn’t a lot of money because nobody cared about quality anymore and any clown could take a picture of a celebrity with their phone.
It wasn’t much of a living, but it was a life. Until the day he looked down at his hand and screamed.
He woke up that morning without a hangover, which was a bonus. Ricky checked all the things in his head that he might need to know before he got up: where was he, had he done anything last night he needed to be worried about, would he fall over if he got up, and so on. The list complete – in my own bed, no, probably not – he opened his eyes and lifted his arm to look at his watch. His eyes were still gummy from sleep and dehydration, so for a moment it was hard to focus, but after he screwed up his eyes and blinked, Ricky could see that his watch was not on his wrist.
This was odd. Ricky was very much someone who slept with his watch on. Not only was it practical, it also saved messing with the complexities of a strap while drunk. Also, Ricky had no memory of taking the watch off. True, he had no memory of a lot of things – including all of July 2009 – but taking his watch off was something he would have remembered, if only because last night had been so dull that taking off his watch would have been a high point. And yet there it was. No watch.
Ricky lifted his hand to look more closely at the place where his watch should be – and then he froze.
There was something wrong. It was his hand.
It was different.
Ricky rotated his wrist to examine it more closely. His hand looked perfectly OK as hands go. Four fingers, a thumb, all the nails, everything present and correct.
But it wasn’t right.
First, it was the wrong weight. Ricky had no idea how much his hands weighed, because they’d never been detached from his arms and put on a set of scales, but he would have said they were probably the same weight as each other. But this hand seemed to be a little heavier than the other. All his life, Ricky had felt fairly balanced in the matter of hands, but now he felt like someone had stuck two large and differently sized vegetables on the ends of his wrists.
Second, there was the shape. This hand seemed to be a bit stockier than the other one, like it was the hand of someone who worked outdoors, or lifted weights, or some physical shit like that.
And third, there were some scars that he had definitely never seen before. Not new scars, either, but the kind of whitened, hard scars that time had worked on.
“What the hell?” Ricky mumbled to himself. The whole thing was stupid. People didn’t wake up with new hands like Frankenstein or something. They woke up with their old hands and the only thing that ever changed was that the hands got older. It must be his eyes, or the light, or some stupid thing.
He rolled off the bed, dislodging his watch and its broken strap – there it is, he thought – and made his way into the bathroom. Ricky wasn’t a fat man, not exactly, but he was a little busty and his navel stuck out of his hairy stomach like a whale’s eye. He flip-flopped his way across the tiled floor, turned on the light above the bathroom mirror, and lifted his hands up like he was about to surrender.
Now Ricky could see that his hands weren’t the same as each other. The right hand was entirely familiar to him – the skin quite soft, almost downy, the nails badly manicured – even down to the small, sickle-shaped scar on his palm that he’d got in a fight with a girl as a teenager. But the left hand – the left hand was different somehow. The skin seemed more weather-beaten, harder and maybe even tougher. The nails were small and ground-down. And the fingers were chunky, the knuckles like nuggets of bone under the skin.
Ricky brought his hand (the new hand, as he was trying not to call it) closer to his face; and then he saw it. At first he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it right away. Maybe it had been the light, or maybe he just hadn’t looked properly. All he could do, once he’d realized fully what he was looking at, was stare.
On the knuckles of his right hand, carved in faded but deep ink and written in a shaky, just-legible hand, were four letters.
F U C K
Ricky had never seen the letters before. He hadn’t put them there. But someone had. The person that the hand belonged to.
And that was when he screamed.
Ricky screamed so hard he stepped backwards and fell over. He grabbed at the bathtub but too late to stop his fall, and went over like a toppled penguin.
“Oww!” he shouted as his head slammed into the hard floor. He lost consciousness for a moment, and when he came round a few seconds later couldn t remember where he was or even who he was. He gazed up at the ceiling, groaned, and pulled himself upright with his other hand on the side of the toilet.
Ricky sat on the side of the bath for a few minutes, feeling the new bump on the back of his head.
“What a crappy start to the day,” he said out loud to himself.
He frowned. Something had happened. Something to do with his—
He looked down. There it was again.
F U C K
“Fuck,” said Ricky, agreeing with his hand.
He stood up, went over to the basin, turned on the water and put his hand under the stream. It gushed out nearly boiling but Ricky didn’t care. As the water scalded his hands, he rubbed at his knuckles with soap. I’m gonna wash that fuck right offa my hand, he hummed to himself.
Ricky looked down. Nothing had changed. He reached under the sink for a bottle of bleach, its neck encrusted blue, and poured some onto an old nail brush. Ricky winced as he scrubbed at his knuckles. The writing wasn’t coming off, but quite a bit of skin was. He stopped. All he was doing was hurting himself. He rinsed the bleach off his burning skin, gently dabbed his hand dry with a towel, and went back into the bedroom. He sat down on the bed and tried to think.
Ricky had read something once about the five stages of denial. They were, he vaguely remembered, something like denial, anger, depression, acceptance, and lust. After a moment’s thought, he shortened the list to four by excluding lust. After a few more moments’ thought, he decided that he was passing through denial quite quickly – it was hard for him to deny the existence of something as solid as a fucking hand, after all – but he was still a long way off acceptance. Anger, then, was his current state and, Ricky mused as he stared at the fleshy interloper on his wrist, who could blame him?
He looked around for his phone and found it plugged into the charger by some miracle. Picking it up, Ricky jabbed at the home screen, but with no luck. The words “Fingerprint not recognized” appeared on the screen.
“Shit the fuck!” Ricky shouted. “Shit the fuck this and piss on it!”
He smashed his new hand into the wall, remembering too late that, while it might not be his hand, it was still attached to his muscles and nerve endings. The pain was quite considerable, and made it even harder to type in his old security password with his new fingers.
A few moments later he had the number he needed, and he dialed it.
“Fuck you,” said a woman’s voice.
“That’s no way to talk to your brother.”
“Says you.”
“Listen, I wouldn’t normally call—”
“Then don’t. Bye.”
“Wait! This is a fucking crisis.”
Ricky’s sister sighed.
“It’s always a fucking crisis with you,” she said, and rang off.
Ricky swore for a while, then called the hospital.
“Mount Ararat Medical Center,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “Which department do you require?”
“Hi,” said Ricky, and stopped. What department did he require?
“I need the emergency room,” he said finally.
“If it’s an emergency, you’ll need to come in yourself. Unless you’re unable to, of course.”
Ricky waggled his fingers.
“Nope,” he said, “I can come in.”
Ricky put a plastic glove on his hand, the kind they give out in a chicken restaurant where the food is extra greasy, and took a shower. He didn’t know why he had put on the glove, but it seemed like a good idea. Maybe it’s infectious, he thought, and an image came into his head of touching his dick and his dick turning into something else. He tried to shake the picture out of his head and concentrate on being a regular person just taking a shower. But the image would not go away. Ricky’s hand on Ricky’s dick. Ricky’s new hand on Ricky’s old dick.
New dicks for old! thought Ricky. He remembered a story about a king called Midas, who made everything turn to gold when he touched it, and wondered if Midas had ever touched his own dick in the shower.
Ricky hurriedly finished his ablutions, dried himself and got dressed (he rarely shaved, believing – wrongly – that his stubbly cheeks were alluring to women). Then, because deep down he was a practical man, he made himself a bowl of cereal and ate it hurriedly, Cheerios spilling from his milky mouth.
He took off the plastic glove, wiped his mouth, picked his coat up from off the floor, checked for his car keys and, after a moment’s thought, went to a drawer full of mismatched socks, old underwear, balaclavas, and gloves. Ricky took out his favorite pair of gloves, but the right glove didn’t fit. Swearing a little, he found a second, woolen pair that fit both hands fine. Ricky pulled them on and left the house.
Ricky’s car was parked right outside his apartment. It was a yellow Pontiac Aztek, which Ricky had chosen because it was cheap and inconspicuous, or at least it had been before Ricky had filled it with Burger King debris. It also had a tent in the back that folded out, which Ricky was sure might be useful on a long stakeout, but so far had not been. He checked the location of the hospital on his phone and started the engine.
Twenty minutes later, Ricky was crossing the Mount Ararat parking lot to the emergency room.
“Hi,” he told the receptionist, a portly man called Steven, “I called earlier.”
“Yeah,” Steven replied. “We don’t really do bookings. Take a ticket.”
Ricky sat down. The room was half full with people who seemed to have been stabbed, cut or just battered with varying degrees of success. He was sure people were staring at him and noting with disapproval his apparent lack of flesh wounds.
After some time, his name was called and he went into a small room with a large window, where a cheerful-looking woman in her forties introduced herself as Nurse Mike.
“Don’t I get a doctor?” Ricky asked.
“This is the emergency room. You get Nurse Mike,” said Nurse Mike.
Ricky worked in the entertainment industry, so he was used to people referring to themselves in the third person. He said, “OK. But this might be something for a doctor.”
“And you might be hurting my feelings,” Nurse Mike replied. “Now please, shit or get off the pot.”
Ricky took off his gloves, first the left, then the right. He thrust his hands out at Nurse Mike.
“You see it?” he asked.
“See what?” answered Nurse Mike.
“My hands,” said Ricky.
“I see your hands,” Nurse Mike agreed. “What about them?”
“They’re different!”
Nurse Mike smiled. “Everyone’s hands are different,” she said. “I mean, a little bit. Look at mine.”
“I don’t want to look at your hands,” said Ricky. “I want you to look at my hands.”
“Oh,” said Nurse Mike. “I get it now. They are different.”
“Finally,” Ricky said.
“You’ve got that offensive tattoo on your right hand.”
“What?”
“Right there,” Nurse Mike said. “The F word.”
She gave Ricky a friendly, understanding look.
“But this is the emergency room,” she said. “We don’t do laser removals here. You need—”
“It’s not the tattoo,” said Ricky. “It’s the whole hand.”
“You want the hand removed?”
“No!” Ricky said. “I mean, maybe… I don’t know.”
Nurse Mike shook her head.
“If this is a body image thing, I sympathize. We had a guy in here, wanted his leg off. But again, this is the—”
Ricky shouted, “It’s not my hand!”
“Excuse me?”
“This! My hand! It’s not my hand!”
Nurse Mike frowned.
“It’s not your hand?” she repeated.
“No,” said Ricky. “I woke up this morning and this fucking thing was where my hand should be.”
Nurse Mike leaned in.
“It does look a little different,” she admitted. “But that could be for any number of reasons.”
“Like what?”
“Allergy, bee sting, animal bite, various kinds of infection… all of those would make it swell up.”
“Yeah, but none of those would make a tattoo appear on my hand.”
“Listen, pal,” said Nurse Mike, sitting upright. “Maybe you got bit by something, you freaked out, got drunk, had a tattoo done for some reason, I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s not an emergency, and this—” she said, getting up and opening the door, “—is the emergency room.”
