The Hand Part 2

"Please take it out to him, Mac," Alice said. "He's waiting for it."

His face was sour and his lips a sneer. "Give it to him, h.e.l.l," he said. "Dobie brought it here, didn't he? I've a mind to let Dobie have it."

"No, No!"

Mac put his hands on the table, stared down at the hand and shook his head. "But Dobie don't deserve it."

He picked up the hand and a queasiness prevented Alice from looking directly at it.

"It's a matter of time," she pleaded. "Please take it to them. They've got to have it right away or they can't use it. She heard the clink of one of the stove lids and watched in horror as Mac dropped the hand through the hole into the fire beneath. She was suddenly sick. During it all she could hear was Mac's laughter.

"Git on upstairs," he said a few minutes later. "Git on up to bed."

Alice looked at him, knowing her face was pale and her eyes wet and hating him for what he had done to her and what he had done to the aliens. But she felt fear, too, because she had never seen him quite like this.

"What are you going to do?"

He went over, took down a box of sh.e.l.ls from the cupboard. "What d'you suppose? I'm goin' to run that thing off my place."

"You can't do that!"

"You wait and see."

"But he's done nothing to you!"

"He's on my property, ain't he? Now you get on upstairs like I told you. Git!"

Alice went up the stairs engulfed by a feeling of sorrow for the aliens, particularly for the one that would never get his hand back, and filled with fury for her husband.

From her bedroom window she could see the alien still standing in the yard and she wondered what he would think of them for burning the hand and for what Mac was about to do.

She stood there a long time before the alien moved. She heard the downstairs door open and close and she knew Mac was outside and that the two were approaching each other. The alien finally moved from her field of vision.

Listening, she heard the alien's calm, whistling voice but she could not make out what he said. She could only hear the raving of her husband and this she did not want to hear.

When the shotgun blast came she jumped as if she herself had been hit and once again she was flooded with compa.s.sion for the creature from another world somewhere who had come in friends.h.i.+p and who had been given something hateful in return.

She went to the window but she could see nothing. She did not dare go downstairs again with Mac in the mood he was in. She sat in an armchair at the window looking out into the barn lot illuminated by the lone electric light high in the windmill. And eventually, she did not know when, she fell asleep.

When she woke up the day was just dawning and with a rush she remembered everything that had happened the night before and she found she had slept through the night in the chair without removing her clothes. When she stood up, her muscles screamed protestingly. She looked out into the yard and saw that the light in the windmill was still burning.

She went to Mac's bedroom, expecting to find him sprawled out across his bed. But his bed had not been slept in. Downstairs she expected to find him, head in hands, asleep at the kitchen table. But he was not there and the shotgun was not in its place on the wall.

She found the gun on the doorstep. But Mac wasn't in sight. Dobie came up to her and nuzzled her hands.

"Where is he Dobie?" she asked. "Where's Mac?"

Dobie turned and trotted before her, looking back at her as if to say, "This is the way."

She found Mac behind the barn.

He was alive, but in a state of shock, moaning in pain and fear.

His right hand was missing. Severed neatly at the wrist.

THE END.