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Excerpt: Marble Hands by Bernard Capes is a creepy short story about two boys who see something strange in a cemetery. The story was written in 1915 and appeared in 100 Hair Raising Little Horror Stories and The Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories. We left our bikes by a small lychee gate and entered the old cemetery. Heriot explained to me that he did not want to come; but at the last moment, when feeling or curiosity got the better of him, he changed his mind. I always knew that there was something distasteful to him in the associations of the place, although he always referred fondly to a relative with whom he lived here as a boy. Maybe he was lying under those green rocks. We walked around a church with a curving shingled tower. Here in the corner of the small town, where the blooming fields began, it was completely quiet. The bones of the mountain were bones of the dead, and its flesh was grass. Suddenly Heriot stopped me. We then stood northwest of the pulpit, and the darkness of the motionless trees overshadowed us. "I hope you will look there a moment," he said, "and come back and tell me what you see." He pointed to a small bay formed by a low retaining wall, the green floor obscured by thick branches and a pair of interspersed graves, large, coffin-shaped, and enclosed in rails. His voice sounded strange; he had a "deep" look in his eyes, to use a gambler's expression. I looked at him for a moment, followed the direction of his hand; then without a word he stooped under the heavy bushy branches, went round the great graves, and came to a lonely grave. It lay there alone in the hidden Lahti—a strange thing, fantastic and terrible. There was no headstone, but the gravel area was surrounded by a sloping marble curb with no name or epitaph, from which two hands protruded. They were of white marble, very faintly touched with green, and conveyed the strangest sense of reality in that still, lonely place, as if they had really been driven from a grave beneath the deadly and alluring. The effect grew as I watched, until I could imagine them moving stealthily, knowingly, and turning in the ground as if saluting. It was absurd, but I turned and hurried back to Heriot. “Obviously. I see they are still there,” he said; and that was it. Without a word we left the place and got on our backs, continued our journey. Kilometers from the place, on the sunny side, among hundreds of sheep around us mowing the hot grass, he told me a story: “She was living in town with her husband when I first visited when I was seven. They were known by Aunt Caddie, who did not like the woman. I didn't like him at all because when we met he made me like him. He was a little kind, frivolous and shallow; but really, I know now that he has a nasty side. "He was exceedingly proud of his hands; and they were indeed the most beautiful things, softer and better shaped than those of a child. He represented them in fifty different positions; and once a sculptor, a friend of his, made them magnificently in marble. .. Yes, they were the ones you saw, but they were cruel hands despite all their beauty. There was something mean and dirty in the way he treated them. "He died while I was there, and his memory came to mind by his own express wish, after a fashion. The marble arms were to be his only inscription, more eloquent than the stars. They were to preserve the tradition of his name. and his best qualities, beyond the age to which no decaying letter could reach. "The work of art was not liked among the parishioners, but it did not give me a childish quarrel. The hands were really beautifully formed by the natives, and the natives often caressed me. I was never afraid to go and see them, which sprang up like white celery from the land "I went away, and two years later I visited Aunt Caddy a second time. During our conversation I learned that her husband had married again—a lady of the place—and the arms had only recently been removed. The new woman resisted them—for some reason that might not be hard to fathom—and they were uprooted at his command. "I was a little sorry, I suppose—hands always seemed a little personal to me—and at the first suggestion I slipped away myself to see what the grave looked like without them. It was close, fell, I remember, and the churchyard. was very quiet. After running just below the branes, I saw where I knew Aunt Caddy had spoken before. The hands were not thrown open at first, but were extended in their old place and attitude, looking as if they were welcome to me. I was happy; and I ran and knelt down and put my hands down to touch them. They were soft and cold like dead flesh, and they closed tenderly around me, as if beckoning to pull - pull. - I don't know what happened after that. Maybe I was sick all the time because of the fever I had. It was a season of fear and emptiness—crawling, worm-wounds, and wobbly bones—and then at last the blessed light of day. Heriot stopped and sat plucking at the fresh pasture. "I never learned," he said suddenly, "what other experiences synchronized with my own. But the place somehow got a confused reputation, and the marble hands were put back. Surely the imagination can play strange tricks with one.