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A Human Finger

a campfire story on the eve of WWI

By Eric DovigiPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 15 min read
3
A Human Finger
Photo by Anandu Vinod on Unsplash

“The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night a candle burned in the window.”

(“Ahhh - ahhh -”)

“But when we got close, real close, we could see that it wasn’t a candle at all that was burning.”

(“Ahhhhhhhhh…”)

“It was a human finger!”

(“ATCHOO.”)

Beethoven sneezed so violently I couldn’t believe the campfire didn’t blow out. It wasn’t even a fake sneeze.

Okay, I admit it, Scout Leader Davidson wasn’t the best storyteller. He tended to be long-winded and used overwrought language that blunted the impact of his story, but he was trying. And along comes Beethoven with his real sneeze to ruin things. I was a little annoyed. I suppose I considered myself the leader of the group, and responsible for our conduct.

Beethoven? No, that wasn’t his real name. A twelve-year-old lad from Cumbria. Real name was something like Bragg.

We called each other after composers whose last name started with the same letter as ours. Bragg was Beethoven; my friend Wendall Vincent was Verdi; I was Parsons, which became Purcell, which became Percy, which became Perce or sometimes just “P.” The German boy didn’t get a name change, because his last name was already Meyerbeer. We thought that was hilarious.

You see, we were not just any Scouts. We were Sea Scouts.

And we were not merely Sea Scouts, of which there were hundreds in Britain in 1914. We were musicians, very good musicians, and members of the Youth Orchestra of the Scouts, which was one of the premiere youth orchestras of Great Britain at the time. A small cohort of this orchestra was in the Sea Scouts; mostly second violins, but also one of the flute players and two cellists. The rest were normal Scouts.

We had a joke that what made us Sea Scouts was not the fact that we were focused on duties that aligned with the Navy as opposed to the Army, but rather on the fact that we were born in the North Sea and had crawled out of it all slimy and dripping. Someday, we claimed, we would slither back into it.

The ten of us sat around the campfire, holding in our laughter from Beethoven’s colossal sneeze, and attempted to allow Scout Leader Davidson to finish his story.

“It was a human finger!” he repeated, without any acknowledgment of the interruption.

We were camped in a little hollow of trampled grass, and all that separated us from a steep cliff to the sea was a copse of ancient oak trees. You couldn’t see the cliff drop from where we were, but you could feel it. On the other side of the camp, the grassy slope rose gently up for about a quarter-mile before meeting the edge of the wood. Two or three miles inside the wood was the village that headquartered us for that summer. A gentle vermilion glow from the village lit dense clouds that sat low in the sky.

A cool roll of wind rustled the oak trees. The flames of the campfire bent under the wind, under-lighting Scout Leader Davidson’s face and creating angled shadows around his nose and cheeks. Our snickers died away.

“I approached the cabin. I could not bring myself to look in the window. Instead, I moved around the side of the little shack and put my ear to the door. A strange scraping noise was coming from within. Like a fingernail against unvarnished wood.”

Meyerbeer was shivering beside me. I had an urge to mock him, but I was scared too. Something about the eeriness of our surroundings seemed to rob us of the incorrigible irony that only very rarely leaves a teenage boy.

“The scraping noise, which had seemed very close to the door, was now receding. Slowly, it tapered off and I could no longer hear it. I reached for the doorknob.”

No, whispered Tchaikovsky.

“My knuckles were white. I turned the knob and opened the door a sliver. Putting my eye to the crack, I had to squint, for the candlelight, as weak as it was, was bright to my nocturnal eye. When my vision finally adjusted, I gave a hideous shriek! In the corner of the cabin was a …”

Despite ourselves, we were all leaning forward, breathless. When we realized it was to be a cliffhanger, we expressed that collective sense of injustice that an audience feels at such moments.

Scout Leader Davidson sat back, sighed, and slapped his knees. “Until next time!”

“You can’t stop there!”

“Just one more page, mate!”

“What was behind the bleeding door?”

Davidson said, “Steady on, Scouts, steady on! No language like that, or you’ll never hear the end of this story.”

Yet he was grinning. His story had come off marvelously.

The cabin of the story was real. It sat not far from our campsite, a few hundred yards into the wood. Far from being abandoned, it was kept in decent shape and regularly used as a supply shed. But it had an unsettling, lopsided feel to it. Like it had been built by a lopsided person for lopsided ends. Nobody liked it, and nobody ever wanted to be told to go fetch something—a flare, a flag, an ax—from it.

“What I don’t understand,” someone protested, “was how the finger stood upright in the candle holder.”

“Oh, probably rigor mortis or something,” explained Scout Leader Davidson. He stood up and clapped his hands. “Well Scouts, it’ll be past midnight. Dead out, then turn in. Meyerbeer, you fetch some water.”

Meyerbeer looked petrified.

Davidson had been picking on the German boy more and more as the weeks wore on and events in Europe got thicker and thicker. He’d make Meyerbeer clean up a table after breakfast all by himself, or fetch tea for the whole group, or clean someone else’s berth (Davidson called our bunks berths despite the fact that we were sleeping in some nice old houses on the edge of the village), and if anything ever went wrong, anywhere, for any reason, it was Meyerbeer’s fault.

It was starting to get to the kid.

“I’ll go with him, sir,” I said, less out of sympathy with the German than a desire to get the fire out swiftly and get to bed.

“You will not, Parsons. Meyerbeer is perfectly capable of performing this task on his own. The German people are a thoroughly capable group. Are they not, Meyerbeer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There you have it, Parsons. Goodnight, Scouts.”

Davidson vanished beyond the ring of firelight. His usual custom was to hover around and pester us until we thoroughly drowned the fire and then drowned it a second time, toeing the sodden ashes before finally releasing us to bed. This abrupt departure struck us all as strange.

“Well, wait a moment and then we’ll go get some water together and douse this fucker and then get to sleep,” Verdi said to Meyerbeer, who was about to venture off toward the stream. The German sighed with relief.

A crack of thunder, quite close, startled me. Ignoring Beethoven, who was laughing at my jumpiness, I looked up: the clouds that had been hovering over the village were now overhead. I looked east; more clouds, thicker than these, were sailing in from the sea. A fine mist began to fall.

“Fuck waiting. Let’s go,” murmured Verdi, pushing Meyerbeer out into the darkness and following close behind. Beethoven skipped after them.

“I still don’t get how a finger stands upright in a candle holder,” said Handel, a tall, thin boy from London with a posh accent. If it hadn’t been for Meyerbeer, he would have been the butt of our jokes. “I mean, the knuckles would buckle.”

“The knuckles would buckle, the knuckles would buckle!”

“Buck those knucks!”

“Knuck those bucks!”

“Fuck those cucks!”

“Shuck those yucks!”

A chorus of absurdity surrounded Handel, who merely shook his head. “Odd children.”

“A human finger,” I echoed, trying to ignore the thickening rain. There was another crack of thunder, followed this time by a flash. I weighed the words, felt them in my mouth. A human finger. That this descriptor should make a finger feel an alien thing struck me as strange, as if even our own humanness were alien to something more essential in us.

“This rain keeps up, we won’t need any buckets of stream-water to put the fire out,” someone said.

“Why do you think Davey Jones left so quick?” another boy wondered aloud.

“A rendez-vous with a local lass, no doubt,” answered a violinist, who was miming the violin part to the piece we were learning and humming under his breath.

“Yeah, that’s it. He’s going to get bonked at 1 o’clock am sharp.”

“No, no. He’s eager to play with his model ships.” Davidson infamously possessed no fewer than ninety-one model ships, no two the same, carefully positioned around his office. Lately, rumor had it, they had all been re-positioned to face south-east. Across the Channel.

The rain was falling more in earnest. Still, Meyerbeer and Verdi were not back. What would Lord Baden-Powell do? I asked myself.

My hero, Lord Baden Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, would stand up, take charge of the situation, delegate someone to go check on Verdi and Meyerbeer, someone to lead the others back to camp, and stay with the fire in the meantime.

I rose, but was preempted by Verdi’s return.

He came alone, water-less, staggering out of the darkness like he was drunk.

“What’s with you?” asked Handel. “Where’s Meyerbeer?”

Verdi looked confused.

I took him by the shoulders and sat him down on the ground. My palm on the back of his head came away bright scarlet. “Vincent,” I said. “What happened?”

“I don’t remember. We were almost at the stream, then there was a big flash of bright white light, and… I don’t remember.”

“A flash of light? Lightning?”

“I don’t remember.”

We couldn’t get anything else out of Vincent. Beethoven sat him down by the fire and Handel and I trudged off toward the stream to see if we could find Meyerbeer.

“I wonder if the kid snapped,” Handel said.

“I dunno...”

“I mean here he is, in the belly of the beast, all alone, poked and prodded.”

“What do you mean, ‘the belly of the beast?’” I asked.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? A German in England.”

“Here’s only here on a music scholarship.”

“Oh Perce, don’t be naive.”

I said nothing.

By the time we got to the stream the rain was falling so hard we could barely see twelve feet ahead of us. Further in the trees I could see the tool shed, the little red square of light that was its window. I shuddered and turned away.

There was no sign of Meyerbeer, and we were about to turn back when Handel shouted over a peal of thunder and pointed at the ground.

A shoe. Just one.

We looked at each other.

A hasty retreat brought us back to a camp in disarray. The fire was a sputtering mess of coals; scouts were running this way and that, shouting unintelligibly at each other; Vincent had fallen on his side and lay insensible on the sodden grass.

“What’s going on?” Handel caught Beethoven by the shoulders.

“A ship! A ship!” Beethoven wrenched out of his grasp and ran toward the sea.

Suddenly Scout Leader Davidson appeared out of the rain. He spoke firmly.

“Parsons, Harrison. Join the rest of the scouts at the cliff edge. I will meet you there with torches. Parsons, get a formation going along the edge of the cliff. The water below is deep and mostly free of coral or rock until you get around the curve. I’ll bring Vincent back to the village.”

He scooped Verdi up like a rag-doll, turned, and disappeared.

I looked at Handel.

“A ship must be struggling in the storm,” Handel said. “C’mon!”

We ran toward the cliff-edge. The rain fell so thickly that I nearly careened off the side.

Only about four or five boys had formed a line along the edge. They stood uncertainly. No one had brought flags or torches.

I looked out at the sea. It was an unbroken, churning mass of black and blue and grey.

“Where’s the ship?” I turned to Handel—but he was gone. Two sopping footprints at the edge of the cliff were all the remained. Oh my god, I mouthed. I ran in the other direction. Beethoven stood there, motionless, expressionless.

“We need torches,” he said.

“But where is this ship? What kind of ship is it?”

“A Navy ship! A big one. That’s what Davidson said.”

“Where the fuck did everyone go?”

The dark outlines that had been standing at the cliff edge just a moment ago were gone. I spun around; Beethoven and I were the only ones left.

“Goddammit,” I hissed. “I can’t think. I can’t think straight.” My brain felt like mush. Later I’d learn all about the fog of war. This would be my first taste of it. It felt like someone opened up my skull and scooped my brains out with a spoon. What would Lord Baden Powell do? I asked myself. But I found I couldn’t remember what he even looked like, let alone what he would do in such a situation.

Beethoven shouted, “There should be torches and a flare in the shed.”

“The shed?”

“Yes, idiot. The tool shed. The cabin.”

Of course. The cabin from Davidson’s campfire story. That’s where the deputized scouts had been sent to gather supplies in the first place. Something had waylaid them.

“Go get them!” Beethoven cried.

I turned and ran back toward the trees. I briefly looked over my shoulder to watch Beethoven turn from a boy, to a water-sprite, to a silhouette, and finally merge with the falling rain.

I passed the campsite, dashed into the trees, and fixated on a small point of red light: the shed window. The rain fell less thickly in the wood, filtered by thick oak leaves.

I got close enough for the point of light to become a square, then ground to a halt. The light was not coming from a torch, or a lamp.

It was a candle.

The flame at the end of the wick was bright yellow, but the room inside was red like the inside of a ruby. I got closer, my heart pounding, eyes fixed on the candle.

Finally, only a handful of yards away, I saw it: on the windowsill, just below the candle-holder, was a finger. A human finger. Severed neatly at the bottom joint.

I couldn’t feel my body. It’s like I was made out of bread, or pudding, or jam. My hand rose as if of its own will to the door, turned the knob, and swung the door open.

Each limb was in one corner of the shed. Leg, leg, arm, arm. The head was directly in the middle of the floor, facing up toward the ceiling. The eyes wide, the mouth curling in a silent scream.

Meyerbeer.

His torso peeked out from behind a stack of boxes.

And everywhere, covering every free surface, was a model ship. I didn’t need to count them to know there were ninety-one. And no two the same.

The ships were all pointed south-east. Across the Channel.

On the floor by my feet, as if placed there for easy retrieval, were a powerful electric torch and a flare gun. I scooped them up, turned and ran back toward the cliff.

When I returned, Beethoven was gone.

Now I could see the great silhouette. Like a Leviathan rising and falling on the waves not more than a half mile away from the rocky shoal, a huge warship of the British Navy struggled against the storm. Weak lights dotted its hulk. I could see it; it was clearly insensible of its proximity to shore.

I fumbled with my torch, cursing; I finally found the switch and flicked it. The bulb inside shimmered to life, then out again.

A sudden light appeared four or five hundred feet down the cliff edge. Bright, piercing, almost blinding. It made a strong, straight arc out toward the ship, which seemed to turn to face it.

A strange figure, silhouetted against the strong white beam of light, held the decoy torch. It was directing the ship toward a heap of jagged rocks that jutted out of the white foamy waves at the base of the cliff!

I shouted useless warnings and frantically tried to light my torch. Finally I tossed it aside, and aimed the flare-gun in the air in the opposite direction of the strange torchlight, hoping at least to confuse the captain of the Navy ship enough to mistrust both signals. But the flare-gun wouldn’t work; it was drenched.

The ship slowly made its way through the rain toward a crop of jagged rocks. The misguiding signal light shone straight, bright, full, leading the ship forward, ever forward. The figure holding the torch stood as still as stone. With each sheet of rain, the silhouette shimmered; it was there and then it wasn't there. The torch looked as if floating in the air. The rain fell harder. It mingled with the falling water, shimmered.

“Stop!” I cried. An image of what I had seen in the cabin flashed before me. Other images paraded before me, pictures that were strange: thousands of men trudging through grooves in the earth, their heads down, their boots soaked with mud and rain; blasted plains dotted with withered trees; boys clutching rifles in fear; everywhere the dead and the dying, men passing away not knowing who killed them, or why, or why they were there in the first place. Not remembering what lie they were told to get them out there in the dark. I saw myself, a little bigger, but not by much, treading through muck with a straggling few dozen men, at night, lit by falling orbs of white heat that seared the air and smelled of ozone. Overhead, a great finger points east. What a liar is that finger.

Sometimes the lie is a candle in the window. Sometimes a foundering ship. Sometimes it is sweet words, or angry words, or now’s the time! words. Sometimes it’s a light. Just a light.

Sometimes the light is not left for you. And the last thing in the world you should do, no matter how struggling, how tired, how lost you might be, is walk toward a light that’s not for you.

“Stop!” I screamed at the rain.

Those were the early morning hours of July 28th, 1914.

The day World War One began.

psychological
3

About the Creator

Eric Dovigi

I am a writer and musician living in Arizona. I write about weird specific emotions I feel. I didn't like high school. I eat out too much. I stand 5'11" in basketball shoes.

Twitter: @DovigiEric

Reader insights

Outstanding

Excellent work. Looking forward to reading more!

Top insight

  1. Excellent storytelling

    Original narrative & well developed characters

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