Ricky's Hand

by David Quantick

Genres: Horror; Time Travel

Synopsis

From the Emmy Award-winning writer of Avenue 5, Veep and The Thick of It comes a funny, violent and thought-provoking horror story like nothing you’ve seen before.

Ricky Smart is a nobody, a Miami Beach paparazzo who scrapes a living snapping celebs. One day Ricky wakes up and realises there’s something wrong with his hand. It’s not his hand. In fact, it’s someone else’s hand. How does he know it’s not his? Because it looks different, feels different and – perhaps the biggest clue – has a four-letter word tattooed across the knuckles.
 
But hey, it's still a hand, and it works just fine, so that's ok. Except a week later, his other hand changes. And a few days after that, Ricky gets a new arm…
 
Ricky is losing his mind as well as his body parts, but he has to pay rent and those seedy photos aren't going to take themselves. The world needs candid shots of pop sensation and local girl Scala Jaq, almost as much as Ricky's bank account does. Yet Scala has a secret of her own, a secret that leads them to an unlikely partnership, the strangest support group ever, and revelations that threaten existence as they know it.
 
It's up to the celebrity and her tormentor to work out what to do with a world of misfits, explosions, and other people's bad tattoos. Because when you've looked for redemption in all the right places, you might need to try the wrong ones.

 

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Release date: August 23, 2022

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

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 ownbed, 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.”

After sitting in the Aztek for a few minutes and banging his head on the steering wheel, Ricky considered his options. He could ask to be admitted to the correct department, but he had no idea what the correct department was. He could forget the whole thing, which was hard to do when he had this fucking hand. Or he could just take a few deep breaths, make an appointment with a doctor, and in the meantime get back to work. Ricky decided this was the best option. If nothing else, he still had to eat.

Ricky lifted up his hand and addressed it directly.

“I don’t know who you are or what the fuck is going on,” he told it. “But I have a full day ahead of me and you are not going to mess with it.”

The hand did not reply so Ricky drove home.

Once back at the apartment, Ricky went into his bedroom and opened his tiny closet, most of which was taken up by a bulky safe. Ricky’s safe was his number two prized possession. Ricky’s number one prized possession was inside the safe. He jabbed at the electronic display until it beeped at him and the small but hefty metal door swung open. He crouched down and was about to reach inside when he remembered his hand and put the plastic glove back on. He was almost sure that touching the contents of his safe with the hand would be alright, but better to be cautious; besides, the glove was opaque so he didn’t have to keep looking at what was written on his knuckles. He reached into the safe with his other hand and took out a large black case with a strap. Closing the safe, he placed the case on a table and opened it.

Inside was Ricky’s camera, a slightly scratched but impressive-looking Olympus. Ricky stroked its smooth black casing: he and the Olympus had been in a few tight spots together, and almost always come out on top. He checked that the camera was fully charged and ready to go, slung it over his T-shirt (MILEY CYRUS LIVE 2010), picked up the camera bag, and headed out the door.

Ricky got into the Aztek, pushed out several burger wrappers, placed the camera bag delicately in the passenger footwell, took out his cell phone and looked at his schedule.

9AM LEGALLY BLONDE IV SCRNG was the first entry. Ricky looked at his watch: 9.40. Ricky shrugged: nobody went to screenings.

10.30 REGALITY HOTEL SCALA JAQ. This was more like it – if it was true. Ricky’s contact at the Regality did a little too much coke for Ricky’s liking and had a tendency to spin gold from bullshit. Scala Jaq – singer, actress, and influencer – couldbe checking into the Regality at 10.30, but equally Ricky could be getting scammed for a hundred bucks.

Ricky shrugged again. He had nothing to lose, and if Coke Boy was right, it was going to be a nice payday. He turned on the engine and pointed the Aztek toward the city.

Ricky grew up in Miami Beach and so, being Ricky, he had always lived in Miami Beach. When his parents died, Ricky bought an apartment on the outskirts of town, and that was the only thing that had changed about his life. That, and the job. Growing up where he did, Ricky had seen so many celebrities that they seemed to be part of the scenery, in the same way that the tourists, the retired people, and the homeless were part of the scenery, with the difference that none of the homeless, the retired, and the tourists were always stepping out of limousines, walking into clubs, dining at fancy restaurants, staying at beautiful Art Deco hotels – or being photographed.

Unlike many people, Ricky knew that he would become a celebrity only by killing someone or being killed by someone. He was not photogenic, had no screen presence, and whatever “it” was, Ricky had never had. But he did belong to a Camera Club, for the simple reason that he was lonely and he had a camera (his dad’s) and, after a local nature photographer came to Ricky’s club and revealed his actual source of income, Ricky evolved a career plan.

Since then, Ricky could be seen most mornings, afternoons, and nights hanging around outside hotels, bars, and clubs, camera round his neck, trying to get famous people to move a little to the left or the right, so that he could take their picture and then sell it to someone else for anything up to ten thousand dollars. Most of the time he just got a middle finger or a blurred head turning away, but occasionally (like with Miley Cyrus back in 2010), he hit the jackpot.

It was a tough life, by Ricky’s standards anyway. He was outdoors most of the time, competing with other, more ruthless, paps, and he was always at the mercy of cops, rentacops, private security, angry fans, and jealous stalkers. Nevertheless, Ricky thought of himself as a Zen-like patient fisherman, prepared to wait for hours for the perfect time to cast his rod and reel in a big catch. Of course, very few fishermen ever got punched in the face, but so it went. Ricky was a pap now, and that was all there was to it. He made a living, he sometimes took vacations, and one day he was going to hit the motherlode.

But for now he was taking the Aztek at a moderate speed toward a hotel that was right on South Beach itself, on a tip that might be solid gold and might equally be bullshit. He had a full tank of gas, a reliable camera, and the whole day ahead of him.

And someone else’s hand on the end of his wrist.