MANOS: 2 Hands 2 Fate - prologue

(As I said on Twitter, this is a Serious Horror Novelization of the very bad film MANOS: The Hands of Fate. It is ongoing and should be considered a rough draft. Updates (probably) will be weekly and locked to supporters after this.)

 Prologue

He no longer remembered a time before the house, before the pain, before the Master.

He no longer remembered that he once remembered. At some point the years ran together like muddy water, and he forgot that there was anything that he had forgotten. A smile, a sound sleep, the taste of sweetness, a clear sky—gone, and their absence gone too. There was only the house squatting under hot sullen days and cold moonless nights—the keeping of it, to the extent that such keeping was even necessary in a house so rarely lived in by anyone but him—and the pain, which ate into his bones with every step and settled a thick, noxious fog over his brain so that the world around him was something he could never quite see or smell or taste or touch or hear and he had to fight for every sensation that slogged its way through.

And there was the Master. Sometimes.

Once, somewhere in all that lost time, he might have hated the Master. He was aware that the Master was a thing—a man? What was a man? How would one know, how would one differentiate him from a ghost or a demon or a god?—that might earn one’s hatred. It was possible that in some lost and shadowy part of him, he still did. Once he might also have loved the Master, but that emotion was even more of a blurry shred of distant memory than the hatred. Now and then he would sit outside in the cool of the evenings, nursing the jagged ache in his body and watching the snakes wind lazily around his distorted ankles, and try to decide what he really felt for the man-like thing dead and sleeping in the inner dark, and he would think of scattered bits of paper wet from rain that never fell anymore, the ink smeared and illegible. That was all he was now: those wet torn pages. No stronger, no better-shaped, no more useful.

He didn’t know whether he hated the Master. He did know that he hated himself, very much. He knew that more than once he had tried to make himself die. He knew that he had failed. He knew that he would likely never succeed, because the Master did not will it so, did not approve, and whatever the Master did not approve of would not be allowed to happen.

So he limped through the silent rooms of the house, visited the chamber where he could whisper his madness and let his furtive hands roam, and he listened to the chatter of the bats as they swooped and roosted, and the resentful hissing of the snakes as they wriggled through the sickly yellow dust, and when the mood took him he sang the wild, wailing songs of the coyotes and wasn’t judged for his jarring tunelessness, and he considered how the songs sounded like mourning, and he did not know what he mourned for. And he curled into himself in the cold hardness of his small bed until the constant agony of himself so exhausted him that he couldn’t help but sleep.

And he waited.

He did not know that he was waiting. He had forgotten. He had forgotten the other times when his waiting had stopped for a while.

Which is why, when the people finally arrived, he wasn’t ready.