Before Pretty Hands

CW: The following story contains instances of Abduction, Abuse, Violence, Blood, Gore, Death, and language that may be too much for some beings to endure. Listener discretion is advised.

Intro: This is Queer Ghoul. An anthology of short queer horror stories written and produced by me, Adriana Oister, pronouns she/her and they/them. 

With various tales of horror, suspense, mystery, and science fiction, I in the role of “The Narrator”, will introduce you to a diverse set of characters each of whom trapped in their own hellish landscapes, and teeth-clenching nightmares.

Monologue: You’ve probably heard the expression when a window closes, a door opens. Well, let me elaborate to you on the Queer Ghoul version of that. Picture in your mind with your third eye waking up in a dark room with a boarded-up window. In that same sinister space are three unlocked doors. You have any pick of them as you wish, you may even open all of them if that’s what you yearn for. But behind each door, lies a beset of horror in which you won’t dare soon forget. You can awake from this daydream, but it won’t make it any less real, especially for Adam Harcourt. Because Adam, who also goes by the alias of drag performer Sunshine Darling, pronouns he and him and she and her, is going to take center stage in this production of murder and terror. I caution you to keep your hands close to your heartbeat and beware any faces with eyes or none. I now present to you…BEFORE PRETTY HANDS.

Before Pretty Hands

Adam sat in front of his vanity mirror, organizing his wigs and setting them on top of white blank plastic heads, before moving them onto the rickety unbalanced metal shelves in his club dressing room. He lined each of the heads up side by side and organized them by the wig’s color and length. The shortest on the left to the longest towards the right. He was careful to not mess up his acrylic nails, painted in yellow and white, and extended out an inch and a half.

A repetitious three knock pattern cracked against the dressing room door, before it opened and a man in a black suit appeared. “Great show tonight, Sunshine Darling!” He said.

            Adam took the blonde wig off of his head and placed it on the expressionless head sitting beside his lit-up vanity mirror. He ruffled his own short black locks once he ripped off the tan wig cap. “Isn’t it always, my dear?”

“Of course, you’re the best queen to have ever graced this old club.”

            Adam giggled. “You’re so sweet.” His face flattened. “What do you want?”

            “Why would you think that I want something? Am I not allowed to give praise when it is due?”

Adam rubbed his palms against the sides of his yellow dress. “Of course, you are, my apologies. Thank you for the nice comments.”

“You’re welcome.” His manager rolled his head and peaked out the door. “Now Adam, I have a friend here that would love to meet you. They’re a huge fan of Sunshine.”

Adam rolled his eyes. He knew it. He didn’t comment on it though, instead he leaned into the mirror to check if his pink lipstick was smudged. “How could I say no to a fan? I’m not putting the wig back on though. Once the wig comes off, unless you offer me a hundred dollars and a good time, it stays off.”

The manager smiled. “Awesome.” He said as he poked his head out again to speak to the person behind the door. “She says you can come in.”

The door opened farther, and a man in a black jacket and jeans approached Adam. He had a thick dark beard clinging to his face. His eyebrows bushy. His eyes brightened at seeing Adam. “Hello Miss Sunshine Darling.” He said. “Thank you so much for letting me meet you. I’ve been to every show you’ve done in the state for the past two years. You’re so much fun to watch.”

Adam extended his hand. “Why, thank you. Those are such nice things to say.”

Adam’s manager nodded. “Harold Shipman, Adam Harcourt a.k.a. Sunshine Darling. Adam and Sunshine, Harold Shipman. I can confirm that he’s been in fact, to every show we book you in this state.”

“Really? I knew I was funny, but I didn’t think I was come more than once or twice funny. It’s always wonderful to know I have dedicated fans; those are the people who pay my bills. Makeup and clothes aren’t always a bargain. Dolly said herself, it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

Harold eyed Adam’s extended well-groomed hand, and if it were even possible, his eyes grew wider, lighter than before. He took his own hand and wrapped it softly around Adam’s and brought it closer to his face. His cheeks turned a light shade of pink. “Your hands,” He said. Hypnotized. “Your hands are so beautiful; I’ve never seen such hands be so flawless. Your cuticles and nails, are so pristine, as is the skin itself.”

Adam shivered; a tremor of panic pumped into his heart. Something felt off about this. “Oh, you know, at my age you got to use special creams and gels to fight the wrinkles and veins away. I just put on some of my goat milk hand treatment a little bit ago.”

His eyes never left Adam’s hand. He stroked his rough thumb against the smooth skin. “They’re so soft. You have the most gorgeous hands I’ve ever seen.” He said. He lifted the hand further and pressed wet kisses across each knuckle. 

That crossed the line for Adam. “Okay, Pepe Le Pew, that’s enough now.” He tugged his hand back at his side, shaking it to sling the saliva off. He exchanged a look with his manager, who only smirked and shrugged.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Sunshine. I got carried away, your hands are just so elegant, as if they belong to a king or queen. I’m an assistant to a maker who would adore your hands as much as I do.” A twinkle was still in his eyes. “Please, Miss Sunshine, let me take you out tonight for dinner, my treat. Please allow me to marvel more at your beauty and hands.”

Adam backed away from the two, and instead sat down in front of the mirror on his vanity. “I’m very sorry, but I have to decline. I’m much too busy with rehearsing and writing material for my shows, my doctor insists that any downtime I have I must use it to rest.”

“Adam, please reconsider.” The manager said. “My friend here, a big fan, gave you a dinner invite. It would be rude not to accept.”

Harold waved him off. “No, it wouldn’t be rude, I don’t take it personally. I understand that she’s busy. I don’t want to take up too much more of her time anyway. I think I better be on my way. Thank you for letting me see you tonight, Miss Sunshine.”

Adam sneered. “You’re welcome.”

Harold left the room, and Adam’s manager slammed the door. “What the hell was that?”

Adam’s attention turned towards the endless supply of makeup palettes and perfume bottles sitting in front of him. “Easy. It’s called, don’t make friends with random people on the street.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him. He just got excited at meeting you.”

            “Oh, please. How would you know anyway? All of your so-called friends are just money hungry sluts. This one just happened to be the same way, just with a hand fetish. Now out of all the fetishes in the world, a hand fetish is one of the least messed up. But he was so weird about it, he was practically having an erection just looking at mine.”

            His manager opened and closed his mouth like a fish, unable to find his words. “Just please for the love of God, be a little more civil when you meet fans who push out a lot of money to pay your bills.”

“Will you please for the love of God, stop bringing horny creepers into my dressing room?”

            His manager left the room without answering.

“If you do it one more time, you’re fired!” Adam shouted. “And get me a large Big Mac meal with a Dr. Pepper! No ice!” When he didn’t get a response, he swiveled out of his chair. He decided to just get one on his way back to his hotel room. He picked up his purse from underneath the chair and changed out of his high heeled shoes in favor of a more comfortable pair of flats.

He exited the club and arrived into the large, spacious parking lot that was beside a lively highway. It was lit with only a few streetlights, which blinked and fought to keep their bulbs lit. Few cars remained in the parking lot, including Adam’s blue Prius. Adam believed that they really needed to fix the place, for it felt like one big safety violation as he walked out into the night, moving past a billboard with flyers of missing people shielded with glass. Each of their eyes in their photos seemingly followed Adam, and he felt like he was being watched by real human beings.

He got to his car and shook his hands around the inside of his chaotic mess of a purse, searching for the car keys. He managed to find them and pulled them out. They slipped past his fingers and jingled as they fell against the asphalt. “Fuck.” He said as he bent down to pick them up.

There was a crack as a heavy object rammed into his head, and Adam’s vision swam into black. His body slumped down to the ground.

 When he awoke with a dull pounding in the back of his head, the first thing Adam noticed was that he was still feeling watched. The sense never left, it only intensified as he felt weight on each of his shoulders, and an itchiness that crawled up his leg. He blinked his eyes and waited for them to adjust to the poor lighting. When they did, he saw that he was in fact being observed by unblinking eyes.

The room around him had shelves full of dolls.

He jolted forward from his place on the floor, the weights on his shoulders fell behind him. He looked to see that they were also dolls, porcelain, with bulbous eyes. The one that had been on his left shoulder had a crack running down the left side of its face. Its outfit was a pair of purple overalls pulled over a blue shirt. Its feet were covered with tiny shoes of black leather. The doll that had been positioned on his right shoulder, wore a pink and white spotted dress, its feet slipped into white heels, and springing out from its head were long blonde curls.

The itchiness went further up his leg and tingled. He turned his leg to the side and saw a large thick spider crawl against his skin with its thin eight legs. Adam panicked and pushed himself into a standing position, flinging the spider off of his leg. It sprinted across the dust covered floor and up the walls where the ocean blue wallpaper was faded and peeling. Webs with colonies of spiders cascaded in the air, where the creatures spun and cradled their eggs and waited for them to burst with more of their species. Small insects like flies were caught in a few of the traps, and the spiders surrounded them and bit off their heads.

Adam snapped his attention away from the spiders and instead to the just as unnerving dolls who all watched him cower. All of the dolls were made out of the same material, the same size, and each had their own looks and personality. All of them creepy, especially to Adam. They weren’t at all like the Barbies he wished for as a child. But the most intriguing thing he found about the dolls, were that each of their hands were different. They were disproportionate to the dolls themselves; they didn’t even look like they were made of the same material. They were larger, and much more decayed compared to the doll they were attached to.

Adam pulled at one of the doll’s fingers, and it snapped off. He rolled it around in his palms, and believed it to be perfectly detailed, right down to the nails and cuticles and purple veins. The skin was even etched with fingerprints. It was hard, and something that seemed like a stick with a crunch was held inside of it. He allowed the finger to roll across his hand and drop to the floor in one of the footprints in the dirt. In one of the many footsteps that he knew didn’t belong to him. It couldn’t, it was much too big of a shoe size. His were much smaller. 

            The mysterious shoe prints led him to another part of the room. There was a boarded-up window on the side of a worktable, the wooden planks covering it were decayed and the nails holding them in place rusted. He knew that it wouldn’t take much for all of it to come off. On the worktable next to it, there was a single doll with sunny eyes and short black hair. The doll wore exactly what Adam was wearing, and the only thing missing about the doll were its hands.

            Adam shook his head, he didn’t know what was going on, but he did know that he had to get out of that shady bitch of a room as fast as possible. He followed the shoe prints to the other side of the room where they divided and created individual pathways towards three doors. Door number one was on the left side, door number two right in the middle, and door number three on the right.

He walked up to the door in front of him, and slowly pulled it open to not make a sound. It was a wooden staircase which plunged into a black abyss. He tapped his hand against the cream-colored wall but there wasn’t a light switch. Against his better judgment, he took a risk along with a prayer and a step forward. The moldy green step groaned under his weight and cracked. He pulled himself away from it and studied the step further. It was wet and rotted, and it seemed that at any moment, they would give out. He didn’t want to take the chance. It would be unwise and not safe to use that staircase, especially when there was no light. He closed the door.

            That’s when he heard the voices.

He thought for a moment that they were coming from the dolls themselves, begging for him to stay, telling him that there was no escape from the prison in which he found himself trapped in. But as he walked closer to that first door, the one of his left, he heard the voices become louder, and familiar. He lowered himself closer down to the floor and peeked his eye through the crack in the door. His yellow dress was covered in filth.

Harold Shipman was standing in the obscure room putting on black gloves at a small workstation. An orange electric saw blade sat next to him on the table. A gray apron covered the front of his body. He moved out of the way, and that’s when Adam saw another man. He was strapped to a chair by his waist, his arms were extended out in front of him as he was also strapped at both the elbows and wrists. His hands hung off the chair’s armrest. His head swayed side to side, back and forth. His eyes rolled along with the motions, as if he was in a trance.

Harold grasped the man’s hands and stroked them as if they were a pet. “It’s okay Pretty Pretties.” He said to the hands. “You’re going to be alright. I’ll take care of you.” He delicately picked up each of the fingers and examined them, before watching them fall back down. “The nails and skin are still perfect.”

He reached his hand over towards the workstation and grabbed the saw blade. He flipped a switch, and it roared to life. The rounded blade spun and shrieked as he raised it up and lowered it down to the man’s wrists. He studied the spot and sunk the blade into the skin. 

            The man screamed. Blood and bits sprayed the room. The blade ripped apart and shredded his skin and muscle. It tore apart at every fiber of the bone until the hand flopped onto the floor and squirted blood out of its clean-cut bottom.

            Adam gasped and lost his balance. He crashed to the floor and onto his back. He squashed a few of the spiders in the process, their milky innards staining the yellow dress. Adam held his breath.

            The sawing continued.

            His legs and hands shook as his body bolted back up to his feet. He placed his hands over his chest as he tried to catch his breath and soothe his fearful heart. And with every ounce of strength left in him, and willpower to get away, he thrusted himself towards the third and final door. 

            And he couldn’t stop himself from screaming.

            The room housed an incinerator, a bulky hot brick oven. It radiated a powerful heatwave that licked Adam’s skin with a scorching tongue. The walls and floor covered in ash and soot. A gray table sat in front of it. The top of the table was coated in blood, and it dripped off of the edges in thick clotted globs which formed dark pools on the floor. A trail of it led from the table to a man squirming on the foul floor. The man wormed his way towards Adam, his mouth covered up with cloth as he bawled into it. His hair was matted. His eyes were tearful and red. His skin had bubbling pink blisters which oozed white sludge. His hands were gone. His wrists nothing more than bloody stumps.

            Harold’s saw blade stopped.

Adam closed the door right as Harold’s door opened.

            “What do you think you’re doing, Miss Sunshine Darling?” Harold said. “The hands. You’re going to damage the hands. I need the hands to stay perfect as they are.”

            Adam’s eyes shifted around the room, trying to look anywhere but at Harold, who had blood splattered across his body and apron, a few blotches stained his beard. “I’m not letting you saw blade any part of my body.” Adam said.

            “You don’t understand. The hands are beautiful, I must preserve them. The Dollmaker helps me do that. The Dollmaker wouldn’t like it if you refused.”

            Adam reconsidered the decomposed hands on each of the many dolls staring at them. His stomach lurched. “You’re a sick fuck, you know that. Fucking sick. How many people have you murdered just to be part of your collection? You’re not even preserving any hands. They’re rotting.”

            “I don’t care about the people, it’s the hands that are the most attractive. The hands always stay beautiful.”

            “Yeah, you just love people’s hands, don’t you?” Adam said as he grabbed one of the dolls from its foot and opened the door with the staircase. He swung the doll in the air.

            Harold waved his hands. “No! Please! I love them! The Dollmaker helped me make them!”

            “It would be a damn shame then if this little one got destroyed, wouldn’t it?”

            Harold wailed. “No. No. You’ll destroy the hands. You’ll make The Dollmaker upset.”

            “And of course, we wouldn’t want that.” Adam threw the doll into the black pit. “Whoops.”

            Harold cried and rushed past Adam to follow the doll down the staircase in a haste. Adam ran towards the bordered-up window and began to rip away the wooden planks, the nails pulling out with only minor muscle. 

A thunderous crash shook Adam and the house as the staircase collapsed. Harold’s deep howl was cut off by choking which turned into gurgling and morphed into nothing. Adam didn’t check the scene, instead he worked away at the window, and soon managed to get all but one plank tore off and thrown into a pile on the floor. By that time, the room was back into a silence, except the occasional cracking of the destroyed staircase.

Until he heard footsteps.

            Adam turned around to face the darkness. He shook his head. There was no way that was Harold. He had to have been dead, no one could have survived that crash. He was dead. He knew that. The howl he cried was one of death. But yet, footsteps were walking down below, concealed in the lack of light. 

Adam went back to the window, and pulled at that last wooden plank, ripping it away, and throwing it into the pile with the others. He looked through the window and saw that he was up high on the top floor. It was daylight outside, and the sudden brightness blinded his eyes.

            The footsteps got louder and sounded closer. And before Adam knew it, or could believe it, he realized that someone was running up towards the door using a staircase that no longer existed.

            “Oh, hell no.” Adam said aloud as he worked at undoing the window’s latch and pushing it open all the way. The dirt and mold on the window frame buried into his fingernails. He brought his legs through the window, and sat on the windowsill, looking down at the dead brown grass below.

            The footsteps pounded against wood.

            He jumped.

            Adam landed in the dead bushes and rolled out of their brown crunchy leaves. He didn’t take the time to acknowledge his stabbing pain as he hoisted himself up. He ran off of the property and down the empty street, and he didn’t stop till the house of his nightmare was out of his sight.

            Out of that window, a shadowy hand gripped onto its base. Its fingers stretched and soon slithered away back inside. A face appeared. It looked to have been made out of porcelain with unblinking eyes that had holes in their whites, which glowed an orange hue. The face had a long crack right down its middle, and a wide smile grew across it.



Outro: For the written version of the story you just heard and other Queer Ghoul originals, visit QueerGhoulPodcast.com.

The Queer Ghoul podcast anthology is an independent endeavor. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider leaving a review or rating and telling a fellow creature of the night about the show.

Follow Queer Ghoul and me Adriana Oister (O-I-S-T-E-R) on social media to stay up to date about the podcast and future projects. All links are in the show notes below as well as other ways to support the show.

Until next time, thank you for listening. And in case there isn’t a next time…which I could only assume would be because either you’ve met your own terror chamber or I lost a bet with The Reaper…See you on the other side, although I can’t guarantee which one.