Halloween Haunts: The Severed Hand

Halloween Haunts: The Severed Hand

By Michael Subjack

Halloween has always been my favorite time of year, but there was an odd period between trick-or-treating as a child and enjoying more ambitious pursuits as an adult that found me homebound but still eager to celebrate the holiday. This interlude occurred from eighth grade through my senior year of high school. I generally had friends over to watch horror movies while I handed out candy. The street I grew up on was on a direct path to a building known colloquially as the Armory, which hosted a family-friendly Halloween party every year. That meant the traffic and breathless cries of “Trick or Treat” ran non-stop. Some people liked to stand guard and prop their doors open or lower the upper pane on their storm door to avoid the insistent gong of their doorbell.

As we had multiple dogs and cats, we didn’t have such a luxury, which meant camping out in the front hallway while my guests enjoyed Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Evil Dead. I didn’t mind this, though. I had found a way to bring Halloween to life in almost every room in the house, making me something of a figurative, low-key Dr. Frankenstein. However, dumping handfuls of candy into pumpkin-shaped buckets and shiny plastic bags can grow tedious regardless of your enthusiasm, so I decided to liven things up one year. Among my decorations was a severed arm, complete with a rubber hand that bore a respectable resemblance to its real-life counterpart. As the allotted trick-or-treating time neared its end, I called my friends into the hallway for my piece de resistance.

I removed the hand from its lumpy cotton arm and shoved it into the wrist of my sweatshirt, complete with a fun-sized Snickers bar tucked between the thumb and palm. My victim was to be random, and in this case, it proved to be a small girl in a lion costume, her plump cheeks carefully painted with whiskers and yellow dots as she shuffled up to the door with her bag out, her mother waiting patiently at the end of the walkway.

“Twick o tweat!”

I opened the door and smiled, swinging my arm out and dropping the entire hand in her bag, which resulted not in laughter but horror as she dropped her bag and padded back to her mother as fast as her little legs would allow.

My mother and friends chided me for this, and I quickly apologized, returning her bag and throwing in an extra treat for good measure. Her mother, to my relief, was the only one who found it funny.

This child would be an adult now, and I hope she’s okay and enjoying the various incarnations of The Addams Family without being triggered at the sight of Thing.

I swear to everyone involved that my intentions were good.

And that hand is long gone.

Links:

Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B01GJ2QSGW

Goodreads Blog: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14925207.Michael_Subjack/blog

Twitter/ X: MSubjack

Bluesky: @msubjack.bsky.social

Michael Subjack was born in a small town in Western New York and has since relocated to Pasadena, California. He’s published two short story collections, and his work has appeared in the anthologies 101 Proof Horror, It Calls from the Forest, Trigger Warning: Curses, and Heavy Metal Nightmares. He’s also had one of his stories read on an episode of the horror podcast Chilling Tales for Dark Nights. Most recently, he had a story appear in the second issue of Max Blood’s Mausoleum.