Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [200]
Rescue stood, dressed in his usual immaculate suit. He looked slowly around him. The congregation was a variegated group. There were six humans apart from him, one khepri and one vodyanoi. There was a large, well-fed pedigree dog. The humans and xenians looked well-to-do or nearly so, except for one Remade street-sweeper and a ragged little child. There was an old woman dressed in tattered finery and a comely young debutante. A muscular, bearded man and a thin, bespectacled clerk.
All the figures, human and otherwise, were unnaturally still and calm. All wore at least one item of voluminous or concealing clothing. The vodyanoi loincloth was twice the size as most, and even the dog sported an absurd little waistcoat.
All eyes were motionless, trained on Rescue. Slowly he unwound his scarf from his neck.
As the last layer of cotton fell from his body, a dark shape shifted underneath.
Something coiled tightly around Rescue’s flesh.
Clamped to his neck was what looked like a human right hand. The skin was livid purple. At the wrist, the flesh of the thing tapered quickly into a foot-long tail like a snake’s. The tail was wound around Rescue’s neck, its tip embedded under his skin, pulsating wetly.
The fingers of the hand moved slightly. They dug into the flesh of the neck.
After a moment, the rest of the figures unrobed. The khepri unbuttoned her flapping trousers, the old woman her outdated bustle. All removed some piece of covering to unveil a moving hand coiling and uncoiling its snake-tail subcutaneously, its fingers moving softly as if it played their nerve-ends like a piano. Here it clung to the inside of a thigh, here to a waist, here the scrotum. Even the dog fumbled with its waistcoat until the urchin helped it, unbuttoning the preposterous thing and unveiling another ugly hand-tumour clamped to the dog’s hairy flesh.
There were five right hands and five left, their tails coiling and uncoiling, their skin mottled and thick.
The humans and xenians and the dog shuffled closer. They made a tight circle.
At a signal from Rescue, the thick tails emerged from the flesh of the hosts with a viscous plopping. Each of the humans, the vodyanoi and khepri and dog, jerked a little and faltered, their mouths falling open spastically, their eyes flickering neurotically in their heads. The entry wounds began to ooze as sluggish and thick as resin. The blood-wet tails waved blindly in the air for a moment like massive worms. They stretched out and quivered as they touched one another.
The host bodies were bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange huddled greeting. They were utterly still.
The handlingers communed.
The handlingers were a symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.
They spawned rumours and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how handlingers were born.
There were many myths, and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by infection, taking their hosts’ minds, controlling their bodies and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible. The handlingers could only live the lives of others.
They kept hidden through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets, inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the warnings and all the children’s games, no handlingers