The Phantom Hand by Victor Rousseau

Book Details

Don Wenworth, aided by Sudh Hafiz, a Babist priest, battles Godfrey Moore, power mad practitioner of black magic. At stake is his life and the life of his fiancee. An astounding novel of Black Magic, eery murders, and weird occult happenings occasioned by The Phantom Hand.

Victor Rousseau Emanuel (1879-1960), was originally born as Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel in England. He died in 1960 in Tarryton, New York. He wrote predominantly under the pen names Victor Rousseau, H. M. Egbert, and V. R. Emanuel, but, in the 1930s, he abandoned these pseudonyms to establish Victor Rousseau as a recognizable name in pulp fiction magazines. He wrote “spicy” stories under the pen name Lew Merrill.

The Phantom Hand was written in 1932 and published as a five part serial novel in Weird Tales.

The Phantom Hand has 6 illustrations.

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Excerpt: The Phantom Hand

Part 1

DON WENTWORTH had no remembrance of what preceded the strange state in which he found himself. He knew that, unless he came quickly back to consciousness, he would be a dead man; for something like a rope was about his throat, tightening inexorably and choking out his life. And he was clawing impotently at it, and vainly seeking to free himself.

If he could get his fingers upon it before his throat quite closed, he could tear it away, he knew, for it was soft—and the more deadly because of that. But his arms and hands seemed paralyzed, and the same creeping paralysis was in his brain. He couldn’t think, couldn’t remember; he didn’t know where he was, or who he was.

The vision of Lorna West flashed through his mind. He didn’t think of her by name, only as some one infinitely dear and precious to him, for whose sake he had to live, to kill this thing. He put forth every effort. But what was happening to him? Shadows all about him were taking form, springing into horrible reality.

God! he was standing on a scaffold, and those were figures of men, seen in blurred silhouette through the material of the cap or mask that covered his face! He was in the act—infinitely prolonged—of dropping through a trap-door. The noose was tightening, and at the end of the fraction of a second he would be dead, killed by the dislocation of the vertebra; as his body checked the fall!

A moment infinitely prolonged, for the fall seemed to have begun centuries before, and it was still going on. Time had become suspended, in order that he might taste that moment of bitter retribution to the utmost. But what was his crime? Murder? Whom had he killed, and when, and why?

He could see in a dim way, as if he had somehow become exteriorized to his body. He could see the drab jail yard, with the shaft of pale sunshine that gilded one wall, the high steps of the gallows, and the little knot of spectators—the prison governor or sheriff, whichever he might be, the doctor, stethoscope already in hand, and the brutal face of the hangman at his side.

Then the open door of the trap and his body plunging downward, but so slowly! Like the movements in a slowed-up film. And then of a sudden the realization came home to Don that that human form, the features twisted in anticipatory agony, was not his own!

Not his own! It was another who was suffering, a portly, elderly man, with graying hair and white mustache, a face that he had seen somewhere and forgotten.

Then, of an instant, a shadow seemed to hover in air beside the victim. A youngish man with a dark but pleasing face—an Arab or Persian, for he wore a turban about his head. Don knew that he was invisible to the little group assembled in the jail yard. In his hand was a knife, and he was slashing at the rope.

But the knife made no impression, and from the dark man’s lips there broke the wailing cry, “Too late!”

Then of a sudden came the end. Don sensed it with relief, though it meant physical extinction. The awful jerk as the body tautened against the rope, the shock of riven bone and rending tissue. The cloud of black unconsciousness that fogged the brain even before the pain could reach it.

Don felt himself plunging downward. Then, somehow, he had forced himself free of the dream. He was himself again, and the dream had no more substance. He was on his feet in his stateroom aboard the President Harrison, gasping, his forehead bathed with sweat, his hand fumbling desperately for the electric light button.

HE snapped it on at last, and found himself in his pajamas and bare feet, with the berth disordered, and the bedclothes lying in a heap upon the floor. With that, the disorder of the nightmare began to give place to recollection. He knew who he was now, and where he was.

In the mirror a white face was staring into his. For an instant Don hardly recognized it as his own reflection. The terror of death was still in those protruding eyes—bulging as if in very truth the rope had been about his neck. And now, to Don’s horror, he saw that on either side of the throat there was a faint but unmistakable livid bruise!

He glanced about the stateroom, looked under the bed; no one was hiding there. It certainly could have been nothing but a nightmare, yet he had neither eaten nor drunk anything that ought to have disagreed with him. The very force of his imagination must have imprinted those livid marks upon his throat.

The light was dissipating Don’s fears, though that horrid memory was still very real to him. He glanced at the clock upon the shelf, and saw that it was seven o’clock. The dawn was already stealing through the porthole.

Merciful heavens, there was the face again, the face of the man who had been hanged! There, in the center of the porthole, looking in at him, the eyes closed in death, the skin livid! Don leaped forward, and in a new access of fear drove his fist hard against the glass.

The face vanished. Blood oozed from Don’s broken knuckles. He stood there, glaring wildly out at the gray, heaving sea. He knew the face now. It was that of State Senator West, Lorna’s father, whom he had seen twice in his life, more than a year before.

State Senator West, a power in the beautiful city on the Gulf of Mexico! Not a good power. A self-made man, a politician of a certain school. Don had often wondered how Lorna could be his daughter. But a power nevertheless, and a leader of the community. How could Senator West have paid the supreme penalty?

Preposterous! If he thought any more about it, he would go mad. That second vision must have been a mere prolongation of the nightmare. He had not been fully awake. Don had hardly tasted liquor for months, but now he opened his steamer trunk and drew out a bottle of whisky, nearly full. He placed it to his lips and took a deep draft. It ran through his veins like fire. He was feeling better now. God, what a dream!”

Excerpt From: Victor Rousseau. “The Phantom Hand.”