16 Feb A Gift of the Undivine

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on February 16, 2022

“A Gift of the Undivine”

Written by Bryce Simmons
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 10 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 1 vote.

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I have only a few things to say, a few terrible events to relate, and then I must go and join my best friend. She is in the other room, struggling against her restraints, crying out wildly, madly, shrieking like a thing inhuman. In many respects, she has forsaken that part of her—has joined some other, blacker order of existence, one more wicked than mankind, if such a thing can even be possible.

She had come all the way from Poland to visit and was staying with me in my apartment, the final day of her four-day visit, when he visited us, and ruined forever her life and mine. We were watching Lord of the Rings (she’d never seen the trilogy before) when there was a knock at the door. I hadn’t been expecting anyone; hadn’t ordered anything, but I sprang up cheerfully, unsuspectingly, gladdened by the circumstances. Alicja, my best friend, remained on the couch, nibbling on cheese, absolutely immersed in the events onscreen.

At the door, I brushed a few crumbs from my shirt and opened it, and standing there was a bald, heavily bearded man, neatly dressed in a dark suit and tie, holding a tightly wrapped package. He said that it was for Alicja, that she should open it at once. Surprised, I accepted the package, and turned back to ask Alicja if she’d been expecting something. A slight breeze or some other barely perceptible force swept by, and turning back to the door, I found the space beyond empty—the man had vanished.

I shut the door, a little unnerved by the man’s speedy disappearance, and went back to the couch. I told her what happened and handed her the package, asking as I did if she’d given my address to anyone. I wasn’t necessarily bothered by the idea, just surprised, considering the shortness of her visit. But she promised that she hadn’t given my address to anyone and that no one aside from her parents and fiancé knew of the trip. At that, she unwrapped the package, which had been tightly sealed by black twine. Pulling this away, she removed the wax paper—only now, hours later, am I realizing the absence of any postal information—and held up the item.

It was a claw—the severed hand of some beast, one I didn’t recognize. The claw had three fingers, long and lined with dozens of tiny dark bristles, with each finger terminating in black, sinisterly sharp nails. The skin of the hand was a dark, almost greenish-grey, and mottled with darker, shapeless spots.

Alicja, plainly disgusted by the thing, handed it to me, and I was shocked to find that it was deceptively light, despite its appearance of having just been removed from the assuredly large creature. It couldn’t have weighed more than a pound, and yet the hand dwarfed my own, the fingers longer than the length of my elbow to the base of my hand.

We stared at it silently for a few moments, both simultaneously disgusted and awed by the ghastliness of it, and then she said, in a disquietingly soft voice, “Why would someone send this to me?”

I looked to her, to the claw, and then back to her, as if to try and bridge some connection between the two, but couldn’t come up with any worthwhile answer. I suggested that maybe someone was playing a joke, but she dismissed the idea, saying that she hadn’t told any of her friends of her coming here; and that besides, none of her friends would ever send her something so grotesque.

Turning back to the claw, I examined the site of severance and found the shaved tip of a sallow bone, tightly enmeshed in the dark muscles and flesh of the hand. The view was repulsive, and I turned it away, bringing my attention to the nails. They were entirely black as if painted, and sharper than any knife I’d ever held. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable holding it and placed it on the cushion between Alicja and me, atop the wax paper it had been wrapped in.

Alicja stood up from the couch, nervously smoothed out her sweater, and went over and sat on the recliner a few feet away, obviously discomforted by the closeness of the thing. I paused the movie and cleared away the dishes and snacks from the coffee table, setting them on the floor beneath it. Then, I carefully picked up the claw—using the paper beneath it, rather than the claw itself—and set it on the coffee table. Some part of me expected it to move, the fingers to curl or twitch, even though it was obvious that time had come and swept the life from it. Alicja, growing increasingly disturbed by the minute, watched it with a sort of despairing anticipation, as if she expected the same posthumous animation—or worse.

“We should burn it.”

I didn’t realize how utterly transfixed my thoughts were upon the thing until I heard Alicja utter those words, her voice full of fear. It was an effort to draw my eyes away from the thing, and turning to her, I saw tears forming in her eyes. Keeping a portion of my attention on the claw, I got up from the couch and went over to her, and she grabbed my hand as if she feared some actual threat of violence from the inanimate appendage. I comforted her as best I could, then went back to the couch; and after gazing at the claw for a few more silent, strangely breathless moments, I folded the paper over it and picked up the bundle.

I agreed to her proposal, even though a part of me thought it was a strange, nonsensical idea; another, darker part even thought that to suggest such a thing was itself awful, almost…blasphemous, as if the thing were actually some sacred artifact and not the wretched claw of some unimaginable beast.

I have a fire pit in my backyard, which I occasionally use when friends are over. With Alicja following cautiously behind, I went out onto the back patio, lit the pit, and gave her one final look of questioning. She nodded, standing almost in the grass, and I placed the wrapped bundle into the pit. The flames quickly enveloped it, and for good measure, I squirted a little bit of lighter fluid into the fire. We watched silently, her no doubt with relief filtering into her heart; and yet I felt a slight pinging of regret as I watched the flames eat away at the wax paper.

But the claw itself didn’t burn. We waited, five, ten, fifteen minutes, silently, gravely, and yet the claw withstood the ravaging flames; it showed not even the slightest sign of having been immersed in the pit. The skin remained grey, unbothered. When twenty minutes had passed, I grabbed some tongs from the grill and retrieved the hand, then extinguished the pit. Seeing the thing perfectly unharmed, Alicja fled back into the house, shouting for me to “Get rid of it!” as she slammed the door shut. Not knowing what else to do, I opened my grill, tossed the claw on the rack, and closed it—deeming it a good enough place as any other to store the wretched thing.

Going back inside, I found Alicja sitting at the kitchen table, slightly trembling, with her hands held against herself. I told her that the thing was shut up in the grill and that I’d make sure to take it somewhere and dispose of it in the morning. When I saw her cringe at the idea of sleeping in the house with the thing just outside, I mentioned that we still had a film and a half—and a plate of wings—to finish before she left, and this served to lessen her unrest somewhat. I told her to head back into the living room while I washed the ash stains from my hands.

Having touched not just the soot-stained pit but the grisly hand itself, I spent extra time washing my own, carefully cleaning and scrubbing off my hands and wrists. When I finished, I went back into the kitchen, and found Alicja still sitting at the table, albeit in a different seat than before. I asked if there was something wrong, then remembered how the hand had rested on the coffee table, and thinking this to be the reason for her continued avoidance, said that I’d grab some cleaning supplies and wipe down the table and couch.

But, in a voice that was markedly graver than it had ever been before and tinged by a subtle layer of pain, she responded: “I’m not afraid of the hand, exactly. I wanted to get away from it because I felt drawn to it, from the moment I laid eyes on it. There was this horrible pull, like a…a spiritual magnetism. It seemed like it was my own hand, calling to me, desperately wanting to rejoin me. As if a severed hand could want something….”

Almost absentmindedly, I noticed that the backdoor was slightly ajar. Before I could form a coherent thought as to the reason, Alicja brought her hands to the table’s surface, which up until that point had remained beneath it.

With an involuntary and shamefully high-pitched cry, I noticed the knife in Alicja’s right hand, its blade rimmed with a streak of fresh blood. And in her left hand…in place of it, was the unamenable beast’s hand. She had viciously severed her own, and attached to her wrist that savage, inhuman claw.

I almost swooned at the sight. The ash-skinned hand, somehow, had grafted itself to her flesh; was almost seamlessly attached to her notoriously pale skin. She looked down at it almost admiringly, lovingly, as a mother might look upon a well-behaved child. The fingers, lethally tipped by those black, razor-sharp nails, flexed casually in response to her impulses.

“Alicja, what have you done?” I asked this in a whisper, suddenly feeling afraid to come across as opposing the dreadful appendage’s presence, as if it had suddenly become the dominant entity of the house. She turned to me, her eyes lidded as if she were on the verge of a deep, peaceful sleep, and said, “I didn’t want to, or rather, I knew it would be a ‘bad’ thing to do. But now, I don’t know. It feels natural, feels perfectly fine. See?”

Then, in an abhorrent display of the thing’s total integration with her body, she raised the monstrous hand and twiddled the fingers in a playful—though no less loathsome—wave.

I was filled with such utter disgust and terror that had there not been a knock at the front door just then, I probably would’ve fled from my own house through the back door. Giving the kitchen table—and Alicja—a wide berth, I left the kitchen, entered the living room—noticing with dismay the parcel’s twine, which I wished I had also burned—and went to the front door. Shakingly, I gripped the knob and inched the door open, dreading to find that same man, perhaps come to deliver yet another piece of the butchered horror. But there was only an envelope on the porch. Warily, I bent down and picked it up, then shut the door with an unnecessary slam.

Not yet ready to re-enter the kitchen and again see Alicja’s mutilation—or rather, mutation—I went and sat on the couch. After taking a few calming breaths, I opened the envelope, which was plain and unmarked, just as the package had been. Inside was a note, handwritten in eerily sanguine ink on thick, slightly yellowed parchment. I read the note three times and then used my shirt to wipe away the tears that had started to fall. With stuttering, half-choking breaths, I stumbled into the kitchen, hoping to find Alicja as I’d left her, in a state which I hoped, prayed was still salvageable.

But when I rounded the corner, my heart plummeted into an abyss of black despair, as I saw the thing that had, just moments ago, been my best friend, now crouched atop the kitchen table.

There are animals and creature of the earth that are so bizarre looking, so unlike us, that it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call them monstrous. Perhaps offensive, given the obvious connotations of the word compared to the potential harmlessness of the animal, but not necessarily inaccurate.

Monstrous is not an accurate enough word for what I saw; not sufficiently severe in its suggestion of the thing’s sheer abominableness. Alicja, in a matter of moments, mere minutes, had succumbed to some sort of rapid, bodily degeneration and wholesale reconfiguration of her basic anatomical form. Her humanity, in every aspect of the word, had been totally overmastered by an obscenely bestial vitality. She’d become the slouching, jackal-like avatar of some pre-historic—or perhaps evilly post-historic—entity beyond man, the living manifestation of some ancient tribe’s ultra-bestial idol.

Long, sinewy, irregularly jointed arms hung from broad though drooped shoulders, which extended from a slouched, semi-mammalian frame that was supported by two short though trunk-thick legs. These ended in feet that were similar in nature and plain lethality to the awful hand. The body was nude, her clothes having been discarded in a shredded pile beneath the table, and the naked, darkly mottled skin glistened abhorrently in the scope of the ceiling light, as if she’d just been ejected from the foul womb of some monumentally horrific mother-beast.

Her head, to even recall it….the only traces of my once-beautiful friend in that profane visage were her eyes, which bore just a fraction of the human cognizance she’d once had. They gazed at me curiously, as if only dimly remembering who I was. Fear swept over me and would’ve driven my legs towards the front door, regardless of any conscious efforts to steer them otherwise, but a single tear then fell from Alicja’s eye, and I mustered the courage to stay.

Even as terror threatened to force consciousness from me, I slowly, cautiously walked to the table, hands slightly raised at my sides in what I hoped was a gesture of harmlessness. Alicja sniffed the air with her…with her wide-nostriled snout, and some resilient memory of my identity kept her powerfully primal nature at bay. I saw both her savage claws twitch anticipatingly, and I knew that with a single swipe from either, she could spill my guts onto the floor.

Upon reaching the table, I held out my hand, my nerves screaming at me in protest as she bent further to sniff it. Satisfied that I was indeed a friend, or at least not something worth immediately mauling, she leaped from the table with a startling finesse and stood upright before me. The horror of her full stature was nauseating. In her crouched position atop the table, she’d appeared deceptively short, but now, standing at her full height, she towered over me by at least a foot. I tried not to let the depth of my horror show, lest her half-beast mind take it as a reason to dismiss her earlier assessment of friendship.

With a calmness for which I should be given an award, I led her into her room, the guest room. Once there, I motioned for her to go into the closet, which was thankfully spacious enough to fit several adults. She entered, stooping lowly as she passed the threshold, and I shut the closet door behind her, then used the straps from one of her bags to seal it. When, after a push from within, the strap nearly came undone, I affixed a few more and even a belt to the binding, until finally, she struggled uselessly against the doors.

With her securely contained, I left the room, then went into the living room and dragged the chair from there to brace it against the door. After that, I went back and sat on the couch, absentmindedly picking the letter up as I rested against the cushions. It read:

Hello! I see that symbiosis has been initiated. Good. Before long, your dear friend will be transformed into something truly magnificent. The Undivine Beast, that fiend of the ancient swamps, born in the darkest nadir of the Earth, will rise again. Once hunted and slain and callously scattered, He will now be reborn not as one entity but as a pack—of which your friend will be an integral, fiercely feral part. I’ve already dispensed the other parts of Him to similarly unsuspecting persons throughout the Earth. Soon, they will converge, and roam, spreading bloodshed and terror, as He once did, centuries ago, before those ungrateful barbarians slaughtered him. Even now, I can smell the blood on the air, hear the cries of the limbless and dying. Wonderful!

But, should you feel compelled to save your friend, or to forestall His coming, you only have to offer yourself to her as a sacrifice. I’ve heard—but have not witnessed—that the blood of a loved one can undo the transformation. But, alas, it must be the entire body’s worth of the stuff…and even then, the hand itself would not be destroyed, and your friend, having severed hers, would remain forever maimed, and of course woefully bereaved…

Yours truly,

Herald of His Undivine Majesty

Even though it may simply be a trick to get me to willingly submit myself as her first of many meals, I’m going to try that last-ditch effort of reversing the claw’s despicable curse. I’ll post this as a warning and hope that Alicja, in a human state, may later come and answer questions in my place…