Clarence and I had spent many a windswept midnight trading horror stories. On one of these occasions, for instance, he told me about a museum in Guanajuato, Mexico that was stocked entirely with mummified corpses which had been exhumed from the surrounding grounds after the families of the deceased had failed to pay their five-year rents on the grave sites, and more, about how one day a visiting tourist had vowed not to go home with his usual souvenir, the hand-woven serape, say, or the blowfish, the dia de los muertos doll, and other suchlike banal stripe, but would return instead, like an emperor from his journey to the world’s farthest reaches, with something inconceivably unique. All this was fine, of course, but for one exception: search over hill and under dale, the tourist couldn’t find an object equal to such an exotic claim. The way my husband described it, it was only as the tourist had stood gazing into the rictus of one of these mummies that he was smitten by a notion that could’ve been Thor’s own hammer. It was one of the corpses themselves he wanted, by godfrey, yes, they were perfect, why hadn’t he thought of it sooner, yes, they were absolutely perfect, and what was more, who could stop him, propped along the walls as the mummies were, just waiting for him to do as he would, curled in boxes, some so tiny they hung from the ceiling by pieces of leather string? The tourist cast a furtive glance over his shoulder. Eureka! He was alone with the dead. In his excitement, however, he’d failed to consider that though he’d have no problem carrying the corpse, he couldn’t very well walk right out with the thing in plain view. And so quickly then he changed his mind. Whirling, he snapped off the finger of one, the toe of another. Then an ear, a nose, a tuft of desiccated hair. He filled his pockets with as many parts as they could hold, and then he left. At home, notwithstanding the protests of his wife, the tourist displayed these relics to his family and friends in a small glass box he’d had made especially for the purpose.

“Of course,” Clarence said, “he thought himself very clever, very daring. Without doubt he must’ve been quite proud. And yet.”

“And yet?” I said.

“And yet as it happens,” Clarence said, “several years later our tourist was born a child. This child, as you may well suspect, was far from ordinary. This child, in fact, was missing several fingers from each of its hands. Also, as the French would say, it was sans toes.” My husband paused here, dramatically, allowing the gravity of his words to take their desired effect. “That said, it should come as no surprise to hear that our little mooncalf was also born sans le nez.”

“No nose!” I said, playing into the tale now, horrified.

“Sans le nez,” Clarence said, snipping with his first two fingers at the tip of his nose. “Still, that’s not all. This infant, who by the way was a girl, had not a single strand of hair. She was, in fact, as bald as an earthworm.”

“Ghastly,” I said. “Incredibly unfortunate.”

“Believe it or not, there’s more.”

“No.”

“In her later years,” Clarence said, and now his face had contracted into the thinnest of hatchet-like edges, “the child was prone to bouts of somnambulism so seemingly lucid that no one could tell whether she was waking or sleeping. During one of these, poor girl, a knife had somehow found its way into her hand such that, while her father lay deep in slumber, she did away with his unsuspecting sex. To his still greater misfortune, if you can withstand your doubt for yet a minute more, when the business was concluded, the authorities had determined the evidence to have been destroyed in the family incinerator. Later, however, the child’s mother herself was to find it, dried and shriveled as a dead baby mouse, on display in the same glass case her husband had made to hold his mummified relics all those years before.”

“How terrible!” I shouted. “How absolutely dreadful!”

“Cruel, I know, but somehow just.”

“Think of all the irony.”

“Yes,” Clarence said. “I rather like that story.”

Come my turn I told Clarence about a woman who’d taken certain distinctive measures to avenge herself upon an absconding lover. Five days after she’d dug up a coffin and removed all of its nails while incanting, Nails, I take you so that you may serve to turn aside and cause evil to all persons whom I will, her lover had his foot crushed so badly beneath an overturned forklift that it had to be amputated. The woman, it turns out, had incanted the phrase Pater noster upto in terra while driving one of the nails from the coffin into a footprint that the erstwhile lover had left in her yard.

Clarence was grimacing. “Apparently,” he said, “Sir Beelzebub found this little parody of the Lord’s Prayer a bit more than simply appealing.”

“Let that be a lesson,” I told him, and tickled his chin.

Doubtless my husband had to up the ante, as the expression goes. And so he did. The following night I was told a tale concerning a marvel known as the Hand of Glory. To begin with, Clarence’s story really lacks the impact it deserves if you fail to explain the provenance of such a hand. A Hand of Glory is one that’s been severed at the wrist from a freshly hanged man and then wrapped in a piece of winding sheet. Before that, though, or rather after it’s been severed and before it’s been wrapped, the hand must also have been thoroughly squeezed, to ensure that all of its blood is drained. Next, you must pound the hand with a veritable ragout of ingredients that includes salt, peppercorns, saltpeter, and a substance known as zimort, before proceeding to pickle the thing for fifteen days in an earthenware jar. According to Clarence, this hand must remain in the jar for exactly fifteen days, no more, no less. He was very adamant about this requirement, why I’ll never know. At any rate, once you’ve done this, you must then dry the hand in the heat of the hottest sun, preferably, and again, this is all according to my diabolically inventive husband, when the star Sirius is in the daytime sky. Failing this, you can heat the accursed thing in a furnace fed strictly by bracken and verain.

“The point,” Clarence said, “of this aspect of the preparation will be immediately obvious when I say that you must collect the fat which runs from the hand and then mix it with a wax that has itself been mingled with the powdered sperm of the man from which you severed the hand. Ghoulish in the extreme, I know, but absolutely necessary. For you see, this amalgam, shall we say, is imperative to the successful creation of a special candle, a candle, no less, that is in turn to be held by the hand itself, between its devilishly stiffened fingers.”

“I’m not sure,” I told Clarence, “that I want to hear the rest of this tale. It’s too horrific, even for me.”

“Come now, my dear,” Clarence said. “Let’s not be mawkish.”