“Why this foul detail about the hanged man’s seminal fluids? Why this candle, as you call it?”

“That should have been obvious, as I explained. Surely it makes sense that adulterating the wax with the sperm of the deceased would imbue it with an onanistically doomed quality, a quality of the accursed? Well, and this, it follows, in conjunction with the lifelessness and bloodlessness of the hand itself, endows the candle with the power to strike any person upon whom its light falls as blind and as motionless as the dead — if, of course, that is your will.”

“Of course,” I said, though I hadn’t the faintest idea where he was headed. “How silly of me. Still, do me the favor of indulging me for another minute or two and tell why the need to commit such an abomination in the first place?”

“Ah,” said Clarence. “That recalls to mind the words of Eliphaz the Temanite to Job in his anguish. How much more abominable and filthy, he said, is man, who drinketh iniquity like water?”

“Dear husband, really, I’ll love you so much the more when you cease to toy with me.”

“In the same way that Mallory mounted Everest simply because it was there,” Clarence said, “some men will commit evil merely because they can. It is almost, I’d venture to say, human nature.”

“Depending on who you talk to of course,” I said, “that’s debatable.”

“Perhaps. But let us proceed with our tale. Imagine, if you will, the power of the man who wields the Hand of Glory?”

“Or the woman,” I said.

“Yes. Think of the acts that he, or she, could commit with complete and utter impunity?”

“My god,” I said, “yes. Really, I suppose, the list is endless.”

“As endless as time,” Clarence said.

“The tale,” I said. “Knit.”

And so Clarence went on to explain that from as far back as the middle ages and right up until recently modern times, in fact, people have employed the Hand of Glory to achieve their nefarious ends. In the fifteenth century, for example, Petrus Mamoris speaks of people carrying the Hand of a Corpse unto which the Sacraments hath been applied and with which, over some Sleeper, and in reverséd fashion, they maketh the sign of the Cross, that it might causeth him to lie in profoundest Slumber for whole Days without waking, so that they might rob his House at leisure. In Philadelphia in 1939, an alliance of poisoners used the Hand of Glory to commit several murders and then collect the life insurance of their victims. Whereas the hand in question was real, severed from a corpse and then mummified, the gang who used it had dispensed with the stipulated candle. Instead they folded the thumb and the two middle fingers onto the palm and pointed the index and little fingers up like a pair of horns. Years later, Freddie the Bastard O’Callahan, the gang’s ruthless boss, was quoted as saying, Alls you’d have to do is shove that thing in their faces and they’d shrink back like you was the prince of darkness hisself. I seen them have strokes and mess in their pants even when they seen that hand we had. It was just the ticket for the kind of work we done all right. Clearly these tales are not for everyone. Still and all, they’re comparable only with those of such fabulators as sweet Dr Seuss and dear Mother Goose when set beside that which Clarence then went on to relate.

“There was once a man,” he said, “whose infinite love for the woman of his desire went unrequited for years on end. He’d tried everything to win her, from serenading her in the softest of moony lights to sending her gifts of silver and gold and other shiny things. He fought for her in the streets. He recited the love poems of Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke from a megaphone in the plaza on Sunday afternoons. The woman, however, was as impervious to his tearful entreaties as a stone is to rain.

“At long last then, in his despair, the man consulted with a woman known in certain black circles for her wisdom in such matters as love and hate and vengeance. Immediately upon hearing his plight, for it was that obvious, the sorceress determined that the man should never prevail with the aid of some common panacea, nor, in fact, would he even begin to approach the remotest chance of success until he’d obtained none other than the one true Hand of Glory. Forget sweet balms, she told him, ointments and salves. Hope not for the miracle of Nepenthe or the oblivion of Lethe. King Mithridate cannot help you, for you are among the most forlorn of men. And yet beware too, she warned, the Hand of Glory you must, as beneath the aegis of the weak it can work the brightest of miracles or the heaviest of woes. By then, however, the man had ceased to hear her words. She’d spoken of this diabolical hand, so that now he needed merely to perform those deeds necessary to acquiring it. His love, you see my dear, was that strong.

“It began as you might guess, with his inveigling one of the homeless into his place of dwelling, where he then hung the man from the pipes in his cellar. According to the sorceress’s every letter, he severed the hand, he bled it, he pickled and cured and baked it. He followed the instructions perfectly until at last the hand was complete, ghastly as it was to look upon. To employ it upon his lady, though — then would his goal be realized! And so that night he crept into her room to wave it above her while incanting, Non nostrum tantas componere lites, non nostrum tantas componere lites!

“Lest I forget, allow me to mention also that prior to his embarkation upon this wretched endeavor, the sorceress had assured our man of the hand’s effectiveness, that its spell once cast wouldn’t fully take hold for several days. Notwithstanding her assurance, the man began to fret when his lady hadn’t rushed forth to pronounce her own undying love for him, much less to search him out. He sweated in his sleepless sheets, he wandered the automotive highways and byways, he smoked one monotonous cigarette after the other with never a thought for food. All for the love of a woman. All because he’d wanted for her to give him her heart, for her to take his own. These, in fact, had more or less amounted to the very words he’d been incessantly repeating for the last several months. Give me your heart for a day, beloved, he’d cried, and mine shall be yours forever! Now, though, he’d waited long enough. If in the next day or two she hadn’t come to him, he determined, he’d pray for more tenderness in the sweet by-and-by and then end his prolific misery. Life without love, he’d come to see, this life, was life without meaning.

“But then it happened. Suddenly and without warning, there amidst the waffle irons and egg beaters of a Sunday afternoon’s department store, an afternoon which like so many others in days past would’ve quietly expired, like the breath of an asthmatic child, his beloved appeared before him, her eyes moist with desire, her open red mouth so evidently yearning that he could no longer doubt himself. The lady was smitten to the core. She was his votary of ardor and sweetness come true at last. There was no one for her but him, no one for him, as ever, but her, and never a question to broach.