The Puffin Book of Horror Stories

    'The thing that's wrong with it is my hands,' said Peter. 'The face is all right, but the hands are wrong to go with it, don't you think?'

    He put the mask on again and held his hands out for her to see the effect. She glanced at him briefly. 'Putting a mask on like that won't make your hands look different from a boy's,' she said. 'The only thing you could do is wear gloves, your woolly ones perhaps, to disguise them.'

    Since she was taking no more notice of him, he went back upstairs, drew a pair of woolly gloves from a drawer in his dressing table, and tried the effect this time. Well, perhaps it wasn't all that bad. At least the gloves gave some kind of appearance of hairiness, but it was still not quite right. He tried combing the backs of the gloves, but that was no good at all. When he tried the claw effect, it was not half as good as when his nails were showing.

    He still had some money left, so he went back to the joke shop, taking the mask with him.

    'Have you got,' he asked, 'anything like hairy hands?'

    The shopkeeper, being a bit of a joker himself, looked down at his hands and asked if they would do. Then he looked down at his feet behind the counter and as if in surprise announced that he hadn't got pigs' trotters, either.

    'No, I mean,' explained Peter carefully, 'like I bought this werewolf mask, I wonder if you have a kind of hairy hand mask to go with it. You know, to make the whole thing look - well, more real?'

    'Hairy, with sort of claws, you mean?' asked the shopkeeper, nodding. 'I might have. Hang on.'

    He went along the shelves behind the counter, opened first one drawer then another, and at the third drawer extracted a transparent plastic bag which he placed on the counter.

    'These do?' he asked.

    Peter picked them up eagerly, and inspected the contents through the plastic. They looked about right.

    'Can I try them on?' he asked.

    'Sure.' The shopkeeper ripped open the bag and laid the hands out for him.

    They were not like gloves, because they did not cover the hands all round, but merely lay on top and were fastened by a strap underneath and another round the wrist. Just the tips of the fingers fitted into sockets so that the rubber fingers would not dangle about uselessly. Peter tried them on.

    'You can't expect a perfect fit,' the shopkeeper said, 'because of course they don't make them in different sizes. If they're too big, just tighten the strap underneath and pull the one that goes round your wrist up your arm a bit.'

    He helped him to put them on. They were rather big, but with them pulled well up the hands and over his wrists they were not bad at all, Peter decided. He would have them, if he could afford them. They were just as good as the magnificent mask, they had what looked like real hair growing along the backs, really satisfying long claws with just enough red on the ends to look as if they had torn into somebody's flesh, and what was more the red was actually painted to look as if it were still wet.

    'Try the effect of both the mask and the hands,' suggested the shopkeeper, pointing towards a mirror on the wall behind the door, so Peter did. That was much better, especially in the fairly dim light inside the shop. Absolutely terrifying, almost.

    'Wrap them up for you?' asked the shopkeeper.

    'No, I'll take them as they are,' said Peter.

    'Pardon?' The mask was not adjusted quite correctly, so his voice had been rather muffled.

    Peter straightened the mask round his face so that his mouth was in the right place. 'No thanks. How much?'

    He paid the money and left the shop wearing his new possessions, because he just happened to have noticed Billy Fidler leaning against the pillar box outside, looking the other way.

    He ran out of the shop, crept round the side of the pillar box then slowly reached out a hand to touch Billy on the shoulder. Billy turned, as he expected him to do.

    'That's pretty good,' said Billy, standing up. He looked Peter over critically. 'I like the hands.' Then he peered closer. 'Oh - it's Peter.'

    'What do you think of it, then?' asked Peter.

    'Pretty good. I could only really tell who you were by the clothes. It needs to be darker, though. I mean, you don't expect to come across a werewolf in daylight, so it looks just like a horrible mask and a pair of hands just now. If it was dark, though, and you suddenly came at me, that would really give me a nasty turn, I can tell you. Can I try them on?'

    Peter didn't mind showing off his new acquisitions, and in any case he wanted to find out if what Billy had said was true. When Billy put them on, he found that it was. They were very good indeed, very effective for what they were, money well spent. But it was still unfortunately true that in broad daylight, on the pavement outside a row of shops with a pillar box just next to them, the mask was just a mask, and the hands were obviously artificial: not at all bad, though.