Nyx D Vespar is a born creative, founder of witches of South Africa, front liner for mental health awareness and can usually be found on a date with midnight and Nosferatu. She deludes herself into thinking she's a Ann Rice novel come to life, she describes her work as "chaos is in the details"
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DON’T THINK OF MS LONG FINGERS
by
Nyx D. Vespar
This All happened like all things do.
With a thought.
A choice.
A conscious discussion that set everything into motion.
I grew up in an old farmhouse, inherited from my grandparents, passed down to my parents.
Miles and miles from all and nothing.
The house was an ancient looking two-story building, three if you counted the attic.
Light, sky-blue paint peeling off the outside like decaying skin flaking off a long forgotten carcass.
Dry, high-waisted fields surrounded it.
The wispy, brittle grass enveloping the property like prison bars, only solidifying the feel of incarceration.
A huge porch, wrapped around the home like it was seeking to hug itself, struggling to find solace in the feeling of aloneness.
My Childhood wasn’t the best, nevertheless it wasn’t something unfortunate either.
I was an unruly child; I got myself into trouble whenever I thought I could get away with it.
My parents, although distant, would try their best to keep me in line.
Whether that be through spanking me, grounding me or taking one of my favorite toys away.
It didn’t matter, I would persist.
It wasn’t their fault; I was bored and would try to entertain myself, which ended up with me doing things I wasn’t supposed to.
Sometimes I would be difficult just for the sake of it, to get some reaction, like I was trying to force some life into the long exhausted house.
Silly me, it didn’t occur to me at the time that you can’t make a dead piece of wood grow into a living, green apple tree.
After countless trails and errors in struggling to make me to behave, my mother gave up and gave in to an old family tradition.
She introduced me to Ms Long Fingers.
“Ms Long Fingers is a towering lady, A Lady with extended fingers.
Every time you misbehave, Ms Long Fingers will take a small, little taste out of you every night while you sleep, until there was nothing left.” My mother told me in a tired, strained voice, her eyes blown out and looking around like she was telling me a terrible secret.
It worked. I was terrified of Ms Long Fingers and the thought of her taking a nibble out of me.
Whenever I so much as attempted to be naughty, my Mother would look around the house like something was coming, staring at me in fright and saying only three words “Ms Long Fingers”.
I would stop in my tracks and cease whatever I was doing or trying to do.
She was my nightmare for many points until I moved out of that dull, colorless house.
Putting as much distances as I possibly could between me and it.
20 years passed with nothing more than a blink of my eyes, a carbon copy of me now with me and going through one ugly divorce.
With my parents gone, and nowhere else to go, I had no choice but to retreat to that familiar forgotten farm house with my seven-year-old Little girl, Hannah.
I tried to be positive, telling little Hannah about the big open fields, convincing her she could shoot in one direction forever, but she would never reach the end, I promised we would paint the home any color she wanted and that we would bake cookies every Saturday morning too.
She was excited; I remember.
Rambling about how she was going to run until she came to the end of the field, wondering what would be at the edge and if it was the edge of the world.
She never got the end.
We must’ve been in the home for three months then. Nothing spectacular happened.
I tried my best to bring in some love and light into the dust filled tomb. I would buy brightly colored curtains and flowers, getting Hannah to help me bring the household to life.
I now realize we were only panting a face into an already dead thing.
Hannah started acting out. I thought it had to be about the divorce.
As much as I tried to force sunshine into our lives, some days the clouds came in too.
I don’t blame her. She must’ve felt trapped between me and her dad.
I don’t know how it happened. Hannah was refusing to take a bath for the third night in a row, and I was so drained.
Emotionally and physically tired of fighting her father every day over small things, and having to force myself to smile through it.
She was screaming her head off and running around, yelling that she does not want to bathe and that I couldn’t make her.
Something seized me around my throat and crawled up my scalp until it felt like my head was in a clamp, my eyes were bulging, and my pupils felt blown wide.
When Hannah ran past me again, I hunched down and called her over in a hushed tone.
She stopped and turned, regarding me with as much interest as someone being asked to watch paint dry.
“Hannah, come here. Ms Long fingers will hear you,” I told her. The words felt like it was being sucked out of my voice box, pulled out by fishing line, and I couldn’t stop myself.
My breath left me instantly, deflating my lungs and leaving me gasping after I said her name. I haven’t thought about her in 20 years.
And here I was, passing along the same fear to my daughter.
“Ms Long Fingers is a towering lady, A Lady with extended fingers.
Every time you misbehave, Ms Long Fingers will take a small, little bite out of you every night while you sleep, until there was nothing left.” I whispered to her in a frightened tone, like I wasn’t supposed to be telling her this, but not being able to stop myself.
She looked at me then, like she was spotting a rabid dog.
I didn’t blame her.
There I was, hunched over and whispering about a lady with long fingers.
It seemed she took me seriously for a second before a smirk played across her lips.
“I'm not scared momma, I'm not scared of anything” she said with pride dripping for her words. Yes, as much as she looked like me, she also had her father in there.
No fear.
When Hannah fell asleep in my bed that night, I sat on the couch and cleared a bottle of wine.
Shame was beating into the back of my skull, and dread was twisting my stomach into knots.
I wanted to avoid passing this down to my daughter, this stupid abusive tradition, scarring your child into submission, but I couldn’t stop.
It stumbled out of my mouth and formed into words.
Forced out into the open to be turned into something real.
Ms Long Fingers
I fell asleep with guilt, like a new lover holding on to me throughout the night. I woke up around 3AM on the couch to a slight and soft scrapping sound.
Feeling groggy and dizzy, nausea coming and going with the room spinning in union.
I looked over to the doorway that lead to the stairs, thinking that Hannah was awake and wrecking havoc again.
But no…
There she was, her gangling tall frame towering by the door
Her malformed body jagged and twisted into unimaginably sharp edges, her skin pulled taut around her bones.
Raw-boned upper mass twitching and convulsing, but her lower body still.
Her hands, small with unnaturally long fingers, dragging behind her like a fleshy, withering cape.
The source of the scraping coming from her to tall frame.
Bent head, resting on her shoulder, scrapping the top of the ceiling every time her upper torso would convulse.
Ms Long fingers
I lurched into a sitting position, falling off the couch and crawled towards the back wall.
When I turned around, she was still standing there, shuddering and silent.
I pressed myself into the wall, picturing myself turning into one of the flowers on the dreadful wallpaper.
I didn’t dare move, nor breath.
She lifted her quivering hands and her grim three knuckled fingers slithered towards me. She shoved them underneath the couch, the quickest route to me.
The space underneath the couch so small, I could hear the sickening crack and crunch as she broke her fingers.
For all those years, those noises were her, forcing her fingers underneath the door frames or cracks in the walls.
It wasn’t the house.
I started gagging at the sounds, I dug my nails into the wall behind me, peeling my finger nails off the flesh and embedding them into the home as offering for this monstrosity’s to stop.
When her Fingers reached me, I saw on the tips of each extremity a tiny little mouth, with round rows and rows of sharp teeth.
The stench of death, wafting from all ten mouths.
I couldn’t keep it in anymore. Sick spewed out of my lips onto my clothes and the surrounding floor.
I looked over to Ms Long Fingers,
The only part protruding out of her was her stomach, causing her look like a gaunt skin- skeleton with a meat sack dangling from her torso.
One of her fingers came close to my face, forcing me cross my eyes.
I saw it slurp up a tiny little finger.
Her appendages reared up and started whispering in soft lullaby Voices.
“She was good”
“So good”
“Well behaved”
“Behave”
“Good girl”
“So sweet”
“Always obedient”
“Always”
“Not scared”
“Not scared of anything”
I clutched at my ears until blood ran down my palms and dripped from my elbows. I screwed my eyes shut, and a shriek ripped its way through my throat.
I don’t know for how long I screamed and mumbled, but when I stopped, Ms long fingers was gone.
And so was Hannah.
The distended meat sack stomach of Ms long fingers was my daughter.
Eaten until nothing was left.
All because she wouldn’t behave.
Ms long fingers is not confined to this house.
She is spoken into existence by tired mothers and fathers, forced by misbehaving children.
She catches you at your weakest.
Don’t think of her.
Don't think of her…
Ms Long Fingers.