Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions by Fritz Leiber Page B

Jockey Lowthrope had had his hands hacked off. I knew why Jock Lathrop had never let anyone see his own ungloved hands, after that "change" had begun in London.
    The little finger and ring finger on each of his hands were normal. The others – the ones used in motivating a puppet – were not. Replacing the thumb and second finger were tiny muscular arms. The first finger was in each case a tiny, wormlike body, of the general shape of a finger, but with a tiny sphincterlike mouth and two diminutive, malformed eyes that were all black pupil. One was dead by Delia's bullet. The other was not. I crushed it under my heel...
    Among Jock Lathrop's papers was found the following note, penned in longhand, and evidently written within a few days of the end:
    If I die, they have killed me. For I am sure they hate me.  
    I have tried to confide in various people, but have been unable to go through with it. I feel compelled to secrecy. Perhaps that is their desire, for their power over my actions is growing greater every day. Delia would loathe me if she knew. And she suspects.  
    I thought I would go mad in London, when my injured fingers began to heal with a new growth. A monstrous growth – that where my brothers who were engulfed in my flesh at the time of my birth and did not begin to develop until now! Had they been developed and born at the proper time, we would have been triplets. But the mode of that development now!  
    Human flesh is subject to horrible perversions. Can my thoughts and activities as a puppeteer have had a determining influence? Have I influenced their minds until those minds are really those of Punch and Jack Ketch?  
    And what I read in that old pamphlet. Hands hacked off ... Could my ancestor's pact with the devil have given him his fiendish skill? Given him the monstrous growth which led to his ruin? Could this physical characteristic have been inherited, lying dormant until such time as another Lathrop, another puppeteer, summoned it forth by his ambitious desires?  
    I don't know. What I do know is that as long as I live I am the world's greatest puppeteer – but at what cost! I hate them and they hate me. I can hardly control them. Last night one of them clawed Delia while I slept. Even now, when my mind wandered for a moment, the one turned the pen and tried to drive it into my wrist...
    I did not scoff at the questions that Jock Lathrop had asked himself. I might have at one time. But I had seen them , and I had seen the tiny sword driven into Lathrop's eye. No, I'm not going to spend any more time trying to figure out the black mystery behind the amazing skill of Jock Lathrop. I'm going to spend it trying to make Delia forget.
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    CRY WITCH!
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    THE GIRL was very beautiful and she came into the café on the arm of a young writer whose fearless idealism has made him one of the most talked of figures of today. Still, it seemed odd to me that old Nemecek should ignore my question in order to eye her. Old Nemecek loves to argue better than to eat or drink, or, I had thought, to love, and in any case he is very old.
    Indeed, old Nemecek is almost incredibly old. He came to New York when the homeland of the Czechs was still called Bohemia, and he was old then. Now his face is like a richly tooled brown leather mask and his hands are those of a dapperly gloved skeleton and his voice, though mellow, is whispery. His figure is crooked and small and limping, and I sometimes feel that he came from a land of ancient myth. Yet there are times when a certain fiery youthfulness flashes from his eyes.
    The girl looked our way and her glance stopped at Nemecek. For a moment I thought they had recognized each other. A cryptic look passed between them, a guardedly smiling, coolly curious, rapid, reminiscent look as if they had been lovers long ago, incredible as that might be. Then the girl and her escort went on to the bar and old Nemecek turned back to me.
    "Idealism?"