It lay there, a human hand cut off at the wrist, decaying gently on my table.  It was, not surprisingly corpse-white and the finger nails had long since fallen off.  I found if I looked at it from a different angle, I could see some bone protruding through the finger tips.  There was a candle wick protruding from the middle finger, unlit.  From my limited knowledge these things were meant to be preserved with herbs and then fired in an oven, but this one looked as though whoever made it hadn’t bothered with any of that.  Slime slid from the dead digits giving it a bilious tinge of hen-shit green.  Rumour had it that it had to be the hand of a murderer cut off just at the point of death when the moon had waned to its lowest point.  Even I knew better than to touch the thing, but that didn’t leave me with a hell of a lot of options.

Shutting the door firmly, I went to the bathroom to wash my own hands, aware but uncaring that it was more of a symbolic gesture than any actual need for hygiene.  Muttering under my breath I went to my bag and took out one of the ouja boards I hadn’t even had time to unpack.  It was the heavy duty board that had the power to summon the lowest spirits which were all that could help me now, although the price tag didn’t bear thinking about.  I’d just been handed a death sentence and if this had been a film, this was the part where I announced dramatically that it was now prison rules.