A change now took place in the shadow; the blurr dissipated, and the clearly defined outlines of an object--an object that made Mr. Vance perfectly sick with apprehension--slowly disclosed themselves. His suspicions were verified--it was the HAND!--the hand--no longer skeleton, but covered with green, mouldering flesh--feeling its way slyly and stealthily towards him--towards the back of his chair! He noted the murderous twitching of its short, flat finger-tips, the monstrous muscles of its hideous thumb, and the great, clumsy hollows of its clammy palm. It closed in upon him; its cold, slimy, detestable skin touched his coat--his shoulder--his neck--his head! It pressed him down, squashed, suffocated him! He saw it all in the glass--and then an extraordinary thing happened. Mr. Vance suddenly became animated. He got up and peeped furtively round. Chairs, bed, wardrobe, had all disappeared--so had the bedroom--and he found himself in a small, bare, comfortless, queerly constructed apartment without a door, and with only a narrow slit of a window somewhere near the ceiling.
He had in one of his hands a knife with a long, keen blade, and his whole mind was bent on murder. Creeping stealthily forward, he approached a corner of the room, where he now saw, for the first time--a mattress--a mattress on which lay a huddled-up form. What the Thing was--whether human or animal--Mr. Vance did not know--did not care--all he felt was that it was there for him to kill--that he loathed and hated it--hated it with a hatred such as nothing else could have produced. Tiptoeing gently up to it, he bent down, and, lifting his knife high above his head, plunged it into the Thing's body with all the force he could command.
He recrossed the room, and found himself once more in his apartment at the inn. He looked for the skeleton hand--it was not where he had left it--it had vanished. Then he glanced at the mirror, and on its brilliantly polished surface saw--not his own face--but the face of the gardener, the man who had given him the hand! Features, colour, hair--all--all were identical--wonderfully, hideously identical--and as the eyes met his, they smiled--devilishly.
Early the next day, Mr. Vance set out for the spinney and cottage; they were not to be found--nobody had ever heard of them. He continued his travels, and some months later, at a loan collection of pictures in a gallery in Edinburgh, he came to an abrupt--a very abrupt--halt, before the portrait of a gentleman in ancient costume. The face seemed strangely familiar--the huge head with thick, red hair--the hawk-like features--the thin and tightly compressed lips. Then, in a trice, it all came back to him: the face he looked at was that of the uncouth gardener--the man who had given him the hand. And to clinch the matter, the eyes--leered.