Dark Luck (A Suspense Thriller) by Tim Kizer Page A

eager to have it chopped off again ?
You sure would.
    Was Zack scared when he discovered that his sixth
finger was coming back? Honestly, yes. In fact, he was almost terrified since
there was no rational explanation to his condition. But at the same time he was
excited and couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. Zack had always known
he used to have six fingers on his right hand: when, at the age of five, he had
inquired about the small scar between the middle and the ring fingers, his
mother had chosen not to sugarcoat reality and told him the truth.
    “And then the doctor snipped it off,” she said and gave
him a hug.
    Oddly, even though he was supposed to be happy about
his hand being restored to the normal condition, Zack found out that the
story of his extra finger had created a strange emptiness in his heart. For
some reason, he was a bit upset that his parents had made this decision for him
and that it had never occurred to them to ask for his opinion. He had a feeling
that he’d missed out on something significant, having lost that finger. 
    Once Jeremy got going, it took him about three months
to complete the comeback, growing at a rather quick pace of one inch a month.
For the first few weeks, the sight of his new finger always made Zack think of
bamboo, the fastest growing plant on the Earth, some of whose species could
grow up to four feet in one day.
    Zack wanted to name his new finger Sixtus. Why? First,
it sounded cool. Second, Pope Sixtus II was the name of the man with six
fingers on Raphael’s The Sistine Madonna, one of the most famous paintings
depicting the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child—famous among the intelligent people, anyway. Zack forgot how he had come to find out about this gorgeous
five-hundred-year-old painting, but he did remember why it had impressed him so
much: the image of the Pope’s six-fingered right hand (and you most likely
wouldn’t notice the extra digit unless you were told to look for it since it
was quite subtle) was incredibly fascinating and engrossing and he had been
excited to see that someone who had the same deformity as he did had ended up
friends with the Mother of Jesus.
    The remarkable thing about the painting was the fact
that, as Zack found out later, Sixtus wasn’t actually a polydactyl and that
Raphael had added the sixth finger to show that the Pope had possessed a sixth
sense awakened by Initiation. As Zack learned about the hidden messages and
symbolism in The Sistine Madonna, he began to admire this masterpiece—and
Raphael—even more. But we digressed.
    His new buddy already had a name, and it was not
Sixtus.
    “Call me Jeremy,” the finger said. “I love this name.”
    Where had Jeremy been all these years? And why had he
waited so long before deciding to come back?
    Actually, the right question would be: ‘Was it Jeremy
that the surgeon removed from Zack’s right hand fourteen years ago or was it
someone— or something —else?’
    It didn’t take Zack’s parents long to notice that the
sixth finger had begun growing back. Zack was thinking of finding a way to hide
Jeremy from his folks but soon realized that he wouldn’t have been able to come
up with a practical solution even if he were as smart as Einstein. Early on,
Zack had decided to keep his mouth shut about his new finger being able to talk
to him as he realized no one would believe it, so his folks had never found out
who his friend Jeremy actually was.
    Having little natural curiosity, his parents decided to
abandon their investigation into the reasons for the extra finger’s return
after two orthopedic doctors had told them that more research was needed. They
spent no time debating whether they should or should not amputate the sixth
finger. Once it became clear that they were dealing with just a finger and not
an exotic form of cancer or somesuch, his parents started looking for a surgeon
who could perform the amputation in the most aesthetically pleasing way. And
they