Dripping ink figure with floating hands on ribs

You will think me mad, but Mr Fenwick has given the drawing-room sketches to me to clean, and the ink on them is still wet, though the sheets have hung three weeks above the stove. The figure is the one he calls the Pointer, a thin grey fellow with a face like a boiled glove, lunging out of the page with one arm flung towards the door. Every morning there are fresh drips running down from his fingertips onto the blank margin, as if he has been at work all night.

Yesterday I counted the sheets and found two more hands on the bench, pale ones, fingers curled like spiders, sitting beside the proof press as though they had climbed down from the paper to fetch something. Fenwick laughed and said the stone-man's boy had spilt the lye. I did not tell him I had seen the left one twitch when I moved the lamp.

Last night I stayed late to finish the chromolithograph of the Hartley cask label. When I looked up from the stone, the Pointer was no longer on the wall sheet. He stood in the doorway of the stock room, one leg lifted, the other stepping, his long arm stretched past my shoulder to the corner where the ink barrels sit. I did not turn round. I followed his finger, and there beneath the barrel was the tin box where Fenwick keeps the wages, with a trail of black drops leading to it, neat as a sum.

I have put the box in the post with the lid taped shut. Write to me at Hulme, not the works, and tell me I am not mad.

Yours in haste, Tom