Facial

by Jeff Strand

  Greg and I stood there for a moment, taking in the face’s words of wisdom. He was right. Any disinterested minimum-wage-earning slacker could lop off a head, but Greg and I had proven our dedication to the craft.

  We weren’t merely not wrong about what we’d done; we were right.

  Greg and I smiled at each other, and Greg let out a sheepish little chuckle. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just get so nervous sometimes. I doubted my moral compass. It won’t happen again.”

  We gave each other a hug.

  I laughed. “I’d feel guilty about hugging you like this if we didn’t both already have blood and guts on us.”

  “I don’t have any actual guts on me, do I?”

  “Yeah. There’s at least one.”

  Greg laughed as well. “Wow. Whatever that is, it must’ve had quite a trajectory to end up on my shoulder.”

  We both laughed some more. (Although only for a few seconds. It wasn’t minutes of laughing. Just some extra chuckles at the absurdity of it all.)

  “I was thinking—” we both said together.

  “You first,” I said.

  “No, you first,” said Greg. “I want to make sure that what I’m thinking isn’t as dark as what you’re thinking. What were you thinking?”

  “Killing spree.”

  “Oh, yeah, yours is way darker. I was thinking of another victim, not a whole spree.”

  “Spree may have been the wrong word. Three to five more. Maybe six.”

  “Let’s not commit ourselves to six quite yet,” said Greg. “We’ll start with one, and if that works out, move on to two, and if we’re still cool with the idea, we’ll go to three, and then from three we’ll probably be able to figure out if we actually want to do the whole six, don’t you agree?”

  “Excellent plan,” I said.

  My doorbell rang.

  “Did you order a pizza?” asked Greg.

  I shook my head.

  “Could somebody be delivering a pizza to the wrong house?”

  “Conceivably.”

  “Do you have nosy neighbors? Jasper did a lot of screaming while we were killing him. What if somebody heard it and called the police?”

  I cursed. “That’s a definite possibility. I mean, I don’t know how much lung power Jasper had, but I got the impression that he was screaming at the top of his lungs. So, yeah, I suppose it could be the authorities investigating. Damn. The noise level is something we really should have thought about.”

  “Well, we can’t think of everything.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  “Do you think they’ll just leave if nobody answers?” Greg asked.

  “I can’t help feeling like they won’t.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “So, killing the cop is off the table, right? If we do that, they’ll just send more cops. I mean, granted, that would help us get victims for our spree, but they might send a whole bunch at once.”

  “No cop-killing,” said Greg.

  “That’s my stance, too. Just making sure we’re on the same page.”

  “Answer the door,” said the faces.

  I wiggled my hand, shaking off several drops of blood. “I’m not really dressed for company.”

  “Answer the door.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “We’re drenched in gore. Everybody knows you don’t talk to the police when you’re drenched in gore. It’s supremely suspicious.”

  “I have now asked you to answer the door twice,” said the faces. “Do not make me ask a third.”

  As you read this, it’s important to me that you understand that I knew that answering the door while covered in gore was not a smart thing to do. It’s just not. I don’t want you to read this and think, Holy crap! What a fuckin’ simpleton! I was with him until now, but if he’s going to answer the door in that condition, then fuck that guy. Fuck him with a steel-toed boot, which is way up there on the list of unpleasant ways to be fucked!

  I get what you’re saying. The thing is, I had to trust the face. I just had to. After all this, why would they lead me astray? How could they benefit from giving me poor advice? If the face(s) said to answer the door, I had to answer the door.

  Greg and I walked upstairs and over to my front door. Okay, the faces’ advice wasn’t perfect, because we were dripping blood on my carpet, but still…

  I looked through the peephole.

  “Is it the police?” Greg asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think they’re mad?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  I opened the door. It was only one cop, and except for his scary mustache, there was very little about him that was intimidating. Okay, he had a gun. That was about it, though.

  “May I help you?” I asked.

  The cop raised an eyebrow. “Have you been painting?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Really? What room of the house have you been painting…in blood?” He pulled his gun out of its holster and pointed it at me.

  This is where I started to feel kind of silly for treating the face as a fountain of wisdom. When a homicide-encouraging face on your basement floor tells you to do something, maybe the best course of action is to do the opposite.

  Greg and I exchanged a glance, as if to say, yep, this time we really stepped in it.

  Interestingly, though, the cop did not shoot point-blank into my neck. He tucked his gun back into its holster. “You know,” he said, “is it really my place to butt into other people’s business? Who am I to judge what is and what is not appropriate behavior? If I wanted to do that, I would’ve become a judge. And, just between you and me, judges could stand to worry a little bit more about themselves and a little bit less about other people. I apologize for bothering you.”

  The cop turned to leave. I have to admit that I wanted to ask him some questions, because even the laziest of police officers would at least ask to take a peek inside the house. As I have repeatedly stressed, I take responsibility for my own actions, but we’re talking about the actions of the cop now, and I simply couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some kind of mind control going on here.

  At the bare minimum, shouldn’t he have swiped a finger across my chin and tasted it? Or asked a non-invasive question, like “Why do you have all that blood on you?” or “Hypothetically, if somebody was screaming bloody murder in your basement, who might that individual have been?”

  So I really wanted to get his perspective on what was happening. Yet I couldn’t have him suddenly realize that, yes, there was mind control at work here, and that it behooved him to investigate further.

  We watched him leave.

  “We both know that was strange,” I said to Greg, “so there’s no reason to discuss it further. There are a lot of men out there who’ve done you wrong, so let’s get started on our killing spree.”

  9

  Professor Sebastian Snowberg

  In a world without consequences, what are the rules that govern morality?

  I believe that we are all fundamentally decent. I do not believe that anybody is born evil. Nurture, not nature. It is my firm stance that even the child of a sadistic husband-and-wife serial killer team could grow up to be an upstanding member of society if he was raised by different parents.

  Yet I also believe that it is possible for each and every one of us to commit atrocities against our fellow human beings. If a kindhearted man were offered a one-dollar bill in exchange for the brutal murder of his local pharmacist, would he accept? Almost certainly not. What if the offer was raised to ten dollars? Would he accept? Again, almost certainly not. One hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?

  Almost certainly not.

  The truth of the matter is, to convince an otherwise kindhearted man to murder his pharmacist would require a sum of money that’s out of reach for virtually everyone who would want a pharmacist killed. Because even if you offered him a million dollars, the kindhearted man
would still worry about the consequences. What good is a million dollars in prison?

  A million dollars is some good in prison, of course. One could bribe guards or purchase cigarettes to use as currency. Still, is having a million dollars in prison better than not having a million dollars at home? Almost certainly not.

  But what if there were no consequences? What if you could assure this kindhearted man that he would never be caught? What if you could promise him that he would be able to spend every cent of his million dollars without the risk of even a single night behind bars?

  Would he do it?

  These were the kinds of questions I was asking myself while I went down on Felicia. I suppose it goes without saying that I was not an attentive lover.

  “More to the right,” she said.

  I moved my tongue a bit more to the right. Based on her reaction, it was the correct distance to have moved, and I went back to my philosophical thoughts.

  * * *

  “But why?” I wailed. “Why?”

  “Because,” said the non-kindhearted-looking man, “you were boning my wife.”

  That information helped, but didn’t narrow things down all the way. I couldn’t perish without understanding why I was being killed, and yet admitting that he could be one of four husbands might increase his hostility towards me.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I said. “I am the gayest professor you’ll ever meet. The impurity of the thoughts I’m having about your brother would amaze you.”

  He’d introduced the other man as his brother. It worried me that he was sharing the status of their relationship with me, since it implied that I would not survive to make use of this knowledge, yet he hadn’t told me either of their names, implying that my death was not a certainty.

  “Bullshit,” said Greg. (It would be awkward and disingenuous to continue to refer to him as “the man,” since I now know that his name was Greg.) “At the very most, you’re bi.”

  Truth be told, I was a little bi, although not for Carlton. I’d never done anything with a man, but there’d been times over the years when I’d made eye contact with a gentleman from across the room and thought there could be worse uses for the restroom stall. Sadly, the one man who’d offered me his finger was rather unattractive, and after a few seconds of consideration I’d politely declined. Now that I was facing possible death, I regretted that decision.

  “Please don’t kill me,” I said. “I’ll do anything!”

  That wasn’t entirely true. If these men had lined up a row of babies, handed me a machine gun, and told me to mow them down, I would have refused, sacrificing my own life for that of the babies, a sacrifice that might turn out to be a waste if they went ahead and killed the babies themselves, but a sacrifice that needed to be made regardless.

  They did not line up a row of babies. They also did not hand me a machine gun, which was disappointing because if they were that foolish, I would have turned it on them.

  Instead, they threw me into the trunk of their automobile and brought me down to Carlton’s basement.

  I was not prone to shouting things like “Gaaaahhhhh!!!” but how articulate could one expect me to be when I gazed upon five hideous faces on the basement floor?

  “Will he do, master?” asked Greg.

  “He will indeed,” said the five faces in unison.

  And then Carlton held me down while Greg decapitated me with a shovel. At that point, I died, so I wasn’t really present in the moment, although I’d get to watch it later.

  10

  Greg

  To clarify: the faces didn’t make me call them master. I just started doing it because I thought it was funny.

  11

  Felicia

  Five of my previous boy-toys had gone missing in a week. In my defense, I’d started to suspect foul play after the second.

  “Quite a few disappearances in this city recently,” I said to Greg, as we sat at the table, eating the microwaved dinners that I’d over-microwaved.

  “What are you trying to say?” asked Greg.

  “Just making conversation.”

  “If you’re accusing me of wrongdoing, why not come out and say it?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” I insisted. “But you’ve been spending a lot of time with your brother, who you only barely tolerate, and every night this week you’ve come home with blood behind your ears.”

  “Why are you looking behind my ears?” Greg asked. “Can’t a man have privacy in a single crevice? Maybe I should ask what’s behind your ears, hmmm?”

  I showed him that there was nothing behind my ears.

  “All right, well, fair enough, it was just speculation,” said Greg. “It wasn’t an accusation, unlike what you’ve done with me.”

  “I specifically said that I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

  “And yet you wanted to know why there was blood behind my ears. If that’s not an accusation, I don’t know what is.” Greg frowned for an instant, as if momentarily doubting his understanding of the word accusation, but he quickly returned to his look of indignation.

  “I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t question the presence of blood on my husband,” I said.

  “What if I’d been hurt? What if I had nasty gashes behind my ears? How come you didn’t express concern for my health?”

  “I did,” I insisted. “I asked you about it every night this week. You told me not to worry, that it wasn’t your blood.”

  That had seemed like a sufficient explanation each time, even though on Tuesday and Thursday there’d been so much blood that it was dripping onto his shirt. I couldn’t see an actual wound, so it seemed completely feasible that he was telling the truth about it not being his blood.

  But that left me with an extremely important question: whose blood was it?

  Was there a connection between Greg coming home with blood on him, and some of my former lovers going missing? He had a pretty good reason to dislike them. If our roles were reversed, I’d be upset with the women he was banging.

  If he were on some sort of killing spree where he wiped out my former lovers one by one, the final body count would be astounding. I’m not an attractive woman, and my best years are far behind me, so it could take a lot of effort to rebuild my boy-toy empire…but frankly I was less worried about that than the tragic loss of human life.

  I really should have confronted Greg about this sooner.

  “Are you killing people?” I asked.

  “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “Because I want to know if you’re killing people.”

  Greg pushed aside his plastic tray of turkey and mashed potatoes. “That question is disrespectful.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is. Do I go around asking if you’re killing people? Do I?”

  “The difference, Greg, is that I haven’t given you any reason to suspect that I’ve committed murder. There’s not a drop of blood on me. We can’t say the same about you.”

  “Why do you immediately associate blood with murder? Maybe somebody accidentally bled on me. What about that?”

  “Did somebody accidentally bleed on you?”

  “Well, no, but you could have started there instead of going straight to me being a murderer!”

  “You never answered my question,” I said.

  “Are you fucking other men?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Has your vagina admitted bonus penises?”

  I glared at him. “You’ve known that I was screwing around for years. The only way I could be less discrete is if I 69’ed one of them at the foot of our bed while you were watching TV.”

  “More like you 699’ed them.”

  “Huh?”

  “I know you had a threesome.”

  “But what does 699 represent? What’s the second 9 doing?”

  “The numbers don’t matter. What matters is that you’ve been unfaithful. You’ve used my impote
nce and my lack of interest in trying to fix the problem as an excuse to go out and seek your own sexual gratification. Slut!”

  “Did you kill any of them?” I asked.

  “How many of them spanked you?” Greg demanded. “Did you use the p-word in your bedroom talk? Because you rarely use it with me!”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Is that so? One of the filthiest words in the English language and you don’t remember if you used it? How is that possible? Oh, you get all high and mighty when you accuse me of slaughtering people, but I’m supposed to just sit back and watch you—?”

  I interrupted him. “I didn’t say you were slaughtering people.”

  “You did so! That’s why my mood is so poor!”

  “I said killing people, not slaughtering them.” I looked at Greg in horror. “Are you slaughtering them?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No! I mean, yes! Stop trying to twist my words! This isn’t about the people I’ve slaughtered; it’s about the people you’ve screwed! And don’t think I don’t know about the women! Obviously you didn’t screw them, but you’ve done things with them! You’ve done things with your fingers, and tongue, and, yes, I even know about the elbow!”

  “How do you know about the elbow?” I asked.

  “The subject line of the e-mail was ‘Luv Your Elbow.’”

  “Oh, that’s right. Have you been killing my lovers?”

  “Stop trying to change the subject away from your lovers!”

  “I’m not! We’re still on-topic, but I damn well need to know if you’ve been killing them!”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why do you need to know? What purpose will it serve? Will you warn them? Will you ask me to stop?”

  “Yes!”

  “I asked you four questions. I’m not sure which one you’re answering.”

  “The last and the second-to-last ones.”

  “I don’t remember what they were,” said Greg. “I’m sorry—I’m getting kind of worked up over this.” He began to cry.