by Jeff Strand
“Are you crying?” I asked.
“No.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Well, wouldn’t you cry if you’d committed several acts of cold-blooded murder? I chopped off their heads! All of them had heads and now they don’t! I touched a rib bone! I know what a spleen looks like! I tried to rip out a heart but it wouldn’t come out! I know how a neck looks when there’s no skin on it! I’m a monster, Felicia! A monster!”
Now I was crying, too. “But why?”
“Because I’m killing people! Haven’t you been listening?”
“I wasn’t asking why you think you’re a monster. I was asking why you’re killing people. Is it for revenge?”
“That’s a fringe benefit, yes.”
“But also…?”
“But also, this scary face appeared on the floor of Carlton’s basement, and it gave us gold coins in exchange for feeding it severed heads, and we figured that if we had to kill people, it might as well be people who are cuckolding me, so I’m a monster!”
“Oh my God,” I said. I would have fallen into my chair if I hadn’t already been sitting.
“Do you believe me?” Greg asked.
“Yes.”
“Seriously? I just told you about a severed-head-eating face on Carlton’s basement floor.”
“I believe you.”
“I would’ve held on to doubt for a while longer, but whatever.” Greg dabbed at the corners of his eyes with his napkin and then blew his nose into it. “Anyway, that’s why I had blood behind my ears.”
“Are you planning to kill more people?”
Greg shrugged. “Yeah, I think so. Not necessarily the entire list of your men, but a few more, at least.”
“Please don’t.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you cheated on me.”
“I should have thought of a carnivorous basement face?”
“Even without the face, I would have snapped at some point. You know that.”
“Take me to see it.”
“Okay.”
12
Jasper
Nothingness.
Somethingless.
I float, and yet I do not float. I sink and yet I rise. I scream and yet I am silent. I have no eyes and yet I have a million eyes. I am obese and yet I am physically fit.
This bites.
We, the lost souls in the land of eternity, spiral endlessly in a world of blackness and all colors, conversing with words that we do not speak.
I’m the only one here who didn’t get to bang Felicia.
Sure, Felicia is no great prize, but apparently she was quite the little hellion in the sack. Not in a “Hi, I’m Felicia, let’s do double penetration” way, but, as the others explain it, if you were sweet to her and brought her flowers and complimented her dress, different acts would be unlocked, like levels on a video game.
I don’t feel jealous or anything. I just wish I had more to contribute to the conversation.
By the way, we all hate Greg. He’d damn well better hope he doesn’t end up here with us…
13
Greg
Carlton was going to be really mad when I showed up at his house with Felicia, but he’d get over it, just like he’d gotten over the fact that the gold coins were worthless.
“Completely worthless?” I’d asked the appraiser at the coin shop.
The appraiser nodded. “More worthless than gold-foil-covered chocolate. At least with those you get the chocolate. Didn’t you think these seemed kind of light to be gold?”
“How the fuck should we know how much gold coins weigh?” asked Carlton. “Do you think we walk around with gold coins in our pocket? Look at the way we dress!”
“Sir, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to refrain from using coarse language while in my shop,” said the appraiser. “That kind of talk is fine at your Targets or your Wal-Marts, but not here.”
“How about you open wide and suck my—no, you’re right, your store, your rules,” said Carlton, grabbing the coin from the counter. “Okay, if we were so easily duped, then maybe one of your other customers will be, too. Wanna buy it?”
The appraiser shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so.”
As soon as we’d stepped out of the boundaries of the shop, Carlton said, “Fuck.”
“The face lied to us.”
“That son of a bitch. I almost don’t want to kill for him anymore.”
“Almost?” I asked.
“I know that we did it for the treasure, but oddly enough, I still feel that it was a valuable use of our time. We were productive, weren’t we?”
“Very productive.”
“It’s not like we were goofing around on social media.”
“Nope.”
“So my vote is that we keep killing Felicia’s lovers, and when we run out of them, we start killing people who wanted to sleep with her, and when we run out of them, we start killing random strangers who are walking alone at night.”
“All right,” I said.
* * *
“What the hell is she doing here?” Carlton demanded.
“Can we come in?” I asked.
“No, you can’t come in! Are you crazy?”
“Let me in, Carlton,” said Felicia.
“Absolutely not. That would cause complications.”
“I’m not leaving until you let me in.”
“If you come in, here’s what’s going to happen: you’ll get eaten. Now, I’m sure that a godless tramp like you is thinking, ‘Ooooh, sounds good to me!’ but I assure you that this is the bad kind of getting eaten.”
“Greg already told me about the face,” Felicia said.
Carlton looked at me. “You what?”
I nervously scratched my arm. Felicia and I had agreed that she’d reveal her knowledge about the face somewhere around the four-minute mark of this encounter, and we were barely thirty seconds in.
“You what?” Carlton repeated.
“She was going to find out eventually,” I said.
“I suppose you’re right. But I accept no responsibility for what happens if she goes down there. Felicia, are you willing to sign a waiver?”
“Sure,” she said.
“I don’t actually have a waiver, of course. That would be insane. I just wanted you to confirm that you’d sign one if it was available.”
“I would.”
“Well, then prove it, because I do have a waiver!” Carlton reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “I’m kidding. This is a pizza receipt.”
Felicia leaned over and whispered to me. “Your brother is acting strange.”
“I read your lips!” said Carlton. “You think I’m acting strange! You haven’t seen strange yet!”
Carlton proceeded to do something strange, which I will not describe here out of respect for his dignity.
“In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that,” said Carlton. “It was a below-average thing to do. It won’t be repeated.”
“Thank you,” said Felicia, still traumatized.
“If I take you down to the basement, do you promise not to get upset?” Carlton asked.
“I do not.”
“Okay, that’s not the answer I wanted, but you know what? Screw it. Let’s go.”
* * *
“What you’re going to see will shock you,” I warned Felicia. “If you feel the need to run back up the stairs and scream about unholy abominations, you go right ahead. You won’t hurt anybody’s feelings.”
Sometimes life is filled with irony. For example, you tell your wife that what she’s about to see may shock her, and that she won’t hurt anybody’s feelings if she runs back up the stairs screaming about an unholy abomination, but then when you actually walk halfway down the stairs, it’s you who wants to run and scream about the abomination thing.
By “you” I mean “me.”
To clarify: I wanted to run back up the stairs screaming, but I didn’t actuall
y do it.
The faces were still there, but they’d been joined by at least fifty more. They covered the basement floor so thoroughly that there was barely a path to walk past them. Some were the size of the original face, but others were half its size, while others were twice its size.
And they were no longer limited to the basement floor. Six or seven of them were on the walls.
“Where did all of these come from?” I demanded. “You’ve been killing people without me, haven’t you, you cheating bastard?”
“I was faithful to you, I swear!” Carlton insisted. “They just started multiplying on their own!”
“Why would they do that? That doesn’t make any sense!”
My brother and I’d had our differences, but he’d always been the one person I could trust. So this hurt. It really hurt.
“I didn’t kill anybody without you!” Carlton wailed. “I would never do that! Okay, one! I killed one person! He came to my door asking if I’d seen his son. What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have waited for me!”
“He was searching for his missing child! He wasn’t going to hang out and have a cup of coffee! And my house is a pigsty. There. I said it.”
“I should stab you with a lobster!” I said, a perplexing statement even to me. A couple of weeks ago I’d been thinking that it sure would be nice if I could afford a lobster dinner, so maybe that was the origin of the comment.
I meant to check on Felicia’s reaction to this whole thing. I’d get to that in a second, after I was done yelling at Carlton.
“Silence!” shouted all fifty faces at once. Dark liquid flowed from their mouths as they did so. And now they had thick black tendrils. When the hell had they acquired tendrils?
It was, I must say, the scariest shit I’d ever seen.
Terrifying.
Frightening beyond compare.
And so I did what you’re supposed to do when confronted with unimaginable horror: I clawed out my eyes.
The process was not as speedy as I would have thought. I assumed you just dug your fingers in there and gave your eyeballs a good yank. Not the case at all. It took several minutes. Fortunately, Carlton was kind enough to wait patiently and not try to rush me. I couldn’t hear what Felicia was doing, but presumably she was ripping out her own eyes, too.
Finally, I stood there, blood gushing from my empty sockets. I didn’t feel all that much less scared, but at least it was a little better.
The floor began to vibrate, and there was a loud rumbling sound.
“So beautiful…” said Felicia. “So beautiful.”
How was she seeing something beautiful? I couldn’t see shit. Had she not torn out her eyes in horror? Had I jumped the gun?
“Gaze upon me!” shouted the faces. “Gaze upon your master!”
“I can’t gaze!” I said. “Somebody tell me what’s going on!”
“Shhh!” said Carlton. “The faces are speaking!”
I felt a slimy tendril wrap around my left ankle.
“I demand another sacrifice!” shouted the faces.
“When did they become sacrifices?” I asked, utterly confused. “I thought the heads were food! Somebody tell me what’s going on?”
Blood was still pouring from my eye sockets. How frickin’ long did that stuff take to clot?
“Give me the eyeless one,” said the heads.
That sounded like a perfectly fine idea. Why not give the eyeless one to the heads as a sacrifice? There was no downside that immediately came to mind, and so…
No, wait.
I was the eyeless one. I didn’t want to be sacrificed.
But somebody had to be sacrificed, right? It might as well be me.
No, wait.
That thought process didn’t make any sense. Had I poked my brain while I was ripping out my eyes?
“Carlton, no!” I said. “You can’t do this! We’re brothers!”
“Nobody likes a guilt tripper,” Carlton informed me, shoving me down the stairs.
I don’t remember exactly what I said as I was tumbling down the stairs, but it was impolite. I struck the cement floor, hard, and my right hand came down on something very slimy and tongue-like. As it licked my palm, I thought, yep, that’s a tongue. The sensation really wasn’t all that unpleasant, at least compared to the prior sensation of falling down the stairs, or the next sensation of two of my fingers getting bitten off.
I remember exactly what I said then, but I don’t think there’s a spelling for it.
The face I’d landed on proceeded to bite off the remaining three fingers. I shrieked. Some blood from the stumps would have squirted into my eye, so from a “glass is half-full” perspective I was spared that discomfort, although I wasn’t feeling particularly blessed.
“Since when do the faces eat fingers?” I cried out. “I thought they only ate heads! What the hell has happened to the world?”
“I think they felt bad for us having to bury all of those bodies,” said Carlton.
That was a blatant lie. We’d been stacking the headless bodies in the corner of his living room. The relationship between my brother and me had been damaged beyond repair.
I suppose the best course of action would have been to turn around and try to climb back up the stairs, but I was blind, disoriented, and in extreme agony, so I ended up crawling forward. A mouth bit into my knee. Another mouth bit into my other knee. A third mouth chewed on my toe, although I was wearing decent shoes and its teeth didn’t break through the rubber.
I was glad that this was—no! I wasn’t glad at all! Getting devoured by these faces was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Felicia could make rambunctious love to a guy right next to me on our bed while I was trying to watch TV and this would still be worse.
My arm that had a hand that still had all of its fingers went into a very large mouth, plunging in past my elbow. I tried to pull it out (obviously) but the mouth chomped down before I could do so.
“Aaah!” I said. That probably doesn’t convey the full impact of what I said, but I don’t wish to overwhelm you with capital letters and exclamation points.
The mouth chomped and chomped.
The teeth had broken the skin, but not the bone, so I did have another opportunity to withdraw my arm. I’m not certain why I didn’t. After all, the pain was significant and I wanted relief.
“Why?” I bellowed in what I hoped was the direction of Carlton and/or Felicia. “Why?”
“It is the will of the faces,” said Carlton. “It must be done.”
An arm bone cracked.
“Please, master!” I shouted to the faces. “I’ve served you well! Why must you…actually, I’m sure you know what’s best. You wouldn’t be biting off my arm without a good reason. I withdraw my question.”
The mouth bit off my arm. I said, “Aaah!”
I continued to crawl, as more mouths took bites out of me. I would not wish this agony on anyone, except maybe Carlton for pushing me down the stairs, but I figured I’d get over it. It did kind of hurt my feelings that Felicia wasn’t making any attempt to assist me. Though I didn’t expect her to put herself at risk of getting devoured by creepy basement faces, she could at least have provided lip service and said, “I’ll be right there!” I had no eyes; I wouldn’t know if she was telling the truth.
Speaking of my eyes, the sockets still hadn’t stopped bleeding. I was starting to feel kind of woozy in addition to the excruciating pain. I regretted my earlier decision and wished that I could shove my eyeballs back into their sockets, but of course that was silly, since I’d discarded them immediately after their removal.
“Your death will not be in vain,” said Carlton.
“Not to rub salt in his countless open wounds,” said the faces, “but in the interest of total honesty, when you told him that his death would not be in vain, you were incorrect.”
“I thought it was a sacrifice?”
“No. I don’t need sacrifices. Just
food. Just heads.”
And then one of the faces ate mine.
14
Greg Again
Hi. I apologize for not handing this over the way I was supposed to, but I feel like my last sentence downplayed the ghastly nature of what happened to me. I didn’t wish to imply that my head was gulped down in one bite. It took dozens of bites, as I dragged my ravaged body across the floor, the amount of flesh attached to my frame decreasing with every second. Soon I had no arms left to drag myself with, so I rolled, which seemed like it was working until I rolled onto my side and jostled one of my ribs that no longer had any cushion, and the pain became so unbearable that I just lay there, weeping, waiting for it all to end, longing for the joyful time of ages ago when I wasn’t being eaten.
It took a long time for the teeth to crack my skull. I believe I was being savored, but I don’t know for sure. That could just be me being prideful.
Eventually, though, one of the faces really did eat my head. I don’t need to describe how that felt; you can probably figure it out.
Anyway, I wanted to make it clear that my death was outrageously miserable.
15
Felicia
“So,” said Carlton. “That just happened.”
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked. I was having difficulty sorting through my emotions. I wasn’t happy that Carlton and I had stood there for twenty minutes watching my husband get devoured, but I wasn’t especially bummed out about it.
“I want you to know that I didn’t lure Greg here to kill him,” Carlton insisted. “It was completely a spur-of-the-moment decision.”
“Uh, I know. We came unannounced. You were upset about it.”
“Right. Good. That confirms my story, then.”
“What are those faces?”
“Travelers. Well, one traveler. I don’t completely understand the logistics. Are you going to push me down the stairs?”
