Facial (8 page)

“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 impotence 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.

“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 actually 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.