Facial Read Free

right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
    “Thank you. You and your family will not die tonight.”
    I walked over to the lion, recoiling at the smell. “How do I do this?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I can’t move a whole lion by myself.”
    “Am I really going to have to talk you through every step of the process? Get a wheelbarrow. Or move it in pieces. All you have to do is scoot it two feet away from where it is right now. This is not rocket science, a warlock spell, or brain surgery.”
    “I don’t have a wheelbarrow.”
    “Then select the other option.”
    “The one about moving it in pieces?”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t know…”
    “Never mind. I do not care. I cannot deal with you anymore. Just allow me to die under here.”
    “Fine, fine,” I said. “I’ll move it in pieces.”
    No matter how bad you think it might be to cut apart a rotting lion corpse, I assure you that the reality is worse. (If you’ve done it, you know what I’m talking about.) It was terrible even though I didn’t just reach into the muck with my bare hands; I put on rubber gloves, wrapped a towel around the lower half of my face, and got a saw from the garage. Then I went to work.
    I simply cannot do justice to the sheer awfulness of this experience. There is literally not a single positive thing I can say about it. So I’m going to do an H.P. Lovecraft and write that it was so horrible that it cannot be described, and leave it at that.
    As I dragged away a particularly large, moist, and sticky chunk of the lion, I saw what was underneath it, and I did a lot of screaming.

 
     
     
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    More From Carlton
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    There was a bloody face on my basement floor.
    The blood itself presumably came from the lion, leaving me with the still-disturbing fact that there was a face on my basement floor.
    I don’t mean that somebody’s face had been skinned off, Leatherface-style, and left on the floor. I mean that there was a face actually imbedded in the floor. So maybe it’s more accurate to write “there was a bloody face in my basement floor,” though it protruded above the floor, as if somebody had tilted their head all the way back and then been buried in cement up just past their ears.
    The bits of the face that didn’t have blood on them had the color of Caucasian flesh. It was larger than a regular human face, but not significantly so. Just enough that you would think, wow, that guy has a pretty big head. Not that I could see the whole head—just the face.
    One eye (the blue one) was larger than the other (the green one). Its nose was small and flat. Its mouth was wider than a normal human mouth, and the ends curved down too far. There was no visible hair or ears.
    “Stop screaming,” said the face.
    “You…you’re…you’re a…you’re a…you…you’re…you’re a…you…”
    “Correct.”
    If you weren’t there, I suppose you could come up with some theories about what I was seeing. A puppet, for example. Smear some blood on it to hide the imperfections, install a remote control system, and make Carlton The Wacky Nitwit think there was a face in his basement floor.
    This was no puppet.
    I wasn’t dreaming. I wasn’t on drugs. No government agency had slipped anything into the water supply. This was totally real, and standing around saying “This can’t be real!” wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
    I decided that, until I was given reason to believe otherwise, I was going to assume that I was not in danger, and conduct this conversation without fear.
    “What are you?” I asked.
    “A traveler.”
    “Are you human?”
    “Technically.”
    “Why was there a dead lion on top of you?”
    The face smiled. Its teeth were very small but there were a hell of a lot of them. “A traveler must prove himself worthy. Do you know of a more noble creature than the lion?”
    “Nope.”
    “I successfully slew the lion, but this kind of travel is an imperfect art to say the least, and I