Face of Evil

CHAPTER SEVEN

It began with a sore back.

At first, Janey thought she'd twisted something the wrong way as she was lifting a box of school supplies out of the pickup truck. Matt was always telling her to lift with her knees, not her lower back, and she always ignored him.

But the ache wouldn't go away. After a week or two of ice packs, massages, and enough Advil to eat away half her stomach lining, she gave in and saw the doctor, something she absolutely hated to do. She saw it as a sign of weakness, a failure of character, and an avoidable expense. But it was the only way, short of hitting up one of her drug-dealing high school students, to get her hands on some Vicodin.

She went in for her aching back, but all the doctor wanted to talk about was some freckle he saw right above her hip. Janey found it incredibly irritating, especially when he refused to give her a prescription for painkillers until she went across the hall to see a dermatologist, an old coot with hair coming out of his ears who insisted on cutting the freckle out with what felt like a razor-edged melon baller.

But he stitched her up, gave her the Vicodin, and sent her back home.

Two days later, she got The Call. The little freckle was malignant.

It turned out that the freckle was a tiny speck of an unusually aggressive, particularly corrosive strain of skin cancer that had metastasized, wrapped itself around her lower spine, and then went straight up to her brain, where it was spreading like an oil slick.

Within just a few weeks, she was in the hospital and grim-faced doctors were telling Matt it was time to talk with Janey about her "end of life" wishes.

She had no wishes for death. All of her wishes were about life, and the future she and Matt were supposed to have together.

But now her future was measured in the steady drip of fluids into her IV, which was pumping her full of drugs that dulled her pain but fogged her thinking.

She'd long since lost the will to eat and was being nourished by a feeding tube. She pissed through a catheter and crapped into a bedpan, unable to make it to the restroom any longer.

Janey mostly slept. When she was awake, she was rarely lucid, more often dazed, incoherent, irrational, and irritable. Only occasionally would the real Janey emerge and offer him a tender smile and a look of sadness, and then she'd disappear into herself again.

Matt spent his days sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, soothing her as best he could.

There was a couch in the room that folded out into a hide-a-bed, but he'd usually fall asleep in his chair, still holding his wife's hand.

As he had now.

It was the coldness that woke him up. It was like he was holding on to an icicle.

He jerked awake to find a doctor he'd never seen before standing on the other side of her bed, looking down at Janey, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling with her labored, rasping breathing.

The doctor had a jaunty demeanor, as if he was waiting for the Oompa-Loompas to finish their rhyme before breaking into song. He was wearing a round reflector band on his head, and an outrageously large stethoscope dangled from his neck.

"Why is she so cold?" Matt asked him.

"Perhaps because she's dead." The doctor reached into the pocket of his lab coat and then held a selection of lollipops out to Matt like a sugary bouquet. “Want a lollipop?"

"She can't be dead," Matt said, glancing at the EKG, the little light bouncing across the screen. “Her heart is still beating."

"Really?" the doctor put on his stethoscope and touched the diaphragm to her chest. “We can't have that."

The instant the stethoscope touched her flesh, the skin turned black, curling back and exposing her muscle and sinew, which rapidly rotted away, revealing her sternum and internal organs, which were riddled with yellow pus.

"No!" Matt screamed, lunging for the doctor, but it was too late. The rot was spreading up to her lovely face, devouring it, revealing her skull, eroding the bone itself, and exposing her brain, where maggots feasted on the gelatinous lobes as one writhing, squirming, squiggly mass that spewed out of her cranial cavity and over her entire body.

Matt looked up in horror at the doctor, who unwrapped a lollipop and began sucking on it in an outrageously lewd and suggestive way.

That's when Matt noticed the doctor's orange hair, the round, red ball on the tip of his nose, and the smile painted around his lips.

He wasn't a doctor at all. He was a clown.

The clown took the sucker out of his mouth. “We are going to have so much fun together, Matt."

And that's when Matt woke up, disoriented and afraid, his heart pounding.

It took him a few long seconds to realize that he'd had a nightmare, and that he was in his cabin and not the hospital, and that Janey was long dead.

So the worst part of the nightmare was true.

He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was 4:11 a.m., several hours until dawn. But he knew there was no way he could get back to sleep now. So he got up, put on his clothes, and went out into the frigid darkness to chop wood.

Perhaps if Matt hadn't been in such a hurry to get out of the room, and if it wasn't so dark, he might have noticed the lollipop wrapper on the floor…

…and the maggots squirming beneath his bed.