The eyeholes looked out onto a game room, a hunter’s trophy room with two plush leather chairs facing the wall from which I looked. A circular mahogany table was in the middle of the room with a cigar box on top, a chandelier with green lampshades hanging above. Rich oriental rug. Hunter-green walls with wood-paneled wainscoting. Animal busts mounted to the walls. A boar with tusks like the doctor who had been in the room when I awakened, but cleaner. An oryx with some decomposing rodent impaled on one of its antlers. Several deer that had not been taxidermied so they were dangling by limp necks, pulp oozing through eye sockets, plasma or some other sap-like substance seeping down like a shroud. My throat closed when I saw the head mounted on the wall opposite mine and my heart stopped beating. There, mounted on the opposite side, was Kevin’s severed head staring back at me, hung like a trophy kill. His long hair combed shiny and flowing down either side of his waxen face. The waxen face you see staring up from a coffin during a funeral viewing – rouge on the cheeks, lips and eyes glued shut. Inanimate as a goddamned doll. That was Kevin’s decapitated head, not a prop.

Which made me think about the head that I now inhabited. The ripe stench of blood.

A door on the far side of the room swung open. The thing walking through was crippled with yellow, wrinkly skin, like larvae. Thin and hunched over with a tragically disfigured spine. One arm longer than the other. Stark collar bones and vertebrae. Lank, colorless hair. It looked up at me with a misshapen face, swollen and flushed red with spider veins. Staring into my eyes, it grunted and drooled and hastened its lopsided shuffle.

The back of my head pressed against the solid panel as I tried to pull away. This was no spyhole; that maggot thing knew where I was positioned. It stared right into my eyes after every few ambling steps – its lips stretched in a permanent sneer – until he, I think it was a he, rounded one of the two plush chairs and bent down out of view to manipulate something on the wall underneath me. Seconds passed, then I heard the click-click-click of a starter fuse. Followed by the whoosh of a gas flame.

I was the mantel trophy over a fucking fireplace, stuck inside what I felt sure was Caspian’s scooped out head, still wet from its recent cleaning.

The lady in the book I read never went through shit like this. What then is waiting for you?