Enjoy this short story by Mace Styx. I remember waking once from a horrible dream, in which I looked down and saw the clown's enormous mouth, its massive, wall sized face at the end of my bed and felt myself being dragged… dragged though I kicked and screamed, fighting against the covers. Thrashing and flailing for purchase, closer and closer to the red rimmed mouth, filled with murderous hanging teeth that waited, hungry to chew and devour me as the clown continued to smile. Sometimes I would look at the black. The space painted in for the mouth. In the daylight, you could clearly see that it was black paint. You could even sort of make out the brickwork beneath the paint. But at night, at night the clown's fixed smile seemed warped around a space that seemed not to end with the wall, but to extend back, further and further, like a pathway or a tunnel that would go on forever. Looking at it in the half light of that one dodgy striplight, it seemed to go on extending back beyond the surface of the wall and descending down into god knew what, and hell knew where. In this half light, this pressing darkness, the black space of the mouth looked like a bottomless pit. A fleshy gullet and a throat that if you got too close to it, would close around you like the stretching mouth of some great snake and slowly swallow you whole. I never mentioned how much I hated the head. I was embarrassed. Wouldn't you be? It was only three months into the job that my colleague Andy, another crew member on the front of house team, explained why he didn't want to do the clean up on his own.
