Just now I was shown by my friend Jen (who does things like this) the most startling image I’ve seen in as long as I can remember, so naturally I had to share it with all of you. It’s from some kind of arts and crafts catalog. Steel yourself before scrolling down, because there’s no going back:
 

 
 
Let me just tell you that this is the most frightening thing I’ve experienced in the past twenty-four hours, and I spent last night immersed in an H. P. Lovecraft collection.

Let’s start with the fact that it’s a clown. Clowns stir something primal in many people, with their allegedly “happy” expressions that twist into hideous death masks with a chance twitch of the cheek muscle. Then of course it’s also a ski mask: an image that caused more than a few of us to fear looking out the window at night as children, lest we see a person wearing one peering malevolently in at us with who knows what diabolical designs. This…this creature combines the worst elements of both.

On top of this, add what appears in the photo to be a large, open face wound, with tatters of flesh dangling unhealed from the weeping sore. Those colorless irises, meanwhile, are certainly those of a thing from which all life has drained. And do not overlook the jaws of the fiend, parted in a snarl of flesh-hunger, the teeth filed into deceptively rounded nubs from the gnawing of bone. I can practically guarantee that there is a chainsaw in her unseen hands.

And people wonder why I stopped skiing.