Joe Hill

by Horns (v5. 0)

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Eric said.

  “You and me both,” Ig said.

  “Go to hell, you fuck,” Eric said, and his left hand started to come up, and for the first time Ig saw the snub-nosed revolver.

  Ig lunged, not giving himself time to think, rising and slamming the pitchfork into Eric’s left shoulder. It was like driving it into the trunk of a tree. A shivering impact ran up the shaft and into Ig’s hands. One of the tines shattered Eric’s clavicle; another punctured his deltoid; the middle tine got his upper chest. The gun went off, fired into the sky, a loud crack like a cherry bomb exploding, the sound of an American summer. Ig kept going, carrying Eric off balance, driving him onto his ass. Eric’s left arm flew out, and the gun sailed away into the dark and fired again when it hit the floor, and a rat snake was torn in two.

  Hannity grunted. It looked as if he were straining to lift some terrible weight. His jaw was clenched, and his face, already red, was approaching a shade of crimson, spotted with fat white blisters. He dropped his nightstick, reached across his body with his right hand, and took the pitchfork by the iron head, as if he meant to pry it out of his torso.

  “Leave it,” Ig said. “I don’t want to kill you. You’ll hurt yourself worse trying to pull it out.”

  “I’m not,” Hannity panted. “Trying. To pull. It out.”

  And he swung his body to the right, dragging the handle of the pitchfork and Ig with it, out of the darkness and into the brightly lit doorway. Ig didn’t know it was going to happen until it had happened, until he had been tugged off balance and gone staggering from the shadows. He recoiled, yanking at the pitchfork, and for an instant the barbed points caught on tendon and flesh, and then they sprang free and Eric screamed.

  Ig had no doubt what was about to happen and tried to get out of the doorway, which framed him like a red target on black paper, but he was too slow. The boom of the shotgun was a single deafening clap, and the first casualty was Ig’s hearing. The gun spit red fire, and Ig’s stunned eardrums flatlined. The world was instantly swaddled in an unnatural, not-quite-perfect silence. It felt as if Ig’s right shoulder had been clipped by a passing school bus. He staggered forward and slammed into Eric, who made a harsh, wet, coughing noise, a kind of doglike bark.

  Lee grabbed the doorframe with one hand and pulled himself up and in, a shotgun in his other hand. He came to his feet, in no rush. Ig saw him work the slide, saw very clearly as the spent shell jumped from the open chamber and leaped in a parabolic arc away through the darkness. Ig tried to leap in an arc of his own, to break to the left, make himself a moving target, but something had him by the arm—Eric. Eric had his elbow and was hauling on him, either to use him as a crutch or to hold him in place as a human shield.

  Lee fired again, and a shovel struck Ig in the legs. They folded beneath him. For one instant he was able to keep his feet: He put the shaft of the pitchfork on the floor and leaned his weight against it to stay up. But Eric still had him by the arm and had caught spray himself, not in the legs but the chest. Eric went straight back and jerked Ig over with him.

  Ig caught a whirling glimpse of black sky and luminescent cloud, where once, almost a century before, there had been ceiling. Then he hit the concrete on his back with a resounding thud that rattled his bones.

  He lay next to Eric, his head almost resting on Eric’s hip. He couldn’t feel his right shoulder anymore, or anything below his knees. Blood rushed from his head, the darkness of the sky deepening dangerously, and he made a thrashing, desperate effort to hang on to consciousness. If he passed out now, Lee would kill him. This was followed by another thought, that his relative consciousness didn’t make any difference, because he was going to be killed here regardless. He noted, almost as a distant afterthought, that he had held on to his pitchfork.

  “You hit me, you fuckhead!” Eric cried. His voice was muffled. Ig felt as if he were hearing the world through a motorcycle helmet.

  “It could be worse. You could be dead,” Lee told Eric, and then he was standing over Ig, pointing the barrel into Ig’s face.

  Ig stabbed out with the pitchfork and caught the barrel of the gun between the tines. He wrenched it up and to the right, so when it went off, it exploded in Eric Hannity’s face. Ig looked over in time to see Eric Hannity’s head burst like a cantaloupe dropped from a great height. Blood lashed Ig in the face, so hot it seemed to scald, and Ig thought, helplessly, of the turkey coming apart with a sudden annihilating crack. Snakes sloughed and slid through the blood, fleeing, headed to the corners of the room.

  “Ah, shit,” Lee said. “It just got worse. Sorry, Eric. I was trying to kill Ig, I swear.” And then he laughed, hysterical, unfunny laughter.

  Lee took a step back, sliding the barrel free from between the tines of the pitchfork. He lowered the gun, and Ig jabbed at it with the fork again, and the shotgun slammed for a fourth time. The shot went high, caught the shaft of the pitchfork itself, and shattered it. The trident head of the fork spun away into the darkness and clanged off the concrete, leaving Ig holding a splintered and useless wooden spoke.

  “You want to please hold still?” Lee asked, working the slide on the shotgun again.

  He took a step back and, from a safe distance of four feet away, pointed the gun once more into Ig’s face and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dry clack. Lee scowled, lifted the .410, and looked at it with disappointment.

  “What, these things only carry four bullets?” Lee said. “It’s not mine. It’s Eric’s. I would’ve used a gun on you the other night, but, you know, forensics. In this case, though, there’s nothing to worry about. You killed Eric, and he killed you, and I’m out of it, and everything makes sense. I’m just sorry Eric ran out of shells and had to club you to death with his gun.”

  He turned the .410 around, took the barrel in both hands, and lifted it back over his shoulder. Ig had an instant to note that it looked as if Lee had been spending some time on the golf course—he had an easy, clean stroke, bringing the shotgun around—and then he smashed it into Ig’s head. It struck one of the horns with a splintering crack, and Ig was flung away from Eric, rolled across smooth floor.

  He came to rest faceup, panting, a hot stitch in one lung, and waited for the sky to stop spinning. The heavens swayed, stars flying around like flakes in a snow globe that someone has given a good shake. The horns hummed, a great tuning fork. They had absorbed the blow, though, kept his skull together.

  Lee stalked toward him and lifted the shotgun and brought it down on Ig’s right knee. Ig screamed and sat straight up, grabbing his leg with one hand. It felt as if the kneecap had split into three large pieces, as if there were broken shards of plate shifting around under the skin. He had hardly sat up, though, when Lee came around again. He caught Ig a glancing blow across the top of the head and knocked him onto his back once more. The spoke of wood Ig had been holding, the sharp spear that had been the shaft of the pitchfork, flew from his hand. The sky continued its nauseating snow-globe whirl.

  Lee swung the butt of the shotgun, with as much force as he could muster, between Ig’s legs, struck him in the balls. Ig could not scream, could not find the air to scream. He twisted, jerking onto his side and doubling over. A hard white knot of pain rose from his crotch and into his bowels and intestines, expanding, like poisonous air filling a balloon, into a withering sensation of nausea. Ig’s whole body tightened as he fought the urge to vomit, his body clenching like a fist.

  Lee tossed the shotgun, and Ig heard it clatter on the floor next to Eric. Then he began to pace around, looking for something. Ig couldn’t speak, could hardly get air down into his lungs.

  “Now, what did Eric do with that pistol of his?” Lee said in a musing voice. “You know, you had me fooled, Ig. It’s amazing the things you can do to people’s heads. How you can make them forget things. Blank out their memory. Make them hear voices. I really thought it was Glenna. I was on the way here when she called me from the salon to tell me I coul
d go fuck myself. More or less just like that. You believe it? I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go fuck myself, but how did you get your car unstuck?’ And she said, ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ You can’t imagine how that felt. Like I was losing my mind. Like the whole world was knocked out of whack. I felt something like that once upon a time, Ig. When I was little, I fell off a fence and hurt my head, and when I got up, the moon was trembling like it was about to fall out of the sky. I tried to tell you about it once, about how I fixed it. Fixed the moon. I set heaven back in order. And I’ll fix you, too.”

  Ig heard the door to the blast furnace open with a squeal of iron hinges and felt a brief, almost painful surge of hope. The timber rattler would get Lee. He would reach into the chimney, and the viper would bite him. But then he heard Lee moving away, heels scuffing on concrete. He had only opened the door, perhaps for more light to see by, still searching for the gun.

  “I called Eric, told him I thought you were out here, playing some kind of game, and that we had to step on you and I wasn’t sure how hard. I said because you used to be a friend, I thought we should deal with you off the books. Course, you know Eric. I didn’t have to work too hard to talk him into it. I didn’t need to tell him to bring his guns either. He did that all on his own. You know I’ve never shot a gun in my life? Never so much as loaded one. My mother used to say they’re the devil’s right hand and wouldn’t keep them in the house. Ah. Well. Better than nothing.” Ig heard a metallic scrape, Lee picking something off the floor. The waves of nausea were coming slower now, and Ig could breathe, in tiny little swallows. He thought that with another minute to rest he might have the strength to sit up. To make one final effort. He also thought that in another minute there would be five .38-caliber slugs in his head.

  “You are just full of tricks, Iggy,” Lee said, walking back. “Truth is, just a couple minutes ago? When you were shouting to us in your Glenna voice from in here? A part of me half believed it all over again, really thought it was her, even though rationally I knew she was at the salon. The voices are great, Ig, but not as great as coming out of a burning wreck without a mark on you.” He paused. He was standing over Ig, not with the pistol but with the head of the pitchfork. He said, “How did it happen? How did you become like this? With the horns?”

  “Merrin,” Ig said.

  “What about her?”

  Ig’s voice was weak, shaking, hardly louder than an exhaled breath. “Without Merrin in my life…I was this.”

  Lee lowered himself to one knee and stared at Ig with what seemed real sympathy. “I loved her too, you know,” Lee said. “Love made devils of us both, I guess.”

  Ig opened his mouth to speak, and Lee put his hand on Ig’s neck, and every evil thing Lee had ever done poured down Ig’s throat like some icy, corrosive chemical.

  “No, I think it would be a mistake to let you say any more,” Lee said, and he raised the pitchfork overhead, the prongs aimed at Ig’s chest. “And at this point I don’t really think there’s anything left for us to talk about.”

  The blast of the trumpet was a shrill, deafening squall, the sound of a car accident about to happen. Lee jerked his head to look back at the doorway, where Terry balanced on one knee, his horn lifted to his lips.

  In the instant he was looking away, Ig shoved himself up, pushing aside Lee’s hand. He took hold of the lapels of Lee’s sport coat and drove his head into his torso: slammed the horns into Lee’s stomach. The impact reverberated down Ig’s spine. Lee grunted, the soft, simple sound of all the breath being forced out of him.

  A feeling of wet suction grabbed at the horns and held them, so it was hard to pull free. Ig twisted his head from side to side, tearing the holes wider. Lee wrapped his arms around Ig’s head, trying to force him back, and Ig gored him again, thrusting deep into an elastic resistance. He smelled blood, mingled with another odor, a foul old garbage stink—a perforated bowel, perhaps.

  Lee put his hands on Ig’s shoulders and shoved, trying to extricate himself from the horns. They made a wet, sucking sound as they came loose, the sound a boot makes as it is pulled out of deep mud.

  Lee folded and rolled onto his side, his arms wrapped around his stomach. Ig couldn’t sit up any longer either and toppled, slumping to the concrete. He was still turned to face Lee, who was almost fetal, hugging himself, his eyes shut and his mouth a great open hole. Lee wasn’t screaming anymore, couldn’t get the breath to scream, and with his eyes shut he couldn’t see the black rat snake sliding past him. The rat snake was looking for a place to hide, a way out of bedlam. It turned its head as it glided past, giving Ig a frantic look with eyes of gold foil.

  There, Ig told it with his mind, gesturing with his chin toward Lee. Hide. Save yourself.

  The rat snake slowed and looked at Lee, then back to Ig. Ig felt there was unmistakable gratitude in the rat snake’s gaze. It swerved, gliding elegantly through the dust on the smooth concrete, and slithered headfirst into Lee’s yawning mouth.

  Lee’s eyes sprang open, the good eye and the blind eye alike, and they were bright with a kind of ecstatic horror. He tried to snap his jaws shut, but when he bit the three-inch-thick cable of the snake, he only startled it. Its tail shivered furiously back and forth, and it began to hurry, pumping itself down Lee’s throat. Lee groaned, choking on it, and let go of his mauled stomach to grab at it, but his palms were soaked with blood, and it squirmed slickly from within his fingers.

  Terry was coming across the floor at a stumbling run. “Ig? Ig, are you—” But when he saw Lee thrashing on the floor, he stopped where he was and stared.

  Lee rolled onto his back, screaming now, although it was hard to make any sound with his throat full of snake. His heels beat against the floor. His face was deepening to a color that was almost black in the night, and branches of veins stood out in Lee’s temples. The bad eye, the eye of ruin, was still turned toward Ig, and it stared at him with something very close to wonder. That eye was a bottomless dark hole containing a circular staircase of pale smoke, leading down to a place where a soul might go and never return. His hands fell to his sides. A good eight inches of rat snake hung from his open mouth, a long black fuse drooping from a human bomb. The snake itself was motionless, seemed to understand that it had been lied to, had made a grave error trying to hide itself in the wet, tight tunnel of Lee Tourneau’s throat. It could go forward no farther, nor could it slide itself out. Ig was sorry for it. That was a bad way to die: stuck inside Lee Tourneau.

  The pain was returning, pouring into the center of him from crotch and devastated shoulder and smashed knees, like four polluted tributaries emptying into a deep reservoir of sick feeling. Ig shut his eyes to concentrate on managing his pain. Then, for a while, it was quite still in the old foundry, where the man and the demon lay side by side—although which was which would perhaps have been a matter for theological debate.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  SHADOWS LAPPED UNSTEADILY at the walls, rising and falling, the darkness coming in waves. The world was ebbing and flowing around him in waves, and Ig struggled to hold on to it. A part of him wanted to go under, to escape the pain, turn the volume down on his ruined body. He was already drifting away from himself, the hurt balanced by a dreamy, growing sensation of buoyancy. The stars swam slowly along overhead, drifting from left to right, so it was as if he were floating on his back in the Knowles River, letting the current carry him steadily downstream.

  Terry bent over him, his face anguished and confused. “All right, Ig. You’re all right. I’m going to call someone. I have to run back to my car and get my phone.”

  Ig smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring and tried to tell Terry all he needed to do was set him on fire. The gas tank was outside, against the wall. Slosh some unleaded on him and throw a match, he’d be fine. But he couldn’t find the air to push out the words, and his throat was too raw and tight for talking. Lee Tourneau had done a number on him, all right.

  Terry squeezed his hand, and I
g knew, randomly, that his older brother had copied answers on a seventh-grade geography test from the boy sitting in front of him. Terry said, “I’ll be back. Do you hear me? Right back. One minute.”

  Ig nodded, grateful to Terry for taking care of things. Terry’s hand slipped from Ig’s, and he rose out of sight.

  Ig tipped his head back and looked at the reddish candlelight washing over the old bricks. The steady, shifting movement of the light soothed him, added to his feeling of suspension, of floating. His next thought was that if there was candlelight, the hatch to the furnace must be open. That’s right, Lee had opened it to throw more light on the concrete floor.

  And then Ig knew what was about to happen, and the shock of it brought him up out of his dreamy, floating stupor. Terry was about to see the phone, Glenna’s phone, carefully set on the blanket in the furnace. Terry could not put his hand in there. Terry, of all people—Terry, who had nearly died at fourteen from a bee sting—needed to stay the fuck away from the furnace. Ig tried to call for him, to shout, to warn him, but could not produce anything except a cracked and tuneless whistle.

  “One minute, Ig,” Terry said from across the room. He seemed, in truth, to be talking to himself. “You hang in there and—Wait! Hey, Ig, we’re in luck. Got a phone right here.”

  Ig turned his head and tried again, tried to stop him, and did in fact manage a single word: “Terry.” But then that tight, painful feeling of compression settled back into his throat, and he could say no more, and anyway, Terry did not look back at the sound of his name.

  His brother bent into the hatch, grabbing for the phone on the lumpy blanket. When he picked it up, one fold flopped back and Terry hesitated, looking down at the loops of snake beneath, the scales like brushed copper in the candlelight. There was a dry rattle of castanets.

  The viper uncoiled and struck Terry in the wrist, with a sound Ig could hear twenty-five feet away, a meaty thump. The phone flew. Terry screamed and went up and straight back and banged the iron frame of the hatch with his skull. The impact dropped him. He got his hands up, stopped himself before he could go face-first into the mattress, the lower half of his body hanging out through the hatch.