Horns: A Novel

by Joe Hill

  “Mod?”

  “A body modification. Did you do it to yourself?”

  Although he still could not remember the evening before—he could recall everything up until his drunken outburst in the woods by the foundry, but after that there was only a dreadful blank—he knew the answer to this one. It came to him instantly and without struggle.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE WAITRESS SAID HE’D BE more interesting if he killed someone, so he decided why not kill Lee Tourneau.

  It was a joy to know where he was going, to climb back into the car with a certain destination. The tires threw dirt as he peeled out. Lee worked in the congressman’s office in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, forty minutes away, and Ig was in the mood for a drive. He could use the time on the road to figure out how he was going to do it.

  First he thought he’d use his hands. Strangle him as he had strangled Merrin, Merrin who’d loved Lee, who’d been first to his house to console him the day his mother died, and Ig grabbed the steering wheel as if he were throttling Lee already and shook it back and forth hard enough to rattle the steering column. Hating Lee was the best feeling Ig had felt in years.

  His second thought was that there had to be a tire iron in the trunk. He could put on his windbreaker—it was lying across the backseat—and stick the tire iron up his sleeve. When Lee was in front of him, he could let it slip down into his hand and give it to him across the head. Ig imagined the wet thok! of the tire iron connecting with Lee’s skull and shivered with excitement.

  His concern was that the tire iron might be too quick, that Lee might never know what hit him. In a perfect world, Ig would force Lee into the car and take him somewhere to drown him. Hold his head under the water and watch him struggle. Ig grinned at the thought, unaware that smoke was trickling from his nostrils. In the brightly lit cockpit of the car, it was just a pale summery haze.

  After Lee had lost most of the sight in his left eye, he got quiet and kept his head down. He did twenty hours of unpaid volunteer work for every store he’d stolen from, regardless of how much he’d taken, a thirty-dollar pair of sneakers or a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket. He wrote a letter to the paper detailing each of his crimes and apologizing to shopkeepers, his friends, his mother, his father, and his church. He got religion—literally—and volunteered for every program Sacred Heart offered. He worked every summer with Ig and Merrin at Camp Galilee.

  And once every summer, Lee was a guest speaker at Camp Galilee’s Sunday-morning services. He always began by telling the children that he was a sinner, that he had stolen and lied, used his friends and manipulated his parents. He told the children that once he was blind but now he saw. He said it while pointing into his half-ruined left eye. He delivered the same moral pep talk every summer. Ig and Merrin listened from the rear of the chapel, and when Lee pointed to his eye and quoted “Amazing Grace,” it inevitably caused Ig’s back and arms to break out in goose bumps. Ig felt lucky knowing him, was proud to know him, to have a small piece of Lee’s story.

  It was a hell of a good story. Girls liked it especially. They liked both that Lee had been bad and that he had reformed; they liked that he could talk about his own soul and that children loved him. There was something unbearably noble about the way he could calmly admit to the things he had done, without showing any shame or self-consciousness. The girls he dated liked being the one temptation he still allowed himself.

  Lee had been accepted to the seminary school in Bangor, Maine, but he gave up theology when his mother got sick and he came home to take care of her. By then his parents were divorced, his father off with his second wife in South Carolina. Lee brought his mother her meds, kept her sheets clean, changed her diapers, and watched PBS with her. When he wasn’t at his mother’s bedside, he was at UNH, where he collected a major in media studies; on Saturdays he drove to Portsmouth to work in the office of New Hampshire’s newest congressman.

  He started as an unpaid volunteer, but by the time his mother died, he was a full-time employee, head of the congressman’s religious-outreach program. A lot of people thought that Lee was reason number one the congressman had been reelected the last time out. His opponent, a former judge, had signed a waiver allowing a pregnant felon the right to receive a first-trimester abortion, which Lee dubbed capital punishment for the unborn. Lee went to half the churches in the state to speak about it. He looked good in the pulpit, in his tie and crisp white shirt, and he never missed a chance to call himself a sinner, and they all loved that.

  Lee’s work on the campaign had also resulted in the one and only fight he ever had with Merrin, although Ig wasn’t sure it was a fight if one person wouldn’t defend himself. Merrin ripped him up one side and down the other over the abortion thing, but Lee took it calmly and said, “If you want me to quit my job, Merrin, I’ll turn in my resignation tomorrow. Don’t even need to think about it. But if I remain in the job, I have to do what I was hired to do, and I’m going to do it well.” She said Lee had no shame. Lee said sometimes he wasn’t sure he had anything else, and she said, “Oh, Christ, don’t go earnest on me,” but after that she let him be.

  Lee had liked to look at her, of course. Ig had seen him sometimes, checking Merrin out when she got up from a table, her skirt swishing at her legs. He had always liked looking at her. Ig had not minded that Lee looked. Merrin was his. And anyway, after what Ig had done to Lee’s eye—over time he’d come to feel he was personally responsible for Lee’s partial blindness—he could hardly begrudge him a glance at a pretty woman. Lee often said the accident could’ve blinded him completely and that he tried to enjoy each and every good thing he saw as if it were his last taste of ice cream. Lee had a knack for making statements like that, confessing plainly to his pleasures and mistakes, unafraid of being mocked. Not that anyone mocked him. Quite the opposite: Everyone was rooting for Lee. His turnaround was in-fucking-spirational. Maybe someday soon he would run for political office himself. There had already been some talk along those lines, although Lee laughed off any suggestion that he might seek higher office, trotted out that Groucho Marx bit about how any group that would accept him as a member wasn’t worth belonging to. Caesar had refused the throne three times as well, Ig remembered.

  Something was beating in Ig’s temples. It was like a hammer falling on hot metal, a steady ringing crash. He came off the interstate and followed the highway to the office park, where the congressman kept his offices in a building with a great wedge-shaped glass atrium thrusting outward from the front of the building, like the prow of some enormous glass tanker. Ig drove to the entrance around back.

  The blacktop lot behind the building was two-thirds empty, baking in the afternoon heat. Ig parked and grabbed his blue nylon windbreaker from the backseat and climbed out. It was too warm for a coat, but he put it on anyway. He liked the feel of the sun on his face and head and the heat shimmering up off the asphalt beneath him. Gloried in it, really.

  He opened the hatchback and raised the compartment in the floor. The tire iron was bolted to the underside of a metal panel, but the bolts were caked in rust, and trying to twist them loose hurt his hands. He quit and looked in his roadside-emergency kit. It held a magnesium flare, a tube wrapped in red paper, oily and smooth. He grinned. A flare beat the hell out of a tire iron. He could burn Lee’s pretty face with it. Blind him in the other eye, maybe—that might be as good as killing him. Besides, Ig was more suited to a flare than a tire iron. Wasn’t it well established that fire was the devil’s only friend?

  Ig crossed the blacktop through the shimmering heat. It was this summer that the seventeen-year locusts came out to mate, and the trees behind the parking lot were filled with their noise, a deep, resonating thrum, like the working of a great mechanical lung. The sound of them filled Ig’s head, was the sound of his headache, of madness, of his clarifying rage. A snippet of the Revelation to John came back to him: Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth.
The locusts came every seventeen years to fuck and to die. Lee Tourneau was a bug, no better than the locusts—quite a bit worse, really. He had done the fucking part, and now he could die. Ig would help him. As he crossed the lot, he jammed the flare up into the sleeve of his coat and held it there with his right hand.

  He approached a pair of Plexiglas doors imprinted with the Honorable Congressman of New Hampshire’s name. They had a mirrored tint, and he saw himself reflected there: a scrawny, sweating man in a windbreaker zipped to his throat, who looked as if he’d come to commit a crime. Not to mention he had horns. The points had split through the skin of his temples, and the bone beneath was stained pink with blood. Worse even than the horns, though, was the way he was grinning. If he had been standing on the other side of those doors and saw himself coming, he would’ve turned the lock and called 911.

  He pushed into air-conditioned, carpeted quiet. A fat man with a flattop haircut sat behind a desk, talking cheerfully into a headset. Just to the right of the desk was a security checkpoint where visitors were required to pass through a metal detector. A fifty-something state trooper sat behind the X-ray monitor, chewing gum. A sliding Plexiglas window behind the receptionist’s desk looked into a small bare room with a map of New Hampshire tacked to the wall and a security monitor on a table. A second state trooper, an enormous, broad-shouldered man, sat in there at a folding table, bent over paperwork. Ig could not see his face, but he had a thick neck and a great white bald head that was somehow vaguely obscene.

  It unnerved Ig, those state troopers, that metal detector. The sight of them brought back bad memories of Logan Airport, and his body tingled with an ill sweat. He had not been here to see Lee in well over a year and didn’t remember ever having to clear any kind of security before.

  The receptionist said “Good-bye, honey” into his headset, pressed a button on his desk, and looked at Ig. The receptionist had a big, round, moony face, and probably his name was Chet or Chip. Behind his square-framed glasses was a bright look of dismay or bafflement.

  “Help you?” he asked Ig.

  “Yes. Could you—”

  But then something else caught Ig’s attention: the security monitor in that room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. It displayed a fish-eyed view of the reception area—the potted plants, the inoffensive plush couches, and Ig himself. Only something was wrong with the monitor. Ig kept splitting into two overlapping figures and then jumping back together; that part of the image was flickering and unstable. The primary image of Ig showed him as he was, a pale, gaunt man with tragically receding hair, a goatee, and curving horns. But then there was that secondary shadow image, dark and featureless, which kept twitching in and out of existence. This second version of himself was without horns—an image not of who he was but of who he had been. It was like watching his own soul trying to pry itself free from the demon to which it was anchored.

  The state trooper who sat in that bare, brightly lit room with the monitor had noticed as well, had revolved in his office chair to study the screen. Ig could still not see the trooper’s face; he had rotated far enough around so Ig could see only his ear and his polished white dome, a cannonball of bone and skin, resting on the thick, brutal plug of his neck. After a moment the state trooper reached out and banged his fist on the monitor, trying to correct the image, and hit it so hard that for a moment the whole picture blacked out.

  “Sir?” said the receptionist.

  Ig pulled his stare away from the monitor. “Could…could you page Lee Tourneau? Tell him Ig Perrish is here to see him.”

  “I have to see your driver’s license and print you an ID tag before I can send you through,” he said in a flat, automatic sort of way, staring at the horns with blank-eyed fascination.

  Ig glanced at the security checkpoint and knew he couldn’t walk through it with a magnesium flare stuck up his sleeve.

  “Tell him I’ll wait out here. Tell him he’s going to want to see me.”

  “I don’t think he will,” said the receptionist. “I can’t imagine anyone would want to. You’re awful. You have horns, and you’re awful. I wish I didn’t even come into work today, just looking at you. I almost didn’t come into work. Once a month I give myself a mental-health day and stay at home and put on my mother’s underpants and get myself good and hot. For an old bird, she has some really dirty stuff. She’s got a black satin corset with a whalebone back, lotta straps, real nice.” His eyes were glazed, and there was a little white spit at the corner of his mouth.

  “I especially like that you think of it as a mental-health day,” Ig said. “Get me Lee Tourneau, would you?”

  The receptionist rotated ninety degrees to one side, turning his shoulder to Ig. He punched a button, then murmured into his headset. He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He revolved back toward Ig. His round face gleamed with perspiration.

  “He’s in meetings all morning.”

  “Tell him I know what he did. Use those exact words. Tell Lee if he wants to talk about it, I’ll wait five minutes in the parking lot.”

  The receptionist gave him a blank stare, then nodded and turned slightly away again. Into his headset he said, “Mr. Tourneau? He says…he says he knows what you did?” Turning it into a question at the last moment.

  Ig didn’t hear what else the receptionist had to say, though, because in the next moment there was a voice in his ear, a voice he knew well but had not heard in several years.

  “Iggy fucking Perrish,” said Eric Hannity.

  Ig turned around and saw the bald state trooper who’d been sitting with the security monitor in the room on the other side of the Plexiglas window. At eighteen Eric had been a teenager straight out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, big and sinewy, with a head of close-cropped curly brown hair. He had liked to walk around with no shoes and his shirt off and his jeans slipping down around his hips. But now that he was almost thirty, his face had lost its definition, becoming a fleshy block, and when his hair started to thin, he’d shaved it off rather than fight a battle he couldn’t win. He was magnificent now in his baldness; if he had an earring in one ear, he could’ve played Mr. Clean in a TV commerical. He had, perhaps inevitably, gone into his daddy’s line of work, a trade that offered him both authority and legal cover to occasionally hurt people. Back when Ig and Lee were still friends (if they had ever really been friends), Lee had mentioned that Eric was in charge of the congressman’s security. Lee said Eric had mellowed a lot. Lee had even been out sportfishing with him a time or two. “Course, for chum he uses the livers of disemboweled protesters,” Lee said. “Make of that what you will.”

  “Eric,” Ig said, stepping back from the desk. “How are you?”

  “Happy,” Eric Hannity said. “Happy to see you. What about you, Ig? How you doing? Kill anyone this week?”

  Ig said, “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look like you forgot to take your pill.”

  “What pill?”

  “Well. You must be sick with something. It’s ninety degrees out, but you’re in a windbreaker and you’re sweating like a hog. Plus, you’ve got horns growing out of your head, and I know that’s not normal. Course, if you were a healthy person, you never would’ve beat your girlfriend’s face in and left her in the woods. The little redheaded twat,” Hannity said. He regarded Ig with pleasure. “I’ve been a fan of yours ever since, you know that, Ig? No shit. I’ve thought your rich-bitch family was due to come down a couple pegs for years. Your brother especially, all his fucking money, on TV with swimsuit models sitting in his lap every night, like he ever worked an honest day in his life. Then you go and do what you did. You shoveled shit all over your family name, and they aren’t ever going to scrape it off. I love it. I don’t know what you can do for an encore. What will you do for an encore, Ig?”

  It was a struggle to keep his legs from shaking. Hannity loomed, outweighing him by a hundred pounds, towering over him by six inches. “I’m just here to pass a
word with Lee.”

  “I know what you do for an encore,” Eric Hannity said, as if Ig had not replied. “You show up at a congressman’s office with a head full of crazy and a weapon hidden in your windbreaker. You’ve got a weapon, don’t you? That’s why you’re wearing that jacket, to hide it. You’ve got a gun, and I’m going to shoot you and be on the front page of the Boston Herald for bagging Terry Perrish’s mentally ill brother. Wouldn’t that be something? Last time I saw your brother, he offered me free tickets to his show if I ever got out to L.A. Rubbing it in my face about what a big shit he is. What I’d like is to be the guy who heroically shoots you in the fucking face before you can kill again. Then, at the funeral, I could ask Terry if he can still help me out with tickets. Just to see his expression. Come on, Ig. Step up to the metal detector so I can have an excuse to blow your mentally deficient ass away.”

  “I’m not going in to see anyone. I’m going to wait outside,” Ig said, already backing away for the door, conscious of a cool flop sweat under his arms. His palms were slippery. As he nudged the door open with one elbow, the flare slipped, and for one terrifying moment he thought it was going to slide out in front of Hannity and fall to the floor, but he was able to grab it with his thumb and hold it in place.

  Eric Hannity watched with an almost-animal look of hunger on his face as Ig backed out into the sunlight.

  The transition from the chill of the office to the baking heat of the afternoon made Ig briefly dizzy. The sky brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again.

  He had known just what he was doing when he drove to the congressman’s office. It had seemed simple, had seemed right. He saw now, though, that it had been a mistake. He was not going to kill Lee Tourneau with a highway flare (itself a comically absurd idea). Lee wasn’t even going to come out to talk to him.