Horns: A Novel

by Joe Hill

  Ig forgot his shattered jaw and tried to tell Lee to stay the fuck away from her. But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was another scream. Pain radiated from his smashed jawbone, and a darkness rushed up with it, gathering at the corners of his vision and then closing in around him. He breathed out—snorted blood from his nostrils—and fought it, pushed the darkness back by an effort of will.

  “Eric doesn’t remember what happened in Glenna’s place this morning,” Lee said, in such a soft voice Ig almost missed it. “Why is that, Ig? He can’t remember anything except you throwing a pot of water in his face and nearly passing out. But something happened in that apartment. A fight? Something. I maybe would’ve had Eric along with me tonight—I’m sure he’d like to see you dead—but his face. You burned his face real good, Ig. If it was any worse, he would’ve had to take himself to a hospital and make up some lie about how he got hurt. He shouldn’t have gone in Glenna’s apartment anyway. Sometimes I think that guy has no respect for the law.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s for the best, though, that he’s not part of this. This kind of thing is just easier when there are no witnesses.”

  Lee’s wrists rested on his knees, and the wrench hung from his right hand, twelve pounds of rusting iron.

  “I can almost understand Eric not remembering what happened over at Glenna’s. A steel pot to the head will shake up a person’s memory. But I don’t know what to make of what happened when you showed up at the congressman’s office yesterday. Three people watched you walk in: Chet, our receptionist, and Cameron, who runs the X-ray, and Eric. Five minutes after you left, none of them could remember you being there. Only me. Even Eric wouldn’t believe you’d been there until I showed him the video. There’s video of the two of you talking, but Eric couldn’t tell me what you talked about. And there’s something else, too. The video. The video doesn’t look right. Like there’s something wrong with the tape….” His voice trailed off, and he was silent for a musing moment. “Distortion. But just around you. What did you do to the tape? What’d you do to them? And why didn’t it seem to touch me? That’s what I’d like to know.” When Ig didn’t reply, Lee lifted the wrench and poked him in one shoulder. “Are you listening, Ig?”

  Ig had listened to every word, had been getting ready while Lee blabbed away, gathering what strength he had left to spring. He had pulled his knees under him and got his breath back and had just been waiting for the right moment, and here it was at last. He came up, batting the wrench aside and throwing himself at Lee, nailed him in the chest with his shoulder, knocked him back onto his ass. Ig got his hands up and put them around Lee’s throat—

  —and in the moment of skin-to-skin contact nearly screamed again. He was, for an instant, in Lee’s head, and it was like being in the Knowles River all over again; he was drowning in a rushing black torrent, pulled down into a cold, roaring place of darkness and desperate motion. In that one moment of contact, Ig knew everything and wanted not to, wanted to make it go away, to unknow.

  Lee still had the wrench, and he came up with it, pounded it into Ig’s gut, and Ig coughed explosively. He was shoved off, but as Ig was jolted aside, his fingers caught on the golden chain around Lee’s neck. It came apart with hardly a sound. The cross sailed away into the night.

  Lee squirmed out from under him, climbed back to his feet. Ig was on elbows and knees, struggling to breathe.

  “Try and choke me, you piece of shit,” Lee said, and kicked him in the side. A rib snapped. Ig groaned and slumped onto his face.

  Lee followed with a second kick and a third. The third thudded into the small of Ig’s back and sent a withering shock of pain through kidney and bowels. Something wet hit the back of his head. Spit. Then, for a while, Lee was still, and the both of them had a chance to get their breath back.

  And at last Lee said, “What are those goddamn things on your head?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Jesus, Ig. Are those horns?”

  Ig shivered against the waves of hurt and sick in his back, his side, his hand, his face. He scratched at the dirt with his left hand, digging furrows in the black earth, clawing at consciousness, fighting for each second of clarity. What had Lee just said? Something about the horns.

  “That’s what was on the video,” Lee said, a little breathlessly. “Horns. Holy fucking shit. I thought it was bad tape. But it wasn’t something wrong with the tape. It was something wrong with you. You know, I think I saw them yesterday, looking at you through my bad eye. Everything is just shadows through that eye, but when I looked at you, I thought, Hunh….” His voice trailed off, and he touched two fingers to his bare throat. “How about that.”

  When Ig closed his eyes he saw a bright, brassy Tom Crown mute, pushed deep into a trumpet to choke off the sound. He had found a mute for the horns at last. Merrin’s cross had choked off their signal, had made a circle of protection around Lee Tourneau that they couldn’t get through. Without it Lee was open to the horns at last. Naturally, too late to do Ig any good.

  “My cross,” Lee said, still touching his neck. “Merrin’s cross. You broke it. You broke it trying to strangle me. That was uncalled for, Ig. You think I want to do this to you? I don’t. I don’t. The person I want to do this to is a little fourteen-year-old girl who lives next door to me. She likes to sunbathe in her backyard, and I watch her sometimes from my bedroom window. She looks real cherry in her American-flag bikini. I think about her the way I used to think about Merrin. Not that I’d ever do anything to her. Too big a risk. We’re neighbors, I’d be a natural suspect. You don’t shit where you eat. Unless—unless you think maybe I could get away with it. What do you think, Ig? Do you think I ought to do her?”

  Through the black spoke of pain in his shattered rib and the swelling heat in his jaw and smashed hand, Ig noted that Lee’s voice was different now—that he was speaking in a dreamy, talking-to-himself kind of tone. The horns were going to work on Lee as they had gone to work on everyone else.

  Ig shook his head and made a pained sound of negation. Lee looked disappointed.

  “No. It isn’t a good idea, is it? Tell you what, though. I did almost come out here with Glenna just a couple nights ago. I wanted to like you wouldn’t believe. When we walked out of the Station House Tavern together, she was really drunk, and she was going to let me give her a ride home, and I was thinking I could drive her out here instead and fuck her in the fat tits and then beat her head in and leave her. That would’ve been on you, too. Ig Perrish strikes again, kills another girlfriend. But then Glenna had to go and blow me in the parking lot, right in front of three or four guys, and I couldn’t do it. Too many people could’ve placed us together. Oh, well. Another time. Thing about girls like Glenna, girls with rap sheets and tattoos, girls who drink too much and smoke too much—they disappear all the time, and six months later even people who knew them can’t remember their name. And tonight, Ig—tonight, at least, I’ve got you.”

  He bent and took Ig by the horns and dragged him through the weeds. Ig could not find the strength to so much as kick his feet. Blood ran from his mouth, and his right hand beat like a heart.

  Lee opened the front door of Ig’s Gremlin and then got him under the arms and heaved him into it. Ig sprawled facedown across the seats, his legs hanging out. The effort of tossing him into the car almost pulled Lee over—he was tired, too, Ig could feel it—and he half fell into the Gremlin himself. He put a hand on Ig’s back to steady him, his knee on Ig’s ass.

  “Hey, Ig. Remember the day we met? Out here on the Evel Knievel trail? Just think, if you went and drowned way back then, I could’ve had Merrin when she was cherry, and maybe none of the bad things would’ve happened. Although I don’t know. She was quite the stuck-up little bitch even then. There’s something you need to know, Ig. I’ve felt guilty about it for years. Well. Not guilty. But you know. Funny. Here it is: I really. Truly. Did not. Save you. From drowning. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that or why you never believed me. You swam out on your own
. I didn’t even smack your back to get you breathing again. I only kicked you by accident, trying to get away from you. There was this big fucking snake right next to you. I hate snakes. I have, like, an aversion. Hey, maybe the snake pulled you out. It sure was big enough. Like a fucking fire hose.” He patted a gloved hand on the back of Ig’s head. “There. I’m glad I got that off my chest. I feel better already. It’s true what they say. Confession is good for the soul.”

  He rose, got Ig’s ankles, and pushed his legs up and into the car. A tired part of Ig was glad he was going to die here. Most of the best times of his life had happened in the Gremlin. He had loved Merrin here, had had all his happiest conversations with her here, and had held her hand on long drives in the dark, neither of them speaking, just enjoying a shared quiet. He felt that Merrin was close to him now, that if he looked up, he might see her in the passenger seat, reaching to put her hand gently on his head.

  He heard scuffling from behind him and then that echoing, tinny, sloshing sound, and at last he could identify the noise. It was the sound made by liquid slopping about in a metal can. He had just struggled up onto his elbows when he felt a cold, wet splashing over his back, soaking his shirt. The eye-watering reek of gasoline filled the cockpit.

  Ig rolled over, struggled to sit up. Lee finished dousing him, gave the can a last shake, and tossed it aside. Ig blinked at the stinging fumes, the air wavering around him with gasoline stink. Lee fished a small box out of his pocket. He had picked up Ig’s Lucifer Matches on the way out of the foundry.

  “I’ve always wanted to do this,” Lee said, struck the match, and flicked it through the open window.

  The burning match hit Ig’s forehead, flipped, and fell. Ig’s hands were taped together at the wrists, but they were in front of his body, and he caught the match as it dropped through the air, not thinking about it, just acting on reflex. For a moment—just one—his hands were a cup filled with fire, brimming with golden light.

  Then he wore a red suit of flame, became a living torch. He screamed but couldn’t hear his own voice, because that was when the interior of the car ignited, with a low, deep whump that seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the air. He caught a glimpse of Lee staggering back from the Gremlin, the flame light playing across his startled face. Even braced for it, he had not been ready for it: The Gremlin became a roaring tower of fire.

  Ig grabbed the door and tried to push it open and climb out, and Lee stepped forward and kicked it shut. The plastic of the dash blackened. The windshield began to soot over. Through it Ig could see the night, and the drop of the Evel Knievel hill, and the river was down there somewhere. He reached blindly through the flames and found the gearshift, slammed it into neutral. With his other hand, he released the parking brake. As he lifted his palm from the gearshift, tacky strands of plastic came away, fusing with skin.

  He looked again through the open driver’s-side window and saw Lee sliding away from him. His face was pale and stunned in the glow of the moving inferno. Then Lee was behind him, and trees were beginning to rush past as the Gremlin tilted forward down the hill. Ig did not need the headlights to see ahead of him. The interior of the car produced a soft golden rush of light, was a burning chariot that cast a reddish glow ahead of it into the darkness. Comin’ for to carry me home, Ig thought randomly.

  The trees closed in from above, and brush swiped at the sides of the car. Ig had not been on the trail since that time on the shopping cart, more than ten years before, and had never ridden it at night, or in a car, or while burning alive. But for all that, he knew the way, knew the trail by the plunging sensation in his bowels. The hill got steeper and steeper as he went, until it seemed almost as if the car had been dropped off the side of a cliff. The back tires lifted off the ground and then came back down, with a metallic, bashing sound. The passenger-side window exploded from the heat. The evergreens whipped audibly by. Ig had the steering wheel in his hands. He didn’t know when he had grabbed it. He could feel it softening in his grip, melting like one of Dalí’s watches, sagging in on itself. The front driver’s-side tire struck something, and he felt the wheel try to twist free from his grip, turn the burning Gremlin sideways, but he pulled against it, held it on the trail. He couldn’t breathe. All was fire.

  The Gremlin hit the slight dirt incline at the bottom of the Evel Knievel trail and was catapulted into the stars, out over the water, a burning comet. It left a coil of smoke behind, like a rocket. The forward motion opened the flames in front of Ig’s face, as if invisible hands had parted a red curtain. He saw the water rushing up at him, like a road paved in slick black marble. The Gremlin hit with a great wallop that smashed the windshield in at him, and water followed after.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  LEE TOURNEAU STOOD ON THE RIVERBANK and watched the current slowly turn the Gremlin around so it was pointed downriver. Only the back end stuck out of the water. The fire was out, although white smoke still poured from around the edges of the hatchback. He stood with the wrench, while the car listed and sank a little deeper, following the current. He stared until a sliding movement near his foot caught his attention. He looked down, then leaped back with a revolted little cry, kicking at a water snake in the grass. It slipped past him and plopped into the Knowles. Lee retreated, his upper lip curled in disgust, as a second, and then a third, slithered into the water, causing the moonlight on the river to shiver and break into silver pieces. He cast a final look out toward the sinking car and then turned and set off up the hill.

  He was gone by the time Ig rose from the water and climbed the embankment, into the weeds. His body smoked in the darkness. He walked six shaky paces, across the dirt, and sank to his knees. As he flung himself onto his back in the ferns, he heard a car door slam at the top of the hill and the sound of Lee Tourneau turning his Caddy around and driving away. Ig lay there, resting beneath the trees along the riverbank.

  His skin was no longer a pale, fish-belly white but had assumed a deep red burnish, like certain varnished hardwoods. His breathing had never been so easy, or his lungs so full. The bellows of his ribs expanded effortlessly with each inhalation. He had heard one of those ribs snap, not twenty minutes before, but felt no pain. He did not note until much later the faint discolorations of month-old bruises on his sides—all that remained to show he’d been attacked. He opened and closed his mouth, wiggling his jaw, but there was no pain, and when his tongue searched for the missing teeth, it found them, smooth and whole, back where they belonged. He flexed his hand. It felt fine. He could see the bones in the back of it, the rods even and undamaged. He had not been aware of it at the time but saw now that he’d never been in pain, all the while he burned. He had, instead, come out of the fire unharmed and made whole. The warm night air was redolent with the smell of gasoline and melted plastic and scorched iron, a fragrance that stirred something in Ig, in much the same way Merrin’s odor of lemons and mint and girlsweat had stirred him. Iggy Perrish closed his eyes and drew restful breath after restful breath, and when next he looked up, it was dawn.

  His skin felt stretched tight across muscle and bone, felt clean. He had never felt cleaner. This was how baptism was supposed to feel, he thought. The banks were crowded with oaks, and their broad leaves fluttered and waved against a sky of precious and impossible blue, their edges shining with a golden green light.

  MERRIN HAD SEEN THE TREE HOUSE among leaves that were lit just so. She and Ig were pushing their bikes along a trail in the woods, coming back from town, where they had spent the morning as part of a volunteer team painting the church, and they were both wearing baggy T-shirts and cutoffs spattered in white paint. They had walked and biked this particular path often enough, but neither of them had ever seen the tree house before.

  It was easy to miss it. It had been built fifteen feet off the ground, up in the broad, spreading crown of some tree Ig couldn’t identify, hidden behind ten thousand slender leaves of darkest green. At first, when Merrin pointed, Ig didn’t even think there was a
nything there. It wasn’t there. Then it was. The sunlight reached through the leaves to shine against white clapboard. As they went closer, stepping under the tree, the house came into clearer view. It was a white box with wide squares cut out for windows, cheap nylon curtains hanging in them. It looked as if it had been framed out by someone who knew what he was doing, not a casual weekend carpenter, although there was nothing particularly showy about it. No ladder led to it, nor was one needed. Low branches provided a natural series of rungs leading to the closed trapdoor. Painted on the underside of the door in whitewash was a single, presumably comic sentence: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN.

  Ig had stopped to look at it—he snorted softly at what was written on the trap—but Merrin didn’t lose a step. She set her bike down in the soft tufts of grass at the base and immediately began to climb, jumping with an athletic self-assurance from branch to branch. Ig stood below, watching her make the ascent, and as she worked her way up through the boughs, he was struck by her naked brown thighs, smooth and limber from a long spring of soccer. As she reached the trapdoor, she turned her head to look down at him. It was a struggle to move his gaze from her cutoffs to her face, but when he did, she was smirking at him. She did not speak but pushed the trapdoor back with a bang and wiggled up through the opening.

  By the time he poked his head into the tree house, she was already pulling her clothes off. The floor had a little square of dusty carpet on it. A brass menorah, holding nine half-melted candles, stood on an end table surrounded by small china figures. An easy chair with moldering moss-colored upholstery sat in one corner. The leaves moved outside the window, and their shadows moved over her skin, in constant rushing motion, while the tree house creaked softly in its cradle of branches, and what was the old nursery rhyme about cradles in trees? Ig and Merrin up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. No, that wasn’t the one. Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop. Rock-a-bye. Ig closed the trapdoor behind him and moved the chair over it, so no one could enter and surprise them. He undressed, and for a while they went rock-a-bye together.