Horns: A Novel

by Joe Hill

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning, eyebrows knitting together. “I mean I’m not in the mood for comedy. What kind of mood are you talking about?”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were wet and cold.

  She flinched, took a startled step back. The jacket slipped, and she caught it to hold it in place, keep it between them. “What are you doing?”

  “I just want you to feel better. If you’re miserable, that’s at least partly my fault.”

  “Nothing’s your fault,” she said. She was watching him with wide, wondering eyes, a terrible kind of understanding dawning in her face. So like a little girl’s face. It was easy to look at her and imagine she was not twenty-four but still sixteen, still cherry. “I didn’t break up with Ig because of you. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Except that now we can be together. Wasn’t that the reason for this whole exercise?”

  She took another unsteady step back, her face becoming incredulous, her mouth widening as if to cry out. The thought that she might be about to yell alarmed him, and he felt an impulse to step forward and get a hand over her mouth. But she didn’t yell. She laughed—strained, disbelieving laughter. Lee grimaced; for a moment it was like his senile mother laughing at him: You ought to ask for your money back.

  “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Oh, Jesus fuck. Aw, Lee, this is a really bad time for some kind of shitty joke.”

  “I agree,” Lee said.

  She stared. The sick, confused smile faded from her face, and her upper lip lifted in a sneer. An ugly sneer of disgust.

  “That’s what you think? That I broke up with him…so I could fuck you? You’re his friend. My friend. Don’t you understand anything?”

  He took a step toward her, reaching for her shoulder, and she shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it, and his heels struck a root, and he went straight down onto his ass in the wet, hard earth.

  Lee stared up at her and felt something rising in him, a kind of thunderous roar, a subway coming through the tunnel. He didn’t hate her for the things she was saying, although that was bad enough, leading him on for months—years, really—then ridiculing him for wanting her. What he hated mostly was the look on her face. That look of disgust, the sharp little teeth showing under her raised upper lip.

  “What were we talking about, then?” Lee asked patiently, ludicrously, from his spot on the damp earth. “What have we spent the whole last month discussing? I thought you wanted to fuck other people. I thought there were things you knew about yourself, about how you feel, that you had to deal with. Things about me.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Lee.”

  “Telling me to meet you for dinners. Writing me dirty messages about some mythical blonde who doesn’t even exist. Calling me up at all hours to find out what I’m doing, how I am.” He reached out with one hand and put it on that neat pile of her clothes. He was getting ready to stand up.

  “I was worried about you, you dick,” she said. “Your mother just died.”

  “You think I’m stupid? You were climbing all over me the morning she passed away, dry humping my leg with her dead in the next room.”

  “I what?” Her voice rose, shrill and piping. She was making too much noise, Terry might hear, Terry might wonder why they were arguing. Lee’s hand closed around the tie tucked into her shoe, and he clenched it in his fist as he started to push himself to his feet. Merrin went on, “Are you talking about when you were drunk and I gave you a hug and you started fondling me? I let it go because you were fucked up, Lee, and that’s all that happened. That’s all.” She was beginning to cry again. She put one hand over her eyes, her chin trembling. She still held the sport coat to her chest with the other hand. “This is so fucked. How could you think I’d break up with Ig so I could screw you? I’d rather be dead, Lee. Dead. Don’t you know that?”

  “I do now, bitch,” he said, and jerked the jacket out of her hands, threw it on the ground, and put the loop of the tie around her throat.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  AFTER HE HIT HER with the stone, Merrin stopped trying to throw him off, and he could do what he wanted, and he loosened his grip on the tie around her throat. She turned her face to the side, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, her eyelids fluttering strangely. A trickle of blood ran from under her hairline and down her dirty, smudged face.

  He thought she was completely out of it, too dazed to do anything except take it while he fucked her, but then she spoke, in a strange, distant voice.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Yeah?” he asked her, pushing with more force, because it was the only way to stay hard. It wasn’t as good as he thought it’d be. She was dry. “Yeah, you like that?”

  But he had misunderstood her again. She wasn’t talking about how it felt.

  “I escaped,” she said.

  Lee ignored her, kept working between her legs.

  Her head turned slightly, and she stared up into the great spreading crown of the tree above them.

  “I climbed the tree and got away,” she said. “I finally found my way back, Ig. I’m okay. I’m where it’s safe.”

  Lee glanced up into the branches and waving leaves, but there was nothing up there. He couldn’t imagine what she was staring at or talking about, and he didn’t feel like asking. When he looked back into her face, something had fled from her eyes, and she didn’t say another word, which was good, because he was sick and tired of all her fucking talk.

  THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MICK AND KEITH

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  IT WAS EARLY WHEN IG collected his pitchfork from the foundry and returned, still naked, to the river. He waded into the water up to his knees and did not move while the sun climbed higher in the cloudless sky, the light warm on his shoulders.

  He didn’t know how much time had passed before he observed a brown trout, perhaps a yard from his left leg. It hovered over the sandy bottom, waving its tail back and forth and gazing stupidly at Ig’s feet. Ig cocked the pitchfork, Poseidon with his trident, twirled the shaft in his hand, and threw. It struck the fish on the first try, as if he had spent years spearfishing, as if he had thrown the fork a thousand times. It wasn’t so different from the javelin, what he’d taught at Camp Galilee.

  Ig cooked the trout with his breath, on the riverbank, driving a smothering blast of heat up from his lungs, strong enough to distort the air and blacken the flopping fish, strong enough to bake its eyes the color of cooked egg yolk. He was not yet able to breathe fire, like a dragon, but he assumed that would come.

  It was easy enough to bring forth the heat. All he had to do was concentrate on a pleasurable hate. Mostly he focused on what he’d seen in Lee’s head, Lee slow-roasting his mother in the oven of her deathbed, Lee pulling the tie around Merrin’s throat to stop her from shouting. Lee’s memories crowded Ig’s head now, and it was like a mouthful of battery acid, a toxic, burning, bitterness that had to be spit out.

  After he ate, he returned to the river to wash the trout grease off him, while water snakes slid around his ankles. He dunked himself and came up, cold water drizzling down his face. He wiped the back of one gaunt red hand across his eyes to clear them, blinked, and stared into the river at his own reflection. Maybe it was a trick of the moving water, but his horns seemed larger, thicker at the base, the points beginning to hook inward, as if they were going to meet over his skull. His skin had been cooked a deep, full shade of red. His body was as unmarked and supple as sealskin, his skull as smooth as a doorknob. Only his silky goatee had, inexplicably, not been burned away.

  He turned his head this way and that, considering his profile. He thought he was the very image of the romantic, raffish young Asmodeus.

  His reflection turned its head and eyed him slyly.

  Why are you fishing here? said the devil in the water. For are you not a fisher of men?

  “Catch and release?” Ig asked.

  His reflection contorted with laughter, a di
rty, convulsive shout of crowlike amusement, as startling as a string of firecrackers going off. Ig jerked his head up and saw that it was indeed only the sound of a crow, lifting off from Coffin Rock and skimming away over the river. Ig toyed with his chinlock, his little schemer’s beard, listening to the woods, to the echoing silence, and at last became aware of another sound, voices drifting upriver. After a while there sounded the brief, distant squawk of a police siren, a long way off.

  Ig climbed back up the hill to dress. Everything he had brought with him to the foundry had burned in the Gremlin. But he recalled the mildewed old clothes strung in the branches of the oak that overhung the top of the Evel Knievel trail: a stained black overcoat with a torn liner, a single black sock, and a blue lace skirt that looked like something from an early-eighties Madonna video. Ig tugged the filthy garments from the branches. He pulled the skirt up over his hips, remembering the rule of Deuteronomy 22:5, that a man shall not put on a woman’s garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God. Ig took his responsibilities as a budding young lord of Hell seriously. In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh (his own, most likely). He put the sock on under the skirt, though, because it was a short skirt, and he was self-conscious. Last he added the stiff black overcoat, with its tattered oilskin lining.

  Ig set out, his blue lace skirt flouncing about his thighs, fanning his bare red ass, while he dragged the pitchfork in the dirt. He had not reached the tree line, though, when he saw a flash of golden light to his right, down in the grass. He turned, searching for the source, and it blinked and blinked again, a hot spark in the weeds, sending him an urgent and uncomplicated message: Over here, chump, look over here. He bent and scooped Merrin’s cross from the grass. It was warm from an entire morning of heating in the light, a thousand fine scratches in its surface. He held it to his mouth and nose, imagining he might smell her on it, but there was no smell at all. The clasp was broken again. He breathed on it gently, heating it to soften the metal, and used his pointed fingernails to straighten the delicate gold hoop. He studied it for a moment longer and then lifted it and put it around his own neck, fastening the clasp at his spine. He half expected it to sizzle and burn, to sear into the red flesh of his chest, leaving a black, cross-shaped blister, but it rested lightly against him. Of course nothing that had been hers could really ever do him harm. Ig drew a sweet breath of morning air and went on his way.

  They had found the car. It had followed the current all the way to the sandbar below the Old Fair Road Bridge, where the local kids had their yearly bonfire to mark the end of summer. The Gremlin looked as if it had tried to drive right up out of the river, the front tires embedded in the soft sand, the rear end underwater. A few cop cars and a tow truck had driven partly out onto the sandbar toward it. Other cars—police cruisers, but also local yokels who had pulled over to stare—were scattered on the gravel landing below the bridge. Still more cars were parked up on the bridge itself, people lined along the rail to look down. Police scanners crackled and babbled.

  The Gremlin didn’t look like itself, the paint cooked right off it and the iron body beneath baked black. A cop in waders opened the passenger-side door, and water flooded forth. A sunfish spilled out in the torrent, its scales iridescent in the late-morning sunshine, and landed in the wet sand with a splat. The cop in rubber boots kicked it into the shallows, and it recovered itself and shot away.

  A few uniformed cops stood in a knot on the sandbar, drinking coffee and laughing, not even looking at the car. Snippets of their conversation came to Ig, carried on the clear morning air.

  “—fuck is it? A Civic, you think?”

  “—dunno. Something old and shitty.”

  “—someone decided to get the bonfire goin’ a couple days early—”

  They gave off an air of summery good humor and ease and masculine indifference. As the tow truck slammed into gear and began to roll forward, hauling the Gremlin out, water gushed from the rear windows, which had shattered. Ig saw that the license plate had been removed from the back end. Probably gone from the front, too. Lee had thought to remove them before he hauled Ig out of his chimney and put him into it. The police didn’t know what they had, not yet.

  Ig made his way down through the trees and settled at last on some rocks above a steep drop to watch the sandbar through the pines, from a distance of maybe twenty yards. He didn’t look down until he heard the sound of soft laughter directly below. He took a casual glance over the edge and saw Sturtz and Posada, in full uniform, standing side by side, holding each other’s prick while they urinated into the brush. When they locked mouths, Ig had to grab a low nearby tree to keep from toppling off the rocks and falling onto them. He scrambled back to where he wouldn’t be seen.

  Someone shouted, “Sturtz! Posada! Where the fuck are you guys? We need someone on the bridge!” Ig took another peek over the side to watch them go. He had meant to turn them against each other, not turn them on to each other, and yet was not altogether surprised by this outcome. It was, perhaps, the devil’s oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill. There was a whisper and the rustle of the two men adjusting their clothing and Posada laughing, and then they started back.

  Ig moved to a position higher on the slope, where he had a better view of both the sandbar and the bridge, and that was when he saw Dale Williams. Merrin’s father stood at the railing among the other onlookers, a pasty man with a buzz cut, in a striped, short-sleeved shirt.

  The sight of the nuked car seemed to hold Dale fascinated. He leaned against the rusted railing, his fat fingers entwined, staring at it with a stricken, empty expression on his face. Maybe the cops didn’t know what they’d found, but Dale did. Dale knew cars, had sold them for twenty years, and he knew this car. He hadn’t just sold it to Ig, he’d helped Ig fix it up and had seen it in his driveway almost every night for six years. Ig could not imagine what Dale saw now, looking over the bridge at the fire-blackened ruin of the Gremlin on the sandbar and believing that his daughter had taken her last drive in it.

  There were cars parked along the bridge and on the sides of the road at either end of the span. Dale stood on the eastern tip of the bridge. Ig began to cross the hill, angling through the trees toward the road.

  Dale was moving, too. For a long time, he had simply been standing there staring at the burned-out shell of the Gremlin, the water pouring off it. What finally broke him out of his trance was the sight of a cop—it was Sturtz—coming up the hill to provide some crowd control. Dale began to squeeze by the other onlookers, making his slow water-buffalo way off the bridge.

  As Ig reached the verge of the road, he spotted Dale’s ride, a blue BMW station wagon; Ig knew it was his by the dealer plates. It was parked in the gravel breakdown lane, in the shadow of a stand of pines. Ig stepped briskly from the woods and climbed into the back, shut the door behind him, and sat there with his pitchfork across his knees.

  The rear windows were tinted, but it hardly mattered. Dale was in a hurry and didn’t glance into the backseat. Ig understood he might not want to be seen hanging around. If you made a list of the people in Gideon who would most want to see Ig Perrish burned alive, Dale would definitely be in the top five. The car salesman opened the door and dropped behind the wheel.

  He took his glasses off with one hand, covered his eyes with the other. For a while he just sat there, his breathing ragged and soft. Ig waited, not wanting to interrupt.

  There were pictures taped to the dash. One was of Jesus, an oil painting, Jesus with his golden beard and his swept-back golden hair, staring, in an inspired sort of way, into the sky while shafts of golden light broke through the clouds behind him. “Blessed are they that mourn,” read the caption, “for they shall be comforted.” Taped next to it was a picture of Merrin at ten, sitting behind her father on the back of his motorcycle. She wore aviator goggles and a white helmet with red stars and blue racing lines on it, and her
arms were around him. A handsome woman with cherry-red hair stood behind the bike, one hand on Merrin’s helmet, smiling for the camera. At first Ig thought it was Merrin’s mother, then realized she was too young and that it had to be Merrin’s sister, the one who’d died when they lived in Rhode Island. Two daughters, both gone. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up. That wasn’t in the Bible, but maybe it should’ve been.

  When Dale regained control of himself, he reached for the keys and started the car, pulled out onto the road with a last sidelong glance in the driver’s-side mirror. He swiped at his cheeks with his wrists, stuck his glasses back on his face. He drove for a while. Then he kissed his thumb and touched it to the little girl in the photo of the motorcycle.

  “That was his car, Mary,” he said, his name for Merrin. “All burned up. I think he’s gone. I think the bad man is gone.”

  Ig put one hand on the driver’s seat and the other on the passenger seat and hoisted himself between them, sliding up front to sit next to Dale.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Ig said. “Only the good die young, I’m afraid.”

  As Ig climbed forward into view, Dale made a gobbling noise of fright and jerked at the wheel. They swerved hard to the right, into the gravel breakdown lane. Ig fell hard against the dash and almost crashed to the floor. He could hear rocks clanging and bashing against the undercarriage. Then the car was in park and Dale was out of it and running up the road, running and screaming.

  Ig pushed himself up. He couldn’t make sense of it. No one else screamed and ran when they saw the horns. Sometimes they wanted to kill him, but no one screamed and ran.

  Dale reeled up the center of the road, looking back over his shoulder at the station wagon and uttering vaguely birdlike cries. A woman in a Sentra blasted her horn at him as she blew by—Get the hell out of the road. Dale staggered to the edge of the highway, a thin strip of dirt crumbling off into a weedy ditch. The earth gave way under Dale’s right foot, and he went tumbling down.