Horns: A Novel

by Joe Hill

  “Your place. It was never ours.”

  “I tried to make it ours.”

  “I know. I think you tried your best. I didn’t.”

  “Why’d you burn your car? Why are you out here, wearing…that?” Her hands were balled into fists pressed into her bosom. She fought for a smile. “Aw, baby. You look like you’ve been through hell on earth.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Come on. Come get in my car, Ig. We’ll go back to the apartment and get you out of that skirt and get you cleaned up, and you’ll be yourself again.”

  “And we’ll go back to the way things were before?”

  “Yes. Just like the way things were before,” she said.

  That was the problem right there. With the cross around his neck, he could be his old self again, he could have it all back if he wanted it, but it wasn’t worth having. If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils. Ig reached behind his neck and unclasped Merrin’s cross and hung it from a branch overhead, then shoved aside the bushes and stepped into the light, let her see him for what he was now.

  For one moment she quailed. Glenna took a staggering, unsteady step back, a heel sinking into soft earth and turning under her so she nearly twisted her ankle before she recovered. Her mouth opened to scream, a real horror-movie scream, a deep and tortured wail. But the scream didn’t come. Almost immediately her plump, pretty face smoothed itself back out.

  “You hated the way things were,” spoke the devil.

  “I hated it,” she agreed, and a kind of grief stole over her face again.

  “All of it.”

  “No,” she said. “There were a couple things I liked. I liked when we’d make love. You’d close your eyes and I’d know you were thinking of her, but I wouldn’t care because I could make you feel good and that was all right. And I liked when we made breakfast together on Saturday mornings, a big breakfast, bacon and eggs and juice, and then we’d watch stupid TV, and you seemed like you’d be happy to sit by me all day. But I hated knowing I’d never matter. I hated we didn’t have a future, and I hated hearing you talk about the funny things she said and the clever things she did. I couldn’t compete. I was never going to be able to compete.”

  “Do you really want me to come back to the apartment?”

  “I don’t even want to go back. I hate that apartment. I hate living there. I want to go away. I want to start again somewhere else.”

  “Where else would you go? Where could you go to be happy?”

  “To Lee’s house,” she said, and her face shone, and she smiled in a sweet, surprised way, like a girl catching her first sight of Disney World. “Go in my raincoat with nothing on underneath and give him a real thrill. Lee wants me to come by and see him sometime. He sent me a text message this afternoon saying if you didn’t turn up, we should—”

  “No,” Ig said, his voice harsh and black smoke gushing from his nostrils.

  She cringed, stepped away.

  He inhaled, sucking the smoke back in. Took her arm and turned her in the direction of the car and started walking. The maiden and the devil walked in the furnace light at the end of the day, and the devil admonished her, “You don’t want to have anything to do with him. What’d he ever do for you besides steal you a jacket and treat you like a hooker? You need to tell Lee to fuck off. You need better than him. You have to give less and take more, Glenna.”

  “I like to do nice things for people,” she said in a brave little voice, as if embarrassed.

  “You’re people, too. Do something nice for yourself.” And as he spoke, he put his will behind the horns and felt a shock of white pleasure pass through the nerves in them. “Besides, look at how you’ve been treated. I wrecked your apartment, you haven’t seen me for days, and then you come out here and find me fagging around in a skirt. Screwing Lee Tourneau won’t pull you even. You need to think bigger than that. You got a little revenge coming to you. Go on home and get the bank card, empty the account, and…give yourself a vacation. Haven’t you ever wanted to take off for a little you time?”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” she said, but her smile faltered after a moment, and she said, “I’d get in trouble. I was in jail once, thirty days. I don’t ever want to go back.”

  “No one’s going to bother you. Not after you drove by the foundry and spotted me out here in my little lace skirt, playing the nancy boy. My parents aren’t going to sic a lawyer on you. That’s not the kind of thing they want getting out to the general public. Take my credit card, too. I bet my folks won’t even put a stop on it for a few months. The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better. You deserve something better, Glenna,” Ig said.

  They were beside her car. Ig opened the door and held it for her. She looked down at his skirt, then up into his face. She was smiling. She was also crying, big black mascara tears.

  “Was that your thing, Ig? Skirts? Is that why we didn’t have us too much fun? If I knew, I would’ve tried to…I dunno, tried to make that work.”

  “No,” Ig said. “I’m only wearing this because I didn’t have red tights and a cape.”

  “Red tights and a cape?” Her voice was dazed and a little slow.

  “Isn’t that what the devil is supposed to wear? Like a superhero costume. In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.”

  “Don’t you mean supervillain?”

  “Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.”

  She laughed—weird, disjointed, confused laughter—and then hiccuped, and the smile faded.

  “So where do you think you’ll go?” Ig asked.

  “I dunno,” she said. “I always wanted to see New York City. New York City at night. Taxis going by with strange foreign music coming out the windows. People selling those peanuts, the sweet peanuts, on the corners. Don’t they still sell those peanuts in New York?”

  “I don’t know if they do anymore. They used to. I haven’t been there since just before Merrin died. Go find out, why don’t you. It’s going to be great. Time of your life.”

  “If taking off is so great,” she said, “if getting even with you is so wonderful, why do I feel so shitty?”

  “Because you aren’t there yet. You’re still here. And by the time you drive away, all you’re going to remember is you saw me dressed up for the dance in my best blue skirt. Everything else—you’re going to forget.” Putting the weight and force of the horns behind this instruction, pushing the thought deep into her head, a more intimate penetration than anything they had ever done in bed.

  She nodded, staring at him with bloodshot, fascinated eyes. “Forget. Okay.” She started to get into the car, then hesitated, looking at him over the door. “First time I ever talked to you was out here. You remember? Bunch of us were cooking a turd. What a thing, huh?”

  “Funny,” Ig said. “That’s kind of what I’m planning on this evening. Go on now, Glenna. Rearview mirror.”

  She nodded and began to lower herself into the car, then straightened and bent over the door and kissed him on the forehead. He saw some bad things about her he hadn’t known; she had sinned often, always against herself. He was startled and stepped back, the cool touch of her lips still on his brow and the cigarette and peppermint smell of her breath in his nostrils.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She smiled. “Don’t get hurt out here, Ig. Seems like you can’t spend an afternoon at the foundry without nearly getting yourself killed.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now that you mention it, it is getting to be something of a habit.”

  IG WALKED BACK to the Evel Knievel trail to watch the smoldering coa
l of the sun sink into the Knowles River and gutter out. Standing there in the tall grass, he heard a curious musical chirrup, insectlike, but no insect he knew. He heard it quite distinctly—the locusts had gone quiet in the dusk. They were dying anyway, the droning machinery of their lust winding down with the end of the summer. The sound came again, to the left, in the weeds.

  He crouched to investigate and saw Glenna’s phone in its pink semitransparent shell, lying in the straw-colored grass where she had dropped it. He tugged it from the weeds and flipped it open. There was a text from Lee Tourneau on the Home screen:

  WHAT R U WEARING?

  Ig twisted his goatee, nervously considering. He still didn’t know if he could do it over a phone, if the influence of the horns could be shot from a radio transmitter and bounced off a satellite. On the other hand, it was a well-known fact that cell phones were tools of the devil.

  He selected Lee’s message and pressed CALL.

  Lee answered on the second ring. “Just tell me you’ve got on something hot. You don’t even have to be wearing it. I’m great at pretend.”

  Ig opened his mouth but spoke in Glenna’s soft, breathless, buttery voice. “I’m wearing a bunch of mud and dirt, is what I’m wearing. I’m in trouble, Lee. I need someone to help me. I got my goddamn car stuck.”

  Lee hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and measured. “Where did you get yourself stuck, lady?”

  “Out at the goddamn fuckin’ foundry,” Ig said in Glenna’s voice.

  “The foundry? Why are you out there?”

  “I came looking for Iggy.”

  “Why would you want to do that? Glenna, that wasn’t thinking. You know how unstable he is.”

  “I know it, but I can’t help it, I’m worried about him. His family is worried, too. There isn’t anyone knows where he’s at, and he missed his grandma’s birthday, and he won’t answer his phone. He could be dead for all anyone knows. I can’t stand it, and I hate thinking he’s messed up and it’s my fault. It’s part your fault, too, you shithead.”

  He laughed. “Well. Probably. But I still don’t know why you’d be out at the foundry.”

  “He likes to go out here this time of year, ’cause of this is where she died. So I thought I’d poke around, and I drove up, and got the car stuck, and of course Iggy isn’t anywhere around. You were nice enough to give me a ride home the other night. Treat a lady twice?”

  He paused for a moment. Then he said, “Have you called anyone else?”

  “You were the first person I thought of,” Ig said in Glenna’s voice. “Come on. Don’t make me beg. My clothes are all muddy, and I need to get out of them and wash off.”

  “Sure,” he said. “All right. As long as I can watch you. Wash off, I mean.”

  “That depends how fast you get here. I’m sittin’ inside the foundry waitin’ on you. You’ll make fun of me when you see where I got my car stuck. When you get out here, you’re going to absolutely die.”

  “I can’t wait,” he said.

  “Hurry up. It’s kind of creepy out here by myself.”

  “I bet. No one out there but the ghosts. You hold on. I’m coming for you.”

  Ig hung up without saying good-bye. Then he crouched for a while, over the scorch mark on the top of the Evel Knievel trail. The sun had gone down while he wasn’t paying attention. The sky was a deep, plummy shade of purple, the first stars lighting it in pinpricks. He rose at last to walk back to the foundry and get ready for Lee. He stopped and collected Merrin’s cross from where he’d hung it in the branches of the oak. He grabbed the red metal gas tank, too. It was still about a quarter full.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  HE FIGURED LEE WOULD NEED at least half an hour to get there, more if he was coming all the way from Portsmouth. It didn’t feel like a lot of time. Ig was just as glad. The longer he had to think about what he needed to do, the less likely he was to do it.

  Ig had come around to the front of the foundry and was about to hoist himself up through the open door into the great room when he heard a car thudding in the rutted road behind him. Adrenaline came up in an icy rush, filling him with its chill. Things were moving fast, but they couldn’t be going that fast, not unless Lee had already been in his car when Ig called, and driving out this way for some reason. Only it wasn’t Lee’s big red Caddy, it was a black Mercedes, and for some reason Terry Perrish was behind the wheel.

  Ig sank into the grass, set the quarter-full gas can down against the wall. He was so unprepared for the sight of his brother—here, now—that it was hard to accept what he was seeing. His brother couldn’t be here because by now Terry’s plane was on the ground in California, and Terry was out in the semitropical heat and Pacific sunlight of L.A. Ig had told him to go, to give in to what he wanted to do most anyway—which was cut and run—and that should’ve been enough.

  The car turned and slowed as it approached the building, creeping along through the high, wiry grass. The sight of Terry infuriated and alarmed Ig. His brother didn’t belong here, and there was hardly any time to get rid of him.

  Ig scampered along the concrete foundation, staying low. He reached the corner of the foundry as the Mercedes crunched by, quickened his pace, and grabbed the passenger-side door. He popped it open and leaped in.

  Terry looked at him and screamed and fell back against the driver’s-side door, hand fumbling for the latch. Then he recognized Ig and stopped himself.

  “Ig,” he panted. “What are you—” His gaze dropped to the filthy skirt, then rose to his face. “What the fuck did you do to yourself?”

  Ig didn’t understand at first, couldn’t make sense of Terry’s shock. Then he felt the cross, still clasped in his right hand, the chain wound around his fingers. He was holding the cross, and it was muting the horns. Terry was seeing Ig for himself, for the first time since he’d come home. The Mercedes jostled along through the high summer weeds.

  “Want to stop the car, Terry?” Ig said. “Before we go down Evel Knievel trail and into the river?”

  Terry’s foot found the brake, and he brought the car to a halt.

  The two brothers sat together in the front seat. Terry’s breath came fast and quick through his open mouth. For a long moment, he gaped at Ig, his face vacant and baffled. Then he laughed. It was shaky, horrified laughter, but with it came a nervous twitch of the lips that was almost a smile.

  “Ig. What are you doing out here…like this?”

  “That’s my question. What are you doing out here? You had a flight today.”

  “How do you—”

  “You need to get away from here, Terry. We don’t have a lot of time.” As he spoke, he looked into the rearview mirror, checking the road. Lee Tourneau would be coming any minute.

  “Time before what? What’s going to happen?” Terry hesitated, then said, “What’s with the skirt?”

  “You, of all people, ought to know a Motown reference when you see it, Terry.”

  “Motown? You aren’t making sense.”

  “Sure I am. I’m telling you that you need to get the fuck out of here. What could make more sense than that? You are the wrong person in the wrong place at the exact wrong time, Terry.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re scaring me. What’s going to happen? Why do you keep looking in the rearview mirror?”

  “I’m expecting someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Lee Tourneau.”

  Terry blanched. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Oh,” Terry said again. “You know. How…how much?”

  “All of it. That you were in the car. That you passed out. That he fixed it so you couldn’t tell.”

  Terry’s hands were on the steering wheel, his thumbs moving up and down, his knuckles white. “All of it. How do you know he’s on his way?”

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to kill him,” Terry said. It wasn’t a question.

 
“Obviously.”

  Terry considered Ig’s skirt, his grimy bare feet, his reddened skin, which might just have been a particularly bad sunburn. He said, “Let’s go home, Ig. Let’s go home and talk about this. Mom and Dad are worried about you. Let’s go home so they can see you’re all right, and then we’ll all talk. We’ll figure things out.”

  “My figuring is done,” Ig said. “You should’ve left. I told you to leave.”

  Terry shook his head. “What do you mean, you told me to leave? I haven’t seen you the whole time I’ve been home. We haven’t talked at all.”

  Ig looked in the rearview and saw headlights. He twisted around in the seat and stared through the back window. A car was passing out on the highway, on the other side of that thin strip of forest between the foundry and the road. The headlights blinked between the trunks of the trees in a rapid staccato, a shutter being opened and closed, blink-blink-blink, sending a message: Hurry, hurry. The car went past without turning in, but it was a matter of minutes until a car came that would not pass but instead would swing up the gravel road and head their way. Ig’s gaze dropped, and he saw a suitcase on the backseat and Terry’s trumpet case beside it.

  “You packed,” Ig said. “You must’ve planned to go. Why didn’t you?”

  “I did,” Terry said.

  Ig sat up and looked a question at him.

  Terry shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Later.”

  “Tell me now. What do you mean? If you left town, how come you’re back?”

  Terry gave him a bright and blank-eyed look. After a moment he began to speak, careful and slow. “It doesn’t make sense, okay?”