Joe Hill - Horns

When Ig turned away from them, he saw other policemen coming from the opposite direction. They were closing in from either side. Ig wondered if they were going to pull someone out of line. Someone waiting to clear security must’ve come up on Big Brother’s threat list. Ig twisted his head to look back over his shoulder at those policemen approaching from behind. They walked with the barrels of their machine guns pointed at the floor, visors of their helmets lowered across their eyes. Staring with hooded eyes at his part of the line. Those guns were scary, but not as scary as the dead, dull look in their faces.

And there was one other thing he noticed, the funniest thing of all. The officer in charge, the one using hand gestures to tell his men to spread out, to cover the exits-sometimes Ig had the crazy impression the guy was pointing at him.

IG STOOD JUST INSIDE THE DOOR of The Pit, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the cavernous gloom, a shadowy space lit only by wide-screen TVs and digital poker machines. A couple sat at the bar, figures that seemed entirely formed from darkness. A bodybuilder moved behind the bar, hanging beer glasses upside down over the back counter. Ig recognized him as the bouncer who had chased him out on the night Merrin was murdered.

Other than that, the place was empty. Ig was glad. He didn’t want to be seen. What he wanted was to get lunch without even placing an order, without speaking to anyone at all. He was trying to come up with a way to make that happen when his cell phone went off, burring softly.

It was his brother. The darkness flexed around Ig like a muscle. The thought of answering, of speaking to him, made Ig dizzy with hate and dread. He did not know what he would say, what he could say. He held the phone in his hand, watching it hum in his palm, until the ringing stopped.

No sooner had it gone silent than he began to wonder if Terry knew what he had confessed to a few minutes ago. And then there were the other things Ig could’ve found out by answering the phone. Such as: if the horns needed to be seen to pervert people’s minds. It seemed to him it might still be possible to have a normal conversation with someone over the phone. He wondered, too, if Vera was dead and Ig was now, really, the murderer everyone had always believed him to be.

No. He wasn’t ready to find that one out, not yet. He needed some time to be alone in the dark, to dwell in isolation and ignorance.

Sure, came a voice in his mind, his own voice, but sly and mocking. That’s how you spent the last twelve months. What’s one more afternoon?

When his eyes were used to the yawning shadows of The Pit, he spotted an empty corner booth where someone had eaten pizza, perhaps with kids; Ig noted plastic cups with bendy straws. A few wedges of the pizza remained. More important, the parent who had chaperoned this particular pizza party had left a half-full glass of pale beer. Ig slipped into the booth, the upholstery creaking, and helped himself. The beer was lukewarm. For all he knew, the last person to drink from the glass had had oozing cankers and a virulent case of hepatitis. After you’d grown horns from your temples, it seemed a little silly to be too fussy about possible exposure to germs.

A swinging door to the kitchen batted open, and a waitress came through, emerging from a white-tiled space, brightly lit by fluorescents, into the darkness. She had a bottle of cleaning fluid in one hand and a rag in the other and came briskly across the room, headed straight for him.

Ig knew her, of course. It was the same woman who had served him and Merrin drinks on their last night together. Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something. Ig had been waiting to read the books with the children he and Merrin planned to have together.

She wasn’t looking at the booth, and he shrank back into the red vinyl. It was already too late to slip out without being seen. He considered hiding under the table, then dismissed the idea as disturbing. In another moment she was bent over the table, collecting plates. A light hung directly above the booth, and even when he pressed himself all the way back into the seat, it still cast the shadow of his head, and the horns, upon the table. She saw the shadow first, then glanced up at him.

Her pupils shrank. Her face paled. She dropped the plates back on the table with a shocking crash, although it was perhaps more of a shock that none of them broke. She drew a sharp breath, preparing to cry out, and then her gaze found the horns. The shout seemed to die in her throat. She stood there.

“The sign said to please seat yourself,” Ig told her.

“Yes. All right. Let me clean your table off and…and I’ll bring you a menu.”

“Actually,” Ig said, “I’ve already eaten.” Gesturing at the plates before him.

Her eyes shifted from his horns to his face, back and forth, several times.

“You’re the guy,” she said. “Ig Perrish.”

Ig nodded. “You served my girlfriend and me a year ago, on our last evening together. I want to say I’m sorry for the things I said that night and the way I acted. I would tell you that you saw me at my worst, except who I was then is nothing compared to who I am now.”

“I don’t feel even a little bad about it.”

“Oh. Good. I thought I made a terrible impression.”

“No,” she said. “I mean I don’t feel even a little bad about lying to the police. I’m just sorry they didn’t believe me.”

Ig felt his insides clench. It was starting again. She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish’s face. If he didn’t find a way to control it-to mute the effect of the horns-he would go out of his mind soon, if he wasn’t crazy already.

“What lies?”

“I told the police you threatened to strangle her. I said I watched you try to push her down.”

“Why would you tell them that?”

“So you wouldn’t get away with it. So you wouldn’t just walk away. And look at you. She’s dead, and here you are. You got away with it anyhow, just like my father got away with what he did to my mother and me. I wanted you to go to jail.” She gave her head an unconscious toss, flipping her hair out of her face. “Also, I wanted to be in the newspaper. I wanted to be a star witness. If they put you on trial, I would’ve been on TV.”

Ig stared.

“I tried my best,” she went on. “When you left that night, your girlfriend went hurrying out after you, and she forgot her coat. I carried it outside to give it back to her, and I saw you drive away without her. But that’s not what I told the police. I told them when I went outside I saw you pulling her into the car and then hauling ass out of here. That’s what screwed me up. I guess you hit a telephone pole, backing up, and one of the customers heard the crunch and looked out a window to see what happened. They told the police they saw you leave her. The detective asked me to take a polygraph to confirm my story, and I had to take back that part. Then they didn’t believe any of the other stuff I told them either. But I know what happened. I know you just turned around and came back to get her a couple minutes later.”

“You’ve got that wrong. Someone else picked her up.” When Ig thought who, he felt nauseated.

But the idea that she might’ve been wrong about him didn’t seem to interest the waitress. When she spoke again, it was as if Ig had said nothing. “I knew I’d see you again someday. Are you going to force me to go out in the parking lot with you? Are you going to take me somewhere to sodomize me?” Her tone was unmistakably hopeful.