Joe Hill - Horns

Lee cleared whatever was in his right eye and let the hand fall to his side. He casually replaced it in his pocket. He was coming forward again. Ig retreated, staying out of arm’s reach. He wasn’t sure why he was backing off, didn’t know why it suddenly seemed a matter of life and death to keep at least a few feet of blacktop between himself and Lee Tourneau. The locusts droned in the trees, a terrible, maddening buzz that filled Ig’s head.

“She was your friend, Lee,” Ig said as he retreated around the front end of the car. “She trusted you, and you raped her and killed her and left her in the woods. How could you do that?”

“You’ve got one thing wrong, Ig,” Lee said in a calm, steady, low voice. “It wasn’t rape. I’m sure you’d like to believe that, but honestly, she wanted me to fuck her. She was coming on to me for months. Sending me messages. Playing little word games. She had this whole cocktease business going on behind your back. She was just waiting for you to go to London so we could have our thing.”

“No,” Ig said, a sick heat rising to his face, rising behind the horns. “She might’ve slept with someone else, but she wouldn’t have slept with you, Lee.”

“She told you that she wanted to sleep with other people. Who do you think she was talking about? I mean, honestly, this seems to be a running theme with your girls, Ig. Merrin, Glenna-sooner or later they all wind up on the end of my dick.” Opening his mouth in a toothy, aggressive grin that had no humor in it.

“She fought you.”

“I know you probably won’t believe this, Ig, but she wanted that, too, wanted me to take the lead, push past her objections. Maybe she needed that. It was the only way she could get over her inhibitions. Everybody has a dark side. That was hers. You know she came when we fucked, don’t you? Out there in the woods with me? She came hard. I think it was a fantasy of hers. Being taken in the gloomy ol’ forest. A little bit of scratch and wrestle.”

“And then a rock in the head?” Ig asked. He had by now backed all the way around the front end of the Gremlin to the passenger side, and Lee had followed him step by step. “That part of the fantasy?”

Lee stopped walking and stood there. “You’ll have to ask Terry. He was the one who did that part.”

“That’s a lie,” Ig whispered.

“But there really is no truth. None that matters,” Lee said. His left hand came out of his shirt. He wore a gold cross, which flashed in the sunlight. He put it in his mouth and sucked on it for a moment, then let it fall and said, “No one knows what went down that evening. If I smashed her with the rock, or if Terry did it, or if you did it…no one is ever going to know what really happened. You don’t have a case to make, and I’m not going to cut some deal with either of you, so what do you want?”

“I want to see you die hopeless and scared in the dirt,” Ig said. “Just like she did.”

Lee smiled, as if he had been offered a compliment.

“Do it, then,” he said. “Come on and do it.” He took a quick step forward, lunging at Ig, and Ig opened the passenger-side door between them, flinging it into Lee.

It crashed into Lee’s legs with a bang, and something hit the asphalt-rattle-clatter-tchok! Ig had a glimpse of a red Swiss Army knife with a three-inch blade, spinning away across the ground. Lee staggered and made a harsh whuffing sound, exhaling sharply, and Ig used the chance to scramble into the car, across the passenger seat, and behind the wheel. He didn’t even bother to close the passenger door.

“Eric!” Lee shouted. “Eric, he’s got a knife!”

But the Gremlin came to life in a rasping, grinding burst, and Ig’s foot found the gas before he was even settled in the seat. The Gremlin lurched forward, and the passenger door thudded shut. Ig’s gaze darted to the rearview mirror, and he saw Eric Hannity trotting across the lot, pistol in his hand, barrel pointed at the ground.

Chunks of asphalt flew from the back tires and glittered in the sunlight, skeins of gold. As Ig pulled out, he shot another glance at the rearview mirror and saw Lee and Eric standing in the dust cloud. Lee’s good right eye was closed again, and he was waving a hand at the billowing grit. The half-blind left eye, though, was open and staring after Ig with an alien sort of fascination.

HE STAYED OFF THE INTERSTATE on the way back-back where? He didn’t know. Ig drove automatically, with no conscious thought to direction. He wasn’t sure what had just happened to him. Or, rather, he knew what had happened but not what it meant. It wasn’t anything Lee had said or done; it was what he hadn’t said, hadn’t done. The horns hadn’t touched him. Lee alone, of all the people Ig had dealt with today, had told Ig only what he wanted to tell; his confession had been a considered decision, not a helpless impulse.

Ig wanted off the road, as soon as possible. Would Lee call the police and tell them Ig had shown up in a deranged state and come at him with a knife? No, actually, Ig didn’t think he would. Lee wouldn’t bring the law into this if he could avoid it. Still, Ig kept to the speed limit and watched his rearview mirror for police cruisers.

He wished he could be coolly in control, could handle his getaway like Dr. Dre-be a stone-cold badass-but his nerves were jangled and his breath was short. He had finally come up against the edge of emotional exhaustion. Crucial systems were shutting down. He couldn’t keep going like this. He needed to get a handle on what was happening to him. He needed a fucking saw, a sharp-toothed saw, needed to cut the miserable things off his head.

The sun beat at the window in flashes, a soothing, hypnotic repetition. Images beat the same way in Ig’s mind. The open Swiss Army knife on the ground, Vera riding her wheelchair down the hill, Merrin flashing her cross at him that day ten years ago in church, the horned image of himself in the security monitor at the congressman’s office, the golden cross shining in the summer light at Lee’s throat-and Ig twitched in surprise, knees knocking the steering wheel. A peculiar and unpleasant idea came to him, an impossible idea, that Lee was wearing her cross, had taken it off her dead body, a trophy. Only no, she hadn’t been wearing it their last night together. Still: It was hers. It had been just a gold cross like any other, not a mark on it to show who it had belonged to, and yet he felt sure it was the same cross she’d been wearing the first day he saw her.

Ig restlessly twisted at his goatee, wondering if it might be as simple as that, if Merrin’s cross had turned off the horns (muted them) in some way. Crosses held back vampires, didn’t they? No, that was worse than garbage, that was nonsense. He had walked into the house of the Lord earlier that morning, and Father Mould and Sister Bennett had fallen all over themselves to tell him their secrets and ask his permission to sin.

But Father Mould and Sister Bennett hadn’t been in the church. They had been beneath it. That wasn’t a holy place. It was a gym. Had they worn crosses, had they dressed themselves in any sign of their faith? Ig remembered Father Mould’s cross, hanging from one end of the twenty-pound bar set across the bench press, and Sister Bennett’s bare throat. What do you say to that, Ig Perrish? Ig Perrish didn’t say anything; he drove.

A boarded-up Dunkin’ Donuts flashed by on his left, and he realized he was near the town woods, not far from the road running up to the old foundry. He was less than half a mile from where Merrin had been murdered, the very same place he’d gone last night to curse and rave and piss and pass out. It was as if the day’s whole motion had merely described a great circle that was always, inevitably, going to lead him back to where he had started.