Joe Hill - Horns

Ig wheeled around and pointed the business end of the tool at the boy named Rory. Rory let go of the snake. It hit the blacktop and twisted desperately about, as if still alive and trying to squirm away.

Rory rose slowly to his feet and took a step back onto a low heap of wooden planks and old cans and rusting wire. The junk shifted underfoot, and he wobbled and sat down again. He stared at what Ig was pointing at him: an ancient pitchfork with three curved and rusting tines.

There was a stitch in Ig’s lungs, a seared feeling, such as he often felt when one of his asthma attacks was coming on, and he exhaled, trying to breathe out the tightness in his chest. Smoke gushed from his nostrils. At the periphery of his vision, he saw the boy in jockey shorts rising to one knee and wiping at his face with both hands, trembling in his tightie-whities.

“I want to run,” said Jesse.

“Me, too,” the fat kid said.

“Just leave Rory here to die alone,” Jesse said. “What’d he ever do for us?”

“He got me two weeks’ detention for flooding the bathroom at school, and I didn’t even plug the toilets up,” said the fat kid. “I was just standing there. So fuck him. I want to live!”

“Then you better run,” Ig told them, and Jesse and Fatboy turned and sprinted for the woods.

Ig lowered the pitchfork and sank the points into the ground, leaned on the handle, looking over it at the teenage boy sitting on the trash heap. Rory did not attempt to rise but stared back with large, fascinated eyes.

“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done, Rory,” Ig asked him. “I want to know if this is a new low for you, or if you’ve done worse.”

Speaking automatically, Rory said, “I stole forty bucks from my mother to buy beer, and my older brother, John, beat her up when she said she didn’t know what happened to the money. Johnnie thought she blew it on scratch tickets and was lyin’, and I didn’t say anything because I was afraid he’d beat me up, too. The way he hit her was like hearing someone kick a watermelon. Her face still isn’t right, and I feel sick whenever I kiss her good night.” As he spoke, a dark stain began to spread across the crotch of Rory’s denim shorts. “Are you going to kill me?”

“Not today,” Ig said. “Go. I release you.” The smell of Rory’s urine appalled him, but he kept it from showing in his face.

Rory pushed himself back to his feet. His legs were shaking visibly. He slid sideways and began to retreat toward the tree line, walking backward, keeping his gaze on Ig and Ig’s pitchfork. He wasn’t watching where he was going and almost stumbled over Cumstain, who still sat on the ground in his underwear and a pair of unlaced tennis sneakers. Cumstain held an armful of laundry to his chest and was staring at Ig with the same look he might’ve given some dead and diseased thing, a carcass withered by infection.

“Do you want a hand up?” Ig asked him, stepping toward him.

At that, Cumstain leaped to his feet and backed a few steps off. “Keep away from me.”

“Don’t let him touch you,” Rory said.

Ig met Cumstain’s gaze and said, in the most patient voice he could muster, “I was just trying to help.”

Cumstain’s upper lip was drawn back in a disgusted sneer, but his eyes had in them the dazed and distant look with which Ig was becoming familiar-the look that said the horns were taking hold and casting their influence.

“You didn’t help,” Cumstain said. “You fucked everything up.”

“They were burning you,” Ig said.

“So what? All the freshmen who make swim team get a mark. All I had to do was suck a little snake to show I enjoy the taste of blood, and then I was going to be solid with them. And you went and ruined it.”

“Get the hell out of here. Both of you.”

Rory and Cumstain ran. The other two were waiting at the tree line for them, and when Rory and Cumstain reached them, they all held up for a moment, in the fir-scented gloom under the trees.

“What is he?” Jesse asked.

“Scary,” said Rory. “He’s scary.”

“I just want to go,” said the fat boy. “And forget about this.”

Ig had an idea then, and he stepped forward and called to them. “No. Don’t forget. Remember that there’s something scary out here. Let everyone know. Tell them to stay away from the old foundry. This place is mine now.” He wondered if it was within the scope of his new powers to persuade them not to forget, as everyone else seemed to forget him. He could be very persuasive on other matters, so maybe he could have his way on this, too.

The boys stared at him rapt for a moment longer, and then Fatboy broke and ran, and the others went after him. Ig watched until they were gone. Then he picked up the decapernated snake with the end of the fork-blood dripped steadily from the open hose of her neck-and carried her into the foundry, where he buried her under a cairn of bricks.

MIDMORNING HE WALKED INTO THE WOODS to take a shit, hanging his can over the side of a stump, his shorts pushed down to his ankles. When he pulled them up, there was a foot-long garter curled in his boxers. He screamed and grabbed it and whipped it into the leaves.

He wiped with some old newspaper but still felt unclean and walked down the Evel Knievel trail to wade naked into the water. The river was deliciously cool against his bare skin, and he shut his eyes and pushed out from the bank, gliding into the current. The locusts thrummed, their timbales producing a harmonic that swelled and faded, swelled and faded, like breath. He was breathing easy, but when he opened his eyes, he saw water snakes zooming like torpedoes beneath him, and he screamed again and scrambled back to shore. He stepped carefully over what he thought was a long, river-softened log, then jumped and shivered when it slid away through the wet grass, a rat snake the length of his own body.

He retreated into the foundry to escape them, but there was no escape. He watched, squatting in the furnace, as they gathered on the floor beyond the hatch, slipping through holes in the mortar between bricks, falling in through open windows. It was as if the room beyond the blast furnace was a tub and someone had turned the faucets on the cold and hot running snakes. They piddled in, spilling across the floor, a rippling liquid mass of them.

Ig regarded them unhappily, his head a nervous hum of thought that corresponded in pitch, and urgency, to the throb of the locusts. The forest was filled with locust song, the males calling the females to them with that single maddening transmission that went on and on without cessation.

The horns. The horns were transmitting a signal, just like the fuck-melody of the locusts. They were broadcasting a continuous call on WSNK, Radio Snake: This next tune is for all you skin-shedding lovers out there. Cue “Tube Snake Boogie.” The horns called snakes and sins alike from the shadows, beckoning them out of hiding to show themselves.

He considered, not for the first time, sawing the horns right off his head. There was a long, rusted, hook-toothed saw in the wheelbarrow. But they were a part of his body, fused to his skull, joined to the rest of his skeleton. He pressed his thumb into the point of the left-hand horn until he felt a sharp prick, pulled his hand back, and saw a ruby-red drop of blood. His horns were the realest and most solid thing in his world now, and he tried to imagine dragging a saw back and forth across one. He flinched from the thought, envisioned spurting blood, tearing pain. It would be like dragging the saw across his ankle. The removal of the horns would require heavy-duty drugs and a surgeon.

Except any surgeon exposed to them would use the heavy-duty drugs on the nurse and then fuck her on the operating table after she passed out. Ig needed a way to cut off the signal without cutting off parts of his body, needed a way to take Radio Snake off the air, put it to sleep somehow.