Joe Hill - Horns

IG SAW IT ALL IN A TOUCH, just as if he had sat in the car with them, the whole way to the old foundry-saw it all, and more besides. He saw the desperate and pleading conversation Terry had with Lee, thirty hours later, in Lee’s kitchen. It was a day of impossible sunshine and unseasonably cool weather; kids shouted in the street, some teenagers splashed in a swimming pool next door. It was almost too jarring, trying to match the bright normalcy of the morning with the idea that Ig was locked up and Merrin was in a refrigerated cabinet in a morgue somewhere. Lee stood leaning against a kitchen counter, watching impassively, while Terry leaped from thought to thought and emotion to emotion, his voice sometimes strangled with rage, sometimes with misery. Lee waited for him to spend his energy, then said, They’re going to let your brother go. Be cool. The forensic evidence won’t match, and they’ll have to publicly clear him. He was passing a golden pear from hand to hand.

What forensic evidence?

Shoe prints, Lee said. Tire prints. Who knows what else? Blood, I guess. She might’ve scratched me. My blood won’t match with Ig, and there’s no reason they’d ever test me. Or at least you better hope they don’t test me. You wait. They’ll let him go inside of eight hours, and he’ll be clear by the end of the week. You just need to stay quiet a while longer, and you and him will both be out of this thing.

They’re saying she was raped, Terry said. You didn’t tell me you raped her.

I didn’t. It’s only rape if she doesn’t want you to do it, Lee said, and he lifted the pear and took a wet bite.

Worse than that was the glimpse Ig had of what Terry had attempted to do five months later, sitting in his garage, in the driver’s seat of his Viper, the windows down and the garage door shut and the engine running. Terry was on the twitching edge of unconsciousness, exhaust boiling up around him, when the garage door rumbled open behind him. His housekeeper had never once in her life shown up on a Saturday morning, but there she was, gaping at Terry through the driver’s-side window, clutching his dry cleaning to her chest. She was a fifty-year-old Mexican immigrant and understood English well enough, but it was unlikely she could read the part of the folded note sticking out of Terry’s shirt pocket:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

Last year my brother, Ignatius Perrish, was taken into custody under suspicion of assaulting and murdering Merrin Williams, his closest friend. HE IS INNOCENT OF ALL CHARGES. Merrin, who was my friend, too, was assaulted and murdered by Lee Tourneau. I know because I was present, and although I did not assist him in the crime, I am complicit in covering it up, and I cannot live with myself another-

But Ig didn’t get any further than that, dropped Terry’s hand, reacting as if he’d been zapped by static electricity. Terry’s eyes opened, his pupils huge in the darkness.

“Mom?” Terry said in a doped, heavy voice. It was dark in the room, dark enough so Ig doubted he could make out anything more than the vague shape of him standing there. Ig held his hand behind his back, squeezing the hilt of the knife.

Ig opened his mouth to say something; he meant to tell Terry to go back to sleep, which was the most absurd thing he could say, except for any other thing. But as he spoke, he felt a throb of blood surge up into the horns, and the voice that came from his mouth was not his own, but his mother’s. Nor was it an imitation, a conscious act of mimicry. It was her. “Go back to sleep, Terry,” she said.

Ig was so surprised at himself he stepped back and thumped a hip into the night table. A glass of water clashed softly against the lamp. Terry shut his eyes again but began to stir feebly, as if in another moment he might sit up.

“Mom,” he said. “What time is it?”

Ig stared down at his brother, not wondering how he’d done it-how he had summoned Lydia’s voice-but only if he could do it again. He already knew how he’d done it. The devil could, of course, speak in the voice of loved ones, telling them the things they most wanted to hear. The gift of tongues…the devil’s favorite trick.

“Shh,” Ig said, and the horns were filled with pressure, and his voice was the voice of Lydia Perrish. It was easy-he didn’t even have to think about it. “Shh, dear. You don’t need to do anything. You don’t need to get up. Rest. Take care of yourself.”

Terry sighed and rolled away from Ig, turning a shoulder to him.

Ig had been prepared for anything except to feel sympathy for Terry. There was no cheapening what Merrin had been put through, but in a sense-in a sense Ig had lost his brother that night, too.

He crouched in the darkness, looking at Terry lying on his side under the sheets, and thought for a spell, considering this newest manifestation of his powers. Finally he opened his mouth, and Lydia said, “You should go home tomorrow. Get back to your life, dear. You’ve got rehearsals. You’ve got things you need to do. Don’t you worry about Grandma. Grandma is going to be fine.”

“What about Ig?” Terry asked. He spoke in a low murmur, with his back turned. “Shouldn’t I stay until we know where Ig went? I’m worried.”

“Maybe he needs to be alone right now,” Ig said in his mother’s voice. “You know what time of year it is. I’m sure he’s fine and would want you to take care of work. You need to think about yourself-for once. Straight back to L.A. tomorrow, Terry.” Making it an order, pushing the weight of his willpower behind the horns so they tingled with delight.

“Straight back,” Terry said. “Okay.”

Ig retreated, backing for the door, for daylight.

Terry spoke again, before Ig could go.

“Love you,” he said.

Ig held up in the door, his pulse tripping strangely in his throat, his breath short.

“I love you, too, Terry,” he said, and gently shut the door between them.

IN THE AFTERNOON IG DROVE up the highway to a small country grocery. He picked out some cheese and pepperoni, brown mustard, two loaves of bread, two bottles of red table wine, and a corkscrew.

The shopkeeper was an old man with a scholarly look, in granny glasses and a sweater that buttoned up the front. He slumped behind the counter with his chin on his fist, leafing through the New York Review of Books. He glanced at Ig without interest and began to ring up his purchases.

As he pressed the keys of the cash register, he confessed to Ig that his wife of forty years had Alzheimer’s, and he had been thinking about luring her to the basement stairs and pushing her down them. He felt sure a broken neck would be ruled an accident. Wendy had loved him with her body, and written him letters every week while he was in the army, and given him two fine daughters, but he was tired of listening to her rave and washing her, and he wanted to go live with Sally, an old friend, in Boca Raton. When his wife died, he could collect an insurance payment of almost three-quarters of a million dollars, and then there would be golf and tennis and good meals with Sally for however many years he had left. He wanted to know what Ig thought about it. Ig said he thought he would burn in hell. The shopkeeper shrugged and said of course-that went without saying.

He spoke to Ig in Russian, and it was in this language that Ig gave his reply, although he didn’t know Russian, had never studied it. Yet he was entirely unsurprised by his sudden, undeserved fluency. After speaking to Terry in their mother’s voice, it seemed a small enough thing. Besides: The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

Ig started away from the cash register, thinking how he’d fooled Terry, how something in him had been able to bring forth just exactly the voice Terry wanted to hear. He wondered at the limits of such a power, wondered how completely he could lead another mind astray. He stopped at the door and looked back, staring with interest at the shopkeeper, who sat behind the counter looking at his paper once again.