Joe Hill - Horns

“Merrin,” Ig said.

“What about her?”

Ig’s voice was weak, shaking, hardly louder than an exhaled breath. “Without Merrin in my life…I was this.”

Lee lowered himself to one knee and stared at Ig with what seemed real sympathy. “I loved her too, you know,” Lee said. “Love made devils of us both, I guess.”

Ig opened his mouth to speak, and Lee put his hand on Ig’s neck, and every evil thing Lee had ever done poured down Ig’s throat like some icy, corrosive chemical.

“No, I think it would be a mistake to let you say any more,” Lee said, and he raised the pitchfork overhead, the prongs aimed at Ig’s chest. “And at this point I don’t really think there’s anything left for us to talk about.”

The blast of the trumpet was a shrill, deafening squall, the sound of a car accident about to happen. Lee jerked his head to look back at the doorway, where Terry balanced on one knee, his horn lifted to his lips.

In the instant he was looking away, Ig shoved himself up, pushing aside Lee’s hand. He took hold of the lapels of Lee’s sport coat and drove his head into his torso: slammed the horns into Lee’s stomach. The impact reverberated down Ig’s spine. Lee grunted, the soft, simple sound of all the breath being forced out of him.

A feeling of wet suction grabbed at the horns and held them, so it was hard to pull free. Ig twisted his head from side to side, tearing the holes wider. Lee wrapped his arms around Ig’s head, trying to force him back, and Ig gored him again, thrusting deep into an elastic resistance. He smelled blood, mingled with another odor, a foul old garbage stink-a perforated bowel, perhaps.

Lee put his hands on Ig’s shoulders and shoved, trying to extricate himself from the horns. They made a wet, sucking sound as they came loose, the sound a boot makes as it is pulled out of deep mud.

Lee folded and rolled onto his side, his arms wrapped around his stomach. Ig couldn’t sit up any longer either and toppled, slumping to the concrete. He was still turned to face Lee, who was almost fetal, hugging himself, his eyes shut and his mouth a great open hole. Lee wasn’t screaming anymore, couldn’t get the breath to scream, and with his eyes shut he couldn’t see the black rat snake sliding past him. The rat snake was looking for a place to hide, a way out of bedlam. It turned its head as it glided past, giving Ig a frantic look with eyes of gold foil.

There, Ig told it with his mind, gesturing with his chin toward Lee. Hide. Save yourself.

The rat snake slowed and looked at Lee, then back to Ig. Ig felt there was unmistakable gratitude in the rat snake’s gaze. It swerved, gliding elegantly through the dust on the smooth concrete, and slithered headfirst into Lee’s yawning mouth.

Lee’s eyes sprang open, the good eye and the blind eye alike, and they were bright with a kind of ecstatic horror. He tried to snap his jaws shut, but when he bit the three-inch-thick cable of the snake, he only startled it. Its tail shivered furiously back and forth, and it began to hurry, pumping itself down Lee’s throat. Lee groaned, choking on it, and let go of his mauled stomach to grab at it, but his palms were soaked with blood, and it squirmed slickly from within his fingers.

Terry was coming across the floor at a stumbling run. “Ig? Ig, are you-” But when he saw Lee thrashing on the floor, he stopped where he was and stared.

Lee rolled onto his back, screaming now, although it was hard to make any sound with his throat full of snake. His heels beat against the floor. His face was deepening to a color that was almost black in the night, and branches of veins stood out in Lee’s temples. The bad eye, the eye of ruin, was still turned toward Ig, and it stared at him with something very close to wonder. That eye was a bottomless dark hole containing a circular staircase of pale smoke, leading down to a place where a soul might go and never return. His hands fell to his sides. A good eight inches of rat snake hung from his open mouth, a long black fuse drooping from a human bomb. The snake itself was motionless, seemed to understand that it had been lied to, had made a grave error trying to hide itself in the wet, tight tunnel of Lee Tourneau’s throat. It could go forward no farther, nor could it slide itself out. Ig was sorry for it. That was a bad way to die: stuck inside Lee Tourneau.

The pain was returning, pouring into the center of him from crotch and devastated shoulder and smashed knees, like four polluted tributaries emptying into a deep reservoir of sick feeling. Ig shut his eyes to concentrate on managing his pain. Then, for a while, it was quite still in the old foundry, where the man and the demon lay side by side-although which was which would perhaps have been a matter for theological debate.

SHADOWS LAPPED UNSTEADILY at the walls, rising and falling, the darkness coming in waves. The world was ebbing and flowing around him in waves, and Ig struggled to hold on to it. A part of him wanted to go under, to escape the pain, turn the volume down on his ruined body. He was already drifting away from himself, the hurt balanced by a dreamy, growing sensation of buoyancy. The stars swam slowly along overhead, drifting from left to right, so it was as if he were floating on his back in the Knowles River, letting the current carry him steadily downstream.

Terry bent over him, his face anguished and confused. “All right, Ig. You’re all right. I’m going to call someone. I have to run back to my car and get my phone.”

Ig smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring and tried to tell Terry all he needed to do was set him on fire. The gas tank was outside, against the wall. Slosh some unleaded on him and throw a match, he’d be fine. But he couldn’t find the air to push out the words, and his throat was too raw and tight for talking. Lee Tourneau had done a number on him, all right.

Terry squeezed his hand, and Ig knew, randomly, that his older brother had copied answers on a seventh-grade geography test from the boy sitting in front of him. Terry said, “I’ll be back. Do you hear me? Right back. One minute.”

Ig nodded, grateful to Terry for taking care of things. Terry’s hand slipped from Ig’s, and he rose out of sight.

Ig tipped his head back and looked at the reddish candlelight washing over the old bricks. The steady, shifting movement of the light soothed him, added to his feeling of suspension, of floating. His next thought was that if there was candlelight, the hatch to the furnace must be open. That’s right, Lee had opened it to throw more light on the concrete floor.

And then Ig knew what was about to happen, and the shock of it brought him up out of his dreamy, floating stupor. Terry was about to see the phone, Glenna’s phone, carefully set on the blanket in the furnace. Terry could not put his hand in there. Terry, of all people-Terry, who had nearly died at fourteen from a bee sting-needed to stay the fuck away from the furnace. Ig tried to call for him, to shout, to warn him, but could not produce anything except a cracked and tuneless whistle.

“One minute, Ig,” Terry said from across the room. He seemed, in truth, to be talking to himself. “You hang in there and-Wait! Hey, Ig, we’re in luck. Got a phone right here.”

Ig turned his head and tried again, tried to stop him, and did in fact manage a single word: “Terry.” But then that tight, painful feeling of compression settled back into his throat, and he could say no more, and anyway, Terry did not look back at the sound of his name.

His brother bent into the hatch, grabbing for the phone on the lumpy blanket. When he picked it up, one fold flopped back and Terry hesitated, looking down at the loops of snake beneath, the scales like brushed copper in the candlelight. There was a dry rattle of castanets.