Joe Hill - Horns

The viper uncoiled and struck Terry in the wrist, with a sound Ig could hear twenty-five feet away, a meaty thump. The phone flew. Terry screamed and went up and straight back and banged the iron frame of the hatch with his skull. The impact dropped him. He got his hands up, stopped himself before he could go face-first into the mattress, the lower half of his body hanging out through the hatch.

The snake still had him by the wrist. Terry grabbed it and jerked. The timber rattler slashed his wrist open as her fangs were tugged loose, and she coiled and hit him again, in the face, sinking her teeth into his left cheek. Terry grabbed her about halfway up the body and pulled, and she let go and bunched up and hit him a third time, a fourth. Each time she pounded into him, it made a sound like someone drilling the speed bag in a gym.

Ig’s brother sank back out of the hatch, dropping to his knees. He had the snake low, close to the end of her tail. He pulled her off him and lifted her in the air and smashed her against the floor, like someone banging a broom against a rug to knock the dust out of it. A black spray of blood and snake brain dashed across the concrete. Terry flipped her away from himself, and she rolled and landed on her back. Her tail whipped madly about, slapping at the concrete. The thrashing slowed a little at a time, until her tail was only waving gently back and forth, and then it stopped completely.

Terry knelt at the door of the furnace with his head bowed, like a man in prayer, a devout penitent in the church of the holy and everlasting chimney. His shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell with respiration.

“Terry,” Ig managed to call out, but Terry did not lift his head and look back at him.

If Terry heard him-Ig wasn’t sure he had-he couldn’t reply. Terry had to save each precious breath for the effort of getting the next lungful of oxygen. If it was anaphylactic shock, then he would need a stick of epinephrine in the next few minutes, or he’d suffocate on the swollen tissues of his own throat.

Glenna’s phone was somewhere in the furnace, not thirty feet away, but Ig didn’t know where Terry had dropped it and didn’t want to drag himself around looking for it while Terry choked. He felt faint and wasn’t sure he could even clear the hatch to the furnace, two and a half feet off the floor. Whereas the tank of gas was just outside.

He knew that starting would be hardest. Just the thought of trying to roll onto his side lit up vast and intricate networks of pain in shoulder and crotch, a hundred fine burning fibers. The more time he gave himself to think, the worse it was going to be. He turned on his side, and it felt as if there were a hooked blade buried in his shoulder being turned back and forth-a continuous impalement. He shouted-he hadn’t known he could shout until he did it-and closed his eyes.

When his head cleared, he reached out with his good arm and grabbed at the concrete and pulled, dragging himself about a foot. And cried out again. He tried to push himself forward with his legs, but he couldn’t feel his feet, couldn’t feel anything below that sharp, persistent ache in his knees. His skirt was wet with his blood. The skirt was probably ruined.

“And it was my favorite,” he whispered, nose squashed against the floor. “I was going to wear it to the dance.” And laughed-a dry, hoarse cackle that he thought sounded particularly crazy.

He pulled himself another foot with the right arm, and the knives sank deep into his left shoulder once more, the pain radiating into his chest. The doorway didn’t seem any closer. He almost laughed again at the amusing futility of it all. He risked a glance at his brother. Terry still knelt before the hatch, but his head drooped so that his forehead was almost touching his knees. From where Ig was, he could no longer see through the hatch into the chimney. Instead he was looking at the half-open iron door and the way the candlelight wavered around it and-

– there was a door up there, with a light wavering around it.

He was so drunk. He had not been this drunk since the night Merrin had been killed, and he wanted to get drunker still. He had pissed on the Virgin Mother. He had pissed on the cross. He had pissed quite copiously upon his own feet and laughed about it. He was tucking himself in to his pants with one hand and tipping his head back to drink straight from the bottle when he saw it above him, cradled in the diseased branches of the old dead tree. It was the underside of a tree house, not fifteen feet off the ground, and he could see the wide rectangle of the trapdoor, delineated by a faint, wavering candlelight that showed around the edges. The words written upon that door were barely visible in the gloom: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN.

“Hunh,” Ig said, absentmindedly pushing the cork back in the bottle, then letting the bottle drop from his hand. “There you are. I see you up there.”

The Tree House of the Mind had played a good trick on him-on him and Merrin both-hiding from them out here all these years. It had never been there before, not any of the other times he had come to visit the place where Merrin had been killed. Or perhaps it had always been there and he hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to see it.

Pulling his zipper up with one hand, he swayed and then began to move-

– another foot across the smooth concrete floor. He didn’t want to lift his head to see how far he had gone, was afraid he would be no closer to the door now than he’d been a few minutes ago. He reached out with his right arm and-

– grabbed the lowest branch and began to climb. His foot slipped, and he had to clutch at a bough to keep from falling. He waited out a bad moment of dizziness with his eyes shut, feeling that the tree was about to come uprooted and fall over with him in it. Then he recovered himself and went on, climbing with the drunkard’s thoughtless, liquid grace. Soon enough he found himself on the branch directly below the trapdoor, and he went straight up to throw it open. But there was a weight resting on top of it, and the trap only banged noisily in its frame.

Someone cried out, softly, from within-a voice he recognized.

“What was that?” Merrin cried.

“Hey,” said someone else, a voice he knew even better: his own. Coming from within the tree house, it was muffled and remote, but even so, Ig recognized it immediately. “Hey, is someone down there?”

For a moment Ig couldn’t move. They were there, on the other side of the trapdoor, Merrin and himself, both of them still young and undamaged and perfectly in love. They were there, and it was not too late to save them from the worst of what was coming for them, and he rose hard and fast and hit the trapdoor again with his shoulders-

– and opened his eyes and looked blearily around. He had winked out for a while, maybe as long as ten minutes. His pulse was slow and heavy. His left shoulder had been hot before. Now it was cold and wet. The cold worried him. Dead bodies got cold. He lifted his head to orient himself and found he was only a yard from the doorway and from the six-foot drop beyond that he’d been trying not to think about. The can was down there, just to the right. All he had to do was get through the door and-

– he could tell them what was going to happen, could warn them. He could tell his younger self to love Merrin better and trust her, to stay close to her, that their time was short, and he hit the trap again and again, but each time the door only rose an inch or so before smashing back down.

“Cut it the fuck out!” shouted the young Ig, inside the tree house.

Ig paused, readying himself for another go at the trapdoor-and then held himself back, recalling when he had been the one on the other side of the door.