Joe Hill - Horns

He lifted the angel who had stood before her. His face had been imperious and indifferent, a holier-than-thou, how-dare-you-touch-me face, but the head had snapped off and rolled somewhere. Ig put the devil’s head in its place, thought Mary was better off with someone who looked like he knew how to have a good time.

Smoke caught and burned in Ig’s lungs, stung his eyes. He felt his skin going tight from the heat, three walls of fire. He made his way to the trapdoor, but before stepping through it, he lifted it partway to see what was written on the inside; he remembered very clearly that there was something painted there in whitewash. It said, BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO OUT. Ig wanted to laugh but didn’t. Instead he smoothed his hand over the fine grain of the trap and said “Amen,” then eased himself through the hole.

With his feet on the wide branch directly below the trap, he paused for a last look around. The room was the eye at the center of a churning cyclone of flame. Knotholes popped in the heat. The chair roared and hissed. He felt, all in all, happy with himself. Without Merrin the place was just kindling. So was all the world, as far as Ig was concerned.

He shut the trapdoor behind him and started to pick a slow and careful route down. He needed to go home. He needed some rest.

No. What he really needed was to get his hands on the throat of the person who had taken Merrin away from him. What had it said on the parchment in the Tree House of the Mind? That you would get what you needed on your way out? A guy could hope.

He stopped just once, halfway to the ground, to lean against the trunk and rub the palms of his hands into his temples. A dull, dangerous ache was building there, a sensation of pressure, of something with sharp points pushing to get out of his head. Christ. If this was how he felt now, he was going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning.

Ig exhaled-did not notice the pale smoke wafting from his own nostrils-and continued down and out of the tree, while above him heaven burned.

He stared at the burning match in his hand for exactly two seconds-Mississippi one, Mississippi two-and then it sizzled down to his fingers, touched gasoline, and he ignited with a whump and a hiss, exploded like a cherry bomb.

IG STOOD, A BURNING MAN, devil in a gown of fire. For half a minute, the gasoline flames roiled off him, streamed away from his flesh in the wind. Then, as quickly as it had come roaring to life, the blaze began to flutter weakly and sputter out. In a few moments, it was gone entirely, and a black, oily smoke rose from his body in a thick, choking column. Or what would’ve been choking to any man but was, to the demon in the center of it, as sweet as an alpine breeze.

He cast off his robe of smoke, stepped forth from it, entirely naked. The old skin had burned away, and the new skin beneath was a deeper, richer shade of carmine. His left shoulder was still stiff, although the wound had healed to a tormented mass of whitish scar tissue. His head was clear; he felt well, felt as if he had just run a mile and was ready for a swim. The grass around him was black and smoldered. A burning red line was marching across the dry weeds and bunches of grass, moving toward the forest. Ig looked beyond it to the dead cherry tree, pale against its background of evergreens.

He had left the Tree House of the Mind in flames, had burned down heaven, but the cherry still stood undamaged. A wind rose in a hot gust, and the leaves thrashed, and even from here Ig could see there was no tree house up there. It was funny, though-the way the fire seemed to be aimed at it, burning a path through the high grass to its trunk. It was the wind, funneling it straight across the field, pouring fire at the old town woods.

Ig climbed through the foundry doorway. He stepped over his brother’s trumpet.

Terry knelt before the open door of the furnace, head bowed. Ig saw his perfect stillness, the calm look of concentration on his face, and thought his brother looked good even in death. His shirt drawn smoothly across his broad back, cuffs folded carefully past his wrists. Ig lowered himself to his knees beside Terry. Two brothers in the pews. He took his brother’s hand in his and saw that when Terry was eleven, he had stuck gum in Ig’s hair on the school bus.

“Shit,” Ig said. “It had to be cut out with scissors.”

“What?” Terry asked.

“The gum you put in my hair,” Ig said. “On Bus Nineteen.”

Terry inhaled a small sip of air, a whistling breath.

“Breathing,” Ig said. “How are you breathing?”

“I’ve got,” Terry whispered, “very strong. Lungs. I do. Play the horn. Now. And then.” After a moment he said, “It’s a miracle. We both. Got out. Of this. Alive.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Ig said.

Glenna’s phone was in the furnace, had hit the wall and cracked. The battery cover had come off. Ig thought it wouldn’t work, but it beeped to life as soon as he flipped it open. Luck of the devil. He dialed emergency services and told an impersonal operator that he had been bitten by a snake, that he was at the foundry off Route 17, that people were dead and things were burning. Then he broke the connection and climbed out of the chimney to crouch beside Terry again.

“You called,” Terry said. “For help.”

“No,” Ig said. “You called for help. Listen closely, Terry. Let me tell you what you’re going to remember-and what you’re going to forget. You have a lot to forget. Things that happened tonight and things that happened before tonight.” And as he spoke, the horns throbbed, a hard jolt of animal pleasure. “There’s only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn’t get to be the good guy.”

Ig told him a story, in a soft and pleasing voice, a good story, and Terry nodded as he listened, as if to the beat of a song he particularly liked.

IN A FEW MINUTES, it was done. Ig sat with him for a while longer, neither of them speaking. Ig was not sure Terry still knew he was there; he had been told to forget. He seemed to be asleep on his knees. Ig sat until he heard the distant wail of a trumpet, playing a single, razzy note of alarm, a musical sound of panicked urgency: the fire trucks. He took his brother’s head in his hands and kissed his temple. What he saw was less important than what he felt.

“You’re a good man, Ignatius Perrish,” whispered Terry, without opening his eyes.

“Blasphemy,” Ig said.

HE CLIMBED DOWN from the open doorway and then, as an afterthought, reached up and took his brother’s trumpet. Then he turned and looked across the open field, along the avenue of fire, which reached in a straight line toward the cherry tree. The blaze leaped and flickered around the trunk for a moment-and then the tree itself erupted into flames, as if it were soaked in kerosene. The crown of the tree roared, a parachute of red and yellow flame, and in its branches was the Tree House of the Mind. Curtains of flame billowed in the windows. The cherry alone burned in the wood, the other trees untouched by fire.

Ig strode along the path the fire had cut through the field, a young lord on the red carpet that led to his manor. By some trick of optics, the headlights of Lee’s Caddy fell upon him and cast a vast, looming, four-story-high shadow against the boiling smoke. The first of the fire trucks was thumping its slow way down the rutted dirt road, and the driver, a thirty-year veteran named Rick Terrapin, saw it, a horned black devil as tall as the foundry’s chimney, and he cried out and jerked at the wheel, took the fire truck right off the road and clipped a birch tree. Rick Terrapin would retire three weeks later. Between the devil in the smoke and the horrors he saw inside the foundry, he didn’t much feel like putting out fires anymore. After that he was just as happy to let shit burn.