Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

To put it another way, I did try for a while to be someone good, someone better , someone else , someone who could write a love story that acts like a love story, someone who could win a literary prize or two with a novel full of classical allusions and social meaning . . . but in the end, I could only be the devil you know.

Here’s hoping you’ll let me whisper in your ear one more time. And when I tell you to go to hell—remember, I mean it in the kindest possible way.

Throw up your Horns . Let’s rock.

Joe Hill

November 2009

Herewith follows a bonus excerpt from Horns, Joe Hill’s new novel, on sale everywhere in February 2010.

one.

Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.

But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise and for the second time in twelve hours, he pissed on his feet.

two.

He shoved himself back into his khaki shorts—he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes—and leaned over the sink for a better look.

They weren’t much as horns went, each of them about as long as his ring finger, thick at the base, but soon narrowing to a point as they hooked upward. The horns were covered in his own too-pale skin, except at the very tips, which were an ugly inflamed red, as if the needle-points at the ends of them were about to poke through the flesh. He touched one, and found the point sensitive, a little sore. He ran his fingers along the sides of each and felt the density of bone beneath the stretched-tight smoothness of skin.

His first thought was that somehow he had brought this affliction upon himself. Late the night before he had gone into the woods beyond the old foundry, to the place where Merrin Williams had been killed. People had left remembrances at a diseased black cherry tree, the bark peeling away to show the flesh beneath. Merrin had been found like that, clothes peeled away to show the flesh beneath. There were photographs of her placed delicately in the branches, a vase of pussy-willows, Hallmark cards warped and stained from exposure to the elements. Someone, Merrin’s mother probably, had left a decorative cross with yellow nylon roses stapled to it, and a plastic Virgin who smiled with the beatific idiocy of the functionally retarded.

He couldn’t stand that simpering smile. He couldn’t stand the cross either, planted in the place where Merrin bled to death from her smashed-in head. A cross with yellow roses. What a fucking thing. It was like an electric chair with floral print cushions, a bad joke. It bothered him that someone wanted to bring Christ out here. Christ was a year too late to do any good. He hadn’t been anywhere around when Merrin needed Him.

Ig had ripped the decorative cross down and stamped it into the dirt. He had to take a leak and he did it on the Virgin, drunkenly urinating on his own feet in the process. Perhaps that was blasphemy enough to bring on this transformation. But no—he sensed there had been more. What else, he couldn’t recall. He had had a lot to drink.

He turned his head this way and that, studying himself in the mirror, lifting his fingers to touch the horns, once and again. How deep did the bone go? Did the horns have roots, pushing back into his brain? At this thought, the bathroom darkened, as if the light bulb overhead had briefly gone dim. The welling darkness, though, was behind his eyes, in his head, not in the light fixtures. He held the sink and waited for the feeling of weakness to pass.

He saw it then. He was going to die. Of course he was going to die. Something was pushing into his brain, all right: a tumor. The horns weren’t really there. They were metaphorical, imaginary. He had a tumor eating his brain and it was causing him to see things. And if he was to the point of seeing things, then it was probably too late to save him.

The idea that he might be going to die brought with it a surge of relief, a physical sensation, like coming up for air after being underwater too long. Ig had come close to drowning once, and had suffered from asthma as a child, and to him, contentment was as simple as being able to breathe.

“I’m sick,” he breathed. “I’m dying.”

It improved his mood to say it aloud.

He studied himself in the mirror, expecting the horns to vanish now that he knew they were hallucinatory, but it didn’t work that way. The horns remained. He fretfully tugged at his hair, trying to see if he could hide them, at least until he got to the doctor’s, then quit when he realized how silly it was to try and conceal something no one would be able to see but him.

He wandered into the bedroom on shaky legs. The bedclothes were shoved back on either side and the bottom sheet still bore the rumpled impression of Glenna Nicholson’s curves. He had no memory of falling into bed beside her, didn’t even remember getting home; another missing part of the evening. It had been in his head until this very moment that he had slept alone and that Glenna had spent the night somewhere else. With someone else.

They had gone out together, the night before, but after he had been drinking a while, Ig had just naturally started to think about Merrin, the anniversary of her death coming up in a few days. The more he drank, the more he missed her . . . and the more conscious he was of how little Glenna was like her. With her tattoos, and her paste-on nails, her bookshelf full of Dean Koontz novels, her cigarettes and her rap sheet, Glenna was the unMerrin. It irritated Ig to see her sitting there on the other side of the table, seemed a kind of betrayal to be with her, although whether he was betraying Merrin or himself he didn’t know. Finally he had to get away—Glenna kept reaching over to stroke his knuckles with one finger, a gesture she meant to be tender but which for some reason pissed him off. He went to the men’s room and hid there for twenty minutes. When he returned he found the booth empty. He sat there drinking for an hour before he understood she was not coming back, and that he was not sorry. But at some point in the evening they had both wound up here in the same bed, the bed they had shared for the last three months.

He heard the distant babble of the TV in the next room. Glenna was still in the apartment then, hadn’t left for the salon yet. He would ask her to drive him to the doctor. The brief feeling of relief at the thought of dying had passed, and he was already dreading the days and weeks to come: his father struggling not to cry, his mother putting on false cheer, IV drips, treatments, radiation, helpless vomiting, hospital food.

Ig crept into the next room, where Glenna sat on the living room couch, in a Guns N’ Roses tank top, and faded pajamas bottoms. She was hunched forward, elbows on the coffee table, tucking the last of a donut into her mouth with her fingers. In front of her was the box, containing three-day old supermarket donuts, and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. She was watching daytime talk.

She heard him, and glanced his way, eyelids low, gaze disapproving, then returned her stare to the tube. My Best Friend Is A Sociopath! was the subject of today’s program. Flabby rednecks were getting ready to throw chairs at each other.

She hadn’t noticed the horns.

“I think I’m sick,” he said.

“Don’t bitch at me,” she said. “I’m hungover too.”