Horns by Joe Hill
“So what did you want to tell me?”
“I ran into Lee Tourneau last night after you disappeared on me. You remember Lee and I used to have a thing going, back in high school?”
“I remember,” Ig said. Lee and Ig had been friends in another life, but all that was behind Ig now, had died with Merrin. It was difficult to maintain close friendships when you were under suspicion of being a sex murderer.
“Last night at the Station House, he was sitting in a booth in back, and after you disappeared, he bought me a drink. I haven’t talked to Lee in forever. I forgot how easy he is to talk to. You know Lee, he doesn’t look down on anyone. He was real nice to me. When you didn’t come back after a while, he said we ought to look for you in the parking lot, and if you were gone, he’d drive me home. But then when we were outside, we got kissing kind of hot, like old times, like when we were together—and I got carried away and went down on him, right there with a couple guys watching and everything. I haven’t done anything that crazy since I was nineteen and on speed.”
Ig needed help. He needed to get out of the apartment. The air was too close, and his lungs felt tight and pinched.
She was leaning over the box of doughnuts again, her expression placid, as if she had just told him a fact of no particular consequence: that they were out of milk or had lost the hot water again.
“You think it would be all right to eat one more?” she asked. “My stomach feels better.”
“Do what you want.”
She turned her head and stared at him, her pale eyes glittering with an unnatural excitement. “You mean it?”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “Pig out.”
She smiled, cheeks dimpling, then bent over the table, taking the box in one hand. She held it in place, shoved her face into it, and began to eat. She made noises while she chewed, smacking her lips and breathing strangely. She gagged again, her shoulders hitching, but kept eating, using her free hand to push more doughnut into her mouth, even though her cheeks were already swollen and full. A fly buzzed around her head, agitated.
Ig edged past the couch, toward the door. She sat up a little, gasping for breath, and rolled her eyes toward him. Her gaze was panicky, and her cheeks and wet mouth were gritted with sugar.
“Mm,” she moaned. “Mmm.” Whether she moaned in pleasure or misery, he didn’t know.
The fly landed at the corner of her mouth. He saw it there for a moment—then Glenna’s tongue darted out, and she trapped it with her hand at the same time. When she lowered her hand, the fly was gone. Her jaw worked up and down, grinding everything in her mouth into paste.
Ig opened the door and slid himself out. As he closed the door behind him, she was lowering her face to the box again…a diver who had filled her lungs with air and was plunging once more into the depths.
CHAPTER THREE
HE DROVE TO THE MODERN Medical Practice Clinic, where they had walk-in service. The small waiting room was almost full, and it was too warm, and there was a child screaming. A little girl lay on her back in the center of the room, producing great howling sobs in between gasps for air. Her mother sat in a chair against the wall and was bent over her, whispering furiously, frantically, a steady stream of threats, imprecations, and act-now-before-it’s-too-late offers. Once she tried to grip her daughter’s ankle, and the little girl kicked her hand away with a black buckled shoe.
The remainder of the people in the waiting room were determinedly ignoring the scene, looking blankly at magazines or at the muted TV in the corner. It was “My Best Friend Is a Sociopath!” here, too. Several of them glanced at Ig as he entered, a few in a hopeful sort of way, fantasizing, perhaps, that the little girl’s father had arrived to take her outside and deliver a brutal spanking. But as soon as they saw him, they looked away, knew in a glance that he wasn’t there to help.
Ig wished he’d brought a hat. He cupped a hand to his forehead, as if to shade his eyes from a bright light, hoping to conceal his horns. If anyone noticed them, however, they gave no sign of it.
At the far end of the room was a window in the wall and a woman sitting at a computer on the other side. The receptionist had been staring at the mother of the crying child, but when Ig appeared before her, she looked up and her lips twitched, formed a smile.
“What can I do you for?” she asked. She was already reaching toward a clipboard with some forms on it.
“I want a doctor to look at something,” Ig said, and lifted his hand slightly to reveal the horns.
She narrowed her eyes at them and pursed her lips in a sympathetic moue. “Well, that doesn’t look right,” she said, and swiveled to her computer.
Whatever reaction Ig expected—and he hardly knew what he expected—it wasn’t this. She had reacted to the horns as if he’d shown her a broken finger or a rash—but she had reacted to them. Had seemed to see them. Only if she’d really seen them, he could not imagine her simply puckering her lips and looking away.
“I just have to ask you a few questions. Name?”
“Ignatius Perrish.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Do you see a doctor locally?”
“I haven’t seen a doctor in years.”
She lifted her head and peered at him thoughtfully, frowning again, and he thought he was about to be scolded for not having regular checkups. The little girl shrieked even more loudly than before. Ig looked back in time to see her bash her mother in the knee with a red plastic fire truck, one of the toys stacked in the corner for kids to play with while waiting. Her mother yanked it out of her hands. The girl dropped onto her back again and began to kick at the air—like an overturned cockroach—wailing with renewed fury.
“I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up,” the receptionist remarked, in a sunny, passing-the-time tone of voice. “What do you think?”
“Do you have a pen?” Ig asked, mouth dry. He held up the clipboard. “I’ll go fill these out.”
The receptionist’s shoulders slumped, and her smile went out.
“Sure,” she said to Ig, and shoved a pen at him.
He turned his back to her and looked down at the forms clipped to the board, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.
She had seen the horns but hadn’t thought them unusual. And then she’d said that thing about the girl who was crying and her helpless mother: I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up. She had wanted to know if he thought it would be okay. So had Glenna, wondering if it would be all right to stick her face in the box of doughnuts and feed like a pig at the trough.
He looked for a place to sit. There were exactly two empty chairs, one on either side of the mother. As Ig approached, the girl reached deep into her lungs and dredged up a shrill scream that shook the windows and caused some in the waiting area to flinch. Advancing forward into that sound was like moving into a knee-buckling gale.
As Ig sat, the girl’s mother slumped in her chair, swatting herself in the leg with a rolled-up magazine—which was not, Ig felt, what she really wanted to hit with it. The little girl seemed to have exhausted herself with this final cry and now lay on her back with tears running down her red and ugly face. Her mother was red in the face, too. She cast a miserable, eye-rolling glance at Ig. Her gaze seemed to briefly catch on his horns—and then shifted away.
“Sorry about the ridiculous noise,” she said, and touched Ig’s hand in a gesture of apology.
And when she did, when her skin brushed his, Ig knew that her name was Allie Letterworth and that for the last four months she’d been sleeping with her golf instructor, meeting him at a motel down the road from the links. Last week they had fallen asleep after an episode of strenuous fucking, and Allie’s cell phone had been off, and so she had missed the increasingly frantic calls from her daughter’s summer day camp, wondering where she was and when she would be by to pick up her little girl. When she finally arrived, two hours late, her daughter was in hysterics, red-faced, snot boiling from h
Ig pulled his hand away from her.
The girl began to grunt and stamp her feet on the floor. Allie Letterworth sighed and leaned toward Ig and said, “For what it’s worth, I’d love to kick her right in her spoiled ass, but I’m worried about what all these people would say if I hit her. Do you think—”
“No,” Ig said.
He couldn’t know the things he knew about her but knew them anyway, the way he knew his cell-phone number or his address. He knew, too, with utter certainty, that Allie Letterworth would not talk about kicking her daughter’s spoiled ass with a total stranger. She had said it like someone talking to herself.
“No,” repeated Allie Letterworth, opening her magazine and then letting it fall shut. “I guess I can’t do that. I wonder if I ought to get up and go. Just leave her here and drive away. I could stay with Michael, hide from the world, drink gin, and fuck all the time. My husband would get me on abandonment, but, like, who cares? Would you want partial custody of that?”
“Is Michael your golf instructor?” Ig asked.
She nodded dreamily and smiled at him and said, “The funny thing is, I never would’ve signed up for lessons with him if I knew Michael was a nigger. Before Tiger Woods there weren’t any jigaboos in golf except if they were carrying your clubs—it was one place you could go to get away from them. You know the way most blacks are, always on their cell phones with f-word this and f-word that, and the way they look at white women. But Michael is educated. He talks just like a white person. And it’s true what they say about black dicks. I’ve screwed tons of white guys, and there wasn’t one of ’em who was hung like Michael.” She wrinkled her nose and said, “We call it the five-iron.”
Ig jumped to his feet and walked quickly to the receptionist’s window. He hastily scribbled answers to a few questions and then offered her the clipboard.
Behind him the little girl screamed, “No! No, I won’t sit up!”
“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke, but I really want to say just one thing.”
Ig looked at the little girl and at Allie Letterworth. Allie was bent over her again, poking her with the rolled-up magazine, hissing at her. Ig returned his gaze to the receptionist.
“Sure,” he said, experimentally.
She opened her mouth, then hesitated, gazing anxiously into Ig’s face. “Only thing is, I wouldn’t want to start an ugly scene.”
The tips of his horns pulsed with a sudden unpleasant heat. Some part of him was surprised—already, and he hadn’t even had the horns for an hour—that she hadn’t immediately given in when he offered his permission.
“What do you mean, start one?” he asked, tugging restlessly at the little goatee he was cultivating. Curious now to see if he could make her do it. “It’s amazing how people let their kids act these days, isn’t it? When you think about it, you can hardly blame the child if the parent can’t teach them how to act.”
The receptionist smiled: a tough, grateful smile. At the sight of it, he felt another sensation shoot through the horns, an icy thrill.
She stood and glanced past him, to the woman and the little girl.
“Ma’am?” she called. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Yes?” said Allie Letterworth, looking up hopefully, probably expecting that her daughter was about to be called to her appointment.
“I know your daughter is very upset, but if you can’t quiet her down, do you think you could show some fucking consideration to the rest of us and get off your wide ass and take her outside where we won’t all have to listen to her squall?” asked the receptionist, smiling her plastic, stapled-on smile.
The color drained out of Allie Letterworth’s face, leaving a few hot, red spots glowing in her waxy cheeks. She held her daughter by the wrist. The little girl’s face was a hideous shade of crimson now, and she was pulling to get free, digging her fingernails at Allie’s hand.
“What?” Allie asked. “What did you say?”
“My head!” the receptionist shouted, dropping the smile and tapping furiously at her right temple. “Your kid won’t shut up, and my head is going to explode, and—”
“Fuck you!” shouted Allie Letterworth, coming to her feet, swaying.
“—if you had any consideration for anyone else—”
“Shove it up your ass!”
“—you’d take that shrieking pig of yours by the hair and drag her the fuck out—”
“You dried-up twat!”
“—but oh, no, you just sit there diddling yourself—”
“Come on, Marcy,” said Allie, yanking at her daughter’s wrist.
“No!” said the little girl.
“I said come on!” said her mother, dragging her toward the exit.
At the threshold to the street, Allie Letterworth’s daughter wrenched her wrist free from her mother’s grip. She bolted across the room but caught her feet on the fire truck and crashed onto her hands and knees. The girl began to scream once again, her worst, most piercing screams yet, and rolled onto her side, holding a bloody knee. Her mother paid no mind. She threw down her purse and began to yell at the receptionist, and the receptionist hollered shrilly back. Ig’s horns throbbed with a curiously pleasurable feeling of fullness and weight.
Ig was closer to the girl than anyone, and her mother wasn’t coming to help. He took her wrist to help her to her feet. When he touched her, he knew that her name was Marcia Letterworth and that she had dumped her breakfast into her mother’s lap on purpose that morning, because her mother was making her go to the doctor to have her warts burned off and she didn’t want to go and it was going to hurt and her mother was mean and stupid. Marcia turned her face up toward his. Her eyes, full of tears, were the clear, intense blue of a blowtorch.
“I hate Mommy,” she told Ig. “I want to burn her in her bed with matches. I want to burn her all up gone.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NURSE WHO TOOK Ig’s weight and blood pressure told him her ex-husband was dating a girl who drove a sporty yellow Saab. The nurse knew where she parked and wanted to go over on her lunch break and put a big long scratch in the side with her car keys. She wanted to leave dog shit on the driver’s seat. Ig sat perfectly still on the exam table, his hands balled into fists, and offered no opinion.
When the nurse removed the blood-pressure cuff, her fingers brushed his bare arm, and Ig knew that she had vandalized other people’s cars, many times before: a teacher who’d flunked her for cheating on a test, a friend who had blabbed a secret, her ex-husband’s lawyer, for being her ex-husband’s lawyer. Ig could see her in his head, at the age of twelve, dragging a nail along the side of her father’s black Oldsmobile, gouging an ugly white line that ran the length of his car.
The exam room was too cold, air conditioner blasting, and Ig was trembling from the chill and his nervousness by the time Dr. Renald entered the room. Ig lowered his head to show him the horns. He told the doctor he couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. He said he thought he was having delusions.
“People keep telling me things,” Ig said. “Awful things. Telling me things they want to do, things no one would ever admit to wanting to do. A little girl just told me she wanted to burn her mother up in her bed. Your nurse told me she wants to ruin some poor girl’s car. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
The doctor studied the horns, worry lines furrowed across his brow. “Those are horns,” he said.
“I know they’re horns.”
Dr. Renald shook his head. “They look inflamed at the points. Do they hurt??
“Like hell.”
“Ha,” said the doctor. He rubbed a hand across his mouth. “Let me measure them.” He ran the tape around the circumference, at the base, then measured from temple to point and from tip to tip. He scratched some numbers on his prescription pad. He ran his calloused fingertips over them, feeling them, his face attentive, considering, and Ig knew something he didn’t want to know. He knew that Dr. Renald had, a few days before, stood in the dark of his bedroom, peering around a curtain and out his bedroom window, masturbating while he watched his seventeen-year-old daughter’s friends cavorting in the swimming pool.
The doctor stepped back again, his old gray eyes worried. He seemed to be coming to a decision. “You know what I want to do?”
“What?” Ig asked.
“I want to grind up some OxyContin and have a little snort. I promised myself I’d never snort any at work, because I think it makes me stupid, but I don’t know if I can wait six more hours.”
It took Ig a moment before he realized that the doctor was waiting for his thoughts on the matter.
“Can we just talk about these things on my head?” Ig said.
The doctor’s shoulders sank. He turned his face away and let out a slow, seething breath.
“Listen,” Ig said. “Please. I need help. Someone has to help me.”
Dr. Renald reluctantly looked up at him.
Ig said, “I don’t know if this is happening or not. I think I’m going crazy. How come people don’t react more when they see the horns? If I saw someone with horns, I’d piss down my own leg.” Which, in fact, was exactly what he had done, when he first saw himself in the mirror.
“They’re hard to remember,” the doctor said. “As soon as I look away from you, I forget you have them. I don’t know why.”
“But you see them now.”
Renald nodded.
“And you’ve never seen anything like them?”
“Are you sure I can’t have a little sniff of Oxy?” the doctor asked. He brightened. “I’d share. We could get fucked up together.”