Horns by Joe Hill
“Sir,” he said again. “We’re going to have to ask you and your wife to leave. We can’t have you abusing the staff.”
“She’s not my wife. She’s just someone I used to fuck.”
The big man—bartender? bouncer?—said, “I don’t need that language in my face. Take it someplace else.”
Ig got up and found his wallet and put two twenties on the table before setting out for the door. As he went, he felt a sensation of rightness settling over him. Leave her, was what he thought. Sitting across from her, he had wanted to force secrets out of her and to inflict as much unpleasantness as possible upon her in the process. But now that she was out of sight and he had breathing room, he felt it would be a mistake to give her any more time to justify what she’d decided to do to him. He didn’t want to hang around and give her a chance to dilute his hate with tears, with more talk about how she loved him. He didn’t want to understand, and he didn’t want to sympathize.
She would come back and find the table empty. His absence would say more than he could ever hope to articulate if he remained. It did not matter that he was her ride. She was a grown-up, she could get a cab. Wasn’t that her whole point in fucking someone else while he was away in England? To establish her bona fides as a grown-up?
He had never in all his life felt so sure that he was doing the proper thing, and as he got closer to the door, he heard a sound like applause rising to greet him, a low crashing of stomping feet and clapping hands that rose and rose until he opened the door at last and looked out into a thunderous downpour.
By the time he got to the car, his clothes were soaked through. He started backing up, even before he had the headlights on. He flipped the wipers on, full speed, and they lashed at the rain, but still water ran down the windshield in a flood, distorting his view of things. He heard a crunch, glanced back, and saw he had backed into a telephone pole.
He wasn’t going to get out and look at the damage. The thought didn’t even cross his mind. Before he spun onto the highway, though, he looked out the driver’s-side window, and through the water beaded on the glass, he saw her standing ten feet away, hugging herself in the rain, her hair hanging in wet strings. She stared miserably across the lot at him but did not gesture for him to stop, to wait, to come back. Ig put his foot on the gas and drove away.
The world blurred past the window, an impressionistic muddle of greens and blacks. In the late afternoon, the temperature had climbed as high as ninety-eight degrees, falling just short of triple digits. The air conditioner was set on high, where Ig had left it all day. He sat in its refrigerated blast, dimly aware that he was shivering in his wet clothes.
His emotions came in pulses, so on the exhale he hated her and wanted to tell her as much and see it sink into her face. On the inhale he felt a sick pang at the thought of driving away, leaving her in the rain, and he wanted to go back and tell her, in a quiet voice, to get into the car. In his mind she was still standing there in the rain, waiting for him. He lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, as if he might see her back there, but of course The Pit was already half a mile away. Instead he saw a police car riding his bumper, a black cruiser with a bar across the roof.
He looked at the speedometer and discovered he was doing close to sixty in a forty. His thighs were by now trembling with an almost painful force. He eased off the gas, his pulse thudding, and when he saw the closed and boarded-up Dunkin’ Donuts on the right side of the road, he pulled off.
The Gremlin was still moving too quickly, and the tires tore at dirt, slung rocks. In the side mirror, he saw the police cruiser go by. Only it wasn’t a cruiser at all, just a black GTO with a roof rack.
He sat shuddering behind the wheel, waiting for his racing heart to slow down. After a bit he decided it might be a mistake to proceed in this weather, as drunk as he was. He would wait for the rain to stop; it was already slackening. His next thought was that Merrin might try to call him at home, make sure he got in all right, and it would be satisfying for his mother to say, “No, Merrin, he isn’t here yet. Is everything okay?”
Then he remembered his cell phone. Merrin would probably try that first. He slipped it from his pocket and shut it off and threw it on the floor of the passenger seat. He didn’t doubt she’d call, and the idea that she might imagine that something had happened to him—that he’d had an accident or, in his misery, put the car into a tree on purpose—was a good one.
The next thing to do was to stop shaking. He cranked his seat back and turned off the car, got a windbreaker from the backseat and spread it over his legs. He listened to the rain drumming slower and slower on the roof of the Gremlin, the energy of the storm already spent. He closed his eyes, relaxing to the deep, resonant beat of the downpour, and did not open them again until seven in the morning, sunlight showing through the trees.
He went home in a hurry, flung himself into the shower, dressed, collected his luggage. It was not the way he had meant to leave town. His mother and father and Vera were having breakfast together in the kitchen and his parents seemed amused to see him rushing around, flustered and disorganized. They didn’t ask where he’d been all night. They thought they knew. Ig didn’t have the heart or the time to tell them the truth of what had happened. His mother had a sly little smirk on her face, and he preferred to leave her smiling rather than looking sick for him.
Terry was home—Hothouse on summer hiatus—and he had promised he would drive Ig to Logan Airport, but he was still in bed. Vera said he’d been out with the old crowd all night and had not made it home until after sunup. Vera had heard the car pull in and looked out in time to see Terry throwing up in the yard.
“Too bad he’s home and not out there in L.A.,” his grandmother said. “The paparazzi missed out on quite a photograph. Big TV star losing his dinner in the rosebushes. That would’ve been one for People magazine. He wasn’t even dressed in the same clothes he went out in.”
Lydia Perrish looked a little less amused then and poked restlessly at her grapefruit.
Ig’s father sat back in his chair, gazing into his son’s face. “You all right, Ig? You look like you have a touch of something.”
“I’d say Terence wasn’t the only one who got his money’s worth last night,” Vera said.
“You okay to drive? I could be dressed in ten minutes,” Derrick said. “Take you myself.”
“Stay and eat your breakfast. I better get going now before it’s too late. Tell Terry I hope no one died and I’ll call him from England.”
Ig kissed them all and said he loved them and went out the door, into the cool of the morning, the dew bright in the grass. He drove the sixty miles to Logan Airport in forty-five minutes. He didn’t see any traffic until the last few miles, when he was past the Suffolk Downs racetrack and going by a high hill with a thirty-five-foot cross on the top of it. Ig got stuck behind a line of trucks for a while, in the shadow of that cross. It was summer everywhere else, but there in the deep gloom the giant cross cast across the road it was late fall, and he got briefly shivery. He had the curious, confused idea that it was called Don Orsillo’s cross, only that couldn’t be right. Don Orsillo was the play-by-play man for the Red Sox.
The roads were clear, but the British Airways terminal was packed, and Ig’s ticket was coach. He waited in line for a long time. The ticket area was full of echoing voices and the sharp clack of high heels ringing out across the marble floor and indecipherable announcements over the loudspeaker. He had checked his baggage and was waiting in yet another line, to clear security, when he felt rather than heard the disturbance behind him. He glanced around and saw people moving aside, making room for a contingent of policemen in flak vests and helmets, carrying M16s, walking in his direction. One of them was making hand gestures, pointing at the line.
When Ig turned away from them, he saw other policemen coming from the opposite direction. They were closing in from either side. Ig wondered if they were going to pull someone out of line. Someone waiting to clear se
And there was one other thing he noticed, the funniest thing of all. The officer in charge, the one using hand gestures to tell his men to spread out, to cover the exits—sometimes Ig had the crazy impression the guy was pointing at him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IG STOOD JUST INSIDE THE DOOR of The Pit, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the cavernous gloom, a shadowy space lit only by wide-screen TVs and digital poker machines. A couple sat at the bar, figures that seemed entirely formed from darkness. A bodybuilder moved behind the bar, hanging beer glasses upside down over the back counter. Ig recognized him as the bouncer who had chased him out on the night Merrin was murdered.
Other than that, the place was empty. Ig was glad. He didn’t want to be seen. What he wanted was to get lunch without even placing an order, without speaking to anyone at all. He was trying to come up with a way to make that happen when his cell phone went off, burring softly.
It was his brother. The darkness flexed around Ig like a muscle. The thought of answering, of speaking to him, made Ig dizzy with hate and dread. He did not know what he would say, what he could say. He held the phone in his hand, watching it hum in his palm, until the ringing stopped.
No sooner had it gone silent than he began to wonder if Terry knew what he had confessed to a few minutes ago. And then there were the other things Ig could’ve found out by answering the phone. Such as: if the horns needed to be seen to pervert people’s minds. It seemed to him it might still be possible to have a normal conversation with someone over the phone. He wondered, too, if Vera was dead and Ig was now, really, the murderer everyone had always believed him to be.
No. He wasn’t ready to find that one out, not yet. He needed some time to be alone in the dark, to dwell in isolation and ignorance.
Sure, came a voice in his mind, his own voice, but sly and mocking. That’s how you spent the last twelve months. What’s one more afternoon?
When his eyes were used to the yawning shadows of The Pit, he spotted an empty corner booth where someone had eaten pizza, perhaps with kids; Ig noted plastic cups with bendy straws. A few wedges of the pizza remained. More important, the parent who had chaperoned this particular pizza party had left a half-full glass of pale beer. Ig slipped into the booth, the upholstery creaking, and helped himself. The beer was lukewarm. For all he knew, the last person to drink from the glass had had oozing cankers and a virulent case of hepatitis. After you’d grown horns from your temples, it seemed a little silly to be too fussy about possible exposure to germs.
A swinging door to the kitchen batted open, and a waitress came through, emerging from a white-tiled space, brightly lit by fluorescents, into the darkness. She had a bottle of cleaning fluid in one hand and a rag in the other and came briskly across the room, headed straight for him.
Ig knew her, of course. It was the same woman who had served him and Merrin drinks on their last night together. Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something. Ig had been waiting to read the books with the children he and Merrin planned to have together.
She wasn’t looking at the booth, and he shrank back into the red vinyl. It was already too late to slip out without being seen. He considered hiding under the table, then dismissed the idea as disturbing. In another moment she was bent over the table, collecting plates. A light hung directly above the booth, and even when he pressed himself all the way back into the seat, it still cast the shadow of his head, and the horns, upon the table. She saw the shadow first, then glanced up at him.
Her pupils shrank. Her face paled. She dropped the plates back on the table with a shocking crash, although it was perhaps more of a shock that none of them broke. She drew a sharp breath, preparing to cry out, and then her gaze found the horns. The shout seemed to die in her throat. She stood there.
“The sign said to please seat yourself,” Ig told her.
“Yes. All right. Let me clean your table off and…and I’ll bring you a menu.”
“Actually,” Ig said, “I’ve already eaten.” Gesturing at the plates before him.
Her eyes shifted from his horns to his face, back and forth, several times.
“You’re the guy,” she said. “Ig Perrish.”
Ig nodded. “You served my girlfriend and me a year ago, on our last evening together. I want to say I’m sorry for the things I said that night and the way I acted. I would tell you that you saw me at my worst, except who I was then is nothing compared to who I am now.”
“I don’t feel even a little bad about it.”
“Oh. Good. I thought I made a terrible impression.”
“No,” she said. “I mean I don’t feel even a little bad about lying to the police. I’m just sorry they didn’t believe me.”
Ig felt his insides clench. It was starting again. She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish’s face. If he didn’t find a way to control it—to mute the effect of the horns—he would go out of his mind soon, if he wasn’t crazy already.
“What lies?”
“I told the police you threatened to strangle her. I said I watched you try to push her down.”
“Why would you tell them that?”
“So you wouldn’t get away with it. So you wouldn’t just walk away. And look at you. She’s dead, and here you are. You got away with it anyhow, just like my father got away with what he did to my mother and me. I wanted you to go to jail.” She gave her head an unconscious toss, flipping her hair out of her face. “Also, I wanted to be in the newspaper. I wanted to be a star witness. If they put you on trial, I would’ve been on TV.”
Ig stared.
“I tried my best,” she went on. “When you left that night, your girlfriend went hurrying out after you, and she forgot her coat. I carried it outside to give it back to her, and I saw you drive away without her. But that’s not what I told the police. I told them when I went outside I saw you pulling her into the car and then hauling ass out of here. That’s what screwed me up. I guess you hit a telephone pole, backing up, and one of the customers heard the crunch and looked out a window to see what happened. They told the police they saw you leave her. The detective asked me to take a polygraph to confirm my story, and I had to take back that part. Then they didn’t believe any of the other stuff I told them either. But I know what happened. I know you just turned around and came back to get her a couple minutes later.”
“You’ve got that wrong. Someone else picked her up.” When Ig thought who, he felt nauseated.
But the idea that she might’ve been wrong about him didn’t seem to interest the waitress. When she spoke again, it was as if Ig had said nothing. “I knew I’d see you again someday. Are you going to force me to go out in the parking lot with you? Are you going to take me somewhere to sodomize me?” Her tone was unmistakably hopeful.
“What? No. The fuck?”
Some of the excitement went out of her eyes. “Are you at least going to threaten me?”
“No.”
“I could say you did. I could tell Reggie you warned me to watch my back. That’d be a good story.” Her smile faded a little more, and she shot a glum look at the bodybuilder behind the bar. “He probably wouldn’t believe me, though. Reggie thinks I’m a compulsive liar. I guess I am. I like to tell my little stories. Still. I never should’ve told Reggie that my boyfriend, Gordon, died in the World Trade Tower, after I told Sarah—she’s another waitress
“Because you can’t help yourself.”
“That’s right. I can’t,” she said, and shivered, a response with unmistakably sexual connotations.
“What did your father do to your mother and you? Did he…did he hurt you?” Ig asked, not sure he really wanted to know.
“He told us he loved us, but he lied. He ran away to Washington with my fifth-grade teacher. They started a family, and he had another daughter, one he likes better than he ever liked me. If he really loved me, he would’ve taken me with him instead of leaving me with my mother, who is a depressing, angry old bitch. He said he would always be a part of my life, but he isn’t part of shit. I hate liars. Other liars, I mean. My own little stories don’t hurt anyone. Do you want to know the little story I tell about you and your girlfriend?”
The pizza Ig had eaten sat in his stomach in a heavy, doughy lump. “Probably not.”
Her face flushed with excitement, and her smile returned. “Sometimes people come in and ask about what you did to her. I can always tell in a glance how much they want to know, if they just want the basics or some nasty details. The college kids usually want to know something nasty. I tell them after you beat her brains in, you turned her over and sodomized the corpse.”
Ig tried to stand up, clubbed his knees against the underside of the table, and at the same time clashed his horns against the stained-glass lampshade hanging over the tabletop. The lamp started to swing, and his horned shadow plunged toward the waitress and then shrank away from her, toward and away. Ig had to sit back down, pain throbbing behind his kneecaps.