Horns by Joe Hill
Ig had stopped to look at it—he snorted softly at what was written on the trap—but Merrin didn’t lose a step. She set her bike down in the soft tufts of grass at the base and immediately began to climb, jumping with an athletic self-assurance from branch to branch. Ig stood below, watching her make the ascent, and as she worked her way up through the boughs, he was struck by her naked brown thighs, smooth and limber from a long spring of soccer. As she reached the trapdoor, she turned her head to look down at him. It was a struggle to move his gaze from her cutoffs to her face, but when he did, she was smirking at him. She did not speak but pushed the trapdoor back with a bang and wiggled up through the opening.
By the time he poked his head into the tree house, she was already pulling her clothes off. The floor had a little square of dusty carpet on it. A brass menorah, holding nine half-melted candles, stood on an end table surrounded by small china figures. An easy chair with moldering moss-colored upholstery sat in one corner. The leaves moved outside the window, and their shadows moved over her skin, in constant rushing motion, while the tree house creaked softly in its cradle of branches, and what was the old nursery rhyme about cradles in trees? Ig and Merrin up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. No, that wasn’t the one. Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop. Rock-a-bye. Ig closed the trapdoor behind him and moved the chair over it, so no one could enter and surprise them. He undressed, and for a while they went rock-a-bye together.
Afterward she said, “What’s with the candles and those little glass guys?”
Ig got up on all fours to crawl toward them, and she sat up quickly and gave him a full-palmed smack on the ass. He laughed and jumped and scrambled away from her.
He knelt at the end table. The menorah was set on a piece of dirty parchment with big block letters on it in Hebrew. The candles on the menorah had been melted down quite a bit, to leave a lacework of wax stalactites and stalagmites built up around the brass base. A china Mary—a really quite foxy Jewess in blue—was sunk down on one pious knee before an angel of the Lord, a tall, sinewy figure in robes arranged almost toga fashion. She was reaching up, presumably for his hand, although the figure had been maneuvered so she was touching his golden thigh and looked like she was getting ready to reach for his crank. The Lord’s messenger glared down at her with haughty disapproval. A second angel stood a little ways off from them, his face lifted to heaven, his back turned to the scene, mournfully blowing a golden trumpet.
Into this tableau some joker had stuck a gray-skinned alien with the black, multifaceted eyes of a fly. He was posed beside Mary, bent to whisper in her ear. This figure was not china but rubber, a posable figure from some movie; Ig thought maybe Close Encounters.
“Do you know what kind of writing this is?” Merrin asked. She had crawled over to kneel beside him.
“Hebrew,” Ig said. “It’s from a phylactery.”
“Good thing I’m on the pill,” she said. “You forgot to put on your phylactery when we just did it.”
“That’s not what a phylactery is.”
“I know it isn’t,” she said.
He waited. Smiling to himself.
“So what’s a phylactery?” she asked.
“You wear them on your head if you’re Jewish.”
“Oh. I thought that was a yarmulke.”
“No. This is a different thing Jews wear on their head. Or maybe sometimes their arm. I can’t remember.”
“So what’s it say?”
“I don’t know. It’s Scripture.”
She pointed at the angel with his horn. “Looks like your brother.”
“No it doesn’t,” Ig said…although, in fact, considering it again, it did rather resemble Terry playing his horn, with his broad, clear brow and princely features. Although Terry wouldn’t be caught dead in those robes, except maybe at a toga party.
“What is all this stuff?” Merrin asked.
“It’s a shrine,” Ig said.
“To what?” She nodded at the alien. “You think it’s the holy altar of E.T.?”
“I don’t know. Maybe these figures were important to someone. Maybe they’re a way to remember someone. I think someone made this to have a place to pray.”
“That’s what I think, too.”
“Do you want to pray?” Ig asked automatically, and then swallowed heavily, feeling he had requested some obscene act, something she might judge offensive.
She looked at him under half-lowered eyelids and smiled in a sly sort of way, and it struck him for the first time ever that Merrin thought he had a streak of crazy in him. She cast her gaze around, at the window with its view of rippling yellow leaves, at the sunlight painting the weathered old walls, then looked back and nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “Beats the heck out of praying at church.”
Ig put his hands together and lowered his head and opened his mouth to speak, but Merrin interrupted.
“Aren’t you going to light the candles?” she asked. “Don’t you think we ought to create an atmosphere of reverence? We just treated this place like the set for a porno.”
There was a stained, warped box in the shallow drawer that had matches in it with funny black heads. Ig struck one, and it lit with a hiss and a sputter of white flame. He moved it from wick to wick, lighting each of the candles on the menorah. He was as quick at it as he could be, and yet still the match sizzled down to his fingers as he lit the ninth wick. Merrin shouted his name as he shook it out.
“Christ, Ig,” she said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, wiggling his fingertips. He really was. It didn’t hurt even a little.
Merrin slid the tray back into the matchbox and made to put them away, then hesitated to look at them.
“Hah,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, and closed the drawer on them.
She bowed her head then, and put her hands together, and waited. Ig felt his breath go short at the sight of her, her taut, white, naked skin and smooth breasts and the dark red tumble of her hair. He had himself not felt so naked at any other time in his life, not even the first time he’d undressed before her. At the sight of her, patiently waiting for him to say his prayer, he felt a sweet, withering rush of emotion pass through him, almost more love than he could bear.
Naked together, they prayed. Ig asked God to help them be good to each other, to help them be kind to others. He was asking God to protect them from harm when he felt Merrin’s hand moving on his thigh, slipping gently up between his legs. It required a great deal of concentration to complete the prayer, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. When he was done, he said “Amen,” and Merrin turned toward him and whispered “Amen” herself as she placed her lips on his and drew him toward her. They made love again, and when they had finished with each other, they dozed off in each other’s arms, her lips against his neck.
When Merrin finally sat up—shifting his arm off her, rousing him in the process—some of the day’s warmth had fled, and the tree house was filled with gloom. She hunched, covering her bare breasts with an arm, fumbling for her clothes.
“Shit,” she said. “We need to go. My mom and dad were expecting us for dinner. They’ll wonder where we are.”
“Get dressed. I’ll blow out the candles.”
He bent sleepily in toward the menorah to blow out the candles—and then twitched unhappily, a weird, sick thrill passing through him.
He had missed one of the china figures. It was the devil. He was set on the base of the menorah and, like the tree house itself in its cloak of leaves, was easy to miss, half hidden behind the row of wax stalactites hanging from the candles above. Lucifer was convulsed with laughter, his gaunt red hands clenched into fists, his head thrown back to the sky. He seemed to be dancing on his little goaty hooves. His yellow eyes were rolled back in his head in an expression of delirious delight, a kind of rapture.
At the sight, Ig felt his arms and back prickle with cold gooseflesh. It should’ve been just another part of t
“Too bad we have to go,” Merrin said, pulling on her shorts behind him. “Isn’t that air the sweetest thing?”
“Yes,” Ig said, although his voice was unexpectedly hoarse.
“So much for our little piece of heaven,” Merrin said, which was when something hit the trapdoor, with a loud crash that caused them both to scream.
The trap banged hard into the chair set on top of it, with so much force that the whole tree house seemed to shake.
“What was that?” Merrin cried.
“Hey!” Ig shouted. “Hey, is someone down there?”
The trap crashed into the chair again, and the chair hopped a few inches on its legs but remained on top of the hatch. Ig threw a wild look at Merrin, and then they were both grabbing at their clothes. Ig squirmed into his cutoffs while she refastened her bra. The trapdoor boomed against the underside of the chair again, harder than ever. The figurines on the end table jumped, and the Mary fell over. The devil peered hungrily out from amid his cave of melted wax.
“Cut it the fuck out!” Ig yelled, heart throbbing in his chest.
Kids, he thought, got to be fucking kids. But he didn’t believe it. If it was kids, why weren’t they laughing? Why weren’t they dropping out of the tree and sprinting away in a state of high hysterics?
Ig was dressed and ready, and he grabbed the chair to push it aside—then realized he was afraid to. He held up, staring at Merrin, who had frozen in the act of pulling on her sneakers.
“Go on,” she whispered. “See who’s out there.”
“I don’t want to.”
He really didn’t. His heart quailed at the thought of moving aside the chair and letting in whoever (whatever) was out there.
The worst of it was the sudden quiet. Whoever had been pitching themselves into the trapdoor had quit, waiting for them to open it of their own volition.
Merrin finished tugging on her sneakers and nodded.
Ig called out, “Listen, if there’s someone down there…you had your fun. We’re good and scared.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Merrin whispered.
“We’re coming out now.”
“Christ,” Merrin hissed. “Don’t tell him that either.”
They traded a glance. Ig felt a rising dread, did not want to open the door, was seized with the irrational conviction that if he did, he would allow in something that would do them both irreparable harm. And at the same time, there was nothing to do but open the door. He nodded at her and shoved back the chair, and as he did he saw that something else was written on the inside of the trap, big capital letters in white paint, but he didn’t pause to read what it said there, only flung back the hatch. He leaped down, not wanting to give himself time to think, grabbing the edge of the trap and lashing out with his legs, hoping to drive anyone who was on the branch off it, and fuck ’em if they broke their necks. He had assumed that Merrin would stay behind, that it was simply his role as the man to protect her, but she was going through the trapdoor with him and actually put her feet down on the branch below the tree house first.
Ig’s heart was beating so fast that the whole world seemed to jump and twitch around him. He settled onto the branch beside her, his arms still reaching up, hands gripping the edges of the opening. He searched the ground below, breathing hard; she was breathing hard, too. There was no one. He listened intently for the sound of tramping feet, people rushing away, crashing in the brush, but heard only wind, and branches scraping against the outside of the tree house.
He scrambled down out of the branches and made a series of widening circles around the tree, looking in the brush and along the path for signs of passersby, but found nothing. When he returned to the trunk of the tree, Merrin was still up in it, sitting on one of the long boughs below the tree house.
“You didn’t find anyone,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Nope,” he said. “Must’ve been the big bad wolf.”
It felt right to joke it off, but he was still uneasy, his nerves jangled.
If she was feeling jangled, she didn’t show it. She had a last affectionate look up into the tree house and pulled the door shut. She hopped down out of the branches and scooped her bike up by the handlebars. They began to walk, leaving that bad moment of genuine fright farther behind them with each step. The path was still in the last of the day’s warm, generous light, and Ig became aware again of a pleasant, satisfied, freshly laid tingle. It was a good thing, to walk close to her, their hips almost touching and the sun on their shoulders.
“We’ll have to come back out here tomorrow,” she said, and in almost the same moment Ig said, “We could really do something with that place, you know?”
They laughed.
“We should get some beanbags for up there,” Ig said.
“A hammock. You put a hammock up in a place like that,” she said.
They were quiet, walking.
“Maybe grab us a pitchfork, too,” she said.
Ig stumbled, as if she had not just mentioned a pitchfork but pricked him with one, poking the tines into him from behind.
“Why a pitchfork?” Ig asked.
“To scare away the whatever. In case it comes back and tries to get in at us while we’re naked.”
“Okay,” Ig said, already dry-mouthed at the thought of having her again up on the boards, in the cool-blowing breeze. “It’s a plan.”
But Ig was back in the forest alone two hours later, hurrying along the path through the town woods. He had remembered over dinner that neither of them had blown out the candles in the menorah, and he’d been in a state of high distress ever since, imagining the tree ablaze, the burning leaves drifting into the crowns of the surrounding oaks. He ran, in terror that at any moment he would catch a whiff of smoke.
He smelled only the early-summer fragrances of sun-baked grass and the distant cold, clean rush of the Knowles River, somewhere down the hill from him. He thought he knew exactly where to find the tree house and slowed as he neared the general vicinity. He searched the trees for the dim glow of candle flame and saw nothing but the velvety June darkness. He tried to find that tree, that enormous scaly-barked tree of a kind he didn’t know, but in the night it was difficult to tell one leafy tree from another, and the trail didn’t look the same as it had in the daylight. Finally he knew he had gone too far—way too far—and he started for home, breathing hard and proceeding slowly. He went back and forth on the trail, two, three times but couldn’t find any sign of the tree house. He decided at last that the wind had blown the candles out, or they had guttered out on their own. It had always been a little paranoid to imagine them starting a forest fire. They were set in a heavy iron menorah, and unless it fell over, there wasn’t much chance of them igniting anything. He could find the tree house another time.
Only he never did, not with Merrin and not on his own. A dozen afternoons he searched for it, walking the main trail and all the offshoots, in case they had somehow wandered onto a side path. He looked for the tree house with a methodical patience, but it wasn’t to be found. They might as well have imagined the place, and in fact, in time, this was exactly what Merrin concluded: an absurd hypothesis but one that suited both of them. It had simply been there for an hour, one day, when they needed it, when they wanted a place to love each other, and then it was gone.
“We needed it?” Ig said.
“Well,” Merrin said, “I needed it. I was horny as hell.”
“We needed it, and it appeared. A tree house of the mind. The temple of Ig and Merrin,” Ig said. As fantast
“That’s my best guess,” she said. “It’s like in the Bible. You can’t always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.”
“What part of the Bible is that from?” Ig asked her. “The Gospel of Keith Richards?”
THE FIXER
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
HIS MOTHER WAS DEAD in the next room, and Lee Tourneau was a little drunk.
It was only ten in the morning, but the house was already an oven. The fragrance of his mother’s roses, planted on the path leading up to the house, drifted in through open windows, a light floral sweetness that mingled in a rather disagreeable way with a rank odor of human waste, so the whole place smelled just exactly like a perfumed turd. Lee felt that it was too hot to be drunk, but also that he could not bear the stink of her sober.
There was air-conditioning, but it was switched off. Lee had kept it off for weeks, because his mother had a harder time breathing with the humidity weighing on her. When Lee and his mother were alone in the house, he would kill the air conditioner and put an extra comforter or two on top of the old cunt. Then he’d cut her morphine, to be sure she could really feel it: the weight and the heat. God knew Lee could feel it. By late afternoon he would be padding around the house naked, sticky with sweat, the only way he could stand it. He sat cross-legged by her bedside reading about media theory while she struggled weakly under her covers, too out of it to know why she was boiling in her parched yellow skin. When she shouted for something to drink—“thirst” was about the only word his mother still seemed to know in her last days of senility and kidney failure—Lee would get up and fetch cold water. At the sound of ice clinking in the glass, her throat would start to work, in anticipation of slaking her thirst, and her eyes would begin to roll in their sockets, bright with excitement. Then he would stand over her bed, drinking it himself, where she could see him doing it—the eagerness draining out of her face, leaving her confused and forlorn. It was a joke that never got old. Every time he did it, she was seeing him do it for the first time.