Heart-shaped box (34 page)

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.”

“No. I mean . . . look at me. Do I look all right?” Asking because he had to be sure.

She slowly turned her head toward him again and peered at him from under her eyelashes. She had on last night’s mascara, a little smudged. Glenna had a smooth, pleasantly round face, and a smooth, pleasantly curvy body. She could’ve almost been a model, if the job was modeling plus sizes. She outweighed Ig by fifty pounds. It wasn’t that she was grotesquely fat, but that he was absurdly skinny. She liked to fuck him from on top, and when she put her elbows on his chest, she could push all the air out of him, a thoughtless act of erotic asphyxiation. Ig, who so often struggled for breath, knew every famous person who had ever died of erotic asphyxiation. It was a surprisingly common end for musicians. Kevin Gilbert. Hideto Matsumoto, probably. Michael Hutchence, of course, not someone he wanted to be thinking about in this particular moment. The devil inside. Every single one of us.

“Are you still drunk?” she asked.

When he didn’t reply, she shook her head and looked back at the television.

That was it then. If she had seen them she would’ve come screaming to her feet. But she couldn’t see them because they weren’t there. They only existed in Ig’s mind. Probably if he looked at himself now in a mirror, he wouldn’t see them either. Only then Ig spotted a reflection of himself in the window, and the horns were still there. In the window he was a glassy, transparent figure, a demonic ghost.

“I think I need to go to the doctor,” he said.

“You know what
I
need?” she asked.

“What?”

“Another donut,” she said, leaning forward to look into the open box. “You think another donut would be okay?”

He replied in a flat voice he hardly recognized. “What’s stopping you?”

“I already had one and I’m not even hungry anymore. I just want to eat it.” She turned her head and peered up at him, her eyes glittering in a way that suddenly seemed both scared and pleading. “I’d like to eat the whole box.”

“The whole box,” he repeated.

“I don’t even want to use my hands. I just want to stick my face in and start eating. I know that’s gross.” She moved her finger from donut to donut, counting. “Six. Do you think it would be okay if I ate six more donuts?”

It was hard to think past his alarm and the feeling of pressure and weight at his temples. What she had just said made no sense, was another part of the whole unnatural bad dream morning.

“If you’re screwing with me I wish you wouldn’t. I told you I don’t feel good.”

“I want another donut,” she said.

“Go ahead. I don’t care.”

“Well. Okay. If you think it’s all right,” she said and she took a donut, pulled it into three pieces, and began to eat, shoving in one chunk after another without swallowing.

Soon the whole donut was in her mouth, filling her cheeks. She gagged, softly, then inhaled deeply through her nostrils, and began to swallow.

Iggy watched, repelled. He had never seen her do anything like it, hadn’t seen anything like it since junior high, kids grossing other kids out in the cafeteria. When she was done, she took a few panting, uneven breaths, then looked over her shoulder, eyeing him anxiously.

“I didn’t even like it. My stomach hurts,” she said. “Do you think I should have another one?”

“Why would you eat another one if your stomach hurts?”

“ ’Cause I want to get really fat. Not fat like I am now. Fat enough so you won’t want to have anything to do with me.” Her tongue came out and the tip touched her upper lip, a thoughtful, considering gesture. “I did something disgusting last night. I want to tell you about it.”

The thought occurred again that none of it was really happening. If he was having some sort of fever-dream, though, it was a persistent one, convincing in its fine details. A fly crawled across the TV screen. A car shushed past out on the road. One moment naturally followed the next, in a way that seemed to add up to reality. Ig was a natural at addition. Math had been his best subject in school, after Ethics, which he didn’t count as a real subject.

“I don’t think I want to know what you did last night,” he said.

“That’s why I want to tell you. To make you sick. To give you a reason to go away. I feel so bad about what you’ve been through, and what people say about you, but I can’t stand waking up next to you anymore. I just want you to go and if I told you what I did, this disgusting thing, then you’d leave and I’d be free again.”

“What do people say about me?” he asked. It was a silly question. He already knew.

She shrugged. “Things about what you did to Merrin. How you’re like a sick sex pervert and stuff.”

Ig stared at her, transfixed. It fascinated him, the way each thing she said was worse than the one before, and how at ease she seemed to be with saying them. Without shame or awkwardness.

“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 donuts 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.”