IT WAS EARLY WHEN IG collected his pitchfork from the foundry and returned, still naked, to the river. He waded into the water up to his knees and did not move while the sun climbed higher in the cloudless sky, the light warm on his shoulders.
He didn’t know how much time had passed before he observed a brown trout, perhaps a yard from his left leg. It hovered over the sandy bottom, waving its tail back and forth and gazing stupidly at Ig’s feet. Ig cocked the pitchfork, Poseidon with his trident, twirled the shaft in his hand, and threw. It struck the fish on the first try, as if he had spent years spearfishing, as if he had thrown the fork a thousand times. It wasn’t so different from the javelin, what he’d taught at Camp Galilee.
Ig cooked the trout with his breath, on the riverbank, driving a smothering blast of heat up from his lungs, strong enough to distort the air and blacken the flopping fish, strong enough to bake its eyes the color of cooked egg yolk. He was not yet able to breathe fire, like a dragon, but he assumed that would come.
It was easy enough to bring forth the heat. All he had to do was concentrate on a pleasurable hate. Mostly he focused on what he’d seen in Lee’s head, Lee slow-roasting his mother in the oven of her deathbed, Lee pulling the tie around Merrin’s throat to stop her from shouting. Lee’s memories crowded Ig’s head now, and it was like a mouthful of battery acid, a toxic, burning, bitterness that had to be spit out.
After he ate, he returned to the river to wash the trout grease off him, while water snakes slid around his ankles. He dunked himself and came up, cold water drizzling down his face. He wiped the back of one gaunt red hand across his eyes to clear them, blinked, and stared into the river at his own reflection. Maybe it was a trick of the moving water, but his horns seemed larger, thicker at the base, the points beginning to hook inward, as if they were going to meet over his skull. His skin had been cooked a deep, full shade of red. His body was as unmarked and supple as sealskin, his skull as smooth as a doorknob. Only his silky goatee had, inexplicably, not been burned away.
He turned his head this way and that, considering his profile. He thought he was the very image of the romantic, raffish young Asmodeus.
His reflection turned its head and eyed him slyly.
Why are you fishing here? said the devil in the water. For are you not a fisher of men?
“Catch and release?” Ig asked.
His reflection contorted with laughter, a dirty, convulsive shout of crowlike amusement, as startling as a string of firecrackers going off. Ig jerked his head up and saw that it was indeed only the sound of a crow, lifting off from Coffin Rock and skimming away over the river. Ig toyed with his chinlock, his little schemer’s beard, listening to the woods, to the echoing silence, and at last became aware of another sound, voices drifting upriver. After a while there sounded the brief, distant squawk of a police siren, a long way off.
Ig climbed back up the hill to dress. Everything he had brought with him to the foundry had burned in the Gremlin. But he recalled the mildewed old clothes strung in the branches of the oak that overhung the top of the Evel Knievel trail: a stained black overcoat with a torn liner, a single black sock, and a blue lace skirt that looked like something from an early-eighties Madonna video. Ig tugged the filthy garments from the branches. He pulled the skirt up over his hips, remembering the rule of Deuteronomy 22:5, that a man shall not put on a woman’s garment, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God. Ig took his responsibilities as a budding young lord of Hell seriously. In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh (his own, most likely). He put the sock on under the skirt, though, because it was a short skirt, and he was self-conscious. Last he added the stiff black overcoat, with its tattered oilskin lining.
Ig set out, his blue lace skirt flouncing about his thighs, fanning his bare red ass, while he dragged the pitchfork in the dirt. He had not reached the tree line, though, when he saw a flash of golden light to his right, down in the grass. He turned, searching for the source, and it blinked and blinked again, a hot spark in the weeds, sending him an urgent and uncomplicated message: Over here, chump, look over here. He bent and scooped Merrin’s cross from the grass. It was warm from an entire morning of heating in the light, a thousand fine scratches in its surface. He held it to his mouth and nose, imagining he might smell her on it, but there was no smell at all. The clasp was broken again. He breathed on it gently, heating it to soften the metal, and used his pointed fingernails to straighten the delicate gold hoop. He studied it for a moment longer and then lifted it and put it around his own neck, fastening the clasp at his spine. He half expected it to sizzle and burn, to sear into the red flesh of his chest, leaving a black, cross-shaped blister, but it rested lightly against him. Of course nothing that had been hers could really ever do him harm. Ig drew a sweet breath of morning air and went on his way.
They had found the car. It had followed the current all the way to the sandbar below the Old Fair Road Bridge, where the local kids had their yearly bonfire to mark the end of summer. The Gremlin looked as if it had tried to drive right up out of the river, the front tires embedded in the soft sand, the rear end underwater. A few cop cars and a tow truck had driven partly out onto the sandbar toward it. Other cars-police cruisers, but also local yokels who had pulled over to stare-were scattered on the gravel landing below the bridge. Still more cars were parked up on the bridge itself, people lined along the rail to look down. Police scanners crackled and babbled.
The Gremlin didn’t look like itself, the paint cooked right off it and the iron body beneath baked black. A cop in waders opened the passenger-side door, and water flooded forth. A sunfish spilled out in the torrent, its scales iridescent in the late-morning sunshine, and landed in the wet sand with a splat. The cop in rubber boots kicked it into the shallows, and it recovered itself and shot away.
A few uniformed cops stood in a knot on the sandbar, drinking coffee and laughing, not even looking at the car. Snippets of their conversation came to Ig, carried on the clear morning air.
“-fuck is it? A Civic, you think?”
“-dunno. Something old and shitty.”
“-someone decided to get the bonfire goin’ a couple days early-”
They gave off an air of summery good humor and ease and masculine indifference. As the tow truck slammed into gear and began to roll forward, hauling the Gremlin out, water gushed from the rear windows, which had shattered. Ig saw that the license plate had been removed from the back end. Probably gone from the front, too. Lee had thought to remove them before he hauled Ig out of his chimney and put him into it. The police didn’t know what they had, not yet.
Ig made his way down through the trees and settled at last on some rocks above a steep drop to watch the sandbar through the pines, from a distance of maybe twenty yards. He didn’t look down until he heard the sound of soft laughter directly below. He took a casual glance over the edge and saw Sturtz and Posada, in full uniform, standing side by side, holding each other’s prick while they urinated into the brush. When they locked mouths, Ig had to grab a low nearby tree to keep from toppling off the rocks and falling onto them. He scrambled back to where he wouldn’t be seen.
Someone shouted, “Sturtz! Posada! Where the fuck are you guys? We need someone on the bridge!” Ig took another peek over the side to watch them go. He had meant to turn them against each other, not turn them on to each other, and yet was not altogether surprised by this outcome. It was, perhaps, the devil’s oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill. There was a whisper and the rustle of the two men adjusting their clothing and Posada laughing, and then they started back.
Ig moved to a position higher on the slope, where he had a better view of both the sandbar and the bridge, and that was when he saw Dale Williams. Merrin’s father stood at the railing among the other onlookers, a pasty man with a buzz cut, in a striped, short-sleeved shirt.
The sight of the nuked car seemed to hold Dale fascinated. He leaned against the rusted railing, his fat fingers entwined, staring at it with a stricken, empty expression on his face. Maybe the cops didn’t know what they’d found, but Dale did. Dale knew cars, had sold them for twenty years, and he knew this car. He hadn’t just sold it to Ig, he’d helped Ig fix it up and had seen it in his driveway almost every night for six years. Ig could not imagine what Dale saw now, looking over the bridge at the fire-blackened ruin of the Gremlin on the sandbar and believing that his daughter had taken her last drive in it.
There were cars parked along the bridge and on the sides of the road at either end of the span. Dale stood on the eastern tip of the bridge. Ig began to cross the hill, angling through the trees toward the road.
Dale was moving, too. For a long time, he had simply been standing there staring at the burned-out shell of the Gremlin, the water pouring off it. What finally broke him out of his trance was the sight of a cop-it was Sturtz-coming up the hill to provide some crowd control. Dale began to squeeze by the other onlookers, making his slow water-buffalo way off the bridge.
As Ig reached the verge of the road, he spotted Dale’s ride, a blue BMW station wagon; Ig knew it was his by the dealer plates. It was parked in the gravel breakdown lane, in the shadow of a stand of pines. Ig stepped briskly from the woods and climbed into the back, shut the door behind him, and sat there with his pitchfork across his knees.
The rear windows were tinted, but it hardly mattered. Dale was in a hurry and didn’t glance into the backseat. Ig understood he might not want to be seen hanging around. If you made a list of the people in Gideon who would most want to see Ig Perrish burned alive, Dale would definitely be in the top five. The car salesman opened the door and dropped behind the wheel.
He took his glasses off with one hand, covered his eyes with the other. For a while he just sat there, his breathing ragged and soft. Ig waited, not wanting to interrupt.
There were pictures taped to the dash. One was of Jesus, an oil painting, Jesus with his golden beard and his swept-back golden hair, staring, in an inspired sort of way, into the sky while shafts of golden light broke through the clouds behind him. “Blessed are they that mourn,” read the caption, “for they shall be comforted.” Taped next to it was a picture of Merrin at ten, sitting behind her father on the back of his motorcycle. She wore aviator goggles and a white helmet with red stars and blue racing lines on it, and her arms were around him. A handsome woman with cherry-red hair stood behind the bike, one hand on Merrin’s helmet, smiling for the camera. At first Ig thought it was Merrin’s mother, then realized she was too young and that it had to be Merrin’s sister, the one who’d died when they lived in Rhode Island. Two daughters, both gone. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up. That wasn’t in the Bible, but maybe it should’ve been.
When Dale regained control of himself, he reached for the keys and started the car, pulled out onto the road with a last sidelong glance in the driver’s-side mirror. He swiped at his cheeks with his wrists, stuck his glasses back on his face. He drove for a while. Then he kissed his thumb and touched it to the little girl in the photo of the motorcycle.
“That was his car, Mary,” he said, his name for Merrin. “All burned up. I think he’s gone. I think the bad man is gone.”
Ig put one hand on the driver’s seat and the other on the passenger seat and hoisted himself between them, sliding up front to sit next to Dale.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Ig said. “Only the good die young, I’m afraid.”
As Ig climbed forward into view, Dale made a gobbling noise of fright and jerked at the wheel. They swerved hard to the right, into the gravel breakdown lane. Ig fell hard against the dash and almost crashed to the floor. He could hear rocks clanging and bashing against the undercarriage. Then the car was in park and Dale was out of it and running up the road, running and screaming.
Ig pushed himself up. He couldn’t make sense of it. No one else screamed and ran when they saw the horns. Sometimes they wanted to kill him, but no one screamed and ran.
Dale reeled up the center of the road, looking back over his shoulder at the station wagon and uttering vaguely birdlike cries. A woman in a Sentra blasted her horn at him as she blew by-Get the hell out of the road. Dale staggered to the edge of the highway, a thin strip of dirt crumbling off into a weedy ditch. The earth gave way under Dale’s right foot, and he went tumbling down.
Ig got behind the wheel and rolled slowly after him.
He pulled alongside as Dale rose unsteadily to his feet. Dale began to run once again, in the ditch now. Ig pressed the button to lower the passenger-side window and leaned across the seat to call out to him.
“Mr. Williams,” Ig said, “get in the car.”
Dale didn’t slow down but ran on, gasping for breath, clutching at his heart. Sweat gleamed on his jowls. There was a split in the back of his pants.
“Get away!” Dale cried, his words blurring together. Geddway. “Gedawayalp!” He said it twice more before Ig realized that “alp” was panic-ese for “help.”
Ig looked blankly at the picture of Christ taped to the dash, as if hoping Big J might have some advice for him, which was when he remembered the cross. He looked down at it, hanging between his clavicles, resting lightly on his bare chest. Lee had not been able to see the horns while he wore the cross; it stood to reason that if Ig was wearing the cross, no one could see them or feel their effects, an astonishing proposition, a cure for his condition. To Dale Williams, Ig was himself: the sex murderer who had bashed his daughter’s head in with a rock and who had just climbed out of the backseat in a skirt, armed with a pitchfork. The golden cross looped about Ig’s throat was his own humanity, burning brightly in the morning light.
But his humanity was of no use to him, not in this situation or any other. It had been of no use to him since the night Merrin was taken. Was, in fact, a weakness. Now that he was used to it, he far preferred being a demon. The cross was a symbol of that most human condition: suffering. And Ig was sick of suffering. If someone had to get nailed to a tree, he wanted to be the one holding the hammer. He pulled over, unclasped the cross, and put it in the glove compartment. Then he sat up straight behind the wheel again.
He sped up to get ahead of Dale, then stopped the car. He reached behind him and awkwardly lifted the pitchfork from the back and got out. Dale was just stumbling past, down in the ditch, up to his ankles in muddy water. Ig took two steps after him and threw the pitchfork. It hit the marshy water in front of him, and Dale shrieked. He tried to go back too quickly and sat down with a great splash. He paddled about, scrambling to find his feet. The pole of the pitchfork stood straight up from the shallow water, shivering from the force of its impact.
Ig slid down the embankment, with all the grace of a snake greasing its way through wet leaves, and grabbed the pitchfork before Dale could stand. He jerked it free from the mud and pointed the business end at him. There was a crawfish stuck to one of the tines, writhing in its death throes.
“Enough running. Get in the car. We have a lot to talk about.”
Dale sat breathing strenuously in the muck. He looked up the shaft of the pitchfork and squinted into Ig’s face. He shaded his eyes with one hand. “You got rid of your hair.” Paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And grew horns. Jesus. What are you?”
“What’s it look like?” Ig asked. “Devil in a blue dress.”
I KNEW IT WAS YOUR CAR right away,” Dale said, behind the wheel and driving again. He was calm now, at peace with his own private demon. “Soon as I looked at it, I knew someone had set fire to it and pushed it into the river. And I thought you were probably in it at the time, and I felt…felt so…”
“Happy?”
“Sorry. I felt sorry.”
“Really?”
“That I wasn’t the one who did it.”
“Ah,” Ig said, looking away.
Ig held the pitchfork between his knees, the tines sticking into the fabric of the roof, but after they’d been driving for a bit, Dale seemed to forget about it. The horns were doing what they did, playing their secret music, and as long as Ig wasn’t wearing the cross, Dale was helpless not to dance along.
“I was too scared to kill you. I had a gun. I bought it just to shoot you. But the closest I ever came to killing anyone with it was myself. I put it in my mouth one night to see how it tasted.” He was silent briefly, remembering, then added, “It tasted bad.”
“I’m glad you didn’t shoot yourself, Mr. Williams.”
“I was scared to do that, too. Not because I’m afraid I’ll go to hell for committing suicide. It’s because I’m afraid I won’t go to hell…that there isn’t a hell to go to. No heaven either. Just nothing. Mostly I think there must be nothing after we die. Sometimes that seems like it would be a relief. Other times it’s the most awful thing I can imagine. I don’t believe a merciful God would’ve taken both my little girls from me. One from the cancer and the other killed out in the woods that way. I don’t think a God worth praying to would’ve put either of them through what they went through. Heidi still prays. She prays like you wouldn’t believe. She’s been praying for you to die, Ig, for a year now. When I saw your car in the river I thought…I thought…well. God finally came through on something. But no. No, Mary is gone forever, and you’re still here. You’re still here. You’re…you’re…the fucking devil.” Panting for breath. Struggling to go on.
“You make that sound like a bad thing,” Ig said. “Turn left. Let’s go to your house.”
The trees growing alongside the road delineated an avenue of bright and cloudless blue sky. It was a nice day for a drive.
“You said we have things to discuss,” Dale said. “But what could we possibly have to talk about, Ig? What did you want to tell me?”
“I wanted to tell you that I don’t know if I loved Merrin as much as you did, but I loved her as much as I knew how. And I didn’t kill her. The story I told the police, about passing out drunk behind Dunkin’ Donuts, was true. Lee Tourneau picked Merrin up from in front of The Pit. He drove her to the foundry. He killed her there.” After a beat, Ig added, “I don’t expect you to believe me.” Except: He did. Maybe not right away, but soon enough. Ig was very persuasive these days. People would believe almost any awful thing their private devil told them. In this case it was true, but Ig suspected that if he wanted to, he could probably convince Dale that Merrin had been killed by clowns who had picked her up from The Pit in their teeny-tiny clown car. It wasn’t fair. But then, fighting fair was what the old Ig did.
However, Dale surprised him, said, “Why should I believe you? Give me a reason.”
Ig reached over and put his hand on Dale’s bare forearm for a moment, then took it away.
“I know that after your father died, you visited his mistress in Lowell and paid her two thousand dollars to go away. And you warned her if she ever called your mother drunk again, you’d go looking for her, and when you found her, you’d knock her teeth in. I know you had a one-night stand with a secretary at the dealership, at the Christmas party, the year before Merrin died. I know you once belted Merrin in the mouth for calling her mother a bitch. That’s probably the thing in your life you feel worst about. I know you haven’t loved your wife for going on ten years. I know about the bottle in the bottom left-hand desk drawer at work, and the skin magazines at home in the garage, and the brother you don’t talk to because you can’t stand that his children are alive and yours are dead and-”
“Stop. Stop it.”
“I know about Lee the same way I know about you,” Ig said. “When I touch people, I know things. Stuff I shouldn’t know. And people tell me things. Talk about the things they want to do. They can’t help themselves.”
“The bad things,” Dale said, rubbing two fingers against his right temple, stroking it gently. “Only they don’t seem so bad when I look at you. They seem like they might be…fun. Like I’ve been thinking how when Heidi gets on her knees to pray tonight, I ought to sit on the bed in front of her and tell her to blow me while she’s down there. Or the next time she tells me God doesn’t give anyone burdens they can’t bear, I could slug her one. Hit her again and again until that bright look of faith goes out of her eyes.”
“No. You aren’t going to do that.”
“Or it might be good to skip work this afternoon. Lie down for an hour or two in the dark.”
“That’s better.”
“Have a nap and then put the gun in my mouth and be done with this hurt.”
“No. You aren’t going to do that either.”
Dale sighed tremulously and turned in to his driveway. The Williamses owned a ranch on a street of identically dismal ranches, one-story boxes with a square of yard in back and a smaller square in front. Theirs was the pale, pasty green of some hospital rooms, and it looked worse than Ig remembered it. The vinyl siding was mottled with brown splotches of mildew where it met the concrete foundation, and the windows were dusty, and the lawn was a week overdue for a mow. The street baked in the summery heat, and nothing moved on it, and the sound of a dog barking down the road was the sound of heatstroke, of migraines, of the indolent, overheated summer staggering to its end. Ig had hoped, perversely, to see Merrin’s mother, to find out what secrets she hid, but Heidi wasn’t home. No one on the whole street seemed to be home.
“What about if I blow off work and see if I can get shitfaced by noon? See if I can’t get myself fired. I haven’t sold a car in six weeks-they’re just looking for a reason. They only keep me on out of pity as it is.”
“There,” Ig said. “Now, that’s what I call a plan.”
Dale led him inside. Ig didn’t bring the pitchfork, didn’t think he needed it now.
“Iggy, would you pour me a drink out of the liquor cabinet? I know you know where it is. You and Mary used to sneak drinks out of it. I want to sit in the dark and rest my head. My head is all woffly inside.”
The master bedroom was at the end of a short hall done in chocolate shag carpeting. There had been pictures of Merrin along the whole corridor, but they were gone now. There were pictures of Jesus there instead. Ig was angry for the first time all day.
“Why did you take her down and put Him up?”
“Those were Heidi’s idea. She took Mary’s photos away.” Dale kicked off his black loafers as he wandered down the hall. “Three months ago she packed up all of Mary’s books, her clothes, her letters from you, and shoved them in the attic. Merrin’s bedroom is her home office now. She works in there stuffing envelopes for Christian causes. She spends more time with Father Mould than she does with me, goes to the church every morning and all day Sunday. She’s got a picture of Jesus on her desk. She doesn’t have a picture of me or either of her dead daughters, but she has a picture of Jesus. I want to chase her out of the house, shouting her daughters’ names at her. You know what? You should go up in the attic and get down the box. I’d like to dig out all Mary’s and Regan’s photos. I could throw them at Heidi until she starts to cry. I could tell her if she wants to get rid of our daughters’ pictures, she’s going to have to eat them. One at a time.”
“Sounds like a lot of work for a hot afternoon.”
“It would be fun. Be a hell of a good time.”
“But not as refreshing as a gin and tonic.”
“No,” Dale said, standing now at the threshold of his bedroom. “You get it for me, Ig. Make it stiff.”
Ig returned to the den, a room that had once been a gallery on the subject of Merrin Williams’s childhood, filled with photographs of her: Merrin in war paints and skins, Merrin riding her bike and grinning to show a mouthful of chrome wire, Merrin in a one-piece swimsuit and sitting on Ig’s shoulders, Ig up to his waist in the Knowles River. They were all gone now, and it looked as if the room had been furnished by a real-estate agent in the most banal fashion possible, for a Sunday-morning open house. As if no one lived here anymore.
No one lived here anymore. No one had lived here in months. It was just a place Dale and Heidi Williams stored their things, as detached from their interior lives as a hotel room.
The liquor was where it had always been, though, in the cabinets above the TV set. Ig mixed Dale a gin and tonic, using tonic water from the fridge in the kitchen, throwing in a sprig of mint, cutting a section of orange, too, and pushing it down into the ice. On the way back to the bedroom, though, a rope hanging from the ceiling brushed against Ig’s right horn, threatened to snag there. Ig looked up and-
– there it was, in the branches of the tree above him, the bottom of the tree house, words painted on the trap, the whitewash faintly visible in the night: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN. Ig swayed, then-
– shook off an unexpected wave of dizziness. He used his free hand to massage his brow, waiting for his head to clear, for the sick feeling to abate. For a moment it was there, what had happened in the woods when he went drunk to the foundry to rave and wreck shit, but it was gone now. Ig put the glass down on the carpet and pulled the string, lowering a trapdoor to the attic with a loud shriek of springs.
If it was hot in the streets, it was suffocating in the low, unfinished attic. Some plywood had been laid across the beams to make a rudimentary floor. There was not enough headroom to stand under the steep pitch of the roof, and Ig didn’t need to. Three big cardboard boxes with the word MERRIN written on their sides in red Sharpie had been pushed just to the left of the open trap.
He carried them down one at a time, set them on the coffee table in the living room, and went through them. He drank Dale Williams’s gin and tonic while he explored what Merrin had left behind when she died.
Ig smelled her Harvard hoodie and the ass of her favorite jeans. He went through her books, her piles of used paperbacks. Ig rarely read novels, had always liked nonfiction about fasting, irrigation, travel, camping, and building structures out of recycled materials. But Merrin preferred fiction, high-end book-club stuff. She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives, or who at least were English. She wanted a novel to be an emotional and philosophical journey and also to teach her some new vocabulary words.
She read Gabriel García Márquez and Michael Chabon and John Fowles and Ian McEwan. One book fell open in Ig’s hands to an underlined passage: “How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.” And then another, a different book: “It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.” Ig stopped flipping through her paperbacks. They were making him uneasy.
Some of his books were mixed in with hers, books he had not seen in years. A guide to statistics. The Camper’s Cookbook. Reptiles of New England. He drank the rest of his gin and thumbed through Reptiles. About a hundred pages in, he found a picture of the brown snake with the rattle and the orange stripe down the back. She was Crotalus horridus, a pit viper, and although her range was largely south of the New Hampshire border-she was common to Pennsylvania-she could be found as far north as the White Mountains. They rarely attacked humans, were shy by nature. More people had been killed in the last year by lightning than had died in the whole last century from run-ins with horridus; yet for all that, its venom was accounted the most dangerous of any American snake, neurotoxic, known to paralyze lungs and heart. He put the book back.
Merrin’s medical texts and ring-binder notebooks were piled in the bottom of the box. Ig opened one, then another, grazing. She kept notes in pencil, and her careful, not-particularly-girlish cursive was smeared and fading. Definitions of chemical compounds. A hand-drawn cross section of a breast. A list of apartments in London-flats-that she had found online for Ig. At the very bottom of the box was a large manila envelope. Ig almost didn’t bother with it, then hesitated, squinting at some pencil marks in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. Some dots. Some dashes.
He opened the envelope and slid out a mammogram, a blue-and-white teardrop of tissue. The date was sometime in June last year. There were papers, too, ruled notebook papers. Ig saw his name on them. They were penciled all over in dots and dashes. He slid the papers and the mammogram back into the envelope.
He made a second gin and tonic and walked it down the hall. When he let himself into the bedroom, Dale was passed out on the covers, in black socks pulled almost to his knees and white jockey shorts with pee stains on the front. The rest of him was a stark white expanse of male flesh, his belly and chest matted in dark fur. Ig crept to the side of the bed to set down the drink. Dale stirred at the clink of the ice cubes.
“Oh. Ig,” Dale said. “Hello. Would you believe I forgot you were here for a minute?”
Ig didn’t reply. He stood by the bed with the manila envelope. He said, “She had cancer?”
Dale turned his face away. “I don’t want to talk about Mary,” Dale said. “I love her, but I can’t stand to think about her and…and any of it. My brother, you know, we haven’t spoken in years. But he owns a bike and Jet Ski dealership in Sarasota. Sometimes I think I could go down there and sell his bikes for him and look at girls on the beach. He still sends me Christmas cards asking me to visit. I think sometimes I’d like to get away from Heidi, and this town, and this awful house, and how bad I feel about my shitty, fucked-up life, and start all over again. If there’s no God and no reason for all this pain, then maybe I should start again before it’s too late.”
“Dale,” Ig said softly. “Did she tell you she had cancer?”
He shook his head, without lifting it from the pillow. “It’s one of these genetic things, you know. Runs in families. And we didn’t learn about it from her. We didn’t know about it at all until after she was dead. The medical examiner told us.”
“There was nothing in the paper about her having cancer,” Ig said.
“Heidi wanted them to put it in the paper. She thought it would create sympathy and make people hate you more. But I said Mary didn’t want anyone to know and we should respect that. She didn’t tell us. Did she tell you?”
“No,” Ig said. What she told him instead was that they should see other people. Ig had not read the two-page note in the envelope but thought he already understood. He said, “Your older daughter. Regan. I’ve never talked to you about her. I didn’t think it was my business. But I know it was hard losing her.”
“She was in so much pain,” Dale said. His next breath shuddered strangely. “It made her say awful things. I know she didn’t mean a lot of it. She was such a good person. Such a beautiful girl. I try to remember that, but mostly…mostly I remember how she was at the end. She was barely eighty pounds, and seventy pounds of that was hate. She said unforgivable things to Mary, you know. I think she was mad because Mary was so pretty, and-Regan lost her hair, and there was, you know, a mastectomy and a surgery to remove a block on her intestines, and she felt…she felt like Frankenstein, like something from a horror movie. She told us if we loved her, we’d put a pillow over her face and get it done. She told me I was probably glad it was her dying and not Merrin, because I always liked Merrin better. I try to put it all out of my mind, but I wake up some nights thinking about it. Or thinking about how Mary died. You want to remember how they lived, but the bad stuff kind of crowds out the rest. There’s probably some sound psychological reason for that. Mary took courses in psychology, she would’ve known why the bad stuff leaves a deeper mark than the good stuff. Hey, Ig. You believe my little girl got into Harvard?”
“Yes,” Ig said. “I believe it. She was smarter than you and me put together.”
Dale snorted, face still turned away. “Don’t you know it. I went to a two-year college, all my old man would pay for. God, I wanted to be a better father than he was. He told me what classes I could take and where I could live and what I’d do for work after I graduated to pay him back. I used to say to Heidi I’m surprised he didn’t stand in my bedroom on our wedding night and instruct me in the approved method of screwing her.” He smiled, remembering. “That was back when Heidi and I could joke about those kinds of things. Heidi had a funny, dirty streak before she got a head full of Christ. Before the world stuck its taps in her and drained out all the blood. Sometimes I want so bad to leave her, but she doesn’t have anyone else. She’s all alone…except for Jesus, I guess.”
“Oh. I don’t know about that,” Ig said, and let out a slow, seething breath, thinking about how Heidi Williams had pulled down all Merrin’s pictures, had tried to shove her daughter’s memory up away into dust and darkness. “You should drop in on her some morning when she’s working for Father Mould at the church. As a surprise. I think you’ll find she has a much more active…intercourse with life than you give her credit for.”
Dale flicked a questioning look at him, but Ig remained poker-faced and said no more. Finally Dale offered a thin smile and said, “You should’ve shaved your head years ago, Ig. Looks good. I used to want to do that, go bald, but Heidi always said if I ever did it, I could consider our marriage over. She wouldn’t even let me shave it to show my support for Regan, after Regan had chemo. Some families do that. To show they’re all in it together. Not our family, though.” He frowned and said, “How did we get off on this? What were we talking about?”
“When you went to college.”
“Yeah. Well. My father wouldn’t let me take the theology course I wanted, but he couldn’t stop me from auditing it. I remember the teacher, a black woman, Professor Tandy, she said that Satan turns up in a lot of other religions as the good guy. He’s usually the guy who tricks the fertility goddess into bed, and after a bit of fiddling around they bring the world into being. Or the crops. Something. He comes into the story to bamboozle the unworthy or tempt them into ruination, or at least out of their liquor. Even Christians can’t really decide what to do with him. I mean, think about it. Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren’t they working the same side of the street? Aren’t the judge and the executioner on the same team? The Romantics. I think the Romantics liked Satan. I don’t really remember why. Maybe because he had a good beard and was into girls and sex and knew how to throw a party. Didn’t the Romantics like Satan?”
“Yer whisperin’ in my ear,” Ig whispered. “Tell me all the things I wanna hear.”
Dale laughed again. “No. Not those Romantics.”
Ig said, “They’re the only ones I know.”
He eased the door gently shut on his way out.
IG SAT AT THE BOTTOM of the chimney, in a circle of hot afternoon light, holding the glossy mammogram of Merrin’s breast over his head. Lit from behind by the August sky, the tissues within looked like a black sun, going nova, looked like the End of Days, and the sky was as sackcloth. The devil turned to his Bible: not to the Old Testament, nor to the New, but to the back page, where years before he had copied the key to the Morse-code alphabet from his brother’s encyclopedias. Even before he translated the papers within the envelope, he knew they were a testament of a different sort: a final one. Merrin’s final testament.
He started with the dots and dashes on the front of the package, a simple enough sequence. It spelled FUCK OFF, IG.
He laughed-a dirty, convulsive shout of crowlike amusement.
He slipped out the two pages of notebook paper, covered in dots and dashes, both sides, the labor of months, of an entire summer. Working with his Bible, Ig set to translating them, occasionally fingering the cross around his neck, Merrin’s cross. He had put it back on as soon as he left Dale’s. It made him feel she was with him, was close enough to lay her cool fingers on the nape of his neck.
It was slow work, converting those lines of dots and dashes to letters and words. He didn’t care. The devil had nothing but time.
Dear Ig,
You will never read this while I’m alive. I’m not sure I want you to read it even if I’m dead.
Whoo, this is slow writing. I guess I don’t mind. It passes the time when I’m stuck in a lobby somewhere waiting on the result of this or that test. Also forces me to say just what needs to be said and no more.
The sort of cancer I have is the same that struck my sister down, a sort known to run in families. I won’t bore you with the genetics. It is not advanced yet, and I’m sure if you knew, you would want me to fight. I know I should, but I’m not going to. I have made up my mind not to go like my sister. Not to wait until I’m filled with ugliness, not to hurt the people I love and who have loved me, and that is you, Ig, and my parents.
The Bible says suicides go to hell, but hell is what my sister went through when she was dying. You don’t know this, but my sister was engaged when she was diagnosed. Her fiancé left her months before she died. She drove him away, one day at a time. She wanted to know how long he’d wait after she was buried to fuck someone else. She wanted to know if he’d use her tragedy to win sympathy from girls. She was horrible. I would’ve left her.
I’d just as soon skip all that, thanks. But I don’t know how to do it yet, how to die. I wish God would find a way to do it to me all at once, when I’m not expecting it. Put me in an elevator and then have the cable snap. Twenty seconds of flight and it’s over. Maybe as a bonus I could fall on someone bad. Like a child-molesting elevator repairman or something. That would be all right.
I’m afraid if I tell you I’m sick, you will give up your future and ask to marry me, and I will be weak and say yes, and then you’ll be shackled to me, watching while they cut pieces off and I shrink and go bald and put you through hell, and then I die anyway and ruin what was best in you in the process. You want so much to believe that the world is good, Ig, that people are good. And I know when I’m really sick I won’t be able to be good. I will be like my sister. I have that in me, I know how to hurt people, and I might not be able to help myself. I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.
You don’t know how hard it is not to talk about these things with you. That’s the reason I’m writing this, I guess. Because I need to talk to you, and this is the only way. A bit of a one-sided conversation, though, huh?
You’re so excited to go to England, to be up to your neck in the world. Remember that story you told me about the Evel Knievel trail and the shopping cart? That’s you every day. Ready to fly bare-naked down the steep pitch of your own life and be flung into the human stream. Save people drowning in unfairness.
I can hurt you just enough to push you away. I’m not looking forward to it, but it will be kinder than letting this thing play itself out.
I want you to find some girl with a trashy Cockney accent and take her back to your flat and screw her out of her knickers. Someone cute and immoral and literary. Not as pretty as me, I’m not that generous, but it’s okay if she’s not terrible-looking. Then I’m hoping she will callously dump you and you will move on to someone else. Someone better. Someone earnest and caring and with no family history of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, or any other bad stuff. I also hope by then I am long dead so I don’t have to know anything about her.
You know how I want to die? On the Evel Knievel trail, roaring down it on a cart of my own. I could close my eyes and imagine your arms around me. Then go right into a tree. She never knew what hit her. That’s how. I would like very much to believe in a Gospel of Mick and Keith, where I can’t get what I want-which is you, Ig, and our children, and our ridiculous daydreams-but at least get what I need, which is a quick, sudden ending and the knowledge that you got away clean.
And you will have some stout and kindly mother-wife to give you children, and you will be a wonderful, happy, energetic father. You will see all of the world, every corner of it, and you will see pain, and you will ease some of it. You will have grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. You will teach. You will go for long walks in the woods. On one of these walks, when you are very old, you will find yourself at a tree with a house in its branches. I will be waiting for you there. I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.
This is a lot of lines and dots. Two months of work, right here. When I started writing, the cancer was a pea in one breast and less than a pea in my left armpit. Now, wrapping up, it’s…well. From small things, Mama, big things one day come.
I’m not sure I really needed to write so much. Probably could’ve saved myself a lot of effort and just copied out the first message I ever sent you, flashing you with my cross. US. That says most of it. Here’s the rest: I love you, Iggy Perrish.
Your girl, Merrin Williams
AFTER HE HAD READ MERRIN’S final message, and set it aside, and read it again, and set it aside once more, Ig climbed out of his chimney, wanted to be away from the smell of cinder and ash for a while. He stood in the room beyond, breathing deeply of the late-afternoon air, before it came to him that the snakes had not gathered. He was alone in the foundry, or almost. A single snake, the pit viper, lay coiled in the wheelbarrow, sleeping in fat loops of herself. He was tempted to go close and stroke her head, even took a single step toward her, then stopped. Better not, he thought, and looked down at the cross around his neck, then shifted his gaze to stare at his shadow climbing the wall in the last of the day’s red light. He saw the shadow of a man, long and skinny. He still felt the horns at his temples, felt the weight of them, the points slicing into the cooling air, but his shadow showed just himself. If he walked to the snake now, with Merrin’s cross around his throat, he thought there was a good chance she would bury her fangs in him.
He considered the black length of his shadow, climbing the brick wall, and understood that he could go home if he liked. With the cross about his throat, his humanity was his again, if he wanted it. He could put the last two days behind him, a nightmare time of sickness and panic, and be who he had always been. The thought brought with it an almost painful sense of relief, was an almost sensual pleasure: to be Ig Perrish and not the devil, to be a man and not a walking furnace.
He was still thinking it over when the serpent in the wheelbarrow lifted her head, white lights washing over her. Someone was coming up the road. Ig’s first thought was Lee, coming back to look for his lost cross and any other incriminating evidence he might’ve left behind.
But as the car rolled up in front of the foundry, he recognized it as Glenna’s battered emerald Saturn. He could see it through the doorway that opened on a six-foot drop. She climbed out, trailing veils of smoke behind her. She pitched her cigarette into the grass and ground it out with her toe. She had quit twice in the time Ig had been with her-once for as long as a week.
Ig watched her from the windows while she made her way around the building. She had on too much makeup. She always had on too much makeup. Black cherry lipstick and a big hair perm and eye shadow and shiny pink paste-ons. She didn’t want to go inside, Ig could tell from the look on her face. Beneath her painted mask, she looked afraid and miserable and pretty in a plain, forlorn sort of way. She wore tight, low-riding black jeans that showed the crack of her ass, and a studded belt and a white halter, which bared her soft belly and exposed the tattoo on her hip, the Playboy Bunny rabbit head. It hurt Ig, looking at her and seeing how it was all put together in a kind of desperate plea: Want me, somebody want me.
“Ig?” she called. “Iggy! Are you in there? Are you around?” She cupped a hand to her mouth to amplify her voice.
He didn’t reply, and she dropped the hand.
Ig went from window to window, watching her stride through the weeds, around to the back of the foundry. The sun was on the other side of the building, the red tip of a cigarette sizzling through the pale curtain of the sky. As she crossed to the Evel Knievel trail, Ig slipped down through an open doorway and circled behind her. He crept through the grass and the day’s dying ember light: one crimson shadow among many. Her back was to him, and she did not see him coming toward her.
Glenna slowed at the top of the trail, seeing the scorch mark on the earth, the blasted place where the soil had been cooked white. The red metal gas can was still there, lying in the undergrowth on its side. Ig crept on, continuing across the field behind her, and into the trees and brush, on the right-hand side of the trail. In the field around the foundry, it was still late afternoon, but under the trees it was already dusk. He played restlessly with the cross, rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, his mind on how to approach Glenna and what he should say to her. What she deserved of him.
She looked at the burn in the dirt and then at the red metal gas can and, finally, down the trail, toward the water. Ig could see her putting the parts together, figuring it out. She was breathing faster now. Her right hand dived into her purse.
“Oh, Ig,” she said. “Oh, goddamn it, Ig.”
The hand came out with her phone.
“Don’t,” Ig said.
She tottered in her heels. Her phone, as pink and smooth as a bar of soap, slipped from her hand, hit the ground, bounced into the grass.
“What the hell are you doing, Ig?” Glenna said, shifting from grief to anger in the time it took to get her balance back. She peered past a screen of blueberry bushes and into the shadows under the trees. “You scared the shit out of me.” She started toward him.
“Stay where you are,” he told her.
“Why don’t you want me to-” she began, then stopped. “Are you wearing a skirt?”
Some faint rose-colored light reached through the branches and fell upon the skirt and his bare stomach. From the chest up, though, he remained in shadow.
The flushed and angry look on her face gave way to a disbelieving smile that did not express amusement so much as fright. “Oh, Ig,” she breathed. “Oh, baby.” She took another step forward, and he held up a hand.
“I don’t want you to come back here.”
She came no closer.
“What brings you to the foundry?”
“You trashed our place,” she said. “Why’d you do that?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say.
She dropped her gaze and bit her lip. “I guess someone told you about me and Lee the other night.” Not recalling, of course, that she had told him herself. She forced herself to look back up. “Ig, I’m sorry. You can hate me if you want. I got that coming, I guess. I just want to be sure you’re okay.” Breathing softly and in a small voice, she said, “Please let me help you.”
Ig shivered. It was almost more than he could bear, to hear another human voice offering to help him, to hear a voice raised in affection and concern. He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago. It amazed him to be talking with Glenna in a perfectly ordinary way, was an ordinary miracle, as simple and fine as a cold glass of lemonade on a hot day. Glenna felt no impulse to blurt her worst and most shameful impulses; her guilty secrets were just that, secrets. He touched the cross about his neck again, Merrin’s cross, enclosing a small, precious circle of humanity.
“How did you know to find me here?”
“I was watching the local news at work, and I saw about the burned-out wreck they found on the sandbar. The TV cameras were too far back, so I couldn’t tell if it was the Gremlin, and the newslady said the police hadn’t confirmed a make or model. But I just had a feeling, a kind of bad feeling. So I called Wyatt Farmer, do you remember Wyatt? He glued a beard on my cousin Gary once when we were kids, see if they couldn’t buy some beer.”
“I remember. Why did you call him?”
“I saw it was Wyatt’s tow truck that pulled the wreck off the sandbar. That’s what he does now. He has his own business in auto repair. I figured he could tell me what kind of car it was. He said it was so toasted they hadn’t figured it out yet, ’cause there was nothing to work from except the frame and the doors, but he thought it was a Hornet or a Gremlin, and he was thinking Gremlin because they’re more common these days. And I thought, oh, no, someone burned your car. Then I thought what if you were in it when it caught on fire. I thought what if you went and burned yourself up. I knew if you did it, you would’ve done it out here. To be close to her.” She gave him another shy, frightened look. “I get why you trashed our place-”
“Your place. It was never ours.”
“I tried to make it ours.”
“I know. I think you tried your best. I didn’t.”
“Why’d you burn your car? Why are you out here, wearing…that?” Her hands were balled into fists pressed into her bosom. She fought for a smile. “Aw, baby. You look like you’ve been through hell on earth.”
“You could say that.”
“Come on. Come get in my car, Ig. We’ll go back to the apartment and get you out of that skirt and get you cleaned up, and you’ll be yourself again.”
“And we’ll go back to the way things were before?”
“Yes. Just like the way things were before,” she said.
That was the problem right there. With the cross around his neck, he could be his old self again, he could have it all back if he wanted it, but it wasn’t worth having. If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils. Ig reached behind his neck and unclasped Merrin’s cross and hung it from a branch overhead, then shoved aside the bushes and stepped into the light, let her see him for what he was now.
For one moment she quailed. Glenna took a staggering, unsteady step back, a heel sinking into soft earth and turning under her so she nearly twisted her ankle before she recovered. Her mouth opened to scream, a real horror-movie scream, a deep and tortured wail. But the scream didn’t come. Almost immediately her plump, pretty face smoothed itself back out.
“You hated the way things were,” spoke the devil.
“I hated it,” she agreed, and a kind of grief stole over her face again.
“All of it.”
“No,” she said. “There were a couple things I liked. I liked when we’d make love. You’d close your eyes and I’d know you were thinking of her, but I wouldn’t care because I could make you feel good and that was all right. And I liked when we made breakfast together on Saturday mornings, a big breakfast, bacon and eggs and juice, and then we’d watch stupid TV, and you seemed like you’d be happy to sit by me all day. But I hated knowing I’d never matter. I hated we didn’t have a future, and I hated hearing you talk about the funny things she said and the clever things she did. I couldn’t compete. I was never going to be able to compete.”
“Do you really want me to come back to the apartment?”
“I don’t even want to go back. I hate that apartment. I hate living there. I want to go away. I want to start again somewhere else.”
“Where else would you go? Where could you go to be happy?”
“To Lee’s house,” she said, and her face shone, and she smiled in a sweet, surprised way, like a girl catching her first sight of Disney World. “Go in my raincoat with nothing on underneath and give him a real thrill. Lee wants me to come by and see him sometime. He sent me a text message this afternoon saying if you didn’t turn up, we should-”
“No,” Ig said, his voice harsh and black smoke gushing from his nostrils.
She cringed, stepped away.
He inhaled, sucking the smoke back in. Took her arm and turned her in the direction of the car and started walking. The maiden and the devil walked in the furnace light at the end of the day, and the devil admonished her, “You don’t want to have anything to do with him. What’d he ever do for you besides steal you a jacket and treat you like a hooker? You need to tell Lee to fuck off. You need better than him. You have to give less and take more, Glenna.”
“I like to do nice things for people,” she said in a brave little voice, as if embarrassed.
“You’re people, too. Do something nice for yourself.” And as he spoke, he put his will behind the horns and felt a shock of white pleasure pass through the nerves in them. “Besides, look at how you’ve been treated. I wrecked your apartment, you haven’t seen me for days, and then you come out here and find me fagging around in a skirt. Screwing Lee Tourneau won’t pull you even. You need to think bigger than that. You got a little revenge coming to you. Go on home and get the bank card, empty the account, and…give yourself a vacation. Haven’t you ever wanted to take off for a little you time?”
“Wouldn’t that be something?” she said, but her smile faltered after a moment, and she said, “I’d get in trouble. I was in jail once, thirty days. I don’t ever want to go back.”
“No one’s going to bother you. Not after you drove by the foundry and spotted me out here in my little lace skirt, playing the nancy boy. My parents aren’t going to sic a lawyer on you. That’s not the kind of thing they want getting out to the general public. Take my credit card, too. I bet my folks won’t even put a stop on it for a few months. The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better. You deserve something better, Glenna,” Ig said.
They were beside her car. Ig opened the door and held it for her. She looked down at his skirt, then up into his face. She was smiling. She was also crying, big black mascara tears.
“Was that your thing, Ig? Skirts? Is that why we didn’t have us too much fun? If I knew, I would’ve tried to…I dunno, tried to make that work.”
“No,” Ig said. “I’m only wearing this because I didn’t have red tights and a cape.”
“Red tights and a cape?” Her voice was dazed and a little slow.
“Isn’t that what the devil is supposed to wear? Like a superhero costume. In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.”
“Don’t you mean supervillain?”
“Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.”
She laughed-weird, disjointed, confused laughter-and then hiccuped, and the smile faded.
“So where do you think you’ll go?” Ig asked.
“I dunno,” she said. “I always wanted to see New York City. New York City at night. Taxis going by with strange foreign music coming out the windows. People selling those peanuts, the sweet peanuts, on the corners. Don’t they still sell those peanuts in New York?”
“I don’t know if they do anymore. They used to. I haven’t been there since just before Merrin died. Go find out, why don’t you. It’s going to be great. Time of your life.”
“If taking off is so great,” she said, “if getting even with you is so wonderful, why do I feel so shitty?”
“Because you aren’t there yet. You’re still here. And by the time you drive away, all you’re going to remember is you saw me dressed up for the dance in my best blue skirt. Everything else-you’re going to forget.” Putting the weight and force of the horns behind this instruction, pushing the thought deep into her head, a more intimate penetration than anything they had ever done in bed.
She nodded, staring at him with bloodshot, fascinated eyes. “Forget. Okay.” She started to get into the car, then hesitated, looking at him over the door. “First time I ever talked to you was out here. You remember? Bunch of us were cooking a turd. What a thing, huh?”
“Funny,” Ig said. “That’s kind of what I’m planning on this evening. Go on now, Glenna. Rearview mirror.”
She nodded and began to lower herself into the car, then straightened and bent over the door and kissed him on the forehead. He saw some bad things about her he hadn’t known; she had sinned often, always against herself. He was startled and stepped back, the cool touch of her lips still on his brow and the cigarette and peppermint smell of her breath in his nostrils.
“Hey,” he said.
She smiled. “Don’t get hurt out here, Ig. Seems like you can’t spend an afternoon at the foundry without nearly getting yourself killed.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Now that you mention it, it is getting to be something of a habit.”
IG WALKED BACK to the Evel Knievel trail to watch the smoldering coal of the sun sink into the Knowles River and gutter out. Standing there in the tall grass, he heard a curious musical chirrup, insectlike, but no insect he knew. He heard it quite distinctly-the locusts had gone quiet in the dusk. They were dying anyway, the droning machinery of their lust winding down with the end of the summer. The sound came again, to the left, in the weeds.
He crouched to investigate and saw Glenna’s phone in its pink semitransparent shell, lying in the straw-colored grass where she had dropped it. He tugged it from the weeds and flipped it open. There was a text from Lee Tourneau on the Home screen:
WHAT R U WEARING?
Ig twisted his goatee, nervously considering. He still didn’t know if he could do it over a phone, if the influence of the horns could be shot from a radio transmitter and bounced off a satellite. On the other hand, it was a well-known fact that cell phones were tools of the devil.
He selected Lee’s message and pressed CALL.
Lee answered on the second ring. “Just tell me you’ve got on something hot. You don’t even have to be wearing it. I’m great at pretend.”
Ig opened his mouth but spoke in Glenna’s soft, breathless, buttery voice. “I’m wearing a bunch of mud and dirt, is what I’m wearing. I’m in trouble, Lee. I need someone to help me. I got my goddamn car stuck.”
Lee hesitated, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and measured. “Where did you get yourself stuck, lady?”
“Out at the goddamn fuckin’ foundry,” Ig said in Glenna’s voice.
“The foundry? Why are you out there?”
“I came looking for Iggy.”
“Why would you want to do that? Glenna, that wasn’t thinking. You know how unstable he is.”
“I know it, but I can’t help it, I’m worried about him. His family is worried, too. There isn’t anyone knows where he’s at, and he missed his grandma’s birthday, and he won’t answer his phone. He could be dead for all anyone knows. I can’t stand it, and I hate thinking he’s messed up and it’s my fault. It’s part your fault, too, you shithead.”
He laughed. “Well. Probably. But I still don’t know why you’d be out at the foundry.”
“He likes to go out here this time of year, ’cause of this is where she died. So I thought I’d poke around, and I drove up, and got the car stuck, and of course Iggy isn’t anywhere around. You were nice enough to give me a ride home the other night. Treat a lady twice?”
He paused for a moment. Then he said, “Have you called anyone else?”
“You were the first person I thought of,” Ig said in Glenna’s voice. “Come on. Don’t make me beg. My clothes are all muddy, and I need to get out of them and wash off.”
“Sure,” he said. “All right. As long as I can watch you. Wash off, I mean.”
“That depends how fast you get here. I’m sittin’ inside the foundry waitin’ on you. You’ll make fun of me when you see where I got my car stuck. When you get out here, you’re going to absolutely die.”
“I can’t wait,” he said.
“Hurry up. It’s kind of creepy out here by myself.”
“I bet. No one out there but the ghosts. You hold on. I’m coming for you.”
Ig hung up without saying good-bye. Then he crouched for a while, over the scorch mark on the top of the Evel Knievel trail. The sun had gone down while he wasn’t paying attention. The sky was a deep, plummy shade of purple, the first stars lighting it in pinpricks. He rose at last to walk back to the foundry and get ready for Lee. He stopped and collected Merrin’s cross from where he’d hung it in the branches of the oak. He grabbed the red metal gas tank, too. It was still about a quarter full.
HE FIGURED LEE WOULD NEED at least half an hour to get there, more if he was coming all the way from Portsmouth. It didn’t feel like a lot of time. Ig was just as glad. The longer he had to think about what he needed to do, the less likely he was to do it.
Ig had come around to the front of the foundry and was about to hoist himself up through the open door into the great room when he heard a car thudding in the rutted road behind him. Adrenaline came up in an icy rush, filling him with its chill. Things were moving fast, but they couldn’t be going that fast, not unless Lee had already been in his car when Ig called, and driving out this way for some reason. Only it wasn’t Lee’s big red Caddy, it was a black Mercedes, and for some reason Terry Perrish was behind the wheel.
Ig sank into the grass, set the quarter-full gas can down against the wall. He was so unprepared for the sight of his brother-here, now-that it was hard to accept what he was seeing. His brother couldn’t be here because by now Terry’s plane was on the ground in California, and Terry was out in the semitropical heat and Pacific sunlight of L.A. Ig had told him to go, to give in to what he wanted to do most anyway-which was cut and run-and that should’ve been enough.
The car turned and slowed as it approached the building, creeping along through the high, wiry grass. The sight of Terry infuriated and alarmed Ig. His brother didn’t belong here, and there was hardly any time to get rid of him.
Ig scampered along the concrete foundation, staying low. He reached the corner of the foundry as the Mercedes crunched by, quickened his pace, and grabbed the passenger-side door. He popped it open and leaped in.
Terry looked at him and screamed and fell back against the driver’s-side door, hand fumbling for the latch. Then he recognized Ig and stopped himself.
“Ig,” he panted. “What are you-” His gaze dropped to the filthy skirt, then rose to his face. “What the fuck did you do to yourself?”
Ig didn’t understand at first, couldn’t make sense of Terry’s shock. Then he felt the cross, still clasped in his right hand, the chain wound around his fingers. He was holding the cross, and it was muting the horns. Terry was seeing Ig for himself, for the first time since he’d come home. The Mercedes jostled along through the high summer weeds.
“Want to stop the car, Terry?” Ig said. “Before we go down Evel Knievel trail and into the river?”
Terry’s foot found the brake, and he brought the car to a halt.
The two brothers sat together in the front seat. Terry’s breath came fast and quick through his open mouth. For a long moment, he gaped at Ig, his face vacant and baffled. Then he laughed. It was shaky, horrified laughter, but with it came a nervous twitch of the lips that was almost a smile.
“Ig. What are you doing out here…like this?”
“That’s my question. What are you doing out here? You had a flight today.”
“How do you-”
“You need to get away from here, Terry. We don’t have a lot of time.” As he spoke, he looked into the rearview mirror, checking the road. Lee Tourneau would be coming any minute.
“Time before what? What’s going to happen?” Terry hesitated, then said, “What’s with the skirt?”
“You, of all people, ought to know a Motown reference when you see it, Terry.”
“Motown? You aren’t making sense.”
“Sure I am. I’m telling you that you need to get the fuck out of here. What could make more sense than that? You are the wrong person in the wrong place at the exact wrong time, Terry.”
“What are you talking about? You’re scaring me. What’s going to happen? Why do you keep looking in the rearview mirror?”
“I’m expecting someone.”
“Who?”
“Lee Tourneau.”
Terry blanched. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Why?”
“You know why.”
“Oh,” Terry said again. “You know. How…how much?”
“All of it. That you were in the car. That you passed out. That he fixed it so you couldn’t tell.”
Terry’s hands were on the steering wheel, his thumbs moving up and down, his knuckles white. “All of it. How do you know he’s on his way?”
“I know.”
“You’re going to kill him,” Terry said. It wasn’t a question.
“Obviously.”
Terry considered Ig’s skirt, his grimy bare feet, his reddened skin, which might just have been a particularly bad sunburn. He said, “Let’s go home, Ig. Let’s go home and talk about this. Mom and Dad are worried about you. Let’s go home so they can see you’re all right, and then we’ll all talk. We’ll figure things out.”
“My figuring is done,” Ig said. “You should’ve left. I told you to leave.”
Terry shook his head. “What do you mean, you told me to leave? I haven’t seen you the whole time I’ve been home. We haven’t talked at all.”
Ig looked in the rearview and saw headlights. He twisted around in the seat and stared through the back window. A car was passing out on the highway, on the other side of that thin strip of forest between the foundry and the road. The headlights blinked between the trunks of the trees in a rapid staccato, a shutter being opened and closed, blink-blink-blink, sending a message: Hurry, hurry. The car went past without turning in, but it was a matter of minutes until a car came that would not pass but instead would swing up the gravel road and head their way. Ig’s gaze dropped, and he saw a suitcase on the backseat and Terry’s trumpet case beside it.
“You packed,” Ig said. “You must’ve planned to go. Why didn’t you?”
“I did,” Terry said.
Ig sat up and looked a question at him.
Terry shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Later.”
“Tell me now. What do you mean? If you left town, how come you’re back?”
Terry gave him a bright and blank-eyed look. After a moment he began to speak, careful and slow. “It doesn’t make sense, okay?”
“No. It doesn’t make sense to me either. That’s why I want you to tell me.”
Terry’s tongue darted out and touched his dry lips. When he spoke, his voice was calm but a little rushed. He said, “I decided I was going back to L.A. Getting out of the mental ward. Dad was pissed at me. Vera’s in the hospital, and no one knows where you’ve been. But I just got it in my head that I wasn’t doing any good in Gideon and that I needed to go, get back to L.A., get busy with rehearsals. Dad told me he couldn’t imagine anything more selfish than me taking off with things like they are. I knew he was right, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. It just felt good driving away.
“Except the farther I got from Gideon, the less good I felt. I’d be listening to the radio, and I’d hear a song I like, and I’d start thinking about how to arrange it with the band. Then I’d remember I don’t have a band anymore. There’s no one to rehearse with.”
“What do you mean there’s no one to rehearse with?”
“I don’t have a job,” Terry said. “I quit. Walked away from Hothouse.”
“What are you talking about?” Ig asked. He hadn’t seen anything about this on his trip into Terry’s head.
“Last week,” Terry said. “I couldn’t stand it. After what happened to Merrin, it wasn’t fun anymore. It was the opposite of fun. It was hell. Hell is being forced to smile and laugh and play party songs when you want to scream. Every time I played the horn, I was screaming. The Fox people asked me to take the weekend and think it over. They didn’t come right out and threaten to sue me for breach of contract if I don’t show up for work next week, but I know that’s in the air. I also know I don’t give a shit. There’s nothing they got that I need.”
“So when you remembered you didn’t have a show anymore-was that when you turned around and came home?”
“Not right away. It was scary. Like…like being two people at the same time. One minute I’d be thinking I needed to get off the interstate and head back to Gideon. Then I’d go back to imaginary rehearsals again. Finally, when I was almost to Logan Airport-you know that hill with the giant cross on it? The one just past the Suffolk Downs racetrack?”
Ig’s arms prickled with cold and gooseflesh. “About twenty feet tall. I know it. I used to think it was called the Don Orsillo, but that’s not right.”
“Don Orione. That’s the name of the nursing home that takes care of the cross. I pulled over there. There’s a road that leads up through the projects to the thing. I didn’t go all the way up. I just pulled over to think, parked in the shade.”
“In the shade of the cross?”
His brother nodded in a vague sort of way. “I still had the radio on. The college station, you know. The reception gets crackly that far south, but I hadn’t got around to changing it. And the kid came on for the local news, and he said the Old Fair Road Bridge in Gideon was open again, after being closed for a few hours in the middle of the day, while police salvaged a firebombed car from off the sandbar. Hearing about that car gave me a kind of sick feeling. Just because. Because we hadn’t heard from you in a couple days and the sandbar is downriver from the foundry. And this is around the same time of year when Merrin died. It all felt connected. And suddenly I didn’t know anymore why I was in such a hurry to get out of Gideon. I didn’t know why it was so important for me to go. I turned around. I came back. And as I was pulling in to town, I thought maybe I should check the foundry. In case you came out here to be close to Merrin and…and something happened to you. I felt like I had no business doing anything until I knew you were okay. And…and here I am. And you’re not okay.” He looked Ig over again, and when he spoke, his voice was halting and afraid. “How were you going to…kill Lee?”
“Quickly. Which is better than he deserves.”
“And you know what I did…and you’re letting me off? Why not kill me, too?”
“You aren’t the only person to fuck a thing up because he was scared.”
“What’s that mean?”
Ig thought for a moment before he replied, “I hated the way Merrin used to look at you, when you’d play the trumpet at your performances. I was always afraid she’d fall in love with you, instead of me, and I couldn’t stand it. Do you remember the flow charts you used to draw, making fun of Sister Bennett? I wrote the note telling on you. The one that got you an F in Ethics and tossed out of the end-of-year recital.”
Terry goggled at him for a moment, as if Ig had spoken to him in an incomprehensible tongue. Then he laughed. It was a strained, thin sound, but real. “Oh, shit. My ass is still sore from the beating Father Mould gave me.” But he couldn’t hold on to the smile, and when it was gone, he said, “That isn’t the same as what I did to you. Not in kind and not in degree.”
“No,” Ig agreed. “I just mention it to illustrate the principle. People make lousy decisions when they’re afraid.”
Terry tried to smile but looked closer to crying. He said, “We need to go.”
“No,” Ig said. “Just you. Now.” As he spoke, he was already lowering the passenger-side window. He balled the cross up and threw it out into the grass, got rid of it. In the same moment, he put his weight and will behind the horns, calling to all the snakes of the forest, calling for them to join him in the foundry.
Terry made a sound, down in his throat, a long hiss of surprise. “Haaaa-horns. You…you have horns. On your head. What…my God, Ig…what are you?”
Ig turned back. Terry’s eyes were lamps, shining with an elevated kind of terror, a terror that approached awe.
“I don’t know,” Ig said. “Demon or man, I’m not sure. The crazy thing is, I think it’s still up in the air. I know this, though: Merrin wanted me to be a person. People forgive. Demons-not so much. If I’m letting you go, it’s as much for her as for you or me. She loved you, too.”
“I need to go,” Terry said in a thin, frightened voice.
“That’s right. You don’t want to be here when Lee Tourneau arrives. You could be hurt if things go wrong, and even if you aren’t, think of the damage you could do to your reputation. This has nothing to do with you. It never did. In fact, you will forget this conversation. You never came here, and you never saw me tonight. That’s all gone now.”
“Gone,” Terry said, flinching and then blinking rapidly, as if someone had dashed a handful of cold water in his face. “Jesus, I need to get out of here. If I’m ever going to work again, I need to get the fuck out of this joint.”
“That’s right. This conversation is gone, and so are you. Take off. Drive home, and tell Mom and Dad you missed your flight. Be with the people who love you, and have a look at the newspaper tomorrow. They say they never report good news, but I think you’ll feel a whole lot better about your life after you see the front page.” Ig wanted to kiss his brother’s cheek but was afraid-was worried he would discover some hidden deed that would make him rethink his desire to send him away. “Good-bye, Terry.”
HE GOT OUT OF THE CAR and stood back from it as it started to move. The Mercedes rolled slowly forward, crushing the tall grass before it. It went into a big, lazy turn, circling behind a great heap of rubbish, bricks, old boards, and cans. Ig turned away then, didn’t wait to see the Mercedes come around the other side of the midden heap. He had preparations to attend to. He moved quickly along the outer wall of the foundry, casting glances toward the line of trees that screened the building from the road. Any moment now he expected to see headlights through the firs, slowing as Lee Tourneau turned in.
He climbed into the room beyond the furnace. It looked as if someone had come in with a couple buckets of snakes, tossed them, and ran. Snakes slid from the corners and dropped from piles of bricks. The timber rattler uncoiled from the wheelbarrow and fell with an audible thump to the floor. There were only a hundred or so. Well. That was enough.
He crouched and lifted the timber rattler into the air, hand under her midsection; he was not afraid of being bitten now. She narrowed her eyes in a sleepy expression of affection, and her black tongue flicked at him, and for a moment she whispered cool, breathless endearments in his ear. He kissed her gently on the head and then walked her to the furnace. As he carried her, he realized he could not read her for any guilt or sin, that she had no memory of ever having done a wrong. She was innocent. All snakes were, of course. To slip through the grass, to bite and shock into paralysis, either with poison or with the swift crunch of the jaws, to swallow and feel the good, furry, slick lump of a field mouse go down the throat, to drop into a dark hole and curl up on a bed of leaves-these were pure goods, the way the world was supposed to be.
He leaned into the chimney and set her in the stinking blanket on the mattress. Then he bent over her and lit each of the candles, creating an intimate and romantic ambience. She settled down into a contented coil.
“You know what to do if they get by me,” Ig said. “The next person to open this door. I need you to bite and bite and bite. Do you understand?”
Her tongue slipped out of her mouth and lapped sweetly at the air. He folded the corners of the blanket over her, to hide her, and then set upon it the smooth pink soap shape of Glenna’s phone. If by some chance Lee killed him, instead of the other way around, he would go in there to blow out the candles, and when he saw the phone, would want to take it with him. It had been used to call him, after all, and it wouldn’t do to leave evidence lying around.
Ig eased himself out of the hatch and pushed the door almost all the way shut. Candlelight flickered around its edges, as if the old furnaces had been lit once more, as if the foundry were returning to life. He grasped his pitchfork, which was leaning against the wall just to the right of the hatch.
“Ig,” Terry whispered from behind him.
Ig spun around, his heart lunging in him, and saw his brother standing outside, rising on his tiptoes to look through the doorway.
“What are you still doing here?” Ig asked, flustered by the sight of him.
“Are those snakes?” Terry asked.
Terry stepped back from the door as Ig dropped through it. Ig still had the box of matches in one hand, and he flipped them to the side, onto the can of gas. Then he turned and jabbed the pitchfork in the direction of Terry’s chest. He craned his head to look past him, into the dark field. He didn’t see the Mercedes.
“Where’s your car?”
“Behind that pile of shit,” Terry said, gesturing back toward a particularly large mound of trash. He reached up with one hand and gently pushed aside the tines of the pitchfork.
“I said to go.”
Terry’s face gleamed with sweat in the August night. “No,” he said.
It took Ig a moment to process Terry’s unlikely reply.
“Yes.” Pushing with the horns, pushing so hard that the feeling of pressure and heat in them was, for once, almost painful-a disagreeable soreness. “You don’t want to be here, and I don’t want you here.”
Terry actually staggered, as if Ig had shoved him. But then he got his feet set and remained where he was, an expression of grim strain on his features.
“And I said no. You can’t make me. Whatever you’re doing to my head, it has its limits. You can only make the offer. I have to accept. And I don’t accept. I’m not driving away from this place and leaving you here to face Lee alone. That’s what I did to Merrin, and I’ve been living in hell ever since. You want me to go, get in my car and come with me. We’ll figure this out. We’ll figure how to deal with Lee in a way where no one gets killed.”
Ig made a choked sound of rage in his throat and came at him with the pitchfork. Terry danced back, away from the tines. It infuriated Ig that he couldn’t make his brother do what he wanted. Each time Ig came toward him, prodding with the fork, Terry faded out of reach, a weak, uncertain grin on his face. Ig had the helpless sensation of being ten years old and forced into some backyard game of grab-ass.
Headlights wavered on the other side of the line of trees that screened the foundry from the road, slowing steadily as someone prepared to turn in. Ig and Terry both stopped, looking up at the road.
“It’s Lee,” Ig said, and focused his furious gaze back on Terry. “Get in your car and out of sight. You can’t help me. You can only fuck things up. Keep your head down, and stay out of the way where you won’t get your ass killed.” Urging him back with another thrust of the pitchfork and at the same time putting one last blast of will behind the horns, trying to bend Terry.
Terry didn’t fight this time but turned and ran, through the tall grass, back toward the midden heap. Ig watched until he had reached the corner of the building. Then Ig pulled himself through the high doorway and into the foundry. Behind him the headlights of Lee Tourneau’s Cadillac were sliding through the air, slicing the darkness like a letter opener cutting into a black envelope.
NO SOONER HAD HE PULLED himself into the room than the headlights swept through the windows and doors. White squares of brightness streamed over the graffiti-covered walls, picking out ancient messages: TERRY PERRISH BLOWS, PEACE ’79, GOD IS DEAD. Ig stepped away from the light, to one side of the doorway. He removed his coat and threw it into the middle of the floor. Then he crouched in the corner and used his horns to call to the snakes.
They came from the corners, fell from holes in the wall, skated out from under the heap of bricks. They glided toward the coat, sliding over one another in their haste. The overcoat squirmed as they gathered beneath it. Then it began to sit up. The coat rose and straightened, and the shoulders began to fill out, and the sleeves moved, swelling, as if an invisible man were pushing his arms into them. Last rose a head, with hair that twisted and spilled over the collar. It looked as if a long-haired man, or perhaps a woman, were sitting in the middle of the floor, meditating, head down. Someone who was shivering steadily.
Lee honked his horn.
“Glenna?” he called out. “What are you doing, babe?”
“I’m in here,” Ig called in Glenna’s voice. He squatted just to the right of the door. “Aw, Lee, I twisted my goddamn ankle.”
A car door opened and slammed. Footsteps approached through the grass.
“Glenna?” Lee said. “What’s up?”
“I’m just sittin’ here, honey,” said Ig, Glenna-voiced. “I’m just sittin’ right here.”
Lee set a hand on the concrete and hoisted himself up through the door. He had put on a hundred pounds and shaved his head since the last time Ig had seen him, a transformation almost as astonishing as growing horns, and for a moment Ig couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t assimilate what he was seeing. It wasn’t Lee at all. It was Eric Hannity, in his blue latex gloves, holding his nightstick, and his head all blistered and burned. In the headlights the bony curve of his scalp was as red as Ig’s own. The blisters on his left cheek were thick and broad and looked full of pus.
“Hey, lady,” Eric said softly. His eyes darted this way and that, looking around the vast, dark room. He didn’t see Ig with the pitchfork, not where he was crouching to the right, in the deepest of shadows. Eric’s eyes hadn’t adjusted yet. With the headlights pouring in through the door around him, they never would. Lee was out there somewhere. Somehow Lee knew that it wasn’t safe and had come with Eric, and how did he know that? He didn’t have the cross to protect him anymore. It didn’t make sense.
Eric took small, scuffling steps toward the figure in the overcoat, the club swinging in slow, lazy arcs from his right hand.
“Say something, bitch,” Eric said.
The coat shivered and flapped an arm weakly and shook its head. Ig didn’t move, was holding his breath. He couldn’t think what to do. It was supposed to be Lee who came through the door, not someone else. But then, that was the story of his brief life in the demon trade, Ig thought. He had done his Satanic best to come up with a nice and simple murder, and now it was all blowing away, like so much cold ash in the wind. Maybe it was always like that, though. Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what men could think up.
Eric crept forward until he was standing right behind the thing in the coat. He lifted the club with both hands and brought it down, onto its back. The coat collapsed, and snakes gushed out, a great sack splitting open and spilling everywhere. Eric made a sound, a strangled, disgusted cry, and almost tripped over his own Timberlands, stepping away.
“What?” Lee shouted from somewhere outside. “What’s happening?”
Eric brought his boot down on the head of a garter snake, wiggling between his heels. It shattered with a fragile crunch, like a lightbulb breaking. He made a pained sound of revulsion, kicked away a water snake, backing up, backing toward Ig. He was wading in them, a geyser of serpents. He was turning to get out when he stepped on one and his ankle rolled under him. He did a surprisingly graceful pirouette, spinning all the way around, before unbalancing and coming down hard on one knee, facing Ig. He stared with his small, piggy eyes in his big, burnt face. Ig held the pitchfork between them.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Eric said.
“You and me both,” Ig said.
“Go to hell, you fuck,” Eric said, and his left hand started to come up, and for the first time Ig saw the snub-nosed revolver.
Ig lunged, not giving himself time to think, rising and slamming the pitchfork into Eric’s left shoulder. It was like driving it into the trunk of a tree. A shivering impact ran up the shaft and into Ig’s hands. One of the tines shattered Eric’s clavicle; another punctured his deltoid; the middle tine got his upper chest. The gun went off, fired into the sky, a loud crack like a cherry bomb exploding, the sound of an American summer. Ig kept going, carrying Eric off balance, driving him onto his ass. Eric’s left arm flew out, and the gun sailed away into the dark and fired again when it hit the floor, and a rat snake was torn in two.
Hannity grunted. It looked as if he were straining to lift some terrible weight. His jaw was clenched, and his face, already red, was approaching a shade of crimson, spotted with fat white blisters. He dropped his nightstick, reached across his body with his right hand, and took the pitchfork by the iron head, as if he meant to pry it out of his torso.
“Leave it,” Ig said. “I don’t want to kill you. You’ll hurt yourself worse trying to pull it out.”
“I’m not,” Hannity panted. “Trying. To pull. It out.”
And he swung his body to the right, dragging the handle of the pitchfork and Ig with it, out of the darkness and into the brightly lit doorway. Ig didn’t know it was going to happen until it had happened, until he had been tugged off balance and gone staggering from the shadows. He recoiled, yanking at the pitchfork, and for an instant the barbed points caught on tendon and flesh, and then they sprang free and Eric screamed.
Ig had no doubt what was about to happen and tried to get out of the doorway, which framed him like a red target on black paper, but he was too slow. The boom of the shotgun was a single deafening clap, and the first casualty was Ig’s hearing. The gun spit red fire, and Ig’s stunned eardrums flatlined. The world was instantly swaddled in an unnatural, not-quite-perfect silence. It felt as if Ig’s right shoulder had been clipped by a passing school bus. He staggered forward and slammed into Eric, who made a harsh, wet, coughing noise, a kind of doglike bark.
Lee grabbed the doorframe with one hand and pulled himself up and in, a shotgun in his other hand. He came to his feet, in no rush. Ig saw him work the slide, saw very clearly as the spent shell jumped from the open chamber and leaped in a parabolic arc away through the darkness. Ig tried to leap in an arc of his own, to break to the left, make himself a moving target, but something had him by the arm-Eric. Eric had his elbow and was hauling on him, either to use him as a crutch or to hold him in place as a human shield.
Lee fired again, and a shovel struck Ig in the legs. They folded beneath him. For one instant he was able to keep his feet: He put the shaft of the pitchfork on the floor and leaned his weight against it to stay up. But Eric still had him by the arm and had caught spray himself, not in the legs but the chest. Eric went straight back and jerked Ig over with him.
Ig caught a whirling glimpse of black sky and luminescent cloud, where once, almost a century before, there had been ceiling. Then he hit the concrete on his back with a resounding thud that rattled his bones.
He lay next to Eric, his head almost resting on Eric’s hip. He couldn’t feel his right shoulder anymore, or anything below his knees. Blood rushed from his head, the darkness of the sky deepening dangerously, and he made a thrashing, desperate effort to hang on to consciousness. If he passed out now, Lee would kill him. This was followed by another thought, that his relative consciousness didn’t make any difference, because he was going to be killed here regardless. He noted, almost as a distant afterthought, that he had held on to his pitchfork.
“You hit me, you fuckhead!” Eric cried. His voice was muffled. Ig felt as if he were hearing the world through a motorcycle helmet.
“It could be worse. You could be dead,” Lee told Eric, and then he was standing over Ig, pointing the barrel into Ig’s face.
Ig stabbed out with the pitchfork and caught the barrel of the gun between the tines. He wrenched it up and to the right, so when it went off, it exploded in Eric Hannity’s face. Ig looked over in time to see Eric Hannity’s head burst like a cantaloupe dropped from a great height. Blood lashed Ig in the face, so hot it seemed to scald, and Ig thought, helplessly, of the turkey coming apart with a sudden annihilating crack. Snakes sloughed and slid through the blood, fleeing, headed to the corners of the room.
“Ah, shit,” Lee said. “It just got worse. Sorry, Eric. I was trying to kill Ig, I swear.” And then he laughed, hysterical, unfunny laughter.
Lee took a step back, sliding the barrel free from between the tines of the pitchfork. He lowered the gun, and Ig jabbed at it with the fork again, and the shotgun slammed for a fourth time. The shot went high, caught the shaft of the pitchfork itself, and shattered it. The trident head of the fork spun away into the darkness and clanged off the concrete, leaving Ig holding a splintered and useless wooden spoke.
“You want to please hold still?” Lee asked, working the slide on the shotgun again.
He took a step back and, from a safe distance of four feet away, pointed the gun once more into Ig’s face and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a dry clack. Lee scowled, lifted the.410, and looked at it with disappointment.
“What, these things only carry four bullets?” Lee said. “It’s not mine. It’s Eric’s. I would’ve used a gun on you the other night, but, you know, forensics. In this case, though, there’s nothing to worry about. You killed Eric, and he killed you, and I’m out of it, and everything makes sense. I’m just sorry Eric ran out of shells and had to club you to death with his gun.”
He turned the.410 around, took the barrel in both hands, and lifted it back over his shoulder. Ig had an instant to note that it looked as if Lee had been spending some time on the golf course-he had an easy, clean stroke, bringing the shotgun around-and then he smashed it into Ig’s head. It struck one of the horns with a splintering crack, and Ig was flung away from Eric, rolled across smooth floor.
He came to rest faceup, panting, a hot stitch in one lung, and waited for the sky to stop spinning. The heavens swayed, stars flying around like flakes in a snow globe that someone has given a good shake. The horns hummed, a great tuning fork. They had absorbed the blow, though, kept his skull together.
Lee stalked toward him and lifted the shotgun and brought it down on Ig’s right knee. Ig screamed and sat straight up, grabbing his leg with one hand. It felt as if the kneecap had split into three large pieces, as if there were broken shards of plate shifting around under the skin. He had hardly sat up, though, when Lee came around again. He caught Ig a glancing blow across the top of the head and knocked him onto his back once more. The spoke of wood Ig had been holding, the sharp spear that had been the shaft of the pitchfork, flew from his hand. The sky continued its nauseating snow-globe whirl.
Lee swung the butt of the shotgun, with as much force as he could muster, between Ig’s legs, struck him in the balls. Ig could not scream, could not find the air to scream. He twisted, jerking onto his side and doubling over. A hard white knot of pain rose from his crotch and into his bowels and intestines, expanding, like poisonous air filling a balloon, into a withering sensation of nausea. Ig’s whole body tightened as he fought the urge to vomit, his body clenching like a fist.
Lee tossed the shotgun, and Ig heard it clatter on the floor next to Eric. Then he began to pace around, looking for something. Ig couldn’t speak, could hardly get air down into his lungs.
“Now, what did Eric do with that pistol of his?” Lee said in a musing voice. “You know, you had me fooled, Ig. It’s amazing the things you can do to people’s heads. How you can make them forget things. Blank out their memory. Make them hear voices. I really thought it was Glenna. I was on the way here when she called me from the salon to tell me I could go fuck myself. More or less just like that. You believe it? I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go fuck myself, but how did you get your car unstuck?’ And she said, ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ You can’t imagine how that felt. Like I was losing my mind. Like the whole world was knocked out of whack. I felt something like that once upon a time, Ig. When I was little, I fell off a fence and hurt my head, and when I got up, the moon was trembling like it was about to fall out of the sky. I tried to tell you about it once, about how I fixed it. Fixed the moon. I set heaven back in order. And I’ll fix you, too.”
Ig heard the door to the blast furnace open with a squeal of iron hinges and felt a brief, almost painful surge of hope. The timber rattler would get Lee. He would reach into the chimney, and the viper would bite him. But then he heard Lee moving away, heels scuffing on concrete. He had only opened the door, perhaps for more light to see by, still searching for the gun.
“I called Eric, told him I thought you were out here, playing some kind of game, and that we had to step on you and I wasn’t sure how hard. I said because you used to be a friend, I thought we should deal with you off the books. Course, you know Eric. I didn’t have to work too hard to talk him into it. I didn’t need to tell him to bring his guns either. He did that all on his own. You know I’ve never shot a gun in my life? Never so much as loaded one. My mother used to say they’re the devil’s right hand and wouldn’t keep them in the house. Ah. Well. Better than nothing.” Ig heard a metallic scrape, Lee picking something off the floor. The waves of nausea were coming slower now, and Ig could breathe, in tiny little swallows. He thought that with another minute to rest he might have the strength to sit up. To make one final effort. He also thought that in another minute there would be five.38-caliber slugs in his head.
“You are just full of tricks, Iggy,” Lee said, walking back. “Truth is, just a couple minutes ago? When you were shouting to us in your Glenna voice from in here? A part of me half believed it all over again, really thought it was her, even though rationally I knew she was at the salon. The voices are great, Ig, but not as great as coming out of a burning wreck without a mark on you.” He paused. He was standing over Ig, not with the pistol but with the head of the pitchfork. He said, “How did it happen? How did you become like this? With the horns?”
“Merrin,” Ig said.
“What about her?”
Ig’s voice was weak, shaking, hardly louder than an exhaled breath. “Without Merrin in my life…I was this.”
Lee lowered himself to one knee and stared at Ig with what seemed real sympathy. “I loved her too, you know,” Lee said. “Love made devils of us both, I guess.”
Ig opened his mouth to speak, and Lee put his hand on Ig’s neck, and every evil thing Lee had ever done poured down Ig’s throat like some icy, corrosive chemical.
“No, I think it would be a mistake to let you say any more,” Lee said, and he raised the pitchfork overhead, the prongs aimed at Ig’s chest. “And at this point I don’t really think there’s anything left for us to talk about.”
The blast of the trumpet was a shrill, deafening squall, the sound of a car accident about to happen. Lee jerked his head to look back at the doorway, where Terry balanced on one knee, his horn lifted to his lips.
In the instant he was looking away, Ig shoved himself up, pushing aside Lee’s hand. He took hold of the lapels of Lee’s sport coat and drove his head into his torso: slammed the horns into Lee’s stomach. The impact reverberated down Ig’s spine. Lee grunted, the soft, simple sound of all the breath being forced out of him.
A feeling of wet suction grabbed at the horns and held them, so it was hard to pull free. Ig twisted his head from side to side, tearing the holes wider. Lee wrapped his arms around Ig’s head, trying to force him back, and Ig gored him again, thrusting deep into an elastic resistance. He smelled blood, mingled with another odor, a foul old garbage stink-a perforated bowel, perhaps.
Lee put his hands on Ig’s shoulders and shoved, trying to extricate himself from the horns. They made a wet, sucking sound as they came loose, the sound a boot makes as it is pulled out of deep mud.
Lee folded and rolled onto his side, his arms wrapped around his stomach. Ig couldn’t sit up any longer either and toppled, slumping to the concrete. He was still turned to face Lee, who was almost fetal, hugging himself, his eyes shut and his mouth a great open hole. Lee wasn’t screaming anymore, couldn’t get the breath to scream, and with his eyes shut he couldn’t see the black rat snake sliding past him. The rat snake was looking for a place to hide, a way out of bedlam. It turned its head as it glided past, giving Ig a frantic look with eyes of gold foil.
There, Ig told it with his mind, gesturing with his chin toward Lee. Hide. Save yourself.
The rat snake slowed and looked at Lee, then back to Ig. Ig felt there was unmistakable gratitude in the rat snake’s gaze. It swerved, gliding elegantly through the dust on the smooth concrete, and slithered headfirst into Lee’s yawning mouth.
Lee’s eyes sprang open, the good eye and the blind eye alike, and they were bright with a kind of ecstatic horror. He tried to snap his jaws shut, but when he bit the three-inch-thick cable of the snake, he only startled it. Its tail shivered furiously back and forth, and it began to hurry, pumping itself down Lee’s throat. Lee groaned, choking on it, and let go of his mauled stomach to grab at it, but his palms were soaked with blood, and it squirmed slickly from within his fingers.
Terry was coming across the floor at a stumbling run. “Ig? Ig, are you-” But when he saw Lee thrashing on the floor, he stopped where he was and stared.
Lee rolled onto his back, screaming now, although it was hard to make any sound with his throat full of snake. His heels beat against the floor. His face was deepening to a color that was almost black in the night, and branches of veins stood out in Lee’s temples. The bad eye, the eye of ruin, was still turned toward Ig, and it stared at him with something very close to wonder. That eye was a bottomless dark hole containing a circular staircase of pale smoke, leading down to a place where a soul might go and never return. His hands fell to his sides. A good eight inches of rat snake hung from his open mouth, a long black fuse drooping from a human bomb. The snake itself was motionless, seemed to understand that it had been lied to, had made a grave error trying to hide itself in the wet, tight tunnel of Lee Tourneau’s throat. It could go forward no farther, nor could it slide itself out. Ig was sorry for it. That was a bad way to die: stuck inside Lee Tourneau.
The pain was returning, pouring into the center of him from crotch and devastated shoulder and smashed knees, like four polluted tributaries emptying into a deep reservoir of sick feeling. Ig shut his eyes to concentrate on managing his pain. Then, for a while, it was quite still in the old foundry, where the man and the demon lay side by side-although which was which would perhaps have been a matter for theological debate.
SHADOWS LAPPED UNSTEADILY at the walls, rising and falling, the darkness coming in waves. The world was ebbing and flowing around him in waves, and Ig struggled to hold on to it. A part of him wanted to go under, to escape the pain, turn the volume down on his ruined body. He was already drifting away from himself, the hurt balanced by a dreamy, growing sensation of buoyancy. The stars swam slowly along overhead, drifting from left to right, so it was as if he were floating on his back in the Knowles River, letting the current carry him steadily downstream.
Terry bent over him, his face anguished and confused. “All right, Ig. You’re all right. I’m going to call someone. I have to run back to my car and get my phone.”
Ig smiled in a way he hoped was reassuring and tried to tell Terry all he needed to do was set him on fire. The gas tank was outside, against the wall. Slosh some unleaded on him and throw a match, he’d be fine. But he couldn’t find the air to push out the words, and his throat was too raw and tight for talking. Lee Tourneau had done a number on him, all right.
Terry squeezed his hand, and Ig knew, randomly, that his older brother had copied answers on a seventh-grade geography test from the boy sitting in front of him. Terry said, “I’ll be back. Do you hear me? Right back. One minute.”
Ig nodded, grateful to Terry for taking care of things. Terry’s hand slipped from Ig’s, and he rose out of sight.
Ig tipped his head back and looked at the reddish candlelight washing over the old bricks. The steady, shifting movement of the light soothed him, added to his feeling of suspension, of floating. His next thought was that if there was candlelight, the hatch to the furnace must be open. That’s right, Lee had opened it to throw more light on the concrete floor.
And then Ig knew what was about to happen, and the shock of it brought him up out of his dreamy, floating stupor. Terry was about to see the phone, Glenna’s phone, carefully set on the blanket in the furnace. Terry could not put his hand in there. Terry, of all people-Terry, who had nearly died at fourteen from a bee sting-needed to stay the fuck away from the furnace. Ig tried to call for him, to shout, to warn him, but could not produce anything except a cracked and tuneless whistle.
“One minute, Ig,” Terry said from across the room. He seemed, in truth, to be talking to himself. “You hang in there and-Wait! Hey, Ig, we’re in luck. Got a phone right here.”
Ig turned his head and tried again, tried to stop him, and did in fact manage a single word: “Terry.” But then that tight, painful feeling of compression settled back into his throat, and he could say no more, and anyway, Terry did not look back at the sound of his name.
His brother bent into the hatch, grabbing for the phone on the lumpy blanket. When he picked it up, one fold flopped back and Terry hesitated, looking down at the loops of snake beneath, the scales like brushed copper in the candlelight. There was a dry rattle of castanets.
The viper uncoiled and struck Terry in the wrist, with a sound Ig could hear twenty-five feet away, a meaty thump. The phone flew. Terry screamed and went up and straight back and banged the iron frame of the hatch with his skull. The impact dropped him. He got his hands up, stopped himself before he could go face-first into the mattress, the lower half of his body hanging out through the hatch.
The snake still had him by the wrist. Terry grabbed it and jerked. The timber rattler slashed his wrist open as her fangs were tugged loose, and she coiled and hit him again, in the face, sinking her teeth into his left cheek. Terry grabbed her about halfway up the body and pulled, and she let go and bunched up and hit him a third time, a fourth. Each time she pounded into him, it made a sound like someone drilling the speed bag in a gym.
Ig’s brother sank back out of the hatch, dropping to his knees. He had the snake low, close to the end of her tail. He pulled her off him and lifted her in the air and smashed her against the floor, like someone banging a broom against a rug to knock the dust out of it. A black spray of blood and snake brain dashed across the concrete. Terry flipped her away from himself, and she rolled and landed on her back. Her tail whipped madly about, slapping at the concrete. The thrashing slowed a little at a time, until her tail was only waving gently back and forth, and then it stopped completely.
Terry knelt at the door of the furnace with his head bowed, like a man in prayer, a devout penitent in the church of the holy and everlasting chimney. His shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell with respiration.
“Terry,” Ig managed to call out, but Terry did not lift his head and look back at him.
If Terry heard him-Ig wasn’t sure he had-he couldn’t reply. Terry had to save each precious breath for the effort of getting the next lungful of oxygen. If it was anaphylactic shock, then he would need a stick of epinephrine in the next few minutes, or he’d suffocate on the swollen tissues of his own throat.
Glenna’s phone was somewhere in the furnace, not thirty feet away, but Ig didn’t know where Terry had dropped it and didn’t want to drag himself around looking for it while Terry choked. He felt faint and wasn’t sure he could even clear the hatch to the furnace, two and a half feet off the floor. Whereas the tank of gas was just outside.
He knew that starting would be hardest. Just the thought of trying to roll onto his side lit up vast and intricate networks of pain in shoulder and crotch, a hundred fine burning fibers. The more time he gave himself to think, the worse it was going to be. He turned on his side, and it felt as if there were a hooked blade buried in his shoulder being turned back and forth-a continuous impalement. He shouted-he hadn’t known he could shout until he did it-and closed his eyes.
When his head cleared, he reached out with his good arm and grabbed at the concrete and pulled, dragging himself about a foot. And cried out again. He tried to push himself forward with his legs, but he couldn’t feel his feet, couldn’t feel anything below that sharp, persistent ache in his knees. His skirt was wet with his blood. The skirt was probably ruined.
“And it was my favorite,” he whispered, nose squashed against the floor. “I was going to wear it to the dance.” And laughed-a dry, hoarse cackle that he thought sounded particularly crazy.
He pulled himself another foot with the right arm, and the knives sank deep into his left shoulder once more, the pain radiating into his chest. The doorway didn’t seem any closer. He almost laughed again at the amusing futility of it all. He risked a glance at his brother. Terry still knelt before the hatch, but his head drooped so that his forehead was almost touching his knees. From where Ig was, he could no longer see through the hatch into the chimney. Instead he was looking at the half-open iron door and the way the candlelight wavered around it and-
– there was a door up there, with a light wavering around it.
He was so drunk. He had not been this drunk since the night Merrin had been killed, and he wanted to get drunker still. He had pissed on the Virgin Mother. He had pissed on the cross. He had pissed quite copiously upon his own feet and laughed about it. He was tucking himself in to his pants with one hand and tipping his head back to drink straight from the bottle when he saw it above him, cradled in the diseased branches of the old dead tree. It was the underside of a tree house, not fifteen feet off the ground, and he could see the wide rectangle of the trapdoor, delineated by a faint, wavering candlelight that showed around the edges. The words written upon that door were barely visible in the gloom: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN.
“Hunh,” Ig said, absentmindedly pushing the cork back in the bottle, then letting the bottle drop from his hand. “There you are. I see you up there.”
The Tree House of the Mind had played a good trick on him-on him and Merrin both-hiding from them out here all these years. It had never been there before, not any of the other times he had come to visit the place where Merrin had been killed. Or perhaps it had always been there and he hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to see it.
Pulling his zipper up with one hand, he swayed and then began to move-
– another foot across the smooth concrete floor. He didn’t want to lift his head to see how far he had gone, was afraid he would be no closer to the door now than he’d been a few minutes ago. He reached out with his right arm and-
– grabbed the lowest branch and began to climb. His foot slipped, and he had to clutch at a bough to keep from falling. He waited out a bad moment of dizziness with his eyes shut, feeling that the tree was about to come uprooted and fall over with him in it. Then he recovered himself and went on, climbing with the drunkard’s thoughtless, liquid grace. Soon enough he found himself on the branch directly below the trapdoor, and he went straight up to throw it open. But there was a weight resting on top of it, and the trap only banged noisily in its frame.
Someone cried out, softly, from within-a voice he recognized.
“What was that?” Merrin cried.
“Hey,” said someone else, a voice he knew even better: his own. Coming from within the tree house, it was muffled and remote, but even so, Ig recognized it immediately. “Hey, is someone down there?”
For a moment Ig couldn’t move. They were there, on the other side of the trapdoor, Merrin and himself, both of them still young and undamaged and perfectly in love. They were there, and it was not too late to save them from the worst of what was coming for them, and he rose hard and fast and hit the trapdoor again with his shoulders-
– and opened his eyes and looked blearily around. He had winked out for a while, maybe as long as ten minutes. His pulse was slow and heavy. His left shoulder had been hot before. Now it was cold and wet. The cold worried him. Dead bodies got cold. He lifted his head to orient himself and found he was only a yard from the doorway and from the six-foot drop beyond that he’d been trying not to think about. The can was down there, just to the right. All he had to do was get through the door and-
– he could tell them what was going to happen, could warn them. He could tell his younger self to love Merrin better and trust her, to stay close to her, that their time was short, and he hit the trap again and again, but each time the door only rose an inch or so before smashing back down.
“Cut it the fuck out!” shouted the young Ig, inside the tree house.
Ig paused, readying himself for another go at the trapdoor-and then held himself back, recalling when he had been the one on the other side of the door.
He’d been afraid to open the trap, had only worked up his nerve to pull back the hatch when the thing that was waiting outside stopped trying to force its way in. And there had been nothing there. He wasn’t there; or they weren’t.
“Listen,” said the person he’d been, on the other side of that door, “if there’s someone down there…you had your fun. We’re good and scared. We’re coming out now.”
The chair legs thumped and squeaked as they were pushed back, and Ig hit the trapdoor from beneath in the same moment the young Ig threw it open. Ig thought he saw the shadows of the two lovers leaping out and past him for a moment, but it was only a trick of the candlelight within, making the darkness seem briefly alive.
They had forgotten to blow out the candles, and when Ig stuck his head through the open door, he found them still lit, so-
– he stuck his head through the door, and his body tumbled after it. He hit the dirt on his shoulders, and a black electric shock went through his left arm, an explosion, and he felt he might be fragmented from the force of it, blown into pieces. They would find parts of him in the trees. He rolled onto his back, his eyes open and staring.
The world shivered from the force of the impact. Ig’s ears were filled with an atonal hum. When he looked into the night sky, it was like the end of a silent movie: A black circle began to shrink, closing in on itself, erasing the world, leaving him-
– alone in the dark of the tree house.
The candles had melted to misshapen three-inch plugs. Wax ran in thick and glistening columns, almost completely obscuring that crouching devil who squatted on the base of the menorah. The flame light flickered around the room. The mold-spotted easy chair stood to the left of the open trap. The shadows of the china figures wavered against the walls, the two angels of the Lord and the alien. Mary was tipped over on her side, just as he remembered leaving her.
Ig cast his gaze about him. It was as if only a few hours had passed since he’d last been in this place, and not years.
“What’s the point?” he asked. At first he thought he was speaking to himself. “Why bring me here if I can’t help them?” Growing angry as he said it. He felt a heat in his chest, a fuming tightness. They were smoky candles, and the room smelled of them.
There had to be a reason, something he was supposed to do, to find. Something they had left behind, maybe. He looked at the end table with the china figures on it and noticed that the little drawer was open a quarter of an inch. He strode to it and pulled it back, thinking there might be something in it, something he could use, something he could learn from. But there was nothing in there except a rectangular box of matches. A black devil leaped on the cover, head thrown back in laughter. The words LUCIFER MATCHES were written across the cover in ornate nineteenth-century script. Ig grabbed them and stared at them, then closed his fist on them, wanting to crush them. He didn’t, though. He stood there holding them, staring down at the little figures-and then his eyes refocused on the parchment beneath them.
The last time he’d been in this tree house, when Merrin was alive and the world was good, the words on the parchment had been in Hebrew and he hadn’t had any idea what they said. He’d believed it was Scripture, a scroll from a phylactery. But in the wavering light of the candle flame, the ornate black letters swayed, like living shadows somehow magically pinned to paper, spelling a message in plain, simple English:
THE TREE HOUSE OF THE MIND
TREE OF GOOD & EVIL
1 OLD FOUNDRY ROAD
GIDEON, NH 03880
RULES AND PROVISOS:
TAKE WHAT YOU WANT WHILE YOU’RE HERE
GET WHAT YOU NEED WHEN YOU LEAVE
SAY AMEN ON YOUR WAY OUT THE DOOR
SMOKING IS NOT PROHIBITED
L. MORNINGSTAR, PROPRIETOR
Ig stared, not sure he understood it any better now, even knowing what it said. What he wanted was Merrin, and he was never going to have her again, and, lacking that, he wanted to burn this fucking place to the ground and smoking was not prohibited and before he knew what he was doing, he swept his hand across the table, throwing the lit menorah across the room, crashing over the little figures. The alien tumbled and bounced, rolled off the table. The angel who resembled Terry, and who held a horn to his lips, dropped off the table and into the half-open drawer. The second angel, the one who had stood over Mary, looking aloof and superior, hit the table with a crack. His aloof, superior head rolled off.
Ig turned in a furious circle-
– turned his body in a painful circle and saw the gas can where he had left it, against the stone wall, below and to the right of the doorway. He shoved himself through a clump of high grass, and his hand swatted the can, producing a bonging sound and a watery slosh. He found the handle, tugged on it. It surprised him how heavy the thing was. As if it were full of liquid concrete. Ig felt along the top of the gasoline tank for the box of Lucifer Matches and set them aside.
He lay still for a while, gathering his strength for the last necessary act. The muscles in his right arm were trembling steadily, and he wasn’t sure he could do what he needed to. Finally he decided he was ready to try, and he made an effort to lift the can and upend it over himself.
Gasoline splattered down on him in a reeking, glittering rain. He felt it in his mutilated shoulder, a sudden stinging burst. He screamed, and a mushroom cloud of gray smoke gushed from his lips. His eyes watered. The pain was smothering, caused him to let go of the can and double over. He shivered furiously in his ridiculous blue skirt, a series of tremors that threatened to become a full-blown convulsion. He flailed with his right hand, didn’t know what he was reaching for until he found the box of Lucifer Matches in the dirt.
The August-night sounds of crickets and cars humming past on the highway were very faint. Ig tapped open the box. Matches flew from his shaking hand. He picked out one of the few that remained and dragged it across the strike strip on the side of the box. A white lick of fire rose from its head.
The candles had dropped to the floor and rolled every which way. Most of them were still lit. The gray rubber alien figure had come to rest against one, and a white lick of fire was blackening and liquefying the side of its face. One black eye had already melted away to reveal a hollowness within. Three other candles had wound up against the wall, beneath the window, with its sheer white curtains rippling gently in the August breeze.
Ig grabbed fistfuls of curtains, tore them from the window, and hung them over the burning candles. Fire climbed the cheap nylon, rushing up toward his hands. He threw them onto the chair.
Something popped and crunched underfoot, as if he had stepped on a small lightbulb. He looked down and saw he had put his heel on the figure of the china devil. He had crushed the body, although the head remained intact, wobbling on the planks. The devil grinned maniacally, teeth showing in his goatee.
Ig bent and picked the head up from the floor. He stood in the burning tree house, considering Satan’s urbane, handsome features, the little needles of his horns. Streamers of fire unrolled up the wall, and black smoke gathered beneath the banked ceiling. Flames boiled over the easy chair and end table alike. The little devil seemed to regard him with pleasure, with approval. He appreciated a man who knew how to burn a thing down. But Ig’s work here was done now, and it was time to move on. The world was full of other fires waiting to be lit.
He rolled the little head between his fingers for a moment, then returned to the end table. He picked up Mary and kissed her small face, said, “Good-bye, Merrin.” He set her right.
He lifted the angel who had stood before her. His face had been imperious and indifferent, a holier-than-thou, how-dare-you-touch-me face, but the head had snapped off and rolled somewhere. Ig put the devil’s head in its place, thought Mary was better off with someone who looked like he knew how to have a good time.
Smoke caught and burned in Ig’s lungs, stung his eyes. He felt his skin going tight from the heat, three walls of fire. He made his way to the trapdoor, but before stepping through it, he lifted it partway to see what was written on the inside; he remembered very clearly that there was something painted there in whitewash. It said, BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO OUT. Ig wanted to laugh but didn’t. Instead he smoothed his hand over the fine grain of the trap and said “Amen,” then eased himself through the hole.
With his feet on the wide branch directly below the trap, he paused for a last look around. The room was the eye at the center of a churning cyclone of flame. Knotholes popped in the heat. The chair roared and hissed. He felt, all in all, happy with himself. Without Merrin the place was just kindling. So was all the world, as far as Ig was concerned.
He shut the trapdoor behind him and started to pick a slow and careful route down. He needed to go home. He needed some rest.
No. What he really needed was to get his hands on the throat of the person who had taken Merrin away from him. What had it said on the parchment in the Tree House of the Mind? That you would get what you needed on your way out? A guy could hope.
He stopped just once, halfway to the ground, to lean against the trunk and rub the palms of his hands into his temples. A dull, dangerous ache was building there, a sensation of pressure, of something with sharp points pushing to get out of his head. Christ. If this was how he felt now, he was going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning.
Ig exhaled-did not notice the pale smoke wafting from his own nostrils-and continued down and out of the tree, while above him heaven burned.
He stared at the burning match in his hand for exactly two seconds-Mississippi one, Mississippi two-and then it sizzled down to his fingers, touched gasoline, and he ignited with a whump and a hiss, exploded like a cherry bomb.
IG STOOD, A BURNING MAN, devil in a gown of fire. For half a minute, the gasoline flames roiled off him, streamed away from his flesh in the wind. Then, as quickly as it had come roaring to life, the blaze began to flutter weakly and sputter out. In a few moments, it was gone entirely, and a black, oily smoke rose from his body in a thick, choking column. Or what would’ve been choking to any man but was, to the demon in the center of it, as sweet as an alpine breeze.
He cast off his robe of smoke, stepped forth from it, entirely naked. The old skin had burned away, and the new skin beneath was a deeper, richer shade of carmine. His left shoulder was still stiff, although the wound had healed to a tormented mass of whitish scar tissue. His head was clear; he felt well, felt as if he had just run a mile and was ready for a swim. The grass around him was black and smoldered. A burning red line was marching across the dry weeds and bunches of grass, moving toward the forest. Ig looked beyond it to the dead cherry tree, pale against its background of evergreens.
He had left the Tree House of the Mind in flames, had burned down heaven, but the cherry still stood undamaged. A wind rose in a hot gust, and the leaves thrashed, and even from here Ig could see there was no tree house up there. It was funny, though-the way the fire seemed to be aimed at it, burning a path through the high grass to its trunk. It was the wind, funneling it straight across the field, pouring fire at the old town woods.
Ig climbed through the foundry doorway. He stepped over his brother’s trumpet.
Terry knelt before the open door of the furnace, head bowed. Ig saw his perfect stillness, the calm look of concentration on his face, and thought his brother looked good even in death. His shirt drawn smoothly across his broad back, cuffs folded carefully past his wrists. Ig lowered himself to his knees beside Terry. Two brothers in the pews. He took his brother’s hand in his and saw that when Terry was eleven, he had stuck gum in Ig’s hair on the school bus.
“Shit,” Ig said. “It had to be cut out with scissors.”
“What?” Terry asked.
“The gum you put in my hair,” Ig said. “On Bus Nineteen.”
Terry inhaled a small sip of air, a whistling breath.
“Breathing,” Ig said. “How are you breathing?”
“I’ve got,” Terry whispered, “very strong. Lungs. I do. Play the horn. Now. And then.” After a moment he said, “It’s a miracle. We both. Got out. Of this. Alive.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” Ig said.
Glenna’s phone was in the furnace, had hit the wall and cracked. The battery cover had come off. Ig thought it wouldn’t work, but it beeped to life as soon as he flipped it open. Luck of the devil. He dialed emergency services and told an impersonal operator that he had been bitten by a snake, that he was at the foundry off Route 17, that people were dead and things were burning. Then he broke the connection and climbed out of the chimney to crouch beside Terry again.
“You called,” Terry said. “For help.”
“No,” Ig said. “You called for help. Listen closely, Terry. Let me tell you what you’re going to remember-and what you’re going to forget. You have a lot to forget. Things that happened tonight and things that happened before tonight.” And as he spoke, the horns throbbed, a hard jolt of animal pleasure. “There’s only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn’t get to be the good guy.”
Ig told him a story, in a soft and pleasing voice, a good story, and Terry nodded as he listened, as if to the beat of a song he particularly liked.
IN A FEW MINUTES, it was done. Ig sat with him for a while longer, neither of them speaking. Ig was not sure Terry still knew he was there; he had been told to forget. He seemed to be asleep on his knees. Ig sat until he heard the distant wail of a trumpet, playing a single, razzy note of alarm, a musical sound of panicked urgency: the fire trucks. He took his brother’s head in his hands and kissed his temple. What he saw was less important than what he felt.
“You’re a good man, Ignatius Perrish,” whispered Terry, without opening his eyes.
“Blasphemy,” Ig said.
HE CLIMBED DOWN from the open doorway and then, as an afterthought, reached up and took his brother’s trumpet. Then he turned and looked across the open field, along the avenue of fire, which reached in a straight line toward the cherry tree. The blaze leaped and flickered around the trunk for a moment-and then the tree itself erupted into flames, as if it were soaked in kerosene. The crown of the tree roared, a parachute of red and yellow flame, and in its branches was the Tree House of the Mind. Curtains of flame billowed in the windows. The cherry alone burned in the wood, the other trees untouched by fire.
Ig strode along the path the fire had cut through the field, a young lord on the red carpet that led to his manor. By some trick of optics, the headlights of Lee’s Caddy fell upon him and cast a vast, looming, four-story-high shadow against the boiling smoke. The first of the fire trucks was thumping its slow way down the rutted dirt road, and the driver, a thirty-year veteran named Rick Terrapin, saw it, a horned black devil as tall as the foundry’s chimney, and he cried out and jerked at the wheel, took the fire truck right off the road and clipped a birch tree. Rick Terrapin would retire three weeks later. Between the devil in the smoke and the horrors he saw inside the foundry, he didn’t much feel like putting out fires anymore. After that he was just as happy to let shit burn.
Ig went with his stolen trumpet into the yellow blaze and came at last to the tree. He did not lose a step but started straight up the burning ladder of its branches. He thought he heard voices above, irreverent, cheerful voices, and laughter-a celebration! There was music, too, kettledrums and the saucy bump-and-grind of trumpets. The trapdoor was open. Ig climbed through, into his new home, his tower of fire, which held his throne of flame. He was right; there was a celebration under way-a wedding party, his wedding party-and his bride awaited him there, with her hair aflame, naked but for a loose wrap of fire. And he took her into his arms, and her mouth found his, and together they burned.
TERRY CAME BACK HOME in the third week of October, and the first warm afternoon with nothing to do he drove out to the foundry for a look around.
The great brick building stood in a blackened field, amid the trash heaps that had gone up like bonfires and were now hills of ash, smoked glass, and burnt wire. The building itself was streaked with soot, and the whole place had a faint odor of char about it.
But around back, at the top of the Evel Knievel trail, it was nice, the light good, coming sideways through the trees in their Halloween costumes of red and gold. The trees were on fire, blazed like enormous torches. The river below made a soft rushing sound that played in gentle counterpoint to the easy soughing of the wind. Terry thought he could sit there all day.
He had been doing a lot of walking the last few weeks, a lot of sitting and watching and waiting. He had put his L.A. house on the market in late September and moved back to New York City, went to Central Park almost every day. The show was over, and without it he didn’t see any reason to hang around in a place where there weren’t seasons and where you couldn’t walk to anything.
Fox was still hoping he’d come back, had issued a statement that in the aftermath of his brother’s murder Terry had opted to take a professional sabbatical; this conveniently overlooked the fact that Terry had in fact formally resigned, weeks before the incident at the foundry. The TV people could say what they wanted to say. He wasn’t coming back. He thought maybe in another month or two he might go out, do some gigging in clubs. He wasn’t in any hurry to work again, though. He was still getting unpacked, trying not to think too much. Whatever happened next would happen on its own schedule. He’d find his way to something eventually. He hadn’t even bought himself a new horn.
No one knew what had happened that night at the foundry, and since Terry refused to provide a public comment and everyone else at the scene was dead, there were a lot of crazy ideas going around about the evening Eric and Lee died. TMZ had published the craziest account. They said Terry had gone out to the foundry looking for his brother and found Eric Hannity and Lee Tourneau there, the two of them arguing. Terry had overheard enough to understand they had murdered his brother, barbecued him alive in his car, and were out there looking for evidence they might have left behind. According to TMZ, Lee and Eric caught Terry trying to slip away and dragged him into the foundry. They had meant to kill him, but first they wanted to know if he had called anyone, if anyone knew where he was. They locked him in a chimney with a poisonous snake, trying to scare him into talking. But while he was in there, they began to argue again. Terry heard screams and gunshots. By the time he got out of the chimney, things were on fire and both men were dead, Eric Hannity by shotgun, Lee Tourneau by pitchfork. It was like the plot of a sixteenth-century revenge tragedy; all that was missing was an appearance by the devil. Terry wondered where TMZ got their information, if they had paid someone off in the police department-Detective Carter, perhaps; their outlandish report read almost exactly like Terry’s own signed testimony.
Detective Carter had come to see Terry on his second day in the hospital. Terry didn’t remember much about the first day. He recalled when he was wheeled into the emergency room, remembered someone pulling an oxygen mask over his face, and a rush of cool air that smelled faintly medicinal. He remembered that later he had hallucinated, had opened his eyes to find his dead brother sitting on the edge of his hospital cot. Ig had Terry’s trumpet and was playing a little bebop riff. Merrin was there, too, pirouetting barefoot in a short dress of crimson silk, spinning to the music so her dark red hair flew. As the sound of the trumpet resolved to the steady bleep of the EKG machine, both of them faded away. Still later, in the early hours of the morning, Terry had lifted his head from the pillow and looked around to find his mother and father sitting in chairs against the wall, both of them asleep, his father’s head resting on his mother’s shoulder. They were holding hands.
But by the afternoon of the second day, Terry merely felt as if he were recovering from a very bad flu. His joints throbbed and he could not get enough to drink, and he was aware of an all-body weakness…but otherwise he was himself. When the doctor, an attractive Asian woman in cat’s-eye glasses, came in the room to check his chart, he asked her how close he had come to dying. She said it had been one-in-three that he would pull through. Terry asked her how she came up with odds like that, and she said it was easy. There were three kinds of timber rattlers. He had run into the kind that had the weakest venom. With either of the other two, he would’ve had no chance at all. One-in-three.
Detective Carter had walked in as the doctor was walking out. Carter took Terry’s statement down impassively, asking few questions but allowing Terry to shape the narrative, almost as if he were not a police officer but a secretary taking dictation. He read it back to Terry, making occasional corrections. Then, without looking up from his lined yellow notepad, he said, “I don’t believe a word of this horseshit.” Without anger or humor or much inflection at all. “You know that, don’t you? Not one goddamn word.” Finally lifting his dull, knowing eyes to look at him.
“Really?” Terry had said, lying in his hospital bed, one floor below his grandmother with her busted face. “What do you think happened, then?”
“I’ve come up with lots of other explanations,” said the detective. “And they all make even less sense than this pile of crap you’re handing me. I’ll be damned if I have any idea what happened. I’ll just be damned.”
“Aren’t we all,” Terry said.
Carter gave him a hard and unfriendly glare.
“I wish I could tell you something different. But that’s what really happened,” Terry said. And most of the time, at least when the sun was up, Terry really believed it was what had happened. After dark, though, when he was trying to sleep…after dark sometimes he had other ideas. Bad ideas.
THE SOUND OF TIRES on gravel roused him, and he lifted his head, looked back toward the foundry. In another moment an emerald Saturn came bumping around the corner, trolling across the blasted landscape. When the driver saw him, the car whined to a stop and sat there for a moment idling. Then it came on, finally pulling in not ten feet away.
“Hey, Terry,” said Glenna Nicholson as she eased out from behind the wheel. She seemed not in the least surprised to see him-as if they had planned to meet here.
She looked good, a curvy girl in stonewashed gray jeans, a sleeveless black shirt, and a black studded belt. He could see the Playboy Bunny on her exposed hip, which was a trashy touch, but who hadn’t made mistakes, done things to themselves they wished they could take back?
“Hey, Glenna,” he said. “What brings you out here?”
“Sometimes I come here for lunch,” she said, and held up a sub in one hand, wrapped in white waxed paper. “It’s quiet. Good place to think. About Ig and…stuff.”
He nodded. “What’ve you got?”
“Eggplant parm. Got a Dr Pepper, too. You want half? I always get a large, and I don’t know why. I can’t eat a large. Or I shouldn’t. I guess sometimes I do.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m really trying to take off ten pounds.”
“Why?” Terry asked, looking her over again.
She laughed. “Stop it.”
He shrugged. “I’ll eat half your sandwich, if it helps with the diet. But you don’t have anything to worry about. You’re all right.”
They sat on a fallen log along the side of the Evel Knievel trail. The water was spangled gold in the late-afternoon light. Terry didn’t know he was hungry until she gave him half her sandwich and he started to eat. Soon it was gone, and he was licking his fingers, and they were sharing out the last of the Dr Pepper. They didn’t talk. Terry was fine with that. He didn’t want to make small talk, and she seemed to know it. The silence didn’t make her nervous. It was funny, in L.A. no one ever shut up; everyone there seemed terrified by a moment of silence.
“Thanks,” he said finally.
“Don’t mention it,” she said.
He pushed a hand back through his hair. At some point in the last few weeks, he had discovered a thinness at the crown, and he had responded by letting it grow out until it was almost shaggy. He said, “I should’ve come by the salon, had you give me a cut. My shit is getting out of control.”
“I don’t work there anymore,” she said. “Gave my last cut yesterday.”
“Get out.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Well. Here’s to going on to other things, then.”
“Here’s to going on to other things.”
They each had a sip of Dr Pepper.
“Was it a good cut to end on?” Terry asked. “Did you give someone a completely awesome trim to finish up?”
“I shaved a guy bald. An older guy, actually. You don’t usually get older guys asking for a buzz job. That tends to be more of a younger-dude thing. You know him-Merrin Williams’s dad. Dale?”
“Yeah. I kind of know him,” Terry said, and grimaced, fought back an almost tidal surge of sadness that didn’t entirely make sense.
Of course Ig had been killed over Merrin; Lee and Eric had burned him to death because of what they thought he had done to her. Ig’s last year had been so bad, so unhappy, Terry almost couldn’t bear to think about it. He was sure Ig hadn’t done it, could never have killed Merrin. He supposed that now no one would ever know who had really killed her. He shuddered, remembering the night Merrin had died. He had been with fucking Lee Tourneau then-the revolting little sociopath-had even enjoyed his company. A couple of drinks, some cheap ganja out on the sandbar-and then Terry had dozed off in Lee’s car and not woken again until dawn. It sometimes seemed like that had been the last night he was really happy, playing cards with Ig and then aimlessly driving around and around Gideon through an August evening that smelled of the river and firecrackers. Terry wondered if there was any smell in all the world so sweet.
“Why’d he do it?” Terry asked.
“Mr. Williams said he’s moving down to Sarasota, and when he gets there, he wants to feel the sun on his bare head. Also, because his wife hates men with shaved heads. Or maybe she’s his ex-wife now. I think he’s going to Sarasota without her.” She smoothed a leaf out on her knee, then picked it up by the stem, lifted it into the breeze, and let go, watched it sail away. “I’m moving, too. ’S why I quit.”
“Where to?”
“New York,” she said.
“City?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hell. Look me up when you get there, why don’t you? I’ll show you some good clubs,” Terry said. He was already writing the number to his cell on an old receipt in his pocket.
“What do you mean? Aren’t you in L.A.?”
“Naw. No reason to hang around without Hothouse, and I’d take New York over L.A. anytime. You know? It’s just a lot more…real.” He handed her his number.
She sat on the ground, holding the scrap of paper and smiling up at him, her elbows back on the log and the light dappling her face. She looked good.
“Well,” she said, “I think we’ll be living in different neighborhoods.”
“That’s why God invented cabs,” he said.
“He invented them?”
“No. Men invented them so they could get home safely after a night of drunken carousing.”
“When you think about it,” she said, “most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.”
“True that,” he said.
They got up to walk off their sandwiches, went for a meandering stroll around the foundry. As they came to the front, Terry paused again, looking at that wide swath of burned earth. It was funny the way the wind had channeled the fire straight to the town woods and then set just a single tree aflame. That tree. It still stood, a rack of great blackened antlers, terrible horns clawing at the sky. The sight of it gave him pause, held him briefly transfixed. He shivered; the air suddenly felt cooler, more like late October in New England.
“Lookat,” Glenna said, bending and picking something out of the burnt undergrowth.
It was a gold cross, threaded on a delicate chain. She held it up, and it swung back and forth, flashing a golden light into her smooth, pretty face.
“Nice,” she said.
“You want it?”
“I’d probably catch fire if I put this thing on,” she said. “Go for it.”
“Nah,” Terry said. “This is for a girl.” He carried it over to a sapling growing up against the foundry, hung it on one of the branches. “Maybe whoever left it will come back for it.”
They went on their way, not talking much, just enjoying the light and the day, around the foundry and back to her car. He wasn’t sure when they took each other’s hands, but by the time they reached the Saturn, they had. Her fingers slid from his with unmistakable reluctance.
A breeze lifted, raced across the yard, carrying that smell of ash and the fall chill. She hugged herself, trembled pleasurably. Distantly there came the sound of a horn, a saucy, jaunty thing, and Terry cocked his head, listening, but it must’ve been music from a car passing on the highway, because in a moment it was gone.
“I miss him, you know,” Glenna said. “Like I can’t say.”
“Me, too,” he said. “It’s funny, though. Sometimes…sometimes he’s so close it’s like I might turn around and see him. Grinning at me.”
“Yeah. I feel that, too,” she said, and smiled: a tough, generous, real smile. “Hey. I should go. See you in New York, maybe.”
“Not maybe. Definitely.”
“Okay. Definitely.” She got into her car and shut the door and waved to him before she began to back away.
Terry stood there after she was gone, the breeze tugging at his overcoat, and looked again at the empty foundry, the blasted field. He knew he should’ve been feeling something for Ig, should’ve been racked with grief…but instead he was wondering how long after he got to New York it would be before Glenna called, and where he ought to take her. He knew some places.
The wind gusted again, not just chilly but genuinely cold, and Terry cocked his head once more, thought for a moment he heard another distant snatch of trumpet, a dirty salute. It was a beautifully wrought little riff, and in the moment of hearing it he felt, for the first time in weeks, the impulse to play again. Then the sound of the horn was gone, carried away on the breeze. It was time for him to go, too.
“Poor devil,” Terry said before he got into his rent-a-car and drove away.