Horns

“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning, eyebrows knitting together. “I mean I’m not in the mood for comedy. What kind of mood are you talking about?”

He leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips were wet and cold.

She flinched, took a startled step back. The jacket slipped, and she caught it to hold it in place, keep it between them. “What are you doing?”

“I just want you to feel better. If you’re miserable, that’s at least partly my fault.”

“Nothing’s your fault,” she said. She was watching him with wide, wondering eyes, a terrible kind of understanding dawning in her face. So like a little girl’s face. It was easy to look at her and imagine she was not twenty-four but still sixteen, still cherry. “I didn’t break up with Ig because of you. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Except that now we can be together. Wasn’t that the reason for this whole exercise?”

She took another unsteady step back, her face becoming incredulous, her mouth widening as if to cry out. The thought that she might be about to yell alarmed him, and he felt an impulse to step forward and get a hand over her mouth. But she didn’t yell. She laughed-strained, disbelieving laughter. Lee grimaced; for a moment it was like his senile mother laughing at him: You ought to ask for your money back.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Oh, Jesus fuck. Aw, Lee, this is a really bad time for some kind of shitty joke.”

“I agree,” Lee said.

She stared. The sick, confused smile faded from her face, and her upper lip lifted in a sneer. An ugly sneer of disgust.

“That’s what you think? That I broke up with him…so I could fuck you? You’re his friend. My friend. Don’t you understand anything?”

He took a step toward her, reaching for her shoulder, and she shoved him. He wasn’t expecting it, and his heels struck a root, and he went straight down onto his ass in the wet, hard earth.

Lee stared up at her and felt something rising in him, a kind of thunderous roar, a subway coming through the tu

“What were we talking about, then?” Lee asked patiently, ludicrously, from his spot on the damp earth. “What have we spent the whole last month discussing? I thought you wanted to fuck other people. I thought there were things you knew about yourself, about how you feel, that you had to deal with. Things about me.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Lee.”

“Telling me to meet you for di

“I was worried about you, you dick,” she said. “Your mother just died.”

“You think I’m stupid? You were climbing all over me the morning she passed away, dry humping my leg with her dead in the next room.”

“I what?” Her voice rose, shrill and piping. She was making too much noise, Terry might hear, Terry might wonder why they were arguing. Lee’s hand closed around the tie tucked into her shoe, and he clenched it in his fist as he started to push himself to his feet. Merrin went on, “Are you talking about when you were drunk and I gave you a hug and you started fondling me? I let it go because you were fucked up, Lee, and that’s all that happened. That’s all.” She was begi

“I do now, bitch,” he said, and jerked the jacket out of her hands, threw it on the ground, and put the loop of the tie around her throat.

CHAPTER FORTY

AFTER HE HIT HER with the stone, Merrin stopped trying to throw him off, and he could do what he wanted, and he loosened his grip on the tie around her throat. She turned her face to the side, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, her eyelids fluttering strangely. A trickle of blood ran from under her hairline and down her dirty, smudged face.

He thought she was completely out of it, too dazed to do anything except take it while he fucked her, but then she spoke, in a strange, distant voice.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Yeah?” he asked her, pushing with more force, because it was the only way to stay hard. It wasn’t as good as he thought it’d be. She was dry. “Yeah, you like that?”

But he had misunderstood her again. She wasn’t talking about how it felt.

“I escaped,” she said.

Lee ignored her, kept working between her legs.

Her head turned slightly, and she stared up into the great spreading crown of the tree above them.

“I climbed the tree and got away,” she said. “I finally found my way back, Ig. I’m okay. I’m where it’s safe.”

Lee glanced up into the branches and waving leaves, but there was nothing up there. He couldn’t imagine what she was staring at or talking about, and he didn’t feel like asking. When he looked back into her face, something had fled from her eyes, and she didn’t say another word, which was good, because he was sick and tired of all her fucking talk.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MICK AND KEITH

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

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 begi