Horns

Gle

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.