Heart-Shaped Box

Jude interrupted to ask her how she was getting to Buffalo. She said she ran out of bus money back at Penn Station and figured she’d hitch the rest of the way.

“Do you know it’s three hundred miles?” he asked.

Reese stared at him, wide-eyed, then shook her head. “You look at a map and this state doesn’t seem so gosh-darn big. Are you sure it’s three hundred miles?”

Marybeth took her empty plate and set it in the sink. “Is there anyone you want to call? Anyone in your family? You can use our phone.”

“No, ma’am.”

Marybeth smiled a little at this, and Jude wondered if anyone had ever called her “ma’am” before.

“What about your mother?” Marybeth asked.

“She’s in jail. I hope she doesn’t ever get out,” Reese said, and she looked into her cocoa. She began to play with a long yellow strand of her hair, curling it around and around her finger, a thing Jude had seen Anna do a thousand times. She said, “I don’t even like to think about her. I’d rather pretend she was dead or something. I wouldn’t wish her on anyone. She’s a curse, is what she is. If I thought someday I was going to be a mother like her, I’d have myself sterilized right now.”

When she finished her cocoa, Jude put on a rain slicker and told Reese to come on, he would take her to the bus station.

For a while they rode without speaking, the radio off, no sound but the rain tapping on the glass and the Charger’s wipers beating back and forth. He looked over at her once and saw she had the seat cranked back and her eyes closed. She had taken off her denim jacket and spread it over herself like a blanket. He believed she was sleeping.

But in a while she opened one eye and squinted at him. “You really cared about Aunt Anna, didn’t you?”

He nodded. The wipers went whip-thud, whip-thud.

Reese said, “There’s things my momma did she shouldn’t have done. Some things I’d give my left arm to forget. Sometimes I think my Aunt Anna found out about some of what my momma was doing—my momma and old Craddock, her stepfather—and that’s why she killed herself. Because she couldn’t live anymore with what she knew, but she couldn’t talk about it either. I know she was already real unhappy. I think maybe some bad stuff happened to her, too, when she was little. Some of the same stuff happened to me.” She was looking at him directly now.

So. Reese at least did not know everything her mother had done, which Jude could only take to mean that there really was some mercy to be found in the world.

“I am sorry about what I did to your hand,” she said. “I mean that. I have dreams sometimes, about my Aunt Anna. We go for rides together. She has a cool old car like this one, only black. She isn’t sad anymore, not in my dreams. We go for rides in the country. She listens to your music on the radio. She told me you weren’t at our house to hurt me. She said you came to end it. To bring my mother to account for what she let happen to me. I just wanted to say I’m sorry and I hope you’re happy.”

He nodded but did not reply, did not, in truth, trust his own voice.

They went into the station together. Jude left her on a scarred wooden bench, went to the counter and bought a ticket to Buffalo. He had the station agent put it inside an envelope. He slipped two hundred dollars in with it, folded into a sheet of paper with his phone number on it and a note that she should call if she ran into trouble on the road. When he returned to her, he stuck the envelope into the pouch on the side of her backpack instead of handing it to her, so she wouldn’t look into it right away and try to give the money back.

She went with him out onto the street, where the rain was falling more heavily now and the last of the day’s light had fled, leaving things blue and twilighty and cold. He turned to say good-bye, and she stood on tiptoe and kissed the chilled, wet side of his face. He had, until then, been thinking of her as a young woman, but her kiss was the thoughtless kiss of a child. The idea of her traveling hundreds of miles north, with no one to look out for her, seemed suddenly all the more daunting.

“Take care,” they both said, at exactly the same time, in perfect unison, and then they laughed. Jude squeezed her hand and nodded but had nothing else to say except good-bye.

It was dark when he came back into the house. Marybeth pulled two bottles of Sam Adams out of the fridge, then started rummaging in the drawers for a bottle opener.

“I wish I could’ve done something for her,” Jude said.

“She’s a little young,” Marybeth said. “Even for you. Keep it in your pants, why don’t you?”

“Jesus. That’s not what I meant.”

Marybeth laughed, found a dishrag, and chucked it in his face.

“Dry off. You look even more like a pathetic derelict when you’re all wet.”

He rubbed the rag through his hair. Marybeth popped him a beer and set it in front of him. Then she saw he was still pouting and laughed again.

“Come on, now, Jude. If you didn’t have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn’t be any fire left in your life at all,” she said. She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, watching him with a certain wry, tender regard. “Anyway, you gave her a bus ticket to Buffalo, and…what? How much money?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Come on, now. You did something for her. You did plenty. What else were you supposed to do?”

Jude sat at the center island, holding the beer Marybeth had set in front of him but not drinking it. He was tired, still damp and chilly from the outside. A big truck, or a Greyhound maybe, roared down the highway, fled into the cold tunnel of the night, was gone. He could hear the puppies out in their pen, yipping at it, excited by its noise.

“I hope she makes it,” Jude said.

“To Buffalo? I don’t see why she wouldn’t,” Marybeth said.

“Yeah,” Jude said, although he wasn’t sure that was what he’d really meant at all.

HEART-SHAPED ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Raise your lighters for one last schmaltzy power ballad and allow me to sing the praises of those folks who gave so much to help bring Heart-Shaped Box into existence. My thanks to my agent, Michael Choate, who steers my professional ship with care, discretion, and uncommon good sense. I owe much to Jennifer Brehl, for all the hard work she put into editing my novel, for guiding me through the final draft, and especially for taking a chance on Heart-Shaped Box in the first place. Maureen Sugden did an extraordinary job of copyediting my novel. Thanks are also due to Lisa Gallagher, Juliette Shapland, Kate Nintzel, Ana Maria Allessi, Lynn Grady, Rich Aquan, Lorie Young, Kim Lewis, Seale Ballenger, Kevin Callahan, Sara Bogush, and everyone else at William Morrow who went to bat for the book. Gratitude is owed, as well, to Jo Fletcher, at Gollancz, in England, who sweated over this book as much as anyone.

My deepest appreciation to Andy and Kerri, for their enthusiasm and friendship, and to Shane, who is not only my compadre but who also keeps my web site, joehillfiction.com, flying with spit and imagination. And I can’t say how grateful I am to my parents and siblings for their time, thoughts, support, and love.

Most of all, my love and thanks to Leanora and the boys. Leanora spent I don’t know how many hours reading and rereading this manuscript, in all its various forms, and talking with me about Jude, Marybeth, and the ghosts. To put it another way: She read a million pages, and she rocked them all. Thanks, Leanora. I am so glad and so lucky to have you as my best friend.

That’s all, and thanks for coming to my show, everyone. Good night, Shreveport!

Throw Up Your Horns:

Thoughts on the Second Novel

The first concert I went to was KISS, Madison Square Garden, the original members in their glam makeup, Gene Simmons vomiting blood and breathing flame. I was psyched. I had the Colorforms set, the comics, Double Platinum on vinyl. I knew all their secrets. I knew their true names: Demon and Catman, Spaceman and Starchild, names that suited them far better than Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter. I knew that KISS stood for KNIGHTS IN SATAN’S SERVICE, even if the band said it didn’t (wink wink). I was a card-carrying member of the KISS Army. I was eight years old and when the band hit the stage, leaping through a curtain of white fire, I screamed my head off and threw my horns in the air. You know about throwing the horns: make a fist, then stick up your index finger and your pinkie, to show your enthusiasm for personal damnation and the devil. At my age I probably didn’t know that was what it meant; I just knew it felt right.

People tend to overrate the importance of their firsts: concert, kiss, friend, lay, car, broken promise, broken heart. We aren’t ducklings, doomed to imprint on the first moving creature we see, and think of it as mother for the rest of our lives. Yeah, KISS made the first music that ever connected with me, but thirty years after that initial infatuation, it’s my sense that their genius lay in their marketing, not their music. (‘Course, Judas Coyne would’ve been glad to go on tour with them. Jude’s Hammer and KISS on the same bill? Money in the bank, baby.)

I’ve moved on. Borrow my iPod for an hour, put my music on shuffle, you might come across Josh Ritter or Weezer, but you won’t be hearing “Lick it Up.”

But if early influences are overrated, it’s still probably true that what charged your batteries as a kid will often provide clues to what will charge them later. The excitement I felt when I heard “Heaven’s On Fire” for the first time was a shock of discovery, of having come across a secret door, one that opened into a whole series of connected rooms. Dark rooms, with different music playing in each one. And not just any music. Loud music: AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Nine-Inch Nails.

And while I may have outgrown KISS’s sound, I remain preoccupied with certain dizzying notions first suggested to me by that gang of good-Jewish-boys-gone-glam from New York City. Such as: The power of casting aside your old name and taking on a new, more honest one; the thrill of breathing fire, either metaphorically, or actually; the possibility of an ordinary man transforming himself into something bigger-than-life, something both monstrous and wonderful, in the way Chaim Witz only needed to daub on some face makeup to become a demon with a guitar. Jesus saves, but the devil rock-and-rolls all night long (and parties every day). And while, as a child, I could not understand the erotic link the band made between burning heaven and getting laid—between destruction and sexual release—I wasn’t deaf either. It made its impression.

I wrote about some of these things in Heart-Shaped Box, and then that novel was done, and I didn’t know what to do next. I picked at this, I made a mess of that. It wasn’t a great time. I think now that most writers who struggle are really wrestling not with their work, but with their identities. They’d like to write someone else’s novels—Michael Chabon’s maybe, or Neil Gaiman’s. Because maybe they felt they gave too much of themselves away in the last book, and they’re scared to do it again. Maybe the version of themselves they revealed wore devil makeup and spat blood and they don’t want to be that person; they want to wipe the makeup off, be taken seriously.

Remember what happened when the guys in KISS started performing without greasepaint and dropped the freaky names? All the magic was gone. They ran from what made them . . . them. They weren’t KISS anymore, they were just four hard-rock musicians, technically capable, of course, but oddly flavorless. All the craft in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you won’t let your freak flag fly and write your enthusiasms, excitements, secret turn-ons, wishes, hates, and hopes. It is my suggestion that when KISS wiped off the makeup they were not showing their true faces to the world, but erasing them. The mask was more exciting (because it was more honest) than what lay beneath it.

I mention all this to make a point, that the artist’s primary creation is not their work, but the sensibility that creates the work. You want to write (or paint, or direct, or dance) from your truest self, and that means knowing what belongs to you—your particular subjects, motifs, characters, and rhythms. Eventually I found my way back to what belonged to me, and Horns was the natural byproduct: a story about transformation, fire, spitting blood, music, regret, and redemption not from sin, but through it. It goes to a different place than Heart-Shaped Box, but anyone can see the same guy with the same interests (obsessions) wrote it. I don’t know what it means, that I have to write about those things; I just know it feels right.

To put it another way, I did try for a while to be someone good, someone better, someone else, someone who could write a love story that acts like a love story, someone who could win a literary prize or two with a novel full of classical allusions and social meaning . . . but in the end, I could only be the devil you know.

Here’s hoping you’ll let me whisper in your ear one more time. And when I tell you to go to hell—remember, I mean it in the kindest possible way.

Throw up your Horns. Let’s rock.

Joe Hill

November 2009

Herewith follows a bonus excerpt from Horns, Joe Hill’s new novel, on sale everywhere in February 2010.

one.

Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill—wet-eyed and weak—he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.

But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise and for the second time in twelve hours, he pissed on his feet.

two.

He shoved himself back into his khaki shorts—he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes—and leaned over the sink for a better look.

They weren’t much as horns went, each of them about as long as his ring finger, thick at the base, but soon narrowing to a point as they hooked upward. The horns were covered in his own too-pale skin, except at the very tips, which were an ugly inflamed red, as if the needle-points at the ends of them were about to poke through the flesh. He touched one, and found the point sensitive, a little sore. He ran his fingers along the sides of each and felt the density of bone beneath the stretched-tight smoothness of skin.

His first thought was that somehow he had brought this affliction upon himself. Late the night before he had gone into the woods beyond the old foundry, to the place where Merrin Williams had been killed. People had left remembrances at a diseased black cherry tree, the bark peeling away to show the flesh beneath. Merrin had been found like that, clothes peeled away to show the flesh beneath. There were photographs of her placed delicately in the branches, a vase of pussy-willows, Hallmark cards warped and stained from exposure to the elements. Someone, Merrin’s mother probably, had left a decorative cross with yellow nylon roses stapled to it, and a plastic Virgin who smiled with the beatific idiocy of the functionally retarded.

He couldn’t stand that simpering smile. He couldn’t stand the cross either, planted in the place where Merrin bled to death from her smashed-in head. A cross with yellow roses. What a fucking thing. It was like an electric chair with floral print cushions, a bad joke. It bothered him that someone wanted to bring Christ out here. Christ was a year too late to do any good. He hadn’t been anywhere around when Merrin needed Him.

Ig had ripped the decorative cross down and stamped it into the dirt. He had to take a leak and he did it on the Virgin, drunkenly urinating on his own feet in the process. Perhaps that was blasphemy enough to bring on this transformation. But no—he sensed there had been more. What else, he couldn’t recall. He had had a lot to drink.

He turned his head this way and that, studying himself in the mirror, lifting his fingers to touch the horns, once and again. How deep did the bone go? Did the horns have roots, pushing back into his brain? At this thought, the bathroom darkened, as if the light bulb overhead had briefly gone dim. The welling darkness, though, was behind his eyes, in his head, not in the light fixtures. He held the sink and waited for the feeling of weakness to pass.

He saw it then. He was going to die. Of course he was going to die. Something was pushing into his brain, all right: a tumor. The horns weren’t really there. They were metaphorical, imaginary. He had a tumor eating his brain and it was causing him to see things. And if he was to the point of seeing things, then it was probably too late to save him.

The idea that he might be going to die brought with it a surge of relief, a physical sensation, like coming up for air after being underwater too long. Ig had come close to drowning once, and had suffered from asthma as a child, and to him, contentment was as simple as being able to breathe.

“I’m sick,” he breathed. “I’m dying.”

It improved his mood to say it aloud.

He studied himself in the mirror, expecting the horns to vanish now that he knew they were hallucinatory, but it didn’t work that way. The horns remained. He fretfully tugged at his hair, trying to see if he could hide them, at least until he got to the doctor’s, then quit when he realized how silly it was to try and conceal something no one would be able to see but him.

He wandered into the bedroom on shaky legs. The bedclothes were shoved back on either side and the bottom sheet still bore the rumpled impression of Glenna Nicholson’s curves. He had no memory of falling into bed beside her, didn’t even remember getting home; another missing part of the evening. It had been in his head until this very moment that he had slept alone and that Glenna had spent the night somewhere else. With someone else.

They had gone out together, the night before, but after he had been drinking a while, Ig had just naturally started to think about Merrin, the anniversary of her death coming up in a few days. The more he drank, the more he missed her . . . and the more conscious he was of how little Glenna was like her. With her tattoos, and her paste-on nails, her bookshelf full of Dean Koontz novels, her cigarettes and her rap sheet, Glenna was the unMerrin. It irritated Ig to see her sitting there on the other side of the table, seemed a kind of betrayal to be with her, although whether he was betraying Merrin or himself he didn’t know. Finally he had to get away—Glenna kept reaching over to stroke his knuckles with one finger, a gesture she meant to be tender but which for some reason pissed him off. He went to the men’s room and hid there for twenty minutes. When he returned he found the booth empty. He sat there drinking for an hour before he understood she was not coming back, and that he was not sorry. But at some point in the evening they had both wound up here in the same bed, the bed they had shared for the last three months.

He heard the distant babble of the TV in the next room. Glenna was still in the apartment then, hadn’t left for the salon yet. He would ask her to drive him to the doctor. The brief feeling of relief at the thought of dying had passed, and he was already dreading the days and weeks to come: his father struggling not to cry, his mother putting on false cheer, IV drips, treatments, radiation, helpless vomiting, hospital food.

Ig crept into the next room, where Glenna sat on the living room couch, in a Guns N’ Roses tank top, and faded pajamas bottoms. She was hunched forward, elbows on the coffee table, tucking the last of a donut into her mouth with her fingers. In front of her was the box, containing three-day old supermarket donuts, and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. She was watching daytime talk.

She heard him, and glanced his way, eyelids low, gaze disapproving, then returned her stare to the tube. My Best Friend Is A Sociopath! was the subject of today’s program. Flabby rednecks were getting ready to throw chairs at each other.

She hadn’t noticed the horns.

“I think I’m sick,” he said.

“Don’t bitch at me,” she said. “I’m hungover too.”

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

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

“Are you still drunk?” she asked.

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

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

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

“You know what I need?” she asked.

“What?”

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

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

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

“The whole box,” he repeated.

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

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

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

“I want another donut,” she said.

“Go ahead. I don’t care.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what did you want to tell me?”

“I ran into Lee Tourneau last night after you disappeared on me. You remember Lee and I used to have a thing going, back in high school?”

“I remember,” Ig said. Lee and Ig had been friends in another life, but all that was behind Ig now, had died with Merrin. It was difficult to maintain close friendships when you were under suspicion of being a sex-murderer.

“Last night, at the Station House, he was sitting in a booth in back and after you disappeared he bought me a drink. I haven’t talked to Lee in forever. I forgot how easy he is to talk to. You know Lee, he doesn’t look down on anyone. He was real nice to me. When you didn’t come back after a while, he said we ought to look for you in the parking lot, and if you were gone, he’d drive me home. But then when we were outside, we got kissing kind of hot, like old times, like when we were together—and I got carried away and went down on him, right there with a couple guys watching and everything. I haven’t done anything that crazy since I was nineteen and on speed.”

Ig needed help. He needed to get out of the apartment. The air was too close, and his lungs felt tight and pinched.

She was leaning over the box of donuts again, her expression placid, as if she had just told him a fact of no particular consequence: that they were out of milk, or had lost the hot water again.

“You think it would be all right to eat one more?” she asked. “My stomach feels better.”

“Do what you want.”

She turned her head and stared at him, her pale eyes glittering with an unnatural excitement. “You mean it?”

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “Pig out.”

She smiled, cheeks dimpling, then bent over the table, taking the box in one hand. She held it in place, shoved her face into it, and began to eat. She made noises while she chewed, smacking her lips and breathing strangely. She gagged again, her shoulders hitching, but kept eating, using her free hand to push more donut into her mouth, even though her cheeks were already swollen and full. A fly buzzed around her head, agitated.

Ig edged past the couch, toward the door. She sat up a little, gasping for breath, and rolled her eyes toward him. Her gaze was panicky and her cheeks and wet mouth were gritted with sugar.

“Mm,” she moaned. “Mmm.” Whether she moaned in pleasure or misery, he didn’t know.

The fly landed at the corner of her mouth. He saw it there for a moment—then Glenna’s tongue darted out and she trapped it with her hand at the same time. When she lowered her hand, the fly was gone. Her jaw worked up and down, grinding everything in her mouth into paste.

Ig opened the door and slid himself out. As he closed the door behind him, she was lowering her face to the box again . . . a diver who had filled her lungs with air and was plunging once more into the depths.

three.

He drove to the Modern Medical Practice Clinic, where they had walk-in service. The small waiting room was almost full, and it was too warm, and there was a child screaming. A little girl lay on her back in the center of the room, producing great, howling sobs in between gasps for air. Her mother sat in a chair against the wall, and was bent over her, whispering furiously, frantically, a steady stream of threats, imprecations, and act-now-before-it’s-too-late offers. Once she tried to grip her daughter’s ankle, and the little girl kicked her hand away with a black buckled shoe.

The remainder of the people in the waiting room were determinedly ignoring the scene, looking blankly at magazines, or the muted TV in the corner. It was My Best Friend is a Sociopath! here too. Several of them glanced at Ig as he entered, a few in a hopeful sort of way, fantasizing, perhaps, that the little girl’s father had arrived to take her outside and deliver a brutal spanking. But as soon as they saw him they looked away, knew in a glance that he wasn’t there to help.

Ig wished he had brought a hat. He cupped a hand to his forehead, the way a person will when they want to shade their eyes to see into a distance on a sunny day, hoping to conceal his horns. If anyone noticed them, however, they gave no sign of it.

At the far end of the room was a window in the wall and a woman sitting at a computer on the other side. The receptionist had been staring at the mother of the crying child, but when Ig appeared before her, she looked up, and her lips twitched, formed a smile.

“What can I do you for?” she asked. She was already reaching toward a clipboard with some forms on it.

“I want a doctor to look at something,” Ig said, and lifted his hand slightly to reveal the horns.

She narrowed her eyes at them, and pursed her lips in a sympathetic moue.

“Well that doesn’t look right,” she said, and swiveled to her computer.

Whatever reaction Ig expected—and he hardly knew what he expected—it wasn’t this. She had reacted to the horns as if he had showed her a broken finger, or a rash . . . but she had reacted to them. Had seemed to see them. Only if she had really seen them, he could not imagine her simply puckering her lips and looking away.

“I just have to ask you a few questions. Name?”

“Ignatius Perrish.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Do you see a doctor locally?”

“I haven’t seen a doctor in years.”

She lifted her head and peered at him thoughtfully, frowning again, and he thought he was about to be scolded for not having regular check-ups. The little girl shrieked even more loudly than before. Ig turned his head in time to see her bash her mother in the knee with a red plastic firetruck, one of the toys stacked in the corner for kids to play with while waiting. Her mother yanked it out of her hands. The girl dropped onto her back again and began to kick at the air—like an overturned cockroach—wailing with renewed fury.

“I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up,” the receptionist remarked, in a sunny, passing-the-time tone of voice. “What do you think?”

“Do you have a pen?” Ig asked, mouth dry. He held up the clipboard. “I’ll go fill these out.”

The receptionist’s shoulders slumped and her smile went out.

“Sure,” she said to Ig, and shoved a pen at him.

He turned his back to her and looked down at the forms clipped to the board, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.

She had seen the horns but hadn’t thought them unusual. And then she had said that thing about the girl who was crying and her helpless mother: I want to tell her to shut that miserable brat up. She had wanted to know if he thought it would be okay. So had Glenna, wondering if it would be all right to stick her face in the box of donuts and feed like a pig at the trough.

He looked for a place to sit. There were exactly two empty chairs, one on either side of the mother. As Ig approached, the girl reached deep into her lungs, and dredged up a shrill scream that shook the windows and caused some in the waiting area to flinch. Advancing forward into that sound was like moving into a knee-buckling gale.

As Ig sat, the girl’s mother slumped back in her chair, swatting herself in the leg with a rolled-up magazine . . . which was not, Ig felt, what she really wanted to hit with it. The little girl seemed to have exhausted herself with this final cry, and now lay on her back with tears running down her red and ugly face. Her mother was red in the face too. She cast a miserable, eye-rolling glance at Ig. Her gaze seemed to briefly catch on his horns—and then shifted away.

“Sorry about the ridiculous noise,” she said, and touched Ig’s hand in a gesture of apology.

And when she did, when her skin brushed his, Ig knew her name was Allie Letterworth, and that for the last four months she had been sleeping with her golf instructor, meeting him at a motel down the road from the links. Last week they had fallen asleep after an episode of strenuous fucking, and Allie’s cell phone had been off, and so she had missed the increasingly frantic calls from her daughter’s summer day camp, wondering where she was and when she would be by to pick up her little girl. When she finally arrived, two hours late, her daughter was in hysterics, red-faced, snot boiling from her nose, her blood-shot eyes wild, and Allie had to get her a sixty-dollar Webkinz, and a banana split, to calm her down and buy her silence; it was the only way to keep her husband from finding out. If she had known what a drag a kid was going to be, she never would’ve had one.

Ig pulled his hand away from her.

The girl began to grunt and stamp her feet on the floor. Allie Letterworth sighed and leaned toward Ig and said, “For what it’s worth, I’d love to kick her right in her spoiled ass, but I’m worried about what all these people would say if I hit her. Do you think—“

“No,” Ig said.

He couldn’t know the things he knew about her, but knew them anyway, the way he knew his cell phone number, or his address. He knew, too, with utter certainty, that Allie Letterworth would not talk about kicking her daughter’s spoiled ass with a total stranger. She had said it like someone talking to themselves.

“No,” repeated Allie Letterworth, opening her magazine, and then letting it fall shut. “I guess I can’t do that. I wonder if I ought to get up and go. Just leave her here and drive away. I could go stay with Michael, hide from the world, drink gin, and fuck all the time. My husband would get me on abandonment, but like, who cares? Would you want partial custody of that?”

“Is Michael your golf instructor?” Ig asked.

She nodded dreamily and smiled at him and said, “The funny thing is I never would’ve signed up for lessons with him if I knew Michael was a nigger. Before Tiger Woods there weren’t any jigaboos in golf except if they were carrying your clubs . . . it was one place you could go to get away from them. You know the way most blacks are, always on their cell phones with f-word this and f-word that, and the way they look at white women. But Michael is educated. He talks just like a white person. And it’s true what they say about black dicks. I’ve screwed tons of white guys, and there wasn’t one of ‘em who was hung like Michael.” She wrinkled her nose and said, “We call it the five-iron.”

Ig jumped to his feet and walked quickly to the receptionist’s window. He hastily scribbled answers to a few questions and then offered her the clipboard.

Behind him the little girl screamed, “No! No I won’t sit up!”

“I feel like I have to say something to that girl’s mother,” said the receptionist, looking past Ig at the woman and her daughter, paying no attention to the clipboard. “I know it’s not her fault her daughter is a screechy puke but I really want to say just one thing.”

Ig looked at the little girl and at Allie Letterworth. Allie was bent over her again, poking her with the rolled up magazine, hissing at her. Ig returned his gaze to the receptionist.

“Sure,” he said, experimentally.

She opened her mouth—then hesitated, gazing anxiously into Ig’s face. “Only thing is I wouldn’t want to start an ugly scene.”

The tips of his horns pulsed with a sudden unpleasant heat. Some deep part of him was surprised—already, and he had not even had the horns for an hour—that she had not immediately given in when he offered his permission.

“What do you mean start one?” he asked, tugging restlessly at the little goatee he was cultivating. Curious now, to see if he could make her do it. “It’s amazing how people let their kids act these days, isn’t it? When you think about it, you can hardly blame the child if the parent can’t teach them how to act.”

The receptionist smiled: a tough, grateful smile. At the sight of it, he felt another sensation shoot through the horns, an icy thrill.

She stood and glanced past him, to the woman, and the little girl.

“Ma’am?” she called. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Yes?” said Allie Letterworth, looking up hopefully, probably expecting her daughter was about to be called to her appointment.

“I know your daughter is very upset, but if you can’t quiet her down, do you think you could show some fucking consideration to the rest of us and get off your wide ass and take her outside where we won’t all have to listen to her squall?” asked the receptionist, smiling her plastic, stapled-on smile.

The color drained out of Allie Letterworth’s face, leaving a few hot, red spots glowing in her waxy cheeks. She held her daughter by the wrist. The little girl’s face was a hideous shade of crimson now, and she was pulling with all her considerable weight to get free, digging her fingernails at Allie’s hand.

“What?” Allie asked. “What did you say?”

“My head!” the receptionist shouted, dropping the smile and tapping furiously at her right temple. “Your kid won’t shut up and my head is going to explode and—“

“Fuck you,” shouted Allie Letterworth, coming to her feet, swaying.

“- if you had any consideration for anyone else—“

“Shove it up your ass!”

“- you’d take that shrieking pig of yours by the hair and drag her the fuck out—“

“You dried-up twat!”

“- but oh no you just sit there diddling yourself—“

“Come on, Marcy,” said Allie, yanking at her daughter’s wrist.

“No!” said the little girl.

“I said come on!” said her mother, pulling her toward the exit.

At the threshold to the street, Allie Letterworth’s daughter wrenched her wrist free from her mother’s grip. She bolted across the room, but caught her feet on the firetruck and crashed onto her hands and knees. The girl began to scream once again, her worst, most piercing screams yet, and rolled onto her side, holding a bloody knee. Her mother paid no mind. She threw down her purse and began to yell at the receptionist and the receptionist hollered shrilly back. Ig’s horns throbbed with a curiously pleasurable feeling of fullness and weight.

He was closer to the girl than anyone and her mother wasn’t coming to help. Ig took her wrist to help her to her feet. When he touched her he knew her name was Marcia Letterworth and that she had dumped her breakfast into her mother’s lap on purpose that morning, because her mother was making her go to the doctor to have her warts burned off and she didn’t want to go and it was going to hurt and her mother was mean and stupid. Marcia turned her face up toward his. It was a bright sunburnt red, screwed up into a sickening expression of rage. Her eyes, full of tears, were the clear, intense blue of a blowtorch.

“I hate mommy,” she told Ig. “I want to burn her in her bed with matches. I want to burn her all up gone.”

About the Author

JOE HILL is the author of the acclaimed story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He lives in New England

www.joehillfiction.com

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ALSO BY JOE HILL

20th Century Ghosts (stories)

Credits

Jacket design by Richard Aquan

Jacket photograph by Daryle Benson/Masterfile

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HEART-SHAPED BOX. Copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ePub Edition © JANUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780061998270