The Horn

Luke Whisnant

It was a bleak Sunday, overcast, the last day of fall. We were moping through the woods, bitching about our embarrassing parents—what was wrong with them, why they were always kissing and hugging in front of our friends, making out like love-sick teenagers? That’s when we found it. One of us—we can’t remember who—stopped suddenly and bent low over a drift of dead leaves and reached in, like somebody standing in a pond trying to grasp a fish. What is it? we said.

It was The Horn. That’s what we ended up calling it for short. The full name we gave it was The Horn of Satan, Master of Hell.

The Horn of Satan, Master of Hell, was a gnarly old stump. It looked like a piece of driftwood, though the honeysuckle jungle and scrubby pines behind our house were hundreds of miles from any beach. It was about the size of a loaf of bread, with wicked-looking roots and sharp points and broken-off branches sticking out all over it. It looked like a Cro-Magnon mace, but clearly The Horn had been shaped by no human hand. It might have been carved by trolls in a fetid underground lair except there were no tool marks of any kind anywhere on it. It was foul and malformed, a twisted diseased root of something you might find in a witch’s larder, and in the dim late light it radiated evil.

At school we’d heard rumors of devil worshipers in the woods, older kids, teenage goths who drew pentagrams in the dirt, burned black candles, and made animal sacrifices.

One of us said that the horn must belong to those kids, and now our fingerprints were on it and they could track us down and tie us up with black ropes and kill us in a ritual sacrificial manner.

It’s cursed, another of us said. It’s got a curse on it. Get rid of it.

We pitched it as high and as far as we could off the side of the embankment toward the creek below. We heard it go crashing and tumbling through the brambles, good riddance to bad Satanic rubbish.

The next week we found it leaning against a dead oak half a mile away.

It’s cursed, I told you so.

Don’t touch it. You’ll catch the curse.

Let’s bury it.

No, let’s burn it.

Fool. You can’t burn something that was forged in hell.

You talk like a retard.

I’m going to toss it in the creek.

Don’t do that, you retard. You’ll pass the curse to the creek and then to the river and then the ocean and then the whole world of Planet Earth.

Idiot. Help me heave it.

It flew, tumbling like the shadow of a broken-winged bird, and dropped into the dark water.

A few months later one of us tripped over it at the edge of the vacant lot next door to our house. It was crusted in mud and damp with wood rot but there was no doubt whatsoever that this was the Horn of Satan, Master of Hell. Evil emanated from it in waves.

We hosed it off, dried it a day or two in the sun, then took it inside. We figured we would tame it—tame the horn of Satan. We would take the curse off that way. Our parents sat on the sofa holding hands, eating popcorn. We told them it was driftwood, something nice to decorate the hearth.

Are there bugs on it? our mother asked. She lived in terror of spiders. Our father fed her a piece of popcorn.

That summer we had the Hair soundtrack on the living room stereo and were doing spastic jumping jacks to make the record skip and laughing like a gang of idiots when one of us slipped and fell face-first into the brick hearth and opened a gash that took 16 stitches. Not long after, a piece of black rope appeared on our porch, and two fingers were broken two days apart. Spilled coffee badly scalded a bare leg. Warts grew on the backs of our hands, all three of us. With some kids from the neighborhood we were involved in an unprecedented six-bike pile-up at the bottom of Thorncliff Drive: two concussions, a fractured collarbone, and numerous abrasions, cuts, and gashes.

We never should of brought that damn thing in the house.

I’d toss it in the trash but I’m scared to touch it.

Me too.

Just leave it alone. Maybe the curse will wear off. Maybe the horn is just settling in, getting used to us. Maybe it’ll chill.

After that when we walked through the living room we’d twist our fingers into a secret sign and we’d say “Chill out, Horn of Satan.”

The summer passed and the scars faded. Our mother redecorated the living room and set the horn in the hallway by the front door. Later our father carried it out to the garage. It sat on its side in a dark spidery corner. Sometimes it seemed to glow in the dim afternoons.

One Tuesday evening in October our father called from work and told us to pack a bag, we were going to stay at our grandmother’s for a while. It’s a school night, we said, and where’s mom? Don’t worry about that, our father said, just get packed; I’ll be there in ten minutes. In the driveway with the car in park and the engine running he kissed our foreheads and buckled each of our seatbelts as if we were babies, then he got in and rested his head a moment against the steering wheel. The moon stood unmoving and orange over the pines.

We left our house that night and we never went back—they never let us—not even to say goodbye to our friends or gather our toys. The Horn of Satan became one more thing we lost track of—like the croquet set, the inflatable dragon pool-float, the ham radio base-station, the blue-and-red fighting kites—things that ended up who knows where after the divorce came through.

Luke Whisnant is the author of the story collection Down in the Flood, the poetry chapbooks Street and Above Floodstage, and the novel Watching TV with the Red Chinese, which was made into an independent film in 2011. He teaches at East Carolina University, and serves as editor of the journal, Tar River Poetry.