Pet Sematary

1

Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened… although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must do. when he finds the man who should have been his father relatively late in life. He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen’s cat.

The search committee at the university had moved slowly, the hunt for a house within commuting distance of the university had been hair-raising, and by the time they neared the place where he believed the house to be-all the landmarks are right… like the astrological signs the night before Caesar was assassinated, Louis thought morbidly-they were all tired and tense and on edge.

Gage was cutting teeth and fussed almost ceaselessly. He would not sleep, no matter how much Rachel sang to him. She offered him the breast even though it was off his schedule. Gage knew his dining schedule as well as she-better, maybe-and he promptly bit her with his new teeth. Rachel, still not entirely sure about this move to Maine from Chicago, where she had lived her whole life, burst into tears. Eileen promptly joined her. In the back of the station wagon, Church continued to pace restlessly as he had done for the last three days it had taken them to drive here from Chicago. His yowling from the cat kennel had been bad, but his restless pacing after they finally gave up and set him free in the car had been almost as unnerving.

Louis himself felt a little like crying. A wild but not Unattractive idea suddenly came to him: He would suggest that they go back to Bangor for something to eat while they waited for the moving van, and when his three hostages to fortune got out, he would floor the accelerator and drive away without so much as a look back, foot to the mat, the wagon’s huge four-barrel carburetor gobbling expensive gasoline.

He would drive south, all the way to Orlando, Florida, where he would get a job at Disney World as a medic, under a new name. But before he hit the turnpike-big old 95 southbound-he would stop by the side of the road and put the fucking cat out too.

Then they rounded a final curve, and there was the house that only he had seen up until now. He had flown out and looked at each of the seven possibles they had picked from photos once the position at the University of Maine was solidly his, and this was the one he had chosen: a big old New England colonial (but newly sided and insulated; the heating costs, while horrible enough, were not out of line in terms of consumption), three big rooms downstairs, four more up, a long shed that might be converted to more rooms later on-all of it surrounded by a luxuriant sprawl of lawn, lushly green even in this August heat…

Beyond the house was a large field for the children to play in, and beyond the field were woods that went on damn near forever. The property abutted state lands, the realtor had explained, and there would be no development in thз foreseeable future. The remains of the Micmac Indian tribe had laid claim to nearly eight thousand acres in Ludlow and in the towns east of Ludlow, and the complicated litigation, involving the federal government as well as that of the state, might stretch into the next century.

Rachel stopped crying abruptly. She sat up. “Is that-”

“That’s it,” Louis said. He felt apprehensive-no, he felt scared. In fact he felt terrified. He had mortgaged twelve years of their lives for this; it wouldn’t be paid off until Eileen was seventeen.

He swallowed.

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Rachel said, and that was a huge weight off his chest-and off his mind. She wasn’t kidding, he saw; it was in the way she was looking at it as they turned in the asphalted driveway that curved around to the shed in back, her eyes sweeping the blank windows, her mind already ticking away at such matters as curtains and oilcloth for the cupboards, and God knew what else.

“Daddy?” Ellie said from the back seat. She had stopped crying as well. Even Gage had stopped fussing. Louis savored the silence.

“What, love?”

Her eyes, brown under darkish blond hair in the rearview mirror, also surveyed the house, the lawn, the roof of another house off to the left in the distance, and the big field stretching up to the woods.

“Is this home?”

“It’s going to be, honey,” he said.

“Hooray!” she shouted, almost taking his ear off. And Louis, who could sometimes become very irritated with Ellie, decided he didn’t care if he ever clapped an eye on Disney World in Orlando.

He parked in front of the shed and turned off the wagon’s motor.

The engine ticked. In the silence, which seemed very big after Chicago and the bustle of State Street and the Loop, a bird sang sweetly in the late afternoon.

“Home,” Rachel said softly, still looking at the house.

“Home,” Gage said complacently on her lap.

Louis and Rachel stared at each other. In the rearview mirror, Eileen’s eyes widened.

“Did you-”

“Did he-”

“Was that-”

They all spoke together, then all laughed together. Gage took no notice; he only continued to suck his thumb. He had been saying “Ma” for almost a month now and had taken a stab or two at something that might have been “Daaa” or only wishful thinking on Louis’s part.

But this, either by accident of imitation, had been a real Word Home.

Louis plucked Gage from his wife’s lap and hugged him.

That was how they came to Ludlow.

2

In Louis Creed’s memory that one moment always held a magical quality-partly, perhaps, because it really was magical, but mostly because the rest of the evening was so wild. In the next three hours, neither peace nor magic made an appearance.

Louis had stored the house keys away neatly (he was a neat and methodical man, was Louis Creed) in a small manila envelope which he had labeled “Ludlow House-keys received June 29.” He had put the keys away in the Fairlane’s glove compartment. He was absolutely sure of that. Now they weren’t there.

While he hunted for them, growing increasingly irritated, Rachel hoisted Gage onto her hip and followed Eileen over to the tree in the field. He was checking under the seats for the third time when his daughter screamed and then began to cry.

“Louis!” Rachel called. “She’s cut herself!”

Eileen had fallen from the tire swing and hit a rock with her knee. The cut was shallow, but she was screaming like someone who had just lost a leg, Louis thought (a bit ungenerously). He glanced at the house across the road, where a light burned in the living room.

“All right, Ellie,” he said. “That’s enough. Those people over there will think someone’s being murdered.”

“But it hurrrrts!”

Louis struggled with his temper and went silently back to the wagon. The keys were gone, but the first-aid kit was still in the glove compartment. He got it and came back. When Ellie saw it, she began to scream louder than ever.

“No! Not the stingy stuff I don’t want the stingy stuff Daddy! No-”

“Eileen, it’s just Mercurochrome, and it doesn’t sting-”

“Be a big girl,” Rachel said. “It’s just-”

“No-no-no-no-no-”

“You want to stop that or your ass will sting,” Louis said.

“She’s tired, Lou,” Rachel said quietly.

“Yeah, I know the feeling. Hold her leg out.”

Rachel put Gage down and held Eileen’s leg, which Louis painted with Mercurochrome in spite of her increasingly hysterical wails.

“Someone just came out on the porch of that house across the street,” Rachel said. She picked Gage up. He had started to crawl away through the grass.

“Wonderful,” Louis muttered.

“Lou, she’s-”

“Tired, I know.” He capped the Mercurochrome and looked grimly at his daughter.

“There. And it really didn’t hurt a bit. Fess up, Ellie.

“it does! It does hurt! It hurrrr-”

His hand itched to slap her and he grabbed his leg hard.

“Did you find the keys?” Rachel asked.

“Not yet,” Louis said, snapping the first-aid kit closed and getting up. “I’ll-”

Gage began to scream. He was not fussing or crying but really screaming, writhing in Rachel’s arms.

“What’s wrong with him?” Rachel cried, thrusting him almost blindly at Louis. It was, he supposed, one of the advantages of having married a doctor-you could shove the kid at your husband whenever the kid seemed to be dying. “Louis!

What’s-”

The baby was grabbing frantically at his neck, screaming wildly. Louis flipped him over and saw an angry white knob rising on the side of Gage’s neck. And there was also something on the. strap of his jumper, something fuzzy, squirming weakly.

Eileen, who had become quieter, began to scream again, “Bee! Bee! BEEEEEE!” She jumped back, tripped over the same protruding rock on which she had already come a cropper, sat down hard, and began to cry again in mingled pain, surprise, and fear.

I’m going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee! “Do something, Louis!

Can’t you do something?”

“Got to get the stinger out,” a voice behind them drawled. That’s the ticket.

Get the stinger out and put some baking Soda on it. Bump’ll go down.” But the voice was so thick With Down East accent that for a moment Louis’s tired, confused mind refused to translate the dialect: Got t’get the stinga out ‘n put some bakin soda on’t. TI! go daown.

He turned and saw an old man of perhaps seventy-a hale and healthy seventy-standing there on the grass. He wore a biballs over a blue chambray shirt that showed his thickly folded and wrinkled neck. His face was sunburned, and he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette. As Louis looked at him, the old man pinched the cigarette out between his thumb and forefinger and pocketed it neatly. He held out his hands and smiled crookedly… a smile Louis liked at once-and he was not a man who “took” to people.

“Not to tell you y’business, Doc,” he said. And that was how Louis met Judson Crandall, the man who should have been his father.

3

He had watched them arrive from across the street and had come across to see if he could help when it seemed they were “in a bit of a tight,” as he put it.

While Louis held the baby on his shoulder, Crandall stepped near, looked at the swelling on Gage’s neck, and reached out with one blocky, twisted hand. Rachel opened her mouth to protest-his hand looked terribly clumsy and almost as big as Gage’s head-but before she could say a word, the old man’s fingers had made a single decisive movement, as apt and deft as the fingers of a man walking cards across his knuckles or sending coins into conjurer’s limbo. And the stinger lay in his palm.

“Big ‘un,” he remarked. “No prize-winner, but it’d do for a ribbon, I guess.”

Louis burst out laughing.

Crandall regarded him with that crooked smile and said, “Ayuh, corker, ain’t she?”

“What did he say, Mommy?” Eileen asked, and then Rachel burst out laughing too.

Of course it was terribly impolite, but somehow it was okay. Crandall pulled out a deck of Chesterfield Kings, poked one into the seamed corner of his mouth, nodded at them pleasantly as they laughed-even Gage was chortling now, in spite of the swelling of the bee sting-and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. The old have their tricks, Louis thought. Small ones, but some of them are good ones.

He stopped laughing and held out the hand that wasn’t supporting Gage’s bottom-Gage’s decidedly damp bottom. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr.-”

“Jud Crandall,” he said and shook. “You’re the doc, I guess.”

“Yes. Louis Creed. This is my wife Rachel, my daughter Ellie, and the kid with the bee sting is Gage.”

“Nice to know all of you.”

“I didn’t mean to laugh… that is, we didn’t mean to laugh… it’s just that we’re… a little tired.”

That-the understatement of it-caused him to giggle again. He felt totally exhausted.

Crandall nodded. “Course you are,” he said, which came out: Coss you aaa. He glanced at Rachel. “Why don’t you take your little boy and your daughter over to the house for a minute, Missus Creed? We can put some bakin soda on a washrag and cool that off some. My wife would like to say hello too. She don’t get out too much. Arthritis got bad the last two or three years.”

Rachel glanced at Louis, who nodded.

“That would be very kind of you, Mr. Crandall.”

“Oh, I just answer to Jud,” he said.

There was a sudden loud honk, a motor winding down, and then the big blue moving van was turning-lumbering-into the driveway.

“Oh Christ, and I don’t know where the keys are,” Louis said.

“That’s okay,” Crandall said. “I got a set. Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland… they that lived here before you-gave me a set, oh, must have been fourteen, fifteen years ago. They lived here a long time. Joan Cleveland was my wife’s best friend. She died two years ago. Bill went to that old folks’ apartment complex over in Orrington. I’ll bring em back over. They belong to you now, anyway.”

“You’re very kind, Mr. Crandall,” Rachel said.

“Not at all,” he said. “Lookin forward to having young ‘uns around again.”

Except that the sound of this, as exotic to their Midwestern ears as a foreign language, was yowwuns “You just want to watch em around the road, Missus Creed Lots of big trucks on that road.”

Now there was the sound of slamming doors as the moving men hopped out of the cab and came toward them.

Ellie had wandered away a little, and now she said, “Daddy what’s this?”

Louis, who had started to meet the moving men, glanced back. At the edge of the field, where the lawn stopped and high summer grass took over, a path about four feet wide had been cut, smooth and close. It wound up the hill, curved through a low stand of bushes and a copse of birches, and out of sight.

“Looks like a path of some kind,” Louis said.

“Oh, ayuh,” Crandall said, smiling. “Tell you about it sometime, missy. You want to come over and we’ll fix your baby brother up?”

“Sure,” Ellie said and then added with a certain hopefulness “Does baking soda sting?”

4

Crandall brought back the keys, but by then Louis found his set. There was a space at the top of the glove compartment and the small envelope had slipped down into the wiring. He fished it out and let the movers in. Crandall gave him the extra set. They were on an old, tarnished fob. Louis thanked him and slipped them absently into his pocket, watching the movers take in boxes and dressers and bureaus and all the other things they had collected over the ten years of their marriage. Seeing them this way, out of their accustomed places, diminished them.

Just a bunch of stuff in boxes, he thought, and suddenly he felt sad and depressed-he guessed he was feeling what people called homesickness.

“Uprooted and transplanted,” Crandall said, suddenly beside him, and Louis jumped a little.

“You sound like you know the feeling,” he said.

“No, actually I don’t.” Crandall lit a cigarette-pop! went the match, flaring brightly in the first early evening shadows.

“My dad built that house across the way. Brought his wife there, and she was taken with child there, and that child was me, born in the very year 1900.”

“That makes you-”

“Eighty-three,” Crandall said, and Louis was mildly relieved that he didn’t add years young, a phrase he cordially detested.

“You look a lot younger than that.”

Crandall shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve always lived there. I joined up when we fought the Great War, but the closest I got to Europe was Bayonne, New Jersey. Nasty place. Even in 1917 it was a nasty place. I was just as glad to come back here.

Got married to my Norma, put in my time on the railroad, and here we still are.

But I’ve seen a lot of life right here in Ludlow. I sure have.”

The moving men stopped by the shed entrance, holding the box spring that went under the big double bed he and Rachel shared. “Where do you want this, Mr.

Creed?”

“Upstairs… just a minute, I’ll show you.” He started toward them, then paused for a moment and glanced back at Crandall.

“You go on,” Crandall said, smiling. “I’ll see how y’ folks’re makin out. Send em back over and get out of your way. But movin in’s mighty thirsty work. I usually sit out on my porch about nine and have a couple of beers. In warm Weather I like to watch the night come on. Sometimes Norma Joins me. You come over, if you’re a mind.”

Well, maybe I will,” Louis said, not intending to at all. The next thing would be an informal (and free) diagnosis of Norma’s arthritis on the porch. He liked Crandall, liked his Crooked grin, his offhand way of talking, his Yankee accent, which was not hard-edged at all but so soft it was almost a drawl. A good man, Louis thought, but doctors became leery of people fast. It was unfortunate, but sooner or later even your best friends wanted medical advice. And with old people there was no end to it. “But don’t look for me, or stay up-we’ve had a hell of a day.”

“Just so long as you know you don’t need no engraved invitation,” Crandall said-and there was something in the man’s crooked grin that made Louis feel that Crandall knew exactly what Louis was thinking.

He watched the old guy for a moment before joining the movers. Crandall walked straight and easily, like a man of sixty instead of over eighty. Louis felt that first faint tug of affection.

5

By nine o’clock the movers were gone. Ellie and Gage, both exhausted, were sleeping in their new rooms, Gage in his crib, Ellie on a mattress on the floor surrounded by a foothill of boxes-her billions of Crayolas, whole, broken, and blunted; her Sesame Street posters; her picture books; her clothes; heaven knew what else. And of course Church was with her, also sleeping and growling rustily in the back of his throat. That rusty growl seemed the closest the big torn could come to purring.

Rachel had prowled the house restlessly with Gage in her arms earlier, second-guessing the places where Louis had told. the movers to leave things, getting them to rearrange, change, or restack. Louis had not lost their check; it was still in his breast pocket, along with the five ten-dollar bills he had put aside for a tip. When the van was finally emptied, he handed both the check and the cash over, nodded at their thanks, signed the bill of receipt, and stood on the porch, watching them head back to their big truck. He supposed they would probably stop over in Bangor and have a few beers to lay the dust. A couple of beers would go down well right now. That made him think of Jud Crandall again.

He and Rachel sat at the kitchen table, and he saw the circles under her eyes.

“You,” he said, “go to bed.”

“Doctor’s orders?” she asked, smiling a little.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she said, standing. “I’m beat. And Gage is apt to be up in the night.

You coming?”

He hesitated. “I don’t think so, just yet. That old fella across the street-”

“Road. You call it a road, out in the country. Or if you’re Judson Crandall, I guess you call it a rud.”

“Okay, across the rud. He invited me over for a beer. I think I’m going to take him up on it. I’m tired, but I’m too jived-up to sleep.”

Rachel smiled. “You’ll end up getting Norma Crandall to tell you where it hurts and what kind of mattress she sleeps on.”

Louis laughed, thinking how funny-funny and scary-it was, the way wives could read their husbands’ minds after a while.

“He was here when we needed him,” he said. “I can do him a favor, I guess.”

“Barter system?”

He shrugged, unwilling and unsure how to tell her that he had taken a liking to Crandall on short notice. “How’s his wife?”

“Very sweet,” Rachel said. “Gage sat on her lap. I was surprised because he’s had a hard day, and you know he doesn’t take very well to new people on short notice under the best of circumstances. And she had a dolly she let Eileen play with.”

“How bad would you say her arthritis is?” “Quite bad.”

“In a wheelchair?”

“No… but she walks very slowly, and her fingers…

Rachel held her own slim fingers up and hooked them into claws to demonstrate.

Louis nodded. “Anyway, don’t be late, Lou. I get the creeps in strange houses.”

“It won’t be strange for long,” Louis said and kissed her.

6

Louis came back later feeling small. No one asked him to examine Norma Crandall; when he crossed the street (rud, he reminded himself, smiling), the lady had already retired for the night. Jud was a vague silhouette behind the screens of the enclosed porch. There was the comfortable squeak of a rocker on old linoleum. Louis knocked on the screen door, which rattled companionably against its frame. Crandall’s cigarette glowed like a large, peaceable firefly in the summer darkness. From a radio, low, came the voice of a Red Sox game, and all of it gave Louis Creed the oddest feeling of coming home.

“Doc,” Crandall said. “I thought that was you.”

Hope you meant it about the beer,” Louis said, coming in.

“Oh, about beer I never lie,” Crandall said. “A man who lies about beer makes enemies. Sit down, Doc. I put an extra couple on ice, just in case.”

The porch was long and narrow, furnished with rattan chairs and sofas. Louis sank into one and was surprised at how comfortable it was. At his left hand was a tin pail filled with ice cubes and a few cans of Black Label. He took one.

“Thank you,” he said and opened it. The first two swallows hit his throat like a blessing.

“More’n welcome,” Crandall said. “I hope your time here will be a happy one, Doc.”

“Amen,” Louis said.

“Say! If you want crackers or somethin, I could get some. I got a wedge of rat that’s just about ripe.”

“A wedge of what?”

“Rat cheese.” Crandall sounded faintly amused.

“Thanks, but just the beer will do me.”

“Well then, we’ll just let her go.” Crandall belched contentedly.

“Your wife gone to bed?” Louis asked, wondering why he was opening the door like this.

“Ayuh. Sometimes she stays up. Sometimes she don’t.”

“Her arthritis is quite painful, isn’t it?”

“You ever see a case that wasn’t?” Crandall asked.

Louis shook his head.

“I guess it’s tolerable,” Crandall said. “She don’t complain much. She’s a good old girl, my Norma.” There was a great and simple weight of affection in his voice. Out on Route 15, a tanker truck droned by, one so big and long that for a moment Louis couldn’t see his house across the road. Written on the side, just visible in the last light, was the word ORINCO.

“One hell of a big truck,” Louis commented.

“Orinco’s near Orrington,” Crandall said. “Chemical fertilizer fact’ry. They come and go, all right. And the oil tankers, and the dump trucks, and the people who go to work in Bangor or Brewer and come home at night.” He shook his head.

“That’s the one thing about Ludlow I don’t like anymore. That frigging road. No peace from it. They go all day and all night. Wake Norma up sometimes. Hell, wake me up sometimes, and I sleep like a goddam log.”

Louis, who thought this strange Maine landscape almost eerily quiet after the constant roar of Chicago, only nodded his head.

“One day soon the Arabs will pull the plug, and they’ll be able to grow African violets right down the yellow line,” Crandall said.

“You might be right.” Louis tilted his can back and was surprised to find it empty.

Crandall laughed. “You just grab yourself one to grow on, Doc.”

Louis hesitated and then said, “All right, but just one more. I have to be getting back.”

“Sure you do. Ain’t moving a bitch?”

“It is,” Louis agreed, and then for a time they were silent. The silence was a comfortable one, as if they had known each other for a long time. This was a feeling about which Louis had read in books, but which he had never experienced until.

now. He felt ashamed of his casual thoughts about free medical advice earlier.

On the road a semi roared by, its running lights twinkling like earthstars.

“That’s one mean road, all right,” Crandall repeated thoughtfully, almost vaguely, and then turned to Louis. There was a peculiar little smile on his seamed mouth. He poked a Chesterfield into one corner of the smile and popped a match with his thumbnail. “You remember the path there that your little girl commented on?”

For a moment Louis didn’t; Ellie had commented on a whole catalogue of things before finally collapsing for the night. Then he did remember. That wide mown patch winding up through the copse of trees and over the hill.

“Yes, I do. You promised to tell her about it sometime.”

“I did, and I will,” Crandall said. “That path goes up into the woods about a mile and a half. The local kids around Route 15 and Middle Drive keep it nice because they use it. Kids come and go… there’s a lot more moving around than there used to be when I was a boy; then you picked a place out and stuck to it. But they seem to tell each other, and every spring a bunch of them mows that path. They keep it nice all the summer long. Not all of the adults in town know it’s there-a lot of them do, of course, but not all, not by a long chalk-but all of the kids do. I’d bet on it.”

“Know what’s there?”

“The pet cemetery,” Crandall said.

“Pet cemetery,” Louis repeated, bemused.

“It’s not as odd as it prob’ly sounds,” Crandall said, smoking and rocking.

“It’s the road. It uses up a lot of animals, that road does. Dogs and cats, mostly, but that ain’t all. One of those big Orinco trucks run down the pet raccoon the Ryder -children used to keep. That was back-Christ, must have been in ‘73, maybe earlier. Before the state made keeping a coon or even a denatured skunk illegal, anyway.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Rabies,” Crandall said. “Lot of rabies in Maine now. There was a big old St.

Bernard went rabid downstate a couple of years ago and killed four people. That was a hell of a thing. Dog hadn’t had his shots. If those foolish people had seen that dog had had its shots, it never would have happened. But a coon or a skunk, you can vaccinate it twice a year and still it don’t always take. But that coon the Ryder boys had, that was what the oldtimers used to call a ‘sweet coon. ’ It’d waddle right up to you-gorry, wa’n’t he fat!-and lick your face like a dog. Their dad even paid a vet to spay him and declaw him. That must have cost him a country fortune!

“Ryder, he worked for IBM in Bangor. They went out to Colorado five years ago.

… or maybe it was six. Funny to think of those two almost old enough to drive.

Were they broken up over that coon? I guess they were. Matty Ryder cried so long his mom got scared and wanted to take him to the doctor. I spose he’s over it now, but they never forget. When a good animal gets run down in the road, a kid never forgets.”

Louis’s mind turned to Ellie as he had last seen her tonight, fast asleep with Church purring rustily on the foot of the mattress.

“My daughter’s got a cat,” he said. “Winston Churchill. We call him Church for short.”

“Do they climb when he walks?”

“I beg your pardon?” Louis had no idea what he was talking about.

“He still got his balls or has he been fixed?”

“No,” Louis said. “No, he hasn’t been fixed.”

In fact there had been some trouble over that back in Chicago. Rachel had wanted to get Church spayed, had even made the appointment with the vet. Louis canceled it. Even now he wasn’t really sure why. it wasn’t anything as simple or as stupid as equating his masculinity with that of his daughter’s tom, nor even his resentment at the idea that Church would have to be castrated so the fat housewife next door wouldn’t need to be troubled with twisting down the lids of her plastic garbage cans-those things had been part of it, but most of it had been a vague but strong feeling that it Would destroy something in Church that he himself valued-that it would put out the go-to-hell look in the cat’s green eyes. Finally he had pointed out to Rachel that they were moving to the country, and it shouldn’t be a problem. Now here was Judson Crandall, pointing out that part of country living in Ludlow consisted of dealing with Route 15, and asked him if the cat was fixed. Try a little irony, Dr. Creed-it’s good for your blood.

“I’d get him fixed,” Crandall said, crushing his smoke between his thumb and forefinger. “A fixed cat don’t tend to wander as much. But if it’s all the time crossing back and forth, its luck will run out, and it’ll end up there with the Ryder kids’ coon and little Timmy Dessler’s cocker spaniel and Missus Bradleigh’s parakeet. Not that the parakeet got run over in the road, you understand. It just went feet up one day.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” Louis said.

“You do that,” Crandall said and stood up. “How’s that beer doing? I believe I’ll go in for a slice of old Mr. Rat after all.”

“Beer’s gone,” Louis said, also standing, “and I ought to go, too. Big day tomorrow.”

“Starting in at the university?”

Louis nodded. “The kids don’t come back for two weeks, but by then I ought to know what I’m doing, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, if you don’t know where the pills are, I guess you’ll have trouble.”

Crandall offered his hand and Louis shook it, mindful again of the fact that old bones pained easily. “Come on over any evening,” he said. “Want you to meet my Norma. Think she’d enjoy you.”

“I’ll do that,” Louis said. “Nice to meet you, Jud.”

“Same goes both ways. You’ll settle in. May even stay awhile.”

“I hope we do.”

Louis walked down the crazy-paved path to the shoulder of the road and had to pause while yet another-truck, this one followed by a line of five cars headed in the direction of Bucksport, passed by. Then, raising his hand in a short salute, he crossed the street (road, he reminded himself again) and let himself into his new house.

It was quiet with the sounds of sleep. Ellie appeared not to have moved at all, and Gage was still in his crib, sleeping in typical Gage fashion, spread-eagled on his back, a bottle within easy reach. Louis paused there looking in at his son, his heart abruptly filling with a love for the boy so strong that it seemed almost dangerous. He supposed part of it was simply homesickness for all the familiar Chicago places and Chicago faces that were now gone, erased so efficiently by the miles that they might never have been at all. There’s a lot more moving around than there used to be… used to be you picked a place out and stuck to it. There was some truth in that.

He went to his son, and because there was no one there to see him do it, not even Rachel, he kissed his fingers and then pressed them lightly and briefly to Gage’s cheek through the bars of the crib.

Gage clucked and turned over on his side.

“Sleep well, baby,” Louis said.

He undressed quietly and slipped into his half of the bed that was for now just two single mattresses pushed together on the floor. He felt the strain of the day beginning to pass. Rachel didn’t stir. Unpacked boxes bulked ghostly in the mom.

Just before sleep, Louis hiked himself up on one elbow and looked out the window. Their room was at the front of the house, and he could look across the road at the Crandall place. It was too dark to see shapes-on a moonlit night it would not have been-but be could see the cigarette ember over there. Still up, he thought. He’ll maybe be up for a long rime. The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.

Against what?

Louis was thinking about that when he slipped into sleep. He dreamed he was in Disney World, driving a bright white van with a red cross on the side. Gage was beside him, and in the dream Gage was at least ten years old. Church was on the white van’s dashboard, looking at Louis with his bright green eyes, and out on Main Street by the l890s train station, Mickey Mouse was shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.

7

The next two weeks were busy ones for the family. Little by little Louis’s new job began to shake down for him (how it would be when ten thousand students, many of them drug and liquor abusers, some afflicted with social diseases, some anxious about grades or depressed about leaving home for the first time, a dozen of them-girls, mostly-anorexic… how it would be when all of them converged on the campus at once would be something else again). And while Louis began getting a handle on his job as head of University Medical Services, Rachel began to get a handle on the house.

Gage was busy taking the bumps and spills that went with getting used to his new environment, and for a while his nighttime schedule was badly out of whack, but by the middle of their second week in Ludlow, he had begun to sleep through again. Only Ellie, with the prospect of beginning kindergarten in a new place before her, seemed always overexcited and on a hair-trigger. She was apt to go into prolonged giggling fits or periods of almost menopausal depression or temper tantrums at the drop of a word. Rachel said Ellie would get over it when she saw that school was not the great red devil she had made it out to be in her own mind, and Louis thought Rachel was right. Most of the time, Ellie was what she had always been-a dear.

His evening beer or two with Jud Crandall became something of a habit. Around the time Gage began sleeping through again, Louis began bringing his own six-pack over every second or third night. He met Norma Crandall, a sweetly pleasant woman who had rheumatoid arthritis-filthy old rheurnatoid arthritis, which kills so much of what could be good in the old ages of men and women who are otherwise healthy-but her attitude was good. She would not surrender to the pain; there would be no white flags. Let it take her if it could. Louis thought she might have another five to seven productive if not terribly comfortable years ahead of her.

Going completely against his own established customs, he examined her at his own instigation, inventoried the prescriptions her own doctor had given her, and found them to be completely in order. He felt a nagging disappointment that there was nothing else he could do or suggest for her, but her Dr. Weybridge had things as under control as they were ever going to be for Norma Crandall-barring some sudden breakthrough, which was possible but not to be counted upon. You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.

Rachel liked her, and they had sealed their friendship by exchanging recipes the way small boys trade baseball cards, beginning with Norma Crandall’s deep-dish apple pie for Rachel’s beef stroganoff. Norma was taken with both of the Creed children-particularly with Ellie, who, she said, was going to be “an old-time beauty.” At least, Louis told Rachel that night in bed, Norma hadn’t said Ellie was going to grow into a real sweet coon. Rachel laughed so hard she broke explosive wind, and then both of them laughed so long and loudly that they woke up Gage in the next room.

The first day of kindergarten arrived. Louis, who felt pretty well in control of the infirmary and the medical-support facilities now, took the day off.

(Besides, the infirmary was currently dead empty; the last patient, a summer student who had broken her leg on the Student Union steps, had been discharged a week before.) He stood on the lawn beside Rachel with Gage in his arms, as the big yellow bus made the turn from Middle Drive and lumbered to a stop in front of their house. The doors at the front folded open; the babble and squawk of many children drifted out on the mild September air.

Ellie cast a strange, vulnerable glance back over her shoulder, as if to ask them if there might not yet be time to abort this inevitable process, and perhaps what she saw on the faces of her parents convinced her that the time was gone, and everything which would follow this first day was simply inevitable-like the progress of Norma Crandall’s arthritis. She turned away from them and mounted the steps of the bus. The doors folded shut with a gasp of dragon’s breath. The bus pulled away. Rachel burst into tears.

“Don’t, for Christ’s sake,” Louis said. He wasn’t crying. Only damn near. “It’s only half a day.”

“Half a day is bad enough,” Rachel answered in a scolding voice and began to cry harder. Louis held her, and Gage slipped an arm comfortably around each parent’s neck. When Rachel cried, Gage usually cried too. But not this time. He has us to himself. Louis thought, and he damn well knows it.

They waited with some trepidation for Ellie to return, drinking too much coffee, speculating on how it was going for her. Louis went out into the back room that was going to be his study and messed about idly, moving papers from one place to another but not doing much else. Rachel began lunch absurdly early.

When the phone rang at a quarter past ten, Rachel raced for it and answered with a breathless “Hello?” before it could ring a second time. Louis stood in the doorway between his office and the kitchen, sure it would be Ellis’s teacher telling them that she bad decided Ellie couldn’t hack it; the stomach of public education had found her indigestible and was spitting her back. But it was only Norma Crandall, calling to tell them that Jud had picked the last of the corn and they were welcome to a dozen ears if they wanted it. Louis went over with a shopping bag and scolded Jud for not letting him help pick it.

“Most of it ain’t worth a tin shit anyway,” Jud said.

“You’ll kindly spare that talk while I’m around,” Norma said. She came out on the porch with iced tea on an antique Coca-Cola tray.

“Sorry, my Love.”

“He ain’t sorry a bit,” Norma said to Louis and sat down with a wince.

“Saw Ellie get on the bus,” Jud said, lighting a Chesterfield. “She’ll be fine,”

Norma said. “They almost always are.” Almost, Louis thought morbidly.

But Ellie was fine. She came home at noon smiling and sunny, her blue first-day-of-school dress belling gracefully around her scabbed shins (and there was a new scrape on one knee to marvel over), a picture of what might have been two children or perhaps two walking gantries in one hand, one shoe untied, one ribbon missing from her hair, shouting, “We sang ‘Old MacDonald’! Mommy! Daddy!

We sang ‘Old MacDonald’! Same one as in the Carstairs Street School!”

Rachel glanced over at Louis, who was sitting in the window seat with Gage on his lap. The baby was almost asleep. There was something sad in Rachel’s glance, and although she looked away quickly, Louis felt a moment of terrible panic.

We’re really going to get old, be thought. It’s really true. No one’s going to make an exception for us. She’s on her way… and so are we.

Ellie ran over to him, trying to show him her picture, her new scrape, and tell him about “Old MacDonald” and Mrs. Berryman all at the same time. Church was twining in and out between her legs, purring loudly, and Ellie was somehow, almost miraculously, not tripping over him.

“Shh,” Louis said and kissed her. Gage had gone to sleep, unmindful of all the excitement. “Just let me put the baby to bed and then I’ll listen to everything.”

He took Gage up the stairs, walking through hot slanting September sunshine, and as he reached the landing, such a premonition of horror and darkness struck him that he stopped-stopped cold-and looked around in surprise, wondering what could possibly have come over him. He held the baby tighter, almost clutching him, and Gage stirred uncomfortably. Louis’s arms and back had broken out in great rashes of gooseflesh.

What’s wrong? he wondered, confused and frightened. His heart was racing; his scalp felt cool and abruptly too small to cover his skull; he could feel the surge of adrenaline behind his eyes. Human eyes really did bug out when fear was extreme, he knew; they did not just widen but actually bulged as blood pressure climbed and the hydrostatic pressure of the cranial fluids increased. What the hell is it? Ghosts? Christ, it really feels as if something just brushed by me in this hallway, something I almost saw.

Downstairs the screen door whacked against its frame.

Louis Creed jumped, almost screamed, and then laughed. It was simply one of those psychological cold pockets people Sometimes passed through-no more, no less. A momentary fugue. They happened; that was all. What had Scrooge said to the ghost of Jacob Marley? You may be no more than an underdone bit of potato.

There’s more gravy than grave to you. And that was more correct-physiologically as well as psychologically-than Charles Dickens had probably known. There were no ghosts, at least not in his experience. He had pronounced two dozen people dead in his career and had never once felt the passage of a soul.

He took Gage into his room and laid him in his crib. As he pulled the blanket up over his son, though, a shudder twisted up his back, and he thought suddenly of his Uncle Carl’s “showroom.” No new cars there, no televisions with all the modem features, no dishwashers with glass fronts so you could watch the magical sudsing action. Only boxes with their lids up, a carefully hidden spotlight over each. His father’s brother was an undertaker.

Good God, what gave you the horrors? Let it go! Dump it!

He kissed his son and went down to listen to Ellie tell about her first day at the big kid’s school.

8

That Saturday, after Ellie had completed her first week of school and just before the college kids came back to campus, Jud Crandall came across the road and walked over to where the Creed family sat on their lawn. Ellie had gotten off her bike and was drinking a glass of iced tea. Gage was crawling in the grass, examining bugs, perhaps even eating a few; Gage was not particular where his protein camу from.

“Jud,” Louis said, getting up. “Let me get you a chair.”

“No need.” Jud was wearing jeans, an open-throated work shirt, and a pair of green boots. He looked at Ellie. “You still want to see where yon path goes, Ellie?”

“Yes!” Ellie said, getting up immediately. Her eyes sparkled. “George Buck at school told me it was the pet cemetery, and I told Mommy, but she said to wait for you because you knew where it was.”

“I do, too,” Jud said. “If it’s okay with your folks, we’ll take us a stroll up there. You’ll want a pair of boots though. Ground’s a bit squishy in places.”

Ellie rushed into the house.

Jud looked after her with amused affection. “Maybe you’d like to come too, Louis.”

“I would,” Louis said. He looked at Rachel. “You want to come, honey?”

“What about Gage? I thought it was a mile.”

“I’ll put him in the Gerrypack.”

Rachel laughed. “Okay… but it’s your back, mister.”

They started off ten minutes later, all of them but Gage wearing boots. Gage was sitting up in the Gerrypack and looking at everything over Louis’s shoulder, goggle-eyed. Ellie ranged ahead constantly, chasing butterflies and picking flowers.

The grass in the back field was almost waist high, and now there was goldenrod, that late-summer gossip which comes to tattle on autumn every year. But there was no autumn in the air today; today the sun was still all August, although calendar August was almost two weeks gone. By the time they had reached the top of the first hill, walking strung out along the mown path, there were big patches of sweat under Louis’s arms.

Jud paused. At first Louis thought it might be because the old man was winded-then he saw the view that had opened Out behind them.

“Pretty up here,” Jud said, putting a piece of timothy grass between his teeth.

Louis thought he had just heard the quintessential Yankee understatement.

“It’s gorgeous,” Rachel breathed and then turned to Louis, almost accusingly.

“How come you didn’t tell me about this?”

“Because! didn’t know it was here,” Louis said, and was a little ashamed. They were still on their own property; he had just never found time to climb the hill in back of the house until today.

Ellie had been a good way ahead. Now she came back also gazing with frank wonder. Church padded at her heels.

The hill was not a high one, but it did not need to be. To the east, heavy woods blocked any view, but looking this way, west, the land fell away in a golden and dozy late summer dream. Everything was still, hazed, silent. There was not even an Orinco tanker on the highway to break the quiet.

It was the river valley they were looking into, of course; the Penobscot, where loggers had once floated their timber from the northeast down to Bangor and Derry. But they were south of Bangor and a bit north of Deny here. The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream. Louis could make out Hampden and Winterport on the far side, and over here he fancied he could trace the black, river-paralleling snake of Route 15 nearly all the way Bucksport. They looked over the river, its lush hem of trees, the roads, the fields. The spire of the North Ludlow Baptist Church. poked through one canopy of old elms, and to the right he could see the square brick sturdiness of Ellie’s school.

Overhead, white clouds moved slowly toward a horizon the color of faded denim.

And everywhere were the late-summer fields, used up at the end of the cycle, dormant but not dead, an incredible tawny color.

“Gorgeous is the right word,” Louis said finally.

“They used to call it Prospect Hill back in the old days,” Jud said. He put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. “There’s a few that still do, but now that younger people have moved into town, it’s mostly been forgot. I don’t think there’s very many people that even come up here. It don’t look like you could see much because the hill’s not very high. But you can see-”

He gestured with one hand and fell silent.

“You can see everything,” Rachel said in a low, awed voice. She turned to Louis.

“Honey, do we own this?”

And before Louis could answer, Jud said: “It’s part of the property, oh yes.”

Which wasn’t, Louis thought, quite the same thing.

It was cooler in the woods, perhaps by as much as eight or ten degrees. The path, still wide and occasionally marked with flowers in pots or in coffee cans (most of them wilted), was now floored with dry pine needles. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, moving downhill now, when Jud called Ellie back.

“This is a good walk for a little girl,” Jud said kindly, “but I want you to promise your mom and dad that if you come up here, you’ll always stay on the path.”

“I promise,” Ellie said promptly “Why?”

He glanced at Louis, who had stopped to. rest. Toting Gage, even in the shade of these old pines and spruces, was heavy work. “Do you know where you are?” Jud asked Louis.

Louis considered and rejected answers: Ludlow, North Ludlow, behind my house, between Route 15 and Middle Drive. He shook his head.

Jud jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Plenty of stuff that way,” he said.

“That’s town. This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going onto those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back. I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is.” He looked back at Ellie.

“All I’m saying is that you don’t want to get messing around in these woods, Ellie. You might lose the path, and God knows where you might end up then.”

“I won’t, Mr. Crandall.” Ellie was suitably impressed, even awed, but not afraid, Louis saw. Rachel, however, was looking at Jud uneasily, and Louis felt a little uneasy himself. It was, he supposed, the city-bred’s almost instinctive fear of the woods. Louis hadn’t held a compass in his hand since Boy Scouts, twenty years before, and his memories of how to find your way by things like the North Star or which side of the trees moss grew on were as vague as his memories of how to tie a sheepshank or a half hitch.

Jud looked them over and smiled a little. “Now, we ain’t lost nobody in these woods since 1934,” he said. “At least, nobody local. The last one was Will Jeppson-no great loss.

Except for Stanny Bouchard, I guess Will was the biggest tosspot this side of Bucksport.”

“You said nobody local,” Rachel remarked in a voice that was not quite casual, and Louis could almost read her mind: We’re not local. At least, not yet.

Jud paused and then nodded. “We do lose one of the tourists every two or three years because they think you can’t get lost right off the main road. But we never lost even one of them for good, missus. Don’t you fret.”

“Are there moose?” Rachel asked apprehensively, and Louis smiled. If Rachel wanted to fret, she would jolly well fret.

“Well, you might see a moose,” Jud said, “but he wouldn’t give you any trouble, Rachel. During mating season they get a little irritated, but otherwise they do no more than look. Only people they take after out of their rutting time are people from Massachusetts. I don’t know why that’s so, but it is.” Louis thought the man was joking but could not be sure; Jud looked utterly serious. “I’ve seen it time and time again. Some fella from Saugus or Milton or Weston up a tree, yelling about a herd of moose, every damn one of em as big as a motorhome. Seems like moose can smell Massachusetts on a man or a woman. Or maybe it’s just all those new clothes from L. L. Bean’s they smell-I dunno. I’d like to see one of those animal husbandry students from the college do a paper on it, but I s’pose none ever will.”

“What’s rutting time?” Ellie asked.

“Never mind,” Rachel said. “I don’t want you up here unless you’re with a grown-up, Ellie.” Rachel moved a step closer to Louis.

Jud looked pained. “I didn’t want to scare you, Rachel-you or your daughter. No need to be scared in these woods. This is a good path; it gets a little buggy in the spring and it’s a little sloppy all the time-except for ‘55, which was the driest summer I can remember-but hell, there-isn’t even any poison ivy or poison oak, which there is at the back of the schoolyard, and you want to stay away from it, Ellie, if you don’t want to spend three weeks of your life takin starch baths.”

Ellie covered her mouth and giggled.

“It’s a safe path,” Jud said earnestly to Rachel, who still didn’t look convinced. “Why, I bet even Gage could follow it, and the town kids come up here a lot, I already told you that. They keep it nice. Nobody tells them to; they just do it. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for Ellie.” He bent over her and winked. “It’s like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all’s well. You get off it and the next thing you know you’re lost if you’re not lucky. And then someone has to send out a searchin party.”

They walked on. Louis began to get a dull cramp of pain in his back,from the baby carrier. Every now and then Gage would grab a double handful of his hair and tug enthusiastically or administer a cheerful kick to Louis’s kidneys. Late mosquitoes cruised around his face and neck, making their eye-watering hum.

The path curved down, bending in and out between very old firs, and then cut widely through a brambly, tangled patch of undergrowth. The going was soupy here, and Louis’s boots squelched in mud and some standing water. At one point they stepped over a marshy spot using a pair of good-sized tussocks as stepping stones. That was the worst of it. They started to climb again and the trees reasserted themselves. Gage seemed to have magically put on ten pounds, and the day had, with some similar magic, warmed up ten degrees. Sweat poured down Louis’s face.

“How you doing, hon?” Rachel asked. “Want me to carry him for a while?”

“No, I’m fine,” he said, and it was true, although his heart was larruping along at a good speed in his chest. He was more used to prescribing physical exercise than he was to doing it.

Jud was walking with Ellie by his side; her lemon-yellow slacks and red blouse were bright splashes of color in the shady brown-green gloom.

“Lou, does he really know where he’s going, do you think?” Rachel asked in a low, slightly worried tone.

“Sure,” Louis said.

Jud called back cheerily over his shoulder: “Not much farther now… you bearin up, Louis?”

My God, Louis thought, the man’s well past eighty, but I don’t think he’s even broken a sweat.

“I’m fine,” he called back a little aggressively. Pride probably would have led him to say the same thing even if he had felt the onset of a coronary. He grinned, hitched the straps of the Gerrypack up a bit, and went on.

They topped the second hill, and then the path sloped through a head-high swatch of bushes and tangled underbrush. It narrowed and then, just ahead, Louis saw Ellie and Jud go under an arch made of old weather stained boards. Written on these in faded black paint, only just legible, were the words PET SEMATARY.

He and Rachel exchanged an amused glance and stepped under the arch, instinctively reaching out and grasping each other’s hands as they did so, as if they had come here to be married.

For the second time that morning Louis was surprised into wonder.-There was no carpet of needles here. Here was an almost perfect circle of mown grass, perhaps as large as forty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous. A man trying so pick his way through that or to climb over it would do well to put on a steel jock, Louis thought. The clearing was crowded with markers, obviously made by children from whatever materials they could beg or borrow-the slats of crates, scrapwood, pieces of beaten -tin. And yet, seen against the perimeter of low bushes and straggly trees that fought for living space and sunlight here, the very fact of their clumsy manufacture, and the fact that humans were responsible for what was here, seemed to emphasize what symmetry they had. The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.

“It’s lovely,” Rachel said, not sounding as if she meant it.

“Wow!” Ellie cried.

Louis unshouldered Gage and pulled him out of the baby carrier so he could crawl. Louis’s back sighed with relief.

Ellie ran from one monument to the next, exclaiming over each. Louis followed her while Rachel kept an eye on the baby. Jud sat down cross-legged, his back against a protruding rock, and smoked.

Louis noticed that the place did not just seem to have a sense of order, a pattern; the memorials had arranged in rough concentric circles.

SMUCKY THE CAT, one crate-board marker proclaimed. The hand was childish but careful. HE WAS OBEDIANT. And below this: 1971-1974. A little way around the outer circle he came to a piece of natural slate with a name written on it in fading but perfectly legible red paint: BIFFER. And below this a bit of verse: BIFFER, BIFFER. A HELLUVA SNIFFER / UNTIL HE DIED HE MADE US RICHER.

“Buffer was the Desslers’ cocker spaniel,” Jud said. He had dug a bald place in the earth with the heel of his shoe and was carefully tapping all his ashes into it. “Got run over by a dumpster last year. Ain’t that some poime?”

“It is,” Louis agreed.

Some of the graves were marked with flowers, some fresh, most old, not a few almost totally decomposed. Over half of the painted and penciled inscriptions that Louis tried to read had faded away to partial or total illegibility. Others bore no discernible mark at all, and Louis guessed that the writing on these might have been done with chalk or crayon.

“Mom!” Ellie yelled. “Here’s a goldfishie! Come and see!”

“I’ll pass,” Rachel said, and Louis glanced at her. She was standing by herself, outside the outermost circle, looking more uncomfortable than ever. Louis thought: Even here she’s upset. She never had been easy around the appearances of death (not, he supposed, that anyone really was), probably because of her sister. Rachel’s sister had died very young, and it had left a scar which Louis had learned early in their marriage not to touch. Her name had been Zelda, and her death had been from spinal meningitis. Her mortal Illness had probably been long and painful and ugly, and Rachel would have been at an impressionable age.

If she Wanted to forget it, he thought there could be no harm in that.

Louis tipped her a wink, and Rachel smiled gratefully at him.

Louis looked up. They were in a natural clearing. He supposed that explained how well the grass did; the sun could get through. Nevertheless it would have taken watering and careful tending. That meant cans of water lugged up here or maybe Indian pumps even heavier than Gage in his Gerrypack carried on small backs. He thought again that it was an odd thing for children to have kept up for so long.

His own memory of childhood enthusiasms, reinforced by his dealings with Ellie, was that they tended to bum like newsprint-fast… hot… and quick to die.

Moving inward, the pet graves became older; fewer and fewer of the inscriptions could be read, but those that could yielded a rough timeline extending into the past. Here was TRIXIE. KILT ON THE HIGHWAY SEPT 15, 1968. in the same circle was a wide flat board planted deep in the earth. Frost and thaw had warped it and canted it to one side, but Louis could still make Out IN MEMORY OF MARTA OUR PET RABIT DYED MARCH 1 1965. A row farther in was: GEN. PATTON (OUR! GOOD! DOG! the inscription amplified), who had died in 1958; and POLYNESIA (who would have been a parrot, if Louis remembered his Doctor Doolittle correctly), who had squawked her last “Polly want a cracker” in the summer of 1953. There was nothing readable in the next two rows, and then, still a long way in from the center, chiseled roughly on a piece of sandstone, was HANNAH THE BEST DOG THAT EVER LIVED 1929-1939. Although sandstone was relatively soft-as a result the inscription was now little more than a ghost-Louis found it hard to conceive of the hours some child must have spent impressing those nine words on the stone.

The commitment of love and grief seemed to him staggering; this was something parents did not even do for their own parents or for their children if they died young.

“Boy, this does go back some,” he said to Jud, who had strolled over to join him.

Jud nodded. “Come here, Louis. Want to show you something.”

They walked to a row only three back from the center. Here the circular pattern, perceived as an almost haphazard coincidence in the outer rows, was very evident. Jud stopped before a small piece of slate that had fallen over. Kneeling carefully, the old man set it up again.

“Used to be words here,” Jud said. “I chiseled em myself, but it’s worn away now. I buried my first dog here. Spot. He died of old age in 1914, the year the Great War begun.”

Bemused by the thought that here was a graveyard that went farther back than many graveyards for people, Louis walked toward the center and examined several of the markers. None of them were readable, and most had been almost reclaimed by the forest floor. The grass had almost entirely overgrown one, and when he set it back up, there was a small tearing, protesting sound from the earth.

Blind beetles scurried over the section he had exposed. He felt a small chill and thought, Boot Hill for animals. I’m not sure I really like it.

“How far do these go back?”

“Gorry, I don’t know,” Jud said, putting his hands deep in his pockets. “Place was here when Spot died, of course. I had a whole gang of friends in those days.

They helped me dig the hole for Spot. Digging here ain’t that easy, either-ground’s awful stony, you know, hard to turn. And I helped them sometimes.” He pointed here and there with a horny finger. “That there was Pete LaVasseur’s dog, if I remember right, and there’s three of Albion Groatley’s barncats buried right in a row there.

“Old Man Fritchie kept racing pigeons. Me and Al Groatley and Carl Hannah buried one of them that a dog got. He’s right there.” He paused thoughtfully. “I’m the last of that bunch left, you know. All dead now, my gang. All gone.”

Louis said nothing, only stood looking at the pet graves with his hands in his pockets.

“Ground’s stony,” Jud repeated. “Couldn’t plant nothing here but corpses anyway, I guess.”

Across the way, Gage began to cry thinly, and Rachel brought him over, toting him oа her hip. “He’s hungry,” she said. “I think we ought to go back, Lou.”

Please, okay? her eyes asked.

“Sure,” he said. He shouldered the Gerrypack again and turned around so Rachel could pop Gage in. “Ellie! Hey Ellie, where are you?”

“There she is,” Rachel said and pointed toward the blowdown. Ellie was climbing as if the blowdown was a bastard cousin to the monkeybars at school.-“Oh, honey, you want to come dawn off there!” Jud called over, alarmed. “You stick your foot in the wrong hole and those old trees shift, you’ll break your ankle.”

Ellie jumped down. “Ow!” she cried and came toward them, rubbing her hip. The skin wasn’t broken, but a stiff dead branch had torn her slacks.

“You see what I mean,” Jud said, ruffling her hair. “Old blowdown like this, even someone wise about the woods won’t try to climb over it if he can go around. Trees that all fall down in a pile get mean. They’ll bite you if they can.”

“Really?” Ellie asked. “Really. They’re piled up like straws, you see. And if you was to step on the right one, they might all come down in an avalanche.”

Ellie looked at Louis. “Is that true, Daddy?”-“I think so, hon.”

“Yuck!” She looked back at the blowdown and yelled: “You tore my pants, you cruddy trees!”

All three of the grown-ups laughed. The blowdown did not. It merely sat whitening in the sun as it had done for decades. To Louis it looked like the skeletal remains of some long-dead monster, something slain by a parfait good and gentil knight, perchance. A dragon’s bones, left here in a giant cairn.

It occurred to him even then that there was something too Convenient about that blowdown and the way it stood between the pet cemetery and the depths of woods beyond, woods which Jud Crandall later sometimes referred to absently as “the Indian woods.” Its very randomness seemed too artful, too perfect for a work of nature. It-Then Gage grabbed one of his ears and twisted it, crowing happily, and Louis forgot all about the blowdown in the. woods beyond the pet cemetery. It was time to go home.

9

Ellie came to him the next day, looking troubled. Louis was working on a model in his study. This one was a 1917 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost-680 pieces, over 50 moving parts. It was nearly done, and be could almost imagine the liveried chauffeur, direct descendant of eighteenthand nineteenth-century English coachmen, sitting imperially behind the wheel.

He had been model-crazy since his tenth year. He had begun with a World War I Sped that his Uncle Carl had bought him, had worked his way through most of the Revell airplanes, and had moved on to bigger and better things in his teens and twenties. There had been a boats-in-bottles phase and a war-machines phase and even a phase in which he had built guns so realistic it was hard to believe they wouldn’t fire when you pulled the trigger-Colts and Winchesters and Lugers, even a Buntline Special. Over the last five years or so, it had been the big cruise ships. A model of the Lusitania and one of the Titanic sat on his shelves at his university office, and the Andrea Doria, completed just before they left Chicago, was currently cruising the mantel-piece in their living room. Now he had moved on to classic cars, and if previous patterns held true, he supposed it would be four or five years before the urge to do something new struck him.

Rachel looked on this, his only real hobby, with a wifely indulgence that held, he supposed, some elements of contempt; even after ten years of marriage she probably thought he would grow out of it. Perhaps some of this attitude came from her father, who believed just as much now as at the time Louis and Rachel had married that he had gotten an asshole for a son-in-law.

Maybe, he thought, Rachel is right. Maybe I’ll just wake up one morning at the age of thirty-seven, put all these models up in the attic, and take up hang gliding.

Meanwhile Ellie looked serious.

Far away, drifting in the clear air, he could hear that perfect Sunday morning sound of churchbells calling worshippers.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

“Hello, pumpkin. Wass happenin?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, but her face said differently; her face said that plenty was up, and-none of it was so hot, thank you very much. Her hair was fleshly washed and fell loose to her shoulders. In this light it was still more blond than the brown it was inevitably becoming. She was wearing a dress, and it occurred to Louis that his daughter almost always put on a dress on Sundays, although they did not attend church. “What are you building?”

Carefully gluing on a mudguard, he told her. “Look at this,” he said, carefully banding her a hubcap. “See those linked R’s? That’s a nice detail, huh? If we fly back to Shytown for Thanksgiving and we get on an L-10l 1, you look Out at the jet engines and you’ll see those same R’s.”

“Hubcap, big deal.”She handed it back.

“Please,” he said. “If you own a Rolls-Royce, you call that a wheel covering. If you’re rich enough to own a Rolls, you can strut a little. When I make my second million, I’m going to buy myself one. Rolls-Royce Comiche. Then when Gage gets carsick, he can throw up into real leather.” And just by the way, Ellie, what’s on your mind? But it didn’t work that way with Ellie. You didn’t ask things right out. She was wary of giving too much of herself away. It was a trait Louis admired.

“Are we rich, Daddy?”

“No,” he said, “but we’re not going away to starve either.”

“Michael Burns at school says all doctors are rich.”

“Well, you tell Michael Burns at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years… and you don’t get rich running a university infirmary. You get rich being a specialist. A gynecologist or an orthopedist or a neurologist.

They get rich quicker. For utility infielders like me, it takes longer.”

“Then why don’t you be a specialist, Daddy?”

Louis thought of his models again and of-the way he had one day just not wanted to build any more warplanes, the way he had likewise gotten tired of Tiger tanks and gun emplacements, the way he had come to believe (almost overnight, it seemed in retrospect) that building boats in bottles was pretty dumb; and then he thought of what it would be like to spend your whole life inspecting children’s feet for hammertoe or putting on the thin Latex gloves so you could grope along some woman’s vaginal canal with one educated finger, feeling for bumps or lesions.

“I just wouldn’t like it,” he said.

Church came into the office, paused, inspected the situation with his bright green eyes. He leaped silently onto the windowsill and appeared to go to sleep.

Ellie glanced at him and frowned, which struck Louis as exceedingly odd. Usually Ellie looked at Church with an expression of love so sappy it was almost painful. She began to walk around the office, looking at various models, and in a voice that was nearly casual, she said, “Boy, there were a lot of graves up in the Pet Sematary, weren’t there?”

Ah, here’s the nub, Louis thought but did not look around; after examining his instructions, he began putting the carriage lamps on the Rolls.

“There were,” he said. “Better than a hundred, I’d say.”

“Daddy, why don’t pets live as long as people?”

“Well, some animals do live about as long,” he said, “and some live much longer.

Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really don’t know how old they are… or maybe they do, and they just can’t believe it.”

Ellie dismissed these simply enough. “Elephants and sea turtles aren’t pets.

Pets don’t live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it’s like nine of our years.”

“Seven,” Louis corrected automatically. “I see what you’re getting at, honey, and there’ amp; some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there’s this thing called metabolism, and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too-some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people-me, for instance-just can’t eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that’s all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time.”

Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. “Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo-”

“What about cats?” Ellie asked and looked at Church again.

“Well, cats live as long as dogs,” he said, “mostly, anyway.” This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter’s bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and-yes, Louis would have sworn it-cold delight.

He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception-a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another torn got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car.

Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.

“I mean,” he said, “Church is only three now, and you’re five. He might still be alive when you’re fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that’s a long time away.”

“It doesn’t seem long to me,” Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. “Not long at all.”-Louis gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come.

She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess.

“Honey,” he said, “if it was up to me, I’d let Church live to be a hundred. But I don’t make the rules.”

“Who does?” she asked, and then, with infinite scorn: “God, I suppose.”

Louis stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious. “God or Somebody,” he said.

“Clocks run down-that’s all I know. There are no guarantees, babe.”

“I don’t want Church to be like all those dead pets!” she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. “I don’t want Church to ever be dead! He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!”

There were footsteps across the kitchen, and Rachel looked in, startled. Ellie was now weeping against Louis’s chest. The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.

“Ellie,” he said, rocking her, “Ellie, Ellie, Church isn’t dead; he’s right over there, sleeping.”

“But he could be,” she wept. “He could be, any time.” He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and beburied; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real.

In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.

It would be easy to lie at this point, the way he had lied earlier about the life expectancy of tomcats. But a lie would be remembered later and perhaps finally totted up on the report card all children hand in to themselves on their parents. His own mother had told him such a lie, an innocuous one about women finding babies in the dewy grass when they really wanted them, and as innocuous as the lie had been, Louis had never forgiven his mother for telling it-or himself for believing it.

“Honey,” he said, “it happens. It’s a part of life.”

“It’s a bad part!” she cried. “It’s a really bad part!”

There was no answer for this. She wept. Eventually her tears would stop. It was a necessary first step on the way to. making an uneasy peace with a truth that was never going to go away.

He held his daughter and listened to church bells on Sunday morning, floating across the September fields; and it was some time after her tears had stopped before he realized that, like Church, she had gone to sleep.

He put her up in her bed and then, came downstairs to the kitchen, where Rachel was beating cake batter too hard. He mentioned his surprise that Ellie should just cork off like that in the middle of the morning; it wasn’t like her.

“No,” Rachel said, setting the bowl down on the counter with a decisive thump.

“It isn’t, but I think she was awake most of last night. I heard her tossing around, and Church cried to go out around three. He only does that when she’s restless.”

“Why would she…?”

“Oh, you know why!” Rachel said, angrily. “That damned pet cemetery is why! It really upset her, Lou. It was the first cemetery of any kind for her, and it just… upset her. I don’t think I’ll write your friend Jud Crandall any thank-you notes for that little hike.”

All at once he’s my friend, Louis thought, bemused and distressed at the same time.

“Rachel-”

“And I don’t want her going up there again.”

“Rachel, what Jud said about the path is true.”

“It’s not the path and you know it,” Rachel said. She picked up the bowl again and began beating the cake batter even faster. “it’s that damned place. It’s unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path.

fucking morbid is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don’t want Ellie to catch it.”

Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends’ marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery-the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic.

And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.

“Honey, it’s just a pet cemetery,” he said.

“The way she was crying in there just now,” Rachel said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter-covered spoon, “do you think it’s just a pet cemetery to her? It’s going to leave a scar, Lou. No. She’s not going up there anymore. It’s not the path, it’s the place. Here she is already thinking Church is going to die.”

For a moment Louis had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Ellie; she had simply donned stilts, one of her mother’s dresses, and a very clever, very realistic Rachel mask. Even the expression was the same-set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.

He groped, because suddenly the issue seemed large to him, not a thing to be simply passed over in deference to that mystery… or that aloneness. He groped because it seemed to him that she was missing something so large it nearly filled the landscape, and you couldn’t do that unless you were deliberately closing your eyes to it.

“Rachel,” he said, “Church is going to die.”

She stared at him angrily. “That is hardly the point,” she said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. “Church is not going to die today, or tomorrow-”

“I tried to tell her that-”

“Or the day after that, or probably for years-”

“Honey, we can’t be sure of th-”

“Of course we can!” she shouted. “We take good care. of him, he’s not going to die, no one is going to die around here, and so why do you want to go and get a little girl all upset about something she can’t understand until she’s much older?”

“Rachel, listen.”

But Rachel had no intention of listening. She was blazing. “It’s bad enough to try and cope with a death-a pet or a friend or a relative-when it happens, without turning it into a… a goddam tourist attraction… a F-F-Forest Lawn for a-animals… “ Tears were running down her cheeks.

“Rachel,” he said and tried to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture.

“Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about.”

He sighed. “I feel like I fell through a hidden trapdoor and into a giant Mixmaster,” he said, hoping for a smile. He got none; only her eyes, locked on his, black and blazing. She was furious, he realized; not just angry, but absolutely furious. “Rachel,” he said suddenly, not fully sure what he was going to say until it was out, “how did you sleep last night?”

“Oh boy,” she said scornfully, turning away-but not before he had seen a wounded flicker in her eyes. “That’s really intelligent. Really intelligent. You never change, Louis. When something isn’t going right, blame Rachel, right? Rachel’s just having one of her weird emotional reactions.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No?” She took the bowl of cake batter over to the far counter by the stove and set it down with another bang. She began to grease a cake tin, her lips pressed tightly together.

He said patiently, “There’s nothing wrong with a child finding out something about death, Rachel. In fact, I’d call it a necessary thing. Ellie’s reaction-her crying-that seemed perfectly natural to me. It-”

“Oh, it sounded natural,” Rachel said, whirling on him again. “It sounded very natural to hear her weeping her heart out over her cat which is perfectly fine-”

“Stop it,” he said. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”

“Yes, but we’re going to,” he said, angry himself now. “You had your at-bats-how about giving me mine?”

“She’s not going up there anymore. And as far as I’m concerned, the subject is closed.”

“Ellie has known where babies come from since last year,” Louis said deliberately. “We got her the Myers book and talked to her about it, do you remember that? We both agreed that children ought to know where they come from.”

“That has nothing to do with-”

“It does, though!” he said roughly. “When I was talking to her in my office, about Church, I got thinking about my mother and how she spun me that old cabbage-leaf story when I asked her where women got babies. I’ve never forgotten that lie. I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”

“Where babies come from has nothing to do with a goddam pet cemetery!” Rachel cried at him, and what her eyes said to him was Talk about the parallels all night and all day, if you want to, Louis; talk until you turn blue, but I won’t accept it.

Still, he tried.

“She knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It’s perfectly natural. In fact, I think it’s the most natural thing in the w-”

“Will you stop saying that!” she screamed suddenly-really screamed and Louis recoiled, startled. His elbow struck the.

open bag of flour on the counter. It tumbled off the edge and struck the floor, splitting open. Hour puffed up in a dry white cloud.

“Oh luck,” he said dismally.

In an upstairs room, Gage began to cry.

“That’s nice,” she said, also crying now. “You woke the baby up too. Thanks for a nice, quiet, stressless Sunday morning.”

She started by him and Louis put a hand on her arm. “Let me ask you something,”

he said, ‘“because I know that anything-literally anything-can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that. Do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if her cat gets distemper or leukemia-cats are very prone to leukemia, you know-or if he gets run over in that road? Do you want to be the one, Rachel?”

“Let me go,” she nearly hissed. The anger in her voice, however, was overmatched by the hurt and bewildered terror in her eyes-! don’t want to talk about this, Louis, and you can’t make me, that look said. “Let me go, I want to get Gage before he falls out of his a-”

“Because ‘maybe you ought to be the one,” he said. “You can tell her we don’t talk about it, nice people don’t talk about it, they just bury it-oops! but don’t say ‘buried,’ you’ll give her a complex.”

“I hate you!” Rachel sobbed and tore away from him.

Then he was of course sorry, and it was of course too late.

“Rachel-”

She pushed by him roughly, crying harder. “Leave me alone. You’ve done enough.”

She paused in the kitchen doorway, turning toward him, the tears coursing down her cheeks. “I don’t want this discussed in front of Ellie anymore, Lou. I mean it. There’s nothing natural about death. Nothing. You as a doctor should know that.”

She whirled and was gone, leaving Louis in the empty kitchen, which still vibrated with their voices. At last he went to the pantry to get the broom. As he swept, he reflected on the last thing she had said and on the enormity of this difference of opinion, which had gone undiscovered for so long. Because, as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world.

Taxes were not so sure; human conflicts were not; the conflicts of society were not; boom and bust were not. In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time. Even sea turtles and the giant sequoias had to buy out someday.

“Zelda,” he said aloud. “Christ, that must have been bad for her.”

The question was should he just let it ride or should he try to do something about it?

He tilted the dustpan over the wastebasket, and flour slid out with a soft foom, powdering the cast-out cartons and used-up cans.

10

“Hope Ellie didn’t take it too hard,” Jud Crandall said. Not for the first time Louis thought that the man had a peculiar-and rather uncomfortable-ability to put his finger gently on whatever the sore spot was.

He and Jud and Norma Crandall now sat on the Crandalls’ porch in the cool of the evening, drinking iced tea instead of beer. On 15, going-home-after-the-weekend traffic was fairly heavy-people recognized that every good late-summer weekend now might be the last one, Louis supposed. Tomorrow he took up his full duties at the University of Maine infirmary All day yesterday and today students had been arriving, filling apartments in Orono and dorms on campus, making beds, renewing acquaintances, and no doubt groaning over another year of eight o’clock classes and commons food. Rachel had been cool to him all day-no, freezing was more like it-and when he went back across the road tonight, he knew that she would already be in bed, Gage sleeping with her more than likely, the two of them so far over to her side that the baby would be in danger of falling off.

His half of the bed would have grown to three quarters, all of it looking like a big, sterile desert.

“I said I hoped-”

“Sorry,” Louis said. “Woolgathering. She was a little upset, yeah. How did you guess that?”

“Seen em come and go, like I said.” Jud took his wife’s hand gently and grinned at her. “Haven’t we, dear?”

“Packs and packs of them,” Norma Crandall said. “We. love the children.”

“Sometimes that pet cemetery is their first eyeball-to-eyeball with death,” Jud said. “They see people die on TV, but they know that’s pretend, like the old Westerns they used to have at the movies on Saturday afternoons. On TV and in the Western movies, they just hold their stomachs or their chests and fall over.

Place up on that hill seems a lot more real to most of em than all those movies and TV shows put together, don’t you know.”

Louis nodded, thinking: Tell my wife that, why don’t you?

“Some kids it don’t affect at all, at least not so you can see it, although I’d guess most of em kinda… kinda take it home in their pockets to look over later, like all the other stuff they collect. Most of em are fine. But some…

you remember the little Holloway boy, Norma?”

She nodded. Ice chattered softly in the glass she held. Her glasses hung on her chest, and the headlights of a passing car illuminated the chain briefly. “He had such nightmares,” she said. “Dreams about corpses coming out of the ground and I don’t know what all. Then his dog died-ate some poisoned bait was all anyone in town could figure, wasn’t it, Jud?”

“Poisoned bait,” Jud said, nodding. “That’s what most people thought, ayuh. That was 1925. Billy Holloway was maybe ten then. Went on to become a state senator.

Ran for the U. S. House of Representatives later on, but he lost. That was just before Korea.”

“He and some of his friends had a funeral for the dog,” Norma remembered. “It was just a mongrel, but he loved it well. I remember his parents were a little against the burying, because of the bad dreams and all, but it went off fine.

Two of the bigger boys made a coffin, didn’t they, Jud?”

Jud nodded and drained his iced tea. “Dean and Dana Hall,” he said. “Them and that other kid Billy chummed with-I can’t remember his first name, but I’m sure he was one of the Bowie kids. You remember the Bowies that used to live up on Middle Drive in the old Brochette house, Norma?”

“Yes!” Norma said, as excited as if it had happened yesterday… and perhaps in her mind, it seemed that way. “It was a Bowie! Alan or Burt-”

“Or maybe it was Kendall,” Jud agreed. “Anyways, I remember they had a pretty good argument about who was going to be pallbearers. The dog wasn’t very big, and so there wasn’t room but for two. The Hall boys said they ought to be the ones to do it since they made the coffin, and also because they were twins-sort of a matched set, y’see. Billy said they didn’t know Bowser-that was the dog-well enough to be the pallbearers. ‘My dad says only close friends get to be pallbearers,’ was his argument, ‘not jest any carpenter. ’ Jud and Norma both laughed at this, and Louis grinned.

“They was just about ready to fight over it when Mandy Holloway, Billy’s sister, fetched out the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica,” Jud said. “Her dad, Stephen Holloway, was the only doctor this side of Bangor and that side of Bucksport in those days, Louis, and they was the only family in Ludlow that could afford a set of encyclopedia.”

“They were also the first to have electric lights,” Norma broke in.

“Anyway,” Jud resumed, “Mandy come out all aflukin, head up and tail over a splashboard, all of eight years old, petticoats flyin, that big book in her arms. Billy and the Bowie kid-I think it must have been Kendall, him that crashed and burned up in Pensacola where they was trainin fighter pilots in early 1942-they was gettin ready to take on the Hall twins over the privilege of toting that poor old poisoned mutt up to the boneyard.”

Louis started giggling. Soon he was laughing out loud. He could feel the days-old residue of tension left from the bitter argument with Rachel beginning to loosen.

“So she says, ‘Wait! Wait! Looka this!’ And they all stop and look. And goddam if she ain’t-”

“Jud,” Norma said warningly.

“Sorry, dear; I get carried away yarning, you know that.”

“I guess you do,” she said.

“And darned if she ain’t got that book open to FUNERALS, and there’s a picture of Queen Victoria getting her final sendoff and bon voyage, and there are about forty-eleven people on each side of her coffin, some sweatin and strainin to lift the bugger, some just standin around in their funeral coats and ruffled collars like they was waitin for someone to call post time at the racetrack. And Mandy says, ‘When it’s a ceremonial funeral of state, you can have as many as you want! The book says so!’ “That solved it?” Louis asked.

“That did the trick. They ended up with about twenty kids, and damn if they didn’t look just like the picture Mandy had found, except maybe for the ruffles and tall hats. Mandy took charge, she did. Got em lined up and gave each of em a wildflower-a dandelion or a lady’s slipper or a daisy-and off they went., By the gee, I always thought the country missed a bet when Mandy Holloway never got voted to the U. S. Congress.” He laughed and shook his head. “Anyway, that was the end of Billy’s bad dreams about the Pet Sematary. He mourned his dog and finished his mourning and got on. Which is what we all do, I guess.”

Louis thought again of Rachel’s near-hysteria.

“Your Ellie will get over it,” Norma said and shifted position. “You must be thinking that death is all we talk about around here, Louis. Jud and I are getting on, but I hope neither of us has gotten to the gore-crow stage yet-”

“No, of course not, don’t be silly,” Louis said.

“-But it’s not such a bad idea to be on nodding acquaintance with it. These days… I don’t know… no one wants to talk about it or think about it, it seems. They took it off the TV because they thought it might hurt the children some way hurt their minds… and people want closed coffins so they don’t have to look at the remains or say goodbye… it just seems like people want to forget it.”

“And at the same time they brought in the cable TV with all those movies showing people”-Jud looked at Norma and cleared his throat-”showing people doing what people usually do with their shades pulled down,” he finished. “Queer how things change from one generation to the next, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Louis said. “I suppose it is.”

“Well, we come from a different time,” Jud said, sounding almost apologetic “We was on closer terms with death. We saw the flu epidemic after the Great War, and mothers dying with child, and children dying of infection and fevers that it seems like doctors just wave a magic wand over these days. In the time when me and Norma was young, if you got cancer, why, that was your death warrant, right there. No radiation treatments back in the 1920s! Two wars, murders, suicides.

.

He fell silent for a moment.

“We knew it as a friend and as an enemy,” he said finally. “My brother Pete died of a burst appendix in 1912, back when Taft was President. Pete was just fourteen, and he could hit a baseball farther than any kid in town. In those days you didn’t need to take a course in college to study death, hot-spice, or whatever they call it. In those days it came into the house and said howdy and sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.”

This time Norma didn’t correct him; instead she nodded silently.

Louis stood up, stretched. “I have to go,” he said. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Yes, the merry-go-round starts for you tomorrow, don’t it?” Jud said, also standing. Jud saw Norma was also trying to get up and gave her a hand. She rose with a grimace.

“Bad tonight, is it?” Louis asked.

“Not so bad,” she said.

“Put some heat on it when you go to bed.”

“I will,” Norma said. “I always do. And Louis… don’t fret about Ellie. She’ll be too busy gettin to know her new friends this fall to worry much about that old place. Maybe someday all of em’II go up and repaint some of the signs, or pull weeds, or plant flowers. Sometimes they do, when the notion takes them. And she’ll feel better about it. She’ll start to get that nodding acquaintance.”

Not if my wife has anything to say about it.

“Come on over tomorrow night and tell me how it went up at the college, if you get the chance,” Jud said. “I’ll whup you at cribbage.”

“Well, maybe I’ll get you drunk first,” Louis said. “Double-skunk you.”

“Doc,” Jud said with great sincerity, “the day I get double-skunked at cribbage would be the day I’d let a quack like you treat me.”

He left on their laughter and crossed the road to his own house in the late-summer dark.

Rachel was sleeping with the baby, curled up on her side of the bed in a fetal, protective position. He supposed she would get over it-there had been other arguments and times of coldness in their marriage, but this one was surely the worst of the lot. He felt sad and angry and unhappy all at the same time, wanting to make it up but not sure how, not even sure that the first move should come from him. It was all so pointless-only a capful of wind somehow blown up to hurricane proportions by a trick of the mind. Other fights and arguments, yes, sure, but only a few as bitter as the one over Ellie’s tears and questions. He supposed it didn’t take a great many blows like that before the marriage sustained structural damage and then one day, instead of reading about it in a note from a friend (“Well, I suppose I ought to tell you before you hear it from someone else, Lou; Maggie and I are splitting… “) or in the newspaper, it was you.

He undressed to his shorts quietly and set the alarm for 6 A. M. Then he showered, washed his hair, shaved, and crunched up a Rolaid before brushing his teeth-Norma’s iced tea had given him acid indigestion. Or maybe it was coming home and seeing Rachel way over on her side of the bed. Territory is that which defines all else, hadn’t he read that in some college history course?

Everything done, the evening put neatly away, he went to bed… but couldn’t sleep. There was something else, something that nagged at him. The last two days went around and around in his head as he listened to Rachel and Gage breathing nearly in tandem. GEN. PATTON HANNAH THE BEST DOG THAT EVER LIVED -. MARIA OUR PET RABIT… Ellie, furious. I don’t want Church to ever be dead!… He’s not God’s cat!

Let God have His own cat! Rachel, equally furious. You as a doctor should know.

… Norma Crandall saying It just seems like people want to forget it… And Jud, his voice terribly sure, terribly certain, a voice from another age: Sometimes it took supper with you and sometimes you could feel it bite your ass.

And that voice merged with the voice of his mother, who had lied to Louis Creed about sex at four but told him the truth about death at twelve, when his cousin Ruthie had been killed in a stupid car accident. She had been crushed in her father’s car by a kid who had found the keys in a Public Works Department payloader and decided to take it for a cruise and then found out he didn’t know how to stop it. The kid suffered only minor cuts and contusions; his Uncle Carl’s Fairlane was demolished. She can’t be dead, he had replied in answer to his mother’s bald statement. He had heard the words, but he couldn’t seem to get the sense of them. What do you mean, she’s dead? What are you talking about? And then, as an afterthought: Who’s going to bury her? For although Ruthie’s father, Louis’s uncle, was an undertaker, he couldn’t imagine that Uncle Carl would possibly be the one to do it. In his confusion and mounting fear, he had seized upon this as the most important question. It was a genuine conundrum, like who cut the town barber’s hair.

I imagine that Donny Donahue will do it, his mother replied. Her eyes were red-rimmed; most of all she had looked tired. His mother had looked almost ill with weariness.

He’s your uncle’s best pal in the business. Oh, but Louis.

Sweet little Ruthie… I can’t stand to think she suffered.

pray with me. will you, Louis? Pray with me for Ruthie. I need you to help me.

So they had gotten down on their knees in the kitchen, he and his mother, and they prayed, and it was the praying that finally brought it home to him; if his mother was praying for Ruthie Creed’s soul, then it meant that her body was gone. Before his closed eyes rose a terrible image of Ruthie coming to his thirteenth birthday party with her decaying eyeballs hanging on her cheeks and blue mould growing in her red hair, and this image provoked not just sickening horror but an awful doomed love.

He cried out in the greatest mental agony of his life, “She can’t be dead!

MOMMA, SHE CAN’T BE DEAD-I LOVE HER!”

And his mother’s reply, her voice flat and yet full of images: dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust: She is, my darling. I’m sorry, but she is. Ruthie is gone.

Louis shuddered, thinking, Dead is dead-what else do you need?

Suddenly Louis knew what it was he had forgotten to do, why he was still awake on this night before the first day of his new job, hashing over old griefs.

He got up, headed for the stairs, and suddenly detoured down the hall to Ellie’s room. She was sleeping peacefully, mouth open, wearing her blue baby-doll pajamas that she had really outgrown. My God, Ellie, he thought, you’re sprouting like corn. Church lay between her splayed ankles, also dead to the world. You should pardon the pun.

Downstairs there was a bulletin board on the wall by the phone with various messages, memos, and bills tacked to it. Written across the top in Rachel’s neat caps was THINGS TO PUT OFF AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Louis got the telephone book, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Quentin L. Jolander, D. V. M.-call for appointment re Church--if Jolander doesn’t neuter animals, he will refer.

He looked at the note, wondering if it was time, knowing that it was. Something concrete had to come out of all this bad feeling, and he had decided sometime between this morning and tonight-without even knowing he was deciding-that he didn’t want Church crossing the road anymore if he could help it.

His old feelings on the subject rose up in him, the idea that neutering would lessen the cat, would turn him into a fat old torn before his time, content to just sleep on the radiator until someone put something into his dish. He didn’t want Church like that. He liked Church the way he was, lean and mean.

Outside in the dark, a big semi droned by on Route 15, and that decided him. He tacked the memo up and went to bed.

11

The next morning at breakfast, Ellie saw the new memo on the bulletin board and asked him what it meant.

“It means he’s going to have a very small operation,” Louis said. “He’ll probably have to stay over at the vet’s for one night afterward. And when he comes home, he’ll stay in our yard and not want to roam around so much.”

“Or cross the road?” Ellie asked.

She may be only five, Louis thought, but she’s sure no slouch. “Or cross the road,” he agreed.

“Yay!” Ellie said, and that was the end of the subject.

Louis, who had been prepared for a bitter and perhaps hysterical argument about Church being out of the house for even one night, was mildly stunned by the ease with which she had acquiesced. And he realized how worried she must have been.

Perhaps Rachel had not been entirely wrong about the effect the Pet Sematary had had on her.

Rachel herself, who was feeding Gage his breakfast egg, shot him a grateful approving look, and Louis felt something loosen in his chest. The look told him that the chill was over; this particular hatchet had been buried. Forever, he hoped.

Later, after the big yellow school bus had gobbled Ellie up for the morning, Rachel came to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed his mouth gently.

“You were very sweet to do that,” she said, “and I’m sorry I was such a bitch.”

Louis returned her kiss, feeling a little uncomfortable nonetheless. It occurred to him that the I’m sorry! was such a bitch statement, while by no means a standard, was not exactly something he’d never heard before either. It usually came after Rachel had gotten her way.

Gage, meanwhile, had toddled unsteadily over to the front door and was looking out the lowest pane of glass at the empty road. “Bus,” he said, hitching nonchalantly at his sagging diapers. “Ellie-bus.”

“He’s growing up fast,” Louis said.

Rachel nodded. “Too fast to suit me, I think.”

“Wait until he’s out of diapers,” Louis said. “Then he can stop. ’, She laughed, and it was all right between them again-completely all right. She stood back, made a minute adjustment to his tie, and looked him up and down critically.

“Do I pass muster, Sarge?” he asked.

“You look very nice.”

“Yeah, I know. But do I look like a heart surgeon? A two-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year man?”

“No, just old Lou Creed,” she said and giggled. “The rock-and-roll animal.”

Louis glanced at his watch. “The rock-and-roll animal has got to put on his boogie shoes and go,” he said.

“Are you nervous?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “It’s sixty-seven thousand dollars a year for putting on Ace bandages, prescribing for the flu and for hangovers, giving girls the pill-”

“Don’t forget the crab-and-louse lotion,” Louis said, smiling again. One of the things that had surprised him on his first tour of the infirmary had been the supplies of Quell, which seemed to him enormous-more fitted to an army base infirmary than to one on a middle-sized university campus.

Miss Charlton, the head nurse, had smiled cynically. “Off campus apartments in the area are pretty tacky. You’ll see. “ He supposed he would.

“Have a good day,” she said and kissed him again, lingeringly. But when she pulled away, she was mock-stem. “And for Christ’s sake remember that you’re an administrator, not an intern or a second-year resident!”

“Yes, Doctor,” Louis said humbly, and they both laughed again. For a moment he thought of asking: Was it Zelda, babe? is that what’s got under your skin? Is that the zone of low pressure?

Zelda and how she died? But he wasn’t going to ask her that, not now. As a doctor he knew a lot of things, and while the fact that death was just as natural as childbirth might be the greatest of them, the fact that you don’t monkey with a wound that has finally started to heal was far from the least of them.

So instead of asking, he only kissed her again and went out.

It was a good start, a good day. Maine was putting on a late-summer show, the sky was blue and cloudless, the temperature pegged at an utterly perfect seventy-two degrees. Rolling to the end of the driveway and checking for traffic, Louis mused that so far he hadn’t seen so much as a trace of the fall foliage that was supposed to be so spectacular. But he could wait.

He pointed the Honda Civic they had picked up as a second car toward the university and let it roll. Rachel would call the vet this morning, they would get Church fixed, and that would put this whole nonsense of Pet Semataries (it was funny how that misspelling got into your head and began to seem right) and death fears behind them. There was no need to be thinking about death on a beautiful September morning like this one.

Louis turned on the radio and dialed until he found the Ramones belting out “Rockaway Beach.” He turned it up and sang along-not well but with lusty enjoyment.

12

The first thing he noticed turning into the university grounds was how suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic, there were joggers by the score. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the latter coming from the direction of Dunn Hall. Louis braked hard enough to lock his shoulder belt and honked. He was always annoyed at the way joggers (bicyclers had the same irritating habit) seemed to automatically assumed that their responsibility lapsed completely at the moment they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Louis the finger without ever looking around. Louis sighed and drove on.

The second thing was that the ambulance was gone from its slot in the small infirmary parking lot, and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short-term basis; there were three well-equipped examination-and-treatment rooms opening off the big foyer, and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents, there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Steve Masterton, the physician’s assistant who had given Louis his first tour of the facility, had shown Louis the log from the previous two academic years with justifiable pride; there had only been thirty-eight ambulance runs in that time… not bad when you considered that the student population here was over ten thousand and the total university population was almost seventeen thousand.

And here he was, on his first real day of work, with the ambulance gone.

He parked in the slot headed with a freshly painted sign reading RESERVED FOR DR. CREED and hurried in.

He found Charlton, a graying but lithe woman of about fifty, in the first examining room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Louis observed; the peeling was well advanced.

“Good morning, Joan,” he said. “Where’s the ambulance?”

“Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right,” Charlton said, taking the thermometer out of the student’s mouth and reading it. “Steve Masterton came in this morning at seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels.

Radiator let go. They hauled it away.”

“Great,” Louis said, but he felt relieved nonetheless. At least it wasn’t out on a run, which was what he had first feared; “When do we get it back?”

Joan Chariton laughed. “Knowing the University Motor Pool,” she said, “it’ll come back around December fifteenth wrapped in Christmas ribbon.” She glanced at the student. “You’ve got half a degree of fever,” she said. “Take two aspirins and stay out of bars and dark alleys.”

The girl got down. She gave Louis a quick appraising glance and then went out.

“Our first customer of the new semester,” Charlton said sourly. She began to shake the thermometer down with brisk snaps.

“You don’t seem too pleased about it.”

“I know the type,” she said. “Oh, we get the other type too-athletes who go on playing with bone chips and tendonitis and everything else because they don’t want to be benched, they got to be macho men, not let the ream down, even if they’re jeopardizing pro careers later on. Then you’ve got little Miss Half-Degree of Fever-” She jerked her head toward the window, where Louis could see the girl with the peeling sunburn walking in the direction of the Gannett Cumberland-Androscoggin complex of dorms. In the examining room the girl had given the impression of being someone who did not feel well at all but was trying not to let on. Now she was walking briskly, her hips swinging prettily, noticing and being noticed.

“Your basic college hypochondriac.” Charlton dropped the thermometer into a sterilizer. “We’ll see her two dozen times this year. Her visits will be more frequent before each round of prelims. A week or so before finals, she’ll be convinced she has either mono or pneumonia. Bronchitis is the fall-back position. She’ll get out of four or five tests-the ones where the instructors are wimps, to use the word they use-and get easier makeups. They always get sicker if they know the prelim or final is going to be an objective test rather than an essay exam.”

“My, aren’t we cynical this morning,” Louis said. He was, in fact, a little nonplussed.

She tipped him a wink that made him grin. ‘I don’t take it to heart. Doctor.

Neither should you”

“Where’s Stephen now?”

“In your office, answering mail and trying to figure out the latest ton of bureaucratic bullshit from Blue Cross-Blue Shield,” she said.

Louis went in. Charlton’s cynicism notwithstanding, he felt comfortably in harness.

Looking back on it, Louis would think-when he could bear to think about it at all-that the nightmare really began when they brought the dying boy, Victor Pascow, into the infirmary around ten that morning.

Until then, things were very quiet. At nine, half an hour after Louis arrived, the two candy-stripers who would be working the nine-to-three shift came in.

Louis gave them each a doughnut and a cup of coffee and talked to them for about fifteen minutes, outlining their duties, and what was perhaps more important, what was beyond the scope of their duties. Then Charlton took over. As she led them out of Louis's office, Louis heard her ask: “Either of you allergic to shit or puke? You’ll see a lot of both here.”

“Oh God,” Louis murmured and covered his eyes. But he was smiling. A tough old babe like Charlton was not always a liability.

Louis began filling out the long Blue Cross-Blue Shield forms, which amounted to a complete inventory of drug stock and medical equipment (“Every year,” Steve Masterton said in an aggrieved voice. “Every goddam year the same thing. Why don’t you write down Complete heart transplant facility, approx. value eight million dollars. Louis? That’II foozle em!”), and he was totally engrossed, thinking only marginally that a cup of coffee would go down well, when Masterton screamed from the direction of the foyer-waiting room: “Louis! Hey, Louis, get out here! We got a mess!”

The near-panic in Masterton’s voice got Louis going in a hurry. He bolted out of his chair almost as if he had, in some subconscious way, been expecting this. A shriek, as thin and sharp as a shard of broken glass, arose from the direction of Masterton’s shout. It was followed by a sharp slap and Chariton saying, “Stop that or get the hell out of here! Stop it right now!”

Louis burst into the waiting room and was first only conscious of the blood-there was a lot of blood. One of the candy-stripers was sobbing. The other, pale as cream, had put her fisted hands to the corners of her mouth, pulling her lips into a big revolted grin. Masterton was kneeling down, trying to hold the head of the boy sprawled on the floor.

Steve looked up at Louis, eyes grim and wide and frightened He tried to speak.

Nothing came out.

People were congregating at the Student Medical Center’s big glass doors, peering in, their hands cupped around their faces to cut out the glare. Louis’s mind conjured up an insanely appropriate image: sitting in the living room as a kid of no more than six with his mother in the morning before she went to work.

watching the television. Watching the old “Today” show, with Dave Garroway.

People were outside, gaping in at Dave and Frank Blair and good old J. Fred Muggs. He looked around and saw other people standing at the windows. He couldn’t do anything about the doors, but-“Shut the drapes,” he snapped at the candy-striper who had screamed.

When she didn’t move immediately, Charlton slapped her can. “Do it, girl!”

The candy-striper got in gear. A moment later green drapes were jerked across the windows. Chariton and Steve Masterton moved instinctively between the boy or. the floor and the doors, cutting off the view as best they could.

“Hard stretcher, Doctor?” Chariton asked.

“If we need it, get it,” Louis said, squatting beside Masterton. “I haven’t even had a chance to look at him.”

“Come on,” Chariton said to the girl who had closed the drapes. She was pulling the corners of her mouth with her fists again, making that humorless, screaming grin. She looked at Charlton and moaned, “Oh, ag,”

“Yeah, oh, ag is right. Come on.” She gave the girl a hard yank and got her moving, her red and white pinstriped skirt swishing against her legs.

Louis bent over his first patient at the University of Maine at Orono.

He was a young man, age approximately twenty, and it took Louis less than three seconds to make the only diagnosis that mattered: The young man was suing to die. Half of his head was crushed. His neck had been Broken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a yellow, pussy fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Louis could see the man’s brain, whitish-gray and pulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like looking through a broken window. The incursion was perhaps five centimeters wide; if he had had a baby in his skull, he could almost have birthed it, like Zeus delivering from his forehead. That he was still alive at all was incredible. In his mind suddenly he heard Jud Crandall saying sometimes you could feel it bite your ass. And his mother: dead is dead. He felt a crazy urge to laugh. Dead was dead, all right. That’s affirmative, good buddy.

“Holler for the ambulance,” he snapped at Masterton.

“Louis, the ambulance is-”

“Oh Christ,” Louis said, slapping his own forehead. He shifted his gaze to Charlton. “Joan, what do you do in a case like this? Call Campus Security or the EMMC?”

Joan looked flustered and upset-an extreme rarity with her, Louis guessed. But her voice was composed enough as she replied. “Doctor, I don’t know. We’ve never had a situation like this before in my time at the Medical Center.”

Louis thought as fast as he could. ‘Call the campus police. We can’t wait for EMMC to send out their own ambulance. If they have to, they can take him up to Bangor in one of the fire engines. At least it has a siren, flashers. Go do it, Joan.”

She went but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and interpreted it. This young man, who was deeply tanned and well-muscled-perhaps from a summer working on a roadcrew somewhere, or painting houses, or giving tennis lessons-and dressed now only in red gym shorts with white piping, was going to die no matter what they did. He would be just as dead even if their ambulance had been parked out front with the motor idling when the patient was brought in.

Incredibly, the dying man was moving. His eyes fluttered and opened. Blue eyes, the irises ringed with blood. They stared vacantly around, seeing nothing. He tried to move his head, and Louis exerted pressure to keep him from doing so, mindful of the broken neck. The cranial trauma did not preclude the possibility of pain.

The hole in his head, oh Christ, the hole in his head.

“What happened to him?” he asked Steve, aware that it was, under the circumstances, a stupid and pointless question. The question of a bystander. But the hole in the man’s head confirmed his status; a bystander was all he was.

“Did the police bring him?”

“Some students brought him in a blanket sling. I don’t know what the circumstances were.”

There was what happened next to be thought of. That was his responsibility too.

“Go out and find them,” Louis said. “Take them around to the other door. I want them handy, but I don’t want them to see any more of this than they already have.”

Masterton, looking relieved to be away from what was happening in here, went to the door and opened it, letting in a babble of excited, curious, confused conversation. Louis could also hear the warble of a police siren. Campus Security was here then. Louis felt a kind of miserable relief.

The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak.

Louis heard syllables-phonetics, at least-but the words themselves were slurred and unclear.

Louis leaned over him and said, “You’re going to be all right, fella.” He thought of Rachel and Ellie as he said it, and his stomach gave a great, unlovely lurch. He put a hand over his mouth and stifled a burp.

“Caaa,” the young man said. “Gaaaaaa-”

Louis looked around and saw that he was momentarily alone with the dying man.

Dimly he could hear Joan Charlton yelling at the candy-stripers that the hard stretcher was in the supply closet off Room Two. Louis doubted if they knew Room Two from a frog’s gonads; it was, after all, their first day on the job. They had gotten a hell of an introduction to the world of medicine. The green wall-to-wall carpet was now soaked a muddy purple in an expanding circle around the young man’s ruined head; the leakage of intercranial fluid had, mercifully, stopped.

“In the Pet Sematary,” the young man croaked… and he began to grin. This grin was remarkably like the mirthless hysterical grin of the candy-striper who had closed the drapes.

Louis stared down at him, at first refusing to credit what he had heard. Then Louis thought he must have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those phonetic sounds and my subconscious made them into something coherent, cross-patched the sounds into my own experience. But that was not what had happened, and a moment later he was forced to realize it. A swooning, mad terror struck him and his flesh began to creep avidly, seeming to actually move up and down his arms and along his belly in waves… but even then he simply refused to believe it Yes, the syllables had been on the bloody lips of the man on the carpet as well as in Louis’s ears, but that only meant the hallucination had been visual as well as auditory.

‘What did you say?” he whispered.

And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: “It’s not the real cemetery.” The eyes were vacant, not-seeing, rimmed with blood: the mouth grinning the large grin of a dead carp.

Horror rolled through Louis, gripping his warm heart in its cold hands, squeezing. It reduced him, made him less and less, until he felt like taking to his heels and running from this bloody, twisted, speaking head on the floor of the infirmary waiting room. He was a man with no deep religious training, no bent toward the superstitious or the occult. He was ill-prepared for this…

whatever it was.

Fighting the urge to run with everything in him, be forced himself to lean even closer. “What did you say?” he asked a second time The grin. That was bad.

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis,” the dying man whispered. “A man grows what he can and tends it.”

Louis. he thought, hearing nothing with his conscious mind after his own name.

Oh my God he called me by my name “Who are you?” Louis asked in a trembling, papery voice. “Who are you?”

“Injun bring my fish “How did you know my-” “Keep clear, us. Know-” “You-”

“Caa,” the young man said, and now Louis fancied he could smell death on his breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, rein.

“What?” A crazy urge came to shake him.

“Gaaaaaaaa-”

The young man in the red gym shorts began to shudder all over. Suddenly he seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression momentarily and seemed to find Louis’s eyes. Then everything let go at once.

There was a bad stink. Louis thought he would, must speak again. Then the eyes resumed their vacant expression… and began to glaze. The man was dead.

Louis sat back, vaguely aware that all his clothes were sticking to him; he was drenched with sweat. Darkness bloomed, spreading a wing softly over his eyes, and the world began to swing sickeningly sideways. Recognizing what was happening, he half-turned from the dead man, thrust his head down between his knees, and pressed the nails of his left thumb and left forefinger into his gums hard enough to bring blood.

After a moment the world began to clear again.

13

Then the room filled up with people, as if they were all only actors, waiting for their cue. This added to Louis’s feeling of unreality and disorientation-the strength of these feelings, which he had studied in psychology classes but never actually experienced, frightened him badly. It was, he supposed, the way a person would feel shortly after someone had slipped a powerful dose of LSD into his drink.

Like a play staged only for my benefit, he thought. The room is first conveniently cleared so the dying Sibyl can speak a few lines of oblique prophecy to me and me alone, and as soon as he’s dead, everyone comes back.

The candy-stripers bungled in, one on each end of the hard stretcher, the one they used for people with spinal or neck injuries. Joan Charlton followed them, saying that the campus police were on their way. The young man had been struck by a car while jogging. Louis thought of the joggers who had run in front of his car that morning and his guts rolled.

Behind Charlton came Steve Masterton with two Campus Security cops. “Louis, the people who brought Pascow in are… “ He broke off and said sharply, “Louis, are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” he said and got up. Faintness washed over him again and then withdrew. He groped. “Pascow is his name?”

One of the campus cops said, “Victor Pascow, according to the girl he was jogging with.”

Louis glanced at his watch and subtracted two minutes. From the room where Masterton had sequestered the people who had brought Pascow in, he could hear a girl sobbing wildly. Welcome back to school, little lady, he thought. Have a nice semester. “Mr. Pascow died at 10:09 A. M.,” he said.

One of the cops wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. Masterton said again, “Louis, are you really okay? You look terrible.”

Louis opened his mouth to answer, and one of the candy stripers abruptly dropped her end of the hard stretcher and ran out, vomiting down the front of her pinafore. A phone began to ring. The girl who had been sobbing now began to scream the dead man’s name-”Vic! Vic! Vic!”-over and over. Bedlam. Confusion. One of the cops was asking Charlton if they could have a blanket to cover him up, and Chariton was saying she didn’t know if she had the authority to requisition one, and Louis found himself thinking of a line from Maurice Sendak: “Let the wild rumpus start!”

Those rotten giggles rose in his throat again, and somehow he managed to bottle them up. Had this Pascow really said the words Pet Sematary? Had this Pascow really spoken his name? Those were the things that were knocking him off kilter, the things that had sent him wobbling out of orbit. But already his mind seemed to be wrapping those few moments in a protective film-sculpting, changing, disconnecting. Surely he had said something else (if he had indeed spoken at all), and in the shock and unhappy passion of the moment, Louis had misinterpreted it. More likely, Pascow had only mouthed sounds, as he had at first thought.

Louis groped for himself, for that part of himself that had caused the administration to give him this job over the other fifty-three applicants for the position. There was no one in command here, no forward motion; the room was full of milling people.

“Steve, go give that girl a trank,” he said, and just saying the words made him feel better. It was as if he were in a rocketship under power now, puffing away from a tiny moonlet. Said moon-let being, of course, that irrational moment when Pascow had spoken. Louis had been hired to take charge; he was going to do it.

“Joan. Give the cop a blanket.”

“Doctor, we haven’t inventoried-”

“Give it to him anyway. Then check on that candy-striper.” He looked at the other girl, who still held her end of the hard stretcher. She was staring at Pascow’s remains with a kind of hypnotized fascination. “Candy-striper!” Louis said harshly, and her eyes jerked away from the body.

“W-W-Wh-”

“What’s the other girl’s name?”

“W-Who?”

“The one who puked,” he said with deliberate harshness.

“Juh-Juh-Judy. Judy DeLessio.”

“Your name?”

“Carla.” Now the girl sounded a little more steady.

“Carla, you go check on Judy. And get that blanket. You’ll find a pile of them in the little utility closet off Examining Room One. Go, all of you. Let’s look a little professional here.”

They got moving. Very shortly the screaming in the other room quieted. The phone, which had stopped ringing, now began again. Louis pushed the hold button without picking up the receiver off its cradle.

The older campus cop looked more together, and Louis spoke to him. “Who do we notify? Can you give me a list?”

The cop nodded and said, “We haven’t had one of these in six years. It’s a bad way to start the semester.”

“It sure is,” Louis said. He picked up the phone and punched off the hold button.

“Hello? Who is-” an excited voice began, and Louis cut it off. He began to make his calls.

14

Things did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis and Richard Irving, the head of Campus Security, made a statement to the press. The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his fiancйe. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women’s Gymnasium toward the center of campus at an excessive speed. Withers’s car had struck Pascow and driven him head-first into a tree. Pascow had been brought to the infirmary in a blanket by his friends and two passersby. He had died minutes later. Withers was being held pending charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicular manslaughter.

The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Pascow had died of head injuries. Louis, thinking of that broken window through which the brain itself could be seen, said he would rather let the Penobscot County coroner announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the four young people who had brought Pascow to the infirmary in the blanket might not have inadvertently caused his death.

“No,” Louis replied. “Not at all. Unhappily, Mr. Pascow was in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck.”

There were other questions-a few-but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Louis sat in his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour before, immediately following the press conference-to catch himself on the evening news Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of the day-or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it. He and Charlton were going over the cards in the “front file”-those students who were pushing grimly through their college years in spite of some disability There were twenty-three diabetics in the front file, fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics, and assorted others: students with leukemia, students with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle-cell anemia, which Louis had never even seen.

Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left.

Charlton came in and laid a pink memo slip on Louis’s desk. Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.

“Carpet?” he had asked.

“It will have to be replaced,” she said apologetically. “No way the stain’s going to come out, Doctor.”

Of course not. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal-what his first med school roommate had called Tooners. “Hop up on the Toonerville Trolley, Louis,” he’d say, “and I’ll put on some Creedence.” More often than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and that was maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third semester and had ridden the Toonerville Trolley all the way to Vietnam as a medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured him over there, stoned to the eyeballs, listening to Creedence do “Run Through the Jungle.”

But he needed something. If he was going to have to see that pink slip about the carpet on his note-minder board every time he glanced up from the front file spread out in front of them, he needed something.

He was cruising fairly well when Mrs. Baillings, the night like doing it-it made him feel like the most rancid sort of gossip-but Missy would accept no money for sitting, and he was grateful to her for the evening he and Rachel had shared.

Gage was fast asleep before Louis had gotten the mile between Missy’s house and their own; even Ellie was yawning and glassy-eyed. He put Gage into fresh diapers, poured him into his sleeper suit, and popped him into his crib. Then he read Ellie a storybook. As usual, she clamored for Where the Wild Things Are, being a veteran wild thing herself. Louis convinced her to settle for The Cat in the Hat. She was asleep five minutes after he carried her up, and Rachel tucked her in.

When he came downstairs again, Rachel was sitting in the living room with a glass of milk. A Dorothy Sayers mystery was open on one long thigh.

“Louis, are you really all right?”

“Honey, I’m fine,” he said. “And thanks. For everything.”

‘ “We aim to please,” she said with a curving, slightly saucy smile. “Are you going over to Jud’s for a beer?”

He shook his head. “Not tonight. I’m totally bushed.”

“I hope I had something to do with that.”

“I think you did.”

“Then grab yourself a glass of milk, Doctor, and let’s go to bed.”

He thought perhaps he would lie awake, as he often had when he was interning, and days that were particularly hairy would play over and over in his mind. But he slid smoothly toward sleep, as if on a slightly inclined, frictionless board.

He had read somewhere that it takes the average human being just seven minutes to turn off all the switches and uncouple from the day. Seven minutes for conscious and subconscious to revolve, like the trick wall in an amusement-park haunted house. Something a little eerie in that.

He was almost there when he heard Rachel say, as if from a great distance,”…

day after tomorrow.”

“Ummmmmm?”

“Jolander. The vet. He’s taking Church the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Church. Treasure your cojуnes while you got em, Church, old boy. Then he slipped away from everything, down a hole, sleeping deeply and without dreams.

16

Something woke him much later, a crash loud enough to cause him to sit up in bed, wondering if Ellie had fallen onto the floor or if maybe Gage’s crib had collapsed. Then the moon sailed out from behind a cloud, flooding the room with cold white light, and he saw Victor Pascow standing in the doorway. The crash had been Pascow throwing open the door.

He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian warpaint. His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.

“Come on, Doctor,” Pascow said. “We got places to go.”

Louis looked around. His wife was a vague hump under her yellow comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Pascow, who was dead but somehow not dead.

Yet Louis felt no fear. He realized why almost at once.

It’s a dream, he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible. This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Bangor with the pathologist’s tattoo-a Y-cut stitched back up-on him. The pathologist probably tossed his brain into his chest cavity after taking a tissue sample and filled up the skull cavity with brown paper to prevent leaking-simpler than trying to fit the brain back into the skull like a jigsaw piece into a puzzle. Uncle Carl, father of the unfortunate Ruthie, had told him that pathologists did that, and all sorts of other random information that he supposed would give Rachel, with her death phobia, the screaming horrors. But Pascow was not here-no way, baby.

Pascow was in a refrigerated locker with a tag around his toe. And he is most certainly not wearing those red jogging shorts in there.

Yet the compulsion to get up was strong. Pascow’s eyes were upon him.

He threw back the covers and swung his feet onto the floor. The hooked rug-a wedding present from Rachel’s grandmother long ago-pressed cold nubbles into the balls of his feet. The dream had a remarkable reality. It was so real that he would not follow Pascow until Pascow had turned and begun to go back down the stairs. The compulsion to follow was strong, but he did not want to be touched, even in a dream, by a walking corpse.

But he did follow. Pascow’s jogging shorts glimmered.

They crossed the living room, dining room, kitchen. Louis expected Pascow to turn the lock and then lift the latch on the door which connected the kitchen to the shed where he garaged the station wagon and the Civic, but Pascow did no such thing. Instead of opening the door, he simply passed through it. And Louis, watching, thought with mild amazement: Is that how it’s done? Remarkable! Anyone could do that!

He tried it himself-and was a little amused to meet only unyielding wood.

Apparently he was a hard-headed realist, even in his dreams. Louis twisted the knob on the Yale lock, lifted the latch, and let himself into the shed-garage.

Pascow was not there. Louis wondered briefly if Pascow had just ceased to exist.

Figures in dreams often did just that. So did locations-first you were standing nude by a swimming pool with a raging hardon, discussing the possibilities of wife swapping with, say, Roger and Missy Dandridge; then you blinked and you were climbing the side of a Hawaiian volcano. Maybe he had lost Pascow because this was the beginning of Act II.

But when Louis emerged from the garage, he saw him again, standing in the faint moonlight at the back of the lawn-at the head of the path.

Now fear came, entering softly, sifting through the hollow places of his body and filling them up with dirty smoke. He didn’t want to go up there. He halted.

Pascow glanced back over his shoulder, and in the moonlight his eyes were silver. Louis felt a hopeless crawl of horror in his belly. That jutting bone, those dried clots of blood. But it was hopeless to resist those eyes. This was apparently a dream about being hypnotized, being dominated… being unable to change things, perhaps, the way he had been unable to change the fact of Pascow’s death. You could go to school for twenty years and you still couldn’t do a thing when they brought a guy in who had been rammed into a tree hard enough to open a window in his skull. They might as well have called a plumber, a rainmaker, or the Man from Glad.

And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he was drawn forward onto the path. He followed the jogging shorts, as maroon in this light as the dried blood on Pascow’s face.

He didn’t like this dream. Oh God, not at all. It was too real. The cold nubbles in the rug, the way he had not been able to pass through the shed door when a person could (or should) be able to walk through doors and walls in any self-respecting dream… and now the cool brush of dew on his bare feet, and the feel of the night wind, just a breath of it, on his body, which was naked except for his Jockey shorts. Once under the trees, pine needles stuck to the soles of his feet… another little detail that was just a bit more real than it needed to be.

Never mind. Never mind. I am home in my own bed. It’s just a dream, no matter how vivid, and like all other dreams, it will seem ridiculous in the morning. My waking mind will discover its inconsistencies.

The small branch of a dead tree poked his bicep rudely and he winced. Up ahead, Pascow was only a moving shadow, and now Louis’s terror seemed to have crystallized into a bright sculpture in his mind: I am following a dead man into the woods, I am following a dead man up to the Pet Sematary, and this is no dream. God help me, this is no dream. This is happening.

They walked down the far side of the wooded hill. The path curved in lazy S-shapes between the trees and then plunged into the underbrush. No boots now.

The ground dissolved into cold jelly under his feet, grabbing and holding, letting go only reluctantly. There were ugly sucking noises. He could feel the mud oozing between his toes, trying to separate them.

He tried desperately to hold on to the dream idea.

It wouldn’t wash.

They reached the clearing, and the moon sailed free of its reef of clouds again, bathing the graveyard with ghastly effulgence. The leaning markers-bits of board and tin cans that had been cut with a father’s tinsnips and then hammered into rude squares, chipped chunks of shale and slate-stood out with three-dimensional clarity, casting shadows perfectly black and defined.

Pascow stopped near SMUCKY THE CAT, HE WAS OBEDIANT and turned back toward Louis. The horror, the terror-he felt these things would grow in him until his body blew apart under their soft yet implacable pressure. Pascow was grinning.

His bloody lips were wrinkled back from his teeth, and his healthy road-crew tan in the moon’s bony light had become overlaid with the white of a corpse about to be sewn into its winding shroud.

He lifted one arm and pointed. Louis looked in that direction and moaned. His eyes grew wide, and he crammed his knuckles against his mouth. There was coolness on his cheeks, and he realized that in the extremity of his terror he had begun to weep.

The deadfall from which Jud Crandall had called Ellie in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals. Fingerbones clittered. Here the remains of a foot flexed its pallid joints.

Ah, it was moving; it was creeping-Pascow was walking toward him now, his bloody face grim in the moonlight, and the last of Louis’s coherent mind began to slip away in a yammering, cyclic thought: You got to scream yourself awake doesn’t matter if you scare Rachel Ellie Gage wake the whole household the whole neighborhood got to scream yourself awake screamscreamscreamyourselfawakeawakeawake-But only a thin whisper of air would come. It was the sound of a little kid sitting on a stoop somewhere and trying to teach himself to whistle.

Pascow came closer and then spoke.

“The door must not be opened,” Pascow said. He was looking down at Louis because Louis had fallen to his knees. There was a look on his face which Louis at first mistook for compassion. It wasn’t really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. “Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember.”

Louis tried again to scream. He could not.

“I come as a friend,” Pascow said-but was friend actually the word Pascow had used? Louis thought not. It was as if Pascow had spoken in a foreign language which Louis could understand through some dream magic… and “friend” was as close to whatever word Pascow had actually used that Louis’s struggling mind could come. “Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor.” He was close enough for Louis to be able to smell death on him.

Pascow, reaching for him.

The soft, maddening click of the bones.

Louis began to overbalance in his effort to get away from that hand. His own hand struck a monument and tilted it into the earth. Pascow’s face, leaning down, filled the sky.

“Doctor-remember.”

Louis tried to scream, and the world whirled away-but still he heard the click of moving bones in the moonlit crypt of the night.

17

It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand’s Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering. When the sleeper wakes, he or she comes up by degrees, from deep sleep to light sleep to what is sometimes called “waking sleep,” a state in which the sleeper can hear sounds and will even respond to questions without being aware of it later… except perhaps as fragments of dream.

Louis heard the click and rattle of bones, but gradually this sound became sharper, more metallic. There was a bang. A yell. More metallic sounds…

something rolling? Sure, his drifting mind agreed. Roll dem bones.

He heard his daughter calling “Get it, Cage! Go get it!”

This was followed by Gage’s crow of delight, the sound to which Louis opened his eyes and saw the ceiling of his own bedroom.

He held himself perfectly still, waiting for the reality, the good reality, the blessed reality, to come home all the way.

All a dream. No matter how terrible, how real, it had all been dream. Only a fossil in the mind under his mind.

The metallic sound came again. It was one of Gage’s toy cars being rolled along the upstairs hail.

“Get it, Gage!”

“Get it!” Gage yelled. “Get it-get it-get it!”

Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Gage’s small bare feet thundering along the hallway runner. He and Ellie were giggling.

Louis looked to his right. Rachel’s side of the bed was empty, the covers thrown back. The sun was well up. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly eight o’clock. Rachel had let him oversleep… probably on purpose.

Ordinarily this would have irritated him, but this morning it did not. He drew in a deep breath and let it out, content for the moment to lie here with a bar of sunlight slanting in through the window, feeling the unmistakable texture of the real world. Dust-motes danced in the sunlight.

Rachel called upstairs: “Better come down and get your snack and go out for the bus, El!”

“Okay!” The louder clack-clack of her feet. “Here’s your car, Gage. I got to go to school.”

Gage began to yell indignantly. Although it was garbled-the only clear words being Gage, car, geddit, and Ellie-bus, his text seemed clear enough: Ellie should stay. Public education could go hang for the day.

Rachel’s voice again, “Give your dad a shake before you come clown, El.”

Ellie came in, her hair done up in a ponytail, wearing her red dress.

“I’m awake, babe,” he said. “Go on and get your bus.”

“Okay, Daddy.” She came over, kissed his slightly scruffy cheek, and bolted for the stairs.

The dream was beginning to fade, to lose its coherence. A ‘damn good thing too.

“Gage!” he yelled. “Come give your dad a kiss!”

Gage ignored this. He was following Ellie downstairs as rapidly as he could, yelling “Get it! Get-it-get-it-GET-IT!” at the top of his lungs. Louis caught just a glimpse of his sturdy little kid’s body, clad only in diapers and rubber pants.

Rachel called up again, “Louis, was that you? You awake?”

“Yeah,” he said, sitting up.

“Told you he was!” Ellie called. “I’m goin. Bye!” The slam of the front door and Gage’s outraged bellow punctuated this.

“One egg or two?” Rachel called.

Louis pushed back the blankets and swung his feet out onto the nubs of the hooked rug, ready to tell her he’d skip the eggs, just a bowl of cereal and he’d run… and the words died in his throat.

His feet were filthy with dirt and pine needles.

His heart leaped up in his throat like a crazy jack-in-the-box. Moving fast, eyes bulging, teeth clamped unfeelingly on his tongue, he kicked the covers all the way back. The foot of the bed was littered with needles. The sheets were mucky and dirty.

“Louis?”

He saw a few errant pine needles on his knees, and suddenly he looked at his right arm. There was a scratch there on the bicep, a fresh scratch, exactly where the dead branch had poked him.

in the dream.

I’m going to scream. I can feel it.

And he could too; it was roaring up from inside, nothing but a big cold bullet of fear. Reality shimmered. Reality-the real reality, he thought-was those needles, the filth on the sheets, the bloody scratch on his bare arm.

I’m going to scream and then I’ll go crazy and I won’t have to worry about it anymore-“Louis?” Rachel was coming up the stairs. “Louis, did you go back to sleep?”

He grappled for himself in those two or three seconds; he fought grimly for himself just as he had done in those moments of roaring confusion after Pascow had been brought into the Medical Center, dying in a blanket. He won. The thought which tipped the scales was that she must not see him this way, his feet muddy and coated with needles, the blankets tossed back onto the floor to reveal the muck-splashed ground sheet.

“I’m awake,” he called cheerfully. His tongue was bleeding from the sudden, involuntary bite he had given it. His mind swirled, and somewhere deep inside, away from the action, he wondered if he had always been within touching distance of such mad irrationalities; if everyone was.

“One egg or two?” She had stopped on the second or third riser. Thank God.

“Two,” he said, barely aware of what he was saying. “Scrambled.”

“Good for you,” she said, and went back downstairs again.

He closed his eyes briefly in relief, but in the darkness he saw Pascow’s silver eyes. His eyes flew open again. Louis began to move rapidly, putting off any further thought. He jerked the bedclothes off the bed. The blankets were okay.

He separated out the two sheets, balled them up, took them into the hallway, and dumped them down the laundry chute.

Almost running, he entered the bathroom, jerked the shower handle on, and stepped under water so hot it was nearly scalding, unmindful. He washed the dirt from his feet and legs.

He began to feel better, more in control. Drying off, it struck him that this was how murderers must feel when they believe they have gotten rid of all the evidence. He began to laugh. He went on drying himself, but he also went on laughing. He couldn’t seem to stop.

“Hey, up there!” Rachel called. “What’s so funny?”

“Private joke,” Louis called back, still laughing. He was frightened, but the fright didn’t stop the laughter. The laughter came, rising from a belly that was as hard as stones mortared into a wall. It occurred to him that shoving the sheets down the laundry chute was absolutely the best thing he could have done.

Missy Dandridge came in five days a week to vacuum, clean… and do the laundry. Rachel would never see those sheets at all until she put them back on the bed… clean. He supposed it was possible that Missy would mention it to Rachel, but he didn’t think so. She would probably whisper to her husband that the Creeds were playing some strange sex game that involved mud and pine needles instead of body paints.

This thought made Louis laugh all the harder.

The last of the giggles and chuckles dried up as he was dressing, and he realized that he felt a little better. How that could be he didn’t know, but he did. The room looked normal now except for the stripped bed. He had gotten rid of the poison. Maybe “evidence” was actually the word he was looking for, but in his mind it felt like poison.

Perhaps this is what people do with the inexplicable, he thought. This is what they do with the irrational that refuses to be broken down into the normal causes and effects that run the Western world. Maybe this was how your mind coped with the flying saucer you saw hovering silently over your back field one morning, casting its own tight little pool of shadow; the rain of frogs; the hand from under the bed that stroked your bare foot in the dead of night. There was a giggling fit or a crying fit… and since it was its own inviolable self and would not break down, you simply passed terror intact, like a kidney stone.

Gage was in his chair, eating Cocoa Bears and decorating the table with it. He was decorating the plastic mat under his high chair with Cocoa Bears and apparently shampooing with it.

Rachel came out of the kitchen with his eggs and a cup of coffee. “What was the big joke, Lou? You were laughing like a loon up there. Scared me a little.”

Louis opened his mouth with no idea of what he was going to say, and what came out was a joke he had heard the week before at the corner market down the road-something about a Jewish tailor who bought a parrot whose only line was “Ariel Sharon jerks off.”

By the time he finished, Rachel was laughing too-so was Cage for that matter.

Fine. Our hero has taken care of all the evidence-to wit: the muddy sheets and the loony laughter in the bathroom. Our hero will now read the morning paper-or at least look at it-putting the seal of normality on the morning.

So thinking, Louis opened the paper.

That’s what you do, all right, he thought with immeasurable relief. You pass it like a stone, and that’s the end of it… unless there comes a campfire some night with friends when the wind is high and the talk turns to inexplicable events. Because on campfire nights when the wind is high, talk is cheap.

He ate his eggs. He kissed Rachel and Gage. He glanced at the square, white-painted laundry cabinet at the foot of the chute only as he left.

Everything was okay. It was another knockout of a morning. Late summer showed every sign of just going on forever, and everything was okay. He glanced at the path as he backed the car out of the garage, but that was okay too. Never turned a hair. You passed it like a stone.

Everything was okay until he had gotten ten miles down the road, and then the shakes hit him so hard that he had to pull off Route z and into the morning-deserted parking lot of Sing’s, the Chinese restaurant not far from the Eastern Maine Medical Center… where Pascow’s body would have been taken.

The EMMC, that is, not Sing’s. Vic Pascow was never going to eat another helping of moo goo gai pan, ha-ha.

The shakes twisted his body, ripped at it, had their way with it. Louis felt helpless and terrified-not terrified of anything supernatural, not in this bright sunshine, but simply terrified of the possibility that he might be losing his mind. It felt as if a long, invisible wire was being twirled through his head.

“No more,” he said. “Please, no more.”

He fumbled for the radio and got Joan Baez singing about diamonds and rust. Her sweet, cool voice soothed him, and by the time she had finished, Louis felt that he could drive on.

When he got to the Medical Center, he called hello to Charlton and then ducked into the bathroom, believing that he must look like hell. Not so. He was a little hollow under the eyes, but not even Rachel had noticed that. He slapped some cold water on his face, dried off, combed his hair, and went into his office.

Steve Masterton and the Indian doctor, Surrendra Hardu, were in there, drinking coffee and continuing to go over the front file.

“Morning, Lou,” Steve said.

“Morning.”

“Let’s hope it is not like last morning,” Hardu said.

“That’s right, you missed all the excitement.”

“Surrendra had plenty of excitement himself last night,” Masterton said, grinning. “Tell him, Surrendra.”

Hardu polished his glasses, smiling. “Two boys bring in their Jady friend around one o’clock in the morning,” he said. “She is very happily drunk, celebrating the return to university, you understand. She has cut one thigh quite badly, and I tell her it will be at least four stitches, no scar. Stitch away, she tells me, and so I do, bending over like this-”

Hardu demonstrated, salaaming over an invisible thigh. Louis began to grin, sensing what was coming.

“And as I am suturing, she vomits on my head.”

Masterton broke up. So did Louis. Hardu smiled calmly, as if this had happened to him thousands of times in thousands of lives.

“Surrendra, how long have you been on duty?” Louis asked, when the laughter died.

“Since midnight,” Hardu said. “I am just leaving. But I wanted to stay long enough to say hello again.”

“Well, hello,” Louis said, shaking his small, brown hand. “Now go home and go to sleep.”

“We’re almost through with the front file,” Masterton said. “Say hallelujah, Surrendra.”

“I decline,” Hardu said, smiling. “I am not a Christian.”

“Then sing the chorus of ‘Instant Karma’ or something.”

“May you both shine on,” Hardu said, still smiling, and glided out the door.

Louis and Steve Masterton looked after him for a moment, Silent, and then looked at each other. They broke out laughing. To Louis, no laugh had ever felt so good… so normal.

“Just as well we got the file finished up,” Steve said. “Today’s the day we put the welcome mat out for the dope pushers.”

Louis nodded… The first of the drug salesmen would begin arriving at ten. As Steve liked to crack, Wednesday might be Prince Spaghetti Day, but at UMO every Tuesday was D-day. The D stood for Darvon, the all-time favorite.

“A word of advice, 0 Great Boss,” Steve said. “I don’t know what dese guys were like out in Chicago, but around here they’ll stoop to just about anything, from all-expenses-paid hunting junkets into the Allagash in November to free bowling at Family Fun Lanes in Bangor. I had one guy try to give me one of those inflatable Judy dolls. Me! And I’m only a P. A.! If they can’t sell you drugs, they’ll drive you to them.”

“Should have taken the Judy doll.”

“Nah, she was a redhead. Not my type.”

“Well, I agree with Surrendra,” Louis said. “Just as long as it’s not like yesterday.”

18

When the rep from Upjohn didn’t turn up promptly at ten, Louis gave in and called the registrar’s office. He spoke with a Mrs. Stapleton, who said she would send over a copy of Victor Pascow’s records immediately. When Louis hung up, the Upjohn guy was there. He didn’t try to give Louis anything, only asked him if he had any interest in buying a season ticket to the New England Patriots’ games at a discount.

“Nope,” Louis said.

“I didn’t think you would,” the Upjohn guy said glumly and left.

At noon Louis walked up to the Bear’s Den and got a tuna fish sandwich and a Coke. He brought them back to his office and ate lunch while going over Pascow’s records. He was looking for some connection with himself or with North Ludlow, where the Pet Sematary was… a vague belief, he supposed, that there must be some sort of rational explanation even for such a weird occurrence as this. Maybe the guy had grown up in Ludlow-had, maybe, even buried a dog or a cat up there.

He didn’t find the connection he was looking for. Pascow was from Bergenfield, New Jersey, and had come to UMO to study electrical engineering. In those few typed sheets, Louis could see no possible connection between himself and the young man who had died in the reception room-other than the mortal one, of course.

He sucked the last Coke out of his cup, listening to the straw crackle in the bottom, and then tossed all his trash into the wastebasket. Lunch had been light, but he had eaten it with good appetite. Nothing much wrong with the way he felt, really. Not now. There had been no recurrence of the shakes, and now even that morning’s horror began to seem more like a nasty, pointless surprise, dreamlike itself, of no consequence.

He drummed his fingers on his blotter, shrugged, and picked up the phone again.

He dialed the EMMC and asked for the morgue.

After he was connected with the pathology clerk, he identified himself and said, “You have one of our students there, a Victor Pascow-”

“Not anymore,” the voice at the other end said. “He’s gone.”

Louis’s throat closed. At last he managed, “What?”

“His body was flown back to his parents late last night. Guy from Brookings-Smith Mortuary came and took custody. They put him on Delta, uh”-papers riffling-”Delta Flight 109. Where did you think he went? Out dancing at the Show Ring?”

“No,” Louis said. “No, of course not. It’s just… “ It was just what? What the Christ was he doing pursuing this, anyway? There was no sane way to deal with it. It had to be let go, marked off, forgotten. Anything else was asking for a lot of pointless trouble. “It’s just that it seemed very quick,” he finished lamely.

“Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon”-that faint riffle of papers again-”at around three-twenty by Dr. Rynzwyck. By then his father had made all the arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning.”

“Oh. Well, in that case-”

“Unless one of the carriers screwed up and sent it somewhere else,” the pathology clerk said brightly. “We’ve had that happen, you know, although never with Delta. Delta’s actually pretty good. We had a guy who died on a fishing trip way up in Aroostook County, in one of those little towns that just have a couple of map coordinates for a name. Asshole strangled on a pop-top while he was chugging a can of beer. Took his buddies two days to buck him out of the wilderness, and you know that by then it’s a toss-up whether or not the Forever Goop will take. But they shoved it in and hoped for the best. Sent him home to Grand Falls, Minnesota, in the cargo compartment of some airliner. But there was a screw-up. They shipped him first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo, North Dakota. Finally somebody wised up, but by then another three days had gone by. Nothing took. They might as well have injected him with Kool-Aid instead of Jaundaflo. The guy was totally black and smelled like a spoiled pork roast.

That’s what I heard, anyway. Six baggage handlers got sick.”

The voice on the other end of the line laughed heartily.

Louis closed his eyes and said, “Well, thank you-”

“I can give you Dr. Rynzwyck’s home phone if you want it, Doctor, but he usually plays golf up in Orono in the morning.”

“That’s okay,” Louis said.

He hung up the telephone. Let that put paid to it, he thought. When you were having that crazy dream, or whatever it was, Pascow’s body was almost certainly in a Bergenfield funeral home. That closes it off; let that be the end of it.

Driving home that afternoon, a simple explanation of the filth at the foot of the bed finally occurred to him, flooding him with relief.

He had experienced an isolated incident of sleepwalking, brought on by the unexpected and extremely upsetting happenstance of having a student mortally injured and then dying in his infirmary during his first real day on the job.

It explained everything. The dream had seemed extremely real because large parts of it were real-the feel of the carpet, the cold dew, and, of course, the dead branch that had scratched his arm. It explained why Pascow had been able to walk through the door and he had not.

A picture rose in his mind, a picture of Rachel coming downstairs last night and catching him bumping against the back door, trying in his sleep to walk through it. The thought made him grin. It would have given her a hell of a turn, all right.

With the sleepwalking hypothesis in mind, he was able to analyze the causes of the dream-and he did so with a certain eagerness. He had walked to the Pet Sematary because it had become associated with another moment of recent stress.

It had in fact been the cause of a serious argument between him and his wife…

. and also, he thought with growing excitement, it was associated in his mind with his daughter’s first encounter with the idea of death-something his own subconscious must have been grappling with last night when he went to bed.

Damn lucky I got back to the house okay-I don’t even remember that part. Must have come back on autopilot.

It was a good thing he had. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have awakened this morning by the grave of Smucky the Cat, disoriented, covered with dew, and probably scared shitless-as Rachel also would have been, undoubtedly.

But it was over now.

Put paid to it, Louis thought with immeasurable relief. Yes, but what about the things he said when he was dying?, his mind tried to ask, and Louis shut it up fast.

That evening, with Rachel ironing and Ellie and Gage sitting in the same chair, both of them engrossed with “The Muppet Show,” Louis told Rachel casually that he believed he might go for a short walk-to get a little air.

“Will you be back in time to help me put Gage to bed?” she asked without looking up from her ironing. “You know he goes better when you’re there.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Where you going, Daddy?” Ellie asked, not looking away from the TV. Kermit was about to be punched in the eye by Miss Piggy.

“Just out back, hon.”

Louis went out.

Fifteen minutes later he was in the Pet Sematary, looking around curiously and coping with a strong feeling of dйjа vu. That he had been here was beyond doubt: the little grave marker put up to honor the memory of Smucky the Cat was knocked over. He had done that when the vision of Pascow approached, near the end of what he could remember of the dream. Louis righted it absently and walked over to the deadfall.

He didn’t like it. The memory of all these weather-whitened branches and dead trees turning into a pile of bones still had the power to chill. He forced himself to reach out and touch one. Balanced precariously on the jackstraw pile, it rolled and fell, bouncing down the side of the heap. Louis jumped back a step before it could touch his shoe.

He walked along the deadfall, first to the left, then to the right. On both sides the underbrush closed in so thickly as to be impenetrable. Nor was it the kind of brush you’d try to push your way through-not if you were smart, Louis thought. There were lush masses of poison ivy growing close to the ground (all his life Louis had heard people boast that they were immune to the stuff, but he knew that almost no one really was), and farther in were some of the biggest, most wicked-looking thorns he had ever seen.

Louis strolled back to the rough center of the deadfall. He looked at it, hands stuck in the back pockets of his jeans.

You’re not going to try to climb that, are you?

Not me, boss. Why would I want to do a stupid thing like that?

Great. Had me worried for just a minute there, Lou. Looks like a good way to land in your own infirmary with a broken ankle, doesn’t it?

Sure does! Also, it’s getting dark.

Sure that he was all together and in total agreement with himself, Louis began to climb the deadfall.

He was halfway up when he felt it shift under his feet with a peculiar creaking sound.

Roll dem bones, Doc.

When the pile shifted again, Louis began to clamber back down. The tail of his shirt had pulled out of his pants.

He reached solid ground without incident and dusted crumbled bits of bark off his hands. He walked back to the head of the path which would return him to his house-to his children who would want a story before bed, to Church, who was enjoying his last day as a card-carrying tomcat and lady-killer, to tea in the kitchen with his wife after the kids were down.

He surveyed the clearing again before leaving, struck by its green silence.

Tendrils of ground fog had appeared from nowhere and were beginning, to wind around the markers. Those concentric circles… as if, all unknowing, the childish hands of North Ludlow’s generations had built a kind of scale-model Stonehenge.

But, Louis, is this all?

Although he had gotten only the barest glimpse over the top of the deadfall before the shifting sensation had made him nervous, he could have sworn there was a path beyond, leading deeper into the woods.

No business of yours, Louis. You’ve got to let this go.

Okay, boss.

Louis turned and headed home.

He stayed up that night an hour after Rachel went to bed, reading a stack of medical journals he had already been through, refusing to admit that the thought of going to bed-going to sleep-made him nervous. He had never had an episode of somnambulism before, and there was no way to be sure it was an isolated incident… until it did or didn’t happen again.

He heard Rachel get out of bed, and then she called down softly, “Lou? Hon? You coming up?”

“Just was,” he said, turning out the lamp over his study desk and getting up.

It took a good deal longer than seven minutes to shut the machine down that night. Listening to Rachel draw the long, calm breaths of deep sleep beside him, the apparition of Victor Pascow seemed less dreamlike. He would close his eyes and see the door crashing open and there he was, Our Special Guest Star, Victor Pascow, standing there in his jogging shorts, pallid under his summer tan, his collarbone poking up.

He would slide down toward sleep, think about how it would be to come fully, coldly awake in the Pet Sematary, to see those roughly concentric circles litten by moonlight, to have to walk back, awake, along the path through the woods. He would think these things and then snap fully awake again.

It was sometime after midnight when sleep finally crept up on his blind side and bagged him. There were no dreams. He woke up promptly at seven-thirty, to the sound of cold autumn rain beating against the window. He threw the sheets back with some apprehension. The ground sheet on his bed was flawless. No purist would describe his feet, with their rings of heel calluses, that way, but they were at least clean.

Louis caught himself whistling in the shower.

19

Missy Dandridge kept Gage while Rachel ran Winston Churchill to the vet’s office. That night Ellie stayed awake until after eleven, complaining querulously that she couldn’t sleep without Church and calling for glass after glass of water. Finally Louis refused to let her have any more on the grounds that she would wet the bed. This caused a crying tantrum of such ferocity that Rachel and Louis stared at each other blankly, eyebrows raised.

“She’s scared for Church,” Rachel said. “Let her work it out, Lou.”

“She can’t keep it up at that pitch for long,” Louis said. “I hope.”

He was right. Ellie’s hoarse, angry cries became hitches and hiccups and moans.

Finally there was silence. When Louis went up to check on her, he found she was sleeping on the floor with her arms wrapped tightly around the cat bed that Church hardly even deigned to sleep in.

He removed it from her arms, put her back in bed, brushed her hair back from her sweaty brow gently, and kissed her, On impulse he went into the small room that served as Rachel’s office, wrote a quick note in large block letters on a sheet of paper-I WILL BE BACK TOMORROW, LOVE, CHURCH-and pinned it to the cushion on the bottom of the cat bed. Then he went into his bedroom, looking for Rachel.

Rachel was there. They made love and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Church returned home on the Friday of Louis’s first full week of work; Ellie made much of him, used part of her allowance to buy him a box of cat treats, and nearly slapped Gage once for trying to touch him. This made Cage cry in a way mere parental discipline could never have done. Receiving a rebuke from Ellie was like receiving a rebuke from Cod.

Looking at Church made Louis feel sad. It was ridiculous, but that didn’t change the emotion. There was no sign of Church’s former feistiness. No more did he walk like a gunslinger; now his walk was the slow, careful walk of the convalescent. He allowed Ellie to hand-feed him. He showed no sign of wanting to go outside, not even to the garage. He had changed. Perhaps it was ultimately for the better that he had changed.

Neither Rachel nor Ellie seemed to notice.

20

Indian summer came and went. Brazen color came into the trees, rioted briefly, and then faded. After one cold, driving rain in mid-October, the leaves started to fall. Ellie began to arrive home laden with Halloween decorations she had made at school and entertained Gage with the story of the Headless Horseman.

Gage spent that evening babbling happily about somebody named Itchybod Brain.

Rachel got giggling and couldn’t stop. It was a good time for them, that early autumn.

Louis’s work at the university had settled into a demanding but pleasant routine. He saw patients, he attended meetings of the Council of Colleges, he wrote the obligatory letters to the student newspaper, advising the university’s co-ed population of the confidentiality of the infirmary’s treatment for VD and exhorting the student population to get flu boosters, as the A-type was apt to be prevalent again that winter. He sat on panels. He chaired panels. During the second week in October, he went to the New England Conference on College and University Medicine in Providence and presented a paper on the legal ramifications of student treatment. Victor Pascow was mentioned in his paper under the fictitious name of “Henry Montez.” The paper was well received. He began working up the infirmary budget for the next academic year.

His evenings fell into a routine: kids after supper, a beer or two with Jud Crandall later. Sometimes Rachel came over with him if Missy was available to sit for an hour, and sometimes Norma joined them, but mostly it was just Louis and Jud. Louis found the old man as comfortable as an old slipper, and he would talk about Ludlow history going back three hundred years almost as though he had lived all of it. He talked but never rambled. He never bored Louis, although he had seen Rachel yawning under her hand on more than one occasion.

He would cross the road to his house again before ten on most evenings, and, like as not, he and Rachel would make love. Never since the first year of their marriage had they made love so often, and never so successfully and pleasurably.

Rachel said she believed it was something in the artesian well water; Louis opted for the Maine air.

The nasty death of Victor Pascow on the first day of the fall semester began to fade in the memory of the student body and in Louis’s own; Pascow’s family no doubt still grieved. Louis had spoken to the tearful, mercifully faceless voice of Pascow’s father on the telephone; the father had only wanted assurance that Louis had done everything he could, and Louis had assured him that everyone involved had. He did not tell him of the confusion, the spreading stain on the carpet, and how his son had been dead almost from the instant he was brought in, although these were things that Louis thought he himself would never forget. But for those to whom Pascow was only a casualty, he had already dimmed.

Louis still remembered the dream and the sleepwalking incident that had accompanied it, but it now seemed almost as if it had happened to someone else, or on a television show he had once watched. His one visit to a whore in Chicago six years ago seemed like that flow; they were equally unimportant, side trips which held a false resonance, like sounds produced in an echo chamber.

He did not think at all about what the dying Pascow had or had not said.

There was a hard frost on Halloween night. Louis and Ellie began at the Crandalls’. Ellie cackled satisfyingly, pretended to ride her broom around Norma’s kitchen, and was duly pronounced “Just the cutest thing I ever saw…

isn’t she, Jud?”

Jud agreed that she was and lit a cigarette. “Where’s Gage, Louis? Thought you’d have him dressed up too.”

They had indeed planned on taking Gage around-Rachel in particular had been looking forward to it because she and Missy Dandridge had whomped together a sort of bug costume with twisted coat hangers wrapped in crepe paper for feelers-but Gage had come down with a troublesome, bronchial cold, and after listening to his lungs, which sounded a bit ratfly, and consulting the thermometer outside the window, which read only forty degrees at six o’clock, Louis had nixed it. Rachel, although disappointed, had agreed.

Ellie had promised to give Gage some of her candy, but the exaggerated quality of her sorrow made Louis wonder if she wasn’t just a bit glad that Gage wouldn’t be along to slow her down.

or steal part of the limelight.

“Poor Gage,” she had said in tones usually reserved for those suffering terminal illness. Gage, unaware of what he was missing, sat on the sofa watching “Zoom”

with Church snoozing beside him.

“Ellie-witch,” Gage had replied without a great deal of interest and went back to the TV.

“Poor Gage,” Ellie had said again, fetching another sigh. Louis thought of crocodile tears and grinned. Ellie grabbed his hand and started pulling him.

“Let’s go, Daddy. Let’s go-let’s go-let’s go.

“Gage has got a touch of the croup,” Louis said to Jud now.

“Well, that’s a real shame,” Norma said, “but it will mean more to him next year. Hold out your bag, Ellie… whoops!”

She had taken an apple and a bite-sized Snickers bar out of the treat bowl on the table, but both of them had fallen out of her hand. Louis was a little shocked at how clawlike that hand looked. He bent over and picked up the apple as it rolled across the floor. Jud got the Snickers and dropped it into Ellie’s bag.

“Oh, let me get you another apple, honey,” Norma said. “That one will bruise.”

“It’s fine,” Louis said, trying to drop it into Ellie’s bag, but Ellie stepped away, holding her bag protectively shut.

“I don’t want a bruised apple, Daddy,” she said, looking at her father as if he might have gone mad. “Brown spots… yuck!”

“Ellie, that’s damned impolite!”

“Don’t scold her for telling the truth, Louis,” Norma said.

“Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children.

The brown spots are yucky.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Crandall,” Ellie said, casting a vindicated eye on her father.

“You’re very welcome, honey,” Norma said.

Jud escorted them out to the porch. Two little ghosts were coming up the walk, and Ellie recognized them both as friends from school. She took them back to the kitchen, and for a moment Jud and Louis were alone on the porch.

“Her arthritis has gotten worse,” Louis said.

Jud nodded and pinched out his cigarette over an ashtray. “Yeah. It’s come down harder on her every fall and winter, but this is the worst it’s ever been.”

“What does her doctor say?”

“Nothing. He can’t say nothing because Norma hasn’t been back to see him.”

“What? Why not?”

Jud looked at Louis, and in the light cast by the headlamps of the station wagon waiting for the ghosts, he looked oddly defenseless. “I’d meant to ask you this at a better time, Louis, but I guess there isn’t no good time to impose on a friendship. Would you examine her?”

From the kitchen, Louis could hear the two ghosts booo-ing and Ellie going into her cackles-which she had been practicing all week-again. It all sounded very fine and Halloweenish.

“What else is wrong with Norma?” he asked. “Is she afraid of something else, Jud?”

“She’s been having pains in her chest,” Jud said in a low voice. “She won’t go see Dr. Weybridge anymore. I’m a little worried.”

“Is Norma worried?”

Jud hesitated and then said, “I think she’s scared. I think that’s why she doesn’t want to go to the doctor. One of her oldest friends, Betty Coslaw, died in the EMMC just last month. Cancer. She and Norma were of an age. She’s scared.”

“I’d be happy to examine her,” Louis said. “No problem at all.”

“Thanks, Louis,” Jud said gratefully. “If we catch her one night, gang up on her, I think-”

Jud broke off, head cocking quizzically to one side. His eyes met Louis’s.

Louis couldn’t remember later exactly how one emotion slipped into the next. Trying to analyze it only made him feel dizzy. All he could remember for sure was that curiosity changed swiftly into a feeling that somewhere something had gone badly wrong. His eyes met Jud’s, both unguarded. It was a moment before he could find a way to act.

“Hoooo-hoooo,” the Halloween ghosts in the kitchen chanted. “Hooo-hooo.” And then suddenly the h-sound was gone arid the cry rose louder, genuinely frightening: “oooo-000000-”

And then one of the ghosts began to scream.

“Daddy!” Ellie’s voice was wild and tight with alarm. “Daddy! Missus Crandall fell down!”

“Ah, Jesus,” Jud almost moaned.

Ellie came running out onto the porch, her black dress flapping. She clutched her broom in one hand. Her green face, now pulled long in dismay, looked like the face of a pygmy wino in the last stages of alcohol poisoning. The two little ghosts followed her, crying.

Jud lunged through the door, amazingly spry for a man of over eighty. No, more than spry. Again, almost lithe. He was calling his wife’s name.

Louis bent and put his hands on Ellie’s shoulders. “Stay right here on the porch, Ellie. Understand?”

“Daddy, I’m scared,” she whispered.

The two ghosts barrelled past them and ran down the walk, candy bags rattling, screaming their mother’s name.

Louis ran down the front hall and into the kitchen, ignoring Ellie, who was calling for him to come back.

Norma lay on the hilly linoleum by the table in a litter of apples and small Snickers bars. Apparently she had caught the bowl with her hand going down and had overturned it. It lay nearby like a small Pyrex flying saucer. Jud was chafing one of her wrists, and he looked up at Louis with a strained face.

“Help me, Louis,” he said. “Help Norma. She’s dying, I think.”

“Move to one side,” Louis said. He kneeled and came down on a Spy, crushing it.

He felt juice bleed through the knee of his old cords, and the cidery smell of apple suddenly filled the kitchen.

Here it is, Pascow all over again, Louis thought and then shoved the thought out of his mind so fast that it might have been on wheels.

He felt for her pulse and got something that was weak, thready, and rapid-not really a beat but only simple spasms. Extreme arrhythmia, well on the way to full cardiac arrest. You and Elvis Presley, Norma, he thought.

He opened her dress, exposing a creamy yellow silk slip. Moving with his own rhythm now, he turned her head to one side and began administering CPR.

“Jud, listen to me,” he said. Heel of the left hand one third of the way up the breastbone-four centimeters above the xyphoid process. Right hand gripping the left wrist, bracing, lending pressure. Keep it firm, but let’s take it easy on the old ribs-no need to panic yet. And for Christ’s sake, don’t collapse the old lungs.

“I’m here,” Jud said.

“Take Ellie,” he said. “Go across the street. Carefully-don’t get hit by a car.

Tell Rachel what’s happened. Tell her I want my bag. Not the one in the study, but the one on the high shelf in the upstairs bathroom. She’ll know the one.

Tell her to call Bangor MedCu and to send an ambulance.”

“Bucksport’s closer,” Jud said.

“Bangor’s faster. Go. Don’t you call; let Rachel do that. I need that bag.” And once she knows the situation here, Louis thought, I don’t think she’ll bring it over.

Jud went. Louis heard the screen door bang. He was alone with Norma Crandall and the smell of apples. From the living room came the steady tick of the seven-day clock.

Norma suddenly uttered a long, snoring breath. Her eyelids fluttered. And Louis was suddenly doused with a cold, horrid certainty.

She’s going to open her eyes… oh Christ she’s going to open her eyes and start talking about the Pet Sematary.

But she only looked at Louis with a muddled sort of recognition, and then her eyes closed again. Louis was ashamed of himself and this stupid fear that was so unlike him. At the same time he felt hope and relief. There had been some pain in her eyes but not agony. His first guess was that this had not been a grave seizure.

Louis was breathing hard now and sweating. No one but TV paramedics could make CPR look easy. A good steady closedchest massage popped a lot of calories, and the webbing between his arms and shoulders would ache tomorrow.

“Can I do anything?”

He looked around. A woman dressed in slacks and a brown sweater stood hesitantly in the doorway, one hand clutched into a fist between her breasts. The mother of the ghosts, Louis thought.

“No,” he said, and then: “Yes. Wet a cloth, please. Wring it out. Put it on her forehead.”

She moved to do it. Louis looked down, Norma’s eyes were open again.

“Louis, I fell down,” she whispered. “Think I fainted.”

“You’ve had some sort of coronary event,” Louis said. “Doesn’t look too serious.

Now relax and don’t talk, Norma.”

He rested for a moment and then took her pulse again. The beat was too fast. She was Morse-coding: her heart would beat regularly, then run briefly in a series of beats that was almost but not quite fibrillation, and then begin to beat regularly again. Beat-beat-beat, WHACK-WHACK-WHACK, beat-beat-beat-beat-beat. It was not good, but it was marginally better than cardiac arrhythmia.

The woman came over with the cloth and put it on Norma’s forehead. She stepped away uncertainly. Jud came back in with Louis’s bag.

“Louis?”

“She’s going to be fine,” Louis said, looking at Jud but actually speaking to Norma. “MedCu coming?”

“Your wife is calling them,” Jud said. “I didn’t stay around.”

“No… hospital,” Norma whispered.

“Yes, hospital,” Louis said. “Five days’ observation, medication, then home with your feet up, Norma my girl. And if you say anything else, I’ll make you eat all these apples. Cores and all.”

She smiled wanly, then closed her eyes again.

Louis opened his bag, rummaged, found the Isodil, and shook one of the pills, so tiny it easily would have fit on the moon of one fingernail, into the palm of his hand. He recapped the bottle and pinched the pill between his fingers.

“Norma, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Want you to open your mouth. You did your trick, now you get your treat. I’m going to put a pill under your tongue. Just a small one. I want you to hold it there until it dissolves. It’s going to taste a little bitter but never mind that. All right?”

She opened her mouth. Stale denture breath wafted out, and Louis felt a moment of aching sorrow for her, lying here on her kitchen floor in a litter of apples and Halloween candy. It occurred to him that once she had been seventeen, her breasts eyed with great interest by the young men of the neighborhood, all her teeth her own, and the heart under her shirtwaist a tough little pony-engine.

She settled her tongue over the pill and grimaced a little. The pill tasted a little bitter, all right. It always did. But she was no Victor Pascow, beyond help and beyond reach. He thought Norma was going to live to fight another day.

Her hand groped in the air, and Jud took it gently.

Louis got up then, found the overturned bowl, and began to pick up the treats.

The woman, who introduced herself as Mrs. Buddinger from down the road, helped him and then said she thought she had better go back to the car. Her two boys were frightened.

“Thank you for your help, Mrs. Buddinger,” Louis said.

“I didn’t do anything,” she said flatly. “But I’ll go down on my knees tonight and thank God you were here, Dr. Creed.”

Louis waved a hand, embarrassed.

“That goes for me, too,” Jud said. His eyes found Louis’s and held them. They were steady. He was in control again. His brief moment of confusion and fear had passed. “I owe you one, Louis.”

“Get off it,” Louis said and tipped a finger toward Mrs. Buddinger as she left.

She smiled and waved back. Louis found an apple and began to eat it. The Spy was so sweet that Louis’s taste buds cramped momentarily… but that was not a totally unpleasurable sensation. Won one tonight, Lou, he thought and worked on the apple with relish. He was ravenous.

“I do though,” Jud said. “When you need a favor, Louis, you see me first.”

“All right,” Louis said, “I’ll do that.”

The ambulance from Bangor MedCu arrived twenty minutes later. As Louis stood outside watching the orderlies load Norma into the back, he saw Rachel looking out the living room window. He waved to her. She lifted a hand in return.

He and Jud stood together and watched the ambulance pull away, lights flashing, siren silent.

“Guess I’ll go on up to the hospital now,” Jud said.

“They won’t let you see her tonight, Jud. They’ll want to run an EKG on her and then put her in intensive care. No visitors for the first twelve hours.”

“Is she going to be okay, Louis? Really okay?”

Louis shrugged. “No one can guarantee that. It was a heart attack. For whatever it’s worth, I think she’s going to be fine. Maybe better than ever, once she gets on some medication.”

“Ayuh,” Jud said, lighting a Chesterfield.

Louis smiled and glanced at his watch. He was amazed to see it was only ten minutes to eight. It seemed that a great deal more time had gone by.

“Jud, I want to go get Ellie so she can finish her trick-or-treating.”

“Yeah, course you do.” This came out as Cossy’do. “Tell her to get all the treats she can, Louis.”

“I will,” Louis promised.

Ellie was still in her witch costume when Louis got home. Rachel had tried to persuade her into her nightie, but Ellie had resisted, holding out for the possibility that the game, suspended because of heart attack, might yet be played out. When Louis told her to put her coat back on, Ellie whooped and clapped.

“It’s going to be awfully late for her, Louis.”

“We’ll take the car,” he said. “Come on, Rachel. She’s been looking forward to this for a month.”

“Well… “ She smiled. Ellie saw it and shouted again. She ran for the coat closet. “Is Norma all right?”

“I think so.” He felt good. Tired but good. “It was a small one. She’s going to have to be careful, but when you’re seventy-five you have to recognize that your pole-vaulting days are done anyway.”

“It’s lucky you were there. Almost God’s providence.”

“I’ll settle for luck.” He grinned as Ellie came back. “You ready, Witch Hazel?”

“I’m ready,” she said. “Come on-come on-come on!”

On the way home with half a bag of candy an hour later (Ellie protested when Louis finally called a halt, but not too much; she was tired), his daughter startled him by saying: “Did I make Missus Crandall have the heart attack, Daddy? When I wouldn’t take the apple with the bruise on it?”

Louis looked at her, startled, wondering where children got such funny, half-superstitious ideas. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Loves me, loves me not. Daddy’s stomach, Daddy’s head, smile at midnight, Daddy’s dead.

That made him think of the Pet Sematary again and those crude circles. He wanted to smile at himself and was not quite able.

“No, honey,” he said. “When you were in with those two ghosts-”

“Those weren’t ghosts, just the Buddinger twins.”

“Well, when you were in with them, Mr. Crandall was telling me that his wife had been having little chest pains. In fact, you might have been responsible for saving her life or at least for keeping it from being much worse.”

Now it was Ellie’s turn to look startled.

Louis nodded. “She needed a doctor, honey. I’m a doctor. But I was only there because it was your night to go trick-or-treating.”

Ellie considered this for a long time and then nodded. “But she’ll probably die anyway,” she said matter-of-factly. “People who have heart attacks usually die.

Even if they live, pretty soon they have another one and another one and another one until…boom!”

“And where did you learn these words of wisdom, may I ask?” Ellie only shrugged-a very Louislike shrug, he was amused to see.

She allowed him to carry in her bag of candy-an almost ultimate sign of trust-and Louis pondered her attitude. The thought of Church’s death had brought on near-hysteria. But the thought of grandmotherly Norma Crandall dying…

that Ellie seemed to take calmly, a matter of course, a given. What had she said? Another one and another one, until… boom!

The kitchen was empty, but Louis could hear Rachel moving around upstairs. He set Ellie’s candy down on the counter and said, “It doesn’t necessarily work that way, Ellie. Norma’s heart attack was a very small one, and I was able to administer the treatment right away. I doubt if her heart was damaged much at all. She-”

“Oh, I know,” Ellie agreed, almost cheerfully. “But she’s old, and she’ll die pretty soon anyway. Mr. Crandall too. Can I have an apple before I go to bed, Daddy?”

“No,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. “Go up and brush your teeth, babe.”

Does anyone really think they understand kids? he wondered.

When the house was settled and they were in their side-by-side twin beds, Rachel asked softly, “Was it very bad for Ellie, Lou? Was she upset?”

No, he thought. She knows old people croak at regular intervals, just like she knows to let the grasshopper go when it spits like she knows that if you stumble on the number thirteen when you’re skipping rope, your best friend will die…

. like she knows that you put the graves in diminishing circles up in the Pet Sematary.

“Nope,” he said. “She handled herself very well. Let’s go to sleep, Rachel, okay?”

That night, as they slept in their house and as Jud lay wakeful in his, there was another hard frost. The wind rose in the early morning, ripping most of the remaining leaves, which were now an uninteresting brown, from the trees.

The wind awoke Louis, and he started up on his elbows, mostly asleep and confused. There were steps on the stairs.

slow, dragging steps. Pascow had come back. Only now, he thought, two months had passed. When the door opened he would see a rotting horror, the jogging shorts caked with mould, the flesh fallen away in great holes, the brain decayed to paste. Only the eyes would be alive… hellishly bright and alive. Pascow would not speak this time; his vocal cords would be too decayed to produce sounds. But his eyes… they would beckon him to come.

“No,” he breathed, and the steps died out.

He got up, went to the door, and pulled it open, his lips drawn back in a grimace of fear and resolution, his flesh cringing. Pascow would be there, and with his raised arms he would look like a long-dead conductor about to call for the first thundering phrase of Walpurgisnacht.

No such thing, as Jud might have said. The landing was empty silent. There was no sound but the wind. Louis went back to bed and slept.

21

The next day Louis called the intensive care unit at the EMMC. Norma’s condition was still listed as critical; that was standard operating procedure for the first twenty-four hours following a heart attack. Louis got a cheerier assessment from Weybridge, her doctor, however. “I wouldn’t even call it a minor myocardial infarction,” he said. “No scarring. She owes you a hell of a lot, Dr.

Creed.”

On impulse, Louis stopped by the hospital later that week with a bouquet of flowers, and found that Norma had been moved to a semiprivate room downstairs-a very good sign. Jud was with her.

Norma exclaimed over the flowers and buzzed a nurse for a vase. Then she directed Jud until they were in water, arranged to her specifications, and placed on the dresser in the corner.

Mother s feeling ever s much better, Jud said dryly after he had fiddled with the flowers for the third time.

“Don’t be smart, Judson,” Norma said.

“No, ma’am.”

At last Norma looked at Louis. “I want to thank you for what you did,” she said with a shyness that was utterly unaffected and thus doubly touching. “Jud says I owe you my life.”

Embarrassed, Louis said, “Jud exaggerates.”

“Not very damn much, he don’t,” Jud said. He squinted at Louis, almost smiling but not quite. “Didn’t your mother tell you never to slip a thank-you, Louis?”

She hadn’t said anything about that, at least not that Louis could remember, but he believed she had said something once about false modesty being half the sin of pride.

“Norma,” he said, “anything I could do, I was pleased to do.”

“You’re a dear man,” Norma said. “You take this man of mine out somewhere and let him buy you a glass of beer. I’m feeling sleepy again, and I can’t seem to get rid of him.”

Jud stood up with alacrity. “Hot damn! I’ll go for that, Louis. Quick, before she changes her mind.”

The first snow came a week before Thanksgiving. They got another four inches on the twenty-second of November, but the day before the holiday itself was clear and blue and cold. Louis took his family to Bangor International Airport and saw them off on the first leg of their trip back to Chicago for a visit with Rachel’s parents.

“It’s not right,” Rachel said for perhaps the twentieth time since discussions on this matter had commenced in earnest a month ago. “I don’t like thinking of you rattling around the house alone on Thanksgiving Day. That’s supposed to be a family holiday, Louis.”

Louis shifted Gage, who looked gigantic and wide-eyed in his first big-boy parka, to his other arm. Ellie was at one of the big windows, watching an Air Force helicopter take off.

“I’m not exactly going to be crying in my beer,” Louis said. “Jud and Norma are going to have me over for turkey and all the trimmings. Hell, I’m the one who feels guilty. I’ve never liked these big holiday group gropes anyway. I start drinking in front of some football game at three in the afternoon and fall asleep at seven, and the next day it feels like the Dallas Cowgirls are dancing around and yelling boola-boola inside my head. I just don’t like sending you off with the two kids.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Flying first class, I feel like a princess. And Gage will sleep on the flight from Logan to O’Hare.”

“You hope,” he said, and they both laughed.

The flight was called, and Ellie scampered over. “That’s us, Mommy. Come on-come on-come on. They’ll leave without us.”

“No they won’t,” Rachel said. She was clutching her three pink boarding cards in one hand. She was wearing her fur coat, some fake stuff that was a luxuriant brown… probably it was supposed to look like muskrat, Louis thought.

Whatever it was supposed to look like, it made her look absolutely lovely.

Perhaps something of what he felt showed in his eyes because she hugged him impulsively, semicrushing Gage between them. Gage looked surprised but not terribly upset.

“Louis Creed, I love you,” she said.

“Mom-eee,” Ellie said, now in a fever of impatience. “some on-come on-c-“Oh, all right,” she said. “Be good, LOUIS.”

“Tell you what,” he said, grinning, “I’ll be careful. Say hello to your folks, Rachel.”

“Oh, you,” she said and wrinkled her nose at him. Rachel was not fooled; she knew perfectly well why Louis was skipping this trip. “Fun-nee.”

He watched them enter the boarding ramp… and disappear from sight for the next week. He already felt homesick and lonely for them. He moved over to the window where Ellie had been, hands stuffed in his coat pockets, watching the baggage handlers loading the hold.

The truth was simple. Not only Mr. but also Mrs. Irwin Goldman of Lake Forest had disliked Louis from the beginning. He came from the wrong side of the tracks, but that was just for starters. Worse, he fully expected their daughter to support him while he went to medical school, where he would almost surely flunk out.

Louis could have handled all this, in fact had been doing so. Then something had happened which Rachel did not know about and never would… not from Louis, anyway. Irwin Goldman had offered to pay Louis’s entire tuition through med school. The price of this “scholarship” (Goldman’s word) was that Louis should break off his engagement with Rachel at once.

Louis Creed had not been at the optimum time of life to deal with such an outrage, but such melodramatic proposals (or bribes, to call a spade a spade) are rarely made to those who are at an optimum time-which might be around the age of eighty-five. He was tired, for one thing. He was spending eighteen hours a week in classes, another twenty hitting the books, another fifteen waiting tables in a deep-dish pizza joint down the block from the Whitehall Hotel. He was also nervous. Mr. Goldman’s oddly jovial manner that evening had contrasted completely with his previous cold behavior, and Louis thought that when Goldman invited him into the study for a cigar, a look had passed from him to his wife.

Later-much later, when time had lent a little perspective-Louis would reflect that horses must feel much the same free-floating anxiety when they smell the first smoke of a prairie fire. He began expecting Goldman to reveal at any moment that he knew Louis had been sleeping with his daughter.

When Goldman instead made his incredible offer-even going so far as to take his checkbook from the pocket of his smoking jacket like a rake in a Noel Coward farce-Louis had blown up. He accused Goldman of trying to keep his daughter like an exhibit in a museum, of having no regard for anyone but himself, and of being an overbearing, thoughtless bastard. It would be a long time before he would admit to himself that part of his rage had been relief.

All of these little insights into Irwin Goldman’s character, though perhaps true, had no redeeming touch of diplomacy in them. Any semblance of Noel Coward departed; if there was humor in the rest of the conversation, it was of a much more vulgar sort. Goldman told him to get out and that if he ever saw Louis on his doorstep again, he would shoot him like a yellow dog. Louis told Goldman to take his checkbook and plug up his ass with it. Goldman said he had seen bums in the gutter who had more potential than Louis Creed. Louis told Goldman he could also shove his goddam BankAmericard and his American Express Gold Card right up there beside his checkbook.

None of this had been a promising first step toward good relations with the future in-laws.

In the end Rachel had brought them around (after each man had had a chance to repent of the things he had said, although neither of them had ever changed his mind in the slightest about the other). There was no more melodrama, certainly no dismally theatrical from-this-day-forward-I-have-no-daughter scene. Goldman would have probably suffered through Rachel’s marriage to the Creature from the Black Lagoon before denying her. Nevertheless the face rising above the collar of Irwin Goldman’s morning coat on the day Louis married Rachel had greatly resembled the faces sometimes seen carved on Egyptian sarcophagi. Their wedding present had been a six-place setting of Spode china and a microwave oven. No money. For most of Louis’s harum-scarum med school days, Rachel had worked as a clerk in a women’s apparel store. And from that day to this day, Rachel only knew that things had been and continued to be “tense” between her husband and her parents… particularly between Louis and her father.

Louis could have gone to Chicago with his family, although the university schedule would have meant flying back three days earlier than Rachel and the kids. That was no great hardship. On the other hand, four days with Im-Ho-Tep and his wife the Sphinx would have been.

The children had melted his in-laws a good deal, as children often do. Louis suspected that he himself could have completed the rapprochement simply by pretending he had forgotten that evening in Goldman’s study. It wouldn’t even matter that Goldman knew he was pretending. But the fact was (and he at least had the guts to be up front about it with himself) that he did not quite want to make the rapprochement. Ten years was a long time, but it was not quite long enough to take away the slimy taste that had come into his mouth when, in Goldman’s study over glasses of brandy, the old man had opened one side of that idiotic smoking jacket and removed the checkbook residing within. Yes, he had felt relief that the nights-five of them in all-that he and Rachel had spent in his narrow, sagging apartment bed had not been discovered, but that surprised disgust had been quite its own thing, and the years between then and now had not changed it.

He could have come, but he preferred to send his father-in-law his grandchildren, his daughter, and a message.

The Delta 727 pulled away from the rampway, turned… and he saw Ellie at one of the front windows, waving frantically. Louis waved back, smiling, and then someone-Ellie or Rachel-hiked Gage into the window. Louis waved, and Gage waved back-perhaps seeing him, perhaps only imitating Ellie.

“Fly my people safe,” he muttered, then zipped his coat and went out to the parking lot. Here the wind whined and zoomed with force enough to almost tear his hunter’s cap off his head, and he clapped a hand to it. He fumbled with his keys to unlock the driver’s side door of his car and then turned as the jet rose beyond the terminal building, its nose tilted upward into the hard blue, its turbos thundering.

Feeling very lonely indeed now-ridiculously close to tears-Louis waved again.

He was still feeling blue that evening when he recrossed Route 15 after a couple of beers with Jud and Norma-Norma had drunk a glass of wine, something she was allowed, even encouraged to have, by Dr. Weybridge. They had moved into the kitchen tonight in deference to the season.

Jud had stoked up the small Marek stove, and they had sat around it, the beer cold, the heat good, and Jud had talked about how the Micmac Indians had staved off a British landing at Machiss two hundred years ago. In those days the Micmacs had been pretty fearsome, he said, and then added that he guessed there were a few state and federal land lawyers who thought they still were.

It should have been a fine evening, but Louis was aware of the empty house waiting for him. Crossing the lawn and feeling the frost crunching under his shoes, he heard the telephone begin to ring in the house. He broke into a run, got through the front door, sprinted through the living room (knocking over a magazine stand), and then slid most of the way across the kitchen, his frosty shoes skidding over the linoleum. He snared the phone.

“Hello?”

“Louis?” Rachel’s voice, a little distant but absolutely fine. “We’re here. We made it. No problems.”

“Great!” he said and sat down to talk to her, thinking: I wish to God you were here.

The Thanksgiving dinner Jud and Norma put on was a fine one. When it was over, Louis went home feeling full and sleepy. He went upstairs to the bedroom, relishing the quiet a little, flipped off his loafers, and lay down. It was just after three o’clock; the day outside was lit with thin, wintry sunshine.

I'll just doze a little, he thought and fell fast asleep.

It was the bedroom extension that woke him up. He groped for it, trying to pull himself together, disoriented by the fact that it was almost dark outside. He could hear the wind whining around the corners of the house and the faint, husky mutter of the furnace.

“Hello,” he said. It would be Rachel, calling from Chicago again to wish him a happy Thanksgiving. She would put Ellie on and Ellie would talk and then Gage would get on and Gage would babble-and how the hell had he managed to sleep all afternoon when he had meant to watch the football game…

But it wasn’t Rachel. It was Jud.

“Louis? Fraid maybe you’ve got a little spot of trouble.”

He swung out of bed, still trying to scrub the sleep out of his mind. “Jud? What trouble?”

“Well, there’s a dead cat over here on our lawn,” Jud said. “I think it might be your daughter’s.”

“Church?” Louis asked. There was a sudden sinking in his belly. “Are you sure, Jud?”

“No, I ain’t one hundred percent sure,” Jud said, “but it sure looks like him.”

“Oh. Oh shit. I’ll be right over, Jud.”

“All right, Louis.”

He hung up and just sat there for a minute longer. Then he went in and used the bathroom, put his shoes on, and went downstairs.

Well, maybe it isn’t Church. Jud himself said he wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Christ, the cat doesn’t even want to go upstairs anymore unless someone carries him… why would he cross the road?

But in his heart he felt sure that it was Church… and if Rachel called this evening as she almost certainly would, what was he going to say to Ellie?

Crazily, he heard himself saying to Rachel: I know that anything, literally anything, can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that… do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if he gets run over in the road? But he hadn’t really believed anything was going to happen to Church, had he?

He remembered one of the guys he played poker with, Wickes Sullivan, asking him once how he could get horny for his wife and not get horny for the naked women he saw day in and day out. Louis had tried to explain to him that it wasn’t the way people imagined in their fantasies-a woman coming in to get a Pap smear or to learn how to give herself a breast self-examination didn’t suddenly drop a sheet and stand there like Venus on the half-shell. You saw a breast, a vulva, a thigh. The rest was draped in a sheet, and there was a nurse in attendance, more to protect the doctor’s reputation than anything else. Wicky wasn’t buying it. A tit is a tit, was Wicky’s thesis, and a twat is a twat. You should either be horny all the time or none of the time. All Louis could respond was that your wife’s tit was different.

Just like your family’s supposed to be different, he thought now. Church wasn’t supposed to get killed because he was inside the magic circle of the family.

What he hadn’t been able to make Wicky understand was that doctors compartmentalized just as cheerfully and blindly as anyone else. A tit wasn’t a tit unless it was your wife’s tit. In the office, a tit was a case. You could stand up in front of a medical colloquium and cite leukemia figures in children until you were blue in the face and still not believe it if one of your own kids got a call on the Bone-Phone. My kid? My kid’s cat, even? Doctor, you must be joking.

Never mind. Take this one step at a time.

But that was hard when he remembered how hysterical Ellie had gotten at the prospect of Church someday dying.

Stupid fucking cat, why did we ever have to get a fucking cat, anyway?

But he wasn’t tucking anymore. That was supposed to keep him alive.

“Church?” he called, but there was only the furnace, muttering and muttering, burning up dollars. The couch in the living room, where Church had recently spent most of his time, was empty. He was not lying on any of the radiators.

Louis rattled the cat’s dish, the one thing absolutely guaranteed to bring Church running if he was in earshot, but no cat came running this time.

and never would again, he was afraid.

He put on his coat and hat and started for the door. Then he came back. Giving in to what his heart told him, he opened the cupboard under the sink and squatted down. There were two kinds of plastic bags in there-small white ones for the household trash baskets and big green garbage-can liners. Louis took one of the latter. Church had put on weight since he had been fixed.

He poked the bag into one of the side pockets of his jacket, not liking the slick, cool way the plastic felt under his fingers. Then he let himself out the front door and crossed the street to Jud’s house.

It was about five-thirty. Twilight was ending. The landscape had a dead look.

The remainder of sunset was a strange orange line on the horizon across the river. The wind bowled straight down Route 15, numbing Louis’s cheeks and whipping away the white plume of his breath. He shuddered, but not from the cold. It was a feeling of aloneness that made him shudder. It was strong and persuasive. There seemed no way to concretize it with a metaphor. It was faceless. He just felt by himself, untouched and untouching.

He saw Jud across the road, bundled up in his big green dufile coat, his face lost in the shadow cast by the fur-fringed hood. Standing on his frozen lawn, he looked like a piece of statuary, just another dead thing in this twilight landscape where no bird sang.

Louis started across, and then Jud moved-waved him back. Shouted something Louis could not make out over the pervasive whine of the wind. Louis stepped back, realizing suddenly that the wind’s whine had deepened and sharpened. A moment later an air-horn blatted and an Orinco truck roared past close enough to make his pants and jacket flap. Damned if he hadn’t almost walked right out in front of the thing.

This time he checked both ways before crossing. There was only the tanker’s taillights, dwindling into the twilight.

“Thought that ‘Rinco truck was gonna get you,” Jud said. “Have a care, Louis.”

Even this close, Louis couldn’t see Jud’s face, and the uncomfortable feeling persisted that this could have been anyone… anyone at all.

“Where’s Norma?” he asked, still not looking down at the sprawled bundle of fur by Jud’s foot.

“Went to the Thanksgiving church service,” he said. “She’ll stay to the supper, I guess, although I don’t think she’ll eat nothing. She’s gotten peckish.” The wind gusted, shifting the hood back momentarily, and Louis saw that it was indeed Jud-who else would it have been? “It’s mostly an excuse for a hen paaaty,” Jud said. “They don’t eat much but sanwidges after the big meal at noon. She’ll be back around eight.”

Louis knelt down to look at the cat. Don’t let it be Church, he wished fervently, as he turned its head gently on its neck with gloved fingers. Let it be someone else’s cat, let Jud be wrong.

But of course it was Church. He was in no way mangled or disfigured; he had not been run over by one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15 (just what was that Orinco truck doing out on Thanksgiving? he wondered randomly).

Church’s eyes were half-open, as glazed as green marbles. A small flow of blood had come from his mouth, which was also open. Not a great deal of blood; just enough to stain the white bib on his chest.

“Yours, Louis?”

“Mine,” he agreed and sighed.

He was aware for the first time that he had loved Church-maybe not as fervently as Ellie but in his own absent way. In the weeks following his castration, Church had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a-routine that took him between Ellie’s bed, the couch, and his dish but rarely out of the house.

Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat’s teeth, was frozen in a shooter’s snarl.

The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying.

“Yeah, it’s Church,” he said. “I’ll be damned if I know how I’m going to tell Ellie about it.”

Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury Church up in the Pet Sematary with no marker or any of that foolishness. He would say nothing to Ellie on the phone tonight about Church; tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn’t seen Church around; the day after he would suggest that perhaps Church had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. Ellie would be upset, sure, but there would be none of the finality… no reprise of Rachel’s upsetting refusal to deal with death… just a withering away.

Coward, part of his mind pronounced.

Yes… no argument. But who needs this hassle?

“Loves that cat pretty well, doesn’t she?” Jud asked.

“Yes,” Louis said absently. He moved Church’s head again. The cat had begun to stiffen, but the head still moved much more easily than it should have. Broken neck. Yeah. Given that, he thought he could reconstruct what had happened.

Church had been crossing the road-for what reason God alone knew-and a car or truck had hit him, breaking his neck and throwing him aside onto Jud Crandall’s lawn. Or perhaps the cat’s neck had been broken when he struck the frozen ground. It didn’t matter. Either way the remains remained the same. Church was dead.

He glanced up at Jud, about to tell him his conclusions, but Jud was looking away toward that fading orange line of light at the horizon. His hood had fallen back halfway, and his face seemed thoughtful and stern… harsh, even.

Louis pulled the green garbage bag out of his pocket and unfolded it, holding it tightly to keep the wind from whipping it away. The brisk crackling sound of the bag seemed to bring Jud back to this here and now.

“Yes, I guess she loves it pretty well,” Jud said. His use of the present tense felt slightly eerie… the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold, and the wind, struck him as eerie and gothic.

Here’s Heathcliff out on the desolate moors, Louis thought, grimacing against the cold. Getting ready to pop the family cat into a Hefty Bag. Yowza.

He grabbed Church’s tail, spread the mouth of the bag, and lifted the cat. He pulled a disgusted, unhappy face at the sound the cat’s body made coming up-rrrriiippp as he pulled it out of the frost it had set into. The cat seemed almost unbelievably heavy, as if death had settled into it like a physical weight. Christ, he feels like a bucket of sand.

Jud held the other side of the bag, and Louis dropped Church in, glad to be rid of that strange, unpleasant weight.

“What are you going to do with it now?” Jud asked.

“Put him in the garage, I guess,” Louis said. “Bury him in the morning.”

“In the Pet Sematary?”

Louis shrugged. “Suppose so.”

“Going to tell Ellie?”

“I… I’ll have to mull that one over awhile.”

Jud was quiet a moment longer, and then he seemed to reach a decision. “Wait here a minute or two, Louis.”

Jud moved away, with no apparent thought that Louis might not want to wait just a minute on this bitter night. He moved away with assurance and that lithe ease which was so strange in a man of his age. And Louis found he had nothing to say anyway. He didn’t feel much like himself. He watched Jud go, quite content to stand here.

He raised his face into the wind after the door had clicked closed, the garbage bag with Church’s body in it riffling between his feet.

Content.

Yes, he was. For the first time since they had moved to Maine, he felt that he was in his place, that he was home. Standing here by himself in the afterglow of the day, standing on the rim of winter, he felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole-whole in a way he had not been, or could not remember feeling that he had been, since childhood.

Something gonna happen here, Bubba. Something pretty weird, I think.

He tilted his head back and saw cold winter stars in a blackening sky.

How long he stood like that he did not know, although it could not have been long in terms of seconds and minutes. Then a light flickered on Jud’s porch, bobbed, approached the porch door, and descended the steps. It was Jud behind a big four-cell flashlight. In his other hand he held what Louis at first thought was a large X… and then he saw that it was a pick and shovel.

He handed the shovel to Louis, who took it in his free hand.

“Jud, what the hell are you up to? We can’t bury him tonight.”

“Yeah, we can. And we’re gonna.” Jud’s face was lost behind the glaring circle of the flashlight.

“Jud, it’s dark. It’s late. And cold-”

“Come on,” Jud said. “Let’s get it done.”

Louis shook his head and tried to begin again, but the words came hard-the words of explanation and reason. They seemed so meaningless against the low shriek of the wind, the seedling bed of stars in the black.

“It can wait till tomorrow when we can see-”

“Does she love the cat?”

“Yes, but-”

jud’s voice, soft and somehow logical: “And do you love her?”

Of course I love her, she s my dau-“Then come on.”

Louis went.

Twice-maybe three times-on the walk up to the Pet Sematary that night Louis tried to talk to Jud, but Jud didn’t answer. Louis gave up. That feeling of contentment, odd under the circumstances but a pure fact, persisted. It seemed to come from everywhere. The steady ache in his muscles from carrying Church in one hand and the shovel in the other was a part of it. The wind, deadly cold, numbing exposed skin, was a part of it; it wound steadily in the trees. Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Jud’s flash was a part of it. He felt the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret.

The shadows fell away and there was a feeling of space. Snow shone pallidly.

“Rest here,” Jud said, and Louis set the bag down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Rest here? But they were here. He could see the markers in the moving, aimless sweep of Jud’s light as Jud sat down in the thin snow and put his face between his arms.

“Jud? Are you all right?”

“Fine. Need to catch my breath a bit, that’s all.”

Louis sat down next to him and deep-breathed half a dozen times.

“You know,” he said, “I feel better than I have in maybe six years. I know that’s a crazy thing to say when you’re burying your daughter’s cat, but it’s the flat truth, Jud. I feel good.”

Jud breathed deeply once or twice himself. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “It is that way once in a while. You don’t pick your times for feeling good, any more than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it too, but you don’t want to trust that. Heroin makes dope addicts feel good when they’re putting it in their arms, but all the time it’s poisoning them. Poisoning their bodies and poisoning their way of thinking. This place can be like that, Louis, and don’t you ever forget it. I hope to God I’m doing right. I think I am, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes my head gets muddled. It’s senility coming, I think.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This place has power, Louis. Not so much here, but… the place we’re going.”

“Jud-”

“Come on,” Jud said and was on his feet again. The flashlight’s beam illuminated the deadfall. Jud was walking toward it. Louis suddenly remembered his episode of somnambulism. What was it Pascow had said in the dream that had accompanied it?

Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken.

But now, tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had been seemed years rather than months distant. Louis felt fine and fey and alive, ready to cope with anything, and yet full of wonder. It occurred to him that this was very much like a dream.

Then Jud turned toward him, the hood seeming to surround a blankness, and for one moment Louis imagined that it was Pascow himself who now stood before him, that the shining light would be reversed, trained on a grinning, gibbering skull framed in fur, and his fear returned like a dash of cold water.

“Jud,” he said, “we can’t climb over that. We’ll each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back.”

“Just follow me,” Jud said. “Follow me and don’t look down. Don’t hesitate and don’t look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure.”

Louis began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had simply never awakened from his afternoon nap. If I was awake, he thought, I’d no more head up that deadfall than I’d get drunk and go skydiving. But I’m going to do it. I really think I am. So I must be dreaming. Right?

Jud angled slightly left, away from the center of the deadfall. The flash’s beam centered brightly on the jumbled heap of (bones) fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure himself that he was in the right place, Jud started up. He did not scramble; he did not climb bent over, the way a man will climb a rocky hillside or a sandy slope. He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. He walked like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from.

Louis followed in the same way.

He did not look down or search for footholds. It came to him with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to. It was a piece of utter assholery of course, like the stupid confidence of a man who believes it’s safe to drive when totally shitfaced as long as he’s wearing his St. Christopher’s medallion.

But it worked, There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes (Hush Puppy loafers-hardly recommended for climbing dead-falls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.

For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist.

The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the.

the barrier. Yes, that’s what it was-why try to pretend it wasn’t? The barrier.

Louis reached the top himself and paused there momentarily, right foot planted on an old fallen tree that was canted up at a thirty-five-degree angle, left foot on something springier-a mesh of old fir branches? He didn’t look down to see, but only switched the heavy trashbag with Church’s body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. He turned his face up into the wind and felt it sweep past him in an endless current, lifting his hair. It was so cold, so clean… so constant.

Moving casually, almost sauntering, he started down again. Once a branch that felt to be the thickness of a brawny man’s wrist snapped loudly under his foot, but he felt no concern at all-and his plunging foot was stopped firmly by a heavier branch some four inches down. Louis hardly staggered. He supposed that now he could understand how company commanders in World War I had been able to stroll along the top of the trenches with bullets snapping all around them, whistling “Tipperary.” It was crazy, but the very craziness made it tremendously exhilarating.

He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Jud’s light. Jud was standing there, waiting for him. Then he reached the bottom, and the exhilaration flared up in him like a shot of coal oil on embers.

“We made it!” he shouted. He put the shovel down and clapped Jud on the shoulder. He remembered climbing an apple tree to the top fork where it swayed in the wind like a ship’s mast. He had not felt so young or so viscerally alive in twenty years or more. “Jud, we made it!”

“Did you think we wouldn’t?” Jud asked.

Louis opened his mouth to say something-Think we wouldn’t?

We’re damn lucky we didn’t kill ourselves!-and then he shut it again. He had never really questioned at all, not from the moment Jud approached the deadfall.

And he was not worried about getting back over again.

“I guess not,” he said.

“Come on. Cot a piece to walk yet. Three miles or more.”

They walked. The path did indeed go on. In places it seemed very wide, although the moving light revealed little clearly; it was mostly a feeling of space, a feeling that the trees had drawn back. Once or twice Louis looked up and saw stars wheeling between the massed dark border of trees. Once something loped across the path ahead of them, and the light picked up the reflection of greenish eyes-there and then gone.

At other times the path closed in until underbrush scratched stiff fingers across the shoulders of Louis’s coat. He switched the bag and the shovel more often, but the ache in his shoulders was now constant. He fell into a rhythm of walking and became almost hypnotized with it. There was power here, yes, he felt it. He remembered a time when he had been a senior in high school. He and his girl and some other couple had gone way out in the boonies and had ended up necking at the end of a dead-end dirt road near a power station. They hadn’t been there long before Louis’s girl said that she wanted to go home, or at least to another place, because all her teeth (all the ones with fillings, anyway, and that was most of them) were aching. Louis had been glad to leave himself. The air around the power station had made him feel nervous and too awake. This was like that, but it was stronger. Stronger but not unpleasant at all. It was-Jud had stopped at the base of a long slope. Louis ran into him.

Jud turned toward him. “We’re almost where we’re going now,” he said calmly.

“This next bit is like the deadfall-you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me and don’t look down. You felt us going downhill?”

“Yes.”

“This is the edge of what the Micmacs used to call Little Cod Swamp. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man’s Bog, and most of them who came once and got out never came gain.”

“Is there quicksand?”

“Oh, ayuh, quicksand aplenty! Streams that bubble up through a big deposit of quartz sand left over from the glacier. Silica sand, we always called it, although there’s probably a proper name for it.”

Jud looked at him, and for a moment Louis thought he saw something bright and not completely pleasant in the old man’s eyes.

Then Jud shifted the flashlight and that look was gone.

“There’s a lot of funny things down this way, Louis. The air’s heavier… more electrical… or somethin.”

Louis started.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Louis said, thinking of that night on the dead-end road.

“You might see St. Elmo’s fire-what the sailors call foo-lights. It makes funny shapes, but it’s nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way. You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny.”

“Loons?” Louis said doubtfully. “This time of year?”

“Oh, ayuh,” Jud said again, and his voice was terribly bland and totally unreadable. For a moment Louis wished desperately he could see the old man’s face again. That look-“Jud, where are we going? What the hell are we doing out here in the back of the beyond?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there.” Jud turned away. “Mind the tussocks.”

They began to walk again, stepping from one broad hummock to the next. Louis did not feel for them. His feet seemed to find them automatically, with no effort from him. He slipped only once, his left shoe breaking through a thin scum of ice and dipping into cold and somehow slimy standing water. He pulled it out quickly and went on, following Jud’s bobbing light. That light, floating through the woods, brought back memories of the pirate tales he had liked to read as a boy. Evil men off to bury gold doubloons by the dark of the moon… and of course one of them would be tumbled into the pit on top of the chest, a bullet in his heart, because the pirates had believed-or so the authors of these lurid tales solemnly attested-that the dead comrade’s ghost would remain there to guard the swag.

Except it’s not treasure we’ve come to bury. Just my daughter’s castrated cat.

He felt wild laughter bubble up inside and stifled it.

He did not hear any “sounds like voices,” nor did he see any St. Elmo’s fire, but after stepping over half a dozen tussocks, he looked down and saw that his feet, calves, knees, and lower thighs had disappeared into a ground fog that was perfectly smooth, perfectly white, and perfectly opaque. It was like moving through the world’s lightest drift of snow.

The air seemed to have a quality of light in it now, and it was warmer, he could have sworn it. He could see Jud before him, moving steadily along, the blunt end of the pick hooked over his shoulder. The pick enhanced the illusion of a man intent on burying treasure.

That crazy sense of exhilaration persisted, and he suddenly wondered if maybe Rachel was trying to call him; if, back in the house, the phone was ringing and ringing, making its rational, prosaic sound. If-He almost walked into Jud’s back again. The old man had stopped in the middle of the path. His head was cocked to one side. His mouth was pursed and tense.

“Jud? What’s-”

“Shhh!”

Louis hushed, looking around uneasily. Here the ground mist was thinner, but he still couldn’t see his own shoes. Then he heard crackling underbrush and breaking branches. Something was moving out there-something big.

He opened his mouth to ask Jud if it was a moose (bear was the thought that actually crossed his mind), and then he closed it again. The sound carries, Jud had said.

He cocked his head to one side in unconscious imitation of Jud, unaware that he was doing it, and listened. The sound seemed at first distant, then very close; moving away arid then moving ominously toward them. Louis felt the sweat on his forehead begin to trickle down his chapped cheeks. He shifted the Hefty Bag with Church’s body in it from one hand to the other. His palm had dampened, and the green plastic seemed greasy, wanting to slide through his fist. Now the thing out there seemed so close that Louis expected to see its shape at any moment, rising up on two legs, perhaps, blotting out the stars with some unthought-of, immense and shaggy body.

Bear was no longer what he was thinking of.

Now he didn’t know just what he was thinking of.

Then it moved away and disappeared.

Louis opened his mouth again, the words What was that? already on his tongue.

Then a shrill, maniacal laugh came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling. To Louis it seemed that every joint in his body had frozen solid and that he had somehow gained weight, so much weight that if he turned to run he would plunge down and out of sight in the swampy ground.

The laughter rose, split into dry cackles like some rottenly friable chunk of rock along many fault lines; it reached the pitch of a scream, then sank into a guttural chuckling that might have become sobs before it faded out altogether.

Somewhere there was a drip of water and above them, like a steady river in a bed of sky, the monotonous whine of the wind. Otherwise Little God Swamp was silent.

Louis began to shudder all over. His flesh-particularly that of his lower belly-began to creep. Yes, creep was the right word; his flesh actually seemed to be moving on his body. His mouth was totally dry. There seemed to be no spit at all left in it. Yet that feeling of exhilaration persisted, an unshakable lunacy.

“What in Christ’s name?” he whispered hoarsely to Jud.

Jud turned to look at him, and in the dim light Louis thought the old man looked a hundred and twenty. There was no sign of that odd, dancing light in his eyes now. His face was drawn, and there was stark terror in his eyes. But when he spoke, his voice was steady enough. “Just a loon,” he said. “Come on. Almost there.”

They went on. The tussocks became firm ground again. For a few moments Louis had a sensation of open space, although that dim glow in the air had now faded, and it was all he could do to make out Jud’s back three feet in front of him. Short grass stiff with frost was underfoot. It broke like glass at every step. Then they were in the trees again. He could smell aromatic fir, feel needles.

Occasionally a twig or a branch scraped against him.

Louis had lost all sense of time or direction, but they did not walk long before Jud stopped again and turned toward him.

“Steps here,” he said. “Cut into rock. Forty-two or forty-four, I disremember which. Just follow me. We get to the top and we’re there.”

He began to climb again, and again Louis followed.

The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoe gritted on a strew of pebbles and stone fragments.

twelve… thirteen… fourteen.

The wind was sharper, colder, quickly numbing his face. Are we above the treeline? he wondered. He looked up and saw a billion stars, cold lights in the darkness. Never in his life had the stars made him feel so completely small, infinitesimal, without meaning. He asked himself the old question-is there anything intelligent out there?-and instead of wonder, the thought brought a horrid cold feeling, as if he had asked himself what it might be like to eat a handful of squirming bugs.

twenty-six… twenty-seven… twenty-eight.

Who carved these, anyway? Indians? The Micmacs? Were they tool-bearing Indians?

I'll have to ask Jud. “Tool-bearing Indians” made him think of “fur-bearing animals,” and that made him think of that thing that had been moving near them in the woods. One foot stumbled, and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled.

Like dry skin that’s almost worn out, he thought.

“You all right, Louis?” Jud murmured.

“I’m okay,” he said, although he was nearly out of breath and his muscles throbbed from the weight of Church in the bag.

forty-two… forty-three… forty-four.

“Forty-five,” Jud said. “I’ve forgot. Haven’t been up here in twelve years, I guess. Don’t suppose I’ll ever have a reason to come again. Here… up you come and up you get.”

He grabbed Louis’s arm and helped him up the last step.

“We’re here,” Jud said.

Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standing on a rocky, rubble strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue. Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach the steps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird, flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or New Mexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa-or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was-was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bending before the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, not an isolated mesa. Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees. But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in the context of New England’s low and somehow tired hills-Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenly spoke up.

“Come on,” Jud said and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. Louis saw a number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees-trees which were the oldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness-but an emptiness which vibrated.

The dark shapes were cairns of stones.

“Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here,” Jud said. “No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have.”

“Why? Why did they do it?”

“This was their burying ground,” Jud said. “I brought you here so you could bury Ellie’s cat here. The Micmacs didn’t discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners.”

This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better: they had slaughtered the pets of royalty so that the souls of the pets might go along to whatever afterlife there might be with the souls of their masters. He remembered reading about the slaughter of more than ten thousand domestic animals following the decease of one pharaoh’s daughter-included in the tally had been six hundred pigs and two thousand peacocks. The pigs had been scented with attar of roses, the dead lady’s favorite perfume, before their throats were cut.

And they built pyramids too. No one knows for sure what the Mayan pyramids are for-navigation and chronography, some say, like Stonehenge-but we know damn well what the Egyptian pyramids were and are… great monuments to death, the world’s biggest gravestones. Here Lies Ramses II, He Was Obedient, Louis thought and uttered a wild, helpless cackle.

Jud looked at him, unsurprised.

“Go on and bury your animal,” he said. “I’m gonna have a smoke. I’d help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own. That’s the way it was done then.”

“Jud, what’s this all about? Why did you bring me here?”

“Because you saved Norma’s life,” Jud said, and although he sounded sincere-and Louis was positive he believed himself sincere-he had a sudden, overpowering sense that the man was lying… or that he was being lied to and then passing the lie on to Louis. He remembered that look he had seen, or thought he had seen, in Jud’s eye.

But up here none of that seemed to matter. The wind mattered more, pushing freely around him in that steady river, lifting his hair from his brow and off his ears.

Jud sat down with his back against one of the trees, cupped his hands around a match, and lit a Chesterfield. “You want to rest a bit before you start?”

“No, I’m okay,” Louis said. He could have pursued the questions, but he found he didn’t really care to. This felt wrong but it also felt right, and he decided to let that be enough… for now. There was really only one thing he needed to know. “Will I really be able to dig him a grave? The soil looks thin.” Louis nodded toward the place where the rock pushed out of the ground at the edge of the steps.

Jud nodded slowly. “Ayuh,” he said. “Soil’s thin, all right. But soil deep enough to grow grass is generally deep enough to bury in, Louis. And people have been burying here for a long, long time. You won’t find it any too easy, though.”

Nor did he. The ground was stony and hard, and very quickly he saw that he was going to need the pick to dig the grave deep enough to hold Church. So he began to alternate, first using the pick to loosen the hard earth and stones, then the shovel to dig out what he had loosened. His hands began to hurt. His body began to warm up again. He felt a strong, unquestionable need to do a good job. He began to hum under his breath, something he sometimes did when suturing a wound.

Sometimes the pick would strike a rock hard enough to flash sparks, and the shiver would travel up the wooden haft to vibrate in his hands. He could feel blisters forming on his palms and didn’t care, although he was, like most doctors, usually careful of his hands. Above and around him, the wind sang and sang, playing a tree-note melody.

Counterpointing this he heard the soft drop and chunk of rock. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jud, hunkered down and pulling out the bigger rocks he had dug up, making a heap of them.

“For your cairn,” he said when he saw Louis looking.

“Oh,” Louis said and went back to work.

He made the grave about two feet wide and three feet long-a Cadillac of a grave for a damn cat, he thought-and when it was perhaps thirty inches deep and the pick was flashing sparks up from almost every stroke, he tossed it and the shovel aside and asked Jud if it was okay.

Jud got up and took a cursory look. “Seems fine to me,” he said. “Anyway, it’s what you think that counts.”

“Will you tell me now what this is about?”

Jud smiled a little. “The Micmacs believed this hill was a magic place,” he said. “Believed this whole forest, from the swamp on north and east, was magic.

They made this place, and they buried their dead here, away from everything else. Other tribes steered clear of it-the Penobscots said these woods were full of ghosts. Later on, the fur trappers started saying pretty much the same thing.

I suppose some of them saw the foo-fire in Little God Swamp and thought they were seeing ghosts.”

Jud smiled, and Louis thought: That isn’t what you think at all.

“Later on, not even the Micmacs themselves would come here. One of them claimed he saw a Wendigo here and that the ground had gone sour. They had a big powwow about it… or so I heard the tale in my green years, Louis, but I heard it from that old tosspot Stanny B.-which is what we all called Stanley Bouchard-and what Stanny B. didn’t know, he’d make up.”

Louis, who knew only that the Wendigo was supposed to be a spirit of the north country, said, “Do you think the ground’s gone sour?”

Jud smiled-or at least his lips slanted. “I think it’s a dangerous place,” he said softly, “but not for cats or dogs or pet hamsters. Go on and bury your animal, Louis.”

Louis lowered the Hefty Bag into the hole and slowly shoveled the dirt back in. He was cold now and tired. The patter of the earth on the plastic was a depressing sound, and while he did not regret coming up here, that sense of exhilaration was fading, and he had begun to wish the adventure over.

It was a long walk back home.

The pattering sound muffled, then stopped-there was only the whump of dirt on more dirt. He scraped the last bit into the hole with the blade of his shovel (there’s never enough, he thought, recalling something his undertaker uncle had said to him at least a thousand years ago, never enough to fill the hole up again) arid then turned to Jud.

“Your cairn,” Jud said.

“Look, Jud, I’m pretty tired and-”

“It’s Ellie’s cat,” Jud said, and his voice, although soft, was implacable.

“She’d want you to do it right.”

Louis sighed. “I suppose she would,” he said.

It took another ten minutes to pile up the rocks Jud handed him, one by one.

When it was done, there was a low, conical pile of stones on Church’s grave, and Louis did indeed feel a small, tired pleasure. It looked right, somehow, rising with the others in the starlight. He supposed Ellie would never see it-the thought of taking her through that patch of swamp where there was quicksand would make Rachel’s hair turn white-but he had seen it, and it was good.

“Most of these have fallen over,” he said to Jud, standing and brushing at the knees of his pants. He was seeing more clearly now, and in several places he could clearly make out scattered strews of loose stones. But Jud had seen to it that he built his own cairn only from stones taken from the grave he himself had dug.

“Ayuh,” Jud said. “Told you: the place is old.”

“Are we done now?”

“Ayuh.” He clapped Louis on the shoulder. “You did good, Louis. I knew you would. Let’s go home.”

“Jud-” he began again, but Jud only grabbed the pick and walked off toward the steps. Louis got the shovel, had to trot to catch up, and then saved his breath for walking. He looked back once, but the cairn marking the grave of his daughter’s cat Winston Churchill had melted into the shadows, and he could not pick it out.

We just ran the film backward, Louis thought tiredly as they emerged from the woods and into the field overlooking his own house some time later. He did not know how much later; he had taken off his watch when he had lain down to doze that afternoon, and it would still be there on the windowsill by his bed. He only knew that he was beat, used up, done in. He could not remember feeling so kicked-dog weary since his first day on Chicago’s rubbish-disposal crew one high-school summer sixteen or seventeen years ago.

They came back the same way they had gone, but he could remember very little about the trip. He stumbled on the deadfall, he remembered that-lurching forward and thinking absurdly of Peter Pan-oh Jesus, I lost my happy thoughts and down I come-and then Jud’s hand had been there, firm and hard, and a few moments later they had been trudging past the final resting places of Smucky the Cat and Trixie and Marta Our Pet Rabit and onto the path he had once walked not only with Jud but with his whole family.

It seemed that in some weary way he had pondered the dream of Victor Pascow, the one which had resulted in his somnambulistic episode, but any connection between that night walk and this had eluded him. It had also occurred to him that the whole adventure had been dangerous-not in any melodramatic Wilkie Collins sense but in a very real one. That he had outrageously blistered his hands while in a state that was nearly somnambulistic was really the least of it. He could have killed himself on the deadfall. Both of them could have. It was hard to square such behavior with sobriety. In his current exhaustion, he was willing to ascribe it to confusion and emotional upset over the death of a pet the whole family had loved.

And after a time, there they were, home again.

They walked toward it together, not speaking, and stopped again in Louis’s driveway. The wind moaned and whined. Wordlessly, Louis handed Jud his pick.

“I’d best get across,” Jud said at last. “Louella Bisson or Ruthie Parks will be bringin Norma home and she’ll wonder where the hell I am.”

“Do you have the time?” Louis asked. He was surprised that Norma wasn’t home yet; in his muscles it seemed to him that midnight must have struck.

“Oh, ayuh,” Jud said. “I keep the time as long as I’m dressed and then I let her go.”

He fished a watch out of his pants pocket and flicked the scrolled cover back from its face.

“It’s gone eight-thirty,” he said and snapped the cover closed again.

“Eight-thirty?” Louis repeated stupidly. “That’s all?”

“How late did you think it was?” Jud asked.

“Later than that,” Louis said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Louis,” Jud said and began to move away.

He turned toward Louis, mildly questioning.

“Jud, what did we do tonight?”

“Why, we buried your daughter’s cat.”

“Is that all we did?”

“Nothing but that,” Jud said. “You’re a good man, Louis, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. That seem right in their hearts, I mean. And if they do those things and then end up not feeling right, full of questions and sort of like they got indigestion, only inside their heads instead of in their guts, they think they made a mistake. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” touis said, thinking that Jud must have been reading his mind as the two of them walked downhill through the field and toward the house lights.

“What they don’t think is that maybe they should be questioning those feelings of doubt before they question their own hearts,” Jud said, looking at him closely. “What do you think, Louis?”

“I think,” Louis said slowly, “that you might be right.”

“And the things that are in a man’s heart-it don’t do him much good to talk about those things, does it?”

“Well-”

“No,” Jud said, as if Louis had simply agreed. “It don’t.” And in his calm voice that was so sure and so implacable, in that voice which somehow put the chill through Louis, he said: “They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she’s never really seen into any man’s heart. The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis-like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock’s close. A man grows what he can… and he tends it.”

Jud-“Don’t question, Louis. Accept what’s done and follow your heart.”

“But-”

“But nothing. Accept what’s done, Louis, and follow your heart. We did what was right this time… at least, I hope to Christ it was right. Another time it could be wrong-wrong as hell.”

“Will you at least answer one question?”

“Well, let’s hear what it is, and then we’ll see.”

“How did you know about that place?” This question had also occurred to Louis on the way back, along with the suspicion that Jud himself might be part Micmac-although he did not look like it; he looked as if every one of his ancestors had been one hundred percent card-carrying Anglos.

“Why, from Stanny B.,” he said, looking surprised.

“He just told you?”

“No,” Jud said. “It isn’t the kind of place you just tell somebody about. I buried my dog Spot up there when I was ten. He was chasing a rabbit, and he run on some rusty barbed wire. The wounds infected and it killed him.”

There was something wrong about that, something that didn’t fit with something Louis had been previously told, but he was too tired to puzzle out the discontinuity. Jud said no more; only looked at him from his inscrutable old man’s eyes.

“Goodnight, Jud,” Louis said.

“Goodnight.”

The old man crossed the road, carrying his pick and shovel.

“Thanks!” Louis called impulsively.

Jud didn’t turn; he only raised one hand to indicate he had heard.

And in the house, suddenly, the telephone began to ring.

Louis ran, wincing at the aches that flared in his upper thighs and lower back, but by the time he had gotten into the warm kitchen, the phone had already rung six or seven times. It stopped ringing just as he put his hand on it. He picked it up anyway and said hello, but there was only the open hum.

That was Rachel, he thought. I'll call her back.

But suddenly it seemed like too much work to dial the number, to dance clumsily with her mother-or worse, her checkbook-brandishing father-to be passed on to Rachel… and then to Ellie. Ellie would still be up of course; it was an hour earlier in Chicago. Ellie would ask him how Church was doing.

Great, he’s fine. Got hit by an Orinco truck. Somehow I’m absolutely positive it was an Orinco truck. Anything else would lack dramatic unity, if you know what I mean. You don’t? Well, never mind. The truck killed him but didn’t mark him up hardly at all. Jud and I planted him up in the old Micmac burying ground-sort of an annex to the Pet Sematary, if you know what I mean. Amazing walk, punkin.

I’ll take you up there sometime and we’ll put flowers by his marker-excuse me, his cairn. After the quicksand's frozen over, that is, and the bears go to sleep for the winter.

He rehung the telephone, crossed to the sink, and filled it with hot water. He removed his shirt and washed. He had been sweating like a pig in spite of the cold, and a pig was exactly what he smelled like.

There was some leftover meatloaf in the refrigerator. Louis cut it into slabs, put them on a slice of Roman Meal bread, and added two thick rounds of Bermuda onion. He contemplated this for a moment before dousing it with ketchup and slamming down another slice of bread. If Rachel and Ellie had been around, they would have wrinkled their noses in identical gestures of distaste-yuck, gross.

Well, you missed it, ladies, Louis thought with undeniable satisfaction and gobbled his sandwich. It tasted great. Confucius say he who smell like pig eat like wolf, he thought and smiled. He chased the sandwich with several long swallows of milk directly from the carton-another habit Rachel frowned on strenuously-and then he went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed without even washing his teeth. His aches and pains had faded to one low throb that was almost comforting.

His watch was there where he had left it, and he looked at it. Ten minutes of nine. It really was incredible.

Louis turned off the light, turned over on his side, and slept.

He woke up sometime after three the next morning and shuffled to the bathroom, He was standing there urinating, blinking owlishly in the bright white fluorescent bathroom light, when the discrepancy suddenly showed up in his mind, and his eyes widened-it was as if two pieces of something which should have fitted together perfectly had instead thudded against one another and rebounded.

Tonight Jud had told him that his dog had died when he was ten-had died of infection after being scraped up in a snarl of rusty barbed wire. But on the late-summer day when all of them had walked up to the Pet Sematary together, Jud said that his dog had died of old age and was buried there-he had even pointed out the marker, although the years had worn the inscription away.

Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed. Something else was wrong, as well-and in a moment he had it. Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.

But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten. Well, he’s an old man, and old men get confused in their memories, he thought uneasily. He’s said himself that he’s noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness-groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age, he’s getting off pretty goddamned light…

senility’s probably too strong a word for it in Jud’s case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting when a dog died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.

But he wasn’t able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.

At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought, Let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead-and the steps faded away.

And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.

23

He awoke at nine the next morning. Bright sunshine streamed in the bedroom’s east windows. The telephone was ringing. Louis reached up and snared it.

“Hello?”

“Hi!” Rachel said. “Did I wake you up? Hope so.”

“You woke me up, you bitch,” he said, smiling.

“Ooooh, such nasty language, you bad old bear,” she said. “I tried to call you last night. Were you over at Jud’s?”

He hesitated for only the tiniest fraction of a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Had a few beers. Norma was up at some sort of Thanksgiving supper. I thought about giving you a ring, but you know.”

They chatted awhile. Rachel updated him on her family, something he could have done without, although he took a small, mean satisfaction in the news that her father’s bald spot seemed to be expanding at a faster rate.

“You want to talk to Gage?” Rachel asked.

Louis grinned. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Don’t let him hang up the phone like he did the other time.”

Much rattling at the other end. Dimly he heard Rachel cajoling the kid to say hi, Daddy.

At last Gage said, “Hi, Dayee.”

“Hi, Gage,” Louis said cheerfully. “How you doing? How’s your life? Did you pull over your grandda’s pipe rack again? I certainly hope so. Maybe this time you can trash his stamp collection as well.”

Gage babbled on happily for thirty seconds or so, interspersing his gobbles and grunts with a few recognizable words from his growing vocabulary-mommy, Ellie, grandda, grandma, car (pronounced in the best Yankee tradition as kaaa, Louis was amused to note), twuck, and shit.

At last Rachel pried the phone away from him to Gage’s wail of indignation and Louis’s measured relief-he loved his son and missed him like mad, but holding a conversation with a not-quite-two-year-old was a little bit like trying to play cribbage with a lunatic; the cards kept going everywhere and sometimes you found yourself pegging backwards.

“So how’s everything there?” Rachel asked.

“Okay,” Louis said, with no hesitation at all this time-but he was aware he had crossed a line, back when Rachel had asked him if he had gone over to Jud’s last night and he told her he had. In his mind he suddenly heard Jud Crandall saying, The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis… a man grows what he can and he tends ft. “Well… a little dull, if you want to know the God’s honest.

Miss you.”

“You actually mean to tell me you’re not enjoying your vacation from this sideshow?”

“Oh, I like the quiet,” he admitted, “sure. But it gets strange after the first twenty-four hours or so.”

“Can I talk to Daddy?” It was Ellie in the background.

“Louis? Ellie’s here.”

“Okay, put her on.”

He talked to Ellie for almost five minutes. She prattled on about the doll Grandma had gotten her, about the trip she and Grandda had taken to the stockyards (“Boy, do they stink, Daddy,” Ellie said, and Louis thought, Your grandda’s no rose, either, sweetie), about how she had helped make bread, and about how Gage had gotten away from Rachel while she was changing him. Gage had run down the hallway and pooped right in the doorway leading into Grandda’s study (Atta boy, Gage! Louis thought, a big grin spreading over his face).

He actually thought he was going to get away-at least for this morning-and was getting ready to ask Ellie for her mother again so he could say goodbye to her when Ellie asked, “How’s Church, Daddy? Does he miss me?”

The grin faded from Louis’s mouth, but he answered readily. and with the perfect note of offhanded casualness: “He’s fine, I guess. I gave him the leftover beef stew last night and then put him out. Haven’t seen him this morning, but I just woke up.”

Oh boy, you would have made a great murderer-cool as a cucumber. Dr. Creed, when did you last see the deceased? He came in for supper. Had a plate of beef stew, in fact. I haven’t seen him since then.

“Well, give him a kiss for me.”

“Yuck, kiss your own cat,” Louis said, and Ellie giggled.

“You want to talk to Mommy again, Daddy?”

“Sure. Put her on.”

Then it was over. He talked to Rachel for another couple of minutes; the subject of Church was not touched upon. He and his wife exchanged love-you’s, and Louis hung up.

“That’s that,” he said to the empty, sunny room, and maybe the worst thing about it was that he didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel guilty at all.

24

Steve Masterton called around nine-thirty and asked if Louis would like to come up to the university and play some racket ball-the place was deserted, he said gleefully, and they could play the whole goddam day if they wanted to.

Louis could understand the glee-when the university was in session, the waiting list for a racket ball court was sometimes two days long-but he declined all the same, telling Steve he wanted to work on an article he was writing for The Magazine of College Medicine.

“You sure?” Steve asked. “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, you know.”

“Check me later,” Louis said. “Maybe I’ll be up for it.”

Steve said he would and hung up. Louis had told only a half-lie this time; he did plan to work on his article, which concerned itself with treating contagious ailments such as chicken-pox and mononucleosis in the infirmary environment, but the main reason he had turned down Steve’s offer was that he was a mass of aches and pains. He had discovered this as soon as he finished talking to Rachel and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. His back muscles creaked and groaned, his shoulders were sore from lugging the cat in that damned garbage bag, and the hamstrings in back of his knees felt like guitar strings tuned three octaves past their normal pitch. Christ, he thought, and you had the stupid idea you were in some kind of shape. He would have looked cute trying to play racket ball with Steve, lumbering around like an arthritic old man.

And speaking of old men, he hadn’t made that hike into the woods the night before by himself; he had gone with a guy who was closing in on eighty-five. He wondered if Jud was hurting as badly as he was this morning.

He spent an hour and a half working on his article, but it did not march very well. The emptiness and the silence began to get on his nerves, and at last he stacked his yellow legal pads and the offprints he had ordered from Johns Hopkins on the shelf above his typewriter, put on his parka, and crossed the road.

Jud and Norma weren’t there, but there was an envelope tacked to the porch door with his name written across the front of it. He took it down and opened the flap with his thumb.

Louis, The good wife and me are off to Bucksport to do some shopping and to look at a welsh dresser at the Emporium Galorium that Norma’s had her eye on for about a hundred years, it seems like. Probably we’ll have a spot of lunch at McLeod’s while we’re there and come back in the late afternoon. Come on over for a beer or two tonight, if you want.

Your family is your family. I don’t want to be no “buttinsky,” but if Ellie were my daughter, I wouldn’t rush to tell her that her cat got killed on the highway-why not let her enjoy her holiday?

By the way, Louis, I wouldn’t talk about what we did last night either, not around North Ludlow. There are other people who know about that old Micmac burying ground, and there are other people in town who have buried their animals there.

you might say it’s another part of the “Pet Sematary.” Believe it or not, there is even a bull buried up there! Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on Stack pole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or ‘68. Ha, ha! He told me that he and his two boys had taken that bull out there and 1 laughed until I thought 1 would rupture myself! But people around here don’t like to talk about it, and they don’t like people they consider to be “outsiders” to know about it, not be-cause some of these old superstitions go back three hundred years or more (although they do), but because they sort of believe in those superstitions, and they think any “outsider” who knows that they do must be laughing at them. Does that make any sense? I suspect it-doesn’t, but nevertheless that’s how it is. So just do me a favor and keep shut on the subject, will you?

We will talk more about this, probably tonight, and by then you will understand more, but in the meantime I want to tell you that you did yourself proud. I knew you would.

Jud PS-Norma doesn’t know what this note says-I told her something different-and I would just as soon keep it that way if it’s all the same to you. I've told Norma more than one lie in the fifty-eight years we’ve been married, and I’d guess that most men tell their wives a smart of lies, but you know, most of them could stand before God and confess them without dropping their eyes from His.

Well, drop over tonight and we’ll do a little boozing.

J.

Louis stood on the top step leading to Jud and Norma’s porch-now bare, its comfortable rattan furniture stored to wait for another spring-frowning over this note. Don’t tell Ellie the cat had been killed-he hadn’t. Other animals buried there? Superstitions going back three hundred years?

and by then you will understand more.

He touched this line lightly with his finger, and for the first time allowed his mind to deliberately turn back to what they had done the night before. It was blurred in his memory, it had the melting, cotton-candy texture of dreams or of waking actions performed under a light haze of drugs. He could recall climbing the deadfall and the odd, brighter quality of light in the bog-that and the way it had felt ten or twenty degrees warmer there-but all of it was like the conversation you had with the anesthetist just before he or she put you out like a light.

and I’d guess most men tell their wives a smart of lies…

Wives and daughters as well, Louis thought-but it was eerie, the way Jud seemed almost to know what had transpired this morning, both on the telephone and in his own head.

Slowly he refolded the note, which had been written on a sheet of lined paper like that in a schoolboy’s Blue Horse tablet, and put it back into the envelope.

He put the envelope into his hip pocket and crossed the road again.

25

It was around one o’clock that afternoon when Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme. Louis was in the garage, where he had been working off and on for the last six weeks on a fairly ambitious set of shelves; he wanted to put all of the dangerous garage stuff such as bottles of windshield-wiper fluid, antifreeze, and sharp tools on these shelves, where they would be out of Gage’s reach. He was hammering in a nail when Church strolled in, his tail high. Louis did not drop the hammer or even slam his thumb-his heart jogged in his chest but did not leap; a hot wire seemed to glow momentarily in his stomach and then cool immediately, like the filament of a light bulb that glows overbrightly for a moment and then burns out. It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their night hike up to the Micmac burying ground had meant all along.

He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his mouth back into his palm, and then dumped them into the pockets of his workman’s apron. He went to Church and picked the cat up.

Live weight, he thought with a kind of sick excitement. He weighs what he did before he was hit. This is live weight. He was heavier in the bag. He was heavier when he was dead.

His heart took a bigger jog this time-almost a leap-and for a moment the garage seemed to swim in front of his eyes.

Church laid his ears back and allowed himself to be held. Louis carried him out into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps. The cat tried to get down then, but Louis stroked him and held him on his lap. His heart seemed to be taking regular jogs now.

He probed gently into the heavy ruff of fur at Church’s neck, remembering the sick, boneless way Church’s head had swiveled on his broken neck the night before. He felt nothing now but good muscle and tendon. He held Church up and looked at the cat’s muzzle closely. -What he saw there caused him to drop the cat onto the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut.

The whole world was swimming now, and his head was full of a tottery, sick vertigo-it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started.

There was dried blood caked on Church’s muzzle, and caught in his long whiskers were two tiny shreds of green plastic. Bits of Hefty Bag.

We will talk more about this and by then you will understand more.

Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

He let Church into the house, got his blue dish, and opened a tuna-and-liver cat dinner. As he spooned the gray-brown mess out of the can, Church purred unevenly and rubbed back and forth along Louis’s ankles. The feel of the cat caused Louis to break out in gooseflesh, and he had to clench his teeth grimly to keep from kicking him away. His furry sides felt somehow too slick, too thick-in a word, loathsome. Louis found he didn’t care if he never touched Church again.

When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Church streaked past him to get it, and Louis could have sworn he smelled sour earth-as if it had been ground into the cat’s fur.

He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear him smacking-had Church smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never noticed. Either way, it was a disgusting sound. Gross, Ellie would have said.

Abruptly Louis turned and went upstairs. He started at a walk, but by the time he got to the upper hallway, he was almost running. He undressed, tossing all of his clothes in the laundry hamper although he had put them on fresh from the underwear out that morning. He drew himself a hot. bath, as hot as he could take it, and plopped in.

The steam rose around him, and he could feel the hot water working on his muscles, loosening them. The bath was also working on his head, loosening that.

By the time the water had begun to cool, he was feeling dozy and pretty much all right again.

The cat came back, just like the cat in the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal.

It had all been a mistake. Hadn’t he thought to himself yesterday evening that Church looked remarkably whole and unmarked for an animal that had been struck by a car?

Think of all the woodchucks and cats and dogs you’ve seen strewn all over the highway, he thought, their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. Tech-ni-color, as Loudon Wainwright says on that record about the dead skunk.

It was obvious now. Church had been struck hard and stunned. The cat he had carried up to Jud’s old Micmac burying ground had been unconscious, not dead.

Didn’t they say cats had nine lives? Thank God he hadn’t said anything to Ellie!

She wouldn’t ever have to know how close Church had come.

The blood on his mouth and ruff… the way his neck turned.

But he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis-that was all. It had hardly been under the best circumstances for close examination, squatting on Jud’s lawn in twenty-degree temperatures, the light almost gone from the sky.

And he had been wearing gloves. That could have-A bloated, misshapen shadow rose on the tiled bathroom wall, like the head of a small dragon or of some monstrous snake; something touched his bare shoulder lightly and skidded. Louis jerked upward galvanically, splashing water out of the tub and soaking the bathmat. He turned, cringing back at the same time, and stared into the muddy yellow-green eyes of his daughter’s cat, who was perched on the lowered seat of the toilet.

Church was swaying slowly back and forth as if drunk. Louis watched, his body crawling with revulsion, a scream barely held back in his mouth by his clamped teeth. Church had never looked like this-had never swayed, like a snake trying to hypnotize its prey-not before he was fixed and not afterward. For the first and last time he played with the idea that this was a different cat, one that just looked like Ellie’s, a cat that had just wandered into his garage while he was putting up those shelves, and that the real Church was still buried under that cairn on the bluff in the woods. But the markings were the same… and the one ragged, ear… and the paw that had that funny chewed look. Ellie had slammed that paw in the back door of their little suburban house when Church was little more than a kitten.

It was Church, all right.

“Get out of here,” Louis whispered hoarsely at him.

Church stared at him a moment longer-God, his eyes were different, somehow they were different-and then leaped down from the toilet seat. He landed with none of the uncanny grace cats usually display. He staggered awkwardly, haunches thudding against the tub, and then he was gone.

It, Louis thought. Not he; it. Remember, it’s been spayed.

He got out of the tub and dried off quickly, jerkily. He was shaved and mostly dressed when the phone rang, shrill in the empty house. When it sounded, Louis whirled, eyes wide, hands going up. He lowered them slowly. His heart was racing. His muscles felt full of adrenaline.

It was Steve Masterton, checking back about racket ball, and Louis agreed to meet him at the Memorial Gym in an hour. He could not really afford the time, and racket ball was the last thing in the world he felt like right now, but he had to get out. He wanted to get away from the cat, that weird cat which had no business being here at all.

He hurried, tucking in his shirt quickly, stuffing a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and a towel into his zipper bag, and trotting down the stairs.

Church was lying on the fourth riser from the bottom. Louis tripped over the cat and almost fell. He managed to grab the bannister and barely save himself from what could have been a nasty fall.

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in snatches, his heart racing, the adrenaline whipping unpleasantly through his body.

Church stood up, stretched… and seemed to grin at him.

Louis left. He should have put the cat out, he knew that, but he didn’t. At that particular moment he didn’t think he could bring himself to touch it.

26

Jud lit a cigarette with a wooden kitchen match, shook it out, and tossed the stub into a tin ashtray with a barely readable Jim Beam advertisement painted on its bottom.

“Ayuh, it was Stanley Bouchard who told me about the place.” He paused, thinking.

Barely touched glasses of beer stood before them on the checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. Behind them, the barrel of range oil clamped to the wall gurgled three times, deliberately, and was still. Louis had caught a pick-up supper with Steve-submarine sandwiches in the mostly deserted Bear’s Den. He had found out early that if you asked for a hoagie or a grinder or a gyro in Maine, they didn’t know what you were talking about. Ask for a sub or a Wop-burger, and you were in business. With some food in him, Louis began to feel better about Church’s return, felt that he had things more in perspective, but he was still not anxious to return to his dark, empty house where the cat could be-let’s face it, gang-anywhere at all.

Norma sat with them for quite a while, watching TV and working on a sampler that showed the sun going down behind a small county meeting house. The cross on the roof tree was silhouetted black against the setting sun. Something to sell, she said, at the church sale the week before Christmas. Always a big event. Her fingers moved well, pushing the needle through the cloth, pulling it up through the steel circle. Her arthritis was barely noticeable tonight. Louis supposed it might be the weather, which had been cold but very dry. She had recovered nicely from her heart attack, and on that evening less than ten weeks before a cerebral accident would kill her, he thought that she looked less haggard and actually younger. On that evening he could see the girl she had been.

At a quarter to ten she said goodnight, and now he sat here with Jud, who had ceased speaking and seemed only to be following his cigarette smoke up and up, like a kid watching a barber pole to see where the stripes go.

“Stanny B.,” Louis prompted gently.

Jud blinked and seemed to come back to himself. “Oh, ayuh,”

he said. “Everyone in Ludlow-round Bucksport and Prospect and Orrington too, I guess-just called him Stanny B. That year my dog Spot died-1910 I mean, the first time he died-Stanny was already an old man and more than a little crazy.

There was others around these parts that knew the Micmac burying ground was there, but it was Stanny B. I heard it from, and he knew about it from his father and his father before him. A whole family of proper Canucks, they were.”

Jud laughed and sipped his beer.

“I can still hear him talking in that broken English of his. He found me sitting behind the livery stable that used to stand on Route 15-except it was just the Bangor-Bucksport Road back then-right about where the Orinco plant is now. Spot wasn’t dead but he was going, and my dad sent me away to check on some chickenfeed, which old Yorky sold back then. We didn’t need chickenfeed any more than a cow needs a blackboard, and I knew well enough why he sent me down there.”

“He was going to kill the dog?”

“He knew how tenderly I felt about Spot, so he sent me away while he did it. I saw about the chickenfeed, and while old Yorky set it out for me I went around back and sat down on the old grindstone that used to be there and just bawled.”

Jud shook his head slowly and gently, still smiling a little.

“And along comes old Stanny B.,” he said. “Half the people in town thought he was soft, and the other half thought he might be dangerous. His grandfather was a big fur trapper and trader in the early 1800s. Stanny’s grandda would go all the way from the Maritimes to Bangor and Derry, sometimes as far south as Skowhegan to buy pelts, or so I’ve heard. He drove a big wagon covered with rawhide strips like something out of a medicine show. He had crosses all over it, for he was a proper Christian and would preach on the Resurrection when he was drunk enough-this is what Stanny said, he loved to talk about his grandda-but he had pagan Indian signs all over it as well because he believed that all Indians, no matter what the tribe, belonged to one big tribe-that lost one of Israel the Bible talks about. He said he believed all Indians were hellbound, but that their magic worked because they were Christians all the same, in some queer, damned way.

“Stanny’s grandda bought from the Micmacs and did a good business with them long after most of the other trappers and traders had given up or gone west because he traded with them at a fair price and because, Stanny said, he knew the whole Bible by heart, and the Micmacs liked to hear him speak the words the blackrobes had spoken to them in the years before the buckskin men and woodsmen came.”

He fell silent. Louis waited.

“The Micmacs told Stanny B. ’s grandda about the burying ground which they didn’t use anymore because the Wendigo had soured the ground, and about Little God Swamp, and the steps, and all the rest.

“The Wendigo story, now, that was something you could hear in those days all over the north country. It was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories. Norma would damn me for a profaner if she heard me say that, but Louis, it’s true. Sometimes, if the winter was long and hard and the food was short, there were north country Indians who would finally get down to the bad place where it was starve or… or do something else.”

“Cannibalism?”

Jud shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe they’d pick out someone who was old and used up, and then there would be stew for a while. And the story they worked out would be that the Wendigo had walked through their village or encampment while they were sleepin and touched them. And the Wendigo was supposed to give those it touched a taste for the flesh of their own kind.”

Louis nodded. “Saying the devil made them do it.”

“Sure. My own guess is that the Micmacs around here had to do it at some point and that they buried the bones of whoever they ate-one or two, maybe even ten or a dozen-up there in their burying ground.”

“And then decided the ground had gone sour,” Louis muttered.

“So here’s Stanny B., come out in back of the livery to get his jug, I guess,”

Jud said, “already half-crocked, he was. His grandfather was worth maybe a million dollars when he died-or so people said-and Stanny B. was nothing but the local ragman. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him. He saw I’d been bawling, and he told me there was a way it could be fixed up, if I was brave and sure I wanted it fixed up.

“I said I’d give anything to have Spot well again, and I asked him if he knew a vet that could do it. ‘Don’t know no vet, me,’ Stanny said, ‘but I know how to fix your dog, boy. You go home now and tell your dad to put that dog in a grain sack, but you ain’t gonna bury him, no! You gonna drag him up to the Pet Sematary and you gonna put him in the shade by that big deadfall. Then you gonna come back and say it’s done. ’ “I asked him what good that would do, and Stanny told me to stay awake that night and come out when he threw a stone against my window. ‘And it be midnight, boy, so if you forget Stanny B. and go to sleep, Stanny B. gonna forget you, and it’s goodbye dog, let him go straight to Hell!”

Jud looked at Louis and lit another cigarette.

“It went just the way Stanny set it up. When I got back, my dad said he’d put a bullet in Spot’s head to spare him any more suffering. I didn’t even have to say anything about the Pet Sematary; my dad asked me if I didn’t think Spot would want me to bury him up there, and I said I guessed he would. So off I went, dragging my dog in a grain sack. My dad asked me if I wanted help, and I said no because I remembered what Stanny B. said.

“I laid awake that night-forever, seemed like. You know how time is for kids. It would seem to me I must have stayed awake right around until morning, and then the clock would only chime ten or eleven. A couple of times I almost nodded off, but each time I snapped wide awake again. It was almost as if someone had shaken me and said, ‘Wake up, Jud! Wake up!’ Like something wanted to make sure I stayed awake.”

Louis raised his eyebrows at that, and Jud shrugged.

“When the clock in the downstairs hall chimed twelve, I got right up and sat there dressed on my bed with the moon shinin in the window. Next I know, the clock is chimin the half-hour, then one o’clock, and still no Stanny B. He’s forgot all about me, that dumb Frenchman, I think to myself, and I’m gettin ready to take my clothes off again when these two pebbles whap off the window, damn near hard enough to break the glass. One of them did put a crack in a pane, but I never noticed it until the next morning, and my mother didn’t see it until the next winter, and by then she thought the frost done it.

“I just about flew across to that window and heaved it up. It grated and rumbled against the frame, the way they only seem to do when you’re a kid and you want to get out after midnight-” Louis laughed, even though he could not remember ever having wanted to get out of the house at some dark hour when he was a boy of ten. Still, if he had wanted to, he was sure that windows which had never creaked in the daytime would creak then.

“I figured my folks must have thought burglars were trying to break in, but when my heart quieted down I could hear my dad still sawin wood in the bedroom on the first floor. I looked out and there was Stanny B., standin in our driveway and lookin up, swayin like there was a high wind when there wasn’t so much as a puff of breeze. I don’t think he ever would have come, Louis, except that he’d gotten to that stage of drunkenness where you’re as wide awake as an owl with diarrhea and you just don’t give a care about anything. And he sort of yells up at me-only I guess he thought he was whispering-’You comin down, boy, or am I comin up to get you?’ “Shh!’ I says, scared to death now that my dad will wake up and give me the whopping of my young life. ‘What’d you say?’ Stanny says, even louder than before. If my parents had been around on the road side of this house, Louis, I would have been a goner. But they had the bedroom that belongs to Norma and me now, with the river view.”

“I bet you got down those stairs in one hell of a hurry,” Louis said. “Have you got another beer, Jud?” He was already two past his usual limit, but tonight that seemed okay. Tonight that seemed almost mandatory.

“I do, and you know where they’re kept,” Jud said and lit a fresh smoke. He waited until Louis was seated again. “No, I wouldn’t have dared to try the stairs. They went past my parents’ bedroom. I went down the ivy trellis, hand over hand, just as quick as I could. I was some scared, I can tell you, but I think I was more scared of my dad just then than I was of going up to the Pet Sematary with Stanny B.”

He crushed out his smoke.

“We went up there, the two of us, and I guess Stanny B. must have fallen down half a dozen times if he fell down once. He was really far gone; smelled like he’d fallen into a vat of corn. One time he damn near put a stick through his throat. But he had a pick and shovel with him. When we got to the Pet Sematary, I

kind of expected he’d sling me the pick and shovel and just pass out while I dug the hole.

“Instead he seemed to sober up a little. He told me we was goin on, up over the deadfall and deeper into the woods, where there was another burial place. I looked at Stanny, who was so drunk he could barely keep his feet, and I looked at that deadfall, and I said, ‘You can’t climb that, Stanny B., you’ll break your neck. ’ “And he said, ‘I ain’t gonna break my neck, me, and neither are you. I can walk and you can lug your dog. ’ And he was right. He sailed up over that deadfall just as smooth as silk, never even looking down, and I lugged Spot all the way up there, although he must have weighed thirty-five pounds or so and I only went about ninety myself. I want to tell you, though, Louis, I was some sore and sprung the next day. How do you feel today?”

Louis didn’t answer, only nodded.

“We walked and we walked,” Jud said. “It seemed to me we was gonna walk forever.

The woods were spookier in those days. More birds calling from the trees, and you didn’t know what any of em was. Animals moving around out there. Deer, most likely, but back then there were moose too and bears and catamounts. I dragged Spot. After a while I started to get the funny idea that old Stanny B. was gone and I was following an Indian. Following an Indian and somewhere farther along he’d turn around, all grinning and black-eyed, his face streaked up with that stinking paint they made from bearfat; that he’d have a tommyhawk made out of a wedge of slate and a hake of ashwood all tied together with rawhide, and he’d grab me by the back of the neck and whack off my hair-along with the top of my skull. Stanny wasn’t staggerin or fallin anymore; he just walked straight and easy, with his head up, and that sort of helped to feed the idea. But when we got to the edge of the Little God Swamp and he turned around to talk to me, I seen it was Stanny, all right, and the reason he wasn’t staggerin or fallin anymore was because he was scared. Scairt himself sober, he did.

“He told me the same things I told you last night-about the loons, and the St.

Elmo’s fire, and how I wasn’t to take any notice of anything I saw or heard.

Most of all, he said, don’t speak to anything if it should speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I ain’t going to tell you what, only that I’ve been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and I’ve never seen anything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was my last trip.”

I’m not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally-the three beers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own mind’s ear. I am not sitting here believing this story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets that come back to life, am I? For Christ’s sake, the cat was stunned, that’s all, a car hit it and stunned it-no big deal. This is a senile old man’s maunderings.

Except that it wasn’t, and Louis knew it wasn’t, and three beers wasn’t going to cure that knowing, and thirty-three beers wouldn’t.

Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor but the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Jud’s eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he had seen-or thought he had seen-in Jud’s eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. He remembered thinking that Jud’s decision to take Louis and Ellie’s cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Jud’s own.

If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortable question away.

“I buried Spot and built the cairn,” Jud went on flatly, “and by the time I was done, Stanny B. was fast asleep. I had to shake the hell out of him to get him going again, but by the time we got down those forty-four stairs-”

“Forty-five,” Louis murmured.

Jud nodded. “Yeah, that’s right, ain’t it? Forty-five. By the time we got down those forty-five stairs, he was walking as steady as if he was sober again. We went back through the swamp and the woods and over the deadfall, and finally we crossed the road and we was at my house again. It seemed to me like ten hours must have gone past, but it was still full dark.

“What happens now?’ I ask Stanny B. ‘Now you wait and see what may happen,’ Stanny says, and off he walks, staggering and lurching again.

I imagine he slept out in back of the livery that night, and as things turned out, my dog Spot outlived Stanny B. by two years. His liver went bad and poisoned him, and two little kids found him in the road on July 4, 1912, stiff as a poker.

“But me, that night, I just climbed back up the ivy and got into bed and fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.

“Next morning 1 didn’t get up until almost nine o’clock, and then my mother was calling me. My dad worked on the railroad, and he would have been gone since six.” Jud paused, thinking. “My mother wasn’t just calling me, Louis. She was screaming for me.”

Jud went to the fridge, got himself a Miller’s, and opened it on the drawer handle below the breadhox and toaster. His face looked yellow in the overhead light, the color of nicotine. He drained half his beer, uttered a belch like a gunshot, and then glanced down the hail toward the room where Norma slept. He looked back at Louis.

“This is hard for me to talk about,” he said. “I have turned it over in my mind, years and years, but I’ve never told anyone about it. Others knew what had happened, but they never talked to me about it. The way it is about sex, I guess. I’m telling you, Louis, because you’ve got a different kind of pet now.

Not necessarily a dangerous one, but… different. Do you find that’s true?”

Louis thought of Church jumping awkwardly off the toilet seat, his haunches thudding against the side of the tub; he thought of those muddy eyes that were almost but not quite stupid staring into his own.

At last he nodded.

“When I got downstairs, my mother was backed into a corner in the pantry between our icebox and one of the counters. There was a bunch of white stuff on the floor-curtains she’d been meaning to hang. Standing in the doorway of the pantry was Spot, my dog. There was dirt all over him and mud splashed clear up his legs. The fur on his belly was filthy, all knotted and snarled. He was just standing there-not growling or nothing-just standing there, but it was pretty clear that he had backed her into a corner, whether he meant to or not. She was in terror, Louis. I don’t know how you felt about your parents, but I know how I felt about mine-I loved them both dearly. Knowing I’d done something to put my own mother in terror took away any joy I might have felt when I saw Spot standing there. I didn’t even seem to feel surprised that he was there.”

“I know the feeling,” Louis said. “When I saw Church this morning, I just…

it seemed like something that was-” He paused a moment. Perfectly natural? Those were the words that came immediately to mind, but they were not the right words.

“Like something that was meant.”

“Yes,” Jud said. He lit a fresh cigarette. His hands were shaking the smallest bit. “And my mother seen me there, still in my underwear, and she screamed at me, ‘Feed your dog, Jud! Your dog needs to be fed, get him out of here before he messes the curtains!’ “So I found him some scraps and called him, and at first he didn’t come, at first it was like he didn’t know his own name, and I almost thought, well, this ain’t Spot at all, it’s some stray that looks like Spot, that’s all-”

“Yes!” Louis exclaimed.

Jud nodded. “But the second or third time I called him, he came. He sort of jerked toward me, and when I led him out onto the porch, damned if he didn’t run right into the side of the door and just about fall over. He ate the scraps though, just wolfed them down. By then I was over my first fright and was starting to get an idea of what had happened. I got on my knees and hugged him, I was so glad to see him. Then he licked my face, and… “ Jud shuddered and finished his beer.

“Louis, his tongue was cold. Being licked by Spot was like getting rubbed up the side of your face with a dead carp.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Louis said, “Go on.”

“He ate, and when he was done, I got an old tub we kept for him out from under the back porch, and I gave him a bath. Spot always hated to have a bath; usually it took both me and my dad to do it, and we’d end up with our shirts off and our pants soaked, my dad cussing and Spot looking sort of ashamed-the way dogs do.

And more likely than not he’d roll around in the dirt right after and then go over by my mother’s clothesline to shake off and put dirt all over the sheets she had hung and she’d scream at both of us that she was going to shoot that dog for a stranger before she got much older.

“But that day Spot just sat in the tub and let me wash him. He never moved at all. I didn’t like it. It was like… like washing meat. I got an old piece of towel after I gave him his bath and dried him all off. I could see the places where the barbed wire had hooked him-there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in. It is the way an old wound looks after it’s been healed five years and more.”

Louis nodded. In his line of work, he had seen such things from time to time.

The wound never seemed to fill in completely, and that made him think of graves and his days as an undertaker's apprentice, and how there was never enough dirt to fill them in again.

“Then I saw his head. There was another of those dimples there, but the fur had grown back white in a little circle. It was near his ear.”

“Where your father shot him,” Louis said.

Jud nodded.

“Shooting a man or an animal in the head isn’t as sure-fire as it sounds, Jud.

There are would-be suicides in vegetable wards or even walking around right as rain who didn’t know that a bullet can strike the skull plate and travel right around it in a semicircle, exiting the other side without ever penetrating the brain. I personally saw one case where a fellow shot himself above the right ear and died because the bullet went around his head and tore open his jugular vein on the other side of his head. That bullet path looked like a county roadmap.”

Jud smiled and nodded. “I remember reading somethin like that in one of Norma’s newspapers, the Star or the Enquirer-one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone.”

“All right,” Louis said. “If you say that’s how it was, that is how it was.”

“Was your daughter’s cat gone?”

“I sure thought it was,” Louis said.

“You got to do better than that. You’re a doctor.”

“You make it sound like ‘You got to do better than that, Louis, you’re God. ’ I’m not God. It was dark-”

“Sure, it was dark, and his head swiveled on his neck like it was full of ball bearings, and when you moved him, he pulled out of the frost, Louis-sounded like a piece of sticky tape comin off a letter. Live things don’t do that. You only stop meltin the frost under where you’re layin when you’re dead.”

In the other room, the clock struck ten-thirty.

“What did your father say when he came home and saw the dog?” Louis asked.

“I was out in the driveway, shooting marbles in the dirt, more or less waitin for him. I felt like I always felt when I’d done something wrong and knew I was probably gonna get a spankin. He come in through the gateposts about eight o’clock, wearin his bib overalls and his pillow-tick cap… you ever seen one of those?”

Louis nodded, then stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

“Yeah, gettin late,” Jud said. “Got to finish this up.”

“It’s not that late,” Louis said. “I’m just a few beers ahead of my usual pace.

Go on, Jud. Take your time. I want to hear this.”

“My dad had an old lard tin he kept his dinner in,” Jud said, “and he come in through the gate swingin it, empty, by the handle, you know. Whisflin somethin.

It was gettin dark, but he seen me there in the gloom and he says, ‘Hi there, Judkins!’ like he would do, and then, ‘Where’s your-’ “He got that far, and then here comes Spot out of the dark, not runnin like he usually did, ready to jump all over him he was so glad to see him, but just walkin, waggin his tail, and my dad dropped that lard bucket and stepped back. I don’t know b’what he would have turned tail and run except his back hit the picket fence and then he just stood there, looking at the dog. And when Spot did jump up, Dad just caught his paws and held them, like you might hold a lady’s hands you was gettin ready to dance with. He looked at the dog for a long time and then he looked at me, and he said, ‘He needs a bath, Jud. He stinks of the ground you buried him in. ’ And then he went in the house.”

“What did you do?” Louis asked.

“Gave him another bath. He just sat there in the tub and took it again. And when I went in the house, my mother had gone to bed, even though it wasn’t even nine o’clock. My dad said, ‘We got to talk, Judkins. ’ And I set down across from him, and he talked to me like a man for the first time in my life with the smell of the honeysuckle coming across the road from what’s your house now and the smell of the wild roses from our own house.”

Jud Crandall sighed. “I had always thought it would be good to have him talk to me that way, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit good. All this tonight, Louis-it’s like when you look into a mirror that’s been set up right across from another mirror, and you can see yourself going down a whole hail of mirrors. How many times has this story been passed along, I wonder? A story that’s just the same, except for the names? And that’s like the sex thing too, isn’t it?”

“Your dad knew all about it.”

“Ayuh. ‘Who took you up there, Jud?’ he asked me, and I told him. He just nodded like it was what he would have expected. I guess it prob’ly was, although I found out later that there were six or eight people in Ludlow at that time that could have taken me up there. I guess he knew that Stanny B. was the only one crazy enough to have actually done it.”

“Did you ask him why he didn’t take you, Jud?”

“I did,” Jud said. “Somewhere during that long talk I did ask him that. And he said it was a bad place, by and large, and that it didn’t often do anything good for people who had lost their animals or for the animals themselves. He asked me if I liked Spot the way he was, and do you know, Louis, I had the hardest time answering that… and it’s important that I tell you my feelings on that, because sooner or later you’re going to ask me why I led you up there with your daughter’s cat if it was a bad thing to do. Isn’t that so?”

Louis nodded. What was Ellie going to think about Church when she got back? That had been much on his mind while he and Steve Masterton had been playing racket ball that afternoon.

“Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better,” Jud said with some difficulty. “That’s somethin your Ellie don’t know, and I got a feelin that maybe she don’t know because your wife don’t know. Now, you go ahead and tell me if I’m wrong, and we’ll leave it.”

Louis opened his mouth and then closed it again.

Jud went on, now speaking very slowly, appearing to move from word to word as they had moved from hummock to hummock in Little God Swamp the night before.

“I’ve seen it happen over the years,” he said. “I guess I told you that Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus named Hanratty. Ain’t that a silly name for a bull?

Died of some sort of ulcer inside, and Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge. How he did it-how he got over the deadfall there I dunno-but it’s said that what you want to do, you can. And at least as far as that burying ground goes, I’d say it’s true.

“Well, Hanratty came back, but Lester shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he’s the only animal I ever heard of that did.

Most of them just seem.

a little stupid… a little slow… a little… “ “A little dead?”

“Yeah,” Jud said. “A little dead. Like they had been… somewhere… and came back… but not all the way. Now, your daughter isn’t going to know that, Louis. Not that her cat was hit by a car, and killed, and came back. So you could say you can’t teach a child a lesson unless the child knows there’s a lesson to be learned. Except…

“Except sometimes you can,” Louis said, more to himself than to Jud.

“Yes,” Jud agreed, “sometimes you can. Maybe she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life, but the end of pain. You don’t tell her those things; she will figure them out on her own.

“And if she’s anything like me, she’ll go on loving her pet. It won’t turn vicious, or bite, or anything like that. She’ll go on loving it… but she’ll draw her own conclusions… and she’ll breathe a sigh of relief when it finally dies.”

“That’s why you took me up there,” Louis said. He felt better now. He had an explanation. It was diffuse, it relied more upon the logic of the nerve endings than the logic of the rational mind, but under the circumstances, he found he could accept that. And it meant he could forget the expression he thought he had seen on Jud’s face briefly last night-that dark, capering glee. “Okay, that’s-”

Abruptly, almost shockingly, Jud covered his face with both hands. For one moment Louis thought he had been struck by a sudden pain, and he half-rose, concerned, until he saw the convulsive heave of the chest and realized that the old man was struggling not to cry.

“That’s why, but it ain’t why,” he said in a strangled, choked voice. “I did it for the same reason Stanny B. did it and for the same reason Lester Morgan did it. Lester took Linda Lavesque up there after her dog got run over in the road. He took her up there even though he had to put his goddam bull out of its misery for chasing kids through its pasture like it was mad. He did it anyway, he did it anyway, Louis,” Jud almost moaned, “and what the Christ do you make of that!”

“Jud, what are you talking about?” Louis asked, alarmed.

“Lester did it and Stanny did it for the same reason I did it. You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place, and you want to share the secret, and when you find a reason that seems good enough, why… “ Jud took his hands away from his face and looked at Louis with eyes that seemed incredibly ancient, incredibly haggard. “Why then you just go ahead and do it. You make up reasons… they seem like good reasons… but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to. My dad, he didn’t take me up there because he’d heard about it but he’d never been. Stanny B. had been up there… and he took me… and seventy years go by… and then… all at once… “ Jud shook his head and coughed dryly into the palm of his hand.

“Listen,” he said. “Listen, Louis. Lester’s bull was the only damn animal I ever knew of that turned really mean. I b’lieve that Missus Lavesque’s little chow might have bit the postman once, after, and I heard a few other things…

animals that got a little nasty… but Spot was always a good dog. He always smelled like dirt, it didn’t matter how many times you washed him, he always smelled like dirt-but he was a good dog. My mother would never touch him afterward, but he was a good dog just the same. But Louis, if you was to take your cat out tonight and kill it, I would never say a word.

“That place… all at once it gets hold of you… and you make up the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world… but I could have been wrong, Louis.

That's all I’m saying. Lester could have been wrong. Stanny B. could have been wrong. Hell, I ain’t God either. But bringing the dead back to life… that’s about as close to playing God as you can get, ain’t it?”

Louis opened his mouth again, then closed it again. What would have come out would have sounded wrong, wrong and cruel: Jud, I didn’t go through all that just to kill the damn cat again.

Jud drained his beer and then put it carefully aside with the other empties. “I guess that’s it,” he said. “I am talked out.”

“Can I ask you one other question?” Louis asked.

“I guess so,” Jud said.

Louis said: “Has anyone ever buried a person up there?” Jud’s arm jerked convulsively; two of the beer bottles fell off the table, and one of them shattered.

“Christ on His throne,” he said to Louis. “No! And who ever would? You don’t even want to talk about such things, Louis!”

“I was just curious,” Louis said uneasily.

“Some things it don’t pay to be curious about,” Jud Crandall said, and for the first time he looked really old and infirm to Louis Creed, as if he were standing somewhere in the neighborhood of his own freshly prepared grave.

And later, at home, something else occurred to him about how Jud had looked at that moment.

He had looked like he was lying.

27

Louis didn’t really know he was drunk until he got back in his own garage.

Outside there was starlight and a chilly rind of moon. Not enough light to cast a shadow, but enough to see by. Once he got in the garage, he was blind. There was a light switch somewhere, but he was damned if he could remember anymore just where it was. He felt his way along slowly, shuffling his feet, his head swimming, anticipating a painful crack on the knee or a toy that he would stumble over, frightening himself with its crash, perhaps falling over himself.

Ellie’s little Schwinn with its red training wheels. Gage’s Crawly-Gator.

Where was the eat? Had he left him in?

Somehow he sailed off course and ran into the wall. A splinter whispered into one palm and he cried out “Shit!” to the darkness, realizing after the word was out that it sounded more seared than mad. The whole garage seemed to have taken a stealthy half-turn. Now it wasn’t just the light switch; now he didn’t know where the fuck anything was, and that included the door into the kitchen.

He began walking again, moving slowly, his palm stinging. This is what it would be like to be blind, he thought, and that made him think of a Stevie Wonder concert he and Rachel had gone to-when? Six years ago? As impossible as it seemed, it had to be. She had been pregnant with Ellie then. Two guys had led Wonder to his synthesizer, guiding him over the cables that snaked across the stage so he wouldn’t stumble. And later, when he had gotten up to dance with one of the back-up singers, she had led him carefully to a clear place on the floor.

He had danced well, Louis remembered thinking. He had danced well, but he had needed a hand to lead him to the space where he could do it.

How about a hand right now to lead me to my kitchen door? he thought… and abruptly shuddered.

If a hand came out of the darkness now to lead him, how he would scream-scream and scream and scream.

He stood still, heart thudding. Come on, he told himself. Stop this shit, come on, come on-Where was that fucking cat?

Then he did slam into something, the rear bumper of the station wagon, and the pain sang up his body from his barked shin, making his eyes water. He grabbed his leg and rubbed it, standing one-legged like a heron, but at least he knew where he was now, the geography of the garage fixed firmly in his mind again, and besides, his night vision was coming, good old visual purple. He had left the cat in, he remembered that now, hadn’t really wanted to touch it, to pick it up and put it out and-And that was when Church’s hot, furry body oiled against his ankle like a low eddy of water, followed by its loathsome tail, curling against his calf like a clutching snake, and then Louis did scream; he opened his mouth wide and screamed.

28

“Daddy!” Ellie screamed.

She ran up the jet way toward him, weaving in and out between deplaning passengers like a quarterback on a keeper play. Most of them stood aside, grinning. Louis was a little embarrassed by her ardor, but he felt a large, stupid grin spreading across his own face just the same.

Rachel was carrying Gage in her arms, and he saw Louis when Ellie shouted.

“Dayeee!” he yelled exuberantly and began to wriggle in Rachel’s arms. She smiled (a trifle wearily, Louis thought) and set him on his feet. He began to run after Ellie, his legs pumping busily. “Dayeee! Dayeee!”

Louis had time to notice that Gage was wearing a jumper he had never seen before-it looked like more of Grandda’s work to Louis. Then Ellie hurtled into him and shinnied up him like a tree.

“Hi, Daddy!” she bellowed and smacked his cheek heartily.

“Hi, hon,” he said and bent over to catch Gage. He pulled him up into the crook of his arm and hugged them both. “I’m glad to see you back.”

Rachel came up then, her traveling bag and pocketbook slung over one arm, Gage’s diaper bag slung over the other. I’LL BE A BIG BOY SOON was printed on the side of the diaper bag, a sentiment probably meant more to cheer up the parents than the diaper-wearing child. She looked like a professional photographer at the end of a long, grueling assignment.

Louis bent between his two kids and planted a kiss on her mouth. “Hi.”

“Hi, Doe,” she said, and smiled.

“You look beat.”

“I am beat. We got as far as Boston with no problem. We changed planes with no problem. We took off with no problem. But as the plane is banking over the city, Gage looks down and says, ‘Pretty, pretty,’ and then whoopses all over himself.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I got him changed in the toilet,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a virus or anything. He was just airsick.”

“Come on home,” Louis said. “I’ve got chili on the stove.”

“Chili! Chili!” Ellie screamed in Louis’s ear, transported with delight and excitement.

“Chiwwi! Chiwwi!” Gage screamed in Louis’s other ear, which at least equalized the ringing.

on,” Louis said. “Let’s get your suitcases and blow this joint.

“Daddy, how’s Church?” Ellie asked as he set her down. It was a question Louis had expected, but not Ellie’s anxious face, and the deep worry line that appeared between her dark blue eyes. Louis frowned and then glanced at Rachel.

“She woke up screaming over the weekend,” Rachel said quietly. “She had a nightmare.”

“I dreamed that Church got run over,” Ellie said.

“Too many turkey sandwiches after the big day, that’s my guess,” Rachel said.

“She had a bout of diarrhea too. Set her mind at rest, Louis, and let’s get out of this airport. I’ve seen enough airports in the last week to last me for at least five years.”

“Why, Church is fine, honey,” Louis said slowly.

Yes, he’s fine. He lies around the house all day long and looks at me with those strange, muddy eyes-as if he’d seen something that had blasted away most of whatever intelligence a cat has. He’s just great. 1 put him out with a broom at night because I don’t like to touch him. I just kind of sweep at him with it and he goes. And the other day when 1 opened the door, Ellie, he had a mouse-or what was left of it. He’d strewed the guts hell to breakfast. And speaking of breakfast, I skipped mine that morning. Otherwise-“He’s just fine.”

“Oh,” Ellie said, and that furrow between her eyes smoothed out. “Oh, that’s good. When I had that dream, I was sure he was dead.”

“Were you?” Louis asked, and smiled. “Dreams are funny, aren’t they?”

“Dweems!” Cage hollered-he had reached the parrot stage that Louis remembered from Ellie’s development. “Dweeeeeems!” He gave Louis’s hair a hearty tug.

“Come on, gang,” Louis said, and they started down to the baggage area.

They had gotten as far as the station wagon in the parking lot when Gage began saying “Pretty, pretty,” in a strange, hiccupping voice. This time he whoopsed all over Louis, who had put on a new pair of double-knit slacks for the plane-meeting occasion. Apparently Gage thought pretty was the code word for I’ve got to throw up now, so sorry, stand clear.

It turned out to be a virus after all.

By the time they had driven the seventeen miles from the Bangor airport to their house in Ludlow, Gage had begun to show signs of fever and had fallen into an uncomfortable doze. Louis backed into the garage, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Church slink along one wall, tail up, strange eyes fixed on the car.

It disappeared into the dying glow of the day, and a moment later Louis saw a disemboweled mouse lying beside a stack of four summer tires-he had had the snows put on while Rachel and the kids were gone. The mouse’s innards glowed pink and raw in the garage’s gloom.

Louis got out quickly and purposely bumped against the pile of tires, which were stacked up like black checkers. The top two fell over and covered the mouse.

“Ooops,” he said.

“You’re a spaz, Daddy,” Ellie said, not unkindly.

“That’s right,” Louis said with a kind of hectic cheer. He felt a little like saying Pretty, pretty and blowing his groceries all over everything. “Daddy’s a spaz.” He could remember Church killing only a single rat before his queer resurrection; he sometimes cornered mice and played with them in that deadly cat way that ultimately ended in destruction, but he or Ellie or Rachel had always intervened before the end. And once cats were fixed, he knew, few of them would do more than give a mouse an interested stare, at least as long as they were well-fed.

“Are you going to stand there dreaming or help me with this kid?” Rachel asked.

“Come back from Planet Mongo, Dr. Creed. Earth people need you.” She sounded tired and irritable.

“I’m sorry, babe,” Louis said. He came around to get Gage, who was now as hot as the coals in a banked stove.

So only the three of them ate Louis’s famous South Side Chili that night; Gage reclined on the living room sofa, feverish and apathetic, drinking a bottle filled with lukewarm chicken broth and watching a cartoon show on TV.

After dinner Ellie went to the garage door and called Church. Louis, who was doing the dishes while Rachel unpacked upstairs, hoped the cat wouldn’t come, but he did-he came in walking in his new slow lurch, and he came almost at once, as if he-as if it-had been lurking out there. Lurking. The word came immediately to mind.

“Church!” Ellie cried. “Hi, Church!” She picked the cat up and hugged it. Louis watched out of the corner of his eye; his hands, which had been groping on the bottom of the sink for any leftover silverware, were still. He saw Ellie’s happy face change slowly to puzzlement. The cat lay quiet in her arms, its ears laid back, its eyes on hers.

After a long moment-it seemed very long to Louis-she put Church down. The cat padded away toward the dining room without looking back. Executioner of small mice, Louis thought randomly. Christ, what did we do that night?

He tried honestly to remember, but it already seemed far away, dim and distant, like the messy death of Victor Pascow on the floor of the infirmary’s reception room. He could remember carriages of wind passing in the sky and the white glimmer of snow in the back field which rose to the woods. That was all.

“Daddy?” Ellie said in a low, subdued voice.

‘What, Ellie?”

“Church smells funny.”

“Does he?” Louis asked, his voice carefully neutral.

“Yes!” Ellie said, distressed. “Yes, he does! He never smelled funny before! He smells like… he smells like ka-ka!”

“Well, maybe he rolled in something bad, honey,” Louis said. “Whatever that bad smell is, he’ll lose it.”

“I certainly hope so,” Ellie said in a comical dowager’s voice. She walked off.

Louis found the last fork, washed it, and pulled the plug. He stood at the sink, looking out into the night while the soapy water ran down the drain with a thick chuckling sound.

When the sound from the drain was gone he could hear the wind outside, thin and wild, coming from the north, bringing down winter, and he realized he was afraid, simply, stupidly afraid, the way you are afraid when a cloud suddenly sails across the sun and somewhere you hear a ticking sound you can’t account for.

“A hundred and three?” Rachel asked. “Jesus, Lou! Are you sure?”

“It’s a virus,” Louis said. He tried not to let Rachel’s voice, which seemed almost accusatory, grate on him. She was tired. It had been a long day for her; she had crossed half the country with her kids today. Here it was eleven o’clock, and the day wasn’t over yet. Ellie was deeply asleep in her room. Gage was on their bed in a state that could best be described as semiconscious.

Louis had started him on Liquiprin an hour ago. “The aspirin will bring his fever down by morning, hon.”

“Aren’t you going to give him ampicfflin or anything?”

Patiently, Louis said, “If he had the flu or a strep infection, I would. He doesn’t. He’s got a virus, and that stuff doesn’t do doodly-squat for viruses.

It would just give him the runs and dehydrate him more.”

“Are you sure it’s a virus?”

“Well, if you want a second opinion,” Louis snapped, “be my guest.”

“You don’t have to shout at me!” Rachel shouted.

“I wasn’t shouting!” Louis shouted back.

“You were,” Rachel began, “you were shuh-shuh-shouting-” And then her mouth began to quiver and she put a hand up to her face. Louis saw there were deep gray-brown pockets under her eyes and felt badly ashamed of himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and sat down beside her. “Christ, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I apologize, Rachel.”

“Never complain, never explain,” she said, smiling wanly. “Isn’t that what you told me once? The trip was a bitch. And I’ve been afraid you’d hit the roof when you looked in Gage’s dresser drawers. I guess maybe I ought to tell you now, while you’re feeling sorry for me.”

“What’s to hit the roof about?”

She smiled wanly. “My mother and father bought him ten new outfits. He was wearing one of them today.”

“I noticed he had on something new,” he said shortly.

“I noticed you noticing,” she replied and pulled a comic scowl that made him laugh, although he didn’t feel much like laughing. “And six new dresses for Ellie.”

“Six dresses!” he said, strangling the urge to yell. He was suddenly furious-sickly furious and hurt in a way he couldn’t explain. “Rachel, why? Why did you let him do that? We don’t need… we can buy… “ He ceased. His rage had made him inarticulate, and for a moment he saw himself carrying Ellie’s dead cat through the woods, shifting the plastic bag from one hand to the other… and all the while Irwin Goldman, that dirty old fuck from Lake Forest, had been busy trying to buy his daughter’s affection by unlimbering the world-famous checkbook and the world-famous fountain pen.

For one moment he felt himself on the verge of shouting He bought her six dresses and I brought her goddam cat back from the dead, so who loves her more?

He clamped down on the words. He would never say anything like that. Never.

She touched his neck gently. “Louis,” she said. “It was both of them together.

Please try to see. Please. They love the children, and they don’t see them much.

And they’re getting old. Louis, you’d hardly recognize my father. Really.”

“I’d recognize him,” Louis muttered.

“Please, honey. Try to see. Try to be kind. It doesn’t hurt you.” He looked at her for a long time. “It does though,” he said finally. “Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.”

She opened her mouth to reply, and then Ellie called out from her room: “Daddy!

Mommy! Somebody!”

Rachel started to get up, and Louis pulled her back down. “Stay with Gage. I’ll go.” He thought he knew what the trouble was. But he had put the cat out, damn it; after Ellie had gone to bed, he had caught it in the kitchen sniffing around its dish and had put it out. He didn’t want the cat sleeping with her. Not anymore. Odd thoughts of disease, mingled with memories of Uncle Carl’s funeral parlor, had come to him when he thought of Church sleeping on Ellie’s bed.

She’s going to know that something’s wrong and Church was better before.

He had put the cat out, but when be went in, Ellie was sitting up in bed, more asleep than awake, and Church was spread out on the counterpane, a batlike shadow. The cat’s eyes were open and stupidly gleaming in the light from the hail.

“Daddy, put him out,” Ellie almost groaned. “He stinks so bad.”

“Shhh, Ellie, go to sleep,” Louis said, astounded by the calmness of his own voice. It made him think of the morning after his sleepwalking incident, the day after Pascow had died. Getting to the infirmary and ducking into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror, convinced that he must look like hell. But he had looked pretty much all right. It was enough to make you wonder how many people were going around with dreadful secrets bottled up inside.

It’s not a secret, goddammit! It’s just the cat!

But Ellie was right. It stank to high heaven.

He took the cat out of her room and carried it downstairs, trying to breathe through his mouth. There were worse smells; shit was worse, if you wanted to be perfectly blunt. A month ago they’d had a go-round with the septic tank, and as Jud had said when he came over to watch Puffer and Sons pump the tank, “That ain’t Chanel Number Five, is it, Louis?” The smell of a gangrenous wound-what old Doctor Bracermunn at med school had called “hot flesh”-was worse too. Even the smell which came from the Civic’s catalytic converter when it had been idling in the garage for a while was worse.

But this smell was pretty damn bad. And how had the cat gotten in, anyway? He had put it out earlier, sweeping it out with the broom while all three of them-his people-were upstairs. This was the first time he had actually held the cat since the day it had come back, almost a week ago. It lay hotly in his arms, like a quiescent disease, and Louis wondered, What bolthole did you find, you bastard?

He thought suddenly of his dream that other night-Pascow simply passing through the door between the kitchen and the garage.

Maybe there was no bolthole. Maybe it had just passed through the door, like a ghost.

“Bag that,” he whispered aloud, and his voice was slightly hoarse.

Louis became suddenly sure that the cat would begin to struggle in his arms, that it would scratch him. But Church lay totally still, radiating that stupid heat and that dirty stink, looking at Louis’s face as if it could read the thoughts going on behind Louis’s eyes.

He opened the door and tossed the cat out into the garage, maybe a little too hard. “Go on,” he said. “Kill another mouse or something.”

Church landed awkwardly, its hindquarters bunching beneath it and momentarily collapsing. It seemed to shoot Louis a look of green, ugly hate. Then it strolled drunkenly off and was gone.

Christ, Jud, he thought, but I wish you’d kept your mouth shut. He went to the sink and washed his hands and forearms vigorously, as if scrubbing for an operation. You do it because it gets hold of you… you make up reasons…

they seem like good reasons… but mostly you do it because once you’ve been up there, it’s your place, and you belong to it… and you make up the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world.

No, he couldn’t blame Jud. He had gone of his own free will and he couldn’t blame Jud.

He turned off the water and began to dry his hands and arms. Suddenly the towel stopped moving and he stared straight ahead, looking out into the little piece of night framed in the window over the sink.

Does that mean it’s my place now? That it’s mine too?

No. Not if I don’t want it to be.

He slung the towel over the rack and went upstairs.

Rachel was in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, and Gage was tucked in neatly beside her. She looked at Louis apologetically. “Would you mind, hon?

Just for tonight? I’d feel better having him with me. He’s so hot.”

“No,” Louis said. “That’s fine. I’ll pull out the hide-a-bed downstairs.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“No. It won’t hurt Cage, and it’ll make you feel better.” He paused, then smiled. “You’re going to pick up his virus, though. That comes almost guaranteed. I don’t suppose that changes your mind, does it?”

She smiled back and shook her head. “What was Ellie fussing about?”

“Church. She wanted me to take Church away.”

“Ellie wanted Church taken away? That’s a switch.”

“Yeah, it is,” Louis agreed and then added, “She said he smelled bad, and I did think he was a little fragrant. Maybe he rolled in a pile of someone’s mulch, or something.”

“That’s too bad,” Rachel said, rolling over on her side. “I really think Ellie missed Church as much as she missed you.”

“Uh-huh,” Louis said. He bent and kissed her mouth softly. ‘Go to sleep, Rachel.”

“I love you, Lou. I’m glad to be home. And I’m sorry about the couch.”

“It’s okay,” Louis said, and turned out the light.

Downstairs, he stacked the couch cushions, pulled out the hide-a-bed, and tried to prepare himself mentally for a night of having the rod under the thin mattress dig into the small of his back. The bed was sheeted, at least; he wouldn’t have to make it up from scratch. Louis got two blankets from the top shelf in the front hail closet and spread them on the bed. He began to undress, then paused.

You think Church is in again? Fine. Take a walk around and have a look. As you told Rachel, it won’t hurt. May even help. And checking to make sure all the doors are on the latch won’t even catch you a virus.

He took a deliberate tour of the entire downstairs, checking the locks on doors and windows. He had done everything right the first time, and Church was nowhere to be seen.

“There,” he said. “Let’s see you get in tonight, you dumb cat.” He followed this with a mental wish that Church would freeze its balls off. Except that Church of course no longer had any.

He switched off the lights and got into bed. The rod started to press into his back almost immediately, and Louis was thinking he would be awake half the night when he fell asleep. He fell asleep resting uncomfortably on his side in the hide-a-bed, but when he woke up he was.

in the burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary again. This time he was alone. He had killed Church himself this time and then had decided for some reason to bring him back to life a second time. God knew why; Louis didn’t. He had buried Church deeper this time, though, and Church couldn’t dig his way out. Louis could hear the cat crying somewhere under the earth, making a sound like a weeping child. The sound came up through the pores of the ground, through its stony flesh-the sound and the smell, that awful sickish-sweet smell of rot and decay. Just breathing it in made his chest feel heavy, as if a weight was on it.

The crying… the crying.

the crying was still going on…

and the weight was still on his chest.

“Louis!” It was Rachel, and she sounded alarmed. “Louis, can you corner She sounded more than alarmed; she sounded scared, and the crying had a choked, desperate quality to it. It was Cage.

He opened his eyes and stared into Church’s greenish-yellow eyes. They were less than four inches from his own. The cat was on his chest, neatly curled up there like something from an old wives’ tale of breath-stealing. The stink came off it in slow, noxious waves. It was purring.

Louis uttered a cry of disgust and surprise. He shot both hands out in a primitive warding-off gesture. Church thumped off the bed, landed on its side, and walked away in that stumbling lurch.

Jesus! Jesus! It was on me! Oh God, it was right on me!

His disgust could not have been greater if he had awakened to find a spider in his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up.

“Louis!”

He pushed the blankets back and stumbled to the stairs. Faint light spilled from their bedroom. Rachel was standing at the head of the stairs in her nightgown.

“Louis, he’s vomiting again… choking on ft… I’m scared.”

“I’m here,” he said and came up to her, thinking: It got in. Somehow it got in.

From the cellar, probably. Maybe there’s a broken cellar window. In fact there must be a broken window down there. I’ll check it tomorrow when 1 get home.

Hell, before I go to work. I’ll-Gage stopped crying and began to make an ugly, gargling choking sound.

“Louis!” Rachel screamed.

Louis moved fast. Gage was on his side and vomit was trickling out of his mouth onto an old towel Rachel had spread beside him. He was vomiting, yes, but not enough. Most of it was inside, and Gage was blushing with the onset of asphyxiation.

Louis grabbed the boy under the arms, aware in a distant way of how hot his son’s armpits were under the Dr. Denton suit, and put him up on his shoulder as if to burp him. Then Louis snapped himself backward, jerking Cage with him.

Gage’s neck whip-lashed. He uttered a loud bark that was not quite a belch, and an amazing flag of almost solid vomit flew from his mouth and spattered on the floor and the dresser. Cage began to cry again, a solid, bawling sound that was music to Louis’s ears. To cry like that you had to be getting an unlimited supply of oxygen.

Rachel’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the bed, head supported in her hands. She was shaking violently. “He almost died, didn’t he, Louis? He almost ch-ch-ch--oh my God-”

Louis walked around the room with his son in his arms. Gage’s cries were tapering off to whimperings; he was already almost asleep again.

“The chances are fifty to one he would have cleared it himself, Rachel. I just gave him a hand.”

“But he was close,” she said. She looked up at him, and her white-ringed eyes were stunned and unbelieving. “Louis, he was so close.”

Suddenly he remembered her shouting at him in the sunny kitchen: He’s not going to die, no one is going to die around here.

“Honey,” Louis said, “we’re all close. All the time.”

It was milk that had almost surely caused the fresh round of vomiting. Gage had awakened around midnight, she said, an hour or so after Louis had gone to sleep, with his “hungry cry,” and Rachel had gotten him a bottle. She had drowsed off again herself while he was still taking it. About an hour later, the choking spell began.

No more milk, Louis said, and Rachel had agreed, almost humbly. No more milk.

Louis got back downstairs at around a quarter of two and spent fifteen minutes hunting up the cat. During his search, he found the door which communicated between the kitchen and basement standing ajar, as he suspected he would. He remembered his mother telling him about a cat that had gotten quite good at pawing open old-fashioned latches, such as the one on their cellar door. The cat would just climb the edge of the door, she’d said, and pat the thumb plate of the latch with its paw until the door opened. A cute enough trick, Louis thought, but not one he intended to allow Church to practice often. There was, after all, a lock on the cellar door, too. He found Church dozing under the stove and tossed it out the front door without ceremony. On his way back to the hide-a-bed, he closed the cellar door again.

And this time shot the bolt.

29

In the morning, Gage’s temperature was almost normal. His cheeks were chapped, but otherwise he was bright-eyed and full of beans. All at once, in the course of a week it seemed, his meaningless gabble had turned into a slew of words; he would imitate almost anything you said. What Ellie wanted him to say was “shit.”

“Say shit, Gage,” Ellie said over her oatmeal.

“Shit-Gage,” Gage responded agreeably over his own cereal. Louis allowed the cereal on condition that Gage eat it with only a little sugar. And, as usual, Gage seemed to be shampooing with it rather than actually eating it.

Ellie dissolved into giggles.

“Say farts, Gage,” she said.

“Farz-Gage,” Gage said, grinning through the oatmeal spread across his face.

“Farz-n-shit.”

Ellie and Louis broke up. It was impossible not to.

Rachel was not so amused. “That’s enough vulgar talk for one morning, I think,”

she said, handing Louis his eggs.

“Shit-n-farz-n-farz-n-shit,” Gage sang cheerily, and Ellie hid her giggles in her hands. Rachel’s mouth twitched a little, and Louis thought she was looking a hundred percent better in spite of her broken rest. A lot of it was relief, Louis supposed. Gage was better and she was home.

“Don’t say that, Gage,” Rachel said.

“Pretty,” Gage said as a change of pace and threw up all the cereal he had eaten into his bowl.

“Oh, gross-OUT!” Ellie screamed and fled the table.

Louis broke up completely then. He couldn’t help it. He laughed until he was crying and cried until he was laughing again. Rachel and Gage stared at him as if he had gone crazy.

No, Louis could have told them. I’ve been crazy, but I think I’m going to be all right now. I really think I am.

He didn’t know if it was over or not, but it felt over; perhaps that would be enough.

And for a while, at least, it was.

30

Gage’s virus hung on for a week, then cleared up. A week later he came down with a bout of bronchitis. Ellie also caught this and then Rachel; during the period before Christmas, the three of them went around hacking like very old and wheezy hunting dogs. Louis didn’t catch it, and Rachel seemed to hold this against him.

The final week of classes at the university was a hectic one for Louis, Steve, Surrendra, and Charlton. There was no flu-at least not yet-but plenty of bronchitis and several cases of mononucleosis and walking pneumonia. Two days before classes broke for Christmas, six moaning, drunken fraternity boys were brought in by their concerned friends. There were a few moments of confusion gruesomely reminiscent of the Pascow affair. All six of the damned fools had crammed onto one medium-length toboggan (the sixth had actually been sitting on the shoulders of the tail man, from what Louis could piece together) and had set off to ride the toboggan down the hill above the steam plant. Hilarious. Except that after gaining a lot of speed, the toboggan had wandered off course and struck one of the Civil War cannons. The score was two broken arms, a broken wrist, a total of seven broken ribs, a concussion, plus contusions far too numerous to count. Only the boy riding on the shoulders of the tail-ender had escaped completely unscathed, When the toboggan hit the cannon, this fortunate soul flew over it and landed headfirst in a snowbank. Cleaning up the human wreckage hadn’t been fun, and Louis had scored all of the boys liberally with his tongue as he stitched and bandaged and stared into pupils, but telling Rachel about it later, he had again laughed until he cried. Rachel had looked at him strangely, not understanding what was so funny, and Louis couldn’t tell her that it had been a stupid accident, and people had been hurt, but they would all walk away from it. His laughter was partly relief, but it was partly triumph too-won one today, Louis.

The cases of bronchitis in his own family began to clear up around the time that Ellie’s school broke for the holidays on December 16, and the four of them settled down to spend a happy and old-fashioned country Christmas. The house in North Ludlow, which had seemed so strange on that day in August when they pulled into the driveway (strange and even hostile, what with Effie cutting herself out back and Gage getting stung by a bee at almost the same time), had never seemed more like home.

After the kids were finally asleep on Christmas Eve, Louis and Rachel stole downstairs from the attic like thieves, their arms full of brightly colored boxes-a set of Matchbox racers for Gage, who had recently discovered the joys of toy cars, Barbie and Ken dolls for Ellie, a Turn ‘n’ Go, an oversized trike, doll clothes, a play oven with a light bulb inside, other stuff.

The two of them sat side by side in the glow of lights from the tree, fussing the stuff together, Rachel in a pair of silk lounging pajamas, Louis in his robe. He could not remember a more pleasant evening. There was a fire in the fireplace, and every now and then one or the other of them would rise and throw in another chunk of split birch.

Winston Churchill brushed by Louis once, and he pushed the cat away with an almost absent feeling of distaste-that smell. Later he saw Church try to settle down next to Rachel’s leg, and Rachel also gave it a push and an impatient “Scat!” A moment later Louis saw his wife rubbing her palm on one silk-clad thigh, the way you sometimes do when you feel you might have touched something nasty or germy. He didn’t think Rachel was even aware she was doing it.

Church ambled over to the brick hearth and collapsed in front of the fire gracelessly. The cat had no grace at all now, it seemed; it had lost it all on that night Louis rarely allowed himself to think about. And Church had lost something else as well. Louis had been aware of it, but it had taken him a full month to pinpoint it exactly. The cat never purred anymore, and it used to have one of the loudest motors going, particularly when Church was sleeping. There had been nights when Louis had had to get up and close Ellie’s door so he could get to sleep himself.

Now the cat slept like a stone. Like the dead.

No, he reminded himself, there was one exception. The night he had awakened on the hide-a-bed with Church curled up on his chest like a stinking blanket…

Church had been purring that night. It had been making some sound, anyway.

But as Jud Crandall had known-or guessed-it had not been all bad. Louis found a broken window down-cellar behind the furnace, and when the glazier fixed it, he had saved them yea bucks in wasted heating oil. For calling his attention to the broken pane, which he might not have discovered for weeks-months, maybe-he supposed he even owed Church a vote of thanks.

Ellie no longer wanted Church to sleep with her, that was true, but sometimes when she was watching TV, she would let the cat hop up on her lap and go to sleep. But just as often, he thought, hunting through the bag of plastic widgets that were supposed to hold Ellie’s Bat-Cycle together, she would push him down after a few minutes, saying, “Go on, Church, you stink.” She fed him regularly and with love, and even Gage was not above giving old Church an occasional tail tug… more in the spirit of friendliness than in one of meanness, Louis was convinced; he was like a tiny monk yanking a furry bell rope. At these times Church would crawl lackadaisically under one of the radiators where Gage couldn’t get him.

We might have noticed more differences with a dog, Louis thought, but cats are such goddam independent animals anyway. Independent and odd. Fey even. It didn’t surprise him that the old Egyptian queens and pharaohs had wanted their cats mummified and popped into their triangular tombs with them in order to serve as spirit guides in the next world. Cats were weird.

“How you doing with that Bat-Cycle, Chief?”

He held out the finished product. “Ta-dat”

Rachel pointed at the bag, which still had three or four plastic widgets in it.

“What are those?”

“Spares,” Louis said, smiling guiltily.

“You better hope they’re spares. The kid will break her rotten little neck.”

“That comes later,” Louis said maliciously. “When she’s twelve and showing off on her new skateboard.”

She groaned. “Come on, Doc, have a heart!”

Louis stood up, put his hands on the small of his back, and twisted his torso.

His spine crackled. “That’s all the toys.”

“And they’re all together. Remember last year?” She giggled and Louis smiled.

Last year seemingly everything they’d gotten had to be assembled, and they’d been up until almost four o’clock Christmas morning, both of them finishing grouchy and out of sorts. And by midafternoon of Christmas, Ellie had decided the boxes were more fun than the toys.

“Gross-OUT!” Louis said, imitating Ellie.

“Well, come on to bed,” Rachel said, “and I’ll give you a present early.”

“Woman,” Louis said, drawing himself up to his full height, “that is mine by right.”

“Don’t you wish,” she said and laughed through her hands. In that moment she looked amazingly like Ellie… and like Gage.

“Just a minute,” he said. “There’s one other thing I gotta do.” He hurried into the front hail closet and brought back one of his boots. He removed the fire screen from in front of the dying fire.

“Louis, what are you-”

“You’ll see.”

On the left side of the hearth the fire was out and there was a thick bed of fluffy gray ashes. Louis stamped the boot into them, leaving a deep track. Then he tromped the boot down on the outer bricks, using it like a big rubber stamp.

“There,” he said, after he had put the boot away in the closet again. “You like?”

Rachel was giggling again. “Louis, Ellie’s going to go nuts.”

During the last two weeks of school, Ellie had picked up a disquieting rumor around kindergarten, to wit, that Santa Claus was really parents. This idea had been reinforced by a rather skinny Santa at the Bangor Mall, whom Ellie had glimpsed in the Deering Ice Cream Parlor a few days ago. Santa had been sitting on a counter stool, his beard pulled to one side so he could eat a cheeseburger.

This had troubled Ellie mightily (it seemed to be the cheeseburger, somehow, even more than the false beard), in spite of Rachel’s assurances that the department store and Salvation Army Santas were really “helpers,” sent out by the real Santa, who was far too busy completing inventory and reading children’s last-minute letters up north to be boogying around the world on public relations jaunts.

Louis replaced the fire screen carefully. Now there were two clear boot tracks in their fireplace, one in the ashes and one on the hearth. They both pointed toward the Christmas tree, as if Santa had hit bottom on one foot and immediately stepped out to leave the goodies assigned to the Creed household.

The illusion was perfect unless you happened to notice that they were both left feet… and Louis doubted if Ellie was that analytical.

“Louis Creed, I love you,” Rachel said and kissed him.

“You married a winner, baby,” Louis said, smiling sincerely. “Stick with me and I’ll make you a star.”

They started for the stairs. He pointed at the card table Ellie had set up in front of the TV. There were oatmeal cookies and two Ring-Dings on it. Also a can of Micheloeb. FOR YOU, SANNA, the note said in Ellie’s large, sticklike printing. “You want a cookie or a Ring-Ding?”

“Ring-Ding,” she said and ate half of it. Louis popped the tab on the beer.

“A beer this late is going to give me acid indigestion,” he said.

“Crap,” she said good-humoredly. “Come on, Doe.”

Louis put down the can of beer and suddenly grasped the pocket of his robe as if he had forgotten something-although he had been aware of that small packet of weight all evening long.

“Here,” he said. “For you. You can open it now. It’s after midnight. Merry Christmas, babe.”

She turned the little box, wrapped up in silver paper and tied with wide satiny-blue ribbon, in her hands. “Louis, what is it?”

He shrugged. “Soap. Shampoo sample. I forget, exactly.”

She opened it on the stairs, saw the Tiffany box, and squealed. She pulled out the cotton batting and then just stood there, her mouth slightly agape.

“Well?” he asked anxiously. He had never bought her a real piece of jewelry before, and he was nervous. “Do you like it?”

She took it out, draped the fine gold chain over her tented fingers, and held the tiny sapphire up to the hail light. It twirled lazily, seeming to shoot off cool blue rays.

“Oh Louis, it’s so damn beautiful-” He saw she was crying a little and felt both touched and alarmed.

“Hey, babe, don’t do that,” he said. “Put it on.”

“Louis, we can’t afford-you can’t afford-”

“Shhh,” he said. “I socked some money away off and on since last Christmas…

and it wasn’t as much as you might think.”

“How much was it?”

“I’ll never tell you that, Rachel,” he said solemnly. “An army of Chinese torturers couldn’t get it out of me. Two thousand dollars.”

“Two thousand-i” She hugged him so suddenly and so tightly that he almost fell down the stairs. “Louis, you’re crazy!”

“Put it on,” he said again.

She did. He helped her with the clasp, and then she turned around to look at him. “I want to go up and look at it,” she said. “I think I want to preen.”

“Preen away,” he said. “I’ll put out the cat and get the lights.”

“When we make it,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, “I want to take everything off except this.”

“Preen in a hurry, then,” Louis said, and she laughed.

He grabbed Church and draped it over his arm-he didn’t bother much with the broom these days. He supposed that, in spite of everything, he had almost gotten used to the cat again. He went toward the entryway door, turning off lights as he went. When he opened the door communicating between the kitchen and garage, an eddy of cold air swirled around his ankles.

“Have a merry Christmas, Ch-”

He broke off. Lying on the welcome mat was a dead crow. Its head was mangled.

One wing had been ripped off and lay behind the body like a charred piece of paper. Church immediately squirmed out of Louis’s arms and began to nuzzle the frozen corpse eagerly. As Louis watched, the cat’s head darted forward, its ears laid back, and before he could turn his head, Church had ripped out one of the crow’s milky, glazed eyes.

Church strikes again, Louis thought a little sickly, and turned his head-not, however, before he had seen the bloody, gaping socket where the crow’s eye had been. Shouldn’t bother me, shouldn’t, I’ve seen worse, oh yeah, Pascow, for instance, Pascow was worse, a lot worse-But it did bother him. His stomach turned over. The warm build of sexual excitement had suddenly deflated. Christ, that bird’s damn near as big as he is. Must have caught it with its guard down. Way, way down.

This would have to be cleaned up. Nobody needed this sort of present on Christmas morning. And it was his responsibility, wasn’t it? Sure was. His and nobody else’s. He had recognized that much in a subconscious way even on the evening of his family's return, when he had purposely spilled the tires over the tattered body of the mouse Church had killed.

The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis.

This thought was so clear, somehow so three-dimensional and auditory, that Louis jerked a little, as if Jud had materialized at his shoulder and spoken aloud.

A man grows what he can… and tends it.

Church was still hunched greedily over the dead bird. He was working at the other wing now. There was a tenebrous rustling sound as Church pulled it back and forth, back and forth. Never get it off the ground, Orville. That’s right, Wilbur, fucking bird’s just as dead as dogshit, might as well feed it to the cat, might as well-Louis suddenly kicked Church, kicked him hard. The cat’s hindquarters rose and came down splayfooted. It walked away, sparing him another of its ugly yellow-green glances. “Eat me,” Louis hissed at it, catlike himself.

“Louis?” Rachel’s voice came faintly from their bedroom. “Coming to bed?”

“Be right there,” he called back. I’ve just got this little mess to clean up, Rachel, okay? Because it’s my mess. He fumbled for the switch that controlled the garage light. He went quickly back to the cupboard under the kitchen sink and got a green Hefty Bag. He took the bag back into the garage and took the shovel down from its nail on the garage wall. He scraped up the crow and dropped it into the bag. Then he shoveled up the severed wing and slipped that in. He tied a knot in the top of the bag and dropped it into the bin on the far side of the Civic. By the time he had finished, his ankles were growing numb.

Church was standing by the garage doorway. Louis made a threatening gesture at the cat with the shovel, and it was gone like black water.

Upstairs, Rachel was lying on her bed, wearing nothing but the sapphire on its chain… as promised. She smiled at him lazily. “What took you so long, Chief?”

“The light over the sink was out,” Louis said. “I changed the bulb.”

“Come here,” she said and tugged him gently toward her. Not by the hand. “He knows if you’ve been sleeping,” she sang softly; a little smile curved up the corners of her lips. “He knows if you’re awake… oh my, Louis dear, what’s this?”

“Something that just woke up, I think,” Louis said, slipping off his robe. “Maybe we ought to see if we can get it to sleep before Santa comes, what do you think?”

She rose on one elbow; he felt her breath, warm and sweet.

“He knows if you’ve been bad or good… so be good… for goodness sake…

Have you been a good boy, Louis?”

“I think so,” he said. His voice was not quite steady.

“Let’s see if you taste as good as you look,” she said.

The sex was good, but Louis did not find himself simply slipping off afterward as he usually did when the sex was good-slipping off easy with himself, his wife, his life. He lay in the darkness of Christmas morning, listening to Rachel’s breathing slow and deep, and he thought about the dead bird on the doorstep-Church’s Christmas present to him.

Keep me in mind, Dr. Creed. I was alive and then I was dead and now I’m alive again. I’ve made the circuit and I’m here to tell you that you come out the other side with your purr-box broken and a taste for the hunt, I’m here to tell you that a man grows what he can and tends it. Don’t forget that, Dr. Creed, I’m part of what your heart will grow now, there’s your wife and your daughter and your son… and there’s me. Remember the secret and tend your garden well.

At some point Louis slept.

31

Their winter passed. Ellie’s faith in Santa Claus was restored-temporarily at least-by the footprints in the hearth. Gage opened his presents splendidly, pausing every now and then to munch a particularly tasty-looking piece of wrapping paper. And that year, both kids had decided by midafternoon that the boxes were more fun than the toys.

The Crandalls came over on New Year’s Eve for Rachel’s eggnog, and Louis found himself mentally examining Norma. She had a pale and somehow transparent look that he had seen before. His grandmother would have said Norma was beginning to “fail,” and that was perhaps not such a bad word for it. All at once her hands, so swollen and misshapen by arthritis, seemed covered with liver Spots. Her hair looked thinner. The Crandalls went home around ten, and the Creeds saw the New Year in together in front of the TV. It was the last time Norma was in their house.

Most of Louis’s semester break was sloppy and rainy. In terms of heating costs, he was grateful for the thaw, but the weather was still depressing and dismal.

He worked around the house, building bookshelves and cupboards for his wife, and a model Porsche in his study for himself. By the time classes resumed on January 23, Louis was happy to go back to the university.

The flu finally arrived-a fairly serious outbreak struck the campus less than a week after the spring semester had begun, and he had his hands full-he found himself working ten and sometimes twelve hours a day and going home utterly whipped but not really unhappy.

The warm spell broke on January 29 with a roar. There was a blizzard followed by a week of numbing subzero weather. Louis was checking the mending broken arm of a young man who was hoping desperately-and fruitlessly, in Louis’s opinion-that he would be able to play baseball that spring when one of the candy-stripers poked her head in and told him his wife was on the telephone.

Louis went into his office to take the call. Rachel was crying, and he was instantly alarmed. Ellie, he thought. She’s fallen off her sled and broken her arm. Or fractured her skull. He thought with alarm of the crazed fraternity boys and their toboggan.

“It isn’t one of the kids, is it?” he asked. “Rachel?”

“No, no,” she said, crying harder. “Not one of the kids. It’s Norma, Lou. Norma Crandall. She died this morning. Around eight o’clock, right after breakfast, Jud said. He came over to see if you were here and I told him you’d left half an hour ago. He oh Lou, he just seemed so lost and so dazed… so old.

thank God Ellie was gone and Gage is too young to understand…”

Louis’s brow furrowed, and in spite of this terrible news he found it was Rachel his mind was going out to, seeking, trying to find. Because here it was again.

Nothing you could quite put your finger on, because it was so much an overall attitudinal fix. That death was a secret, a terror, and it was to be kept from the children, above all to be kept from the children, the way that Victorian ladies and gentlemen had believed the nasty, grotty truth about sexual relations must be kept from the children.

“Jesus,” he said. “Was it her heart?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was no longer crying, but her voice was choked and hoarse. “Could you come, Louis? You’re his friend, and I think he needs you.”

You’re his friend.

Well I am, Louis thought with a small touch of surprise. I never expected to have an eighty-year-old man for a buddy, but I guess I do. And then it occurred to him that they had better be friends, considering what was between them. And considering that, he supposed that Jud had known they were friends long before Louis had. Jud had stood by him on that one, and in spite of what had happened since, in spite of the mice, in spite of the birds, Louis felt that Jud’s decision had probably been the right one… or, if not the right one, at least the compassionate one. He would do what he could for Jud now, and if it meant being best man at the death of his wife, he would be that.

“On my way,” he said and hung up.

32

It had not been a heart attack. It had been a cerebral accident, sudden and probably painless. When Louis called Steve Master-ton that afternoon and told him what was going on, Steve said that he wouldn’t mind going out just that way.

“Sometimes God dillies and dailies,” Steve said, “and sometimes He just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.”

Rachel did not want to talk about it at all and would not allow Louis to talk to her of it.

Ellie was not so much upset as she was surprised and interested-it was what Louis thought a thoroughly healthy six year-old reaction should be. She wanted to know if Mrs. Crandall had died with her eyes shut or open. Louis said he didn’t know.

Jud took hold as well as could have been expected, considering the fact that the lady had been sharing bed and board with him for almost sixty years. Louis found the old man-and on this day he looked very much like an old man of eighty-three-sitting alone at the kitchen table, smoking a Chesterfield, drinking a bottle of beer, and staring blankly into the living room.

He looked up when Louis came in and said, “Well, she’s gone, Louis.” He said this in such a clear and matter-of-fact way that Louis thought it must not have really cleared through all the circuits yet-hadn’t hit him yet where he lived.

Then Jud’s mouth began to work and he covered his eyes with one arm. Louis went to him and put an arm around him. Jud gave in and wept. It had cleared the circuits, all right. Jud understood perfectly. His wife had died.

“That’s good,” Louis said. “That’s good, Jud, she would want you to cry a little, I think. Probably be pissed off if you didn’t.” He had started to cry a little himself. Jud hugged him tightly, and Louis hugged him back.

Jud cried for ten minutes or so, and then the storm passed. Louis listened to the things Jud said then with great care-he listened as a doctor as well as a friend. He listened for any circularity in Jud’s conversation; he listened to see if Jud’s grasp of when was clear (no need to check him on where; that would prove nothing because for Jud Crandall the where had always been Ludlow, Maine); he listened most of all for any use of Norma’s name in the present tense. He found little or no sign that Jud was losing his grip. Louis was aware that it was not uncommon for two old married people to go almost hand-in-hand, a month, a week, even a day apart. The shock, he supposed, or maybe even some deep inner urge to catch up with the one gone (that was a thought he would not have had before Church; he found that many of his thoughts concerning the spiritual and the supernatural had undergone a quiet but nonetheless deep sea-change). His conclusion was that Jud was grieving hard but that he was still compos mentis.

He sensed in Jud none of that transparent frailty that had seemed to surround Norma on New Year’s Eve, when the four of them had sat in the Creed living room, drinking eggnog.

Jud brought him a beer from the fridge, his face still red and blotchy from crying.

“A bit early in the day,” he said, “but the sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the world and under the circumstances…

“Say no more,” Louis told him and opened the beer. He looked at Jud. “Shall we drink to her?”

“I guess we better,” Jud said. “You should have seen her when she was sixteen, Louis, coming back from church with her jacket unbuttoned… your eyes would have popped. She could have made the devil swear off drinking. Thank Christ she never asked me to do it.”

Louis nodded and raised his beer a little. “To Norma,” he said. Jud clinked his bottle against Louis’s. He was crying again but he was also smiling. He nodded.

“May she have peace, and let there be no frigging arthritis wherever she is.”

“Amen,” Louis said, and they drank.

It was the only time Louis saw Jud progress beyond a mild tipsiness, and even so he did not become incapacitated. He reminisced; a constant stream of warm memories and anecdotes, colorful and clear and sometimes arresting, flowed from him. Yet between the stories of the past, Jud dealt with the present in a way Louis could only admire; if it had been Rachel who had simply dropped dead after her grapefruit and morning cereal, he wondered if he could have done half so well.

Jud called the Brookings-Smith Mortuary in Bangor and made as many of the arrangements as he could by telephone; he made an appointment to come in the following day and make the rest. Yes, he would have her embalmed; he wanted her in a dress, which he would provide; yes, he would pick out underwear; no, he did not want the mortuary to supply the special shoes which laced up the back. Would they have someone wash her hair? he asked. She washed it last on Monday night, and so it had been dirty when she died. He listened, and Louis, whose uncle had been in what those in the business called “the quiet trade,” knew the undertaker was telling Jud that a final wash and set was part of the service rendered. Jud nodded and thanked the man he was talking to, then listened again. Yes, he said, he would have her cosmeticized, but it was to be a lightly applied layer. “She’s dead and people know it,” he said, lighting a Chesterfield. “No need to tart her up.” The coffin would be closed during the funeral, he told the director with calm authority, but open during the visiting hours the day before. She was to be buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, where they had bought plots in 1951. He had the papers in hand and gave the mortician the plot number so that preparations could begin out there: H-101. He himself had H-102, he told Louis later on.

He hung up, looked at Louis, and said, “Prettiest cemetery in the world is right there in Bangor, as far as I’m concerned. Crack yourself another beer, if you want, Louis. All of this is going to take awhile.”

Louis was about to refuse-he was feeling a little tiddly-when a grotesque image arose unbidden behind his eyes: Jud pulling Norma’s corpse on a pagan litter through the woods. Toward the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.

It had the effect of a slap on him. Without a word, he got up and got another beer out of the fridge. Jud nodded at him and dialed the telephone again. By three that afternoon, when Louis went home for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, Jud had progressed a long way toward organizing his wife’s final rites; he moved from one thing to the next like a man planning a dinner party of some importance. He called the North Ludlow Methodist Church, where the actual funeral would take place, and the Cemetery Administration Office at Mount Hope; these were both calls the undertaker at Brookings-Smith would be making, but Jud called first as a courtesy. It was a step few bereaved ever thought of… or if they thought of it, one they could rarely bring themselves to take. Louis admired Jud all the more for it. Later he called Norma’s few surviving relatives and his own, paging through an old and tattered address book with a leather cover to find the numbers. And between calls, he drank beer and remembered the past.

Louis felt great admiration for him… and love?

Yes, his heart confirmed. And love.

When Ellie came down that night in her pajamas to be kissed, she asked Louis if Mrs. Crandall would go to heaven. She almost whispered the question to Louis, as if she understood it would be better if they were not overheard. Rachel was in the kitchen making a chicken pie, which she intended to take over to Jud the next day.

Across the street, all the lights were on in the Crandall house. Cars were parked in Jud’s driveway and up and down the shoulder of the highway on that side for a hundred feet in either direction. The official viewing hours would be tomorrow, at the mortuary, but tonight people had come to comfort Jud as well as they could, and to help him remember, and to celebrate Norma’s passing-what Jud had referred to once that afternoon as “the foregoing.” Between that house and this, a frigid February wind blew. The road was patched with black ice. The coldest part of the Maine winter was now upon them.

“Well, I don’t really know, honey,” Louis said, taking Ellie on his lap. On the TV, a running gunfight was in progress. A man spun and dropped, unremarked upon by either of them. Louis was aware-uncomfortably so-that Ellie probably knew a hell of a lot more about Ronald McDonald and Spiderman and the Burger King than she did about Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul. She was the daughter of a woman who was a nonpracticing Jew and a man who was a lapsed Methodist, and he supposed her ideas about the whole spiritus mundi were of the vaguest sort-not myths, not dreams, but dreams of dreams. It’s late for that, he thought randomly. She’s only five, but it’s late for that. Jesus Christ, it gets late so fast.

But Ellie was looking at him, and he ought to say something. “People believe all sorts of things about what happens to us when we die,” he said. “Some people think we go to heaven or hell. Some people believe we’re born again as little children-”

“Sure, carnation. Like what happened to Audrey Rose in that movie on TV.”

“You never saw that!” Rachel, he thought, would have her own cerebral accident if she thought Ellie had seen Audrey Rose.

“Marie told me at school,” Ellie said. Marie was Ellie’s self-proclaimed best friend, a malnourished, dirty little girl who always looked as if she might be on the edge of impetigo, or ringworm, or perhaps even scurvy. Both Louis and Rachel encouraged the friendship as well as they could, but Rachel had once confessed to Louis that after Marie left, she always felt an urge to check Ellie’s head for flits and head lice. Louis had laughed and nodded.

“Marie’s mommy lets her watch all the shows.” There was an implied criticism in this that Louis chose to ignore.

“Well, it’s reincarnation, but I guess you’ve got the idea. The Catholics believe in heaven and hell, but they also believe there’s a place called limbo and one called purgatory. And the Hindus and Buddhists believe in Nirvana-”

There was a shadow on the dining room wall. Rachel. Listening.

Louis went on more slowly.

“There are probably lots more too. But what it comes down to, Ellie, is this: no one knows. People say they know, but when they say that, what they mean is that they believe because of faith. Do you know what faith is?”

“Well…

“Here we are, sitting in my chair,” Louis said. “Do you think my chair will still be here tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then you have faith it will be here. As it so happens, I do, too. Faith is believing a thing will be, or is. Get it?”

“Yes.” Ellie nodded positively.

“But we don’t know it’ll be here. After all, some crazed chair burglar might break in and take it, right?”

Ellie giggled. Louis smiled.

“We just have faith that won’t happen. Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don’t believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don’t. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of.

If we don’t, it’s just blotto. The end.”

“Like going to sleep?”

He considered this and then said, “More like having ether, I think.”

“Which do you have faith in, Daddy?”

The shadow on the wall moved and came to rest again.

For most of his adult life-since college days, he supposed-he had believed that death was the end. He had been present at many deathbeds and had never felt a soul bullet past him on its way to… wherever; hadn’t this very thought occurred to him upon the death of Victor Pascow? He had agreed with his Psychology I teacher that the life-after-life experiences reported in scholarly journals and then vulgarized in the popular press probably indicated a last-ditch mental stand against the onrush of death-the endlessly inventive human mind, staving off insanity to the very end by constructing a hallucination of immortality.

He had likewise agreed with an acquaintance in the dorm who had said, during an all-night bull session during Louis’s sophomore year at Chicago, that the Bible was suspiciously full of miracles which had ceased almost completely during the age of rationality (“totally ceased,” he had said at first but had been forced backward at least one step by others who claimed with some authority that there were still plenty of weird things going on, little pockets of perplexity in a world that had become by and large a clean, well-lighted place-there was, for instance, the Shroud of Turin, which had survived every effort to debunk it).

“So Christ brought Lazarus back from the dead,” this acquaintance-who had gone on to become a highly thought-of o. b. man in Dearborn, Michigan-had said.

“That’s fine with me. If I have to swallow it, I will. I mean, I had to buy the concept that the fetus of one twin can sometimes swallow the fetus of the other in utero, like some kind of unborn cannibal, and then show up with teeth in his testes or in his lungs twenty or thirty years later to prove that he did it, and I suppose if I can buy that I can buy anything. But I wanna see the death certificate-you dig what I’m saying? I’m not questioning that he came out of the tomb. But I wanna see the original death certificate. I’m like Thomas saying he’d only believe Jesus had risen when he could look through the nail holes and stick his hands in the guy’s side. As far as I’m concerned, he was the real physician of the bunch, not Luke.”

No, he had never really believed in survival. At least, not until Church.

“I believe that we go on,” he told his daughter slowly. “But as to what it’s like, I have no opinion. It may be that it’s different for different people. It may be that you get what you believed all your life. But I believe we go on, and I believe that Mrs. Crandall is probably someplace where she can be happy.”

“You have faith in that,” Ellie said. It was not a question. She sounded awed.

Louis smiled, a little pleased and a little embarrassed. “I suppose so. And I have faith that it’s time for you to go to bed. Like ten minutes ago.”

He kissed her twice, once on the lips and once on the nose.

“Do you think animals go on?”

“Yes,” he said, without thinking, and for a moment he almost added, Especially cats. The words had actually trembled on his lips for a moment, and his skin felt gray and cold.

“Okay,” she said and slid down. “Gotta go kiss Mommy.”

“Right on.”

He watched her go. At the dining room doorway, she turned back and said, “I was really silly about Church that day, wasn’t I? Crying like that.”

“No, hon,” he said. “I don’t think you were silly.”

“If he died now, I could take it,” she said and then seemed to consider the thought she had just spoken aloud, as if mildly startled. Then she said, as if agreeing with herself: “Sure I could.” And went to find Rachel.

Later, in bed, Rachel said, “I heard what you were talking about with her.”

“And you don’t approve?” Louis asked. He had decided that maybe it would be best to have this out, if that was what Rachel wanted.

“No,” Rachel said, with a hesitance that was not much like her. “No, Louis, it’s not like that. I just get… scared. And you know me. When I get scared, I get defensive.”

Louis could not remember ever hearing Rachel speak with such effort, and suddenly he felt more cautious than he had with Ellie earlier. He felt that he was in a mine field.

“Scared of what? Dying?”

“Not myself,” she said. “I hardly even think of that… anymore. But when I was a kid, I thought of it a lot. Lost a lot of sleep. Dreamed of monsters coming to eat me up in my bed, and all of the monsters looked like my sister Zelda.”

Yes, Louis thought. Here it is; at last, after all the time we’ve been married, here it is.

“You don’t talk about her much,” he said.

Rachel smiled and touched his face. “You’re sweet, Louis. I never talk about her. I try never to think about her.”

“I always assumed you had your reasons.”

“I did. I do.”

She paused, thinking.

“I know she died… spinal meningitis… “ “Spinal meningitis,” she repeated. “There are no pictures of her in the house anymore.”

“There’s a picture of a young girl in your father’s-”

“In his study. Yes, I forgot that one. And my mother carries one in her wallet still, I think. She was two years older than I was. She caught it… and she was in the back bedroom… she was in the back bedroom like a dirty secret, Louis, she was dying in there, my sister died in the back bedroom and that’s what she was, a dirty secret-she was always a dirty secret!”

Rachel suddenly broke down completely, and in the loud, rising quality of her sobs, Louis sensed the onset of hysteria and became alarmed. He reached for her and caught a shoulder, which was pulled away from him as soon as he touched it.

He could feel the whisper of her nightdress under his fingertips.

“Rachel-babe-don’t-”

“Don’t tell me don’t,” she said. “Don’t stop me, Louis. I’ve only got the strength to tell this once, and then I don’t want to ever talk about it again. I probably won’t sleep tonight as it is.”

“Was it that horrible?” he asked, knowing the answer already. It explained so much, and even things he had never connected before or only suspected vaguely suddenly came together in his mind, She had never attended a funeral with him, he realized-not even that of Al Locke, a fellow med student who had been killed when his motorcycle had collided with a city bus. Al had been a regular visitor at their apartment, and Rachel had always liked him. Yet she had not gone to his funeral.

She was sick that day, Louis remembered suddenly. Got the flu or something.

Looked serious. But the next day she was okay again.

After the funeral she was all right again, he corrected himself. He remembered thinking even then that her sickness might just be psychosomatic.

“It was horrible, all right. Worse than you can ever imagine. Louis, we watched her degenerate day by day, and there was nothing anyone could do. She was in constant pain. Her body seemed to shrivel… pull in on itself… her shoulders hunched up and her face pulled down until it was like a mask. Her hands were like birds’ feet. I had to feed her sometimes. I hated it, but I did it and never said boo about it. When the pain got bad enough, they started giving her drugs-mild ones at first and then ones that would have left her a junkie if she had lived. But of course everyone knew she wasn’t going to live. I guess that’s why she’s such a… secret to all of us. Because we wanted her to die, Louis, we wished for her to die, and it wasn’t just so she wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was so we wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was because she was starting to look like a monster, and she was starting to be a monster… oh Christ I know how awful that must sound… “ She put her face in her hands.

Louis touched her gently. “Rachel, it doesn’t sound awful at all.”

“It does!” she cried. “It does!”

“It just sounds true,” he said. “Victims of long illnesses often become demanding, unpleasant monsters. The idea of the saintlike, long-suffering patient is a big romantic fiction. By the time the first set of sores crops up on a bed-bound patient’s butt, he-or she-has started to snipe and cut and spread the misery. They can’t help it, but that doesn’t help the people in the situation.”

She looked at him, amazed… almost hopeful. Then distrust stole back into her face. “You’re making that up.”

He smiled grimly. “Want me to show you the textbooks? How about the suicide statistics? Want to see those? In families where a terminal patient has been nursed at home, the suicide statistics spike right up into the stratosphere in the six months following the patient’s death.”

“Suicide!”

“They swallow pills, or sniff a pipe, or blow their brains out. Their hate…

their weariness… their disgust… their sorrow… “ He shrugged and brought his closed fists gently together. “The survivors start feeling as if they’d committed murder. So they step out.”

A crazy, wounded kind of relief had crept into Rachel’s puffy face. “She was demanding… hateful. Sometimes she’d piss in her bed deliberately. My mother would ask her if she wanted help getting to the bathroom… and later, when she couldn’t get up anymore, if she wanted the bedpan… and Zelda would say no… and then she’d piss the bed so my mother or my mother and I would have to change the sheets… and she’d say it was an accident, but you could see the smile in her eyes, Louis. You could see it. The room always smelled of piss and her drugs she had bottles of some dope that smelled like Smith Brothers’ Wild Cherry cough drops and that smell was always there… some nights I wake up… even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry cough drops… and I think.

if I’m not really awake… I think ‘Is Zelda dead yet? Is she?’. I think…

Rachel caught her breath. Louis took her hand and she squeezed his fingers with savage, brilliant tightness.

“When we changed her you could see the way her back was twisting and knotting.

Near the end, Louis, near the end it seemed like her… like her ass had somehow gotten all the way up to the middle of her back.”

Now Rachel’s wet eyes had taken on the glassy, horrified look of a child remembering a recurrent nightmare of terrible power.

“And sometimes she’d touch me with her… her hands.

her birdy hands… and sometimes I’d almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of her soup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream… and I cried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.

“Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom… our dirty secret.”

Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.

“My parents were gone when she finally… when she. you know, when she… “ With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.

“When she died, my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover season, and they went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in the kitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting -for it to be time to give her some more medicine because she was screaming. She’d been screaming ever since my folks left, almost. I couldn’t read with her screaming that way. And then see, what happened was… well… Zelda stopped screaming. Louis, I was eight… bad dreams every night… I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn’t have the constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live… I started to imagine she wanted to kill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I don’t really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I don’t really think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way… turned me out of it like in a fairy story I think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was all right… to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in and I looked at her and I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis”-Rachel’s voice rose again, teary and frighteningly childish, as if she were regressing, reliving the experience-”Louis, I didn’t know what to do! I was eight!”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Louis said. He turned to her and hugged her, and Rachel gripped him with the panicky strength of a poor swimmer whose boat has suddenly overturned in the middle of a large lake. “Did someone actually give you a hard time about it, babe?”

“No,” she said, “no one blamed me. But nobody could make it better either. No one could change it. No one could make it an unhappening, Louis. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue. She started making a sound, a kind of, I don’t know-gaaaaaa-like that-”

In her distressed, total recall of that day she did a more than creditable imitation of the way her sister Zelda must have sounded, and Louis’s mind Bashed to Victor Pascow. His grip on his wife tightened.

“-and there was spit, spit coming down her chin-”

“Rachel, that’s enough,” he said, not quite steadily. “I am aware of the symptoms.”

“I’m explaining,” she said stubbornly. “I’m explaining why I can’t go to poor Norma’s funeral, for one thing, and why we had that stupid fight that day-”

“Shh-that’s forgotten.”

“Not by me, it isn’t,” she said. “I remember it well, Louis. I remember it as well as I remember my sister Zelda choking to death in her bed on April 14, 1965.”

For a long moment there was silence in the room.

“I turned her over on her belly and thumped her back,” Rachel went on at last.

“It’s all I knew to do. Her feet were beating up and down… and her twisted legs… and I remember there was a sound like farting… I thought she was farting or I was, but it wasn’t farts, it was the seams under both arms of my blouse ripping out when I turned her over. She started to… to convulse… and I saw that her face was turned sideways, turned into the pillows, and I thought, oh, she’s choking, Zelda’s choking, and they’ll come home and say I murdered her by choking, they’ll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true, and they’ll say you wanted her to be dead, and that was true too. Because, Louis, see, the first thought that went through my mind when she started to go up and down in the bed like that, I remember it, my first thought was Oh good, finally, Zelda’s choking and this is going to be over. So I turned her over again and her face had gone black, Louis, and her eyes were bulging and her neck was swelled up.

Then she died. I backed across the room. I guess I wanted to back out the door, but I hit the wall and a picture fell down-it was a picture from one of the Oz books that Zelda liked before she got sick with the meningitis, when she was well, it was a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible, only Zelda always called him Oz the Gweat and Tewwible because she couldn’t make that sound, and so she sounded like Elmer Fudd. My mother got that picture framed because… because Zelda liked it most of all Oz the Gweat and Tewwible… and it fell down and hit the floor and the glass in the frame shattered and I started to scream because I knew she was dead and I thought… I guess I thought it was her ghost, coming back to get me, and I knew that her ghost would hate me like she did, but her ghost wouldn’t be stuck in bed, so I screamed… I screamed and I ran out of the house screaming ‘Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead! Zelda’s dead!’ And the neighbors… they came and they looked… they saw me running down the street with my blouse all ripped out under the arms… I was yelling ‘Zelda’s dead!’ Louis, and I guess maybe they thought I was crying but I think… I think maybe I was laughing, Louis.

I think maybe that’s what I was doing.”

“If you were, I salute you for it,” Louis said.

“You don’t mean that, though,” Rachel said with the utter surety of one who has been over a point and over it and over it. He let it go. He thought she might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long-most of it, anyway-but never this part. Never completely. Louis Creed was no psychiatrist, but he knew that there are rusty, half-buried things in the terrain of any life and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they cut. Tonight Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, like some grotesque and stinking rotten tooth, its crown black, its nerves infected, its roots fetid. It was out. Let that last noxious cell remain; if God was good it would remain dormant except in her deepest dreams. That she had been able to remove as much as she had was well nigh incredible-it did not just speak of her courage; it clarioned it. Louis was in awe of her. He felt like cheering.

He sat up now and turned on the light. “Yes,” he said, “I salute you for it. And if I needed another reason to… to really dislike your mother and father, I’ve got it now. You never should have been left alone with her, Rachel. Never.”

Like a child-the child of eight she had been when this dirty, incredible thing had happened-she reprimanded him, “Lou, it was Passover season-”

“I don’t care if it was judgment trump,” Louis said with a sudden low and hoarse savagery that caused her to pull back a little. He was remembering the student nurses, those two candy stripers whose evil luck it had been to be in attendance on the morning Pascow had been brought in dying. One of them, a tough little lady named Carla Shavers, had returned the next day and had worked out so well that even Chariton was impressed. The other they had never seen again. Louis was not surprised and did not blame her.

Where was the nurse? There should have been an R. N. in attendance… they went out, they actually went out and left an eight-year-old kid in charge of her dying sister, who was probably clinically insane by then. Why? Because it was Passover season. And because elegant Dory Goldman couldn’t stand the stink that particular morning and had to get away from it for just a little while. So Rachel got the duty. Right, friends and neighbors? Rachel got the duty. Eight years old, pigtails, middy blouse. Rachel got the duty. Rachel could stay and put up with the stink. What did they send her to Camp Sunset in Vermont for six weeks every year, if not to put up with the stink of her dying, insane sister?

Ten new shirt-and-jumper combinations for Gage and six new dresses for Ellie and I’ll pay your way through medical school if you’ll stay away from my daughter…

. but where was the overflowing checkbook when your daughter was dying of spinal meningitis and your other daughter was alone with her, you bastard? Where was the R-fucking-N?

Louis sat up, got out of bed.

“Where are you going?” Rachel asked, alarmed.

“To get you a Valium.”

“You know I don’t-”

“Tonight you do,” he said.

She took the pill and then told him the rest. Her voice remained calm throughout. The tranquilizer was doing its job.

The next-door neighbor had retrieved eight-year-old Rachel from behind a tree where she was crouching and screaming “Zelda’s dead!” over and over. Rachel’s nose had been bleeding. She had blood all over her. The same neighbor had called the ambulance and then her parents; after getting Rachel’s nosebleed stopped and calming her with a cup of hot tea and two aspirins, she was able to get the location of her parents out of her-they were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father’s business.

By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone. The room was a bare box. Later-much later-it had become Dory Goldman’s sewing room.

The first of the nightmares had come to Rachel that night, and when Rachel woke up at two o’clock in the morning, screaming for her mother, she had been horrified to discover that she could barely get out of bed. Her back was in agony. She had strained it moving Zelda. In her spurt of adrenaline-powered strength, she had, after all, lifted Zelda with enough force to pull her own blouse apart.

That she had strained herself trying to keep Zelda from choking was simple, obvious, elementary-my-dear-Watson. To everyone, that was, except Rachel herself. Rachel had been sure that this was Zelda’s revenge from beyond the grave. Zelda knew that Rachel was glad she was dead; Zelda knew that when Rachel burst from the house telling all and sundry Zelda’s dead, Zelda’s dead at the top of her voice, she had been laughing, not screaming; Zelda knew she had been murdered and so had given Rachel spinal meningitis, and soon Rachel’s back would start to twist and change and she too would have to lie in bed, slowly but surely turning into a monster, her hands hooking into claws.

After a while she would begin screaming with the pain, as Zelda had done, and then she would start wetting the bed, and finally she would choke to death on her own tongue. It was Zelda’s revenge.

No one could talk Rachel out of this belief-not her mother, her father, or Dr.

Murray, who diagnosed a mild backsprain and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some-Louis, for instance-would have said) to stop behaving so badly. She ought to remember that her sister had just died, Dr. Murray told her; her parents were prostrate with grief and this was not the time for Rachel to make a childish play for attention. Only the slowly abating pain had been able to convince her that she was neither the victim of Zelda’s supernatural vengeance nor God’s just punishment of the wicked. For months (or so she told Louis; it had actually been years, eight of them) afterward she would awaken from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark Rachel’s hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. In the frightful aftermath of these dreams she often thought that the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws to murder the murderer cowering in her bed with her hands jammed into the small of her back.

She had not attended Zelda’s funeral or any funeral since.

“If you’d told me this before,” Louis said, “it would have explained a hell of a lot.”

“Lou, I couldn’t,” she said simply. She sounded very sleepy now. “Since then I’ve been… I guess a little phobic on the subject.”

Just a little phobic, Louis thought. Yeah, right.

“I can’t… seem to help it. In my mind I know you're right, that death is perfectly natural-good, even-but what my mind knows and what happens… inside me…

“Yeah,” he said.

“That day I blew up at you,” she said, “I knew that Ellie was just crying over the idea… a way of getting used to it… but I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, Louis.”

“No apology needed,” he said, stroking her hair. “But what the hell, I accept it anyway, if it’ll make you feel better.”

She smiled. “It does, you know. And I feel better. I feel as if I just sicked up something that’s poisoned part of me for years.”

“Maybe you have.”

Rachel’s eyes slipped closed and then opened again.

slowly. “And don’t blame it all on my father, Louis. Please. That was a terrible time for them. The bills-Zelda’s bills-were sky-high. My dad had missed his chance to expand into the suburbs, and the sales in the downtown store were off.

On top of that, my mother was half-crazy herself.

“Well, it all worked out. It was as if Zelda’s death was the signal for good times to come around again. There had been a recession, but then the money loosened up and Daddy got his loan, and since then he’s never looked back. But that’s why they’ve always been possessive of me, I think. It’s not just because I’m the only one left-”

“It’s guilt,” Louis said.

“Yes, I suppose. And you won’t be mad at me if I’m sick when they bury Norma?”

“No, honey, I won’t be mad.” He paused and then took her hand. “May I take Ellie?”

Her hand tightened in his. “Oh, Louis, I don’t know,” she said. “She’s so young-”

“She’s known where babies come from for a year or more,” he reminded her again.

She was quiet for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and biting her lips.

“If you think it’s best,” she said finally. “If you think it won’t… won’t hurt her.”

“Come over here, Rachel,” he said, and that night they slept back-to-stomach in Louis’s bed, and when she woke up trembling in the middle of the night, the Valium worn off, he soothed her with his hands and whispered in her ear that everything was okay, and she slept again.

33

“For man-and woman-is like the flowers in the valley, which bloom today and are tomorrow cast into the oven: the time of man is but a season; it cometh, and so it passeth away. Let us pray.”

Ellie, resplendent in a navy blue dress bought especially for the occasion, dropped her head so abruptly that Louis, sitting next to her in the pew, heard her neck creak. Ellie had been in few churches, and of course it was her first funeral; the combination had awed her to unaccustomed silence.

For Louis, it had been a rare occasion with his daughter. Mostly blinded by his love for her, as he was by his love for Gage, he rarely observed her in a detached way; but today he thought he was seeing what was almost a textbook case of the child nearing the end of life’s first great developmental stage; an organism of almost pure curiosity, storing up information madly in almost endless circuits. Ellie had been quiet even when Jud, looking strange but elegant in his black suit and lace-up shoes (Louis believed it was the first time he had ever seen him in anything but loafers or green rubber boots), had bent over, kissed her, and said: “Glad you could come, honey. And I bet Norma is too.”

Ellie had gazed at him, wide-eyed.

Now the Methodist minister, Reverend Laughlin, was pronouncing the benediction, asking God to lift up His countenance upon them and give them peace.

“Will the pallbearers come forward?” he asked.

Louis started to rise, and Ellie halted him, tugging his arm frantically. She looked scared. “Daddy!” she stage-whispered. “Where are you going?”

“I’m one of the pallbearers, honey,” Louis said, sitting down beside her again for a moment and putting an arm around her shoulders. “That means I’m going to help carry Norma out. There are four of us that are going to do it-me and two of Jud’s nephews and Norma’s brother.”

“Where will I find you?”

Louis glanced down front. The other three pallbearers had assembled there, along with Jud. The rest of the congregation was filing out, some of them weeping.

“If you just go out on the steps, I’ll meet you there,” he said. “All right, Ellie?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just don’t forget me.”

“No, I won’t.”

He got up again, and she tugged his hand again.

“Daddy?”

“What, babe?”

“Don’t drop her,” Ellie whispered.

Louis joined the others, and Jud introduced him to the nephews, who were really second or third cousins… descendants of Jud’s father’s brother. They were big fellows in their twenties with a strong facial resemblance. Norma’s brother was somewhere in his late fifties, Louis guessed, and while the strain of a death in the family was on his face, he seemed to be bearing up well.

“Pleased to meet you all,” Louis said. He felt a trifle uncomfortable-an outsider in the family circle.

They nodded at him.

“Ellie okay?” Jud asked and nodded to her. She was lingering in the vestibule, watching.

Sure-she just wants to make sure I don’t go up in a puff of smoke, Louis thought and almost smiled. But then that thought called up another one: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. And the smile died.

“Yes, I think so,” Louis said and raised a hand to her. She raised hers in return and went outside then in a swirl of navy blue dress. For a moment Louis was uneasily struck by how adult she looked. It was the sort of illusion, no matter how fleeting, that could give a man pause.

“You guys ready?” one of the nephews asked.

Louis nodded; so did Norma’s younger brother.

“Take it easy with her,” Jud said. His voice had roughened. Then he turned away and walked slowly up the aisle with his head down.

Louis moved to the back left corner of the steel-gray American Eternal coffin Jud had chosen for his wife. He laid hold of his runner and the four of them slowly carried Norma’s coffin out into the bright still cold of February first. Someone-the church custodian, he supposed-had laid down a good bed of cinders over the slippery path of tamped snow. At the curb a Cadillac hearse idled white exhaust into the winter air. The funeral director and his husky son stood beside it, watching them, ready to lend a hand if anyone (her brother, perhaps) should slip or flag.

Jud stood beside him and watched as they slid the coffin inside. “Goodbye, Norma,” he said and lit a cigarette. “I’ll see you in a while, old girl.”

Louis slipped an arm around Jud’s shoulders, and Norma’s brother stood close by on his other side, crowding the mortician and his son into the background. The burly nephews (or second cousins, or whatever they were) had already done a fade, the simple job of lifting and carrying done. They had grown distant from this part of the family; they had known the woman’s face from photographs and a few duty visits perhaps-long afternoons spent in the parlor eating Norma’s cookies and drinking Jud’s beer, perhaps not really minding the old stories of times they had not lived through and people they had not known, but aware of things they could have been doing all the same (a car that could have been washed and Turtle-waxed, a league bowling practice, maybe just sitting around the TV and watching a boxing match with some friends), and glad to be away when the duty was done.

Jud’s part of the family was in the past now, as far as they were concerned; it was like an eroded planetoid drifting away from the main mass, dwindling, little more than a speck. The past. Pictures in an album. Old stories told in rooms that perhaps seemed too hot to them-they were not old; there was no arthritis in their joints; their blood had not thinned. The past was runners to be gripped and hefted and later let go. After all, if the human body was an envelope to hold the human soul-God’s letters to the universe-as most churches taught, then the American Eternal coffin was an envelope to hold the human body, and to these husky young cousins or nephews or whatever they were, the past was just a dead letter to be filed away.

God save the past, Louis thought and shivered for no good reason other than that the day would come when he would be every bit unfamiliar to his own blood-his own grandchildren if Ellie or Gage produced kids and he lived to see them. The focus shifted. Family lines degenerated. Young faces looking out of old photographs.

God save the past, he thought again and tightened his grip around the old man’s shoulders.

The ushers put the flowers into the back of the hearse. The electric rear window rose and thumped home in its socket. Louis went back to where his daughter was, and they walked to the station wagon together, Louis holding Ellie’s arm so she wouldn’t slip in her good shoes with the leather soles. Car engines were starting up.

“Why are they putting on their lights, Daddy?” Ellie asked with mild wonder.

“Why are they putting on their lights in the middle of the day?”

“They do it,” Louis began and heard the thickness in his own voice, “to honor the dead, Ellie.” He pulled out the knob that turned on the wagon’s headlights.

“Come on.”

They were going home at last, the graveside ceremony over-actually it was held at the small Mount Hope Chapel; no grave would be dug for Norma until spring-when Ellie suddenly burst into tears.

Louis glanced at her, surprised but not particularly alarmed. “Ellie, what is it?”

“No more cookies,” Ellie sobbed. “She made the best oatmeal cookies I ever ate.

But she won’t make them anymore because she’s dead. Daddy, why do people have to be dead?”

“I don’t really know,” Louis said. “To make room for all the new people, I guess. Little people like you and your brother Gage.”

“I’m never going to get married or do sex and have babies!” Ellie declared, crying harder than ever. “Then maybe it’ll never happen to me! It’s awful! It’s rn-rn-mean!”

“But it’s an end to suffering,” Louis said quietly. “And as a doctor I see a lot of suffering. One of the reasons I wanted the job at the university was because I got sick of looking at it day in and day out. Young people quite often have pain… bad pain, even but that’s not quite the same as suffering.”

He paused.

“Believe it or not, honey, when people get very old, death doesn’t always look so bad or so scary as it seems to you. And you have years and years and years ahead of you.”

Ellie cried, and then she sniffed, and then she stopped. Before they got home, she asked if she could play the radio. Louis said yes, and she found Shakin’ Stevens singing “This Ole House” on WACZ. Soon she was singing along. When they got home she went to her mother and prattled about the funeral; to Rachel’s credit, she listened quietly, sympathetically, and supportively although Louis thought she looked pale and thoughtful.

Then Ellie asked her if she knew how to make oatmeal cookies, and Rachel put away the piece of knitting she’d been doing and rose at once, as if she had been waiting for this or something like it. “Yes,” she said. “Want to make a batch?”

“Yay!” Ellie shouted. “Can we really, Mom?”

“We can if your father will watch Gage for an hour.”

“I’ll watch him,” Louis said. “With pleasure.”

Louis spent the evening reading and making notes on a long article in The Duquesne Medical Digest; the old controversy concerning dissolving sutures had begun again. In the small world of those relatively few humans on earth concerned with stitching minor wounds, it appeared to be as endless as that old psychological squabbling point, nature versus nurture.

He intended writing a dissenting letter this very night, proving that the writer’s main contentions were specious, his case examples self-serving, his research almost criminally sloppy. In short, Louis was looking forward-with high good humor-to blowing the stupid fuck right off the map. He was hunting around in the study bookcase for his copy of Troutman’s Treatment of Wounds when Rachel came halfway down the stairs.

“Coming up, Lou?”

“I’ll be a while.” He glanced up at her. “Everything all right?”

“They’re deep asleep, both of them.”

Louis looked at her closely. “Them, yeah. You’re not.”

“I’m fine. Been reading.”

“You’re okay? Really?”

“Yes,” she said and smiled. “I love you, Louis.”

“Love you too, babe.” He glanced at the bookcase, and there was Troutman, right where he had been all along. Louis put his hand on the textbook.

“Church brought a rat into the house while you and Ellie were gone,” she said and tried to smile. “Yuck, what a mess.”

“Jeez, Rachel, I’m sorry.” He hoped he did not sound as guilty as, at that moment, he felt. “It was bad?”

Rachel sat down on the stairs. In her pink flannel nightgown, her face cleaned of makeup and her forehead shining, her hair tied back into a short ponytail with a rubber band, she looked like a child. “I took care of it,” she said, “but do you know, I had to beat that dumb cat out the door with the vacuum cleaner attachment before it would stop guarding the… the corpse? It growled at me.

Church never growled at me before in his life. He seems different lately. Do you think he might have distemper or something, Louis?”

“No,” Louis said slowly, “but I’ll take him to the vet, if you want.”

“I guess it’s all right,” she said and then looked at him nakedly. “But would you come up? I just… I know you’re working, but… “ “Of course,” he said, getting up as though it were nothing important at all.

And, really, it wasn’t-except he knew that now the letter would never be written because the parade has a way of moving on, and tomorrow would bring something new. But he had bought that rat, hadn’t he? The rat that Church had brought in, surely clawed to bloody ribbons, its intestines dragging, its head perhaps gone.

Yes. He had bought it. It was his rat.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said, turning off the lights. He and Rachel went up the stairs together. Louis put his arm around her waist and loved her the best he could… but even as he entered into her, hard and erect, he was listening to the winter whine outside the frost-traced windows, wondering about Church, the cat that used to belong to his daughter and now belonged to him, wondering where it was and what it was stalking or killing. The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, he thought, and the wind sang its bitter black song, and not so many miles distant, Norma Crandall, who had once knitted his daughter and son matching caps, lay in her gray steel American Eternal coffin on a stone slab in a Mount Hope crypt; by now the white cotton the mortician would have used to stuff her cheeks would be turning black.

34

Ellie turned six. She came home from kindergarten on her birthday with a paper hat askew on her head, several pictures friends had drawn of her (in the best of them Ellie looked like a friendly scarecrow), and baleful stories about spankings in the schoolyard during recess. The flu epidemic passed. They had to send two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefully sick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton, who went into convulsions shortly after being admitted. Rachel developed a mild infatuation with the blond bag boy at the A amp; P in Brewer and rhapsodized to Louis at night about how packed his jeans looked. “It’s probably just toilet paper,” she added. “Squeeze it sometime,” Louis suggested. “If he screams, it’s probably not.” Rachel had laughed until she cried. The blue, still, subzero miniseason of February passed and brought on the alternating rains and freezes of March, potholes, and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the Great God BUMP. The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief which the psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four to six weeks in most cases-like that period of time New Englanders sometimes call “deep winter.” But time passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like a rainbow. Strong grief becomes a softer, more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourning at last becomes remembrance-a process that may take from six months to three years and still be considered normal. The day of Gage’s first haircut came and passed, and when Louis saw his son’s hair growing in darker, he joked about it and did his own mourning-but only in his heart.

Spring came, and it stayed awhile.

35

Louis Creed came to believe that the last really happy day of his life was March 24, 1984. The things that were to come, poised above them like a killing sashweight, were still over seven weeks in the future, but looking over those seven weeks he found nothing which stood out with the same color. He supposed that even if none of those terrible things had happened, he would have remembered the day forever. Days which seem genuinely good-good all the way through-are rare enough anyway, he thought. It might be that there was less than a month of really good ones in any natural man’s life in the best of circumstances. It came to seem to Louis that God, in His infinite wisdom, seemed much more generous when it came to doling out pain.

That day was a Saturday, and he was home minding Gage in the afternoon while Rachel and Ellie went after groceries. They had gone with Jud in his old and rattling ‘59 IH pickup not because the station wagon wasn’t running but because the old man genuinely liked their company. Rachel asked Louis if he would be okay with Gage, and he told her that of course he would. He was glad to see her get out; after a winter in Maine, most of it in Ludlow, he thought that she needed all the getting out she could lay her hands on. She had been an unremittingly good sport about it, but she did seem to him to be getting a little stir crazy.

Gage got up from his nap around two o’clock, scratchy and out of sorts. He had discovered the Terrible Twos and made them his own. Louis tried several ineffectual gambits to amuse the kid, and Gage turned them all down. To make matters worse, the rotten kid had an enormous bowel movement, the artistic quality of which was not improved for Louis when he saw a blue marble sitting in the middle of it. It was one of Ellie’s marbles. The kid could have choked. He decided the marbles were going to go-everything Gage got hold of went right to his mouth-but that decision, while undoubtedly laudable, didn’t do a thing about keeping the kid amused until his mother got back.

Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs. Vinton’s field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university. Had he bought twine as well? He had, by God!

“Gage!” he said. Gage had found a green Crayola under the couch and was currently scribbling in one of Ellie’s favorite books-something else to feed the fires of sibling rivalry, Louis thought and grinned. If Ellie got really pissy about the scribbles Gage had managed to put in Where the Wild Things Are before Louis could get it away from him, Louis would simply mention the unique treasure he had uncovered in Gage’s Pampers.

“What!” Gage responded smartly. He was talking pretty well now; Louis had decided the kid might actually be half-bright.

“You wanna go out?”

“Wanna go out!” Gage agreed excitedly. “Wanna go out. Where my neeks, Daddy?”

This sentence, if reproduced phonetically, would have looked something like this: Weh ma neeks, Dah-dee? The translation was Where are my sneakers, Father?

Louis was often struck by Gage’s speech, not because it was cute, but because he thought that small children all sounded like immigrants learning a foreign language in some helter-skelter but fairly amiable way. He knew that babies make all the sounds the human voice box is capable of… the liquid trill that proves so difficult for first-year French students, the glottal grunts and clicks of the Australian bush people, the thickened, abrupt consonants of German. They lose the capability as they learn English, and Louis wondered now (and not for the first time) if childhood was not more a period of forgetting than of learning.

Gage’s neeks were finally found… they were also under the couch. One of Louis’s other beliefs was that in families with small children, the area under living room couches begins after a while to develop a strong and mysterious electromagnetic force that eventually sucks in all sorts of litter-everything from bottles and diaper pins to green Crayolas and old issues of Sesame Street magazine with food mouldering between the pages.

Gage’s jacket, however, wasn’t under the couch-it was halfway down the stairs.

His Red Sox cap, without which Gage refused to leave the house, was the most difficult of all to find because it was where it belonged-in the closet. That was, naturally, the last place they looked.

“Where goin, Daddy?” Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.

“Going over in Mrs. Vinton’s field,” he said. “Gonna go fly a kite, my man.”

“Kiiiyte?” Gage asked doubtfully.

“You’ll like it,” Louis said. “Wait a minute, kiddo.”

They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet, and turned on the light. He rummaged through the closet and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some hope.

“Lat?” Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for “Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?”

“It’s the kite,” Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.

“Birt!” Gage yelled. “Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!”

“Yeah, it’s a bird,” Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: “You’re gonna like it, big guy.”

Gage liked it.

They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton’s field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was.

… what? Twelve? Nineteen years ago? God, that was horrible.

Mrs. Vinton was a woman of almost Jud’s age but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick house at the head of her field, but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and the woods began-the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying ground beyond it.

“Kite’s flyne, Daddy!” Gage screamed.

“Yeah, look at it go!” Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited. He payed out kite twine so fast that the string grew hot and branded thin fire across his palm. “Look at that Vulture, Gage! She’s goin to beat shit!”

“Beat-shit!” Gage cried and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray spring cloud, and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April in the high dead grass of Mrs. Vinton’s field; above them the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steady current of air, still higher, and as he had done as a child, Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it, staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in their dreams; Mrs. Vinton’s field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but a large parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straight black seam, and the river valley-the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the river like a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St. Regis Mill at Bucksport below its steaming fume of cloud, or even land’s end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.

“Look at her go, Gage!” Louis yelled, laughing.

Gage was leaning so far back he was in danger of toppling over. A huge grin covered his face. He was waving to the kite.

Louis got some slack and told Gage to hold out one of his hands. Gage did, not even looking around. He couldn’t take his eyes from the kite, which swung and danced in the wind and raced its shadow back and forth across the field.

Louis wound kite string twice around Gage’s hand and now he did look down, comically amazed at the strong tug and pull.

“What!” he said.

“You’re flying it,” Louis said. “You got the hammer, my man. It’s your kite.”

“Gage flyne it?” Cage said, as if asking not his father but himself for confirmation. He pulled the string experimentally; the kite nodded in the windy sky. Gage pulled the string harder; the kite swooped. Louis and his son laughed together. Gage reached out his free hand, groping, and Louis took it in his own.

They stood together that way in the middle of Mrs. Vinton’s field, looking up at the Vulture.

It was a moment with his son that Louis never forgot. As he had gone up and into the kite as a child himself, he now found himself going into Gage, his son. He felt himself shrink until he was within Gage’s tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes-looking out at a world that was so huge and bright, a world where Mrs. Vinton’s field was nearly as big as the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the kite soared miles above him, the string drumming in his fist like a live thing as the wind blew around him, tumbling his hair.

“Kite flyne!” Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Cage’s shoulders and kissed the boy’s cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.

“1 love you, Gage,” he said-it was between the two of them, and that was all right.

And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. “Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!”

They were still flying the kite when Rachel and Ellie came home. He and Gage had gotten it so high that they had nearly run out the string, and the face of the Vulture had been lost; it was only a small black silhouette in the sky.

Louis was glad to see the two of them, and be roared with laughter when Ellie dropped the string momentarily and chased it through the grass, catching it just before the tumbling, unraveling core tube gave up the last of its twine. But having them around also changed things a little, and he was not terribly sorry to go in when, twenty minutes later, Rachel said she believed Gage had had enough of the wind. She was afraid he would get a chill, So the kite was pulled back in, fighting for the sky at every turn of the twine, at last surrendering. Louis tucked it, black wings, buggy bloodshot eyes, and all, under his arm and imprisoned it in the storage closet again. That night Gage ate an enormous supper of hot dogs and beans, and while Rachel was dressing him in his Dr. Dentons for bed, Louis took Ellie aside and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about leaving her marbles around. Under other circumstances, he might have ended up shouting at her because Ellie could turn quite haughty-insulting, even-when accused of some mistake. It was only her way of dealing with criticism, but that did not keep it from infuriating Louis when she laid it on too thick or when he was particularly tired. But this night the kite flying had left him in a fine mood, and Ellie was inclined to be reasonable. She agreed to be more careful and then went downstairs to watch TV until 8:30, a Saturday indulgence she treasured. Okay, that’s out of the way, and it might even do some good, Louis thought, not knowing that marbles were really not the problem, and chills were really not the problem, that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem… as Jud Crandall had warned them it might be on that first day of August.

He went upstairs that night about fifteen minutes after Cage had been put to bed. He found his son quiet but still awake, drinking the last of a bottle of milk and looking contemplatively up at the ceiling.

Louis took one of Gage’s feet in one hand and raised it up. He kissed it, lowered it. “Goodnight, Gage,” he said.

“Kite flyne, Daddy,” Gage said.

“It really did fly, didn’t it?” Louis said, and for no reason at all he felt tears behind his eyes. “Right up to the sky, my man.”

“Kite flyne,” Cage said. “Up to the kye.”

He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and slept. Just like that.

Louis was stepping into the hail when he glanced back and saw yellowy-green, disembodied eyes staring out at him from Gage’s closet. The closet door was open… just a crack. His heart took a lurch into his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace.

He opened the closet door, thinking (Zelda it’s Zelda in the closet her black tongue puffing out between her lips) he wasn’t sure what, but of course it was only Church, the cat was in the closet, and when it saw Louis it arched its back like a cat on a Halloween card.

It hissed at him, its mouth partly open, revealing its needle-sharp teeth.

“Get out of there,” Louis whispered.

Church hissed again. It did not move.

“Get out, I said.” He picked up the first thing that came to hand in the litter of Gage’s toys, a bright plastic Chuggy-ChuggyChoo-Choo which in this dim light was the maroon color of dried blood. He brandished it at Church; the cat not only stood its ground but hissed again.

And suddenly, without even thinking, Louis threw the toy at the cat, not playing, not goofing around; he pegged the toy at the cat as hard as he could, furious at it, and scared of it too, that it should hide here in the darkened closet of his son’s room and refuse to leave, as if it had a right to be there.

The toy locomotive struck the cat dead center. Church uttered a squawk and fled, displaying its usual grace by slamming into the door and almost falling over on its way out.

Cage stirred, muttered something, shifted position, and was still again. Louis felt a little sick. There was sweat standing out in beads on his forehead.

“Louis?” Rachel, from downstairs, sounding alarmed. “Did Gage fall out of his crib?”

“He’s fine, honey. Church knocked over a couple of his toys.”

“Oh, all right.”

He felt-irrationally or otherwise-the way he might have felt if he had looked in on his son and found a snake crawling over him or a big rat perched on the bookshelf over Gage’s crib. Of course it was irrational. But when it had hissed at him from the closet like that.

(Zelda did you think Zelda did you think Oz the Gweat and Tewwible?) He closed Gage’s closet door, sweeping a number of toys back in with its moving foot. He listened to the tiny click of the latch. After a moment’s further hesitation, he turned the closet’s thumbbolt.

He went back to Gage’s crib. In shifting around, the kid had kicked his two blankets down around his knees. Louis disentangled him, pulled the blankets up, and then merely stood there, watching his son, for a long time.