Pet Sematary

36

It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one’s sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

Louis Creed might have harbored such thoughts if he had been thinking rationally following the funeral of his son, Gage William Creed, on the seventeenth of May, but any rational thought-or attempt at it-ceased at the funeral parlor, where a fistfight with his father-in-law (bad enough) resulted in an event even more terrible-a final bit of outrageous gothic melodrama which shattered whatever remained of Rachel’s fragile self-control. That day’s penny dreadful events were only complete when she was pulled, screaming, from the East Room of the Brookings-Smith Mortuary, where Gage lay in his closed coffin, and sedated in the foyer by Surrendra Hardu.

The irony of it was that she would not have experienced that final episode at all, that extravagance of horror, one might say, if the fistfight between Louis Creed and Mr. Irwin Goldman of Dearborn had taken place at the morning visiting hours (10 to 11:30 A. M.) instead of at the afternoon visiting hours (2 to 3:30 P. M.). Rachel had not been in attendance at the morning visiting hours; she simply had not been able to come. She sat at home with Jud Crandall and Steve Masterton. Louis had no idea how he ever could have gotten through the previous forty-eight hours or so without Jud and Steve.

It was well for Louis-well for all three of the remaining family members-that Steve had shown up as promptly as he had, because Louis was at least temporarily unable to make any kind of decision, even one so minor as giving his wife a shot to mute her deep grief. Louis hadn’t even noticed that Rachel had apparently meant to go to the morning viewing in her housecoat, which she had misbuttoned.

Her hair was uncombed, unwashed, tangled. Her eyes, blank brown orbits, bulged from sockets so sunken that they had almost become the eyes of a living skull.

Her flesh was doughy. It hung from her face. She sat at the breakfast table that morning, munching unbuttered toast and talking in disjointed phrases that made no sense at all. At one point she had said abruptly, “About that Winnebago you want to buy, Lou-” Louis had last spoken about buying a Winnebago in 1981.

Louis only nodded and went on eating his own breakfast. He was having a bowl of Cocoa Bears. Cocoa Bears had been one of Gage’s favorite cereals, and this morning Louis wanted them. The taste of them was appalling, but he still wanted them. He was neatly turned out in his best suit-not black, he didn’t have a black suit, but it was at least a deep charcoal gray. He had shaved, showered, and combed his hair. He looked fine, although he was lost in shock.

Ellie was dressed in blue jeans and a yellow blouse. She had brought a picture to the breakfast table with her. This picture, an enlargement of a Polaroid Rachel had taken with the SX-70 Louis and the kids had given her for her last birthday, showed Gage, grinning from the depths of his Sears ski-parka, sitting on her Speedaway sled as Ellie pulled him. Rachel had caught Ellie looking back over her shoulder and smiling at Gage. Gage was grinning back at her.

Ellie carried the picture, but she didn’t talk much.

Louis was unable to see the condition of either his wife or his daughter; he ate his breakfast and his mind replayed the accident over and over and over, except in this mind-movie the conclusion was different.

In the mind-movie he was quicker, and all that happened was that Gage got a spanking for not stopping when they yelled.

It was Steve who really saw how it was going with Rachel and with Ellie as well.

He forbade Rachel to go to the morning viewing (although “viewing” was really a misnomer because of the closed coffin; if it was open, Louis thought, they’d all run screaming from the room, me included) and forbade Ellie to go at all. Rachel protested. Ellie only sat, silent and grave, with the picture of her and Gage in one hand.

It was Steve who gave Rachel the shot she needed and who gave Ellie a teaspoon of a colorless liquid to drink. Ellie usually whined and protested about taking medicine-any kind of medicine-but she drank this silently and without a grimace.

By ten o’clock that morning she was asleep in her bed (the picture of her and Gage still held in her hand) and Rachel was sitting in front of the television set, watching “Wheel of Fortune.” Her responses to Steve’s questions were slow.

She was stoned, but her face had lost that thoughtful look of madness which had so worried-and frightened-the P. A. when he came in that morning at a quarter past eight.

Jud, of course, had made all the arrangements. He made them with the same calm efficiency that he had made them for his wife three months before. But it was Steve Masterton who took Louis aside just before Louis left for the funeral home.

“I’ll see that she’s there this afternoon, if she seems capable of handling it,”

he told Louis.

“Okay.”

“The shot will have worn off by then. Your friend Mr. Crandall says he’ll stay with Ellie during the afternoon viewing hours-”

“Right.”

“-and play Monopoly or something with her-”

“Uh-huh.”

“But-”

“Right.”

Steve stopped. They were standing in the garage, Church’s stomping ground, the place where he brought his dead birds and dead rats. The ones that Louis owned.

Outside was May sun-shine, and a robin bopped across the head of the driveway, as if it had important business somewhere. Maybe it did.

“Louis,” Steve said, “you’ve got to get hold of yourself.”

Louis looked at Steve, politely questioning. Not much of what Steve had said had gotten through-he had been thinking that if he had been a little quicker he could have saved his son’s life-but a little of this last registered.

“I don’t think you’ve noticed,” Steve said, “but Ellie isn’t vocalizing. And Rachel has had such a bad shock that her very conception of time seems to have been twisted out of shape.”

“Right!” Louis said. More force in reply seemed to be indicated here. He wasn’t sure why.

Steve put a hand on Louis’s shoulder. “Lou,” he said, “they need you more now than they ever have in their life. More than they ever will again, maybe.

Please, man… I can give your wife a shot, but… you… see, Louis, you gotta… oh, Christ, Louis, what a cock-knocking, motherfucking mess this is!”

Louis saw with something like alarm that Steve was starting to cry. “Sure,” he said, and in his mind he saw Gage running across the lawn toward the road. They were yelling at Gage to come back, but he wouldn’t-lately the game had been to run away from Mommy-Daddy-and then they were chasing him, Louis quickly outdistancing Rachel, but Gage had a big lead, Gage was laughing, Gage was running away from Daddy-that was the game-and Louis was closing the distance but too slowly, Gage was running down the mild slope of the lawn now to the verge of Route 15, and Louis prayed to God that Gage would fall down-when little kids ran fast, they almost always fell down because a person’s control over his legs didn’t get really cool until he was maybe seven or eight. Louis prayed to God that Gage would fall down, fall down, yes, fall down bloody his nose crack his skull need stitches whatever, because now he could hear the drone of a truck coming toward them, one of those big ten-wheelers that went back and forth endlessly between Bangor and the Orinco plant in Bucksport, and he had screamed Gage’s name then, and he believed that Gage had heard him and tried to stop.

Gage seemed to realize that the game was over, that your parents didn’t scream at you when it was just a game, and he had tried to put on the brakes, and by then the sound of the truck was very loud, the sound of it filled the world. It was thundering. Louis had thrown himself forward in a long flying tackle, his shadow tracking the ground beneath him as the shadow of the Vulture had tracked the white late-winter grass of Mrs. Vinton’s field that day in March, and he believed that the tips of his fingers had actually brushed the back of the light jacket Gage had been wearing, and then Gage’s forward motion had carried him out into the road, and the truck had been thunder, the truck had been sunlight on high chrome, the truck had been the deep-throated, shrieking bellow of an air horn, and that had been Saturday, that had been three days ago.

“I’m okay,” he said to Steve. “I ought to go now.”

“If you can get yourself together and help them,” Steve said, swiping at his eyes with the arm of his jacket, “you’ll be helping yourself too. The three of you have got to get through it together, Louis. That’s the only way. That’s all anybody knows.”

“That’s right,” Louis agreed, and in his mind it all started to happen again, only this time he leaped two feet farther right at the end, and snagged the back of Gage’s jacket, and none of this was happening.

At the time the scene in the East Room happened, Ellie was pushing her Monopoly marker aimlessly-and silently-around the board with Jud Crandall. She shook the dice with one hand and clutched the Polaroid of her pulling Gage on her Speedaway sled with the other.

Steve Masterton had decided it would be all right for Rachel to attend the afternoon viewing-in light of later developments, it was a decision he came to deeply regret.

The Goldmans had flown into Bangor that morning and were staying at the Holiday Inn. Her father had called four times by noon, and Steve had to be increasingly firm-almost threatening, by call four-with the old man. Irwin Goldman wanted to come out and not all the dogs of hell could keep him from his daughter in her time of need, he said. Steve responded that Rachel needed this time before going to the funeral parlor to get over as much of her initial shock as she could. He didn’t know about all the dogs of hell, he said, but he knew one Swedish-American physician's assistant that had no intention of allowing anyone into the Creed home until Rachel had appeared in public, of her own volition.

After the viewing in the afternoon, Steve said, he would be more than happy to let the relatives’ support system take over. Until then, he wanted her left alone.

The old man swore at him in Yiddish and banged the phone down at his end, breaking the connection. Steve waited to see if Goldman would indeed show up, but Goldman had apparently decided to wait. By noon Rachel did seem a little better. She was at least aware of the time frame she was in, and she had gone out to the kitchen to see if there were sandwich makings or anything for after.

People would probably want to come back to the house after, wouldn’t they? she asked Steve.

Steve nodded.

There was no bologna or cold roast beef, but there was a Butterball turkey in the freezer, and she put it on the drainboard to thaw. Steve looked into the kitchen a few minutes later and saw her standing by the sink, looking fixedly at the turkey on the drainboard and weeping.

“Rachel?”

She looked toward Steve. “Gage really liked these. He especially liked the white meat. It was just occurring to me that he was never going to eat another Butterball turkey.”

Steve sent her upstairs to dress-the final test of her ability to cope, really-and when she came down wearing a simple black dress belted at the waist and carrying a small black clutch bag (an evening bag, really), Steve decided she was all right, and Jud concurred.

Steve drove her into town. He stood with Surrendra Hardu in the lobby of the East Room and watched Rachel drift down the aisle toward the flower-buried coffin like a wraith.

“How is it going, Steve?” Surrendra asked quietly.

“Going fucking terrible,” Steve said in a low, harsh voice. “How did you think it was going?”

“I thought it was probably going fucking terrible,” Surrendra said and sighed.

The trouble really began at the morning viewing, when Irwin Goldman refused to shake hands with his son-in-law.

The sight of so many friends and relatives had actually forced Louis out of the web of shock a little, had forced him to notice what was going on and be outward. He had reached that stage of malleable grief that funeral directors are so used to handling and turning to its best advantage. Louis was moved around like a counter in a Parcheesi game.

Outside the East Room was a small foyer where people could smoke and sit in overstuffed easy chairs. The chairs looked as if they might have come directly from a distress sale at some old English men’s club that had gone broke. Beside the door leading into the viewing room was a small easel, black metal chased with gold, and on this easel was a small sign which said simply CAGE WILLIAM CREED. If you went across this spacious white building that looked misleadingly like a comfortable old house, you came to an identical foyer, this one outside the West Room, where the sign on the easel read ALBERTA BURNHAM NEDEAU. At the back of the house was the Riverfront Room. The easel to the left of the door between the foyer and this room was blank; it was not in use on this Tuesday morning. Downstairs was the coffin showroom, each model lit by a baby spotlight mounted on the ceiling. If you looked up-Louis had, and the funeral director had frowned severely at him-it looked as if there were a lot of strange animals roosting up there.

Jud had come with him on Sunday, the day after Gage had died, to pick out a coffin. They had gone downstairs, and instead of immediately turning right into the coffin showroom, Louis, dazed, had continued straight on down the hallway toward a plain white swinging door, the sort you see communicating between restaurant dining rooms and the kitchen. Both Jud and the funeral director had said quickly and simultaneously, “Not that way,” and Louis had followed them away from that swinging door obediently. He knew what was behind that door though. His uncle had been an undertaker.

The East Room was furnished with neat rows of folding chairs-the expensive ones with plushy seats and backs. At the front, in an area that seemed a combination nave and bower, was Cage’s coffin. Louis had picked the American Casket Company’s rosewood model-Eternal Rest, it was called. It was lined with plushy pink silk. The mortician agreed that it was really a beautiful coffin and apologized that he did not have one with a blue lining. Louis responded that he and Rachel had never made such distinctions. The mortician had nodded. The mortician asked Louis if he had thought about how he would defray the expenses of Cage’s funeral. If not, he said, he could take Louis into his office and quickly go over three of their more popular plans-In Louis’s mind, an announcer suddenly spoke up cheerfully: I got my kid’s coffin free, for Raleigh coupons!

Feeling like a creature in a dream, he said, “I’m going to pay for everything with my MasterCard.”

“Fine,” the mortician said.

The coffin was no more than four feet long-a dwarf coffin. Nonetheless its price was slightly over six hundred dollars. Louis supposed it rested on trestles, but the flowers made it difficult to see, and he hadn’t wanted to go too close. The smell of all those flowers made him want to gag.

At the head of the aisle, just inside the door giving onto the foyer-lounge, was a book on a stand. Chained to the stand was a ballpoint pen. It was here that the funeral director positioned Louis, so he could “greet his friends and relatives.”

The friends and relatives were supposed to sign the book with their names and addresses. Louis had never had the slightest idea what the purpose of this mad custom might be, and he did not ask now. He supposed that when the funeral was over, he and Rachel would get to keep the book. That seemed the maddest thing of all. Somewhere he had a high school yearbook and a college yearbook and a med school yearbook; there was also a wedding book, with MY WEDDING DAY stamped on the imitation leather in imitation gold leaf, beginning with a photo of Rachel trying on her bridal veil before the mirror that morning with her mother’s help and ending with a photo of two pairs of shoes outside a closed hotel door. There was also a baby book for Ellie-they had tired of adding to it rather quickly though; that one-with its spaces for MY FIRST HAIRCUT (add a lock of baby’s hair) and WHOOPS! (add a picture of baby falling on her ass)-had been just too relentlessly cute.

Now, added to all the others, this one. What do we call it?

Louis wondered as he stood numbly beside the stand waiting for the party to begin. MY DEATHBOOK? FUNERAL AUTOGRAPHS? THE DAY WE PLANTED GAGE? Or maybe something more dignified, like A DEATH IN THE FAMILY?

He turned the book back to its cover, which, like the cover to the MY WEDDING DAY book, was imitation leather.

The cover was blank.

Almost predictably, Missy Dandridge had been the first to arrive that morning, good-hearted Missy who had sat with Ellie and Gage on dozens of occasions. Louis found himself remembering that it had been Missy who had taken the kids on the evening of the day Victor Pascow had died. She had taken the kids, and Rachel had made love to him, first in the tub, then in bed.

Missy had been crying, crying hard, and at the sight of Louis’s calm, still face, she burst into fresh tears and reached for him-seemed to grope for him.

Louis embraced her, realizing that this was the way it worked or the way it was supposed to work, anyway-some kind of human charge that went back and forth, loosening up the hard earth of loss, venting it, breaking up the rocky path of shock with the heat of sorrow.

I’m so sorry, Missy was saying, brushing her dark blond hair back from her pallid face. Such a dear sweet little boy. I loved him so much, Louis, I’m so sorry, it’s an awful road, I hope they put that truck driver in jail forever, he was going much too fast, he was so sweet, so dear, so bright, why would Cod take Gage, I don’t know, we can’t understand, can we, but I’m sorry, sorry, so sorry.

Louis comforted her, held her and comforted her. He felt her tears on his collar, the press of her breasts against him. She wanted to know where Rachel was, and Louis told her that Rachel was resting. Missy promised to go see her and that she would sit with Ellie anytime, for as long as they needed her. Louis thanked her.

She had started away, still sniffing, her eyes redder than ever above her black handkerchief. She was moving toward the coffin when Louis called her back. The funeral director, whose name Louis could not even remember, had told him to have them sign the book, and damned if he wasn’t going to have them do it.

Mystery guest, sign in please, he thought and came very close to going off into cackles of bright, hysterical laughter.

It was Missy’s woeful, heartbroken eyes that drove the laughter away.

“Missy, would you sign the book?” he asked her, and because something else seemed to be needed, he added, “For Rachel.”

“Of course,” she said. “Poor Louis and poor Rachel.” And suddenly Louis knew what she was going to say next, and for some reason he dreaded it; yet it was coming, unavoidable, like a black bullet of a large caliber from a killer’s gun, and he knew that he would be struck over and over by this bullet in the next interminable ninety minutes, and then again in the afternoon, while the wounds of the morning were still trickling blood: “Thank God he didn’t suffer, Louis. At least it was quick.”

Yes, it was quick, all right, he thought about saying to her-ah, how that would shatter her face all over again, and he felt a vicious urge to do it, to simply spray the words into her face. It was quick, no doubt about that, that’s why the coffin’s closed, nothing could have been done about Gage even if Rachel and I approved of dressing up dead relatives in their best like department store mannequins and rouging and powdering and painting their faces. It was quick, Missy-my-dear, one minute he was there on the road and the next minute he was lying in it, but way down by the Ringers’ house. It hit him and killed him and then it dragged him and you better believe it was quick. A hundred yards or more all told, the length of a football field. I ran after him, Missy, I was screaming his name over and over again, almost as if I expected he would still be alive, me, a doctor. I ran ten yards and there was his baseball cap and I ran twenty yards and there was one of his Star Wars sneakers, I ran forty yards and by then the truck had run off the road and the box had jackknifed in that field beyond the Ringers’ barn. People were coming out of their houses and I went on screaming his name, Missy, and at the fifty-yard line there was his jumper, it was turned inside-out, and on the seventy-yard line there was the other sneaker, and then there was Gage.

Abruptly the world went dove gray. Everything passed out of his view. Dimly he could feel the corner of the stand which held the book digging into his palm, but that was all.

“Louis?” Missy’s voice. Distant. The mystery sound of pigeons in his ears.

“Louis?” Closer now. Alarmed.

The world swam back into focus.

“You all right?”

He smiled. “Fine,” he said. “I’m okay, Missy.”

She signed for herself and her husband-Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge-in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address-Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road-and then raised her eyes to Louis’s and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.

“Be well, Louis,” she whispered.

David Dandridge shook his hand and muttered something inarticulate, his prominent, arrowhead-shaped adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Then he followed his wife hurriedly down the aisle for the ritual examination of a coffin which had been made in Storyville, Ohio, a place where Gage had never been and where he was not known.

Following the Dandridges they all came, moving in a shuffling line, and Louis received them, their handshakes, their hugs, their tears. His collar and the upper sleeve of his dark gray suit coat soon became quite damp. The smell of the flowers began to reach even the back of the room and to permeate the place with the smell of funeral. It was a smell he remembered from his childhood-that sweet, thick, mortuary smell of flowers. Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn’t suffered thirty-two times by his own inner count. He was told that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform twenty-five times. Bringing up the rear was he’s with the angels now, a total of twelve times.

It began to get to him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had (the way your own name will lose its sense and identity if you repeat it over and over again), they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in toward the vitals. By the time his mother-in-law and father-in-law put in their inevitable appearance, he had begun to feel like a hard-tagged fighter.

His first thought was that Rachel had been right-and how. Irwin Goldman had indeed aged. He was-what? Fifty-eight, fifty-nine? Today he looked a graven and composed seventy. He looked almost absurdly like Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin with his bald head and Coke-bottle glasses. Rachel had told Louis Goldman had aged when she came back from her Thanksgiving trip, but Louis had not expected this. Of course, he thought, maybe it hadn’t been this bad at Thanksgiving. The old man hadn’t lost one of his two grandchildren at Thanksgiving.

Dory walked beside him, her face all but invisible under two-possibly three-layers of heavy black netting. Her hair was fashionably blue, the color favored by elderly ladies of an upper-class American persuasion. She held her husband’s ann. All Louis could really see behind the veil was the glitter of her tears.

Suddenly he decided it was time to let bygones be bygones. He could not hold the old grudge any longer. Suddenly it was too heavy. Perhaps it was the cumulative weight of all those platitudes.

“Irwin. Dory,” he murmured. “Thank you for coming.”

He made a gesture with his arms, as if to shake hands with Rachel’s father and hug her mother simultaneously, or perhaps even to hug them both. Either way he felt his own tears start for the first time, and for an instant he had the crazy idea that they could mend all their fences, that Gage would do that much for them in his dying, as if this were some romantic ladies’ novel he had stepped into where the wages of death were reconciliation, where it could cause something more constructive than this endless, stupid, grinding ache which just went on and on and on.

Dory started toward him, making a gesture, beginning, perhaps, to hold out her own arms. She said something-”Oh, Louis… “ and something else that was garbled-and then Goldman pulled his wife back. For a moment the three of them stood in a tableau that no one noticed except themselves (unless perhaps the funeral director, standing unobtrusively in the far corner of the East Room, saw-Louis supposed that Uncle Carl would have seen), Louis with his arms partly outstretched, Irwin and Dory Goldman standing as stiff and straight as a couple on a wedding cake.

Louis saw that there were no tears in his father-in-law’s eyes; they were bright and clear with hate (does he think I killed Gage to spite him? Louis wondered).

Those eyes seemed to measure Louis, to find him the same small and pointless man who had kidnapped his daughter and brought her to this sorrow… and then to dismiss him. His eyes shifted to Louis’s left-to Gage’s coffin, in fact-and only then did they soften.

Still Louis made a final effort. “Irwin,” he said. “Dory. Please. We have to get together on this.”

“Louis,” Dory said again-kindly, Louis thought-and then they were past him, Irwin Goldman perhaps pulling his wife along, not looking to the left or the right, certainly not looking at Louis Creed. They approached the coffin, and Goldman fumbled a small black skullcap out of his suit coat pocket.

You didn’t sign the book, Louis thought, and then a silent belch of such malignantly acidic content rose through his digestive works that his face clenched in pain.

The morning viewing ended at last. Louis called home. Jud answered and asked him how it had gone. All right, Louis said. He asked Jud if he could talk to Steve.

“If she can dress herself, I’m going to let her come this afternoon,” Steve said. “Okay by you?”

“Yes,” Louis said.

“How are you, Lou? No bullshit and straight on-how are you?”

“All right,” Louis said briefly. “Coping.” I had all of them sign the book. All of them except Dory and Irwin, and they wouldn’t.

“All right,” Steve said. “Look, shall we meet you for lunch?”

Lunch. Meeting for lunch. This seemed such an alien idea that Louis thought of the science fiction novels he had read as a teenager-novels by Robert A.

Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Gordon R. Dickson. The natives here on Planet Quark have an odd custom when one of their children dies, Lieutenant Abelson: they “meet for lunch.” I know how grotesque and barbaric that sounds, but remember, this planet has not been terra formed yet.

“Sure,” Louis said. “What’s a good restaurant for half time between funeral viewings, Steve?”

“Take it easy, Lou,” Steve said, but he didn’t seem entirely displeased. In this state of crazy calm, Louis felt better able to see into people than ever before in his life. Perhaps it was an illusion, but right now he suspected Steve was thinking that even a sudden spate of sarcasm, squirted out like an abrupt mouthful of bile, was preferable to his earlier state of disconnection.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Steve now. “What about Benjamin's?”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Benjamin’s would be fine.”

He had made the call from the office of the funeral director. Now, as Louis passed the East Room on his way out, he saw that the room was almost empty, but Irwin and Dory Goldman sat down in the front row, heads bowed. They looked to Louis as if they might sit there forever.

Benjamin’s was the right choice. Bangor was an early-lunch town, and around one o’clock it was nearly deserted. Jud had come along with Steve and Rachel, and the four of them ate fried chicken. At one point Rachel went to the ladies’ room and remained in there so long that Steve became nervous. He was on the verge of asking a waitress to check on her when she came back to the table, her eyes red.

Louis picked at his chicken and drank a lot of Schlitz beer. Jud matched him bottle for bottle, not talking much.

Their four meals went back almost uneaten, and with his preternatural insight, Louis saw the waitress, a fat girl with a pretty face, debating with herself about whether or not to ask them if their meals had been all right, finally taking another look at Rachel’s red-rimmed eyes and deciding it would be the wrong question. Over coffee Rachel said something so suddenly and so baldly that it rather shocked them all-particularly Louis, who at last was becoming sleepy with the beer. “I’m going to give his clothes to the Salvation Army.”

“Are you?” Steve said after a moment.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “There’s a lot of wear in them yet. All his jumpers…

his corduroy pants… his shirts. Someone will be glad to get them. They’re all very serviceable. Except for the ones he was wearing, of course. They’re…

. ruined.”

The last word became a miserable choke. She tried to drink coffee, but that was no good. A moment later she was sobbing into her hands.

There was a queer moment then. There were crossing lines of tension then. They all seemed to focus on Louis. He felt this with the same preternatural insight he’d had all this day, and of them all, this was the clearest and surest. Even the waitress felt those converging lines of awareness. He saw her pause at a table near the back where she was laying placemats and silver. For a moment Louis was puzzled, and then he understood: they were waiting for him to comfort his wife.

He couldn’t do it. He wanted to do it. He understood it was his responsibility to do it. All the same, he couldn’t. It was the cat that got in his way.

Suddenly and with no rime or reason. The cat. The fucking cat. Church with his ripped mice and the birds he had grounded forever. When he found them, Louis had cleaned up the messes promptly, with no complaint or comment, certainly without protest. He had, after all, bought them. But had he bought this?

He saw his fingers. Louis saw his fingers. He saw his fingers lightly skating over the back of Gage’s jacket. Then Gage’s jacket had been gone. Then Gage had been gone.

He looked into his coffee cup and let his wife cry beside him, uncomforted.

After a moment-in terms of clock time probably quite short, but both then and in retrospect it seemed long-Steve put an arm around her and hugged her gently. His eyes on Louis’s were reproachful and angry. Louis turned from them toward Jud, but Jud was looking down, as if in shame. There was no help there.

37

“I knew something like this would happen,” Irwin Goldman said. That was how the trouble started. “I knew it when she married you. ‘You’ll have all the grief you can stand and more,’ I said. And look at this. Look at this… this mess.”

Louis looked slowly around at his father-in-law, who had appeared before him like some malign jack-in-the-box in a skullcap; and then, instinctively, he looked around at where Rachel had been, by the book on the stand-the afternoon shift was hers by default-but Rachel was gone.

The afternoon viewing had been less crowded, and after half an hour or so, Louis had gone down to the front row of seats and sat there on the aisle, aware of very little (only peripherally aware of the cloying stink of the flowers) except the fact that he was very tired and sleepy. It was only partly the beer, he supposed. His mind was finally ready to shut down. Probably a good thing.

Perhaps, after twelve or sixteen hours of sleep, he would be able to comfort Rachel a little.

After a while his head had sunk until he was looking at his hands, loosely linked between his knees. The hum of voices near the back was soothing. He had been relieved to see that Irwin and Dory weren’t here when the four of them returned from lunch, but he should have known their continued absence was too good to be true.

“Where’s Rachel?” Louis asked now.

“With her mother. Where she should be.” Goldman spoke with the studied triumph of a man who has closed a big deal. There was Scotch on his breath. A lot of it.

He stood before Louis like a banty little district attorney before a man in the bar of justice, a man who is patently guilty. He was unsteady on his feet.

“What did you say to her?” Louis said, feeling the beginnings of alarm now. He knew Goldman had said something. It was in the man’s face.

“Nothing but the truth. I told her this is what it gets you, marrying against your parents’ wishes. I told her-”

“Did you say that?” Louis asked incredulously. “You didn’t really say that, did you?”

“That and more,” Irwin Goldman said, “I always knew it would come to this-this or something like it. I knew what kind of a man you were the first time I saw you.” He leaned forward, exhaling Scotch fumes. “I saw through you, you prancing little fraud of a doctor. You enticed my daughter into a stupid, feckless marriage and then you turned her into a scullery maid and then you let her son be run down in the highway like a… a chipmunk.”

Most of this went over Louis’s head. He was still groping with the idea that this stupid little man could have-“You said that to her?” he repeated. “You said it?” “I hope you rot in hell!” Goldman said, and heads turned sharply toward the sound of his voice. Tears began to squeeze out of Irwin Goldman’s bloodshot brown eyes. His bald head glowed under the muted fluorescent lights.

“You made my wonderful daughter into a scullery maid… destroyed her future took her away… and let my grandson die a dirty death in a country road.”

His voice rose to a hectoring scream.

“Where were you? Sitting on your ass while he was playing in the road? Thinking about your stupid medical articles? What were you doing, you shit? You stinking shit! Killer of children!

There they were. There they were at the front of the East Room. There they were, and Louis saw his arm go out. He saw the sleeve of his suit coat pull back from the cuff of his white shirt. He saw the mellow gleam of one cufflink. Rachel had given him the set for their third wedding anniversary, never knowing that her husband would someday wear these cufflinks to the funeral ceremonies of their then-unborn son. His fist was just something tied to the end of his arm. It connected with Goldman’s mouth. He felt the old man’s lips squash and splay back. It was a sickening feeling, really-squashing a slug with your fist might feel something like that.

There was no satisfaction in it. Beneath the flesh of his father-in-law’s lips he could feel the stern, unyielding regularity of his dentures.

Goldman went stumbling backward. His arm came down against Gage’s coffin, knocking it aslant. One of the vases, top-heavy with flowers, fell over with a crash. Someone screamed.

It was Rachel, struggling with her mother, who was trying to hold her back. The people who were there-ten or fifteen in all-seemed frozen between fright and embarrassment. Steve had taken Jud back to Ludlow, and Louis was dimly grateful for that. This was not a scene he would have wished Jud to witness. It was unseemly.

“Don’t hurt him!” Rachel screamed. “Louis, don’t hurt my father!”

“You like to hit old men, do you?” Irwin Goldman of the overflowing checkbook cried out shrilly. He was grinning through a mouthful of blood. “You like to hit old men? I am not surprised, you stinking bastard. That does not surprise me at all.”

Louis turned toward him, and Goldman struck him in the neck. It was a clumsy, side-handed, chopping blow, but Louis was unprepared for it. A paralyzing pain that would make it hard for him to swallow for the next two hours exploded in his throat. His head rocked back, and he fell to one knee in the aisle.

First the flowers, now me, he thought. What is it the Ramones say? Hey-ho, let’s go! He thought he wanted to laugh, but there was no laugh in him. What came out of his hurt throat was a little groan.

Rachel screamed again.

Irwin Goldman, his mouth dripping blood, marched over to where his son-in-law kneeled and kicked Louis smartly in the kidneys. The pain was a bright flare of agony. He put his hands down on the rug runner to keep from going flop on his belly.

“You don’t do so good even against old men, sonny!” Goldman cried with cracked excitement. He kicked out at Louis again, missing the kidney this time, getting Louis on the high part of the left buttock with one black old man’s shoe. Louis grunted in pain, and this time he did go down on the carpet. His chin hit with an audible crack. He bit his tongue.

“There!” Goldman cried. “There’s the kick in the ass I should have given you the first time you came sucking around, you bastard. There!” He kicked Louis in the ass again, this time connecting with the other buttock. He was weeping and grinning. Louis saw for the first time that Goldman was unshaven-a sign of mourning. The funeral director raced toward them. Rachel had broken Mrs. Goldman’s hold and was also racing toward them, screaming.

Louis rolled clumsily over on his side and sat up. His father-in-law kicked out at him again and Louis caught his shoe in both hands-it thwapped solidly into his palms like a well-caught football-and shoved backward as hard as he could.

Bellowing, Goldman flew backward at an angle, pinwheeling his arms for balance.

He fell on Gage’s Eternal Rest casket, which had been manufactured in the town of Storyville, Ohio, and which had not come cheap.

Oz the Gweat and Tewwible has just fallen on top of my son’s coffin, Louis thought dazedly. The casket fell from the trestle with a huge crash. The left end fell first, then the right. The latch snapped. Even over the screams and the crying, even over the bellows of Goldman, who after all was only playing a children’s party game of Pin the Blame on the Donkey, Louis heard the lock snap.

The coffin did not actually open and spill Gage’s sad, hurt remains out onto the floor for all of them to gawp at, but Louis was sickly aware that they had only been spared that by the way the coffin had fallen-on its bottom instead of on its side. It easily could have fallen that other way. Nonetheless in that split instant before the lid slammed shut on its broken latch again, he saw a flash of gray-the suit they had bought to put in the ground around Gage’s body. And a bit of pink. Gage’s hand, maybe.

Sitting there on the floor, Louis put his face in his hands and began to weep.

He had lost all interest in his father-in-law, in the MX missile, in permanent versus dissolving sutures, in the heat death of the universe. At that moment, Louis Creed wished he were dead. And suddenly, weirdly, an image rose in his mind: Gage in Mickey Mouse ears, Gage laughing and shaking hands with a great big Goofy on Main Street, in Disney World. He saw this with utter clarity.

One of the trestle supports had fallen over; the other leaned with drunken casualness against the low dais where a minister might stand to offer a eulogy. Sprawled in the flowers was Goldman, also weeping. Water from the overturned vases trickled. The flowers, some of them crushed and mangled, gave off their turgid scent even more strongly.

Rachel was screaming and screaming.

Louis could not respond to her screams. The image of Gage in Mickey Mouse ears was fading, but not before he heard a voice announcing there would be fireworks later that evening. He sat with his face in his hands, not wanting them to see him anymore, his tear-stained face, his loss, his guilt, his pain, his shame, most of all his cowardly wish to be dead and out of this blackness.

The funeral director and Dory Goldman led Rachel out. She was still screaming.

Later on, in another room (one that Louis assumed was reserved especially for those overcome with grief-the Hysterics’ Parlor, perhaps) she became very silent. Louis himself, dazed but sane and in control, sedated her this time, after insisting that the two of them be left alone.

At home he led her up to bed and gave her another shot. Then he pulled the covers up to her chin and regarded her waxy, pallid face.

“Rachel, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d give anything in the world to take that back.”

“It’s all right,” she said in a strange, flat voice and then rolled over on her side, turning away from him.

He heard the tired old question Are you all right? rising to his lips and pushed it back. It wasn’t a true question; it wasn’t what he really wanted to know.

“How bad are you?” he asked finally.

“Pretty bad, Louis,” she said and then uttered a sound that could have been a laugh. “I am terrible, in fact.”

Something more seemed required, but Louis could not supply it. He felt suddenly resentful of her, of Steve Masterton, of Missy Dandridge and her husband with his arrowhead-shaped adam’s apple, of the whole damned crew. Why should he have to be the eternal supplier? What sort of shit was that?

He turned off the light and left. He found that he could not give much more to his daughter.

For one wild moment, regarding her in her shadowy room, he thought she was Gage-the thought came to him that the whole thing had been a hideous nightmare, like his dream of Pascow leading him into the woods, and for a moment his tired mind grasped at it. The shadows helped-there was only the shifting light of the portable TV that Jud had taken up for her to pass the hours. The long, long hours.

But it wasn’t Gage, of course; it was Ellie, who was now not only grasping the picture in which she was pulling Gage on the sled, but sitting in Cage’s chair.

She had taken it out of his room and brought it into hers. It was a small director’s chair with a canvas seat and a canvas strip across the back.

Stenciled across that strip was GAGE. Rachel had mail-ordered four of these chairs. Each member of the family had one with his or her name stenciled on the back.

Ellie was too big for Gage’s chair. She was crammed into it, and the canvas bottom bulged downward dangerously. She held the Polaroid picture to her chest and stared at the TV, where some movie was showing.

“Ellie,” he said, snapping off the TV, “bedtime.”

She worked her way out of the chair, then folded it up. She apparently meant to take the chair into bed with her.

Louis hesitated, wanting to say something about the chair, and finally settled on, “Do you want me to tuck you in?”

“Yes, please,” she said.

“Do you… would you want to sleep with Mommy tonight?”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?”

She smiled a little. “Yes. She steals the covers.”

Louis smiled back. “Come on then.”

Instead of trying to put the chair in bed with her, Ellie unfolded it by the head of the bed, and an absurd image came to Louis-here was the consulting room of the world’s smallest psychiatrist.

She undressed, putting the picture of her and Gage on her pillow to do it. She put on her baby doll pajamas, picked up the picture, went into the bathroom, put it down to wash up, brush, floss, and to take her fluoride tablet. Then she picked it up again and got into bed with it.

Louis sat down beside her and said, “I want you to know, Ellie, that if we keep on loving each other, we can get through this.”

Each word was like moving a handcar loaded with wet bales, and the total effort left Louis feeling exhausted.

“I’m going to wish really hard,” Ellie said calmly, “and pray to God for Gage to come back.”

“Ellie-”

“God can take it back if He wants to,” Ellie said. “He can do anything He wants to.”

“Ellie, God doesn’t do things like that,” Louis said uneasily, and in his mind’s eye he saw Church squatting on the closed lid of the toilet, staring at him with those muddy eyes as Louis lay in the tub.

“He does so,” she said. “In Sunday School the teacher told us about this guy Lazarus. He was dead, and Jesus brought him back to life. He said ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ and the teacher said if he’d just said ‘Come forth,’ probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out, and Jesus only wanted Lazarus.”

An absurdity popped out of his mouth (but the day had sung and gibbered with absurdity): “That was a long time ago, Ellie.”

“I’m going to keep things ready for him,” she said. “I’ve got his picture, and I’m going to sit in his chair-”

“Ellie, you’re too big for Gage’s chair,” Louis said, taking her hot, feverish hand. “You’ll break it.”

“God will help it not to break,” Ellie said. Her voice was serene, but Louis observed the brown half-moons under her eyes. Looking at her made his heart ache so badly that he turned away from her. Maybe when Gage’s chair broke, she would begin to understand what had happened a little better.

“I’m going to carry the picture and sit in his chair,” she said. “I’m going to eat his breakfast too.” Gage and Ellie had each had their own breakfast cereals; Gage’s, Ellie had once claimed, tasted like dead boogers. If Cocoa Bears was the only cereal in the house, Ellie would sometimes eat a boiled egg… or nothing at all. “I’ll eat lima beans even though I hate them, and I’ll read all of Gage’s picturebooks and I’ll… I’ll… you know… get things ready…

in case… “ She was crying now. Louis did not try to comfort her but only brushed her hair back from her forehead. What she was talking about made a certain crazed sense.

Keeping the lines open. Keeping things current. Keeping Gage in the present, in the Hot One Hundred, refusing to let him recede; remember when Gage did this… or that… yeah, that was great… good old Gage, wotta kid.

When it started not to hurt, it started not ‘to matter. She understood, perhaps, Louis thought, how easy it would be to let Gage be dead.

“Ellie, don’t cry anymore,” he said. “This isn’t forever.”

She cried forever… for fifteen minutes. She actually fell asleep before her tears stopped. But eventually she slept, and downstairs the clock struck ten in the quiet house.

Keep him alive, Ellie, if that’s what you want, he thought and kissed her. The shrinks would probably say it’s as unhealthy as hell, but I’m for it. Because I know the day will come-maybe as soon as this Friday-when you forget to carry the picture and I’ll see it lying on your bed in this empty room while you ride your bike around the driveway or walk in the field behind the house or go over to Kathy McGown’s house to make clothes with her Sew Perfect. Gage won’t be with you, and that’s when Gage drops off whatever Hot One Hundred there is that exists in little girls’ hearts and starts to become Something That Happened in 1984. A blast from the past.

Louis left the room and stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, thinking-not seriously-about going to bed.

He knew what he needed and went downstairs to get it.

Louis Albert Creed set methodically about getting drunk. Downstairs in the cellar were five cases of Schlitz Light beer. Louis drank beer, Jud drank it, Steve Masterton drank it, Missy Dandridge would occasionally have a beer or two while watching the kids (kid, Louis reminded himself, going down the cellar stairs). Even Chariton, on the few occasions she had come over to the house, preferred a beer-as long as it was a light beer-to a glass of wine. So one day last winter Rachel had gone out and bought a staggering ten cases when Schlitz Light went on sale at the Brewer A amp; P. Stop you running down to Julio’s in Orrington every time somebody drops in, she had said. And you’re always quoting Robert Parker to me, love-any beer that’s in the refrigerator after the stores close is good beer, right? So drink this and think about the dough you’re saving. Last winter. When things had been okay. When things had been okay. It was funny, how quickly and easily your mind made that crucial division.

Louis brought up a case of beer and shoved the cans into the fridge. Then he took one can, closed the fridge door, and opened the beer. Church came oiling slowly and rustily out of the pantry at the sound of the refrigerator door and stared inquiringly up at Louis. The cat did not come too close; Louis had perhaps kicked it too many times.

“Nothing for you,” he told the cat. “You had your can of Calo today. If you want something else, go kill a bird.”

Church stood there, looking up at him. Louis drank off half the can of beer and felt it go to his head almost at once.

“You don’t even eat them, do you?” he asked. “Just killing them is enough for you.”

Church strolled into the living room, apparently deciding there was going to be no food, and after a moment Louis followed it.

He thought again randomly, Hey-ho, let’s go.

Louis sat down in his chair and looked at Church again. The cat was reclining on the rug by the TV stand, watching Louis carefully, probably ready to run if Louis should suddenly become aggressive and decide to put his kicking-foot in gear.

Instead Louis raised his beer. “To Gage,” he said. “To my son, who might have been an artist or an Olympic swimmer or the motherfucking President of the United States. What do you say, asshole?”

Church regarded him with those dull, strange eyes.

Louis drank off the rest of his beer in big gulps that hurt his tender throat, arose, went to the fridge, and got a second one.

By the time Louis had finished three beers, he felt that he had some sort of equilibrium for the first time that day. By the time he had gotten through the first six-pack, he felt that sleep might actually be possible in another hour or so. He came back from the fridge with his eighth or ninth (he had really lost count by then and was walking on a slant), and his eyes fell on Church; the cat was dozing-or pretending to-on the rug now. The thought came so naturally that it surely must have been there all along, simply waiting its time to come forward from the back of his mind: When are you going to do it? When are you going to bury Gage in the annex to the Pet Sematary?

And on the heels of that: Lazarus, come forth.

Ellie’s sleepy, dazed voice: The teacher said if he’d just said “Come forth,” probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out.

A chill of such elemental force struck him that Louis clutched himself as the shudder twisted through his body. He suddenly found himself remembering Ellie’s first day of school, how Gage had gone to sleep on his lap while he and Rachel were listening to Ellie prattle on about “Old MacDonald” and Mrs. Berryman; he had said Just let me put the baby to bed, and when he took Gage upstairs a horrible premonition had struck him, and now he understood: Back in September part of him had known Gage was going to die soon. Part of him had known that Oz the Gweat and Tewwible was at hand. It was nonsense, it was rot, it was superstitious bullshit of the purest ray serene… and it was true. He had known. Louis spilled some of his beer on his shirt, and Church looked up wearily to see if this was a signal that the evening's cat-kicking festivities were about to commence.

Louis suddenly remembered the question he had asked Jud; he remembered the way Jud’s arm had jerked, knocking two empty beer bottles off the table. One of them had shattered. You don’t even want to talk about such things, Louis!

But he did want to talk about them-or at least think about them. The Pet Sematary. What was beyond the Pet Sematary. The idea had a deadly attraction. It made a balance of logic which was impossible to deny. Church had been killed in the road; Gage had been killed in the road. Here was Church-changed of course, distasteful in some ways-but here. Ellie, Gage, and Rachel all had a working relationship with him. He killed birds, true, and had turned a few mice inside out, but killing small animals was a cat thing to do. Church had by no means turned into Frankencat. He was, in many ways, as good as ever.

You’re rationalizing, a voice whispered. He’s not as good as ever. He’s spooky.

The crow, Louis… remember the crow?

“Good God,” Louis said aloud in a shaky, distracted voice he was barely able to recognize as his own.

God, oh yes, fine, sure. If there had ever been a time to invoke the name of God outside of a novel about ghosts or vampires, this was it. So just what-what in the name of God-was he thinking about? He was thinking about a dark blasphemy which he was even now not wholly able to credit. Worse, he was telling himself lies. Not just rationalizing, but outright lying.

So what’s the truth? You want the truth so fucking bad, what’s the truth?

That Church wasn’t really a cat anymore at all-start with that. He looked like a cat, and he acted like a cat, but he was really only a poor imitation. People couldn’t actually see through that imitation, but they could feel through it. He remembered a night when Chariton had been at the house. The occasion had been a small pre-Christmas dinner party. They’d been sitting in here, talking after the meal, and Church had jumped up in her lap. Chariton had pushed the cat off immediately, a quick and instinctive moue of distaste puckering her mouth.

It had been no big deal. No one had even commented on it. But… it was there. Chariton had felt what the cat wasn’t. Louis killed his beer and went back for another. If Gage came back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity.

He popped the top and drank deeply. He was drunk now, drunk for fair, and there would be a big head for him to deal with tomorrow. How I Went to My Son’s Funeral with a Han gover by Louis Creed, author of How I Just Missed Him at the Crucial Moment and numerous other works.

Drunk. Sure. And he suspected now that the reason he had gotten drunk was so he could consider this crazy idea soberly.

In spite of everything, the idea had that deadly attraction, that sick luster, that glamour. Yes, that above all else-it had glamour.

Jud was back, speaking in his mind: 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 you make up reasons… they seem like good reasons.

but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to.

Jud’s voice, low and drawling with Yankee intonation, Jud’s voice chilling his flesh, bringing out the goosebumps, making the hackles on the back of his neck rise.

These are secret things, Louis… the soil of a man’s heart is stonier…

like the soil up in the old Micmac burying ground. A man grows what he can…

and he tends it.

Louis began to go over the other things Jud had told him about the Micmac burying ground. He began to collate the data, to sort through it, to compress it-he proceeded in exactly the same way he had once readied himself for big exams.

The dog. Spot.

I could see all the places where the barbed wire had hooked him-there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in.

The bull. Another file turned over in Louis’s mind.

Lester Morgan buried his prize hull up there. Black Angus bull, named Hanratty.

… Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge… shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he’s the only animal I ever heard of that did.

He turned mean.

The soil of a man’s heart is stonier.

He turned really mean.

He’s the only animal I ever heard of that did.

Mostly you do it because once you’ve been up there, it’s your place.

The flesh looked dimpled in.

Hanratty, ain’t that a silly name for a bull?

A man grows what he can… and tends it.

They’re my rats. And my birds. I bought the fuckers.

It’s your place, a secret place, and it belongs to you, and you belong to it.

He turned mean, but he’s the only animal I ever heard of that did.

What do you want to buy next, Louis, when the wind blows hard at night and the moon lays a white path through the woods to that place? Want to climb those stairs again? When they’re watching a horror movie, everyone in the audience knows the hero or the heroine is stupid to go up those stairs, but in real life they always do-they smoke, they don’t wear seat belts, they move their family in beside a busy highway where the big rigs drone back and forth all day and all night. So, Louis, what do you say? Want to climb the stairs? Would you like to keep your dead son or go for what’s behind Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?

Hey-ho, let’s go.

Turned mean… only animal… the flesh looked… a man yours… his…

Louis dumped the rest of the beer down the sink, feeling suddenly that he was going to vomit. The room was moving around in great swinging motions.

There was a knock at the door.

For a long time-it seemed like a long time, anyway-he believed it was only in his head, a hallucination. But the knocking just went on and on, patient, implacable. And suddenly Louis found himself thinking of the story of the monkey’s paw, and a cold terror slipped into him. He seemed to feel it with total physical reality-it was like a dead hand that had been kept in a refrigerator, a dead hand which had suddenly taken on its own disembodied life and slipped inside his shirt to clutch the flesh over his heart. It was a silly image, fulsome and silly, but oh, it didn’t feel silly. No.

Louis went to the door on feet he could not feel and lifted the latch with nerveless fingers. And as he swung it open, he thought: It’ll be Pascow. Like they said about Jim Morrison, back from the dead and bigger than ever. Pascow standing there in his jogging shorts, big as life and as mouldy as month-old bread, Pascow with his horribly ruined head, Pascow bringing the warning again: Don’t go up there. What was that old song by the Animals? Baby please don’t go, baby PLEASE don’t go, you know I love you so, baby please don’t go.

The door swung open and standing there on his front step in the blowing dark of this midnight, between the day of the funeral parlor visitation and the day of his son’s burial, was Jud Crandall. His thin white hair blew randomly in the chilly dark.

Louis tried to laugh. Time seemed to have turned cleverly back on itself. It was Thanksgiving again. Soon they would put the stiff, unnaturally thickened body of Ellie’s cat Winston Churchill into a plastic garbage bag and start off. Oh, do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.

“Can I come in, Louis?” Jud asked. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket and poked one into his mouth.

“Tell you what,” Louis said. “It’s late and I’ve been drinking a pile of beer.”

“Ayuh, I could smell it,” Jud said. He struck a match. The wind snuffed it. He struck another around cupped hands, but the hands trembled and betrayed the match to the wind again. He got a third match, prepared to strike it, and then looked up at Louis standing in the doorway. “I can’t get this thing lit,” Jud said. “Gonna let me in or not, Louis?”

Louis stepped aside and let Jud walk in.

38

They sat at the kitchen table over beers-first time we’ve ever tipped one in our kitchen, Louis thought, a little surprised. Halfway across the living room, Ellie had cried out in her sleep, and both of them had frozen like statues in a children’s game. The cry had not been repeated.

“Okay,” Louis said, “what are you doing over here at quarter past twelve on the morning my son gets buried? You’re a friend, Jud, but this is stretching it.”

Jud drank, wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, and looked directly at Louis. There was something clear and positive in his eyes, and Louis at last looked down from it.

“You know why I’m here,” Jud said. “You’re thinking about things that are not to be thought of, Louis. Worse still, I fear you’re considering them.”

“I wasn’t thinking about anything but going up to bed,” Louis said. “I have a burying to go to tomorrow.”

“I’m responsible for more pain in your heart than you should have tonight,” Jud said softly. “For all I know, I may even have been responsible for the death of your son.”

Louis looked up, startled. “What-? Jud, don’t talk crazy!”

“You are thinking of trying to put him up there,” Jud said. “Don’t you deny the thought has crossed your mind, Louis.”

Louis did not reply.

“How far does its influence extend?” Jud said. “Can you tell me that? No. I can’t answer that question myself, and I’ve lived my whole life in this patch of the world. I know about the Micmacs, and that place was always considered to be a kind of holy place to them… but not in a good way. Stanny B. told me that.

My father told me too-later on. After Spot died the second time. Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis.

Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim ever stuck. Anson Ludlow, the great-grandson of this town’s founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But even then he would have been in a hell of a court fight because there was cross-claims to the land by other Ludlows and by a fellow named Peter Dimmart, who claimed he could prove pretty convincingly that he was a Ludlow on the other side of the sheets. And Joseph Ludlow the Elder was money-poor but land-rich toward the end of his life, and every now and then he’d just gift somebody with two or four hundred acres when he got into his cups.”

“Were none of those deeds recorded?” Louis asked, fascinated in spite of himself.

“Oh, they were regular bears for recording deeds, were our grandfathers,” Jud said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. “The original grant on your land goes like this.” Jud closed his eyes and quoted, “From the great old maple which stands atop Quinceberry Ridge to the verge of Orrington Stream; thus runneth the tract from north until south.” Jud grinned without much humor.

“But the great old maple fell down in 1882, let’s say, and was rotted to moss by the year 1900, and Orrington Stream silted up and turned to marsh in the ten years between the end of the Great War and the crash of the stock market. A nice mess it made! It ended up not mattering to old Anson, any-ways. He was struck and killed by lightning in 1921, right up around where that burying ground is.”

Louis stared at Jud. Jud sipped his beer.

“It don’t matter. There’s lots of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never gets unraveled, only the lawyers end up makin money. Hell, Dickens knew that. I suppose the Indians will get it back in the end, and I think that’s the way it should be. But that don’t really matter, Louis. I came over here tonight to tell you about Timmy Baterman and his dad.”

“Who’s Timmy Baterman?”

“Timmy Baterman was one of the twenty or so boys from Ludlow that went overseas to fight Hitler. He left in 1942. He come back in a box with a flag on the top of it in 1943. He died in Italy. His daddy, Bill Batennan, lived his whole life in this town. He about went crazy when he got the telegram… and then he quieted right down. He knew about the Micmac burying ground. you see. And he’d decided what he wanted to do.”

The chill was back. Louis stared at Jud for a long time, trying to read the lie in the old man’s eyes. It was not there. But the fact of this story surfacing just now was damned convenient.

“Why didn’t you tell me this that other night?” he said finally. “After we…

after we did the cat? When I asked you if anyone had ever buried a person up there, you said no one ever had.”

“Because you didn’t need to know,” Jud said. “Now you do.”

Louis was silent for a long time. “Was he the only one?”

“The only one I know of personally,” Jud said gravely. “The only one to ever try it? I doubt that, Louis. I doubt it very much. I’m kind of like the preacher in Clesiastes-I don’t believe that there’s anything new under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but that’s all. What’s been tried once has been tried once before… and before… and before.”

He looked down at his liver-spotted hands. In the living room, the clock softly chimed twelve-thirty.

“I decided that a man in your profession is used to looking at symptoms and seeing the diseases underneath… and I decided I had to talk straight to you when Mortonson down at the funeral home told me you’d ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing vault.”

Louis looked at Jud for a long time, saying nothing. Jud flushed deeply but didn’t look away.

Finally Louis said: “Sounds like maybe you did a little snooping, Jud. I am sorry because of it.”

“I didn’t ask him which you bought.”

“Not right out, maybe.”

But Jud did not reply, and although his blush had deepened even more-his complexion was approaching a plum color now-his eyes still didn’t waver.

At last, Louis sighed. He felt unutterably tired. “Oh, fuck it. I don’t care.

Maybe you’re even right. Maybe it was on my mind. If it was, it was on the downside of it. I didn’t think much about what I was ordering. I was thinking about Gage.”

“I know you were thinking about Gage. But you knew the difference. Your uncle was an undertaker.”

Yes, he had known the difference. A sealing vault was a piece of construction work, something which was meant to last a long, long time. Concrete was poured into a rectangular mould reinforced with steel rods, and then, after the graveside services were over, a crane lowered a slightly curved concrete top into place. The lid was sealed with a substance like the hot-patch highway departments used to fill potholes. Uncle Carl had told Louis that sealant-trade-named Ever-Lock-got itself a fearsome grip after all that weight had been on it for a while.

Uncle Carl, who liked to yarn as much as anyone (at least when he was with his own kind, and Louis, who had worked with him summers for a while, qualified as a sort of apprentice undertaker), told his nephew of an exhumation order he’d gotten once from the Cook County D. A. ’s office. Uncle Carl went out to Groveland to oversee the exhumation. They could be tricky things, he said-people whose only ideas concerning disinterral came from those horror movies starring Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Dwight Frye as Igor had an entirely wrong impression. Opening a sealing vault was no job for two men with picks and shovels-not unless they had about six weeks to spend on the job. This one went all right… at first. The grave was opened, and the crane grappled onto the top of the vault. Only the top didn’t just pull off, as it was supposed to do.

The whole vault, its concrete sides already a little wet and discolored, started to rise out of the ground instead. Uncle Carl screamed for the crane operator to back off. Uncle Carl wanted to go back to the mortuary and get some stuff that would weaken the sealant’s grip a bit.

The crane operator either didn’t hear or wanted to go for the whole thing, like a little kid playing with a toy crane and junk prizes in a penny arcade. Uncle Carl said that the damned fool almost got it too. The vault was three quarters of the way out-Uncle Carl and his assistant could hear water pattering from the underside of the vault onto the floor of the grave (it had been a wet week in Chicagoland) when the crane just tipped over and went kerplunk into the grave.

The crane operator crashed into the windshield and broke his nose. That day’s festivities cost Cook County roughly $3,000-$2,100 over the usual price of such gay goings-on. The real point of the story for Uncle Carl was that the crane operator had been elected president of the Chicago local of the Teamsters six years later.

Grave liners were simpler matters. Such a liner was no more than a humble concrete box, open at the top. It was set into the grave on the morning of a funeral. Following the services, the coffin was lowered into it. The sextons then brought on the top, which was usually in two segments. These segments were lowered vertically into the ends of the grave, where they stood up like bookends. Iron rings were embedded into the concrete at the ends of each segment. The sextons would run lengths of chain through them and lower them gently onto the top of the grave liner. Each section would weigh sixty, perhaps seventy pounds-eighty, tops. And no sealer was used.

It was easy enough for a man to open a grave liner; that’s what Jud was implying.

Easy enough for a man to disinter the body of his son and bmy it someplace else.

Shhhhh… shhhh. We will not speak of such things. These are secret things.

“Yes, I guess I knew the difference between a sealing vault and a grave liner,”

Louis said. “But I wasn’t thinking about about what you think I was thinking about.”

“Louis-”

“It’s late,” Louis said. “It’s late, I’m drunk, and my heart aches. If you feel like you have to tell me this story, then tell me and let’s get it over with.”

Maybe I should have started with martinis, he thought. Then I could have been safely passed out when he came knocking.

“All right, Louis. Thank you.”

“Just go on.”

Jud paused a moment, thinking, then began to speak.

39

“In those days-back during the war, I mean-the train still stopped in Orrington, and Bill Baterman had a funeral hack there at the loading depot to meet the freight carrying the body of his son Timmy. The coffin was unloaded by four railroad men. I was one of them. There was an army fellow on board from Graves and Registration-that was the army’s wartime version of undertakers, Louis-but he never got off the train. He was sitting drunk in a boxcar that still had twelve coffins in it.

“We put Timmy into the back of a mortuary Cadillac-in those days it still wasn’t uncommon to hear such things called ‘hurry-up wagons’ because in the old days, the major concern was to get them into the ground before they rotted. Bill Baterman stood by, his face stony and kinda… I dunno… kinda dry, I guess you’d say. He wept no tears. Huey Garber was driving the train that day, and he said that army fella had really had a tour for himself. Huey said they’d flown in a whole shitload of those coffins to Limestone in Presque Isle, at which point both the coffins and their keeper entrained for points south.

“The army fella comes walking up to Huey, and he takes a fifth of rye whiskey out of his uniform blouse, and he says in this soft, drawly Dixie voice, ‘Well, Mr. Engineer, you’re driving a mystery train today, did you know that?’ “Huey shakes his head.

“Well, you are. At least, that’s what they call a funeral train down in Alabama. ’ Huey says the fella took a list out of his pocket and squinted at it.

‘We’re going to start by dropping two of those coffins off in Houlton, and then I’ve got one for Passadumkeag, two for Bangor, one for Derry, one for Ludlow, and so on. I feel like a fugging milkman. You want a drink?’ “Well, Huey declines the drink on the grounds that the Bangor and Aroostook is pretty fussy on the subject of train drivers with rye on their breaths, and the fella from Graves and Registration don’t hold it against Huey, any more than Huey holds the fact of the army fella’s drunkenness against him. They even shook on her, Huey said.

“So off they go, dropping those flag-covered coffins every other stop or two.

Eighteen or twenty of em in all. Huey said it went on all the way to Boston, and there was weeping and wailing relatives at every stop except Ludlow… and at Ludlow he was treated to the sight of Bill Baterman, who, he said, looked like he was dead inside and just waiting for his soul to stink. When he got off that train, he said he woke up that army fella, and they hit some spots-fifteen or twenty-and Huey got drunker than he had ever been and went to a whore, which he’d never done in his whole life, and woke up with a set of crabs so big and mean they gave him the shivers, and he said that if that was what they called a mystery train, he never wanted to drive no mystery train again.

“Timmy’s body was taken up to the Greenspan Funeral Home on Fern Street-it used to be across from where the New Franklin Laundry stands now-and two days later he was buried in Pleasantview Cemetery with full military honors.

“Well, I tell you, Louis: Missus Baterman was dead ten years then, along with the second child she tried to bring into the world, and that had a lot to do with what happened. A second child might have helped to ease the pain, don’t you think? A second child might have reminded old Bill that there’s others that feel the pain and have to be helped through. I guess in that way, you’re luckier-having another child and all, I mean. A child and a wife who are both alive and well.

“According to the letter Bill got from the lieutenant in charge of his boy’s platoon, Timmy was shot down on the road to Rome on July 15, 1943. His body was shipped home two days later, and it got to Limestone on the nineteenth. It was put aboard Huey Garber’s mystery train the very next day. Most of the GIs who got killed in Europe were buried in Europe, but all of the boys who went home on that train were special-Timmy had died charging a machine-gun nest, and he had won the Silver Star posthumously.

“Timmy was buried-don’t hold me to this, but I think it was on July 22. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn, who was the mailwoman in those days, saw Timmy walking up the road toward York’s Livery Stable. Well, Margie damn near drove right off the road, and you can understand why. She went back to the post office, tossed her leather bag with all her undelivered mail still in it on George Anderson’s desk, and told him she was going home and to bed right then.

“Margie, are you sick?’ George asks. ‘You are just as white as a gull’s wing. ’ “I’ve had the fright of my life, and I don’t want to talk to you about it,’ Margie Washburn says. ‘I ain’t going to talk to Brian about it, or my mom, or anybody. When I get up to heaven, if Jesus asks me to talk to Him about it, maybe I will. But I don’t believe it. ’ And out she goes.

“Everybody knew Timmy was dead; there was his bituary in the Bangor Daily News and the Ellsworth American just the week before, picture and all, and half the town turned out for his funeral up to the city. And here Margie seen him, walking up the road-lurching up the road, she finally told old George Anderson-only this was twenty years later, and she was dying, and George told me it seemed to him like she wanted to tell somebody what she’d seen. George said it seemed to him like it preyed on her mind, you know.

“Pale he was, she said, and dressed in an old pair of chino pants and a faded flannel hunting shirt, although it must have been ninety degrees in the shade that day. Margie said all his hair was sticking up in the back. ‘His eyes were like raisins stuck in bread dough. I saw a ghost that day, George. That’s what scared me so. I never thought I’d see such a thing, but there it was. ’ “Well, word got around. Pretty soon some other people saw Timmy, too. Missus Stratton-well, we called her ‘missus,’ but so far as anyone knew she could have been single or divorced or grass-widowed; she had a little two-room house down where the Pedersen Road joins the Hancock Road, and she had a lot of jazz records, and sometimes she’d be willing to throw you a little party if you had a ten-dollar bill that wasn’t working too hard. Well, she saw him from her porch, and she said he walked right up to the edge of the road and stopped there.

“He just stood there, she said, his hands dangling at his sides and his head pushed forward, lookin like a boxer who’s ready to eat him some canvas. She said she stood there on her porch, heart goin like sixty, too scared to move. Then she said he turned around, and it was like watching a drunk man try to do an about-face. One leg went way out and the other foot turned, and he just about fell over. She said he looked right at her and all the strength just run out of her hands and she dropped the basket of washing she had, and the clothes fell out and got smutty all over again.

“She said his eyes… she said they looked as dead and dusty as marbles, Louis. But he saw her… and he grinned… and she said he talked to her.

Asked her if she still had those records because he wouldn’t mind cutting a rug with her. Maybe that very night. And Missus Stratton went back inside, and she wouldn’t come out for most of a week, and by then it was over anyway.

“Lot of people saw Timmy Baterman. Many of them are dead now-Missus Stratton is, for one, and others have moved on, but there are a few old crocks like me left around who’ll tell you. if you ask em right.

“We saw him, I tell you, walking back and forth along the Pedersen Road, a mile east of his daddy’s house and a mile west. Back and forth he went, back and forth all day, and for all anyone knew, all night. Shirt untucked, pale face, hair all stuck up in spikes, fly unzipped sometimes, and this look on his face.

… this look… “ Jud paused to light a cigarette, then shook the match out, and looked at Louis through the haze of drifting blue smoke. And although the story was, of course, utterly mad, there was no lie in Jud’s eyes.

“You know, they have these stories and these movies-I don’t know if they’re true-about zombies down in Haiti. In the movies they just sort of shamble along, with their dead eyes starin straight ahead, real slow and sort of clumsy. Timmy Baterman was like that, Louis, like a zombie in a movie, but he wasn’t. There was somethin more. There was somethin goin on behind his eyes, and sometimes you could see it and sometimes you couldn’t see it. Somethin behind his eyes, Louis.

I don’t think that thinkin is what I want to call it. I don’t know what in the hell I want to call it.

“It was sly, that was one thing. Like him tellin Missus Stratton he wanted to cut a rug with her. There was somethin goin on in there, Louis, but I don’t think it was thinkin and I don’t think it had much-maybe nothing at all-to do with Timmy Baterman. It was more like a… a radio signal that was comin from somewhere else. You looked at him and you thought, ‘If he touches me, I’m gonna scream. ’ Like that.

“Back and forth he went, up and down the road, and one day after I got home from work-this must have been, oh, I’m going to say it was July 30 or so-here is George Anderson, the postmaster, don’t you know, sitting on my back porch, drinking iced tea with Hannibal Benson, who was then our second selectman, and Alan Purinton, who was fire chief. Norma sat there too but never said a thing.

“George kept rubbing the stump at the top of his right leg. Lost most of that leg working on the railroad, he did, and the stump used to bother him something fierce on those hot and muggy days. But here he was, misery or not.

“This has gone far enough,’ George says to me. ‘I got a mail-woman who won’t deliver out on the Pedersen Road-that’s one thing. It’s starting to raise Cain with the government, and that’s something else. ’ “What do you mean, it’s raising Cain with the government?’ I asked “Hannibal said he’d had a call from the War Department. Some lieutenant named Kinsman whose job it was to sort out malicious mischief from plain old tomfoolery. ‘Four or five people have written anonymous letters to the War Department,’ Hannibal says, ‘and this Lieutenant Kinsman is starting to get a little bit concerned. If it was just one fellow who had written one letter, they’d laugh it off. If it was just one fellow writing a whole bunch of letters, Kinsman says he’d call the state police up in Derry Barracks and tell em they might have a psychopath with a hate on against the Baterman family in Ludlow.

But these letters all came from different people. He said you could tell that by the handwriting, name or no name, and they all say the same crazy thing-that if Timothy Baterman is dead, he makes one hell of a lively corpse walking up and down Pedersen Road with his bare face hanging out.

“This Kinsman is going to send a fellow out or come himself if this don’t settle down,’ Hannibal finishes up. ‘They want to know if Timmy’s dead, or AWOL, or what because they don’t like to think their records are all at sixes and sevens.

Also they’re gonna want to know who was buried in Timmy Baterman’s box, if he wasn’t. ’ “Well, you can see what kind of a mess it was, Louis. We sat there most of an hour, drinking iced tea and talking it over. Norma asked us if we wanted sandwidges, but no one did.

“We talked it around and talked it around, and finally we decided we had to go out there to the Baterman place. I’ll never forget that night, not if I live to be twice as old’s I am now. It was hot, hotter than the hinges of hell, with the sun going down like a bucket of guts behind the clouds. There was none of us wanted to go, but we had to. Norma knew it before any of us. She got me inside on some pretext or other and said, ‘Don’t you let them dither around and put this off, Judson. You got to get this taken care of. It’s an abomination.”

Jud measured Louis evenly with his eyes.

“That was what she called it, Louis. It was her word. Abomination. And she kind of whispers in my ear, ‘If anything happens, Jud, you just run. Never mind these others; they’ll have to look out for themselves. You remember me and bust your hump right out of there if anything happens. ’ “We drove over in Hannibal Benson’s car-that son of a bitch got all the A-coupons he wanted, I don’t know how. Nobody said much, but all four of us was smokin like chimblies. We was scared, Louis, just as scared as we could be. But the only one who really said anything was Alan Purinton. He says to George, ‘Bill Baterman has been up to dickens in that woods north of Route 15, and I’ll put my warrant to that. ’ Nobody answered, but I remember George noddin his head.

“Well, we got there, and Alan knocked, but nobody answered, so we went around to the back and there the two of them were. Bill Baterman was sitting there on his back stoop with a pitcher of beer, and Timmy was at the back of the yard, just staring up at that red, bloody sun as it went down. His whole face was orange with it, like he’d been flayed alive. And Bill… he looked like the devil had gotten him after his seven years of highfalutin. He was floatin in his clothes, and I judged he’d lost forty pounds. His eyes had gone back in their sockets until they were like little animals in a pair of caves… and his mouth kep goin tick-tick-tick on the left side.”

Jud paused, seemed to consider, and then nodded imperceptibly. “Louis, he looked damned.

“Timmy looked around at us and grinned. Just seeing him grin made you want to scream. Then he turned and went back to looking at the sun go down. Bill says, ‘I didn’t hear you boys knock,’ which was a bald-faced lie, of course, since Alan laid on that door loud enough to wake the… to wake up a deaf man.

“No one seemed like they was going to say anything, so I says, ‘Bill, I heard your boy was killed over in Italy. ’ “That was a mistake,’ he says, looking right at me.

“Was it?’ I says.

“You see him standin right there, don’t you?’ he says.

“So who do you reckon was in that coffin you had buried out at Pleasantview?’ Alan Purinton asks him.

“‘Be damned if I know,’ Bill says, ‘and be damned if I care. ’ He goes to get a cigarette and spills them all over the back porch, then breaks two or three trying to pick them up.

“Probably have to be an exhumation,’ Hannibal says. ‘You know that, don’t you? I had a call from the goddam War Department, Bill. They are going to want to know if they buried some other mother’s son under Timmy’s name. ’ “Well, what in the hell of it?’ Bill says in a loud voice. ‘That’s nothing to me, is it? I got my boy. Timmy come home the other day. He’s been shell-shocked or something. He’s a little strange now, but he’ll come around. ’ “Let’s quit this, Bill,’ I says, and all at once I was pretty mad at him. ‘If and when they dig up that army coffin, they’re gonna find it dead empty, unless you went to the trouble of filling it up with rocks after you took your boy out of it, and I don’t think you did. I know what happened, Hannibal and George and Alan here know what happened, and you know what happened too. You been foolin around up in the woods, Bill, and you have caused yourself and this town a lot of trouble. ’ “You fellas know your way out, I guess,’ he says. ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you, or justify myself to you, or nothing. When I got that telegram, the life ran right out of me. I felt her go, just like piss down the inside of my leg. Well, I got my boy back. They had no right to take my boy. He was only seventeen. He was all I had left of his dear mother, and it was illfuckinlegal.

So fuck the army, and fuck the War Department, and fuck the United States of America, and fuck you boys too. I got him back. He’ll come around. And that’s all I got to say. Now you all just march your boots back where you came from. ’ “And his mouth is tick-tick-tickin, and there’s sweat all over his forehead in big drops, and that was when I saw he was crazy. It would have driven me crazy too. Living with that… that thing.”

Louis was feeling sick to his stomach. He had drunk too much beer too fast.

Pretty soon it was all going to come up on him. The heavy, loaded feeling in his stomach told him it would be coming up soon.

“Well, there wasn’t much else we could do. We got ready to go. Hannibal says, ‘Bill, God help you. ’ “Bill says, ‘God never helped me. I helped myself. ’ “That was when Timmy walked over to us. He even walked wrong, Louis. He walked like an old, old man. He’d put one foot high up and then bring it down and then kind of shuffle and then lift the other one. It was like watchin a crab walk. His hands dangled down by his legs. And when he got close enough, you could see red marks across his face on the slant, like pimples or little burns. I reckon that’s where the Kraut machine gun got him. Must have damn near blowed his head off.

“And he stank of the grave. It was a black smell, like everything inside him was just lying there, spoiled. I saw Alan Purinton put a hand up to cover his nose and mouth. The stench was just awful. You almost expected to see grave maggots squirming around in his hair-”

“Stop,” Louis said hoarsely. “I’ve heard enough.”

“You ain’t,” Jud said. He spoke with haggard earnestness. “That’s it, you ain’t.

And I can’t even make it as bad as it was. Nobody could understand how bad it was unless they was there. He was dead, Louis. But he was alive too. And he…

he… he knew things.”

“Knew things?” Louis sat forward.

“Aynh. He looked at Alan for a long time, kind of grinning-you could see his teeth, anyway-and then he spoke in this low voice; you felt like you had to strain forward to hear it. It sounded like he had gravel down in his tubes.

‘Your wife is fucking that man she works with down at the drugstore, Purinton.

What do you think of that? She screams when she comes. What do you think of that?’ “Alan, he kind of gasped, and you could see it had hit him. Alan’s in a nursing home up in Gardener now, or was the last I heard-he must be pushing ninety. Back when all this happened, he was forty or so, and there had been some talk around about his second wife. She was his second cousin, and she had come to live with Alan and Alan’s first wife, Lucy, just before the war. Well, Lucy died, and a year and a half later Alan up and married this girl. Laurine, her name was. She was no more than twenty-four when they married. And there had been some talk about her, you know. If you were a man, you might have called her ways sort of free and easy and let it go at that. But the women thought she might be loose.

And maybe Alan had had a few thoughts in that direction too because he says, ‘Shut up! Shut up or I’ll knock you down, whatever you are!’ “Shush now, Timmy,’ Bill says, and he looks worse than ever, you know, like maybe he’s going to puke or faint dead away, or do both. ‘You shush, Timmy. ’ “But Timmy didn’t take no notice. He looks around at George Anderson and he says, ‘That grandson you set such a store by is just waiting for you to die, old man. The money is all he wants, the money he thinks you got socked away in your lockbox at the Bangor Eastern Bank. That’s why he makes up to you, but behind your back he makes fun of you, him and his sister. Old wooden-leg, that’s what they call you,’ Timmy says, and Louis, his voice-it changed. It got mean. It sounded like the way that grandson of George’s would have sounded if… you know, if the things Timmy was saying was true.

“Old wooden-leg,’ Timmy says, ‘and won’t they shit when they find out you’re poor as a church mouse because you lost it all in 1938? Won’t they shit, George?

Won’t they just shit?'

“George, he backed away then, and his wooden leg buckled under him, and he fell back on Bill’s porch and upsat his pitcher of beer, and he was as white as your undershirt, Louis.

“Bill, he gets him back on his feet somehow, and he’s roarin at his boy, ‘Timmy, you stop it! You stop it!’ But Timmy wouldn’t. He said somethin bad about Hannibal, and then he said something bad about me too, and by then he was…

ravin, I’d say. Yeah, he was ravin, all right. Screamin. And we started to back away, and then we started to run, draggin George along the best we could by the arms because he’d gotten the straps and harnesses on that fake leg twisted somehow, and it was all off to one side with the shoe turned around backward and draggin on the grass.

“The last I seen of Timmy Baterman, he was on the back lawn by the clothesline, his face all red in the settin sun, those marks standin out on his face, his hair all crazy and dusty somehow.

and he was laughin and screechin over and over again ‘Old wooden-leg! Old wooden-leg! And the cuckold! And the whoremaster! Goodbye, gentlemen! Goodbye!

Goodbye!’ And then he laughed, but it was screaming, really… something inside him screaming… and screaming… and screaming.”

Jud stopped. His chest moved up and down rapidly.

“Jud,” Louis said. “The thing this Timmy Baterman told you was it truer’ “It was true,” Jud muttered. “Christ! It was true. I used to go to a whorehouse in Bangor betimes. Nothing many a man hasn’t done, although I s’pose there are plenty that walk the straight and narrow. I just would get the urge-the compulsion, maybe-to sink it into strange flesh now and then. Or pay some woman to do the things a man can’t bring himself to ask his wife to do. Men keep their gardens too, Louis. It wasn’t a terrible thing, what I done, and all of that has been behind me for the last eight or nine years, and Norma would not have left me if she had known. But something in her would have died forever. Something dear and sweet.”

Jud’s eyes were red and swollen and bleary. The tears of the old are singularly unlovely, Louis thought. But when Jud groped across the table for Louis’s hand, Louis took it firmly.

“He told us only the bad,” he said after a moment. “Only the bad. God knows there is enough of that in any human being’s life, isn’t there? Two or three days later, Laurine Purinton left Ludlow for good, and folks in town who saw her before she got on the train said she was sporting two shiners and had cotton stuffed up both bores of her pump. Alan, he would never talk about it. George died in 1950, and if he left anything to that grandson and granddaughter of his, I never heard about it. Hannibal got kicked out of office because of something that was just like what Timmy Baterman accused him of. I won’t tell you exactly what it was-you don’t need to know-but misappropriation of town funds for his own use comes close enough to cover it, I reckon. There was even talk of trying him on embezzlement charges, but it never came to much. Losing the post was enough punishment for him anyway; his whole life was playing the big cheese.

“But there was good in those men too. That’s what I mean; that’s what folks always find it so hard to remember. It was Hannibal got the fund started for the Eastern General Hospital, right before the war. Alan Purinton was one of the most generous, open-handed men I ever knew. And old George Anderson only wanted to go on running the post office forever.

“It was only the bad it wanted to talk about though. It was only the bad it wanted us to remember because it was bad… and because it knew we meant danger for it. The Timmy Baterman that went off to fight the war was a nice, ordinary kid, Louis, maybe a little dull but goodhearted. The thing we saw that night, lookin up into that red sun… that was a monster. Maybe it was a zombie or a dybbuk or a demon. Maybe there’s no name for such a thing as that, but the Micmacs would have known what it was, name or no.”

“What?” Louis said numbly.

“Something that had been touched by the Wendigo,” Jud said evenly. He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, let it out, and looked at his watch.

“Welladay. The hour’s late, Louis. I’ve talked nine times as much as I meant to.”

“I doubt that,” Louis said. “You’ve been very eloquent. Tell me how it came out.”

“There was a fire at the Baterman place two nights later,” Jud said. “The house burned flat. Alan Purinton said there was no doubt about the fire being set.

Range oil had been splashed from one end of that little house to the other. You could smell the reek of it for three days after the fire was out.”

“So they both burned up.”

“Oh, ayuh, they burned. But they was dead beforehand. Timmy was shot twice in the chest with a pistol Bill Baterman kept handy, an old Colt’s. They found it in Bill’s hand. What he’d done, or so it looked like, was to kill his boy, lay him on the bed, and then spill out that range oil. Then he sat down in his easy chair by the radio, flicked a match, and ate the barrel of that Colt. 45.”

“Jesus,” Louis said.

“They were pretty well charred, but the county medical examiner said it looked to him like Timmy Baterman had been dead two or three weeks.”

Silence, ticking out.

Jud got up. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I might have killed your boy, Louis, or had a hand in it. The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they made it what it was. The Micmacs weren’t always here. They came maybe from Canada, maybe from Russia, maybe from Asia way back in the beginning. They stayed here in Maine for a thousand years, or maybe it was two thousand-it’s hard to tell, because they did not leave their mark deep on the land. And now they are gone again… same way we’ll be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better or worse. But the place will stay no matter who’s here, Louis. It isn’t as though someone owned it and could take its secret when they moved on. It’s an evil, curdled place, and I had no business taking you up there to bury that cat. I know that now. It has a power you’ll beware of if you know what’s good for your family and what’s good for you. I wasn’t strong enough to fight it. You saved Norma’s life, and I wanted to do something for you, and that place turned my good wish to its own evil purpose. It has a power… and I think that power goes through phases, same as the moon. It’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared it’s coming around to full again. I’m ascared it used me to get at you through your son. Do you see, Louis, what I’m getting at?”

His eyes pleaded with Louis.

“You’re saying the place knew Gage was going to die, I think,” Louis said.

“No, I am saying the place might have made Gage die because I introduced you to the power in the place. I am saying I may have murdered your son with good intentions, Louis.”

“I don’t believe it,” Louis said at last, shakily. Didn’t; wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

He held Jud’s hand tightly. “We’re burying Gage tomorrow. In Bangor. And in Bangor he will stay. I don’t plan to go up there to the Pet Sematary or beyond it ever again.”

“Promise me!” Jud said harshly. “Promise.”

“I promise,” Louis said.

But in the back of his mind, contemplation remained-a dancing flicker of promise that would not quite go away.

40

But none of those things happened.

All of them-the droning Orinco truck, the fingers that just touched the back of Cage’s jumper and then slid off, Rachel preparing to go to the viewing in her housecoat, Ellie carrying Gage’s picture and putting his chair next to her bed, Steve Masterton’s tears, the fight with Irwin Goldman, Jud Crandall’s terrible story of Timmy Baterman-all of them existed only in Louis Creed’s mind during the few seconds that passed while he raced his laughing son to the road. Behind him, Rachel screamed again-Gage, come back, don’t RUN!-but Louis did not waste his breath. It was going to be close, very close, and yes, one of those things really happened: from somewhere up the road he could hear the drone of the oncoming truck and somewhere inside a memory circuit opened and he could hear Jud Crandall speaking to Rachel on that very first day in Ludlow: You want to watch em around the road, Missus Greed. It’s a bad road for kids and pets.

Now Gage was running down the gentle slope of lawn that merged with the soft shoulder of Route 15, his husky little legs pumping, and by all the rights of the world he should have fallen over sprawling but he just kept going and now the sound of the truck was very loud indeed, it was that low, snoring sound that Louis sometimes heard from his bed as he floated just beyond the rim of sleep.

Then it seemed a comforting sound, but now it terrified him.

Oh my dear God oh my dear Jesus let me catch him don’t let him get into the road!

Louis put on a final burst of speed and leaped, throwing himself out straight and parallel to the ground like a football player about to make a tackle; he could see his shadow tracking along on the grass below him in the lowest periphery of his vision, and he thought of the kite, the Vulture, printing its shadow all the way across Mrs. Vinton’s field, and just as Gage’s forward motion carried him into the road, Louis’s fingers brushed the back of his jacket…

and then snagged it.

He yanked Gage backward and landed on the ground at the same instant, crashing his face into the rough gravel of the shoulder, giving himself a bloody nose.

His balls signaled a much more serious flash of pain-Ohhh, if l’d’a known I was gonna be playing football, I woulda worn my jock-but both the pain in his nose and the driving agony in his testes were lost in the swelling relief of hearing Gage’s wail of pain and outrage as his bottom landed on the shoulder and he fell over backward onto the edge of the lawn, thumping his head. A moment later his wails were drowned by the roar of the passing truck and the almost regal blat of its air horn.

Louis managed to get up in spite of the lead ball sitting in his lower stomach and cradled his son in his arms. A moment later Rachel joined them, also weeping, crying out to Gage, “Never run in the road, Gage! Never, never, never! The road is bad! Bad!” And Gage was so astonished at this tearful lecture that he left off crying and goggled up at his mother.

“Louis, your nose is bleeding,” she said and then hugged him so suddenly and strongly that for a moment he could barely breathe.

“That isn’t the worst of it,” he said. “I think I’m sterile, Rachel. Oh boy, the pain.”

And she laughed so hysterically that for a few moments he was frightened for her, and the thought crossed his mind: If Gage really had been killed, I believe it would have driven her crazy.

But Gage was not killed; all of that had only been a hellishly detailed moment of imagination as Louis outraced his son’s death across a green lawn on a sunshiny May afternoon.

Gage went to grammar school, and at the age of seven he began going to camp, where he showed a wonderful and surprising aptitude for swimming. He also gave his parents a rather glum surprise by proving himself able to handle a month’s separation with no noticeable psychic trauma. By the time he was ten, he was spending the entire summer away at Camp Agawam in Raymond, and at eleven he won two blue ribbons and a red one at the Four Camps Swimathon that ended the summer’s activities. He grew tall, and yet through it all he was the same Gage, sweet and rather surprised at the things the world held out.

and for Gage, the fruit was somehow never bitter or rotten.

He was an honors student in high school and a member of the swimming team at John Bapst, the parochial school he had insisted on attending because of its swimming facilities. Rachel was upset, Louis not particularly surprised when, at seventeen, Gage announced his intention to convert to Catholicism. Rachel believed that all of it was because of the girl Gage was going out with; she saw marriage in his immediate future (“if that little slut with the St.

Christopher’s medal isn’t balling him, I’ll eat your shorts, Louis,” she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nine or ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according to Rachel, anyway) a cigar-smoking truck driver with a beer belly, Our-Fathering and Hail-Marying his way into precardiac oblivion.

Louis suspected his son’s motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the day he actually did the deed, Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhaps you’ll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy son-in-law, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (and decidedly unslutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year.

He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, and incredibly proud afternoon sixteen years after Louis had raced an Orinco truck for his son’s life, he and Rachel-who had now gone almost entirely gray, although she covered it with a rinse-watched their son win a gold medal for the U. S. A. When the NBC cameras moved in for a close-up of him, standing with his dripping, seal-sleek head back, his eyes open and calm and fixed on the flag as the national anthem played, the ribbon around his neck, and the gold lying against the smooth skin of his chest, Louis wept. He and Rachel both wept.

“I guess this caps everything,” he said huskily and turned to embrace his wife.

But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the national anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed.

This caps everything.

His cap.

His cap is…

oh dear God, his cap is full of blood.

Louis woke up in the cold dead light of a rainy seven o’clock, clutching his pillow in his arms. His head thumped monstrously with his heartbeat; the ache swelled and faded, swelled and faded. He burped acid that tasted like old beer, and his stomach heaved miserably. He had been weeping; the pillow was wet with his tears, as if he had somehow stumbled in and then out of one of those hokey country-and-western laments in his sleep. Even in the dream, he thought, some part of him had known the truth and had cried for it.

He got up and stumbled to the bathroom, heart racing threadily in his chest, consciousness itself fragmented by the fierceness of his hangover. He reached the toilet bowl barely in time and threw up a glut of last night’s beer.

He kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, until he felt capable of actually making it to his feet. He groped for the handle and flushed the john. He went to the mirror to see how badly bloodshot his eyes were, but the glass had been covered with a square of sheeting. Then he recalled. Drawing almost randomly on a past she professed to barely remember, Rachel had covered all the mirrors in the house, and she took off her shoes before entering through the door.

No Olympic swimming team, Louis thought dully as he walked back to his bed and sat down on it. The sour taste of beer coated his mouth and throat, and he swore to himself (not for the first time or the last) that he would never touch that poison again. No Olympic swimming team, no 3. 0 in college, no little Catholic girlfriend or conversion, no Camp Agawam, no nothing. His sneakers had been torn off; his jumper turned inside out; his sweet little boy’s body, so tough and sturdy, nearly dismembered. His cap had been full of blood.

Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.

41

Gage was buried at two o’clock that afternoon. By then the rain had stopped.

Tattered clouds still moved overhead, and most of the mourners arrived carrying black umbrellas provided by the undertaker.

At Rachel’s request, the funeral director, who officiated at the short, nonsectarian graveside service, read the passage from Matthew which begins “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” Louis, standing on one side of the grave, looked across at his father-in-law. For a moment Goldman looked back at him, and then he dropped his eyes. There was no fight left in him today. The pouches under his eyes now resembled mailbags, and around his black silk skullcap, hair as fine and white as tattered spiderwebs flew randomly in the breeze. With his grayish-black beard scragging his cheeks, he looked more like a wino than ever.

He gave Louis the impression of a man who did not really know where he was.

Louis tried but could still find no pity in his heart for him.

Gage’s small white coffin, its latch presumably repaired, sat on a pair of chromed runners over the grave liner. The verges of the grave had been carpeted with Astroturf so violently green it hurt Louis’s eyes. Several baskets of flowers had been set on top of this artificial and strangely gay surface.

Louis’s eyes looked over the funeral director’s shoulder. Here was a low hill, covered with graves, family plots, one Romanesque monument with the name PHIPPS engraved on it. Just above the sloping roof of PHIPPS, he could see a sliver of yellow. Louis looked at this, pondering it. He continued to look at it even after the funeral director said, “Let us bow our heads for a moment of silent prayer.” It took Louis a few minutes, but he got it. It was a payloader. A payloader parked over the hill where the mourners wouldn’t have to look at it.

And, when the funeral was over, Oz would crush his cigarette on the heel of his tewwible workboot, put it in whatever container he carried around with him (in a cemetery, sextons caught depositing their butts on the ground were almost always summarily fired-it looked bad; too many of the clientele had died of lung cancer), jump in the payloader, fire that sucker up, and cut his son off from the sun forever… or at least until the day of the Resurrection.

Resurrection… ah, there’s a word (that you should put right the fuck out of your mind and you know it).

When the funeral director said “Amen,” Louis took Rachel’s arm and guided her away. Rachel murmured some protest-she wanted to stay a bit longer, please, Louis-but Louis was firm. They approached the cars. He saw the funeral director taking umbrellas with the home’s name discreetly printed on the handles from the mourners who passed and handing them to an assistant. The assistant put them in an umbrella stand which looked surreal, standing there on the dewy turf. He held Rachel’s arm with his right hand and Ellie’s white-gloved hand with his left. Ellie was wearing the same dress she had worn to Norma Crandall’s funeral.

Jud came over as Louis handed his ladies into the car. Jud also looked as if he’d had a hard night.

“You okay, Louis?”

Louis nodded.

Jud bent to look into the car. “How are you, Rachel?” he asked.

“I’m all right, Jud,” she whispered.

Jud touched her shoulder gently and then looked at Ellie. How about you, dear one?”

“I’m fine,” Ellie said and produced a hideous smile of sharklike proportions to show him how fine she was.

“What’s that picture you got there?”

For a moment Louis thought she would hold it, refuse to show him, and then with a painful shyness she passed it to Jud. He held it in his big fingers, fingers that were so splayed and somehow clumsy-looking, fingers that looked fit mostly for grappling with the transmissions of big road machines or making couplings on the B amp; M Line-but they were also the fingers that had pulled a bee stinger from Gage’s neck with all the offhand skill of a magician… or a surgeon.

“Why, that’s real nice,” Jud said. “You pullin him on a sled. Bet he liked that, didn’t he, Ellie?”

Beginning to weep, Ellie nodded.

Rachel began to say something, but Louis squeezed her arm-be still awhile.

“I used to pull im a lot,” Ellie said, weeping, “and he’d laugh and laugh. Then we’d go in and Mommy would fix us cocoa and say, ‘Put your boots away,’ and Gage would grab them all up and scream ‘Boots! Boots!’ so loud it hurt your ears.

Remember that, Mom?”

Rachel nodded.

“Yeah, I bet that was a good time, all right,” Jud said, handing the picture back. “And he may be dead now, Ellie, but you can keep your memories of him.”

“I’m going to,” she said, wiping at her face. “I loved Gage, Mr. Crandall.”

“I know you did, dear.” He leaned in and kissed her, and when he withdrew, his eyes swept Louis and Rachel stonily. Rachel met his gaze, puzzled and a little hurt, not understanding. But Louis understood well enough: What are you doing for her? Jud’s eyes asked. Your son is dead, but your daughter is not. What are you doing for her?

Louis looked away. There was nothing he could do for her, not yet. She would have to swim in her grief as best she could. His thoughts were too full of his son.

42

By evening a fresh rack of clouds had come in and a strong west wind had begun to blow. Louis put on his light jacket, zipped it up, and took the Civic keys from the peg on the wall.

“Where you going, Lou?” Rachel asked. She spoke without much interest. After supper she had begun crying again, and although her weeping was gentle, she had seemed incapable of stopping. Louis had forced her to take a Valium. Now she sat with the paper folded open to the barely started crossword puzzle. In the other room, Ellie sat silently watching “Little House on the Prairie” with Gage’s picture on her lap.

“I thought I’d pick up a pizza.”

“Didn’t you get enough to eat earlier?”

“I just didn’t seem hungry then,” he said, telling the truth and then adding a lie: “I am now.”

That afternoon, between three and six, the final rite of Gage’s funeral had taken place at the Ludlow house. This was the rite of food. Steve Masterton and his wife had come with a hamburger-and-noodle casserole. Charlton had appeared with a quiche. “It will keep until you want it, if it doesn’t all get eaten,”

she told Rachel. “Quiche is easy to warm up.” The Dannikers from up the road brought a baked ham. The Goldmans appeared-neither of them would speak to Louis or even come close to him, for which he was not sorry-with a variety of cold cuts and cheeses. Jud also brought cheese-a large wheel of his old favorite, Mr.

Rat. Missy Dandridge brought a key lime pie. And Surrendra Hardu brought apples.

The rite of food apparently transcended religious differences.

This was the funeral party, and although it was quiet, it was not quite subdued.

There was rather less drinking than at an ordinary party, but there was some.

After a few beers (only the night before he had sworn he would never touch the stuff again, but in the cold afternoon light the previous evening had seemed impossibly long ago) Louis thought to pass on a few little funerary anecdotes his Uncle Carl had told him-that at Sicilian funerals unmarried women sometimes snipped a piece of the deceased's shroud and slept with it under their pillows, believing it would bring them luck in love; that at Irish funerals mock weddings were sometimes performed, and the toes of the dead were tied together because of an ancient Celtic belief that it kept the deceased’s ghost from walking. Uncle Carl said that the custom of tying D. O. A. tags to the great toes of corpses had begun in New York, and since all of the early morgue keepers had been Irish, he believed this to be a survival of that old superstition. Then, looking at their faces, he had decided such tales would be taken wrong.

Rachel had broken down only once, and her mother was there to comfort her.

Rachel clung to Dory Goldman and sobbed against her shoulder in an open, let-it-all-go way that had been so far impossible for her with Louis, perhaps because she saw them both as culpable in Gage’s death or perhaps because Louis, lost in the peculiar half-world of his own fancies, had not encouraged her grief. Either way, she had turned to her mother for comfort, and Dory was there to give it, mingling her tears with her daughter's. Irwin Goldman stood behind them, his hand on Rachel’s shoulder, and looked with sickly triumph across the room at Louis.

Ellie circulated with a silver tray loaded with canapes, little rolls with a feathered toothpick poked through each one. Her picture of Gage was tucked firmly under her arm.

Louis received condolences. He nodded and thanked the condolers. And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave robbing… only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied.

It was not as if he intended to do anything.

Louis stopped at the Orrington Corner Store, bought two six-packs of cold beer, and called ahead to Napoli’s for a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza.

“Want to give me a name on that, sir?”

Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, Louis thought.

“Lou Creed.”

“Okay, Lou, we’re real busy, so it’ll be maybe forty-five minutes-that okay for you?”

“Sure,” Louis said and hung up. As he got back into the Civic and keyed the engine, it occurred to him that although there were maybe twenty pizza joints in the Bangor area, he had picked the one closest to Pleasantview, where Gage was buried. Well, what the hell? he thought uneasily. They make good pizza. No frozen dough. Throw it up and catch it on their fists, right there where you can watch, and Gage used to laugh-He cut that thought off.

He drove past Napoli’s to Pleasantview. He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None.

He parked across the street and crossed the road to the wrought-iron gates, which glimmered in the final light of day. Above them, in a semicircle, were wrought-iron letters spelling PLEASANTVIEW. The view was, in Louis’s mind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The cemetery was nicely landscaped on several rolling hills; there were long aisles of trees (ah, but in these last few minutes of fading daylight, the shadows those trees threw seemed deeply pooled and as blackly unpleasant as still quarry water) and a few isolated weeping willows. It wasn’t quiet. The turnpike was near-the drone of traffic came on the steady, chill wind-and the glow in the darkening sky was Bangor International Airport.

He stretched his hand out to the gate, thinking, They’ll be locked, but they were not. Perhaps it was too early to lock them, and if they locked them at all it would only be to protect the place against drunks, vandals, and teenage neckers. The days of the Dickensian Resurrection Men (there’s that word again) were over. The right-hand gate swung in with a faint screeing noise, and after a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, Louis stepped through.

He closed the gate behind him and heard the click of the latch.

He stood in this modest suburb of the dead, looking around.

A fine and private place, he thought, but none, I think, do there embrace. Who?

Andrew Marvel? And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk, anyway?

Jud’s voice spoke up in his mind then, worried and-frightened? Yes. Frightened.

Louis, what are you doing here? You’re looking up a road you don’t want to travel.

He pushed the voice aside. If he was torturing anyone, it was only himself. No one need know he had been here as the daylight wound down to the dark.

He began to walk toward Gage’s grave, taking one of the winding paths. In a moment he was in a lane of trees; they rustled their new leaves mysteriously over his head. His heart was thudding too loudly in his chest. The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretaker’s building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantview’s twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. One-room apartments. Sleepers.

Not much like the Pet Sematary, he thought, and this caused him to stop and consider for a moment, surprised. No, it wasn’t. The Pet Sematary had given him an impression of order rising almost unknown out of chaos. Those rough, concentric circles moving inward to the center, rude slates, crosses made out of boards. As if the children who buried their pets there had created the pattern out of their own collective unconsciousness, as if.

For a moment Louis saw the Pet Sematary as a kind of advertisement… a come-on, like the kind they gave you on freak alley at the carnival. They’d bring out the fire-eater and you got to watch his show for free because the owners knew you wouldn’t buy the steak unless you saw the sizzle, you wouldn’t cough up the cash if you didn’t see the flash-Those graves, those graves in their almost Druidic circles.

The graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked. It was a symbol the Egyptians had chiseled on the tombs of the Pharaohs, a symbol the Phoenicians had drawn on the barrows of their fallen kings; it was found on cave walls in ancient Mycenae; the guildkings of Stonehenge had created it as a clock to time the universe; it appeared in the Judeo-Christian Bible as the whirlwind from which God had spoken to Job.

The spiral was the oldest sign of power in the world, man’s oldest symbol of that twisty bridge which may exist between the world and the Gulf.

Louis reached Gage’s grave at last. The payloader was gone. The Astroturf had been removed, rolled up by some whistling workman with his mind on an after-work beer at the Fairmount Lounge, stored in an equipment shed somewhere. Where Gage lay there was a neat rectangle of bare, raked earth, perhaps five feet by three feet. The headstone had not been set up yet.

Louis kneeled. The wind blew through his hair, tumbling it. The sky was almost entirely dark now. It raced with clouds.

No one has shone a light in my face and asked me what I’m doing here. No watchdog has barked. The gate was unlocked. The days of the Resurrection Men are past. If I came up here with a pick and a shovel-He came back to himself with a jerk. He was only playing a dangerous mind game with himself if he pretended that Pleasant-view stood unwatched during the night hours. Suppose he was discovered belly-deep in his son’s new grave by the caretaker or the watchman?

It might not get into the papers, but then again it might. He might be charged with a crime. What crime? Grave robbing? Unlikely. Malicious mischief or vandalism would be more likely. And in the paper or out of it, the word would get around. People would talk; it was a story too juicy not to be told: Local doctor is discovered digging up his two-year-old son, recently killed in a tragic road accident. He would lose his job. Even if not, Rachel would be chilled by the wind of such tales, and Ellie might be harried by them at school until her life was a misery of chanting children. There might be the humiliation of a sanity test in exchange for dropping charges.

But I could bring Gage back to life! Gage could live again!

Did he really, actually believe that?

The fact was that he did. He had told himself time and time again, both before Gage’s death and after it, that Church had not really been dead, only stunned.

That Church had dug his way out and come home. A kiddie story with gruesome undertones-Winnie the Poe. Master unwittingly piles a cairn of stones over a living animal.

Faithful beast digs itself out and comes home. Fine. Except it was not true.

Church had been dead. The Micmac burying ground had brought it back to life.

He sat by Gage’s grave, trying to place all the known components in an order as rational and logical as this dark magic would allow.

Timmy Baterman, now. First, did he believe the story? And second, did it make a difference?

In spite of its convenience, he believed most of it. It was undeniable that if a place like the Micmac burying ground existed (as it did) and if people knew of it (as a few of the older Ludlowites did), then sooner or later someone would try the experiment. Human nature as Louis understood it made it more difficult to believe that it had stopped at a few pets and valuable breed animals.

All right, then-did he also believe that Timmy Baterman had been transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?

That was a more difficult question, and he was wary of it because he didn’t want to believe it, and he had seen the results of that sort of mind-set before.

No, he did not want to believe Timmy Baterman had been a daemon, but he would not-absolutely could not-allow himself to let what he wanted cloud his judgment.

Louis thought about Hanratty, the bull. Hanratty, Jud said, had turned mean. So, in his way, had Timmy Baterman. Hanratty had later been “put down” by the same man who had somehow dragged the bull’s body up to the Micmac burying ground on a sledge. Timmy Baterman had been “put down” by his father.

But because Hanratty had gone bad, did that mean that all animals went bad? No.

Hanratty the bull did not prove the general case; Hanratty was in fact an exception to the general case. Look back at the other animals-Jud’s dog Spot, the old woman’s parakeet, Church himself. They had all come back changed, and the change had been noticeable in all cases, but in the case of Spot, at least, the change hadn’t been so great that Jud had forborne to recommend the process of… of…

(resurrection) Yes, of resurrection to a friend years later. Of course, farther down the line he had tried to justify and hem and haw, and had spouted a lot of ominous, confused bullshit that could not even rightly be called philosophy.

How could he refuse to take the chance available to him-this one, unbelievable chance-on the basis of the Timmy Baterman story? One swallow did not a summer make.

You’re slanting all the evidence in favor ‘of the conclusion you want to produce, his mind protested. At least tell yourself the goddamned truth about the change in Church. Even if you want to disqualify the animals-the mice and the birds-what about the way he is? Muddled… that’s the best word of all, that sums it up. The day we were out with the kite. You remember how Gage was that day? How vibrant and alive he was, reacting to everything? Wouldn’t it be better to remember him that way? Do you want to resurrect a zombie from a grade-B horror picture? Or even something so prosaic as a retarded little boy? A boy who eats with his fingers and stares blankly at images on the TV screen and who will never learn to write his own name? What did Jud say about his dog? “It was like washing a piece of meat.” Is that what you want? A piece of breathing meat? And even if you’re able to be satisfied with that, how do you explain the return of your son from the dead to your wife? To your daughter? To Steve Masterton? To the world? What happens the first time Missy Dandridge pulls into the driveway and sees Gage riding his trike in the yard? Can’t you hear her screams, Louis? Can’t you see her harrowing her face with her fingernails? What do you say to the reporters? What do you say when a film crew from “Real People”

turns up on your doorstep, wanting to shoot film of your resurrected son?

Did any of this really matter, or was it only the voice of cowardice? Did he believe these things could not be dealt With? That Rachel would greet her dead son with anything but tears of joy?

Yes, he supposed there was a real possibility that Gage might return… well… diminished. But would that change the quality of his love? Parents loved children who were born blind, children born as Siamese twins, children who were born with their guts abysmally rearranged. Parents pled for judicial mercy or executive clemency on behalf of children who had grown up to commit rape and murder and the torture of the innocent.

Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapers until he was eight? If he did not master the first-grade primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all? Could he simply dismiss his son as a.

a sort of divine abortion, when there was another recourse?

But, Louis, my God, you don’t live in a vacuum! People will say-He cut that thought off with rude, angry force. Of all the things not to consider now, public notice was probably the greatest of them.

Louis glanced down at the raked dirt of Gage’s grave and felt a wave of awe and horror course through him. Unknowing, moving by themselves, his fingers had drawn a pattern in the dirt-he had drawn a spiral.

He swept the fingers of both hands through the dirt, rubbing the pattern out.

Then he left Pleasantview, hurrying, feeling very much a trespasser now, believing that he would be seen, stopped, questioned at every turn of the path.

He was late collecting his pizza, and although it had been left on top of one of the big ovens, it was semicold and greasy and every bit as tasty as cooked clay.

Louis ate one piece and then tossed the rest out the window, box and all, as he headed back to Ludlow. He wasn’t a litterbug by nature, but he did not want Rachel to see a mostly uneaten pizza at home in the wastebasket. It might raise a surmise in her mind-that a pizza wasn’t really what he’d had in mind when he went to Bangor.

Louis now began to think about the time and circumstance.

Time. Time might be of extreme, even crucial, importance. Timmy Baterman had been dead a good while before his father could get him up to the Micmac burying ground. Timmy was shot the nineteenth… Timmy was buried-don’t hold me to this, but I think it was July twenty-second. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn… saw Timmy walking up the road.

All right, say that Bill Baterman had done it four days after his son’s original interral… no. If he was going to err, let him err on the side of conservatism. Say three days. For the sake of argument, assume that Timmy Baterman returned from the dead on July twenty-fifth. That made six days between the boy’s death and his return, and that was a conservative estimate. It might have been as long as ten days. For Gage, it had now been four days. Time had already gotten away from him to a degree, but it was still possible to cut Bifi Baterman’s best time considerably. If If he could bring about circumstances similar to those which had made the resurrection of Church possible. Because Church had died at the best possible time, hadn’t he? His family had been away when Church was struck and killed. No one was the wiser, except for him and Jud.

His family had been in Chicago.

For Louis, the final piece fell into place with a neat little click.

“You want us to what?” Rachel asked, staring at him, astounded.

It was a quarter of ten. Ellie had gone to bed. Rachel had taken another Valium after cleaning up the detritus of the funeral party (“funeral party” was another of those horrible phrases full of unstated paradox, like “visiting hours,” but there seemed no other phrase for the way they had spent their afternoon) and had seemed dazed and quiet ever since he returned from Bangor… but this had gotten through.

“To go back to Chicago with your mother and father,” Louis repeated patiently.

“They’ll be going tomorrow. If you call them now and Delta right after, you may be able to get on the same plane with them.”

“Louis, have you lost your mind? After the fight you had with my father-”

Louis found himself speaking with a quick glibness that was totally unlike him.

It afforded him a cheesy sort of exhilaration. He felt like a football sub who suddenly gets the ball and makes a seventy-yard touchdown run, cutting and weaving, outthinking potential tacklers with a delirious one-time-only ease. He had never been a particularly good liar, and he had not planned this encounter in any detail at all, but now a string of plausible lies, half-truths, and inspired justification poured out of him.

“The fight we had is one of the reasons I want you and Ellie to go back with them. It’s time we sewed up this wound, Rachel. I knew that… felt it…

at the funeral parlor. When the fight started, I was trying to patch things up.”

“But this trip… I don’t think it’s a good idea at all, Louis. We need you.

And you need us.” Her eyes measured him doubt-fully. “At least, I hope you need us. And neither of us are in any shape to-”

“-in any kind of shape to stay here,” Louis said forcefully. He felt as if he might be coming down with a fever. “I’m glad you need me, and I do need you and Ellie. But right now this is the worst damn place in the world for you, honey.

Gage is everywhere in this house, around every corner. For you and me, sure. But it’s even worse for Ellie, I think.”

He saw pain flicker in her eyes and knew he had touched her. Some part of himself felt shame at this cheap victory. All the textbooks he’d read on the subject of death told him that the bereaved’s first strong impulse is to get away from the place where it happened… and that to succumb to such an impulse may turn out to be the most harmful course of action because it allows the bereaved the dubious luxury of refusing to come to terms with the new reality. The books said it was best to remain where you were, to battle grief on its home ground until it subsided into remembrance. But Louis simply did not dare make the experiment with his family at home. He had to get rid of them, at least for a while.

“I know,” she said. “It just… hits you all over the place. I moved the couch while you were in Bangor… I thought running the vacuum around would take my mind off… off things and I found four of his little Matchbox cars under there.

as if they were waiting for him to come back and… you know, play with them.

… “ Her voice, already wavering, now broke. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “And that’s when I took the second Valium because I started crying again, the way I’m crying now… oh what a fucking soap opera all of this is… hold me, Lou, will you hold me?”

He did hold her, and he did it well, but he felt like an imposter. His mind spun with ways to turn these tears to his further benefit. Some nice guy, all right.

Hey-ho, let’s go.

“How long does it go on?” she wept. “Does it ever end? If only we could have him back, Louis, I swear I’d watch him better, it would never happen, and just because that driver was going too fast that doesn’t let me-us-off the hook. I didn’t know there could ever be hurt like this, and that’s the truth. It comes, over and over it comes, and it hurts so much, Louis, there’s no rest from it even when I go to sleep, when I go to sleep I dream it, over and over again, I see him running to the road… and I scream to him…

. “ “Shhh,” he said. “Rachel, shhhh.”

She lifted her puffy face to him. “It wasn’t even as if he were being bad, Louis. It was just a game to him… the truck came at the wrong time… and Missy Dandridge called while I was still crying… and said she read in the Ellsworth American that the driver tried to kill himself.”

“What?”

“He tried to hang himself in his garage. He’s in shock and deep depression, the paper said… “ “Too fucking bad he didn’t make good on it,” Louis said savagely, but his voice sounded distant to his own ears, and he felt a chill spreading through. The place has a power, Louis… it’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared it’s coming round to full again. “My boy’s dead and he’s out on a thousand dollars’ bail and he’ll go on feeling depressed and suicidal until some judge takes away his license for ninety days and gives him a slap-on-the-wrist fine.”

“Missy says his wife has taken the kids and left him,” Rachel said dully. “She didn’t get that from the paper, but from somebody who knows somebody down Ellsworth way. He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t on drugs. He didn’t have any previous speeding violations. He said that when he got to Ludlow, he just felt like putting the pedal to the metal. He said he didn’t even know why. So around and around it goes.”

He just felt like putting the pedal to the metal.

The place has a power.

Louis thrust these thoughts away. He gripped his wife’s forearm gently. “Call your mother and father. Do it now. There’s no need for you and Ellie to be in this house another day. Not another day.”

“Not without you,” she said. “Louis, I want us… I need us to stick together.”

“I’ll follow you in three days-four at the most.” If things went well, Rachel and Ellie might be back here in forty-eight hours. “I’ve got to find someone to fill in for me, on a part-time basis, at least, at the university. I’ve got sick time and vacation time coming, but I don’t want to leave Surrendra on the hot seat. Jud can watch the house while we’re gone, but I’ll want to cut off the electricity and store what we’ve got in the Dandridges’ deep freeze,”

“Effie’s school… “ “The hell with it. It’s out in three weeks, anyway. They’ll understand, the circumstances being what they are. They’ll arrange an early dismissal. It’ll all work just-”

“Louis?”

He broke off. “What?”

“What are you hiding?”

“Hiding?” He looked at her openly, clearly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Never mind. I’ll call them right now… if that’s what you really want.”

“It is,” he said, and the words seemed to echo in his mind with an iron clang.

“It might even be best… for Ellie.” She looked at him with her red-rimmed eyes, still slightly glazed from Valium. “You look feverish, Louis. As if you might be coming down with something.”

She went to the telephone and called the motel where her parents were staying before Louis could reply.

The Goldmans were overjoyed at Rachel’s proposal. They were not so wild about the idea of Louis joining them in three or four days, but in the end they wouldn’t have to worry about it all, of course. Louis had not the slightest intention of going to Chicago. He had suspected that if there was to be a snag, it would be getting air reservations this late. But luck was with him there too.

There were still available seats on Delta’s Bangor to Cincinnati run, and a quick check showed two cancellations on a Cincinnati to Chicago flight. It meant that Rachel and Ellie would be able to travel with the Goldmans only as far as Cincinnati, but they would get to Chicago less than an hour after.

It’s almost like magic, Louis thought, hanging up the telephone, and Jud’s voice responded promptly, It’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared.

Oh, get fucked, he told Jud’s voice rudely. I’ve learned to accept a great many strange things in the last ten months, my good old friend. But am I ready to believe that a haunted patch of ground can influence airline ticketing? I don’t think so.

“I’ll have to pack,” Rachel said. She was looking at the flight information Louis had jotted down on the pad by the phone.

“Take just the one big suitcase,” Louis said.

She looked at, him wide-eyed, mildly startled. “For both of us? Louis, you’re joking.”

“All right, take a couple of tote bags too. But don’t exhaust yourself packing a different outfit for the next three weeks,” he said, thinking, Especially since you may be back in Ludlow very soon. “Take enough for a week, ten days. You’ve got the checkbook and the credit cards. Buy what you need.”

“But we can’t afford-” she began doubtfully. She seemed doubtful about everything now, malleable, easily confused. He remembered her odd, dangling comment about the Winnebago he had once spoken idly about buying.

“We have the money,” he said.

“Well… I suppose we could use Gage’s college fund if we needed to, although it would take a day or two to process the savings account and a week to get the treasury bills cashed-”

Her face began to crumple and dissolve again. Louis held her. She’s right. It just keeps right on hitting you, it never lets up. “Rachel, don’t,” he said.

“Don’t cry.”

But of course she did-she had to.

While she was upstairs packing, the phone rang. Louis sprang for it, thinking it would be someone from Delta ticketing, saying a mistake had been made, no flights were available. I should have known everything was going too smoothly.

But it wasn’t Delta ticketing. It was Irwin Goldman.

“I’ll get Rachel,” Louis said.

“No.” For a moment there was nothing else, only silence. He’s probably sitting there and trying to decide which name to call you first.

When Goldman spoke again, his voice was strained. He seemed to be pushing the words out against some great inner resistance. “It’s you I want to talk to. Dory wanted me to call and apologize for my… for my behavior. I guess… Louis, I guess I wanted to apologize too.”

Why, Irwin! How big of you! My God, I think I just wet my pants!

“You don’t need to apologize,” Louis said. His voice was dry and mechanical.

“What I did was inexcusable,” Goldman said. Now he did not just seem to be pushing the words out; he seemed to be coughing them out. “You suggesting that Rachel and Eileen come out has made me see what a big man you have been about this… and how small I have been.”

There was something very familiar in this rap, something eerily familiar. Then he got it, and his mouth suddenly pulled together in a tight pucker, as if he had bitten straight through a plump yellow lemon. Rachel’s way-she was completely unaware of it, Louis was sure-of saying contritely, Louis, I’m sorry I was such a bitch, after her bitchiness had gotten her her own way about something she really wanted. Here was that voice-robbed of Rachel’s liveliness and merriness, true-but that same voice saying, I’m sorry 1 was such a bastard, Louis.

The old man was getting his daughter and granddaughter back; they were running home from Maine to Daddy. Courtesy of Delta and United, they were coming back to where they belonged, back to where Irwin Goldman wanted them. Now he could afford to be magnanimous. As far as old Irwin knew, he had won. So let’s just forget that I took a swing at you over your dead son’s body, Louis, or that I kicked you when you were down, or that I knocked his coffin off its bier and snapped the latch so you could see-or think you saw-that one last flash of your child’s hand. Let’s forget all of that. Let bygones be bygones.

Terrible as it may be, Irwin, you old prick, I’d wish for you to drop dead right this second, if it wouldn’t screw up my plans.

“That’s all right, Mr. Goldman,” he said evenly. “It was. well… an emotional day for all of us.”

“It was not all right,” he persisted, and Louis realized-although he did not want to-that Goldman was not just being political, was not just saying that he was sorry he had been such a bastard now that he was getting his own way. The man was nearly weeping, and he was speaking with a slow and trembling urgency.

“It was a terrible day for all of us. Thanks to me.

Thanks to a stupid, bullheaded old man. I hurt my daughter when she needed my help… I hurt you, and maybe you needed my help too, Louis. That you do this… behave this way after I behaved that way… it makes me feel like garbage. And I think that is just the way I should feel.”

Oh let him stop this, let him stop before 1 start to scream at him and blow the whole deal.

“Rachel’s probably told you, Louis, we had another daughter-”

“Zelda,” Louis said. “Yes, she told me about Zelda.”

“It was difficult,” Goldman said in that trembling voice. “Difficult for all of us. Most difficult for Rachel, perhaps-Rachel was there when Zelda died-but difficult for Dory and me too. Dory almost had a breakdown-”

What do you think Rachel had? Louis wanted to shout. Do you think a kid can’t have a nervous breakdown? Twenty years later she’s still jumping at death’s shadow. And now this happens. This miserable, awful thing. It’s a minor miracle that she isn’t in the fucking hospital, being fed through an I. V. tube. So don’t talk to me about how difficult it was for you and your wife, you bastard.

“Ever since Zelda died, we have… I suppose we have clung to Rachel…

always wanting to protect her… and to make it up to her. Make up for the problems she had with her… her back… for years afterward. Make up for not being there.”

Yes, the old man was really crying. Why did he have to be crying? It made it harder for Louis to hold on to his clean, pure hate. More difficult, but not impossible. He deliberately called up the image of Goldman reaching into the pocket of his smoking jacket for his overflowing checkbook… but he suddenly saw Zelda Goldman in the background, an unquiet ghost in a stinking bed, her cheesy face full of spite and agony, her hands pulled into claws. The Goldman ghost. Oz the Gweat and Tewwible.

“Please,” he said. “Please, Mr. Goldman. Irwin. No more. Let’s not make things any worse than they have to be, okay?”

“I believe now that you are a good man and that I misjudged you, Louis. Oh, listen, I know what you think. Am I that stupid? No. Stupid, but not that stupid. You think I’m saying all of this because now I can, you’re thinking oh yeah, he’s getting what he wants and once he tried to buy me off, but… but Louis, I swear… “ “No more,” Louis said gently. “I can’t… I really can’t take any more.” Now his voice was trembling as well. “Okay?”

“All right,” Goldman said and sighed. Louis thought it was a sigh of relief.

“But let me say again that I apologize. You don’t have to accept it. But that is what I called to say, Louis. I apologize.”

“All right,” Louis said. He closed his eyes. His head was thudding. “Thank you, Irwin. Your apology is accepted.”

“Thank you,” Goldman said. “And thank you… for letting them come. Perhaps it is what they both need. We’ll wait for them at the airport.”

“Fine,” Louis said, and an idea suddenly occurred to him. It was crazy and attractive in its very sanity. He would let bygones be bygones… and he would let Gage lie in his Pleasantview grave. Instead of trying to reopen a door that had swung shut, he would latch it and double-bolt it and throw away the key. He would do just what he had told his wife he was going to do: tidy up their affairs here and catch a plane back to Shytown. They would perhaps spend the entire summer there, he and his wife and his good-hearted daughter. They would go to the zoo and the planetarium and boating on the lake. He would take Ellie to the top of the Sears Tower and show her the Midwest stretching away like a great fiat gameboard, rich and dreaming. Then when mid-August came, they would come back to this house which now seemed so sad and so shadowy, and perhaps it would be like starting over again. Perhaps they could begin weaving from fresh thread. What was on the Creed loom right now was ugly, splattered with drying blood.

But would that not be the same as murdering his son? Killing him a second time?

A voice inside tried to argue that this was not so, but he would not listen. He shut the voice up briskly.

“Irwin, I ought to go now. I want to make sure Rachel’s got what she needs and then get her to bed.”

“All right. Goodbye, Louis. And once more-”

If he says he’s sorry one more time, I’ll fucking scream.

“Goodbye, Irwin,” he said and hung up the phone.

Rachel was deep in a litter of clothes when he came upstairs. Blouses on the beds, bras hung over the backs of chairs, slacks on hangers that had been hung over the doorknob. Shoes were lined up like soldiers under the window. She appeared to be packing slowly but competently. Louis could see it was going to take her at least three suitcases (maybe four), but he could also see no sense in arguing with her about it. Instead he pitched in and helped.

“Louis,” she said as they closed the last suitcase (he had to sit on it before Rachel could snap the catches), “are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“For God’s sake, hon, what is this?”

“I don’t know what it is,” she replied evenly. “That’s why I’m asking.”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Creep off to a bordello? Join the circus?

What?”

“I don’t know. But this feels wrong. It feels as if you’re trying to get rid of us.”

“Rachel, that’s ridiculous!” He said this with a vehemence that was partly exasperation. Even in such straits as these, he felt a certain pique in being seen through so easily.

She smiled wanly. “You never were a very good liar, Lou.”

He began to protest again, and she cut him off.

“Ellie dreamed you were dead,” she said. “Last night. She woke up crying, and I went in to her. I slept with her for two or three hours and then came back in with you. She said that in her dream you were sitting at the kitchen table and your eyes were open, but she knew you were dead. She said she could hear Steve Masterton screaming.”

Louis looked at her, dismayed. “Rachel,” he said at last, “her brother just died. It’s normal enough for her to dream that other members of her family-”

“Yes, I surmised that much for myself. But the way she told it the elements…

. it seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.

She laughed weakly.

“Or maybe you had to be there.”

“Yes, maybe so,” Louis said.

It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.

“Come to bed with me,” Rachel said. “The Valium’s all worn off, and I don’t want to take any more. But I’m afraid. I’ve been having my own dreams… “ “Dreams of what?”

“Of Zeida,” she said simply. “The last few nights since Gage died, when I go to sleep, Zelda’s there, She says she’s coming for me, and this time she’ll get me.

That both she and Gage will get me. For letting them die.”

“Rachel, that’s-”

“I know. Just a dream. Normal enough. But come to bed with me and keep the dreams away if you can, Louis.”

They lay together in the dark, crowded into Louis’s single.

“Rachel? You still awake?”

“Yes.”

“I want to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

He hesitated, not wanting to cause her even more pain but needing to know.

“Do you remember the scare we had with him when he was nine months old?” he asked finally.

“Yes. Yes, of course I do. Why?”

By the time Gage was nine months old, Louis had become deeply concerned about his son’s cranial size. It was right off Louis’s Berterier Chart, which showed the normal range of infant head sizes on a per-month basis. At four months, Gage’s skull size had begun to drift toward the highest part of the curve, and then it began to go even higher than that. He wasn’t having any trouble holding his head up-that would have been a dead giveaway-but Louis had nevertheless taken him to George Tardiff, who was perhaps the best neurologist in the Midwest. Rachel had wanted to know what was wrong, and Louis had told her the truth: he was worried that Gage might be hydrocephalic.

Rachel’s face had grown very white, but she had remained calm.

“He seems normal to me,” she said.

Louis nodded. “He does to me too. But I don’t want to ignore this, babe.”

“No, you mustn’t,” she said. “We mustn’t.”

Tardiff had measured Gage’s skull and frowned. Tardiff poked two fingers at Gage’s face, Three Stooges style. Gage flinched. Tardiff smiled. Louis’s heart thawed out a little. Tardiff gave Gage a ball to hold. Gage held it for a while and then dropped it.

Tardiff retrieved the ball and bounced it, watching Cage’s eyes. Gage’s eyes tracked the ball.

“I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’s hydrocephalic,” Tardiff said to Louis in his office later. “No-the odds may actually be a bit higher than that. If so, it’s mild. He seems very alert. The new shunt operation should take care of the problem easily… if there is a problem.”

“A shunt means brain surgery,” Louis said.

“Minor brain surgery.”

Louis had studied the process not long after he began to worry about the size of Gage’s head, and the shunt operation, designed to drain excess fluid, had not looked very minor to him. But he kept his mouth shut, telling himself just to be grateful the operation existed at all.

“Of course,” Tardiff went on, “there’s still a large possibility that your kid just has a real big head for a nine-month-old. I think a CAT-scan is the best place to start. Do you agree?”

Louis had agreed.

Gage spent a night in Our Sisters of Charity Hospital and underwent general anesthesia. His sleeping head was stuck into a gadget that looked like a giant clothes dryer. Rachel and Louis waited downstairs while Ellie spent the day at Grandma and Grandda’s, watching “Sesame Street” nonstop on Grandda’s new video recorder. For Louis, those had been long, gray hours in which he found himself totting up sums of varying ugliness and comparing results. Death under general anesthesia, death during a shunt operation, mild retardation as a result of hydrocephalus, cataclysmic retardation as a result of same, epilepsy, blindness.

… oh, there were all sorts of possibilities. For really complete disaster maps, Louis remembered thinking, see your local doctor.

Tardiff had come into the waiting room around five o’clock. He had three cigars.

He plugged one into Louis’s mouth, one into Rachel’s (she was too flabbergasted to protest), and one into his own.

“The kid is fine. No hydrocephalus.”

“Light this thing,” Rachel had said, weeping and laughing at the same time. “I’m going to smoke it till I puke.”

Grinning, Tardiff lit their cigars.

God was saving him for Route 15, Dr. Tardiff, Louis thought now.

“Rachel, if he had been hydrocephalic, and if the shunt hadn’t worked… could you have still loved him?”

“What a weird question, Louis!”

“Could you?”

“Yes, of course. I would have loved Gage no matter what.”

“Even if he was retarded?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have wanted him institutionalized?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “I suppose, with the money you’re making now, we could afford that… a really good place, I mean… but I think I’d want him with us if we could… Louis, why do you ask?”

“Why, I suppose I was still thinking of your sister Zelda,” he said. He was still astonished at this eerie glibness. “Wondering if you could have gone through that again.”

“It wouldn’t have been the same,” she said, sounding almost amused. “Gage was.

… well, Gage was Gage. He was our son. That would have made all the difference. It would have been hard, I guess, but… would you have wanted him in an institution? A place like Pineland?”

“Let’s go to sleep.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“I feel like I can sleep now,” she said. “I want to put this day behind me.”

“Amen to that,” Louis said.

A long time later she said drowsily, “You’re right, Louis… just dreams and vapors… “ “Sure,” he said, and kissed her earlobe. “Now sleep.”

It seemed to me to have a quality of prophecy.

He did not sleep for a long time, and before he did, the curved bone of the moon looked in the window at him.

43

The following day was overcast but very warm, and Louis was sweating heavily by the time he had checked Rachel’s and Ellie’s baggage through and gotten their tickets out of the computer. He supposed just being able to keep busy was something of a gift, and he felt only a small, aching comparison to the last time he had put his family on a plane to Chicago, at Thanksgiving. Ellie seemed distant and a trifle odd. Several times that morning Louis had looked up and seen an expression of peculiar speculation on her face.

Conspirator’s complex working overtime, boyo, he told himself. She said nothing when told they were all going to Chicago, she and Mommy first, perhaps for the whole summer, and only went on eating her breakfast (Cocoa Bears). After breakfast she went silently upstairs and got into the dress and shoes Rachel had laid out for her. She had brought the picture of her pulling Gage on her sled to the airport with her, and she sat calmly in one of the plastic contour seats in the lower lobby while Louis stood in line for their tickets and the loudspeaker blared intelligence of arriving and departing flights.

Mr. and Mrs. Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight time. Irwin Goldman was natty (and apparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over to the Avis desk to check his car in while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Effie.

Louis and Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was a bit afraid that there might be a reprise of the my son, my son playlet, but he was spared.

Goldman contented himself with a rather limp handshake and a muttered hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmed the certainty Louis had awakened with this morning: the man must have been drunk.

They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking much. Dory Goldman thumbed nervously at her copy of an Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little nervously, at the picture Ellie was holding.

Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with him and pick out something to read on the plane.

Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn’t like it. It made him nervous.

“Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda’s?” he asked her as they walked over.

“Yes,” she said. “Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there’s a truant officer and he gets school skippers.”

“Don’t you worry about the truant officer,” he said. “I’ll take care of the school, and you can start again in the fall with no trouble.”

“I hope I’ll be okay in the fall,” Ellie said. “I never was in a grade before.

Only kindergarten. I don’t know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?”

He gaped at her. “Why in the world would you think I was that I didn’t like your grandda, Effie?”

She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. “When you talk about him, you always look pissed off.”

“Ellie, that’s vulgar.”

“Sorry.”

She gave him that strange, fey look and then drifted off to look at the racks of kid books-Mercer Meyer and Maurice Sendak and Richard Scarry and Beatrix Potter and that famous old standby, Dr. Seuss. How do they find this stuff out? Or do they just know? How much does Ellie know? How’s it affecting her? Ellie, what’s behind that pale little face? Pissed off at him-Christ!

“Can I have these, Daddy?” She was holding out a Dr. Seuss and a book Louis hadn’t seen since his own childhood-the story of Little Black Sambo and how the tigers had gotten his clothes one fine day.

I thought they’d made that one an unbook, Louis thought, bemused.

“Yes,” he said, and they stood in a short line at the cash register. “Your grandda and I like each other fine,” he said and thought again of his mother’s story of how when a woman really wanted a baby, she “found” one. He remembered his own foolish promises to himself that he would never lie to his own children.

Over the last few days he had developed into quite a promising liar, he felt, but he would not let himself think about it now.

“Oh,” she said and fell silent.

The silence made him uneasy. To break it he said, “So do you think you’ll have a good time in Chicago?”

No.

“No? Why not?”

She looked up at him with that fey expression. “I’m scared.”

He put his hand on her head. “Scared? Honey, what for? You’re not scared of the plane, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m scared of. Daddy, I dreamed we were at Gage’s funeral and the funeral man opened his coffin and it was empty. Then I dreamed I was home and I looked in Gage’s crib and that was empty too. But there was dirt in it.”

Lazarus, come forth.

For the first time in months he remembered the dream he had had after Pascow’s death-the dream, and then waking up to find his feet dirty and the foot of the bed caked with pine needles and muck.

The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred.

“Just dreams,” he said to Ellie, and his voice sounded, to his ears at least, perfectly normal. “They’ll pass.”

“I wish you were coming with us,” she said, “or that we were staying here. Can we stay, Daddy? Please? I don’t want to go to Grandma and Grandda’s… I just want to go back to school. Okay?”

“Just for a little while, Ellie,” he said. “I’ve got”-he swallowed-”a few things to do here, and then I’ll be with you. We can decide what to do next.”

He expected an argument, perhaps even an Ellie-style tantrum. He might even have welcomed it-a known quantity, as that look was not. But there was only that pallid, disquieting silence which seemed so deep. He could have asked her more but found he didn’t dare; she had already told him more than he perhaps wanted to hear.

Shortly after he and Ellie returned to the boarding lounge, the flight was called. Boarding passes were produced, and the four of them got in line. Louis embraced his wife and kissed her hard.

She clung to him for a moment and then let him go so he could pick Ellie up and buss her cheek.

Ellie gazed at him solemnly with her sibyl’s eyes. “I don’t want to go,” she said again but so low oniy Louis could really hear over the shuffle and murmur of the boarding passengers. “I don’t want Mommy to go either.”

“Ellie, come on,” Louis said. “You’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, “but what about you? Daddy, what about you?”

The line had begun to move now. People were walking down the jetway to the 727.

Rachel pulled Ellie’s hand and for a moment she resisted, holding up the line, her eyes fixed on her father-and Louis found himself remembering her impatience last time, her cries of come on-come on-come on.

“Daddy?”

“Go now, Ellie. Please.”

Rachel looked at Ellie and saw that dark, dreamy look for the first time.

“Ellie?” she said, startled and, Louis thought, a little afraid. “You’re holding up the line, baby.”

Ellie’s lips trembled and grew white. Then she allowed herself to be led into the jetway. She looked back at him, and he saw naked terror in her face. He raised his hand to her in false cheeriness.

Ellie did not wave back.

44

As Louis left the BIA terminal building, a cold cloak fell over his mind. He became aware that he meant to go through with this. His mind, which had been sharp enough to get him through med school mostly on a scholarship and what his wife could earn pushing coffee-and-danish on the 5 to 11 A. M. shift six days a week, had taken the problem over and broken it down into components, as if this was just another prelim-the biggest one he had ever taken. And he intended to pass it with an A plus, one hundred percent.

He drove to Brewer, the little city across the Penobscot River from Bangor. He found a parking spot across the street from Watson’s Hardware.

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked.

“Yes,” Louis said. “I’d like a heavy flashlight-one of the square ones-and something I can hood it with.”

The clerk was a small slim man with a high forehead and sharp eves. He smiled now, but his smile was not particularly pleasant. “Going jacking, good buddy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Gonna jacklight a few deer tonight?”

“Not at all,” Louis said, unsmiling. “I haven’t a license to jack.” The clerk blinked and then decided to laugh. “In other words, mind my own business, huh?

Well, look-you can’t hood one of those big lights, but you can get a piece of felt and poke a hole in the middle of it. Cut the beam clown to a penlight.”

“That sounds fine,” Louis said. “Thanks.”

“Surely. Anything else for you today?”

“Yes indeed,” Louis said. “I need a pick, a shovel, and a spade. Short-handled shovel, long-handled spade. A stout length of rope, eight feet long. A pair of work gloves. A canvas tarpaulin, maybe eight by eight.”

“I can do all that,” the clerk said.

“I’ve got a septic tank to dig up,” Louis said. “It looks like I’m in violation of the zoning ordinances, and I’ve got some very nosy neighbors. I don’t know if hooding my light will do any good or not, but I thought I might give it a try. I could get a pretty good fine.”

“Oh-oh,” the clerk said, “better get a clothespin for your nose while you’re at it.”

Louis laughed dutifully. His purchases came to $58. 60. He paid cash.

As gas prices went up, they had used the big station wagon less and less. For some time it had had a bad wheel-bearing, but Louis had kept putting off the repair job. This was partly because he didn’t want to part with the two hundred it was likely to cost, hut mostly because it was a nuisance. Now, when he could have really used the big old dinosaur, lie didn’t dare chance it. The Civic was a hatchback, and Louis was nervous about going hack to Ludlow with the pick, shovel, and spade in there. Jud Crandall’s eyes were sharp, and there was nothing wrong with his brains either. He would know what was up.

Then it occurred to him that there was no real reason to go back to Ludlow anyway. Louis recrossed the Chamberlain Bridge into Bangor and checked into the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge on the Odlin Road-once again near the airport, once again near Pleasantview Cemetery where his son was buried. He checked in under the name Dee Dee Ramone and paid cash for his room.

He tried to nap, reasoning that he would be glad of the rest before tomorrow morning. In the words of some Victorian novel or other, there was wild work ahead of him tonight-enough wild work to last a lifetime.

But his brain simply would not shut down.

He lay on the anonymous motel bed beneath a nondescript motel print of picturesque boats at dock beside a picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet, coins, and keys on the night table beside him, his hands behind his head. That feeling of coldness still held; he felt totally unplugged from his people, the places that had become so familiar to him, even his work. This could have been any Howard Johnson’s in the world-in San Diego or Duluth or Bangkok or Charlotte Amalie. He was nowhere, and now and then a thought of surpassing oddity struck him: before he saw any of those familiar places and faces again, he would see his son.

His plan kept unreeling in his mind. He looked at it from all angles, poked it, prodded it, looked for holes or soft places. And he felt that in truth he was walking along a narrow beam over a gulf of insanity. Madness was all around him, softly fluttering as the wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he was heading into madness.

The voice of Tom Rush echoed dreamily in his head: 0 death your hands are clammy… I feel them on my knees… you came and took my mother… won’t you come back after me?

Madness. Madness all around, close, hunting him.

He walked the balance beam of rationality; he studied his plan.

Tonight, around eleven o’clock, he would dig up his son’s grave, remove the body from the coffin in which it lay, wrap Gage in a cutdown piece of the tarpaulin, and put it in the trunk of the Civic. He would replace the coffin and refill the grave. He would drive to Ludlow, take Gage’s body from the trunk… and take a walk. Yes, he would take a walk.

If Gage returned, the single path forked into two possibilities. Along one, he saw Gage returning as Gage, perhaps stunned or slow or even retarded (only in the deepest recesses of his mind did Louis allow himself to hope that Gage would return whole, and just as he had been-but surely even that was possible, wasn’t it?), but still his son, Rachel’s son, Ellie’s brother.

Along the other, he saw some sort of monster emerging from the woods behind the house. He had accepted so much that he did not balk at the idea of monsters, or even of daemons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworid which might well take charge of a reanimated body from which the original soul had fled.

Either way, he and his son would be alone. And he would.

I will make a diagnosis.

Yes. That is what he would do.

I will make a diagnosis, not only of his body but of his spirit. I will make allowances for the trauma of the accident itself, which he may or may not remember. Keeping the example of Church before me, I will expect retardation, perhaps mild, perhaps profound. I will judge our ability to reintegrate Gage into our family on the basis of what I see over a period of from twenty-four to seventy-two hours. And if the loss is too great-or if he comes back as Timmy Baterman apparently came back, as a thing of evil-i will kill him.

As a doctor, he felt he could kill Gage, if Gage was only the vessel containing some other being, quite easily. He would not allow himself to be swayed by its pleadings or its wiles. He would kill it as he would kill a rat carrying bubonic plague. There need be no melodrama about it. A pill in solution, perhaps two or three of them. If necessary, a shot. There was morphine in his bag. The following night, he would return the lifeless clay to Pleasantview and reenter it, simply trusting that his luck would hold a second time (you don’t even know if it will hold once, he reminded himself). He had considered the easier and safer alternative of the Pet Sematary, but he would not have his son up there.

There were a lot of reasons. A child burying his pet five years or ten years or even twenty years later might stumble on the remains-that was one reason. But the most compelling one was simpler. The Pet Sematary might be…

too close.

The reinterment completed, he would fly to Chicago and join his family. Neither Rachel nor Ellie would ever need to know about his failed experiment.

Then, looking along the other path-the path he hoped for blindly with all his love for his son: he and Gage would leave the house when the examination period was over, would leave at night. He would take certain papers with him and plan never to return to Ludlow again. He and Gage would check into a motel-perhaps this very one in which he now lay.

The following morning he would cash every account they had, converting everything into American Express traveler’s checks (don’t leave home with your resurrected son without them, he thought) and flat cash. He and Gage would fly somewhere-Florida, most likely. From there he would call Rachel, tell her where he was, tell her to take Ellie and catch a plane without telling her mother and father where she was going. Louis believed he could convince her to do this. Ask no questions, Rachel. Just come. Come now. This minute.

He would tell her where he (they) were staying. Some motel. She and Ellie would arrive in a rental car. He would bring Gage to the door when they knocked.

Perhaps Gage would be wearing a bathing suit.

And then-Ah, but beyond that he did not dare go; instead he turned back to the plan’s beginning and began to go over it again. He supposed that if things worked out, it would mean accumulating the identification minutae of whole new lives so that Irwin Goldman could not use his overflowing checkbook to trace them. Such things could be done.

Vaguely, he remembered arriving at the Ludlow house, tense, tired, and more than a little scared, and having some fantasy about just driving down to Orlando and hiring on as a medic at Disney World. Maybe that wasn’t so farfetched after all.

He saw himself, dressed in white, resuscitating a pregnant woman who had foolishly gone on the Magic Mountain ride and had fainted. Stand back, stand back, give her some air, he heard himself saying, and the woman opened her eyes and smiled gratefully at him.

As his mind spun out this not disagreeable fantasy, Louis fell asleep. He slept as his daughter awoke in an airplane somewhere above Niagara Falls, screaming from a nightmare of clutching hands and stupid yet merciless eyes; he slept as the stewardess rushed down the aisle to see what was wrong; he slept as Rachel, totally unnerved, tried to soothe her; he slept as Ellie cried over and over again: It’s Gage! Mommy! It’s Gage! it’s Gage! Gage is alive! Gage has got the knife from Daddy’s bag! Don’t let him get me! Don’t let him get Daddy!

He slept as Ellie quieted at last and lay shuddering against her mother’s breast, her eyes wide and tearless, and as Dory Goldman thought what an awful thing all of this had been for Eileen, and how much she reminded Dory of Rachel after Zelda had died.

He slept and woke up at a quarter past five, with the afternoon light beginning to slant down toward the coming night.

Wild work, he thought stupidly and got up.

45

By the time United Airlines flight 419 touched down at O’Hare Airport and offloaded its passengers at ten minutes past three, central standard time, Ellie Creed was in a state of low hysteria, and Rachel was very frightened.

If you touched Ellie casually on the shoulder, she jumped and stared around at you with big walleyes, and her whole body quivered steadily and without letup.

It was as if she were full of electricity. The nightmare on the airplane had been bad enough, but this… Rachel simply didn’t know how to cope with it.

Going into the terminal, Ellie tripped over her own feet and fell down. She did not get up but merely lay there on the carpet with people passing around her (or looking down at her with that mildly sympathetic but disconnected glance of people who are in transit and cannot be bothered) until Rachel picked her up in her arms.

“Ellie, what’s wrong with you?” Rachel asked.

But Ellie would not answer. They moved across the lobby toward the luggage carousels, and Rachel saw her mother and father waiting there for them. She waved at them with her free hand, and they came over.

“They told us not to go to the gate and wait for you,” Dory said, “so we thought… Rachel? How’s Eileen?”

“Not good.”

“Is there a ladies’ room, Mommy? I’m going to throw up.”

“Oh, God,” Rachel said despairingly and took her by the hand. There was a ladies’ room across the lobby, and she led Ellie toward it quickly.

“Rachel, shall I corner’ Dory called.

“No, get the luggage, you know what it looks like. We’re okay.”

Mercifully the ladies’ room was deserted. Rachel led Ellie to one of the stalls, fumbling in her purse for a dime, and then she saw-thank God-that the locks on three of them were broken. Over one broken lock, someone had written in grease pencil: SIR JOHN CRAPPER WAS A SEXIST PIG!

Rachel pulled the door open quickly; Ellie was now moaning and holding her stomach. She retched twice, but there was no vomiting; they were the dry heaves of total nervous exhaustion.

When Ellie told her she felt a little better, Rachel took her over to the basins and washed her daughter’s face. Ellie was wretchedly white, and there were circles under her eyes.

“Ellie, what is wrong? Can’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “But I knew something was wrong ever since Daddy told me about the trip. Because something was wrong with him.”

Louis, what are you hiding? You were hiding something. I could see it; even Ellie could see it.

It occurred to her that she had also been nervous all day, as though waiting for a blow to fall. She felt the way she did in the two or three days before her period, tense and on edge, ready to laugh or cry or get a headache that would come bulleting through like a fast express, there and then gone three hours later.

“What?” she said now to Ellie’s reflection in the mirror. “Honey, what could be wrong with Daddy?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “It was the dream. Something about Gage. Or maybe it was Church. I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

“Ellie, what was your dream?”

“I dreamed I was in the Pet Sematary,” Ellie said. “Paxcow took me to the Pet Sematary and said Daddy was going to go there and something terrible was going to happen.”

“Paxcow?” A bolt of terror both sharp and yet undefined struck her. What was that name, and why did it seem familiar? It seemed that she had heard that name-or one like it-but she could not for the life of her remember where. “You dreamed someone named Paxcow took you to the Pet Sematary?”

“Yes, that’s what he said his name was. And-” Her eyes suddenly widened.

“Do you remember something else?”

“He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was… I don’t know… that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis-dis-I can’t remember!” she wailed.

“Honey,” Rachel said, “I think you dreamed about the Pet Sematary because you’re still thinking about Gage. And I’m sure Daddy is fine. Do you feel any better now?”

“No,” Ellie whispered. “Mommy, I’m scared. Aren’t you scared?”

“Huh-uh,” Rachel said, with a brisk little shake of her head and a smile-but she was, she was scared; and that name, Fax-cow, haunted her with its familiarity.

She felt she had heard it in some dreadful context months or even years ago, and that nervy feeling would not leave her.

She felt something-something pregnant, swollen, and waiting to burst. Something terrible that needed to be averted. But what? What?

“I’m sure everything is fine,” she told Ellie. “Want to go back to Grandma and Grandda?”

“I guess so,” Ellie said listlessly.

A Puerto Rican woman led her very young son into the ladies’, scolding him. A large wet stain had spread on the crotch of the little boy’s Bermudas and Rachel found herself reminded of Gage with a kind of paralyzing poignancy. This fresh sorrow was like novocaine, smothering her jitters.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll call Daddy from Grandda’s house.”

“He was wearing shorts,” Ellie said suddenly, looking back at the little boy.

“Who was, honey?”

“Paxcow,” Ellie said. “He was wearing red shorts in my dream.

That brought the name momentarily into focus, and Rachel felt that knee-weakening fear again… then it danced away.

They could not get close to the luggage carousel; Rachel could just see the top of her father’s hat, the one with the feather. Dory Goldman was holding two seats against the wall for them and waving. Rachel brought Ellie over.

“Are you feeling any better, dear?” Dory asked.

“A little bit,” Ellie said. “Mommy-”

She turned to Rachel and broke off. Rachel was sitting bolt upright, her hand clapped to her mouth, her face white. She had it. It had suddenly gone through with a terrible thud. Of course she should have known at once, but she had tried to put it out of her mind. Of course.

“Mommy?”

Rachel turned slowly to her daughter, and Ellie could hear the tendons in her neck creak. She took her hand away from her mouth.

“Did the man in your dream tell you his first name, Eileen?”

“Mommy, are you all-”

“Did the man in your dream tell you his first name?”

Dory was looking at her daughter and granddaughter as if they might have both gone crazy.

“Yes, but I can’t remember… Mommy, you’re hurrrrting me-”

Rachel looked down and saw that her free hand was clamped around Ellie’s lower forearm like a manacle.

“Was it Victor?”

Ellie drew sharp breath. “Yes, Victor! He said his name was Victor! Mommy, did you dream of him too?”

“Not Paxcow,” Rachel said. “Pascow.”

“That’s what I said. Paxcow.”

“Rachel, what’s wrong?” Dory said. She took Rachel’s free hand and winced at its chill. “And what’s wrong with Eileen?”

“It’s not Eileen,” Rachel said. “It’s Louis, I think. Something is wrong with Louis. Or something is going to be wrong. Sit with Ellie, Mom. I want to call home.”

She got up and crossed to the telephones, digging in her purse for a quarter.

She made the call collect, but there was no one to accept the charges. The phone simply rang.

“Will you try your call later?” the operator asked her.

“Yes,” Rachel said and hung up.

She stood there, staring at the phone.

He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was… that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis-dis-I can’t remember!

“Discorporated,” Rachel whispered. Her fingers dug at the fabric of her handbag.

“Oh my God, was that the word?”

She tried to catch at her thoughts, to arrange them. Was something going on here, something beyond their natural upset at Gage’s death and this queer cross-country trip that was so much like flight? How much had Ellie known about the young man who had died on Louis’s first day at work?

Nothing, her mind answered inexorably. You kept it from her, the way you tried to keep anything from her that had to do with death-even the possible death of her cat, remember the dumb, stupid argument we had that day in the pantry? You kept it from her. Because you were scared then and you’re scared now. His name was Pascow, Victor Pascow, and how desperate is the situation now, Rachel? How bad is this? What in the name of God is happening?

Her hands were trembling so badly that it took her two tries to redeposit her quarter. This time she called the infirmary at the university and got Chariton, who accepted the call, a little mystified. No, she hadn’t seen Louis and would have been surprised if he had come in today. That said, she offered her sympathies to Rachel again. Rachel accepted them and then asked Chariton to have Louis call her at her folks’ house if he did come in. Yes, he had the number, she answered Charlton’s question, not wanting to tell the nurse (who probably knew anyway; she had a feeling that Chariton didn’t miss much) that her folks’ house was half the continent away.

She hung up, feeling hot and trembly.

She heard Pascow’s name somewhere else, that’s all. My God, you don’t raise a kid in a glass box like a… a hamster or some-thing. She heard an item about it on the radio. Or some kid mentioned it to her at school, and her mind stored it away. Even that word she couldn’t say-suppose it was a jawbreaker like “discorporated” or “discorporeal,” so what? That proves nothing except that the subconscious is exactly the kind of sticky flypaper the Sunday supplements say it is.

She remembered a college psych instructor who had asserted that under the right conditions, your memory could play back the names of every person to whom you had ever been introduced, every meal you had ever eaten, the weather conditions which had obtained on every day of your life. He made a persuasive case for this incredible assertion, telling them that the human mind was a computer with staggering numbers of memory chips-not i6K, or 32K, or 64K, but perhaps as much as one billion K: literally, a thousand billion. And how much might each of these organic “chips” be capable of storing? No one knew. But there were so many of them, he said, that there was no need for any of them to be erasable so they could be re-used. In fact the conscious mind had to turn down the lights on some of them as a protection against informational insanity. “You might not be able to remember where you keep your socks,” the psych instructor had said, “if the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica was stored in the adjacent two or three memory cells.”

This had produced dutiful laughter from the class.

But this isn’t a psych class under good fluorescent lights with all that comforting jargon written on the board and some smartass assistant prof cheerfully blueskying his way through the last fifteen minutes of the period.

Something is dreadfully wrong here and you know it-you feel it. I don’t know what it has to do with Pascow, or Gage, or Church, but it has something to do with Louis. What? Is it-Suddenly a thought as cold as a handful of jelly struck her. She picked up the telephone receiver again and groped in the coin-return for her dime. Was Louis contemplating suicide? Was that why he had gotten rid of them, nearly pushed them out the door? Had Ellie somehow had a… a… oh, fuck psychology! Had she had a psychic flash of some sort?

This time she made the call collect to Jud Crandall. It rang five times…

six… seven. She was about to hang up when his voice, breathless, answered.

“H’lo?”

“Jud! Jud, this is-”

“Just a minute, ma’axn,” the operator said. “Will you accept a collect call from Mrs. Louis Creed?”

“Ayuh,” Jud said.

“Pardon, sir, is that yes or no?”

“I guess I will,” Jud said.

There was a doubtful pause as the operator translated Yankee into American.

Then: “Thank you. Go ahead, ma’am.”

“Jud, have you seen Louis today?”

“Today? I can’t say I have, Rachel. But I was away to Brewer this mornin, gettin my groceries. Been out in the garden this afternoon, behind the house. Why?”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing, but Ellie had a bad dream on the plane and I just thought I’d set her mind at ease if I could.”

“Plane?” Jud’s voice seemed to sharpen a trifle. “Where are you, Rachel?”

“Chicago,” she said. “Ellie and I came back to spend some time with my parents.”

“Louis didn’t go with you?”

“He’s going to join us by the end of the week,” Rachel said, and now it was a struggle to keep her voice even. There was something in Jud’s voice she didn’t like.

“Was it his idea that you should go out there?”

“Well… yes. Jud, what’s wrong? Something is wrong, isn’t it? And you know something about it.”

“Maybe you ought to tell me the child’s dream,” Jud said after a long pause. “I wish you would.”

46

After he and Rachel were done talking, Jud put on his light coat-the day had clouded up and the wind had begun to blow-and crossed the road to Louis’s house, pausing on his side of the road to look carefully for trucks before crossing. It was the trucks that had been the cause of all this. The damned trucks.

Except it wasn’t.

He could feel the Pet Sematary pulling at him-and something beyond. Where once its voice had been a kind of seductive lullabye, the voice of possible comfort and a dreamy sort of power, it was now lower and more than ominous-it was threatening and grim. Stay out of this, you.

But he would not stay out of it. His responsibility went back too far.

He saw that Louis’s Honda Civic was gone from the garage. There was only the big Ford wagon, looking dusty and unused. He tried the back door of the house and found it open.

“Louis?” he called, knowing that Louis was not going to answer, but needing to cut across the heavy silence of this house somehow. Oh, getting old was starting to be a pain in the ass-his limbs felt heavy and clumsy most of the time, his back was a misery to him after a mere two hours in the garden, and it felt as if there was a screw auger planted in his left hip.

He began to go through the house methodically, looking for the signs he had to look for-world’s oldest housebreaker, he thought without much humor and went right on looking. He found none of the things that would have seriously upset him: boxes of toys held back from the Salvation Army, clothes for a small boy put aside behind a door or in the closet or under a bed perhaps worst of all, the crib carefully set up in Gage’s room again. There were absolutely none of the signs, but the house still had an unpleasant blank feel, as if it were waiting to be filled with… well, something.

P’raps I ought to take a little run out to Pleasantview Cemetery. See if anything’s doing out there. Might even run into Louis Creed. I could buy him a dinner, or somethin.

But it wasn’t at Pleasantview Cemetery in Bangor that there was danger; the danger was here, in this house, and beyond it.

Jud left again and crossed the road to his own house. He pulled a six-pack of beer out of the kitchen fridge and took it into the living room. He sat down in front of the bay window that looked out on the Creed house, cracked a beer, and lit a cigarette. The afternoon drew down around him, and as it did so often these last few years, he found his mind turning back and back in a widening gyre. If he had known the run of Rachel Creed’s earlier thoughts he could have told her that what her psych teacher had told her was maybe the truth, but when you got older that dimming function of the memory broke down little by little, the same way that everything else in your body broke down, and you found yourself recalling places and faces and events with an eerie surety. Sepia-toned memories grew bright again, the colors trueing up, the voices losing that tinny echo of time and regaining their original resonance. It wasn’t informational breakdown at all, Jud could have told him. The name for it was senility.

In his mind Jud again saw Lester Morgan’s bull Hanratty, his eyes rimmed with red, charging at everything in sight, everything that moved. Charging at trees when the wind jigged the leaves. Before Lester gave up and called it off, every tree in Hanratty’s fenced meadow was gored with his brainless fury and his horns were splintered and his head was bleeding. When Lester put Hanratty down, Lester had been sick with dread-the way Jud himself was right now.

He drank beer and smoked. Daylight faded. He did not put on the light. Gradually the tip of his cigarette became a small red pip in the darkness. He sat and drank beer and watched Louis Creed’s driveway. He believed that when Louis came home from wherever he was, he would go over and have a little talk with him.

Make sure Louis wasn’t planning to do anything he shouldn’t.

And still he felt the soft tug of whatever it was, whatever sick power it was that inhabited that devil’s place, reaching down from its bluff of rotted stone where all those cairns had been built.

Stay out of this, you. Stay out of it or you’re going to be very, very sorry.

Ignoring it as best he could, Jud sat and smoked and drank beer. And waited.

47

While Jud Crandall was sitting in the ladderbacked rocker and watching for him out of his bay window, Louis was eating a big tasteless dinner in the Howard Johnson’s dining room.

The food was plentiful and dull-exactly what his body seemed to want. Outside it had grown dark. The headlights of the passing cars probed like fingers. He shoveled the food in. A steak. A baked potato. A side dish of beans which were a bright green nature had never intended. A wedge of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream on top of it melting into a soft drool. He ate at a corner table, watching people come and go, wondering if he might not see someone he knew. In a vague way, he rather hoped that would happen. It would lead to questions-where’s Rachel, what are you doing here, how’s it going?-and perhaps the questions would lead to complications, and maybe complications were what he really wanted.

A way out.

And as a matter of fact, a couple that he did know came in just as he was finishing his apple pie and his second cup of coffee. Rob Grinnell, a Bangor doctor, and his pretty wife Barbara. He waited for them to see him, sitting here in the corner at his table for one, but the hostess led them to the booths on the far side of the room, and Louis lost sight of them entirely except for an occasional glimpse of Grinnell’s prematurely graying hair.

The waitress brought Louis his check. He signed for it, jotting his room number under his signature, and left by the side door.

Outside the wind had risen to near-gale force. It was a steady droning presence, making the electrical wires hum oddly. He could see no stars but had a sense of clouds rushing past overhead at high speed. Louis stood on the walk for a moment, hands in pockets, face tilted into that wind. Then he turned back and went up to his room and turned on the television. It was too early to do anything serious, and that nightwind was too full of possibilities. It made him nervous.

He watched four hours of TV, eight back-to-back half-hour comedy programs. He realized it had been a very long time since he had watched so much TV in a steady, uninterrupted stream. He thought that all the female leads on the sitcoms were what he and his friends had called “cockteasers” back in high school.

In Chicago, Dory Goldman was wailing, “Fly back? Honey, why do you want to fly back? You just got here!”

In Ludlow, Jud Crandall sat by his bay window, smoking and drinking beer, motionless, examining the mental scrapbook of his own past and waiting for Louis to come home. Sooner or later Louis would come home, just like Lassie in that old movie. There were other ways up to the Pet Sematary and the place beyond, but Louis didn’t know them. If he intended to do it, he would begin from his own dooryard.

Unaware of these other happenings, like slow-moving projectiles aimed not at where he was, but rather in the best ballistics tradition at the place where he would be, Louis sat and watched the HoJo color television set. He had never seen any of these programs before, but he had heard vague rumors of them: a black family, a white family, a little kid who was smarter than the rich grown-ups he lived with, a woman who was single, a woman who was married, a woman who was divorced. He watched it all, sitting in the HoJo chair and glancing out every now and then at the blowy night.

When the eleven o’clock news came on, he turned the television set off and went out to do what he had decided to do perhaps at the very moment he had seen Gage’s baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood. The coldness was on him again, stronger than ever, but there was something beneath it-an ember of eagerness, or passion, or perhaps lust. No matter. It warmed him against the cold and kept him together in the wind. As he started the Honda’s engine, he thought that perhaps Jud was right about the growing power of that place, for surely he felt it around him now, leading (or pushing) him on, and he wondered: Could I stop? Could I stop even if I wanted to?

48

“You want to what?” Dory asked again. “Rachel… you’re upset… a night’s sleep…

Rachel only shook her head. She could not explain to her mother why she had to go back. The feeling had risen in her the way a wind rises-an early stirring of the grasses, hardly noticed; then the air begins to move faster and harder, and there is no calm left; then the gusts become hard enough to make eerie screaming noises around the eaves; then they are shaking the house and you realize that this is something like a hurricane and if the wind gets much higher, things are going to fall down.

It was six o’clock in Chicago. In Bangor, Louis was just sitting down to his big, tasteless meal. Rachel and Ellie ‘had done no more than pick at their dinners. Rachel kept raising her eyes from her plate to find her daughter’s dark glance upon her, asking her what she was going to do about whatever trouble Daddy was in, asking her what she was going to do.

She waited for the telephone to ring, for Jud to call and tell her that Louis had come home, and once it did ring-she jumped, and Ellie almost spilled her glass of milk-but it was only a lady from Dory’s bridge club, wanting to know if she had gotten home all right.

They were having their coffee when Rachel had abruptly tossed down her napkin and said, “Daddy… Mom… I’m sorry, but I have to go home. If I can get a plane, I’m going tonight.”

Her mother and father had gaped at her, but Ellie had closed her eyes in an adult expression of relief-it would have been funny if not for the waxy, stretched quality of her skin.

They did not understand, and Rachel could no more explain than she could have explained how those tiny puffs of wind, so faint they can barely stir the tips of short grass, can gradually grow in power until they can knock a steel building flat. She did not believe that Ellie had heard a news item about the death of Victor Pascow and ified it away in her subconscious.

“Rachel. Honey.” Her father spoke slowly, kindly, the way one might speak to someone in the grip of a transitory but dangerous hysteria. “This is all just a reaction to your son’s death. You and Ellie are both reacting strongly to that, and who could blame you? But you’ll just collapse if you try to-”

Rachel did not answer him. She went to the telephone in the hall, found AIRLINES in the Yellow Pages and dialed Delta’s number while Dory stood close by, telling her they ought to just think about this, didn’t she think, they ought to talk about it, perhaps make a list… and beyond her EWe stood, her face stifi dark-but now it was lit by enough hope to give Rachel some courage.

“Delta Airlines,” the voice on the other end said brightly. “This is Kim, may I help you?”

“I hope so,” Rachel said. “It’s extremely important that I get from Chicago to Bangor tonight. It’s… it’s a bit of an emergency, I’m afraid. Can you check the connections for me?”

Dubiously: “Yes, ma’am, but this is very short notice.”

“Well, please check,” Rachel said, her voice cracking a little. “I’ll take standby, anything.”

“All right, ma’am. Please hold.” The line became smoothly silent.

Rachel closed her eyes, and after a moment she felt a cool hand on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw that Ellie had moved next to her. Irwin and Dory stood together, talking quietly and looking at them. The way you look at people you suspect of being lunatics, Rachel thought wearily. She mustered a smile for Ellie.

“Don’t let them stop you, Mommy,” Ellie said in a low voice. “Please.”

“No way, big sister,” Rachel said and then winced-it was what they had called her ever since Gage had been born. But she was no one’s big sister anymore, was she?

“Thank you,” Ellie said.

“It’s very important, isn’t it?”

Ellie nodded.

“Honey, I believe that it is. But you could help me if you could tell me more.

Is it just the dream?”

“No,” Ellie said. “It’s… it’s everything now. It’s running all through me now. Can’t you feel it, Mommy? Something like a-”

“Something like a wind.”

Ellie sighed shakily.

“But you don’t know what it is? You don’t remember anything more about your dream?”

Ellie thought hard and then shook her head reluctantly. “Daddy. Church. And Gage. That’s all I remember. But I don’t remember how they go together, Mommy!”

Rachel hugged her tightly. “It will be all right,” she said, but the weight on her heart did not lessen.

“Hello, ma’am,” the reservations clerk said.

“Hello?” Rachel tightened her grip on both Ellie and the phone.

“I think I can get you to Bangor, ma’am-but you’re going to be getting in very late.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Rachel said.

“Do you have a pen? It’s complicated.”

“Yes, right here,” Rachel said, getting a stub of pencil out of the drawer. She found the back of an envelope to write on.

Rachel listened carefully, writing down everything. When the airline clerk finished, Rachel smiled a little and made an 0 with her thumb and forefinger to show Ellie that it was going to work. Probably going to work, she amended. Some of the connections looked very, very tight…

especially in Boston.

“Please book it all,” Rachel said. “And thank you.”

Kim took Rachel’s name and credit card number. Rachel hung up at last, limp but relieved. She looked at her father. “Daddy, will you drive me to the airport?”

“Maybe I ought to say no,” Goldman said. “I think I might have a responsibility to put a stop to this craziness.”

“Don’t you dare!” Ellie cried shrilly. “It’s not crazy! It’s not!” Goldman blinked and stepped back at this small but ferocious outburst.

“Drive her, Irwin,” Dory said quietly into the silence that followed. “I’ve begun to feel nervous too. I’ll feel better if I know Louis is all right.”

Goldman stared at his wife and at last turned to Rachel. “I’ll drive you, if it is what you want,” he said. “I… Rachel, I’ll come with you, if you want that.”

Rachel shook her head. “Thank you, Daddy, but I got all the last seats. It’s as if Cod saved them for me.”

Irwin Goldman sighed. At that moment he looked very old, and it suddenly occurred to Rachel that her father looked like Jud Crandall.

“You have time to pack a bag, if you want,” be said. “We can be at the airport in forty minutes, if I drive the way I used to when your mother and I were first married. Find her your tote bag, Dory.”

“Mommy,” Ellie said. Rachel turned toward her. Ellie’s face was now sheened with light sweat.

“What, honey?”

“Be careful, Mommy,” Ellie said.

49

The trees were only moving shapes against a cloudy sky backlit by the glow from the airport not too far distant. Louis parked the Honda on Mason Street. Mason bordered Pleasantview on its south side, and here the wind was almost strong enough to rip the car door out of his hand. He had to push hard to shut it. The wind rippled at his jacket as he opened the Honda’s hatch and took out the piece of tarpaulin he had cut and wrapped around his tools.

He was in a wing of darkness between two streetlights, standing on the curb with the canvas-wrapped bundle cradled in his arms, looking carefully for traffic before crossing to the wrought-iron fence which marked the boundary of the graveyard. He did not want to be seen at all, if he could help it, not even by someone who would notice him and forget him the next second. Beside him, the branches of an old elm groaned restlessly in the wind, making Louis think of jackleg necktie parties. God, he was so scared. This wasn’t wild work; it was mad work.

No traffic. On the Mason Street side, the streetlamps marched away in perfect white circles, casting spotlights on the sidewalk where, during the days after Fairmount Grammar School let out, boys would ride bikes and girls would jump rope and play hopscotch, never noticing the nearby graveyard, except perhaps at Halloween, when it would acquire a certain spooky charm. Perhaps they would dare to cross their suburban street and hang a paper skeleton on the wrought-iron bars of the high fence, giggling at the old jokes: it’s the most popular place in town; people are dying to get in. Why is it wrong to laugh in the grave yard?

Because everyone who lives there is always in a grave mood.

“Gage,” he muttered. Gage was in there, behind that wrought-iron fence, unjustly imprisoned under a blanket of dark earth, and that was no joke. Gonna break you out, Gage, he thought. Gonna break you out, big guy, or die trying.

Louis crossed the street with his heavy bundle in his arms, stepped up on the other curb, glanced both ways again, and tossed the canvas roll over the fence.

It clinked softly as it struck the ground on the far side. Dusting his hands, Louis walked away. He had marked the place in his mind. Even if he forgot, all he really had to do was follow the fence on the inside until he was standing opposite his Civic, and he would fall over it.

But would the gate be open this late?

He walked down Mason Street to the stop sign, the wind chasing him and worrying his heels. Moving shadows danced and twined on the roadway.

He turned the corner onto Pleasant Street, still following the fence. Car headlights splashed up the street, and Louis stepped casually behind an elm tree. It wasn’t a cop car, he saw, only a van moving toward Hammond Street and, probably, the turnpike. When it was well past him, Louis walked on.

Of course it will be unlocked. It’s got to be.

He reached the gate, which formed a cathedral shape in wrought iron, slim and graceful in the moving wind shadows thrown by the streetlights. He reached out and tried it.

Locked.

You stupid fool, of course it’s locked-did you really think anyone would leave a cemetery inside the municipal city limits of any American city unlocked after eleven o’clock? No one is that trusting, dear man, not anymore. So what do you do now?

Now he would have to climb and just hope no one happened to glance away from the Carson Show long enough to see him monkeying up the wrought iron like the world’s oldest, slowest kid.

Hey, police? I just saw the world’s oldest, slowest kid climbing into Pleasantview Cemetery. Looked like he was dying to get in. Yeah, looked like a grave matter to me. Kidding? Oh no, I’m in dead earnest. Maybe you ought to dig into it.

Louis continued up Pleasant Street and turned right at the next intersection.

The high iron fence marched along beside him relentlessly. The wind cooled and evaporated the drops of sweat on his forehead and in the hollows of his temples.

His shadow waxed and waned in the streetlights. Every now and then he glanced at the fence, and then he stopped and forced himself to really look at it.

You’re going to climb that baby? Don’t make me laugh.

Louis Creed was a fairly tall man, standing a bit over six-two, but the fence was easily nine feet high, each wrought-iron stave ending in a decorative, arrowlike point. Decorative, that is, until you happened to slip while swinging your leg over and the force of your suddenly dropping two hundred pounds drove one of those arrow points into your groin, exploding your testicles. And there you would be, skewered like a pig at a barbecue, hollering until someone called for the police and they came and pulled you off and took you to the hospital.

The sweat continued to flow, sticking his shirt to his back. All was silent except for the faint hum of late traffic on Hammond Street.

There had to be a way to get in there.

Had to be.

Come on, Louis, face the facts. You may be crazy, hut you’re not that crazy.

Maybe you could shinny up to the top of that fence, but it would take a trained gymnast to swing over those points without sticking himself on them. And even supposing you can get in, how are you going to get yourself and Gage’s body out?

He went on walking, vaguely aware that he was circling the cemetery but not doing anything constructive.

All right, here’s the answer. I’ll just go on home to Ludlow tonight and come back tomorrow, in the late afternoon… I’ll go in through the gate around four o’clock and find a place to hole up until it’s midnight or a little later. I will, in other words, put off until tomorrow what I should have been smart enough to think of today.

Good idea, 0 Great Swami Louis… and in the meantime, what do I do about that great big bundle of stuff 1 threw over the wall? Pick, shovel, flashlight…

you might as well stamp GRAVE-ROBBING EQUIPMENT on every damn piece of it.

It landed in the bushes. Who’s going to find it, for Chrissake?

On measure that made sense. But this was no sensible errand he was on, and his heart told him quietly and absolutely that he couldn’t come back tomorrow. If he didn’t do it tonight, he would never do it. He would never be able to screw himself up to this crazy pitch again. This was the moment, the only time for it he was ever going to have.

There were fewer houses up this way-an occasional square of yellow light gleamed on the other side of the street, and once he saw the gray-blue flicker of a black-and-white TV-and looking through the fence he saw that the graves were older here, more rounded, sometimes leaning forward or backward with the freezes and thaws of many seasons. There was another stop sign up ahead, and another right turn would put him on a street roughly parallel to Mason Street, where he had begun. And when he got back to the beginning, what did he do? Collect two hundred dollars and go around again? Admit defeat?

Car headlights turned down the street. Louis stepped behind another tree, waiting for it to pass. This car was moving very slowly, and after a moment a white spotlight stabbed out from the passenger side and ran flickering along the wrought-iron fence. His heart squeezed painfully in his chest. It was a police car, checking the cemetery.

He pressed himself tight against the tree, the rough bark against his cheek, hoping madly that it was big enough to shield him. The spotlight ran toward him.

Louis put his head down, trying to shield the white blur of his face. The spotlight reached the tree, disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared on Louis’s right. He slipped around the tree a little. He had a momentary glimpse of the dark bubbles on the cruiser’s roof. He waited for the taillights to flare a brighter red, for the doors to open, for the spotlight to suddenly turn back on its ball joint, hunting for him like a big white finger. Hey, you! You behind that tree! Come on out where we can see you, and we want to see both hands empty! Come out NOW!

The police car kept on going. It reached the corner, signaled with sedate propriety, and turned left. Louis collapsed back against the tree, breathing fast, his mouth sour and dry. He supposed they would cruise past his parked Honda, but that didn’t really matter. Parking from 6 P. M. to 7 A. M. was legal on Mason Street. There were plenty of other cars parked along it. Their owners would belong to the scattering of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.

Louis found himself glancing up at the tree he had hidden behind.

Just above his head, the tree forked. He supposed he could-Without allowing himself to think about it further, he reached into the fork and pulled himself up, scrambling with his tennis shoes for purchase, sending a little shower of bark down to the sidewalk. He got a knee up and a moment later he had one foot planted solidly in the crotch of the elm. If the police car should happen to come back, their spotlight would find an extremely peculiar bird in this tree.

He ought to move quickly.

He pulled himself up onto a higher branch, one which overhung the very top of the fence. He felt absurdly like the twelve-year-old he supposed he had once been. The tree was not still; it rocked easily, almost soothingly, in the steady wind. Its leaves rustled and murmured. Louis assessed the situation and then, before he could get cold feet, he dropped off into space, holding on to the branch with his hands laced together over it. The branch was perhaps a little thicker than a brawny man’s forearm. With his sneakers dangling about eight feet over the sidewalk, he pulled himself hand for hand toward the fence.

The branch dipped but showed no sign of breaking. He was faintly aware of his shadow following along on the cement sidewalk below him, an amorphous black ape-shape. The wind chilled his hot armpits, and he found himself shivering in spite of the sweat running down his face and neck. The branch dipped and swayed with his movements. The farther out he moved, the more pronounced the dip became. His hands and wrists were getting tired now, and he was afraid that his sweat-greasy palms might slip.

He reached the fence. His tennis shoes dangled perhaps a foot below the arrow tips. The tips did not look blunt at all from this angle. They looked very sharp. Sharp or not, he suddenly realized it was not just his balls that were at risk here. If he fell and hit one of those things dead on, his weight would be enough to drive it all the way up into his lungs. The returning cops would find an early and extremely grisly Halloween decoration on the Pleasant-view fence.

Breathing fast, not quite gasping, he groped for the fence points with his feet, needing a moment’s rest. For a moment he hung there, his feet moving in an air dance, searching but not finding.

Light touched him and grew.

Oh Christ, that’s a car, there’s a car coming-!

He tried to shuffle his hands forward, but his palms slipped. His interlaced fingers were coming apart.

Still groping for purchase, he turned his head to the left, looking under his straining arm. It was a car, but it shot through the intersection up the street without slowing. Lucky. If it had-His hands slipped again. He felt bark sift down onto his hair. One foot found purchase, but now his other pants leg had caught on one of the arrow points. And Christ, he wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer. Desperately, Louis jerked his leg. The branch dipped. His hands slipped again. There was a mutter of tearing cloth, and then he was standing on two of the arrow points. They dug into the soles of his tennis shoes, and the pressure quickly became painful, but Louis stood on them any-way. The relief in his hands and arms was greater than the pain in his feet.

What a figure I must cut, Louis thought with dim and dismal amusement. Holding the branch with his left hand, he wiped his right hand across his jacket. Then he wiped off the left while he held with the right.

He stood on the points for a moment longer and then slipped his hands forward along the branch. It was slim enough for him to be able to lace his fingers together comfortably now. He swung forward like Tarzan, feet leaving the arrow points. The branch dipped alarmingly, and he heard an ominous cracking sound. He let go, dropping on faith.

He landed badly. One knee thudded against a gravestone, sending a lance of pain up his thigh. He rolled over on the grass, holding the knee, lips skinned back in something like a grin, hoping that he hadn’t shattered his kneecap. At last the pain began to fade a little, and he found that he could flex the joint. It would be all right if he kept moving and didn’t allow it to stiffen up on him.

Maybe.

He got to his feet and started to walk along the fence back toward Mason Street and his equipment. His knee was bad at first, and he limped, but the pain smoothed out to a dull ache as he went. There was aspirin in the Honda’s first-aid kit. He should have remembered to bring that with him. Too late now.

He kept an eye out for cars and faded back deeper into the cemetery when one came.

On the Mason Street side, which was apt to be better traveled, he kept well back from the fence until he was opposite the Civic. He was about to trot down to the fence and pull his bundle out of the bushes when he heard footfalls on the sidewalk and a woman’s low laughter. He sat down behind a large grave marker-it hurt his knee too much to squat-and watched a couple walk up the far side of Mason Street. They were walking with their arms about each other’s waists, and something about their movement from one white pool of light to the next made Louis think of some old TV show. In a moment he had it: “The Jimmy Durante Hour.” What would they do if he rose up now, a wavering shadow in this silent city of the dead, and cried hollowly across to them: “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!”

They stopped in the pool of light just beyond his car and embraced. Watching them, Louis felt a kind of sick wonder and self-loathing. Here he was, crouched behind a tombstone like a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book story, watching lovers, is the line so thin, then? he wondered, and that thought also had a ring of familiarity. So thin you can simply step over it with this little fuss, muss, and bother? Climb a tree, shinny along a branch, drop into a graveyard, watch lovers dig holes? That simple? Is it lunacy? I spent eight years becoming a doctor, but I’ve become a grave robber in one simple step-what I suppose people would call a ghoul.

He crammed his fists against his mouth to stop some sound from coming out and felt for that interior coldness, that sense of disconnection. It was there, and Louis drew it gratefully around him.

When the couple finally walked on, Louis watched them with nothing but impatience. They climbed the steps of one of the apartment buildings. The man felt for a key, and a moment later they were inside. The street was silent again except for the constant beat of the wind, rustling the trees and tumbling his sweaty hair over his forehead.

Louis ran down to the fence, bent low, and felt through the brush for his canvas bundle. Here it was, rough under his fingers. He picked it up, listening to the muffled clank from inside. He carried it over to the broad graveled drive that led in through the gates and paused to orient himself. Straight up here, go left at the fork. No problem.

He walked along the edge of the drive, wanting to be able to go farther into the shadow of the elms if there did happen to be a full-time caretaker and if he happened to be out.

He bore left at the fork, approaching Cage’s grave now, and suddenly, appallingly, realized he could not remember what his son had looked like. He paused, staring off into the rows of graves, the frowning faзades of the monuments, and tried to summon him up. Individual features came to him-his blond hair, still so fine and light, his slanting eyes, his small, white teeth, the little twist of scar on his chin from the time he had fallen down the back steps of their place in Chicago. He could see these things but could not integrate them into a coherent whole. He saw Gage running toward the road, running toward his appointment with the Orinco truck, but tage’s face was turned away.

He tried to summon up Cage as he had been in his crib on the night of the kite-flying day and could see only darkness in his mind’s eye.

Gage, where are you?

Have you ever thought, Louis, that you may not be doing your son any good service? Perhaps he’s happy where he is… maybe all of that isn’t the bullshit you always thought it was. Maybe he’s with the angels or maybe he’s just sleeping. And if he’s sleeping, do you really know what it is you might wake up?

Oh Gage, where are you? I want you home with us.

But was he really controlling his own actions? Why couldn’t he summon up Gage’s face, and why was he going against everyone’s warning-Jud’s, the dream of Pascow, the trepidation of his own troubled heart?

He thought of the grave markers in the Pet Sematary, those rude circles, spiraling down into the Mystery, and then the coldness came over him again. Why was he standing here, trying to summon up Gage’s face anyway?

He would be seeing it soon enough.

The headstone was here now; it read simply CAGE WILLIAM CREED, followed by the two dates. Someone had been here today to pay his or her respects, he saw; there were fresh flowers. Who would that have been? Missy Dandridge?

His heart beat heavily but slowly in his chest. This was it then; if he was going to do it, he had better start. There was only so much night ahead, and then the day would come.

Louis glanced into his heart one final time and saw that yes, he did intend to go ahead with this. He nodded his head almost imperceptibly and fished for his pocketknife. He had cinched his bundle with Scotch strapping tape, and now he cut it. He unrolled the tarp at the foot of Gage’s grave like a bedroll and then arranged items in exactly the same way he would have arranged instruments to suture a cut or to perform a small in-office operation.

Here was the flashlight with its lens felted as the hardware store clerk had suggested. The felt was also secured with strapping tape. He had made a small circle in the middle by placing a penny on the felt and cutting around it with a scalpel. Here was the short-handled pick which he should not have to use-he had brought it only as a contingency. He would have no sealed cap to deal with, and he shouldn’t run into any rocks in a newly filled grave. Here was the shovel, the spade, the length of rope, the work gloves. He put the gloves on, grabbed the spade, and started.

The ground was soft, the digging easy. The grave’s shape was well defined, the dirt he was throwing out softer than the earth at the verge. His mind made a kind of automatic comparison between the ease of this dig and the rocky, unforgiving ground of the place where, if all went well, he would be reburying his son later on this night. Up there he would need the pick. Then he tried to stop thinking altogether. It only got in the way.

He threw the dirt on the ground to the left of the grave, working into a steady rhythm that only became more difficult to maintain as the hole deepened. He stepped into the grave, smelling that dank aroma of fresh dirt, a smell he remembered from his summers with Uncle Carl.

Digger, he thought and stopped to wipe sweat from his brow. Uncle Carl had told him that was the nickname for every graveyard sexton in America. Their friends called them Digger.

He started in again.

He stopped only once more, and that was to check his watch. It was twenty minutes past twelve. He felt time slipping through his fist like something that had been greased.

Forty minutes later, the spade gritted across something, and Louis’s teeth came down on his upper lip hard enough to bring blood. He got the flashlight and shone it down. Here was more dirt, and scrawled across it in a diagonal slash, a grayish-silver line. It was the top of the grave liner. Louis got most of the dirt off, but he was wary of making too much noise, and nothing was much louder than a shovel scraping across concrete in the dead of night.

He climbed out of the grave and got the rope. This he threaded through the iron rings on one half of the segmented grave-liner top. He got out of the grave again, spread out the tarpaulin, lay down on it, and grasped the ends of the rope.

Louis, I think this is it. Your last chance.

You’re right. It’s my last chance and I’m damned well taking it.

He wound the ends of the rope around his hands and pulled. The square of concrete came up easily, gritting on the pivot end.

It stood neatly upright over a square of blackness, now a vertical tombstone instead of a horizontal grave cover.

Louis pulled the rope out of the rings and tossed it aside. He wouldn’t need it for the other hail; he could stand on the sides of the grave liner and pull it up.

He got down into the grave again, moving carefully, not wanting to overturn the cement slab he had already pulled up and mash his toes or break the damned thing, which was quite thin. Pebbles rattled down into the hole, and he heard several of them chip hollowly off Gage’s coffin.

Bending, he grasped the other half of the grave-liner top and pulled upward. As he did so, he felt something squelch coldly under his fingers. When he had this second half of the top standing on end, he looked down at his hand and saw a fat earthworm wriggling feebly there. With a choked cry of disgust, Louis wiped it off on the earthen sidewall of his son’s grave.

Then he shone his flashlight downward.

Here was the coffin he had last seen resting on chrome runners over the grave at the funeral service, surrounded by that ghastly green Astroturf. This was the safety-deposit box in which he was supposed to bury all his hopes for his son.

Fury, clean and white hot, the antithesis of his former coldness, rose up in him. Idiotic! The answer was no!

Louis groped for the spade and found it. He raised it over his shoulder and brought it down on the coffin’s latch once, twice, a third time, a fourth. His lips were drawn back in a furious grimace.

Going to break you out, Gage, see if 1 don’t!

The latch had splintered on the first stroke and probably no more were necessary, but he went on, not wanting just to open the coffin but to hurt it.

Some kind of sanity finally returned, and he stopped with the spade raised for another blow.

The blade was bent and scratched. He tossed it aside and scrambled out of the grave on legs that felt weak and rubbery. He felt sick to his stomach, and the anger had gone as quickly as it had come. In its place the coldness flooded back in, and never in his life had his mind felt so alone and disconnected; he felt like an astronaut who has floated away from his ship during an EVA and now only drifts in a great blackness, breathing on borrowed time. Did Bill Baterman feel like this? he wondered.

He lay on the ground, on his back this time, waiting to see if he was under control and ready to proceed. When the rubbery feeling had left his legs, he sat up and slipped back down into the grave. He shone the flashlight on the latch and saw it was not just broken, but demolished. He had swung the spade in a blind fury, but every blow he had struck had gone directly there, bull’s eye, as if guided. The wood around it had splintered.

Louis slipped the flashlight into his armpit. He squatted down slightly. His hands groped, like the hands of a catcher in a troupe of circus flyers, waiting to perform his part in a mortal docking.

He found the groove in the lid, and he slipped his fingers into it. He paused for a moment-one could not rightly call it a hesitation-and then he opened his son’s coffin.

50

Rachel Creed almost made her flight from Boston to Portland. Almost. Her Chicago plane left on time (a miracle in itself), was cleared straight into LaGuardia (another), and left New York only five minutes behind schedule. It got to the gate in Boston fifteen minutes late-at 11:12 P. M. That left her with thirteen minutes.

She still might have made her connecting flight, but the shuttle bus which makes a circle around the Logan terminals was late. Rachel waited, now in a kind of constant low-grade panic, shifting from foot to foot as if she needed to go to the bathroom, switching the travel bag her mother had loaned her from one shoulder to the other.

When the shuttle still hadn’t come at 11:25, she began to run. Her heels were low but still high enough to cause her problems. One of her ankles buckled painfully, and she paused long enough to take off the shoes. Then she ran on in her pantyhose, past Allegheny and Eastern Airlines, breathing hard now, getting the beginnings of a stitch in her side.

Her breath was hot in her throat, that tuck in her side deeper and more painful.

Now she was running past the international terminal, and there, up ahead, was Delta’s triangular sign. She burst in through the doors, almost dropped one shoe, juggled it, caught it. It was 11:37.

One of the two clerks on duty glanced up at her.

“Flight 104,” she panted. “The Portland flight. Has it left?”

The clerk glanced behind him at the monitor. “Still at the gate it says here,”

he said, “but they called for final boarding five minutes ago. I’ll call ahead.

Bags to check?”

“No,” Rachel gasped, and brushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes. Her heart was galloping in her chest.

“Then don’t wait for me to call. I will-but I advise you to run very fast.”

Rachel didn’t run very fast-she was no longer able. But she did as well as she could. The escalator had been turned off for the night, and she pounded up the stairs, tasting copper shavings in her mouth. She reached the security checkpoint and almost threw the tote bag at the startled female guard, then waited for it to come through on the conveyor belt, her hands clenching and unclenching. It was barely out of the X-ray chamber before she had snatched it by the strap and ran again, the bag flying out behind her and then banging her on the hip.

She looked up at one of the monitors as she ran.

FLIGHT 104 PORTLAND SCHED 11:25P GATE 31 BOARDING Gate 31 was at the far end of the concourse-and even as she snatched her glance at the monitor, BOARDING in steady letters changed to DEPARTING, blinking rapidly.

A frustrated cry burst from her. She ran into the gate area just in time to see the gate attendant removing the strips which read: FLIGHT 104 BOSTON-PORTLAND 11:25.

“It’s gone?” she asked incredulously. “It’s really gone?”

The attendant looked at her sympathetically. “It rolled out of the jetway at 11:40. I’m sorry, ma’am. You made a helluva good try, if that’s any consolation.” He pointed out the wide glass windows. Rachel could see a big 727 with Delta markings, its running lights Christmas-tree bright, starting its takeoff roll.

“Christ, didn’t anyone tell you I was coming?” Rachel cried.

“When they called up here from downstairs, 104 was on an active taxiway. If I’d called her back, she would have gotten caught in the parade going out to Runway 30, and that pilot would have had my bee-hind on a platter. Not to mention the hundred or so passengers on board. I’m very sorry. If you’d been even four minutes sooner-”

She walked away, not listening to the rest. She was halfway back to the security checkpoint when waves of faintness rode over her. She stumbled into another gate area and sat down until the darkness had passed. Then she slipped her shoes back on, picking a squashed Lark cigarette butt off the tattered sole of one stocking first. My feet are dirty and I don’t give a fuck, she thought disconsolately.

She walked back toward the terminal.

The security guard eyed her sympathetically. “Missed it?”

“I missed it, all right,” Rachel said.

“Where were you headed?”

“Portland. Then Bangor.”

“Well, why don’t you rent a car? If you really have to be there, that is?

Ordinarily I’d advise a hotel close to the airport, but if I ever saw a lady who looked like she really had to be there, you are that lady.”

“I’m that lady, all right,” Rachel said. She thought about it. “Yes, I suppose I could do that, couldn’t I? If any of the agencies has a car.”

The security guard laughed. “Oh, they’ll have cars. Only time they don’t have cars at Logan is when the airport’s fogged in. Which is a lot of the time.”

Rachel barely heard her. In her mind she was already trying to calculate it.

She couldn’t get to Portland in time to catch her Bangor flight even if she bulleted up the turnpike at a suicidal pace. So figure driving straight through.

How long? That depended on how far. Two hundred and fifty miles, that was the figure which came to mind. Something Jud had said maybe. It was going to be at least a quarter past twelve before she got going, probably closer to 12:30 A. M.

It was all turnpike. She thought that her chances of going the whole distance at sixty-five without getting hauled down for speeding were reasonably good. She ran the figures quickly in her head, dividing sixty-five into two hundred and fifty. Not quite four hours. Well… say four even. She would have to stop once and go to the bathroom. And although sleep seemed impossibly distant now, she knew her own resources well enough to believe she would also have to stop for a great big black coffee. Still she could be back in Ludlow before first light. Mulling all this over, she started for the stairs-the car rental desks were one level down from the concourses.

“Good luck, honey,” the security guard called. “Take care.”

“Thanks,” Rachel said. She felt that she deserved some good luck.

51

The smell hit him first, and Louis recoiled, gagging. He hung on the edge of the grave, breathing hard, and just when he thought he had his gorge under control, his entire big, tasteless meal came up in a spurt. He threw up on the far side of the grave and then put his head against the ground, panting. At last the nausea passed. Teeth clamped together, he took the flashlight out of his armpit and shone it down into the open coffin.

A deep horror that was very nearly awe stole over him-it was the sort of feeling usually reserved for the worst nightmares, the ones you can barely remember upon awakening.

Gage’s head was gone.

Louis’s hands were trembling so badly he had to hold the flashlight with both hands, gripping it the way a policeman is taught to grip his service revolver on the target range. Still the beam jittered back and forth and it was a moment before he could train the pencil-thin beam back into the grave.

it’s impossible, he told himself, just remember that what you thought you saw is impossible.

He slowly moved the narrow beam up Gage’s three-foot length, from the new shoes to the suit pants, the little coat (ah, Christ, no two-year-old was ever meant to wear a suit), to the open collar, to-His breath caught in a harsh sound that was too outraged to be a gasp, and all his fury at Gage’s death came back in a rush, drowning fears of the supernatural, the paranatural, his growing certainty that he had crossed over into’ the country of the mad.

Louis scrabbled in his back pocket for his handkerchief and pulled it out.

Holding the light in one hand, he leaned into the grave again, almost past the point of balance. If one of the segments of grave liner had fallen now, it would have surely broken his neck. Gently he used his handkerchief to wipe away the damp moss that was growing on Gage’s skin-moss so dark that he had been momentarily fooled into thinking Gage’s whole head was gone.

The moss was damp but no more than a scum. He should have expected it; there had been rain, and a grave liner was not watertight. Flashing his light to either side, Louis saw that the coffin was lying in a thin puddle. Beneath the light slime of growth, he saw his son. The mortician, aware that the coffin could not be opened after such a terrible accident, had nonetheless done the best he could-morticians almost always did. Looking at his son was like looking at a badly made doll. Gage’s head bulged in strange directions. His eyes had sunken deep behind closed lids. Something white protruded from his mouth like an albino tongue, and Louis thought at first that they had, perhaps, used too much embalming fluid. It was tricky stuff at best, and with a child it was next to impossible to tell how much was enough or too much.

Then he realized it was only cotton. He reached in and plucked it out of the boy’s mouth. Gage’s lips, oddly lax and seeming somehow too dark and too wide, closed with a faint but audible plip! He threw the cotton into the grave where it floated in the shallow puddle and gleamed a loathsome white. Now one of Gage’s cheeks had a hollow old-man’s look.

“Gage,” he whispered, “going to take you out now, okay?”

He prayed no one would come along now, a caretaker making a 12:30 swing through the cemetery, something like that. But it was no longer a matter of not being caught; if someone else’s flashlight beam speared him as he stood here in the grave going about his grim work, he would seize the bent, scarred spade and put it through the intruder’s skull.

He worked his arms under Gage. The body lolled bonelessly from side to side, and a sudden, awful certainty came over him: when he lifted Gage, Gage’s body would break apart and he would be left with the pieces. He would be left standing with his feet on the sides of the grave liner with the pieces, screaming. And that was how they would find him.

Go on, you chicken, go on and do it!

He got Gage under the arms, aware of the fetid dampness, and lifted him that way, as he had lifted him so often from his evening tub. Gage’s head lolled all the way to the middle of his back. Louis saw the grinning circlet of stitches which held Gage’s head onto his shoulders.

Somehow, panting, his stomach spasming from the smell and from the boneless loose feel of his son’s miserably smashed body, Louis wrestled the body out of the coffin. At last he sat on the verge of the grave with the body in his lap, his feet dangling in the hole, his face a horrible livid color, his eyes black holes, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of horror and pity and sorrow.

“Gage,” he said and began to rock the boy in his arms. Gage’s hair lay against Louis’s wrist, as lifeless as wire. “Gage, It will be all right, I swear, Gage, it will be all right, this will end, this is just the night, please, Gage, I love you, Daddy loves you.”

Louis rocked his son.

By quarter of two, Louis was ready to leave the cemetery. Actually handling the body had been the worst of it-that was the point at which that interior astronaut, his mind, seemed to float the farthest into the void. And yet now, resting, his back a throbbing hurt in which exhausted muscles jumped and twitched, he felt it might be possible to get back. All the way back.

He put Gage’s body on the tarpaulin and wrapped it up. He cinched it with long strips of strapping tape, then cut the length of rope in two and tied off the ends neatly. Once more he might have had a rolled-up rug, no more. He closed the coffin, then after a moment’s thought, he reopened it and put the bent spade in.

Let Pleasantview have that relic; it would not have his son. He closed the coffin and then lowered half of the cement grave-liner top. He considered simply dropping the other half but was afraid it would shatter. After a moment’s consideration, he threaded his belt through the iron rings and used it to lower the cement square gently into place. Then he used the shovel to fill in the hole. There was not enough dirt to bring it up even with the ground again. The grave’s swaybacked look might be noticed. It might not. It might be noticed and disregarded. He would not allow himself to think about it, or worry about it tonight-too much still lay ahead of him. More wild work. And he was very tired.

Hey-ho, let’s go.

“Indeed,” Louis muttered.

The wind rose, shrieking briefly through the trees and making him look around uneasily. He laid the shovel, the pick he had yet had to use, the gloves, and the flashlight beside the bundle. Using the light was a temptation, but he resisted it. Leaving the body and the tools, Louis walked back the way he had come and arrived at the high wrought-iron fence about five minutes later. There, across the street, was his Civic, parked neatly at the curb. So near and yet so far.

Louis looked at it for a moment and then struck off in a different direction.

This time he moved away from the gate, walking along the wrought-iron fence until it turned away from Mason Street at a neat right angle. There was a drainage ditch here, and Louis looked into it. What he saw made him shudder.

There were masses of rotting flowers here, layer upon layer of them, washed down by seasons of rain and snow.

Christ.

No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, hut Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.

Louis stared down into the ditch as if hypnotized. At last he dragged his gaze away with a little gasp-the gasp of one who has come to, or who has been called from a mesmerist’s trance by the final number in a count of ten.

He went on. He hadn’t walked far before he found what he was looking for, and he suspected that his mind had neatly stored this bit of information on the day of Gage’s burial.

Here, looming in the windy dark, was the cemetery’s crypt.

Coffins were stored there in the winter when it was too cold for even the payloaders to dig in the frozen earth. It was also used when there was a rush of business.

There were such rushes of “cold custom” from time to time, Louis knew; in any given population there were times when, for no reason anyone could understand, lots of people died.

“It all balances out,” Uncle Carl told him. “If I have a two-week period in May when nobody dies, Lou, I can count on a two-week period in November when I’ll have ten funerals. Only it’s rarely November, and it’s never around Christmas, although people always think that’s when a lot of people die. That stuff about Christmas depression is just a load of bullshit. Just ask any funeral director.

Most people are real happy around Christmas, and they want to live. So they do live. It’s usually February when we get a big bulge. The flu gets the old people and there’s pneumonia, of course-but that’s not all. There’ll be people who’ve been battling cancer like mad bastards for a year, sixteen months. Then bad old February comes around and it seems as if they get tired and the cancer just rolls them up like a rug. On January 31 they’re in remission, and they feel as if they’re in the pink. Come February 24 they’re planted. People have heart attacks in February, strokes in February, renal failure in February. It’s a bad month. People get tired in February. We’re used to it, in the business. But then, for no reason, the same thing will happen in June or in October. Never in August. August’s a slow month. Unless a gas main explodes or a city bus goes off a bridge, you never fill up a cemetery crypt in August. But there have been Februarys when we’ve had caskets stacked up three deep, hoping like hell for a thaw so we can plant some of them before we have to rent a figging apartment.”

Uncle Carl had laughed. And Louis, feeling a party to something not even his instructors in med school knew, had laughed too.

The crypt’s double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and attractive as the swell of a woman’s breast. This hill (which Louis suspected was landscaped rather than natural) crested only a foot or two below the decorative arrow tips of the wrought-iron fence, which remained even at the top rather than rising with the contour.

Louis glanced around, then scrambled up the slope. On the other side was an empty square of ground, perhaps two acres in all. No… not quite empty. There was a single outbuilding, like a disconnected shed. Probably belongs to ‘the cemetery, Louis thought. That would be where they kept their grounds equipment.

The streetlights shone through the moving leaves of a belt of trees-old elms and maples-that screened this area from Mason Street. Louis saw no other movement.

He slid back down on his butt, afraid of falling and reinjuring his knee, and returned to his son’s grave. He almost stumbled over the roll of the tarpaulin.

He saw he would have to make two trips, one with the body and another for the tools. He bent, grimacing at his back’s protest, and got the stiff canvas roll in his arms. He could feel the shift of Gage’s body within and steadfastly ignored that part of his mind which whispered constantly that he had gone mad.

He carried the body over to the hill which housed Pleasant-view’s crypt with its two steel sliding doors (the doors made it look queerly like a two-car garage).

He saw what would have to be done if he were going to get his forty-pound bundle up that steep slope now that his rope was gone and prepared to do it. He backed up and then ran at the slope, leaning forward, letting his forward motion carry him as far as it would. He got almost to the top before his feet skidded out from under him on the short, slick grass, and he tossed the canvas roll as far as he could as he came down. It landed almost at the crest of the hill. He scrambled the rest of the way up, looked around again, saw no one, and laid the rolled-up tarp against the fence. Then he went back for the rest of his things.

He gained the top of the hill again, put the gloves on, and piled the flashlight, pick, and shovel next to the tarp. Then he rested, back against the staves of the fence, hands propped on his knees. The new digital watch Rachel had given him for Christmas informed him that it was now 2:01.

He gave himself five minutes to regroup and then tossed the shovel over the fence. He heard it thud in the grass. He tried to stuff the flashlight into his pants, but it just wouldn’t go. He slipped it through two of the iron staves and listened to it roll down the hill, hoping it would not hit a stone and break. He wished he had worn a packsack.

He removed his dispenser of strapping tape from the pocket of his jacket and bound the business-end of the pick to the canvas roll, going around and around, drawing the tape tight over the pick’s metal arms and tight under the canvas. He did this until the tape was gone and then tucked the empty dispenser back in his pocket. He lifted the bundle and hoisted it over the fence (his back screamed in protest; he would pay for this night all the following week, he suspected) and then let it drop, wincing at the soft thud.

Now he swung one leg over the fence, grasped two of the decorative arrow points, and swung his other leg over. He skidded down, digging in at the earth between the staves of the fence with the toes of his shoes, and dropped to the ground.

He made his way down the far side of the hill and felt through the grass. He found the shovel right away-muted as the glow from the streetlights was through the trees, it reflected a faint gleam from the blade. He had a couple of bad moments when he was unable to find the flashlight-how far could it have rolled in this grass? He got down on his hands and knees and felt through the thick plush, his breath and heartbeat loud in his own ears.

At last he spotted it, a thin black shadow some five feet from where he had guessed it would be-like the hill masking the cemetery crypt, the regularity of its shape gave it away. He grabbed it, cupped a hand over its felted lens, and pushed the little rubber nipple that hid the switch. His palm lit up briefly, and he switched the flashlight off. It was okay.

He used his pocketknife to cut the pick free from the canvas roll and took the tools through the grass to the trees. He stood behind the biggest, looking both ways along Mason Street. It was utterly deserted now. He saw only one light on the entire street-a square of yellow-gold in an upstairs room. An insomniac, perhaps, or an invalid.

Moving quickly but not running, Louis stepped out onto the sidewalk. After the dimness of the cemetery, he felt horribly exposed under the streetlights; here he stood, only yards away from Bangor’s second-largest boneyard, a pick, shovel, and flashlight cradled in his arms. If someone saw him now, the inference would be too clear to miss.

He crossed the street rapidly, heels clicking. There was his Civic, only fifty yards down the street. To Louis, it looked like five miles. Sweating, he walked toward it, alert for the sound of an approaching car engine, footfalls other ‘than his own, perhaps the rasp of a window going up.

He got to his Honda, leaned the pick and shovel against the side, and fumbled for his keys. They weren’t there, not in either pocket. Fresh sweat began to break on his face. His heart began to run again, and his teeth were clenched together against the panic that wanted to leap free.

He had lost them, most likely when he had dropped from the tree limb, hit the grave marker with his knee, and rolled over. His keys were lying somewhere in the grass, and if he had had trouble finding his flashlight, how could he hope to recover his keys? It was over. One piece of bad luck and it was over.

Now wait, wait just a goddam minute. Go through your pockets again. Your change is there-and if your change didn’t fall out, your keys didn’t fall out either.

This time he went through his pockets more slowly, removing the change, even turning the pockets themselves inside out.

No keys.

Louis leaned against the car, wondering what to do next. He would have to climb back in, he supposed. Leave his son where he was, take the flashlight, climb back in, and spend the rest of the night in a fruitless hunt for-Light suddenly broke in his tired mind.

He bent down and stared into the Civic. There were his keys dangling from the ignition switch.

A soft grunt escaped him, and then he ran around to the driver’s side, snatched the door open, and took the keys out. In his mind he suddenly heard the authoritative voice of that grim father figure Karl Malden, he of the potato nose and the archaic snap-brim hat: Lock your car. Take your keys. Don’t help a good boy go bad.

He went around to the rear of the Civic and opened the hatchback. He put in the pick, shovel, and flashlight, then slammed it. He had gotten twenty or thirty feet down the sidewalk when he remembered his keys. This time he had left them dangling from the hatchback lock.

Stupid! he railed at himself. If you’re going to be so goddam stupid, you better forget the whole thing!

He went back and got his keys.

He had gotten Gage in his arms and was most of the way back to Mason Street when a dog began to bark somewhere. No-it didn’t just begin to bark. It began to howl, its gruff voice filling the street. Auggggh-R0000! Auggggh-R000000!

He stood behind one of the trees, wondering what could possibly happen next, wondering what to do next. He stood there expecting lights to start going on all up and down the street.

In fact only one light did go on, at the side of a house just opposite where Louis stood in the shadows. A moment later a hoarse voice cried, “Shut up, Fred!”

Auggggh-R000000! Fred responded.

“Shut him up, Scanlon, or I’m calling the police!” someone yelled from the side of the street Louis was on, making him jump, making him realize just how false the illusion of emptiness and desertion was. There were people all around him, hundreds of eyes, and that dog was attacking sleep, his only friend. Goddam you, Fred, he thought. Oh, goddam you.

Fred began another chorus; he got well into the Auggggh, but before he could do more than get started on a good solid R000000, there was a hard whacking sound followed by a series of low whimpers and yips.

Silence followed by the faint slam of a door. The light at the side of Fred’s house stayed on for a moment, then clicked off.

Louis felt strongly inclined to stay in the shadows, to wait; surely it would be better to wait until the ruckus had died down. But time was getting away from him.

He crossed the street with his bundle and walked back down to the Civic, seeing no one at all. Fred held his peace. He clutched his bundle in one hand, got his keys, opened the hatchback.

Gage would not fit.

Louis tried the bundle vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally. The Civic’s back compartment was too small. He could have bent and crushed the bundle in there-Gage would not have minded-but Louis could simply not bring himself to do it.

Come on, come on, come on, let’s get out of here, let’s not push it any further.

But lie stood, nonplussed, out of ideas, the bundle containing his son’s corpse in his arms. Then he heard the sound of an approaching car, and without really thinking at all, he took the bundle around to the passenger side, opened the door, and slipped the bundle into the seat.

He shut the door, ran around to the rear of the Civic, and slammed the hatchback. The car went right through the intersection, and Louis heard the whoop of drunken voices. He got behind the wheel, started his car, and was reaching for the headlight switch when a horrible thought struck him. What if Gage were facing backward, sitting there with those joints at knee and hip bending the wrong way, his sunken eyes looking toward the rear window instead of out through the windshield?

It doesn’t matter, his mind responded with a shrill fury born of exhaustion.

Will you get that through your head? it just doesn’t matter!

But it does. it does matter. It’s Gage in there, not a bundle of towels!

He reached over and gently began to press his hands against the canvas tarpaulin, feeling for the contours underneath. He looked like a blind man trying to determine what a specific object might be. At last he came upon a protuberance that could only be Gage’s nose-facing in the right direction.

Only then could he bring himself to put the Civic in gear and start the twenty-five minute drive back to Ludlow.

52

At one o’clock that morning, Jud Crandall’s telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B amp; A coupling shed with George Chapin and Renй Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey-jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it-while outside a nor’easter blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B amp; A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, these were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around. He was twenty-three, and Norma was very much alive (although in bed now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and Renй Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucks-port who-That was when the phone began to ring and he jerked up in his chair, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, feeling a sour heaviness drop into him like a stone-it was, he thought, all those years between twenty-three and eighty-three, all sixty of them, dropping into him at once. And on the heels of that thought: You been sleepin, boyo. That’s no way to run this railroad…

not tonight.

He got up, holding himself straight against the stiffness that had also settled into his back, and crossed to the phone.

It was Rachel.

“Jud? Has he come home?”

“No,” Jud said. “Rachel, where are you? You sound closer.”

“I am closer,” Rachel said. And although she did sound closer somehow, there was a distant humming on the wire. It was the sound of the wind, somewhere between here and wherever she was. The wind was high tonight. That sound that always made Jud think of dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out. “I’m at the rest area at Biddeford on the Maine Turnpike.”

“Biddeford!”

“I couldn’t stay in Chicago. It was getting to me, too whatever it was that got Ellie, it was getting me too. And you feel it. It’s in your voice.”

“Ayuh.” He picked a Chesterfield out of his pack and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. He popped a wooden match alight and watched it flicker as his hand trembled. His hands hadn’t trembled-not before this nightmare had commenced anyway. Outside, he heard that dark wind gust. It took the house in its hand and shook it.

Power’s growing. I can feel it.

Dim terror in his old bones. It was like spun glass, fine and fragile.

“Jud, please tell me what’s going on!”

He supposed she had a right to know-a need to know. And he supposed he would tell her. Eventually he would tell her the whole story. He would show her the chain that had been forged link by link. Norma’s heart attack, the death of the cat, Louis’s question-has anyone ever buried a person up there?-Cage’s death…

. and God alone knew what further link Louis might be forging right now. Eventually he would tell her. But not over the phone.

“Rachel, how come you to be on the turnpike instead of in a plane?”

She explained how she had missed her connecting flight at Boston. “I got an Avis car, but I’m not making the time I thought I would. I got a little bit lost corning from Logan to the turnpike, and I’ve only got into Maine. I don’t think I can get there until dawn. But Jud… please. Please tell me what’s happening. I’m so scared, and I don’t even know why.”

“Rachel, listen to me,” Jud said, “you drive on up to Portland and lay over, do you hear me? Check into a motel there and get some-”

“Jud, I can’t do th-.”

“-and get some sleep. Feel no fret, Rachel. Something may be happening here tonight, or something may not. If something is-if it’s what I think-then you wouldn’t want to be here anyway. I can take care of it, I think. I better be able to take care of it because what’s happening is my fault. If nothing’s happening, then you get here this afternoon, and that will be fine. I imagine Louis will be real glad to see you.”

“I couldn’t sleep tonight, Jud.”

“Yes,” he said, reflecting that he had believed the same thing-hell, Peter had probably believed the same thing on the night Jesus had been taken into custody.

Sleeping on sentry duty. “Yes, you can. Rachel, if you doze off behind the wheel of that damn rent-a-car and go off the road and get yourself killed, what’s going to happen to Louis then? And Ellie?”

“Tell me what’s going on! If you tell me that, Jud, maybe I’ll take your advice.

But I have to know!”

“When you get to Ludlow, I want you to come here,” Jud said. “Not over to your house. Come here first. I’ll tell you everything I know, Rachel. And I am watching for Louis.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“No, ma’am. Not over the phone. I won’t. Rachel, I can’t. You go on now. Drive up to Portland and lay over.”

There was a long, considering pause.

“All right,” she said at last. “Maybe you’re right. Jud, tell me one thing. Tell me how bad it is.”

“I can handle it,” Jud said calmly. “Things have got as bad as they’re going to get.”

Outside the headlights of a car appeared, moving slowly. Jud hall-stood, watching it, and then sat down again when it accelerated past the Creed house and out of sight.

“All right,” she said. “I guess. The rest of this drive has seemed like a stone on my head.”

“Let the stone roll off, my dear,” Jud said. “Please. Save yourself for tomorrow. Things here will be all right.”

“You promise you’ll tell me the whole story?”

“Yes. We’ll have us a beer, and I’ll tell you the whole thing.”

“Goodbye, then,” Rachel said, “for now.”

“For now,” Jud agreed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel.”

Before she could say anything else, Jud hung up the telephone.

He thought there were caffeine pills in the medicine cabinet, but he could not find them. He put the rest of the beer back in the refrigerator-not without regret-and settled for a cup of black coffee. He took it back to the bow window and sat down again, sipping and watching.

The coffee-and the conversation with Rachel-kept him awake and alert for three quarters of an hour, but then he began to nod once more.

No sleeping on sentry duty, old man. You let it get hold of you; you bought something, and now you have to pay for it. So no sleeping on sentry duty.

He lit a fresh cigarette, drew deep, and coughed an old man’s rasping cough. He put the cigarette on the groove of the ashtray and rubbed his eyes with both hands. Outside a ten-wheeler blasted by, running lights glaring, cutting through the windy, uneasy night.

He caught himself dozing off again, snapped awake, and abruptly slapped himself across the face, forehand and backhand, causing his ears to ring. Now terror awakened in his heart, a stealthy visitor who had broken into that secret place.

It’s puttin me to sleep… hypnotizin me… somethin. It doesn’t want me awake. Because he’ll be comin back pretty soon. Yeah, I feel that. And it wants me out of the way.

“No,” he said grimly. “No way at all. You hear me? I’m puttin a stop to this.

This has gone far enough.”

The wind whined around the eaves, and the trees on the other side of the road shook their leaves in hypnotic patterns. His mind went back to that night around the Defiant stove in the coupling shed, which had stood right where the Evarts Furniture Mart stood in Brewer now. They had talked the night away, he and George and Renй Michaud, and now he was the only one left-Renй crushed between two boxcars on a stormy night in March of 1939, George Chapin dead of a heart attack just last year. Of so many, he was the only one left, and the old get stupid. Sometimes the stupidity masquerades as kindness, and sometimes it masquerades as pride-a need to tell old secrets, to pass things on, to pour from the old glass to the new one, to.

So dis Jew peddler come in and he say “I got sumpin you never seen before. These pos’cards, dey jus look like wimmin in bathin suits until you rub dem wit a wet cloth, and den-”

Jud’s head nodded. His chin settled slowly, gently, against his chest.

“-dey’s as nakid as the day dey was born! But when dey dry, the clo’es, dey come back on! And dat ain’t all! I got-”

Renй telling this story in the coupling shed, leaning forward, smiling, and Jud holds the bottle-he feels the bottle and his hand closes around it on thin air.

In the ashtray, the cigarette ash on the end of the cigarette grew longer. At last it tipped forward into the ashtray and burned out, its shape recalled in the neat roll of ash like a rune.

Jud slept.

And when the taillights flashed outside and Louis turned the Honda Civic into his driveway some forty minutes later and drove it into the garage, Jud did not hear, stir, or awaken, any more than Peter awoke when the Roman soldiers came to take a tramp named Jesus into their custody.

53

Louis found a fresh dispenser of strapping tape in one of the kitchen drawers, and there was a coil of rope in the corner of the garage near last winter’s snow tires. He used the tape to bind the pick and shovel together in a single neat bundle and the rope to fashion a rough sling.

Tools in the sling. Gage in his arms.

He looped the sling over his back, then opened the passenger door of the Civic, pulling the bundle out. Gage was much heavier than Church had been. He might well be crawling by the time he got his boy up to the Micmac burying ground-and he would still have the grave to dig, lighting his way through that stony, unforgiving soil.

Well, he would manage. Somehow.

Louis Creed stepped out of his garage, pausing to thumb off the light switch with his elbow, and stood for a moment at the place where asphalt gave way to grass. Ahead of him he could see the path leading to the Pet Sematary well enough in spite of the blackness; the path, with its short grass, glowed with a kind of luminescence.

The wind pushed and pulled its fingers through his hair, and for a moment the old, childlike fear of the dark rushed through him, making him feel weak and small and terrorized. Was he really going into the woods with this corpse in his arms, passing under the trees where the wind walked, from darkness into darkness? And alone this time?

Don’t think about it. Just do it.

Louis got walking.

By the time he got to the Pet Sematary twenty minutes later, his arms and legs were trembling with exhaustion, and he collapsed with the rolled-up tarpaulin across his knees, gasping. He rested there for another twenty minutes, almost dozing, no longer fearful-exhaustion had driven fear out, it seemed.

Finally he got to his feet again, not really believing he could climb the deadfall, only knowing in some numb sort of way that he must try. The bundle in his arms seemed to weigh two hundred pounds instead of forty.

But what had happened before happened again; it was like suddenly, vividly remembering a dream., No, not remembering; reliving. When he placed his foot on the first dead treetrunk, that queer sensation rushed through him again, a feeling that was almost exultation. The weariness did not leave him, but it became bearable-unimportant, really.

Just follow me. Follow me and don’t look down, Louis. Don’t hesitate and don’t look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure.

Quick and sure, yes-the way Jud had removed the stinger.

I know the way through.

But there was only one way through, Louis thought. Either it let you through or it did not. Once before, he had tried to climb the deadfall by himself and hadn’t been able to. This time he mounted it quickly and surely, as he had on the night Jud had shown him the way.

Up and up, not looking down, his son’s body in its canvas shroud cradled in his arms. Up until the wind funneled secret passages and chambers through his hair again, flipping it, parting it widdershins.

He stood on the top for a moment and then descended quickly, as if going down a set of stairs. The pick and shovel rattled and clinked dully against his back.

In no more than a minute, he was standing on the springy, needle-covered ground of the path again, the deadfall bulking behind him, higher than the graveyard fence had been.

He moved up the path with his son, listening to the wind moan in the trees. The sound held no terror for him now. The night’s work was almost done.

54

Rachel Creed passed the sign reading EXIT 8 KEEP RIGHT FOR PORTLAND WESTBROOK, put on her blinker, and guided the Avis Chevette toward the exit ramp. She could see a green Holiday Inn sign clearly against the night sky. A bed, sleep. An end to this constant, racking, sourceless tension. Also an end-for a little while, at least-to her grieving emptiness for the child who was no longer there. This grief, she had discovered, was like a massive tooth extraction. There was numbness at first, but even through the numbness you felt pain curled up like a cat swishing its tail, pain waiting to happen. And when the novocaine wore off, oh boy, you sure weren’t disappointed.

He told her that he was sent to warn… but that he couldn’t interfere. He told her he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was discorporated.

Jud knows, but he won’t tell. Something is going on. Something. But what?

Suicide? Is it suicide? Not Louis; I can’t believe that. But he was lying about something. It was in his eyes… oh shit, it was all over his face, almost as if he wanted me to see the lie see it and put a stop to it… because part of him was scared so scared.

Scared? Louis is never scared!

Suddenly she jerked the Chevette’s steering wheel hard over to the left, and the ear responded with the abrupt suddenness that small cars have, the tires wailing. For a moment she thought it was going to turn over. But it didn’t, and she was moving north again, exit 8 with its comforting Holiday Inn sign slipping behind her. A new sign came in view, reflective paint twinkling eerily.

NEXT EXIT ROUTE 12 CUMBERLAND CUMBEBLAND CENTER JERUSALEM’S LOT FALMOUTH FALMOUTH FORESIDE. Jerusalem’s Lot, she thought randomly, what an odd name. Not a pleasant name, for some reason… Come and sleep in Jerusalem.

But there would be no sleep for her tonight; Jud’s advice notwithstanding, she now meant to drive straight through. Jud knew what was wrong and had promised her he would put a stop to it, but the man was eighty-some years old and had lost his wife only three months before. She would not put her trust in Jud. She should never have allowed Louis to bulldoze her out of the house the way he had, but she had been weakened by Gage’s death. Ellie with her Polaroid picture of Gage and her pinched face-it had been the face of a child who has survived a tornado or a sudden dive-bombing from a clear blue sky. There had been times in the dark watches of the night when she had longed to hate Louis for the grief he had fathered inside her, and for not giving her the comfort she needed (or allowing her to give the comfort she needed to give), but she could not. She loved him too much still, and his face had been so pale… so watchful.

The Chevette’s speedometer needle hung poised just a bit to the right of sixty miles an hour. A mile a minute. Two hours and a quarter to Ludlow maybe. Maybe she could still beat the sunrise.

She fumbled with the radio, turned it on, found a rock-and-roll station out of Portland. She turned up the volume and sang along, trying to keep herself awake. The station began to fade in and out half an hour later, and she retuned to an Augusta station, rolled the window down, and let the restless night air blow in on her.

She wondered if this night would ever end.

55

Louis had rediscovered his dream and was in its grip; every few moments he looked down to make sure it was a body in a tarpaulin he was carrying and not one in a green Hefty Bag. He remembered how on awakening the morning after Jud had taken him up there with Church he had been barely able to remember what they had done-but now he also remembered how vivid those sensations had been, how alive each of his senses had felt, how they had seemed to reach out, touching the woods as if they were alive and in some kind of telepathic contact with himself.

He followed the path up and down, rediscovering the places where it seemed as wide as Route 15, the places where it narrowed until he had to turn sideways to keep the head and foot of his bundle from getting tangled in the underbrush, the places where the path wound through great cathedral stands of trees. He could smell the clear tang of pine resin, and he could hear that strange crump-crump of the needles underfoot-a sensation that is really more feeling than sound.

At last the path began to slant downward more steeply and constantly. A short time later one foot splashed through thin water and became mired in the sludgy stuff underneath… the quicksand, if Jud was to be believed. Louis looked down and could see the standing water between growths of reeds and low, ugly bushes with leaves so broad they were almost tropical. He remembered that the light had seemed brighter that other night too. More electrical.

This next bit is like the deadfall-you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me and don’t look down.

Yes, okay… and just by the bye, have you ever seen plants like these in Maine before? In Maine or anywhere else? What in Christ’s name are they?

Never mind, Louis. Just… let’s go.

He began to walk again, looking at the wet, marshy undergrowth just long enough to sight the first tussock and then only looking ahead of himself, his feet moving from one grassy hump to the next-faith is accepting gravity as a postulate, he thought; nothing he had been told in a college theology or philosophy course, but something his high school physics instructor had once tossed off near the end of a period… something Louis had never forgotten.

He accepted the ability of the Micmac burying ground to resurrect the dead and walked into Little God Swamp with his son in his arms, not looking down or back.

These marshy bottoms were noisier now than they had been at the tag end of autumn. Peepers sang constantly in the reeds, a shrill chorus which Louis found alien and uninviting. An occasional frog twanged a deep elastic somewhere in its throat. Twenty paces or so into Little God Swamp he was buzz-bombed by some shape… a bat, perhaps.

The groundmist began to swirl around him, first covering his shoes, then his shins, finally enclosing him in a glowing white capsule. It seemed to him that the light was brighter, a pulsing effulgence like the beat of some strange heart. He had never before felt so strongly the presence of nature as a kind of coalescing force, a real being… possibly sentient. The swamp was alive, but not with the sound of music. If asked to define either the sense or the nature of that aliveness, he would have been unable. He only knew that it was rich with possibility and textured with strength. Inside it, Louis felt very small and very mortal.

Then there was a sound, and he remembered this from the last time as well: a high, gobbling laugh that became a sob. There was silence for a moment and then the laugh came again, this time rising to a maniacal shriek that froze Louis’s blood. The mist drifted dreamily around him. The laughter faded, leaving only the drone of the wind, heard but no longer felt. Of course not; this had to be some sort of geological cup in the earth. If the wind could have penetrated here, it would have torn this mist to tatters… and Louis wasn’t sure he would want to see what might have been revealed.

You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny.

“Loons,” Louis said and barely recognized the cracked, somehow ghastly sound of his own voice. But he sounded amused. God help him, he actually sounded amused.

He hesitated briefly and then moved on again. As if to punish him for his brief pause, his foot slipped from the next tussock, and he almost lost his shoe, pulling it free from the grasping ooze under the shallow water.

The voice-if that was what it was-came again, this time from the left. Moments later it came from behind him… from directly behind him, it seemed, as if he could have turned and seen some blood-drenched thing less than a foot from his back, all bared teeth and glittering eyes… but this time Louis did not slow. He looked straight ahead and kept walking.

Suddenly the mist lost its light and Louis realized that a face was hanging in the air ahead of him, leering and gibbering. Its eyes, tilted up like the eyes in a classical Chinese painting, were a rich yellowish-gray, sunken, gleaming.

The mouth was drawn down in a rictus; the lower lip was turned inside out, revealing teeth stained blackish-brown and worn down almost to nubs. But what struck Louis were the ears, which were not ears at all but curving horns…

they were not like devil’s horns; they were ram’s horns.

This grisly, floating head seemed to be speaking-laughing. Its mouth moved, although that turned-down lower lip never came back to its natural shape and place. Veins in there pulsed black. Its nostrils flared, as if with breath and life, and blew out white vapors.

As Louis drew closer, the floating head’s tongue lolled out. It was long and pointed, dirty yellow in color. It was coated with peeling scales and as Louis watched, one of these flipped up and over like a manhole cover and a white worm oozed out. The tongue’s tip skittered lazily on the air somewhere below where its adam’s apple should have been… it was laughing.

He clutched Gage closer to him, hugging him, as if to protect him, and his feet faltered and began to slip on the grassy tussocks where they held slim purchase.

You might see St. Elmo’s fire, what the sailors call foo-lights. It can make funny shapes, but it’s nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way.

Jud’s voice in his head gave him a measure of resolve. He began to move steadily forward again, lurching at first, then finding his balance. He didn’t look away but noticed that the face-if that was what it was and not just a shape made by the mist and his own mind-seemed to always remain the same distance away from him. And seconds or minutes later, it simply dissolved into drifting mist.

That was not St. Elmo’s fire.

No, of course it wasn’t. This place was thick with spirits; it was tenebrous with them. You could look around and see something that would send you raving mad. He would not think about it. There was no need to think about it. There was no need to-Something was coming.

Louis came to a total halt, listening to that sound… that inexorable, approaching sound. His mouth fell open, every tendon that held his jaw shut simply giving up.

It was a sound like nothing he had ever heard in his life-a living sound, a big sound. Somewhere nearby, growing closer, branches were snapping off. There was a crackle of underbrush breaking under unimaginable feet. The jellylike ground under Louis’s feet began to shake in sympathetic vibration. He became aware that he was moaning (oh my God oh my dear God what is that what is coming through this fog?) and once more clutching Gage to his chest; he became aware that the peepers and frogs had fallen silent, he became aware that the wet, damp air had taken on an eldritch, sickening smell like warm, spoiled pork.

Whatever it was, it was huge.

Louis’s wondering, terrified face tilted up and up, like a man following the trajectory of a launched rocket. The thing thudded toward him, and there was the ratcheting sound of a tree-not a branch, but a whole tree-falling over somewhere close by.

Louis saw something.

The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better than sixty feet high. It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage, could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.

For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him. Sparks like eyes.

Then the sound began to fade. As it went away, a peeper called hesitantly-one.

It was answered by another. A third joined the conversation; a fourth made it a bull session; a fifth and sixth made it a peeper convention. The sounds of the thing’s progress (slow but not blundering; perhaps that was the worst of it, that feeling of sentient progress) were moving away to the north. Little…

less… gone.

At last Louis began to move again. His shoulders and back were a frozen ache of torment. He wore an undergarment of sweat from neck to ankles. The season’s first mosquitoes, new-hatched and hungry, found him and sat down to a late snack.

The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo-the creature that moves through the north country, the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal.

That was it. The Wendigo has just passed within sixty yards of me.

He told himself not to be ridiculous, to be like Jud and avoid ideas about what might be seen or heard beyond the Pet Sematary-they were loons, they were St.

Elmo’s fire, they were the members of the New York Yankees’ bullpen. Let them be anything but the creatures which leap and crawl and slither and shamble in the world between. Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices… but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.

Louis walked on with his son, and the ground began to firm up again under his feet. Only moments later he came to a felled tree, its crown visible in the fading mist like a gray-green feather duster dropped by a giant’s housekeeper.

The tree was broken off-splintered off-and the break was so fresh that the yellowish-white pulp still bled sap that was warm to Louis’s touch as he climbed over… and on the other side was a monstrous indentation out of which he had to scramble and climb, and although juniper and low pump-laurel bushes had been stamped right into the earth, he would not let himself believe it was a footprint. He could have looked back to see if it had any such configuration once he had climbed beyond and above it, but he would not. He only walked on, skin cold, mouth hot and arid, heart flying.

The squelch of mud under his feet soon ceased. For a while there was the faint cereal sound of pine needles again. Then there was rock. He had nearly reached the end.

The ground began to rise faster. He barked his shin painfully on an outcropping.

But this was not just a rock. Louis reached out clumsily with one hand (the strap of his elbow, which had grown numb, screamed briefly) and touched it.

Steps here. Cut into the rock. Just follow me. We get to the top and we’re there.

So he began to climb and the exhilaration returned, once more beating exhaustion back… at least a little way. His mind tolled off the steps as he rose into the chill, as he climbed back into that ceaseless river of wind, stronger now, rippling his clothes, making the piece of canvas tarp Gage was wrapped in stutter gunshot sounds like a lifted sail.

He cocked his head back once and saw the mad sprawl of the stars. There were no constellations he recognized, and he looked away again, disturbed. Beside him was the rock wall, not smooth but splintered and gouged and friable, taking here the shape of a boat, here the shape of a badger, here the shape of a man’s face with hooded, frowning eyes. Only the steps that had been carved from the rock were smooth.

Louis gained the top and only stood there with his head down, swaying, sobbing breath in and out of his lungs. They felt like cruelly punched bladders, and there seemed to be a large splinter sticking into his side.

The wind ran through his hair like a dancer, roared in his ears like a dragon.

The light was brighter this night; had it been overcast the other time or had he just not been looking? It didn’t matter. But he could see, and that was enough to start another chill worming down his back.

It was just like the Pet Sematary.

Of course you knew that, his mind whispered as he surveyed the piles of rocks that had once been cairns. You knew that, or should have known it-not concentric circles but the spiral…

Yes. Here on top of this rock table, its face turned up to cold starlight and to the black distances between the stars, was a gigantic spiral, made by what the old-timers would have called Various Hands. But there were no real cairns, Louis saw; every one of them had been burst apart as something buried beneath returned to life… and clawed its way out. Yet the rocks themselves had fallen in such a way that the shape of the spiral was apparent.

Has anyone ever seen this from the air? Louis wondered randomly and thought of those desert drawings that one tribe of Indians or another had made in South America. Has anyone ever seen it from the air, and if they did, what did they think, I wonder?

He kneeled and set Gage’s body on the ground with a groan of relief.

At last his consciousness began to come back. He used his pocketknife to cut the tape holding the pick and shovel slung over his back. They fell to the ground with a clink. Louis rolled over and lay down for a moment, spread-eagled, staring blankly at the stars.

What was that thing in the woods? Louis, Louis, do you really think anything good can come at the climax of a play where something like that is among the cast of characters?

But now it was too late to back out, and he knew it.

Besides, he gibbered to himself, it may still come out all right; there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love. There’s still my bag, not the one downstairs but the one in our bathroom on the high shelf, the one I sent Jud for the night Norma’ had her heart attack. There are syringes, and if something happens… something bad… no one has to know but me.

His thoughts dissolved into the inarticulate, droning mutter of prayer even as his hands groped for the pick… and still on his knees, Louis began to dig into the earth. Each time he brought the pick down he collapsed over the end of it, like an old Roman falling on his sword. Yet little by little the hole took shape and deepened. He clawed the rocks out, and most he simply pushed aside along with the growing pile of stony dirt. But some of them he saved.

For the cairn.

56

Rachel slapped her face until it began to tingle, and still she kept nodding off. Once she snapped fully awake (she was in Pittsfield now and had the turnpike all to herself), and it seemed to her for a split second that dozens of silvery, merciless eyes were looking at her, twinkling like cold, hungry fire.

Then they resolved themselves into the small reflectors on the guardrail posts.

The Chevette had drifted far over into the breakdown lane.

She wrenched the wheel to the left again, the tires wailing, and she believed she heard a faint tick! that might have been her right front bumper just kissing off one of those guardrail posts. Her heart leaped in her chest and began to bang so hard between her ribs that she saw small specks before her eyes, growing and shrinking in time with its beat. And yet a moment later, in spite of her close shave, her scare, and Robert Gordon shouting “Red Hot” on the radio, she was drowsing off again.

A crazy, paranoid thought came to her. “Paranoid, all right,” she muttered under the rock and roll. She tried to laugh-but she couldn’t. Not quite. Because the thought remained, and in the eye of the night, it gained a spooky kind of credibility. She began to feel like a cartoon figure who has run into the rubber band of a gigantic slingshot. Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner… inertia becomes what?… elementary physics… something trying to hold her back… stay out of this, you… and a body at rest tends to remain at rest… Gage’s body, for instance… once set in motion.

This time the scream of tires was louder, the shave a lot closer; for a moment there was the queeling, grailing sound of the Chevette running along the guardrail cables, scraping paint down to the twinkling metal, and for a moment the wheel didn’t answer, and then Rachel was standing on the brake, sobbing; she had been asleep this time, not just dozing but asleep and dreaming at sixty miles an hour, and if there had been no guardrail… or if there had been an overpass stanchion…

She pulled over and put the car in park and wept into her hands, bewildered and afraid.

Something is trying to keep me away from him.

When she felt she had control of herself, she began to drive again-the little car’s steering did not seem impaired, but she supposed the Avis company would have some serious questions for her when she returned their car to BIA tomorrow.

Never mind. One thing at a time. Got to get some coffee into me-that’s the first thing.

When the Pittsfield exit came up, Rachel took it. About a mile down the road she came to bright arc-sodium lights and the steady mutter-growl of diesel engines.

She pulled in, had the Chevette filled up (“Somebody put a pretty good ding along the side of her,” the gas jockey said in an almost admiring voice), and then went into the diner, which smelled of deep-fat grease, vulcanized eggs…

. and, blessedly, of good strong coffee.

Rachel had three cups, one after another, like medicine-black, sweetened with a lot of sugar. A few truckers sat at the counter or in the booths, kidding the waitresses, who somehow all managed to look like tired nurses filled with bad news under these fluorescent lights burning in the night’s little hours.

She paid her check and went back out to where she had parked the Chevette. It wouldn’t start. The key, when turned, would cause the solenoid to utter a dry click, but that was all.

Rachel began to beat her fists slowly and forcelessly against the steering wheel. Something was trying to stop her. There was no reason for this car, brand-new and with less than five thousand miles on its odometer, to have died like this, but it had. Somehow it had, and here she was, stranded in Pittsfield, still almost fifty miles from home.

She listened to the steady drone of the big trucks, and it came to her with a sudden, vicious certainty that the truck which had killed her son was here among them… not muttering but chuckling.

Rachel lowered her head and began to cry.

57

Louis stumbled over something and fell full-length on the ground. For a moment he didn’t think he would be able to get up-getting up was far beyond him-he would simply lie here, listening to the chorus of peepers from Little God Swamp somewhere behind him and feeling the chorus of aches and pains inside his own body. He would lie here until he went to sleep.

Or died. Probably the latter.

He could remember slipping the canvas bundle into the hole he had dug, and pushing most of the earth back into the hole with his bare hands. And he believed he could remember piling the rocks up, building from a broad base to a point.

From then to now he remembered very little. He had obviously gotten back down the steps again or he wouldn’t be here, which was… where? Looking around, he thought he recognized one of the groves of great old pines not far beyond the deadfall. Could he have made it all the way back through Little God Swamp without knowing it? He supposed it was possible. Just.

This is far enough. I'll just sleep here.

But it was that thought, so falsely comforting, that got him to his feet and moving again. Because if he stayed here, that thing might find him… that thing might be in the woods and looking for him right this moment.

He scrubbed his hand up to his face, palm first, and was stupidly surprised to see blood on his hand… at some point he’d given himself a nosebleed. “Who gives a fuck?” he muttered hoarsely and grubbed apathetically around him until he had found the pick and shovel again.

Ten minutes later the deadfall loomed ahead. Louis climbed it, stumbling repeatedly but somehow not falling until he was almost down. Then he glanced at his feet, a branch promptly snapped (don’t look down, Jud had said), another branch tumbled, spilling his foot outward, and he fell with a thud on his side, the wind knocked out of him.

I’ll be goddamned if this isn’t the second graveyard I’ve fallen into tonight…

. and I’ll be goddamned if two isn’t enough.

He began to feel around for the pick and shovel again, and laid his hands on them at last. For a moment he surveyed his surroundings, visible by starlight.

Nearby was the grave of SMUCKY. He was obediant, Louis thought wearily. And TRIXIE, KILT ON THE HIGHWAY. The wind still blew strongly, and he could hear the faint ting-ting-ting of a piece of metal-perhaps it had once been a Del Monte can, cut laboriously by a grieving pet owner with his father’s tinsnips and then flattened out with a hammer and nailed to a stick-and that brought the fear back again. He was too tired now to feel it as more than a somehow sickening pulsebeat. He had done it. That steady ting-ting-ting sound coming out of the darkness brought it home to him more than anything else.

He walked through the Pet Sematary, past the grave of MARTA OUR PET RABIT who had DYED MARCH 1 1965, and near the barrow of GEN. PATTON; he stepped over the ragged chunk of board that marked the final resting place of POLYNESIA. The tick of metal was louder now, and he paused, looking down. Here atop a slightly leaning board that had been driven into the ground, was a tin rectangle, and by starlight Louis read, RINGO OUR HAMSTER, 1964-1965. It was this piece of tin that was ticking repeatedly off the boards of the Pet Sematary’s entry arch.

Louis reached down to bend the piece of tin back… and then froze, scalp crawling.

Something was moving back there. Something was moving on the other side of the deadfall.

What he heard was a stealthy kind of sound-the furtive crackle of pine needles, the dry pop of a twig, the rattle of underbrush. They were almost lost under the sough of the wind through the pines.

“Gage?” Louis called hoarsely.

The very realization of what he was doing-standing here in the dark and calling his dead son-pulled his scalp stiff and brought his hair up on end. He began to shudder helplessly and steadily, as if with a sick and killing fever.

“Gage?”

The sounds had died away.

Not yet; it’s too early. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do. That isn’t Gage over there. That’s… something else.

He suddenly thought of Ellie telling him, He called “Lazarus, come forth”… because if He hadn’t called for Lazarus by name, everyone in that graveyard would have risen.

On the other side of the deadfall, those sounds had begun again. On the other side of the barrier. Almost-but not quite-hidden under the wind. As if something blind were stalking him with ancient instincts. His dreadfully overstimulated brain conjured horrible, sickening pictures: a giant mole, a great bat that flopped through the underbrush rather than flying.

Louis backed out of the Pet Sematary, not turning his back to the deadfall-that ghostlike glimmer, a livid scar on the dark-until he was well down the path.

Then he began to hurry, and perhaps a quarter of a mile before the path ran out of the woods and into the field behind his house, he found enough left inside him to run.

Louis slung the pick and shovel indifferently inside the garage and stood for a moment at the head of his driveway, looking first back the way he had come and then up at the sky. It was quarter past four in the morning, and he supposed dawn could not be so far away. Light would already be three quarters of the way across the Atlantic, but for now, here in Ludlow, the night held hard. The wind blew steadily.

He went into the house, feeling his way along the side of the garage and unlocking the back door. He went through the kitchen without turning on a light and stepped into the small bathroom between the kitchen and the dining room.

Here he did snap on a light, and the first thing he saw was Church, curled up on top of the toilet tank, staring at him with those muddy yellow-green eyes.

“Church,” he said. “I thought someone put you out.”

Church only looked at him from atop the toilet tank. Yes, someone had put Church out; he had done it himself. He remembered that very clearly. Just as he remembered replacing the window pane down-cellar that time and then telling himself that that had taken care of the problem. But exactly whom had he been kidding? When Church wanted to get in, church got in. Because Church was different now.

It didn’t matter. In this dull, exhausted aftermath, nothing seemed to matter.

He felt like something less than human now, one of George Romero’s stupid, lurching movie-zombies, or maybe someone who had escaped from T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling through Little God Swamp and up to the Micmac burying ground, he thought and uttered a dry chuckle.

“Headpiece full of straw, Church,” he said in his croaking voice. He was unbuttoning his shirt now. “That’s me. You better believe it.”

There was a nice bruise coming on his left side, about halfway up his ribcage, and when he shucked his pants he saw that the knee he had banged on the gravestone was swelling up like a balloon. It had already turned a rotten purple-black, and he supposed that as soon as he stopped flexing it, the joint would become stiff and painfully obdurate-as if it had been dipped in cement. It looked like one of those injuries that might want to converse with him on rainy days for the rest of his life.

He reached out a hand to stroke Church, wanting some sort of comfort, but the cat leaped down from the toilet tank, staggering in that drunken and weirdly unfeline way, and left for some other place. It spared Louis one flat, yellow glance as it went.

There was Ben-Gay in the medicine cabinet. Louis lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and smeared a gob on his bad knee. Then he rubbed some more on the small of his back-a clumsy operation.

He left the toilet and walked into the living room. He turned on the hall light and stood there at the foot of the stairs for a moment, looking stupidly around.

How strange it all seemed! Here was where he had stood on Christmas Eve when he had given Rachel the sapphire. It had been in the pocket of his robe. There was his chair, where he had done his best to explain the facts of death to Ellie after Norma Crandall’s fatal heart attack-facts he had found ultimately unacceptable to himself. The Christmas tree had stood in that corner, Ellie’s construction-paper turkey-the one that had reminded Louis of some sort of futuristic crow-had been Scotch-taped in that window, and much earlier the entire room had been empty except for the United Van Lines boxes, filled with their family possessions and trucked across half the country from the Midwest.

He remembered thinking that their things looked very insignificant, boxed up like that-a small enough bulwark between his family and the coldness of all the outer world where their names and their family customs were not known.

How strange it all seemed… and how he wished they had never heard of the University of Maine, or Ludlow, or Jud and Norma Crandall, or any of it.

He went upstairs in his skivvies, and in the bathroom at the top he got the stool, stood on it, and took down the small black bag from on top of the medicine cabinet. He took this into the master bedroom, sat down, and began to rummage through it. Yes, there were syringes in case he needed one, and amid the rolls of surgical tape and surgical scissors and neatly wrapped papers of surgical gut were several ampules of very deadly stuff.

If needed.

Louis snapped the bag shut and put it by the bed. He turned off the overhead light, then lay down, hands behind his head. To lie here on his back, at rest, was exquisite. His thoughts turned to Disney World again. He saw himself in a plain white uniform, driving a white van with the mouse-ears logo on it-nothing to indicate it was a rescue unit on the outside, of course, nothing to scare the paying customers.

Gage was sitting beside him, his skin deeply tanned, the whites of his eyes bluish with health. Here, just to the left, was Goofy, shaking hands with a little boy; the kid was in a trance of wonder. Here was Winnie the Pooh posing with two laughing grandmas in pants suits so a third laughing grandma could snap their pictures; here was a little girl in her best dress crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you, Tigger!”

He and his son were on patrol. He and his son were the sentries in this magic land, and they cruised endlessly in their white van with the red dashboard flasher neatly and sensibly covered. They were not looking for trouble, not they, but they were ready for it should it show its face. That it was lurking even here, in a place dedicated to such innocent pleasures, could not be denied; some grinning man buying film along Main Street could clutch his chest as the heart attack struck, a pregnant woman might suddenly feel the labor pains start as she walked down the steps from the Sky Chariot, a teenage girl as pretty as a Norman Rockwell cover might suddenly collapse in a flopping epileptic fit, loafers rattling out a jagged backbeat on the cement as the signals in her brain suddenly jammed up. There were sunstroke and heatstroke and brainstroke, and perhaps at the end of some sultry Orlando summer afternoon there might even be a stroke of light-fling; there was, even, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible himself here-he might be glimpsed walking around near the monorail’s point of egress into the Magic Kingdom or peering down from one of the flying Dumbos with his flat and stupid gaze-down here Louis and Gage had come to know him as just another amusement park figure like Goofy or Mickey or Tigger or the estimable Mr. D.

Duck. He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boogie of electricity-Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too-Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there?

you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia!

Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night.

Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation-in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want-hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.

And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you…

We cruise… my son and I… because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible.

He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it… and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can… and tends it.

Thinking such troubled half-dreaming thoughts, Louis Creed slipped away, unplugging his connections to waking reality line by line, until all thoughts ceased and exhaustion dragged him down to black dreamless unconsciousness.

Just before the first signs of dawn touched the sky in the east, there were footsteps on the stairs. They were slow and clumsy but purposeful. A shadow moved in the shadows of the hail. A smell came with it-a stench. Louis, even in his thick sleep, muttered and turned away from that smell. There was the steady pull and release of respiration.

The shape stood outside the master bedroom door for some little time, not moving. Then it came inside. Louis’s face was buried in his pillow. White hands reached out, and there was a click as the black doctor’s bag by the bed was opened.

A low clink and shift as the things inside were moved.

The hands explored, pushing aside drugs and ampules and syringes with no interest at all. Now they found something and held it up. In the first dim light there was a gleam of silver.

The shadowy thing left the room.