When the rep from Upjohn didn't turn up promptly at ten, Louis gave in
and called the Registrar's Office. He spoke with a Mrs Stapleton, who said she
would send over a copy of Victor Pascow's records immediately. When he hung up,
the Upjohn guy was there. He didn't try to give Louis anything, only asked him if
he had any interest in buying a season's ticket to the New England Patriots' games
at a discount.
'Nope,' Louis said.
'I didn't think you would,' the Upjohn guy said glumly, and left.
At noon, Louis walked up to the Bear's Den and got a tuna fish sandwich and a
Coke. He brought them back to his office, and ate lunch while going over Pascow's
records. He was looking for some connection with himself or with North Ludlow,
where the Pet Sematary was… a vague belief, he supposed, that there must be
some sort of rational explanation even for such a weird occurrence as this. Maybe
the guy had grown up in Ludlow—had, maybe, even buried a dog or a cat up
there.
He didn't find the connection he was looking for. Pascow was from Bergenfield,
New Jersey, and had come to UMO to study electrical engineering. In those few
typed sheets, Louis could see no possible connection between himself and the
young man who had died in the reception room—other than the mortal one, of
course.
He sucked the last of the Coke out of his cup, listening to the straw crackle in
the bottom, and then tossed all his trash into the wastebasket. Lunch had been
light, but he had eaten it with good appetite. Nothing wrong there, anyway… and
not much wrong with the way he felt, really. Not now. There had been no
recurrence of the shakes, and now even that morning's horror began to seem more
like a nasty, pointless surprise, dreamlike itself, of no consequence.
He drummed his fingers on his blotter, shrugged, and picked up the phone
again. He dialed the EMMC and asked for the morgue.
After he was connected with the Pathology Clerk he identified himself and said,
'You have one of our students there, a Victor Pascow—'
'Not any more,' the voice at the other end said. 'He's gone.'
Louis's throat closed. At last he managed. 'What?'
'His body was flown back to his parents late last night. Guy from BrookingsSmith Mortuary came and took custody. They put him on Delta, uh…' Papers
riffling. 'Delta Flight 109. Where did you think he went? Out dancing at the Show
Ring?'
'No,' Louis said. 'No, of course not. It's just…' It was just what? What the Christ
was he doing pursuing this, anyway? There was no sane way to deal with it. It had
to be let go, marked off, forgotten. Anything else was asking for a lot of pointless
trouble. 'It's just that it seemed very quick,' he finished lamely.
'Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon—' That faint riffle of papers again—
'at around 3:20, by Dr Rynzwyck. By then his father had made all the
arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning.'
'Oh. Well, in that case—'
'Unless one of the carriers screwed up and sent it somewhere else,' the
Pathology Clerk said brightly. 'We've had that happen, you know, although never
with Delta. Delta's actually pretty good. We had a guy who died on a fishing trip
way up in Aroostook County, in one of those little towns that just have a couple of
map coordinates for a name. Asshole strangled on a pop-top while he was
chugging a can of beer. Took his buddies two days to buck him out of the
wilderness and you know that by then it's a toss-up whether or not the Forever
Goop will take. But they shoved it in and hoped for the best. Sent him home to
Grand Falls, Minnesota, in the cargo compartment of some airliner. But there was
a screw-up. They shipped him first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo,
North Dakota. Finally somebody wised up, but by then another three days had
gone by. Nothing took. They might as well have injected him with Kool-Aid instead
of Jaundaflo. The guy was totally black and smelled like a spoiled pork roast.
That's what I heard, anyway. Six baggage handlers got sick.'
The voice on the other end of the line laughed heartily.
Louis closed his eyes and said, 'Well, thank you—'
'I can give you Dr Rynzwyck's home phone if you want it, Doctor, but he usually
plays golf up in Orono in the morning.' That hearty laugh again.
'No,' Louis said. 'No, that's okay.'
He hung up the telephone. Let that put paid to it, he thought. When you were
having that crazy dream, or whatever it was, Pascow's body was almost certainly in
a Bergenfield funeral home. That closes it off; let that be the end of it.
Driving home that afternoon, a simple explanation of the filth at the foot
of the bed finally occurred to him, flooding him with relief.
He had experienced an isolated incident of sleepwalking, brought on by the
unexpected and extremely upsetting happenstance of having a student mortally
injured and then dying in his infirmary during his first real day on the job.
It explained everything. The dream had seemed extremely real because large
parts of it were real—the feel of the carpet, the cold dew and, of course, the dead
branch that had scratched his arm. It explained why Pascow had been able to
walk through the door and he had not.
A picture rose in his mind, a picture of Rachel coming downstairs last night and
catching him bumping against the back door, trying in his sleep to walk through
it. The thought made him grin. It would have given her a hell of a turn, all right.
With the sleepwalking hypothesis in mind, he was able to analyze the causes of
the dream—and he did so with a certain eagerness. He had walked to the Pet
Sematary because it had become associated with another moment of recent stress.
It had in fact been the cause of a serious argument between him and his wife…
and also, he thought with growing excitement, it was associated in his mind with
his daughter's first real encounter with the idea of death—something his own
subconscious must have been grappling with last night when he went to bed.
Damn lucky I got back to the house okay—I don't even remember that part. Must
have come back on autopilot.
It was a good thing he had. He couldn't imagine what it would have been like to
have wakened up this morning by the grave of Smucky the Cat, disoriented,
covered with dew, and probably scared shitless—as Rachel would have been,
undoubtedly.
But it was over now.
Put paid to it, Louis thought with immeasurable relief. Yes, but what about the
things he said when he was dying? his mind tried to ask, and Louis shut it up
fast.
That evening, with Rachel ironing and Ellie and Gage sitting in the same
chair, both of them engrossed with The Muppet Show, Louis told Rachel casually
that he believed he might go for a short walk—get a little air.
'Will you be back in time to help me put Gage to bed?' she asked without
looking up from her ironing. 'You know he goes better when you're there.'
'Sure,' he said.
'Where you going, daddy?' Ellie asked, not looking away from the TV. Kermit
was about to be punched in the eye by Miss Piggy.
'Just out back, hon.'
'Oh.'
Louis went out.
Fifteen minutes later he was in the Pet Sematary, looking around curiously and
coping with a strong feeling of déjà vu. That he had been here was beyond doubt:
the little grave marker put up to honor the memory of Smucky the Cat was
knocked over. He had done that when the vision of Pascow approached, near the
end of what he could remember of the dream. Louis righted it absently and walked
over to the deadfall.
He didn't like it. The memory of all these weather-whitened branches and dead
trees turning into a pile of bones still had the power to chill. He forced himself to
reach out and touch one. Balanced precariously on the jackstraw pile, it rolled and
fell, bouncing down the side of the heap. Louis jumped back a step.
He walked along the deadfall, first to the left, then to the right. On both sides
the underbrush closed in so thickly as to be impenetrable. Nor was it the kind of
brush you'd try to push your way through—not if you were smart, Louis thought.
There were lush masses of poison ivy growing close to the ground (all his life Louis
had heard people boast that they were immune to the stuff, but Louis knew that
almost no one really was) and further in were some of the biggest, most wickedlooking thorns he had ever seen.
Louis strolled back to the rough center of the deadfall. He looked at it, hands
stuck in the back pockets of his jeans.
You're not going to try to climb that, are you?
Not me, boss. Why would I want to do a stupid thing like that?
Great. Had me worried for just a minute there, Lou. Looks like a good way to land
in your own infirmary with a broken ankle, doesn't it?
Sure does! Also, it's getting dark.
Sure that he was all together and in total agreement with himself, Louis began
to climb the deadfall.
He was halfway up when he felt it shift under his feet with a peculiar creaking
sound.
Roll dem bones, Doc.
When the pile shifted again, Louis began to clamber back down. The tail of his
shirt had pulled out of his pants.
He reached solid ground without incident and dusted crumbled bits of bark off
his hands. He walked back to the head of the path which would return him to his
house—to his children who would want a story before bed, to Church, who was
enjoying his last day as a card-carrying tom cat and ladykiller, to tea in the
kitchen with his wife after the kids were down.
He surveyed the clearing again before leaving, struck by its green silence.
Tendrils of groundfog had appeared from nowhere and were beginning to wind
around the markers. Those concentric circles… as if, all unknowing, the childish
hands of North Ludlow's generations had built a kind of scalemodel Stonehenge.
But, Louis, is this all?
Although he had gotten only the barest glimpse over the top of the deadfall
before the shifting sensation had made him nervous, he could have sworn there
was a path beyond, leading deeper into the woods.
No business of yours, Louis. You've got to let this go.
Okay, boss.
Louis turned and headed home.
He stayed up that night an hour after Rachel went to bed, reading a
stack of medical journals he had already been through, refusing to admit that the
thought of going to bed—going to sleep—made him nervous. He had never had an
episode of somnambulism before, and there was no way to be sure it was an
isolated incident… until it did or didn't happen again.
He heard Rachel get out of bed and then she called down softly, 'Lou? Hon? You
coming up?'
'Just was,' he said, turning out the lamp over his study desk and getting up.
It took a good deal longer than seven minutes to shut the machine down that
night. Listening to Rachel draw the long, calm breaths of deep sleep beside him,
the apparition of Victor Pascow seemed less dreamlike. He would close his eyes
and see the door crashing open and there he was, Our Special Guest Star, Victor
Pascow, standing there in his jogging shorts, pallid under his summer tan, his
collar-bone poking up.
He would slide down toward sleep, think about how it would be to come fully,
coldly awake in the Pet Sematary, to see those roughly concentric circles lit by
moonlight, to have to walk back, awake, along the path through the woods. He
would think these things and then snap fully awake again.
It was sometime after midnight when sleep finally crept up on his blind side and
bagged him. There were no dreams. He woke up promptly at seven-thirty, to the
sound of cold autumn rain beating against the window. He threw the sheets back
with some apprehension. The groundsheet on his bed was flawless. No purist
would describe his feet, with their hammer-toes and their rings of heel-calluses,
that way, but they were at least clean.
Louis caught himself whistling in the shower.