As Louis left the BIA terminal building, a cold cloak seemed to fall 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
scholarship and on what his wife could earn pushing coffee-and-Danish on the
five a.m. to eleven 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
per cent.
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 eyes. 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 licence to jack.'
The clerk blinked, 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 down to a penlite.'
'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 workgloves. 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 fifty-eight-sixty. He paid cash.
The Civic was a hatchback, and Louis was nervous about going back 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 re-crossed 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 picture of
picturesque boats at dock beside a picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New
England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet and 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 HoJo'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 if with wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he
was heading into madness.
The voice of Tom Rush echoed dreamily in his head: O 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, use the rope to
pull up the top of the graveliner, remove his son's body from the coffin in which it
lay, wrap Gage in a cut-down 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 demons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworld 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.
He discovered that he had advanced even further along these two paths.
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 reinter 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
burying Gage this second time in 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 need ever know about his failed experiment.
Then, looking further 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, 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 travellers' checks (don't leave home with your
resurrected son without them, he thought, and a little giggle escaped his lips) 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 minutiae of whole new lives so that
Irwin Goldman could not use his over-flowing check-book 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 Ellie, and how much she reminded Dory of Rachel after Zelda
had died.
He slept and woke up at quarter past five, with the afternoon light beginning to
slant down toward the coming night.
Wild work, he thought stupidly, and got up.