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
actually 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 obedient, Louis thought wearily. And
TRIXIE, KILLED ON THE HIGHWAY. The wind still blew strongly, and he could
hear the faint ting-ting-ting of a piece of metal—perhaps once it had 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 in that dry, blazing way; it was more
like a low and somehow sickening pulsebeat. He had done it. Somehow 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 HAMPSTER 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 fir needles,
the dry pop of a twig, the rattle of underbrush. They were almost lost under the
sough of the wind through the firs.
'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 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 windowpane down the cellar that time and then telling
himself 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 Romero's stupid, lurching
zombies, or maybe someone who had escaped from 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 purpleblack, 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; 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 ampoules 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
would suddenly collapse in a flopping epileptic fit, loafers rattling out a jagged
back-beat on the cement as the signals in her brain suddenly jammed up. There
was sunstroke and heatstroke and brainstroke and perhaps at the end of some
sultry summer Orlando afternoon there might even be a stroke of lightning; 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 Micky 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 check-points 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! Arteriosclerosis! 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 hall. 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.
The low clink and shift as the things inside were moved.
The hands explored, pushing aside drugs and ampoules 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.