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 goddamn 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 goddamn 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-ROOOO! Auggggh-ROOOOOO!
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-ROOOOOO! 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. Goddamn you, Fred, he thought. Oh, goddamn you.
Fred began another chorus; he got well into the Auggggh, but before he could do more than get started on a good solid ROOOOOO, 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 he 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&A coupling shed with George Chapin and Rene 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&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 Rene Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucksport 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?--Gage'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 coming 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 half-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 Rene Michaud, and now he was the only one left--Rene 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--"
Rene 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 th
an 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, fighting 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.