Church went electric in his grip, struggling against him, spitting and clawing, but Louis held on and depressed the plunger all the way. Only then did he let go. The cat leaped off the Chevette, hissing like a teakettle, yellow-green eyes wild and baleful. The needle and syringe dangled from its haunch as it leaped, then fell out and broke. Louis was indifferent. He had more of everything.
The cat started for the road, then turned back toward the house, as if remembering something. It got halfway there and then began to weave drunkenly. It made the steps, leaped up to the first one, then fell off. It lay on the bare patch at the foot of the porch steps on its side, breathing weakly.
Louis glanced into the Chevette. If he had needed more confirmation than the stone that had replaced his heart, he had it: Rachel's purse on the seat, her scarf, and a clutch of plane tickets spilling out of a Delta Airlines folder.
When he turned around again to walk to the porch, Church's side had ceased its rapid, fluttery movement. Church was dead. Again.
Louis stepped over it and mounted the porch steps.
*
"Gage?"
It was cool in the front hall. Cool and dark. The single word fell into the silence like a stone down a deep-drilled well. Louis threw another.
"Gage?"
Nothing. Even the tick of the clock in the parlor had ceased. This morning there had been no one to wind it.
But there were tracks on the floor.
Louis went into the living room. There was the smell of cigarettes, stale and long since burned out. He saw Jud's chair by the window. It was pushed askew, as if he had gotten up suddenly. There was an ashtray on the windowsill, and in it a neat roll of cigarette ash.
Jud sat here watching. Watching for what? For me of course, watching for me to come home. Only he missed me. Somehow he missed me.
Louis glanced at the four beer cans lined up in a neat row. Not enough to put him to sleep, but maybe he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. However it had been, it was just a little bit too good to have been perfectly accidental, wasn't it?
The muddy tracks approached the chair by the window. Mixed among the human tracks were a few faded, ghostly catprints. As if Church had walked in and out of the gravedirt left by Gage's small shoes. Then the tracks made for the swinging door leading into the kitchen.
Heart thudding, Louis followed the tracks.
He pushed the door open and saw Jud's splayed feet, his old green workpants, his checked flannel shirt. The old man was lying sprawled in a wide pool of drying blood.
Louis glanced his hands to his face, as if to blight his own vision. But there was no way to do that; he saw eyes, Jud's eyes, open, accusing him, perhaps even accusing himself for setting this in motion.
But did he? Louis wondered. Did he really do that?
Jud had been told by Stanny B., and Stanny B. had been told by his father, and Stanny B.'s father had been told by his father, the last trader to the Indians, a Frenchman from the north country in the days when Franklin Pierce had been a living President.
"Oh Jud, I'm so sorry," he whispered.
Jud's blank eyes stared at him.
"So sorry," Louis repeated.
His feet seemed to move by themselves, and he was suddenly back to last Thanksgiving in his mind, not to that night when he and Jud had taken the cat up to the Pet Sematary and beyond, but to the turkey dinner Norma had put on the table, all of them laughing and talking, the two men drinking beer and Norma with a glass of white wine, and she had taken the white lawn tablecloth from the lower drawer as he was taking it now, but she had put it on the table and then anchored it with lovely pewter candlestick holders, while he--
Louis watched it billow down over Jud's body like a collapsing parachute, mercifully covering that dead face. Almost immediately, tiny rosepetals of deepest, darkest scarlet began to stain the white lawn.
"I'm sorry," he said for a third time. "So sor--"
Then something moved overhead, something scraped, and the word broke off between the lips. It had been soft, it had been stealthy, but it had been deliberate. Oh yes, he was convinced of that. A sound he had been meant to hear.
His hands wanted to tremble, but he would not allow them. He stepped over to the kitchen table with its checkered oil cloth covering and reached into his pocket. He removed three more Becton-Dickson syringes, stripped them of their paper coverings, and laid them out in a neat row. He removed three more multidose vials and filled each of the syringes with enough morphine to kill a horse--or Hanratty the bull, if it came to that. He put them in his pocket again.
He left the kitchen, crossed the living room, and stood at the base of the stairs.
"Gage?"
From somewhere in the shadows above there came a giggling--a cold and sunless laughter that made the skin on Louis's back prickle.
He started up.
It was a long walk to the top of those stairs. He could well imagine a condemned man taking a walk almost as long (and as horribly short) to the platform of a scaffold with his hands tied behind his back, knowing that he would piss when he could no longer whistle.
He reached the top at last, one hand in his pocket, staring only at the wall. How long did he stand that way? He did not know. He could now feel his sanity beginning to give way. This was an actual sensation, a true thing. It was interesting. He imagined a tree overloaded with ice in a terrible storm would feel this way--if trees could feel anything--shortly before toppling. It was interesting . . . and it was sort of amusing.
" 'Gage, want to go to Florida with me?"
That giggle again.
Louis turned and was greeted by the sight of his wife, to whom he had once carried a rose in his teeth, lying halfway down the hall, dead. Her legs were splayed out as Jud's had been. Her back and head were cocked at an angle against the wall. She looked like a woman who had gone to sleep while reading in bed.
He walked down toward her.
Hello, darling, he thought, you came home.
Blood had splashed the wallpaper in idiot shapes. She had been stabbed a dozen times, two dozen, who knew? His scalpel had done this work.
Suddenly he saw her, really saw her, and Louis Creed began to scream.
His screams echoed and racketed shrilly through this house where now only dead lived and walked. Eyes bulging, face livid, hair standing on end, he screamed; the sounds came from his swollen throat like the bells of hell, terrible shrieks that signaled the end not of love but of sanity; in his mind all the hideous images were suddenly unloosed at once. Victor Pascow dying on the infirmary carpet, Church coming back with bits of green plastic in his whiskers, Gage's baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood, but most of all that thing he had seen near Little God Swamp, the thing that had pushed the tree over, the thing with the yellow eyes, the Wendigo, creature of the north country, the dead thing whose touch awakens unspeakable appetites.
Rachel had not just been killed.
Something had been . . . something had been at her.
(! CLICK !)
That click was in his head. It was the sound of some relay fusing and burning out forever, the sound of lightning stroking down in a direct hit, the sound of a door opening.
He looked up numbly, the scream still shivering in his throat and here was Gage at last, his mouth smeared with blood, his chin dripping, his lips pulled back in a hellish grin. In one hand he held Louis's scalpel.
As he brought it down, Louis pulled back with no real thought at all. The scalpel whickered past his face, and Gage overbalanced. He is as clumsy as Church, Louis thought. Louis kicked his feet from under him. Gage fell awkwardly, and Louis was on him before he could get up, straddling him, one knee pinning the hand which held the scalpel.
"No," the thing under him panted. Its face twisted and writhed. Its eyes were baleful, insectile in their stupid hate. "No, no, no--"
Louis clawed for one of the hypos, got it out. He would have to be quick. The thing under him was like a greased fish and it wo
uld not let go of the scalpel no matter how hard he bore down on its wrist. And its face seemed to ripple and change even as he looked at it. It was Jud's face, dead and staring; it was the dented, ruined face of Victor Pascow, eyes rolling mindlessly; it was, mirrorlike, Louis's own, so dreadfully pale and lunatic. Then it changed again and became the face of that creature in the woods--the low brow--the dead yellow eyes, the tongue long and pointed and bifurcated, grinning and hissing.
"No, no, no-no-no--"
It bucked beneath him. The hypo flew out of Louis's hand and rolled a short way down the hall. He groped for another, brought it out, and jammed it straight down into the small of Gage's back.
It screamed beneath him, body straining and sunfishing, nearly throwing him off. Grunting, Louis got the third syringe and jammed this one home in Gage's arm, depressing the plunger all the way. He got off then and began to back slowly down the hallway. Gage got slowly to his feet and began to stagger toward him. Five steps and the scalpel fell from its hand. It struck the floor blade first and stuck itself in the wood, quivering. Ten steps and that strange yellow light in its eyes began to fade. A dozen and it fell to its knees.
Now Gage looked up at him and for a moment Louis saw his son--his real son--his face unhappy and filled with pain.
"Daddy!" he cried, and then fell forward on his face.
Louis stood there for a moment, then went to Gage, moving carefully, expecting some trick. But there was no trick, no sudden leap with clawed hands. He slid his fingers expertly down Gage's throat, found the pulse, and held it. He was then a doctor for the last time in his life, monitoring the pulse, monitoring until there was nothing, nothing inside, nothing outside.
When it was gone at last, Louis got up and sauntered down the hall to a far corner. He crouched there, pulling himself into a ball, cramming himself into the corner, tighter and tighter. He found he could make himself smaller if he put a thumb in his mouth and so he did that.
*
He remained that way for better than two hours . . . and then, little by little, a dark and oh-so-plausible idea came to him. He pulled his thumb from his mouth. It made a small pop. Louis got himself
(hey-ho let's go)
going again.
*
In the room where Gage had hidden, he stripped the sheet from the bed and took it out into the hall. He wrapped his wife's body in it, gently, with love. He was humming but did not realize it.
*
He found gasoline in Jud's garage. Five gallons of it in a red can next to the Lawnboy. More than enough. He began in the kitchen where Jud still lay under the Thanksgiving tablecloth. He drenched that, then moved into the living room with the can still upended, spraying amber gas over the rug, the sofa, the magazine rack, the chairs, and so out into the downstairs hall and toward the back bedroom. The smell of gas was strong and rich.
Jud's matches were by the chair where he had kept his fruitless watch, on top of his cigarettes. Louis took them. At the front door he tossed a lighted match back over his shoulder and stepped out. The blast of the heat was immediate and savage, making the skin on his neck feel too small. He shut the door neatly and only stood on the porch for a moment, watching the orange flickers behind Norma's curtains. Then he crossed the porch, pausing for a moment, remembering the beers he and Jud had drunk here a million years ago, listening to the soft, gathering roar of fire within the house.
Then he stepped out.
62
Steve Masterton came around the curve just before Louis's house and saw the smoke immediately--not from Louis's place, but from the house that belonged to the old duck across the street.
He had come out this morning because he had been worried about Louis--deeply worried. Charlton had told him about Rachel's call of the day before, and that had set him to wondering just where Louis was . . . and what he was up to.
His worry was vague, but it itched at his mind--he wasn't going to feel right until he had gone out there and checked to see if things were okay . . . or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.
The spring weather had emptied the infirmary like white magic, and Surrendra had told him to go ahead; he could handle whatever came up. So Steve had jumped into his Honda, which he had liberated from the garage only last weekend, and headed out for Ludlow. Maybe he pushed the cycle a little faster than was strictly necessary, but the worry was there; it gnawed. And with it came the absurd feeling that he was already too late. Stupid, of course, but in the pit of his stomach there was a feeling similar to the one he'd had there last fall when that Pascow thing cropped up--a feeling of miserable surprise and almost leaden disillusion. He was by no means a religious man (in college Steve had been a member of the Atheists' Society for two semesters and had dropped out only when his advisor had told him--privately and very much off the record--that it might hurt his chances to obtain a med school scholarship later on), but he supposed he fell as much heir to whatever biological or biorhythmic conditions passed for premonitions as any other human being, and the death of Pascow had seemed to set a tone for the year which followed, somehow. Not a good year by any means. Two of Surrendra's relatives had been clapped in jail back home, some political thing, and Surrendra had told him that he believed one of them--an uncle he cared for very much--might well now be dead. Surrendra had wept, and the tears from the usually benign Indian had frightened Steve. And Charlton's mother had had a radical mastectomy. The tough nurse was not very optimistic about her mother's chances for joining the Five-Year Club. Steve himself had attended four funerals since the death of Victor Pascow--his wife's sister, killed in a car crash; a cousin, killed in a freak accident as the result of a barroom bet (he had been electrocuted while proving he could shinny all the way to the top of a power pole); a grandparent; and of course Louis's little boy.
He liked Louis enormously, and he wanted to make sure Louis was all right. Louis had been through hell lately.
When he saw the billows of smoke, his first thought was that this was something else to lay at the door of Victor Pascow, who seemed, in his dying, to have removed some sort of crash barrier between these ordinary people and an extraordinary run of bad luck. But that was stupid, and Louis's house was the proof. It stood calm and white, a little piece of clean-limbed New England architecture in the mid-morning sun.
People were running toward the old duck's house, and as Steve banked his bike across the road and pulled into Louis's driveway, he saw a man dash up onto the old duck's porch, approach the front door, and then retreat. It was well that he did; a moment later the glass pane in the center of the door blew out, and flames boiled through the opening. If the fool actually had gotten the door open, the blowout would have cooked him like a lobster.
Steve dismounted and put the Honda on its kickstand, Louis momentarily forgotten. He was drawn by all the old mystery of fire. Maybe half a dozen people had gathered; except for the would-be-hero, who lingered on the Crandalls' lawn, they kept a respectful distance. Now the windows, between the porch and the house blew out. Glass danced in the air. The would-be hero ducked and ran for it. Flames ran up the inner wall of the porch like groping hands, blistering the white paint. As Steve watched, one of the rattan easy chairs smouldered and then exploded into flame.
Over the crackling sounds, he heard the would-be hero cry out with a shrill and absurd sort of optimism: "Gonna lose her! Gonna lose her sure! If Jud's there, he's a gone goose! Told im about the creosote in that chimbly a hunnert times!"
Steve opened his mouth to holler across and ask if the fire department had been called, but just then he heard the faint wail of sirens, approaching. A lot of them. They had been called, but the would-be hero was right: the house was going. Flames probed through half a dozen broken windows now, and the front eave had grown an almost transparent membrane of fire over its bright green shingles.
He turned back, then, remembering Louis--but if Louis were here, wouldn't he be with the others across the street?
Steve caught
something then, just barely caught it with the tail of his eye.
Beyond the head of Louis's hot-topped driveway there was a field that stretched up a long, gently rising hill. The timothy grass, although still green, had grown high already this May, but Steve could see a path, almost as neatly mowed as a putting green on a golf course. It wound and meandered its way up the slope of the field, rising to meet the woods that began, thick and green, just below the horizon. It was here, where the pale green of the timothy grass met the thicker, denser green of the woods, that Steve had seen movement--a flash of bright white that seemed to be moving. It was gone almost as soon as his eye registered it, but it had seemed to him for that brief moment that he had seen a man carrying a white bundle.
That was Louis, his mind told him with sudden irrational certainty. That was Louis, and you better get to him quick because something damn bad has happened and pretty quick something even more damn bad is going to happen if you don't stop him.
He stood indecisively at the head of the driveway, shifting one foot for the other, his weight jittery between the two of them.
Steve baby, you're scared shitless just about now, aren't you?
Yes. He was. He was scared shitless and for no reason at all. But there was also a certain . . . a certain
(attraction)
yes, a creation attraction here, something about that path, that path leading up the hill and perhaps continuing on into the woods--surely that path had to go somewhere, didn't it? Yes, of course it did. All paths eventually went somewhere.
Louis. Don't forget about Louis, you dummy! Louis was the man you came out to see, remember? You didn't come out to Ludlow to go exploring the goddamn woods.
"What you got there, Randy?" the would-be hero cried. His voice, still shrill and somehow optimistic, carried well.