Pet Sematary (48 page)

Light touched him and grew.

Oh Christ, that's a car, there's a car coming—!

He tried to shuffle his hands forward, but his palms slipped. His interlaced fingers were coming apart.

Still groping for purchase, he turned his head to the left, looking under his straining arm. It was a car, but it shot through the intersection up the street without slowing. Lucky. If it had—

His hands slipped again. He felt bark sift down onto his hair.

One foot found purchase, but now his other pants leg had caught on one of the arrow points. And Christ, he wasn't going to be able to hang on much longer. Desperately, Louis jerked his leg. The branch dipped. His hands slipped again. There was a mutter of tearing cloth, and then he was standing on two of the arrow points. They dug into the soles of his tennis shoes, and the pressure quickly became painful, but Louis stood on them anyway. The relief in his hands and arms was greater than the pain in his feet.

What a figure I must cut,
Louis thought with dim and dismal amusement. Holding the branch with his left hand, he wiped his right hand across his jacket. Then he wiped off the left while he held with the right.

He stood on the points for a moment longer and then slipped his hands forward along the branch. It was slim enough for him to be able to lace his fingers together comfortably now. He swung forward like Tarzan, feet leaving the arrow points. The branch dipped alarmingly, and he heard an ominous cracking sound. He let go, dropping on faith.

He landed badly. One knee thudded against a gravestone, sending a lance of pain up his thigh. He
rolled over on the grass, holding the knee, lips skinned back in something like a grin, hoping that he hadn't shattered his kneecap. At last the pain began to fade a little, and he found that he could flex the joint. It would be all right if he kept moving and didn't allow it to stiffen up on him. Maybe.

He got to his feet and started to walk along the fence back toward Mason Street and his equipment. His knee was bad at first, and he limped, but the pain smoothed out to a dull ache as he went. There was aspirin in the Honda's first-aid kit. He should have remembered to bring that with him. Too late now. He kept an eye out for cars and faded back deeper into the cemetery when one came.

On the Mason Street side, which was apt to be better traveled, he kept well back from the fence until he was opposite the Civic. He was about to trot down to the fence and pull his bundle out of the bushes when he heard footfalls on the sidewalk and a woman's low laughter. He sat down behind a large grave marker—it hurt his knee too much to squat—and watched a couple walk up the far side of Mason Street. They were walking with their arms about each other's waists, and something about their movement from one white pool of light to the next made Louis think of some old TV show. In a moment he had it: “The Jimmy Durante Hour.” What would they do if he rose up now, a wavering shadow in this silent city of the dead, and cried hollowly across to them: “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!”

They stopped in the pool of light just beyond his car and embraced.
Watching them, Louis felt a kind of sick wonder and self-loathing. Here he was, crouching behind a tombstone like a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book story, watching lovers.
Is the line so thin, then?
he wondered, and that thought also had a ring of familiarity.
So thin you can simply step over it with this little fuss, muss, and bother? Climb a tree, shinny along a branch, drop into a graveyard, watch lovers . . . dig holes? That simple? Is it lunacy? I spent eight years becoming a doctor, but I've become a grave robber in one simple step—what I suppose people would call a ghoul.

He crammed his fists against his mouth to stop some sound from coming out and felt for that interior coldness, that sense of disconnection. It was there, and Louis drew it gratefully around him.

When the couple finally walked on, Louis watched them with nothing but impatience. They climbed the steps of one of the apartment buildings. The man felt for a key, and a moment later they were inside. The street was silent again except for the constant beat of the wind, rustling the trees and tumbling his sweaty hair over his forehead.

Louis ran down to the fence, bent low, and felt through the brush for his canvas bundle. Here it was, rough under his fingers. He picked it up, listening to the muffled clank from inside. He carried it over to the broad graveled drive that led in through the gates and paused to orient himself. Straight up here, go left at the fork. No problem.

He walked along the edge of the drive, wanting to be able to go farther into the shadow of the elms if there did happen to be
a full-time caretaker and if he happened to be out.

He bore left at the fork, approaching Gage's grave now, and suddenly, appallingly, realized he could not remember what his son had looked like. He paused, staring off into the rows of graves, the frowning façades of the monuments, and tried to summon him up. Individual features came to him—his blond hair, still so fine and light, his slanting eyes, his small, white teeth, the little twist of scar on his chin from the time he had fallen down the back steps of their place in Chicago. He could see these things but could not integrate them into a coherent whole. He saw Gage running toward the road, running toward his appointment with the Orinco truck, but Gage's face was turned away. He tried to summon up Gage as he had been in his crib on the night of the kite-flying day and could see only darkness in his mind's eye.

Gage, where are you?

Have you ever thought, Louis, that you may not be doing your son any good service? Perhaps he's happy where he is . . . maybe all of that isn't the bullshit you always thought it was. Maybe he's with the angels or maybe he's just sleeping. And if he's sleeping, do you really know what it is you might wake up?

Oh Gage, where are you? I want you home with us.

But was he really controlling his own actions? Why couldn't he summon up Gage's face, and why was he going against everyone's warning—Jud's, the dream of Pascow, the trepidation of his own troubled heart?

He thought of the grave markers in the Pet Sematary, those
rude circles, spiraling down into the Mystery, and then the coldness came over him again. Why was he standing here, trying to summon up Gage's face anyway?

He would be seeing it soon enough.

*  *  *

The headstone was here now; it read simply
GAGE WILLIAM CREED,
followed by the two dates. Someone had been here today to pay his or her respects, he saw; there were fresh flowers. Who would that have been? Missy Dandridge?

His heart beat heavily but slowly in his chest. This was it then; if he was going to do it, he had better start. There was only so much night ahead, and then the day would come.

Louis glanced into his heart one final time and saw that yes, he did intend to go ahead with this. He nodded his head almost imperceptibly and fished for his pocketknife. He had cinched his bundle with Scotch strapping tape, and now he cut it. He unrolled the tarp at the foot of Gage's grave like a bedroll and then arranged items in exactly the same way he would have arranged instruments to suture a cut or to perform a small in-office operation.

Here was the flashlight with its lens felted as the hardware store clerk had suggested. The felt was also secured with strapping tape. He had made a small circle in the middle by placing a penny on the felt and cutting around it with a scalpel. Here was the short-handled pick which he should not have to use—he had brought it only as a contingency. He would have no sealed cap to deal
with, and he shouldn't run into any rocks in a newly filled grave. Here was the shovel, the spade, the length of rope, the work gloves. He put the gloves on, grabbed the spade, and started.

The ground was soft, the digging easy. The grave's shape was well defined, the dirt he was throwing out softer than the earth at the verge. His mind made a kind of automatic comparison between the ease of this dig and the rocky, unforgiving ground of the place where, if all went well, he would be reburying his son later on this night. Up there he would need the pick. Then he tried to stop thinking altogether. It only got in the way.

He threw the dirt on the ground to the left of the grave, working into a steady rhythm that only became more difficult to maintain as the hole deepened. He stepped into the grave, smelling that dank aroma of fresh dirt, a smell he remembered from his summers with Uncle Carl.

Digger,
he thought and stopped to wipe sweat from his brow. Uncle Carl had told him that was the nickname for every graveyard sexton in America. Their friends called them Digger.

He started in again.

He stopped only once more, and that was to check his watch. It was twenty minutes past twelve. He felt time slipping through his fist like something that had been greased.

Forty minutes later, the spade gritted across something, and Louis's teeth came down on his upper lip hard enough to bring blood. He got the flashlight and shone it down. Here
was more than dirt, and scrawled across it in a diagonal slash, a grayish-silver line. It was the top of the grave liner. Louis got most of the dirt off, but he was wary of making too much noise, and nothing was much louder than a shovel scraping across concrete in the dead of night.

He climbed out of the grave and got the rope. This he threaded through the iron rings on one half of the segmented grave-liner top. He got out of the grave again, spread out the tarpaulin, lay down on it, and grasped the ends of the rope.

Louis, I think this is it. Your last chance.

You're right. It's my last chance and I'm damned well taking it.

He wound the ends of the rope around his hands and pulled. The square of concrete came up easily, gritting on the pivot end. It stood neatly upright over a square of blackness, now a vertical tombstone instead of a horizontal grave cover.

Louis pulled the rope out of the rings and tossed it aside. He wouldn't need it for the other half; he could stand on the sides of the grave liner and pull it up.

He got down into the grave again, moving carefully, not wanting to overturn the cement slab he had already pulled up and mash his toes or break the damned thing, which was quite thin. Pebbles rattled down into the hole, and he heard several of them chip hollowly off Gage's coffin.

Bending, he grasped the other half of the grave-liner top and pulled upward. As he did so, he felt something squelch coldly under his fingers. When he had this second half
of the top standing on end, he looked down at his hand and saw a fat earthworm wriggling feebly there. With a choked cry of disgust, Louis wiped it off on the earthen sidewall of his son's grave.

Then he shone his flashlight downward.

Here was the coffin he had last seen resting on chrome runners over the grave at the funeral service, surrounded by that ghastly green Astroturf. This was the safety-deposit box in which he was supposed to bury all his hopes for his son. Fury, clean and white hot, the antithesis of his former coldness, rose up in him. Idiotic! The answer was no!

Louis groped for the spade and found it. He raised it over his shoulder and brought it down on the coffin's latch once, twice, a third time, a fourth. His lips were drawn back in a furious grimace.

Going to break you out, Gage, see if I don't!

The latch had splintered on the first stroke and probably no more were necessary, but he went on, not wanting just to open the coffin but to hurt it. Some kind of sanity finally returned, and he stopped with the spade raised for another blow.

The blade was bent and scratched. He tossed it aside and scrambled out of the grave on legs that felt weak and rubbery. He felt sick to his stomach, and the anger had gone as quickly as it had come. In its place the coldness flooded back in, and never in his life had his mind felt so alone and disconnected; he felt like an astronaut who has floated away from his ship during an EVA and now only drifts in a great blackness, breathing on borrowed
time.
Did Bill Baterman feel like this?
he wondered.

He lay on the ground, on his back this time, waiting to see if he was under control and ready to proceed. When the rubbery feeling had left his legs, he sat up and slipped back down into the grave. He shone the flashlight on the latch and saw it was not just broken, but demolished. He had swung the spade in a blind fury, but every blow he had struck had gone directly there, bull's eye, as if guided. The wood around it had splintered.

Louis slipped the flashlight into his armpit. He squatted down slightly. His hands groped, like the hands of a catcher in a troupe of circus flyers, waiting to perform his part in a mortal docking.

He found the groove in the lid, and he slipped his fingers into it. He paused for a moment—one could not rightly call it a hesitation—and then he opened his son's coffin.

Rachel Creed almost made her flight from Boston to Portland. Almost. Her Chicago plane left on time (a miracle in itself), was cleared straight into LaGuardia (another), and left New York only five minutes behind schedule. It got to the gate in Boston fifteen minutes
late—at 11:12
P.M.
That left her with thirteen minutes.

She still might have made her connecting flight, but the shuttle bus which makes a circle around the Logan terminals was late. Rachel waited, now in a kind of constant low-grade panic, shifting from foot to foot as if she needed to go to the bathroom, switching the travel bag her mother had loaned her from one shoulder to the other.

When the shuttle still hadn't come at 11:25, she began to run. Her heels were low but still high enough to cause her problems. One of her ankles buckled painfully, and she paused long enough to take off the shoes. Then she ran on in her pantyhose, past Allegheny and Eastern Airlines, breathing hard now, getting the begininngs of a stitch in her side.