Pet Sematary

  Louis knelt down to look at the cat. Don't let it be Church, he wished fervently, as he turned its head gently on its neck with gloved fingers. Let it be someone else's cat, let Jud be wrong.

  But of course it was Church. He was in no way mangled or disfigured; he had not been run over by one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15 (just what was that Orinco truck doing out on Thanksgiving? he wondered randomly). Church's eyes were half-open, as glazed as green marbles. A small flow of blood had come from his mouth, which was also open. Not a great deal of blood; just enough to stain the white bib on his chest.

  "Yours, Louis?"

  "Mine," he agreed and sighed.

  He was aware for the first time that he had loved Church--maybe not as fervently as Ellie but in his own absent way. In the weeks following his castration, Church had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a routine that took him between Ellie's bed, the couch, and his dish but rarely out of the house. Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat's teeth, was frozen in a shooter's snarl. The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying.

  "Yeah, it's Church," he said. "I'll be damned if I know how I'm going to tell Ellie about it."

  Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury Church up in the Pet Sematary with no marker or any of that foolishness. He would say nothing to Ellie on the phone tonight about Church; tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn't seen Church around; the day after he would suggest that perhaps Church had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. Ellie would be upset, sure, but there would be none of the finality . . . no reprise of Rachel's upsetting refusal to deal with death . . . just a withering away . . .

  Coward, part of his mind pronounced.

  Yes . . . no argument. But who needs this hassle?

  "Loves that cat pretty well, doesn't she?" Jud asked.

  "Yes," Louis said absently. He moved Church's head again. The cat had begun to stiffen, but the head still moved much more easily than it should have. Broken neck. Yeah. Given that, he thought he could reconstruct what had happened. Church had been crossing the road--for what reason God alone knew--and a car or truck had hit him, breaking his neck and throwing him aside onto Jud Crandall's lawn. Or perhaps the cat's neck had been broken when he struck the frozen ground. It didn't matter. Either way the remains remained the same. Church was dead.

  He glanced up at Jud, about to tell him his conclusions, but Jud was looking away toward that fading orange line of light at the horizon. His hood had fallen back halfway, and his face seemed thoughtful and stern . . . harsh, even.

  Louis pulled the green garbage bag out of his pocket and unfolded it, holding it tightly to keep the wind from whipping it away. The brisk crackling sound of the bag seemed to bring Jud back to this here and now.

  "Yes, I guess she loves it pretty well," Jud said. His use of the present tense felt slightly eerie . . . the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold, and the wind, struck him as eerie and gothic.

  Here's Heathcliff out on the desolate moors, Louis thought, grimacing against the cold. Getting ready to pop the family cat into a Hefty Bag. Yowza.

  He grabbed Church's tail, spread the mouth of the bag, and lifted the cat. He pulled a disgusted, unhappy face at the sound the cat's body made coming up--rrrriiippp as he pulled it out of the frost it had set into. The cat seemed almost unbelievably heavy, as if death had settled onto it like a physical weight. Christ, he feels like a bucket of sand.

  Jud held the other side of the bag, and Louis dropped Church in, glad to be rid of that strange, unpleasant weight.

  "What are you going to do with it now?" Jud asked.

  "Put him in the garage, I guess," Louis said. "Bury him in the morning."

  "In the Pet Sematary?"

  Louis shrugged. "Suppose so."

  "Going to tell Ellie?"

  "I . . . I'll have to mull that one over awhile."

  Jud was quiet a moment longer, and then he seemed to reach a decision. "Wait here a minute or two, Louis."

  Jud moved away, with no apparent thought that Louis might not want to wait just a minute on this bitter night. He moved away with assurance and that lithe ease which was so strange in a man of his age. And Louis found he had nothing to say anyway. He didn't feel much like himself. He watched Jud go, quite content to stand here.

  He raised his face into the wind after the door had clicked closed, the garbage bag with Church's body in it riffling between his feet.

  Content.

  Yes, he was. For the first time since they had moved to Maine, he felt that he was in his place, that he was home. Standing here by himself in the afterglow of the day, standing on the rim of winter, he felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole--whole in a way he had not been, or could not remember feeling that he had been, since childhood.

  Something gonna happen here, Bubba. Something pretty weird, I think.

  He tilted his head back and saw cold winter stars in a blackening sky.

  How long he stood like that he did not know, although it could not have been long in terms of seconds and minutes. Then a light flickered on Jud's porch, bobbed, approached the porch door, and descended the steps. It was Jud behind a big four-cell flashlight. In his other hand he held what Louis at first thought was a large X . . . and then he saw that it was a pick and shovel.

  He handed the shovel to Louis, who took it in his free hand.

  "Jud, what the hell are you up to? We can't bury him tonight."

  "Yeah, we can. And we're gonna." Jud's face was lost behind the glaring circle of the flashlight.

  "Jud, it's dark. It's late. And cold--"

  "Come on," Jud said. "Let's get it done."

  Louis shook his head and tried to begin again, but the words came hard--the words of explanation and reason. They seemed so meaningless against the low shriek of the wind, the seedling bed of stars in the black.

  "It can wait till tomorrow when we can see--"

  "Does she love the cat?"

  "Yes, but--"

  Jud's voice, soft and somehow logical: "And do you love her?"

  "Of course I love her, she's my dau--"

  "Then come on."

  Louis went.

  *

  Twice--maybe three times--on the walk up to the Pet Sematary that night Louis tried to talk to Jud, but Jud didn't answer. Louis gave up. That feeling of contentment, odd under the circumstances but a pure fact, persisted. It seemed to come from everywhere. The steady ache in his muscles from carrying Church in one hand and the shovel in the other was a part of it. The wind, deadly cold, numbing exposed skin, was a part of it; it wound steadily in the trees. Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Jud's flash was a part of it. He felt the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret.

  The shadows fell away and there was a feeling of space. Snow shone pallidly.

  "Rest here," Jud said, and Louis set the bag down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Rest here? But they were here. He could see the markers in the moving, aimless sweep of Jud's light as Jud sat down in the thin snow and put his face between his arms.

  "Jud? Are you all right?"

  "Fine. Need to catch my breath a bit, that's all."

  Louis sat down next to him and deep-breathed half a dozen times.

  "You know," he said, "I feel better than I have in maybe six years. I know that's a crazy thing to say when you're burying your daughter's cat, but it's the flat truth, Jud. I feel good."

  Jud breathed deeply once or twice himself. "Yeah, I know," he said. "It is that way once in a while. You don't pick your times for feeling good, any more than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it too, but you don't want to trust that. Heroin makes dope addicts feel good when they're putting it in their arms, but all the
time it's poisoning them. Poisoning their bodies and poisoning their way of thinking. This place can be like that, Louis, and don't you ever forget it. I hope to God I'm doing right. I think I am, but I can't be sure. Sometimes my head gets muddled. It's senility coming, I think."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "This place has power, Louis. Not so much here, but . . . the place we're going."

  "Jud--"

  "Come on," Jud said and was on his feet again. The flashlight's beam illuminated the deadfall. Jud was walking toward it. Louis suddenly remembered his episode of somnambulism. What was it Pascow had said in the dream that had accompanied it?

  Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken.

  But now, tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had been seemed years rather than months distant. Louis felt fine and fey and alive, ready to cope with anything, and yet full of wonder. It occurred to him that this was very much like a dream.

  Then Jud turned toward him, the hood seeming to surround a blankness, and for one moment Louis imagined that it was Pascow himself who now stood before him, that the shining light would be reversed, trained on a grinning, gibbering skull framed in fur, and his fear returned like a dash of cold water.

  "Jud," he said, "we can't climb over that. We'll each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back."

  "Just follow me," Jud said. "Follow me and don't look down. Don't hesitate and don't look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure."

  Louis began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had simply never awakened from his afternoon nap. If I was awake, he thought, I'd no more head up that deadfall than I'd get drunk and go skydiving. But I'm going to do it. I really think I am. So . . . I must be dreaming. Right?

  Jud angled slightly left, away from the center of the deadfall. The flash's beam centered brightly on the jumbled heap of

  (bones)

  fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure himself that he was in the right place, Jud started up. He did not scramble; he did not climb bent over, the way a man will climb a rocky hillside or a sandy slope. He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. He walked like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from.

  Louis followed in the same way.

  He did not look down or search for footholds. It came to him with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to. It was a piece of utter assholery of course, like the stupid confidence of a man who believes it's safe to drive when totally shitfaced as long as he's wearing his St. Christopher's medallion.

  But it worked.

  There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes (Hush Puppy loafers--hardly recommended for climbing deadfalls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.

  For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist. The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the . . . the barrier. Yes, that's what it was--why try to pretend it wasn't? The barrier.

  Louis reached the top himself and paused there momentarily, right foot planted on an old fallen tree that was canted up at a thirty-five-degree angle, left foot on something springier--a mesh of old fir branches? He didn't look down to see, but only switched the heavy trashbag with Church's body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. He turned his face up into the wind and felt it sweep past him in an endless current, lifting his hair. It was so cold, so clean . . . so constant.

  Moving casually, almost sauntering, he started down again. Once a branch that felt to be the thickness of a brawny man's wrist snapped loudly under his foot, but he felt no concern at all--and his plunging foot was stopped firmly by a heavier branch some four inches down. Louis hardly staggered. He supposed that now he could understand how company commanders in World War I had been able to stroll along the top of the trenches with bullets snapping all around them, whistling "Tipperary." It was crazy, but the very craziness made it tremendously exhilarating.

  He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Jud's light. Jud was standing there, waiting for him. Then he reached the bottom, and the exhilaration flared up in him like a shot of coal oil on embers.

  "We made it!" he shouted. He put the shovel down and clapped Jud on the shoulder. He remembered climbing an apple tree to the top fork where it swayed in the wind like a ship's mast. He had not felt so young or so viscerally alive in twenty years or more. "Jud, we made it!"

  "Did you think we wouldn't?" Jud asked.

  Louis opened his mouth to say something--Think we wouldn't? We're damn lucky we didn't kill ourselves!--and then he shut it again. He had never really questioned at all, not from the moment Jud approached the deadfall. And he was not worried about getting back over again.

  "I guess not," he said.

  "Come on. Got a piece to walk yet. Three miles or more."

  They walked. The path did indeed go on. In places it seemed very wide, although the moving light revealed little clearly; it was mostly a feeling of space, a feeling that the trees had drawn back. Once or twice Louis looked up and saw stars wheeling between the massed dark border of trees. Once something loped across the path ahead of them, and the light picked up the reflection of greenish eyes--there and then gone.

  At other times the path closed in until underbrush scratched stiff fingers across the shoulders of Louis's coat. He switched the bag and the shovel more often, but the ache in his shoulders was now constant. He fell into a rhythm of walking and became almost hypnotized with it. There was power here, yes, he felt it. He remembered a time when he had been a senior in high school. He and his girl and some other couple had gone way out in the boonies and had ended up necking at the end of a dead-end dirt road near a power station. They hadn't been there long before Louis's girl said that she wanted to go home, or at least to another place, because all her teeth (all the ones with fillings, anyway, and that was most of them) were aching. Louis had been glad to leave himself. The air around the power station had made him feel nervous and too awake. This was like that, but it was stronger. Stronger but not unpleasant at all. It was--

  Jud had stopped at the base of a long slope. Louis ran into him.

  Jud turned toward him. "We're almost where we're going now," he said calmly. "This next bit is like the deadfall--you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me and don't look down. You felt us going downhill?"

  "Yes."

  "This is the edge of what the Micmacs used to call Little God Swamp. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man's Bog, and most of them who came once and got out never came again."

  "Is there quicksand?"

  "Oh, ayuh, quicksand aplenty! Streams that bubble up through a big deposit of quartz sand left over from the glacier. Silica sand, we always called it, although there's probably a proper name for it."

  Jud looked at him, and for a moment Louis thought he saw something bright and not completely pleasant in the old man's eyes.

  Then Jud shifted the flashlight and that look was gone.

  "There's a lot of funny things down this way, Louis. The air's heavier . . . more electrical . . . or somethin."

  Louis started.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," Louis said, thinking of that night on the dead-end road.

  "You might see St. Elmo's fire--what the sailors call foo-lights. It makes funny shapes, but it's nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother
you, just look the other way. You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It's funny."

  "Loons?" Louis said doubtfully. "This time of year?"

  "Oh, ayuh," Jud said again, and his voice was terribly bland and totally unreadable. For a moment Louis wished desperately he could see the old man's face again. That look--

  "Jud, where are we going? What the hell are we doing out here in the back of the beyond?"

  "I'll tell you when we get there." Jud turned away. "Mind the tussocks."

  They began to walk again, stepping from one broad hummock to the next. Louis did not feel for them. His feet seemed to find them automatically, with no effort from him. He slipped only once, his left shoe breaking through a thin scum of ice and dipping into cold and somehow slimy standing water. He pulled it out quickly and went on, following Jud's bobbing light. That light, floating through the woods, brought back memories of the pirate tales he had liked to read as a boy. Evil men off to bury gold doubloons by the dark of the moon . . . and of course one of them would be tumbled into the pit on top of the chest, a bullet in his heart, because the pirates had believed--or so the authors of these lurid tales solemnly attested--that the dead comrade's ghost would remain there to guard the swag.

  Except it's not treasure we've come to bury. Just my daughter's castrated cat.

  He felt wild laughter bubble up inside and stifled it.

  He did not hear any "sounds like voices," nor did he see any St. Elmo's fire, but after stepping over half a dozen tussocks, he looked down and saw that his feet, calves, knees, and lower thighs had disappeared into a ground fog that was perfectly smooth, perfectly white, and perfectly opaque. It was like moving through the world's lightest drift of snow.

  The air seemed to have a quality of light in it now, and it was warmer, he could have sworn it. He could see Jud before him, moving steadily along, the blunt end of the pick hooked over his shoulder. The pick enhanced the illusion of a man intent on burying treasure.

  That crazy sense of exhilaration persisted, and he suddenly wondered if maybe Rachel was trying to call him; if, back in the house, the phone was ringing and ringing, making its rational, prosaic sound. If--