Pet Sematary

  There was dried blood caked on Church's muzzle, and caught in his long whiskers were two tiny shreds of green plastic. Bits of Hefty Bag.

  We will talk more about this and by then you will understand more . . .

  Oh, Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now.

  Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I'll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.

  *

  He let Church into the house, got his blue dish, and opened a tuna-and-liver cat dinner. As he spooned the gray-brown mess out of the can, Church purred unevenly and rubbed back and forth along Louis's ankles. The feel of the cat caused Louis to break out in gooseflesh, and he had to clench his teeth grimly to keep from kicking him away. His furry sides felt somehow too slick, too thick--in a word, loathsome. Louis found he didn't care if he never touched Church again.

  When he bent and put the dish on the floor, Church streaked past him to get it, and Louis could have sworn he smelled sour earth--as if it had been ground into the cat's fur.

  He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear him smacking--had Church smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had, and Louis had just never noticed. Either way, it was a disgusting sound. Gross, Ellie would have said.

  Abruptly Louis turned and went upstairs. He started at a walk, but by the time he got to the upper hallway, he was almost running. He undressed, tossing all of his clothes in the laundry hamper although he had put them on fresh from the underwear out that morning. He drew himself a hot bath, as hot as he could take it, and plopped in.

  The steam rose around him, and he could feel the hot water working on his muscles, loosening them. The bath was also working on his head, loosening that. By the time the water had begun to cool, he was feeling dozy and pretty much all right again.

  The cat came back, just like the cat in the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal.

  It had been all a mistake. Hadn't he thought to himself yesterday evening that Church looked remarkably whole and unmarked for an animal that had been struck by a car?

  Think of all the woodchucks and cats and dogs you've seen strewn all over the highway, he thought, their bodies burst, their guts everywhere. Tech-ni-color, as Loudon Wainwright says on that record about the dead skunk.

  It was obvious now. Church had been struck hard and stunned. The cat he had carried up to Jud's old Micmac burying ground had been unconscious, not dead. Didn't they say cats had nine lives? Thank God he hadn't said anything to Ellie! She wouldn't ever have to know how close Church had come.

  The blood on his mouth and ruff . . . the way his neck turned . . .

  But he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis--that was all. It had hardly been under the best circumstances for close examination, squatting on Jud's lawn in twenty-degree temperatures, the light almost gone from the sky. And he had been wearing gloves. That could have--

  A bloated, misshapen shadow rose on the tiled bathroom wall, like the head of a small dragon or of some monstrous snake; something touched his bare shoulder lightly and skidded. Louis jerked upward galvanically, splashing water out of the tub and soaking the bathmat. He turned, cringing back at the same time, and stared into the muddy yellow-green eyes of his daughter's cat, who was perched on the lowered seat of the toilet.

  Church was swaying slowly back and forth as if drunk. Louis watched, his body crawling with revulsion, a scream barely held back in his mouth by his clamped teeth. Church had never looked like this--had never swayed, like a snake trying to hypnotize its prey--not before he was fixed and not afterward. For the first and last time he played with the idea that this was a different cat, one that just looked like Ellie's, a cat that had just wandered into his garage while he was putting up those shelves, and that the real Church was still buried under that cairn on the bluff in the woods. But the markings were the same . . . and the one ragged ear . . . and the paw that had that funny chewed look. Ellie had slammed that paw in the back door of their little suburban house when Church was little more than a kitten.

  It was Church, all right.

  "Get out of here," Louis whispered hoarsely at him.

  Church stared at him a moment longer--God, his eyes were different, somehow they were different--and then leaped down from the toilet seat. He landed with none of the uncanny grace cats usually display. He staggered awkwardly, haunches thudding against the tub, and then he was gone.

  It, Louis thought. Not he; it. Remember, it's been spayed.

  He got out of the tub and dried off quickly, jerkily. He was shaved and mostly dressed when the phone rang, shrill in the empty house. When it sounded, Louis whirled, eyes wide, hands going up. He lowered them slowly. His heart was racing. His muscles felt full of adrenaline.

  It was Steve Masterton, checking back about racket ball, and Louis agreed to meet him at the Memorial Gym in an hour. He could not really afford the time, and racket ball was the last thing in the world he felt like right now, but he had to get out. He wanted to get away from the cat, that weird cat which had no business being there at all.

  He hurried, tucking in his shirt quickly, stuffing a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and a towel into his zipper bag, and trotting down the stairs.

  Church was lying on the fourth riser from the bottom. Louis tripped over the cat and almost fell. He managed to grab the bannister and barely save himself from what could have been a nasty fall.

  He stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in snatches, his heart racing, the adrenaline whipping unpleasantly through his body.

  Church stood up, stretched . . . and seemed to grin at him.

  Louis left. He should have put the cat out, he knew that, but he didn't. At that particular moment he didn't think he could bring himself to touch it.

  26

  Jud lit a cigarette with a wooden kitchen match, shook it out, and tossed the stub into a tin ashtray with a barely readable Jim Beam advertisement painted on its bottom.

  "Ayuh, it was Stanley Bouchard who told me about the place." He paused, thinking.

  Barely touched glasses of beer stood before them on the checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. Behind them, the barrel of range oil clamped to the wall gurgled three times, deliberately, and was still. Louis had caught a pick-up supper with Steve--submarine sandwiches in the mostly deserted Bear's Den. He had found out early that if you asked for a hoagie or a grinder or a gyro in Maine, they didn't know what you were talking about. Ask for a sub or a Wop-burger, and you were in business. With some food in him, Louis began to feel better about Church's return, felt that he had things more in perspective, but he was still not anxious to return to his dark, empty house where the cat could be--let's face it, gang--anywhere at all.

  Norma sat with them for quite a while, watching TV and working on a sampler that showed the sun going down behind a small county meeting house. The cross on the roof tree was silhouetted black against the setting sun. Something to sell, she said, at the church sale the week before Christmas. Always a big event. Her fingers moved well, pushing the needle through the cloth, pulling it up through the steel circle. Her arthritis was barely noticeable tonight. Louis supposed it might be the weather, which had been cold but very dry. She had recovered nicely from her heart attack, and on that evening less than ten weeks before a cerebral accident would kill her, he thought that she looked less haggard and actually younger. On that evening he could see the girl she had been.

  At a quarter to ten she said goodnight, and now he sat here with Jud, who had ceased speaking and seemed only to be following his cigarette smoke up and up, like a kid watching a barber pole to see where the stripes go.

  "Stanny B.," Louis prompted gently.

  Jud blinked and seemed to come back to himself. "Oh, ayuh," he said. "Everyone in Ludlow--round Bucksport and Prospect and Orrington too, I guess--just called him Stanny B. That year my dog Spot died--1910 I mean, the first time he died--Stanny was already an old man and more than a little crazy. There was others around
these parts that knew the Micmac burying ground was there, but it was Stanny B. I heard it from, and he knew about it from his father before him. A whole family of proper Canucks, they were."

  Jud laughed and sipped his beer.

  "I can still hear him talking in that broken English of his. He found me sitting behind the livery stable that used to stand on Route 15--except it was just the Bangor-Bucksport Road back then--right about where the Orinco plant is now. Spot wasn't dead but he was going, and my dad sent me away to check on some chickenfeed, which old Yorky sold back then. We didn't need chickenfeed any more than a cow needs a blackboard, and I knew well enough why he sent me down there."

  "He was going to kill the dog?"

  "He knew how tenderly I felt about Spot, so he sent me away while he did it. I saw about the chickenfeed, and while old Yorky set it out for me I went around back and sat down on the old grindstone that used to be there and just bawled."

  Jud shook his head slowly and gently, still smiling a little.

  "And along comes old Stanny B.," he said. "Half the people in town thought he was soft, and the other half thought he might be dangerous. His grandfather was a big fur trapper and trader in the early 1800s. Stanny's grandda would go all the way from the Maritimes to Bangor and Derry, sometimes as far south as Skowhegan to buy pelts, or so I've heard. He drove a big wagon covered with rawhide strips like something out of a medicine show. He had crosses all over it, for he was a proper Christian and would preach on the Resurrection when he was drunk enough--this is what Stanny said, he loved to talk about his grandda--but he had pagan Indian signs all over it as well because he believed that all Indians, no matter what the tribe, belonged to one big tribe--that lost one of Israel the Bible talks about. He said he believed all Indians were hellbound, but that their magic worked because they were Christians all the same, in some queer, damned way.

  "Stanny's grandda bought from the Micmacs and did a good business with them long after most of the other trappers and traders had given up or gone west because he traded with them at a fair price and because, Stanny said, he knew the whole Bible by heart, and the Micmacs liked to hear him speak the words the blackrobes had spoken to them in the years before the buckskin men and woodsmen came."

  He fell silent. Louis waited.

  "The Micmacs told Stanny B.'s grandda about the burying ground which they didn't use anymore because the Wendigo had soured the ground, and about Little God Swamp, and the steps, and all the rest.

  "The Wendigo story, now, that was something you could hear in those days all over the north country. It was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories. Norma would damn me for a profaner if she heard me say that, but Louis, it's true. Sometimes, if the winter was long and hard and the food was short, there were north country Indians who would finally get down to the bad place where it was starve or . . . or do something else."

  "Cannibalism?"

  Jud shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe they'd pick out someone who was old and used up, and then there would be stew for a while. And the story they worked out would be that the Wendigo had walked through their village or encampment while they were sleepin and touched them. And the Wendigo was supposed to give those it touched a taste for the flesh of their own kind."

  Louis nodded. "Saying the devil made them do it."

  "Sure. My own guess is that the Micmacs around here had to do it at some point and that they buried the bones of whoever they ate--one or two, maybe even ten or a dozen--up there in their burying ground."

  "And then decided the ground had gone sour," Louis muttered.

  "So here's Stanny B., come out in back of the livery to get his jug, I guess," Jud said, "already half-crocked, he was. His grandfather was worth maybe a million dollars when he died--or so people said--and Stanny B. was nothing but the local ragman. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him. He saw I'd been bawling, and he told me there was a way it could be fixed up, if I was brave and sure I wanted it fixed up.

  "I said I'd give anything to have Spot well again, and I asked him if he knew a vet that could do it. 'Don't know-no vet, me,' Stanny said, 'but I know how to fix your dog, boy. You go home now and tell your dad to put that dog in a grain sack, but you ain't gonna bury him, no! You gonna drag him up to the Pet Sematary and you gonna put him in the shade by that big deadfall. Then you gonna come back and say it's done.'

  "I asked him what good that would do, and Stanny told me to stay awake that night and come out when he threw a stone against my window. 'And it be midnight, boy, so if you forget Stanny B. and go to sleep, Stanny B. gonna forget you, and it's goodbye dog, let him go straight to Hell!"

  Jud looked at Louis and lit another cigarette.

  "It went just the way Stanny set it up. When I got back, my dad said he'd put a bullet in Spot's head to spare him any more suffering; I didn't even have to say anything about the Pet Sematary; my dad asked me if I didn't think Spot would want me to bury him up there, and I said I guessed he would. So off I went, dragging my dog in a grain sack. My dad asked me if I wanted help, and I said no, because I remembered what Stanny B. said.

  "I laid awake that night--forever, seemed like. You know how time is for kids. It would seem to me I must have stayed awake right around until morning, and then the clock would only chime ten or eleven. A couple of times I almost nodded off, but each time I snapped wide awake again. It was almost as if someone had shaken me and said, 'Wake up, Jud! Wake up!' Like something wanted to make sure I stayed awake."

  Louis raised his eyebrows at that, and Jud shrugged.

  "When the clock in the downstairs hall chimed twelve, I got right up and sat there dressed on my bed with the moon shinin in the window. Next I know, the clock is chimin the half-hour, then one o'clock, and still no Stanny B. He's forgot all about me, that dumb Frenchman, I think to myself, and I'm getting ready to take my clothes off again when these two pebbles whap off the window, damn near hard enough to break the glass. One of them did put a crack in a pane, but I never noticed it until the next morning, and my mother didn't see it until the next winter, and by then she thought the frost done it.

  "I just about flew across to that window and heaved it up. It grated and rumbled against the frame, the way they only seem to do when you're a kid and you want to get out after midnight--"

  Louis laughed, even though he could not remember ever having wanted to get out of the house at some dark hour when he was a boy of ten. Still, if he had wanted to, he was sure that windows which had never creaked in the daytime would creak then.

  "I figured my folks must have thought burglars were trying to break in, but when my heart quieted down, I could hear my dad still sawin wood in the bedroom on the first floor. I looked out and there was Stanny B., standin in our driveway and lookin up, swayin like there was a high wind when there wasn't so much as a puff of breeze. I don't think he ever would have come, Louis, except that he'd gotten to that stage of drunkenness where you're as wide awake as an owl with diarrhea and you just don't give a care about anything. And he sort of yells up at me--only I guess he thought he was whispering--'You comin down, boy, or am I comin up to get you?'

  " 'Shh!' " I says, scared to death now that my dad will wake up and give me the whopping of my young life. 'What'd you say?' Stanny says, even louder than before. If my parents had been around on the road side of this house, Louis, I would have been a goner. But they had the bedroom that belongs to Norma and me now, with the river view."

  "I bet you got down those stairs in one hell of a hurry," Louis said. "Have you got another beer, Jud?" He was already two past his usual limit, but tonight that seemed okay. Tonight that seemed almost mandatory.

  "I do, and you know where they're kept," Jud said and lit a fresh smoke. He waited until Louis was seated again. "No, I wouldn't have dared to try the stairs. They went past my parents' bedroom. I went down the ivy trellis, hand over hand, just as quick as I could. I was some scared, I can tell you, but I think I was more scar
ed of my dad just then than I was of going up to the Pet Sematary with Stanny B."

  He crushed out his smoke.

  "We went up there, the two of us, and I guess Stanny B. must have fallen down half a dozen times if he fell down once. He was really far gone; smelled like he'd fallen into a vat of corn. One time he damn near put a stick through his throat. But he had a pick and shovel with him. When we got to the Pet Sematary, I kind of expected he'd sling me the pick and shovel and just pass out while I dug the hole.

  "Instead he seemed to sober up a little. He told me we was goin on, up over the deadfall and deeper into the woods, where there was another burial place. I looked at Stanny, who was so drunk he could barely keep his feet, and I looked at that deadfall, and I said, 'You can't climb that, Stanny B., you'll break your neck.'

  "And he said, 'I ain't gonna break my neck, me, and neither are you. I can walk and you can lug your dog.' And he was right. He sailed up over that deadfall just as smooth as silk, never even looking down, and I lugged Spot all the way up there, although he must have weighed thirty-five pounds or so and I only went about ninety myself. I want to tell you, though, Louis, I was some sore and sprung the next day. How do you feel today?"

  Louis didn't answer, only nodded.

  "We walked and we walked," Jud said. "It seemed to me we was gonna walk forever. The woods were spookier in those days. More birds calling from the trees, and you didn't know what any of em was. Animals moving around out there. Deer, most likely, but back then there were moose too and bears and catamounts. I dragged Spot. After a while I started to get the funny idea that old Stanny B. was gone and I was following an Indian. Following an Indian and somewhere farther along he'd turn around, all grinning and black-eyed, his face streaked up with that stinking paint they made from bearfat; that he'd have a tommyhawk made out of a wedge of slate and a hake of ashwood all tied together with rawhide, and he'd grab me by the back of the neck and whack off my hair--along with the top of my skull. Stanny wasn't staggerin or fallin anymore; he just walked straight and easy, with his head up, and that sort of helped to feed the idea. But when we got to the edge of the Little God Swamp and he turned around to talk to me, I seen it was Stanny, all right, and the reason he wasn't staggerin or fallin anymore was because he was scared. Scairt himself sober, he did.