Pet Sematary

  "He told me the same things I told you last night--about the loons, and the St. Elmo's fire, and how I wasn't to take any notice of anything I saw or heard. Most of all, he said, don't speak to anything if it should speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I ain't going to tell you what, only that I've been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and I've never seen anything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was my last trip."

  I'm not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally--the three beers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own mind's ear. I am not sitting here believing this story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets that come back to life, am I? For Christ's sake, the cat was stunned, that's all, a car hit it and stunned it--no big deal. This is a senile old man's maunderings.

  Except that it wasn't, and Louis knew it wasn't, and three beers wasn't going to cure that knowing, and thirty-three beers wouldn't.

  Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor . . but the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Jud's eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he had seen--or thought he had seen--in Jud's eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. He remembered thinking that Jud's decision to take Louis and Ellie's cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Jud's own.

  If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortable question away.

  "I buried Spot and built the cairn," Jud went on flatly, "and by the time I was done, Stanny B. was fast asleep. I had to shake the hell out of him to get him going again, but by the time we got down those forty-four stairs--"

  "Forty-five," Louis murmured.

  Jud nodded. "Yeah, that's right, ain't it? Forty-five. By the time we got down those forty-five stairs, he was walking as steady as if he was sober again. We went back through the swamp and the woods and over the deadfall, and finally we crossed the road and we was at my house again. It seemed to me like ten hours must have gone past, but it was still full dark.

  " 'What happens now?' I ask Stanny B. 'Now you wait and see what may happen,' Stanny says, and off he walks, staggering and lurching again. I imagine he slept out in back of the livery that night, and as things turned out, my dog Spot outlived Stanny B. by two years. His liver went bad and poisoned him, and two little kids found him in the road on July 4, 1912, stiff as a poker.

  "But me, that night, I just climbed back up the ivy and got into bed and fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.

  "Next morning I didn't get up until almost nine o'clock, and then my mother was calling me. My dad worked on the railroad, and he would have been gone since six." Jud paused, thinking. "My mother wasn't just calling me, Louis. She was screaming for me."

  Jud went to the fridge, got himself a Miller's, and opened it on the drawer handle below the breadbox and toaster. His face looked yellow in the overhead light, the color of nicotine. He drained half his beer, uttered a belch like a gunshot, and then glanced down the hall toward the room where Norma slept. He looked back at Louis.

  "This is hard for me to talk about," he said. "I have turned it over in my mind, years and years, but I've never told anyone about it. Others knew what had happened, but they never talked to me about it. The way it is about sex, I guess. I'm telling you, Louis, because you've got a different kind of pet now. Not necessarily a dangerous one, but . . . different. Do you find that's true?"

  Louis thought of Church jumping awkwardly off the toilet seat, his haunches thudding against the side of the tub; he thought of those muddy eyes that were almost but not quite stupid staring into his own.

  At last he nodded.

  "When I got downstairs, my mother was backed into a corner in the pantry between our icebox and one of the counters. There was a bunch of white stuff on the floor--curtains she'd been meaning to hang. Standing in the doorway of the pantry was Spot, my dog. There was dirt all over him and mud splashed clear up his legs. The fur on his belly was filthy, all knotted and snarled. He was just standing there--not growling or nothing--just standing there, but it was pretty clear that he had backed her into a corner, whether he meant to or not. She was in terror, Louis. I don't know how you felt about your parents, but I know how I felt about mine--I loved them both dearly. Knowing I'd done something to put my own mother in terror took away any joy I might have felt when I saw Spot standing there. I didn't even seem to feel surprised that he was there."

  "I know the feeling," Louis said. "When I saw Church this morning, I just . . . it seemed like something that was--" He paused a moment. Perfectly natural? Those were the words that came immediately to mind, but they were not the right words. "Like something that was meant."

  "Yes," Jud said. He lit a fresh cigarette. His hands were shaking the smallest bit. "And my mother seen me there, still in my underwear, and she screamed at me, 'Feed your dog, Jud! Your dog needs to be fed, get him out of here before he messes the curtains!'

  "So I found him some scraps and called him, and at first he didn't come, at first it was like he didn't know his own name, and I almost thought, well, this ain't Spot at all, it's some stray that looks like Spot, that's all--"

  "Yes!" Louis exclaimed.

  Jud nodded. "But the second or third time I called him, he came. He sort of jerked toward me, and when I led him out onto the porch, damned if he didn't run into the side of the door and just about fall over. He ate the scraps though, just wolfed them down. By then I was over my first fright and was starting to get an idea of what had happened. I got on my knees and hugged him, I was so glad to see him. Then he licked my face, and . . ."

  Jud shuddered and finished his beer.

  "Louis, his tongue was cold. Being licked by Spot was like getting rubbed up the side of your face with a dead carp."

  For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Louis said, "Go on."

  "He ate, and when he was done, I got an old tub we kept for him out from under the back porch, and I gave him a bath. Spot always hated to have a bath; usually it took both me and my dad to do it, and we'd end up with our shirts off and our pants soaked, and my dad cussing and Spot looking sort of ashamed--the way dogs do. And more likely than not he'd roll around in the dirt right after and then go over by my mother's clothesline to shake off and put dirt all over the sheets she had hung and she'd scream at both of us that she was going to shoot that dog for a stranger before she got much older.

  "But that day Spot just sat in the tub and let me wash him. He never moved at all. I didn't like it. It was like . . . like washing meat. I got an old piece of towel after I gave him his bath and dried him all off. I could see the places where the barbed wire had hooked him--there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in. It is the way an old wound looks after it's been healed five years and more."

  Louis nodded. In his line of work, he had seen such things from time to time. The wound never seemed to fill in completely, and that made him think of graves and his days as an undertaker's apprentice, and how there was never enough dirt to fill them in again.

  "Then I saw his head. There was another of those dimples there, but the fur had grown back white in a little circle. It was near his ear."

  "Where your father shot him," Louis said.

  Jud nodded.

  "Shooting a man or an animal in the head isn't as sure-fire as it sounds, Jud. There are would-be suicides in vegetable wards or even walking around right as rain who didn't know that a bullet can strike the skull plate and travel right around it in a semicircle, exiting the other side without ever penetrating the brain. I personally saw one case where
a fellow shot himself above the right ear and died because the bullet went around his head and tore open his jugular vein on the other side of his head. That bullet path looked like a county roadmap."

  Jud smiled and nodded. "I remember reading somethin like that in one of Norma's newspapers, the Star or the Enquirer--one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone."

  "All right," Louis said. "If you say that's how it was, that is how it was."

  "Was your daughter's cat gone?"

  "I sure thought it was," Louis said.

  "You got to do better than that. You're a doctor."

  "You make it sound like 'You got to do better than that, Louis, you're God.' I'm not God. It was dark--"

  "Sure, it was dark, and his head swiveled on his neck like it was full of ball bearings, and when you moved him, he pulled out of the frost, Louis--sounded like a piece of sticky tape comin off a letter. Live things don't do that. You only stop meltin the frost under where you're layin when you're dead."

  In the other room, the clock truck ten-thirty.

  "What did your father say when he came home and saw the dog?" Louis asked.

  "I was out in the driveway, shooting marbles in the dirt, more or less waitin for him. I felt like I always felt when I'd done something wrong and knew I was probably gonna get a spankin. He come in through the gateposts about eight o'clock, wearin his bib overalls and his pillow-tick cap . . . you ever see one of those?"

  Louis nodded, then stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

  "Yeah, getting late," Jud said. "Got to finish this up."

  "It's not that late," Louis said. "I'm just a few beers ahead of my usual pace. Go on, Jud. Take your time. I want to hear this."

  "My dad had an old lard tin he kept his dinner in," Jud said, "and he come in through the gate swingin it, empty, by the handle, you know. Whistlin somethin. It was gettin dark, but he seen me there in the gloom and he says, 'Hi there, Judkins!' like he would do, and then, 'Where's your--'

  "He got that far, and then here comes Spot out of the dark, not runnin like he usually did, ready to jump all over him he was so glad to see him, but just walkin, waggin his tail, and my dad dropped that lard bucket and stepped back. I don't know b'what he would have turned tail and run except his back hit the picket fence and then he just stood there, looking at the dog. And when Spot did jump up, Dad just caught his paws and held them, like you might hold a lady's hands you was getting ready to dance with. He looked at the dog for a long time and then he looked at me, and he said, 'He needs a bath, Jud. He stinks of the ground you buried him in.' And then he went in the house."

  "What did you do?" Louis asked.

  "Gave him another bath. He just sat there in the tub and took it again. And when I went in the house, my mother had gone to bed, even though it wasn't even nine o'clock. My dad said, 'We got to talk, Judkins.' And I set down across from him, and he talked to me like a man for the first time in my life with the smell of the honeysuckle coming across the road from what's your house now and the smell of the wild roses from our own house." Jud Crandall sighed. "I had always thought it would be good to have him talk to me that way, but it wasn't. It wasn't a bit good. All this tonight, Louis--it's like when you look into a mirror that's been set up right across from another mirror, and you can see yourself going down a whole hall of mirrors. How many times has this story been passed along, I wonder? A story that's just the same, except for the names? And that's like the sex thing too, isn't it?"

  "Your dad knew all about it."

  "Ayuh. 'Who took you up there, Jud?' he asked me, and I told him. He just nodded like it was what he would have expected. I guess it prob'ly was, although I found out later that there were six or eight people in Ludlow at that time that could have taken me up there. I guess he knew that Stanny B. was the only one crazy enough to have actually done it."

  "Did you ask him why he didn't take you, Jud?"

  "I did," Jud said. "Somewhere during that long talk I did ask him that. And he said it was a bad place, by and large, and it didn't often do anything good for people who had lost their animals or for the animals themselves. He asked me if I liked Spot the way he was, and do you know, Louis, I had the hardest time answering that . . . and it's important that I tell you my feelings on that, because sooner or later you're going to ask me why I led you up there with your daughter's cat if it was a bad thing to do. Isn't that so?"

  Louis nodded. What was Ellie going to think about Church when she got back? That had been much on his mind while he and Steve Masterton had been playing racket ball that afternoon.

  "Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better," Jud said with some difficulty. "That's somethin your Ellie don't know, and I got a feelin that maybe she don't know because your wife don't know. Now, you go ahead and tell me if I'm wrong, and we'll leave it."

  Louis opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  Jud went on, now speaking very slowly, appearing to move from word to word as they had moved from hummock to hummock in Little God Swamp the night before.

  "I've seen it happen over the years," he said. "I guess I told you that Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus named Hanratty. Ain't that a silly name for a bull? Died of some sort of ulcer inside, and Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge. How he did it--how he got over the deadfall there I dunno--but it's said that what you want to do, you can. And at least as far as that burying ground goes, I'd say it's true.

  "Well, Hanratty came back, but Lester shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he's the only animal I ever heard of that did. Most of them just seem . . . a little stupid . . . a little slow . . . a little . . ."

  "A little dead?"

  "Yeah," Jud said. "A little dead. Like they had been . . . somewhere . . . and came back . . . but not all the way. Now, your daughter isn't going to know that, Louis. Not that her cat was hit by a car, and killed, and came back. So you could say you can't teach a child a lesson unless the child knows there's a lesson to be learned. Except . . ."

  "Except sometimes you can," Louis said, more to himself than to Jud.

  "Yes," Jud agreed, "sometimes you can. Maybe she'll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain. You don't tell her those things; she will figure them out on her own.

  "And if she's anything like me, she'll go on loving her pet. It won't turn vicious, or bite, or anything like that. She'll go on loving it . . . but she'll draw her own conclusions . . . and she'll breathe a sigh of relief when it finally dies."

  "That's why you took me up there," Louis said. He felt better now. He had an explanation. It was diffuse, it relied more upon the logic of the nerve endings than the logic of the rational mind, but under the circumstances, he found he could accept that. And it meant he could forget the expression he thought he had seen on Jud's face briefly last night--that dark, capering glee. "Okay, that's--"

  Abruptly, almost shockingly, Jud covered his face with both hands. For one moment Louis thought he had been struck by a sudden pain, and he half-rose, concerned, until he saw the convulsive heave of the chest and realized that the old man was struggling not to cry.

  "That's why, but it ain't why," he said in a strangled, choked voice. "I did it for the same reason Stanny B. did it and for the same reason Lester Morgan did it. Lester took Linda Lavesque up there after her dog got run over in the road. He took her up there even though he had to put his goddamn bull out of its misery for chasing kids through its pasture like it was mad. He did it anyway, he did it anyway, Louis," Jud almost moaned, "and what the Christ do you make of that!"

  "Jud, what are you talking about?" Louis asked, alarmed.

  "Lester did it and Stanny did it for the same reason I did it. You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place, and you want to share the secret, and when you find a reas
on that seems good enough, why . . ." Jud took his hands away from his face and looked at Louis with eyes that seemed incredibly ancient, incredibly haggard. "Why then you just go ahead and do it. You make up reasons . . . they seem like good reasons . . . but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to. My dad, he didn't take me up there because he'd heard about it but he'd never been. Stanny B. had been up there . . . and he took me . . . and seventy years ago by . . . and then . . . all at once . . ."

  Jud shook his head and coughed dryly into the palm of his hand.

  "Listen," he said. "Listen, Louis. Lester's bull was the only damn animal I ever knew of that turned really mean. I b'lieve that Missus Lavesque's little chow might have bit the postman once, after, and I heard a few other things . . . animals that got a little nasty . . . but Spot was always a good dog. He always smelled like dirt, it didn't matter how many times you washed him, he always smelled like dirt--but he was a good dog. My mother would never touch him afterward, but he was a good dog just the same. But Louis, if you was to take your cat out tonight and kill it, I would never say a word.

  "That place . . . all at once it gets hold of you . . . and you make up the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world . . . but I could have been wrong, Louis. That's all I'm saying. Lester could have been wrong. Stanny B. could have been wrong. Hell, I ain't God either. But bringing the dead back to life . . . that's about as close to playing God as you can get, ain't it?"

  Louis opened his mouth again, then closed it again. What would have come out would have sounded wrong, wrong and cruel: Jud, I didn't go through all that just to kill the damn cat again.