Pet Sematary, Page 9

  Pascow glanced back over his shoulder, and in the moonlight his eyes were silver. Louis felt a hopeless crawl of horror in his belly. That jutting bone, those dried clots of blood. But it was hopeless to resist those eyes. This was apparently a dream about being hypnotized, being dominated . . . being unable to change things, perhaps, the way he had been unable to change the fact of Pascow's death. You could go to school for twenty years and you still couldn't do a thing when they brought a guy in who had been rammed into a tree hard enough to open a window in his skull. They might as well have called a plumber, a rainmaker, or the Man from Glad.

  And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he was drawn forward onto the path. He followed the jogging shorts, as maroon in this light as the dried blood on Pascow's face.

  He didn't like this dream. Oh God, not at all. It was too real. The cold nubbles in the rug, the way he had not been able to pass through the shed door when a person could (or should) be able to walk through doors and walls in any self-respecting dream . . . and now the cool brush of dew on his bare feet, and the feel of the night wind, just a breath of it, on his body, which was naked except for his Jockey shorts. Once under the trees, pine needles stuck to the soles of his feet . . . another little detail that was just a bit more real than it needed to be.

  Never mind. Never mind. I am home in my own bed. It's just a dream, no matter how vivid, and like all other dreams, it will seem ridiculous in the morning. My waking mind will discover its inconsistencies.

  The small branch of a dead tree poked his bicep rudely and he winced. Up ahead, Pascow was only a moving shadow, and now Louis's terror seemed to have crystallized into a bright sculpture in his mind: I am following a dead man into the woods, I am following a dead man up to the Pet Sematary, and this is no dream. God help me, this is no dream. This is happening.

  They walked down the far side of the wooded hill. The path curved in lazy S-shapes between the trees and then plunged into the underbrush. No boots now. The ground dissolved into cold jelly under his feet, grabbing and holding, letting go only reluctantly. There were ugly sucking noises. He could feel the mud oozing between his toes, trying to separate them.

  He tried desperately to hold on to the dream idea.

  It wouldn't wash.

  They reached the clearing, and the moon sailed free of its reef of clouds again, bathing the graveyard with ghastly effulgence. The leaning markers--bits of board and tin cans that had been cut with a father's tinsnips and then hammered into rude squares, chipped chunks of shale and slate--stood out with three-dimensional clarity, casting shadows perfectly black and defined.

  Pascow stopped near SMUCKY THE CAT, HE WAS OBEDIANT and turned back toward Louis. The horror, the terror--he felt these things would grow in him until his body blew apart under their soft yet implacable pressure. Pascow was grinning. His bloody lips were wrinkled back from his teeth, and his healthy road-crew tan in the moon's bony light had become overlaid with the white of a corpse about to be sewn into its winding shroud.

  He lifted one arm and pointed. Louis looked in that direction and moaned. His eyes grew wide, and he crammed his knuckles against his mouth. There was coolness on his cheeks, and he realized that in the extremity of his terror he had begun to weep.

  The deadfall from which Jud Crandall had called Ellie in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals. Fingerbones clittered. Here the remains of a foot flexed its pallid joints.

  Ah, it was moving; it was creeping--

  Pascow was walking toward him now, his bloody face grim in the moonlight, and the last of Louis's coherent mind began to slip away in a yammering, cyclic thought: You got to scream yourself awake doesn't matter if you scare Rachel Ellie Gage wake the whole household the whole neighborhood got to scream yourself awake screamscreamscreamyourselfawakeawakeawake--

  But only a thin whisper of air would come. It was the sound of a little kid sitting on a stoop somewhere and trying to teach himself to whistle.

  Pascow came closer and then spoke.

  "The door must not be opened," Pascow said. He was looking down at Louis because Louis had fallen to his knees. There was a look on his face which Louis at first mistook for compassion. It wasn't really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. "Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember."

  Louis tried again to scream. He could not.

  "I come as a friend," Pascow said--but was friend actually the word Pascow had used? Louis thought not. It was as if Pascow had spoken in a foreign language which Louis could understand through some dream magic . . . and "friend" was as close to whatever word Pascow had actually used that Louis's struggling mind could come. "Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor." He was close enough for Louis to be able to smell death on him.

  Pascow, reaching for him.

  The soft, maddening click of the bones.

  Louis began to overbalance in his effort to get away from that hand. His own hand struck a monument and tilted it into the earth. Pascow's face, leaning down, filled the sky.

  "Doctor--remember."

  Louis tried to scream, and the world whirled away--but still he heard the click of moving bones in the moonlit crypt of the night.

  17

  It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand's Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering. When the sleeper wakes, he or she comes up by degrees, from deep sleep to light sleep to what is sometimes called "waking sleep," a state in which the sleeper can hear sounds and will even respond to questions without being aware of it later . . . except perhaps as fragments of dream.

  Louis heard the click and rattle of bones, but gradually this sound became sharper, more metallic. There was a bang. A yell. More metallic sounds . . . something rolling? Sure, his drifting mind agreed. Roll dem bones.

  He heard his daughter calling "Get it, Gage! Go get it!"

  This was followed by Gage's crow of delight, the sound to which Louis opened his eyes and saw the ceiling of his own bedroom.

  He held himself perfectly still, waiting for the reality, the good reality, the blessed reality, to come home all the way.

  All a dream. No matter how terrible, how real, it had all been a dream. Only a fossil in the mind under his mind.

  The metallic sound came again. It was one of Gage's toy cars being rolled along the upstairs hall.

  "Get it, Gage!"

  "Get it!" Gage yelled. "Get it-get it-get it!"

  Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Gage's small bare feet thundering along the hallway runner. He and Ellie were giggling.

  Louis looked to his right. Rachel's bed was empty, the covers thrown back. The sun was well up. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly eight o'clock. Rachel had let him oversleep . . . probably on purpose.

  Ordinarily this would have irritated him, but this morning it did not. He drew in a deep breath and let it out, content for the moment to lie here with a bar of sunlight slanting in through the window, feeling the unmistakable texture of the real world. Dust-motes danced in the sunlight.

  Rachel called upstairs. "Better come down and get your snack and go out for the bus, El!"

  "Okay!" The louder clack-clack of her feet. "Here's your car, Gage. I got to go to school."

  Gage began to yell indignantly. Although it was garbled--the only clear words being Gage, car, geddit, and Ellie-bus, his text seemed clear enough: Ellie should stay. Public education could go hang for the day.

  Rachel's voice again, "Give your dad a shake before you come down, El."

  Ellie ca
me in, her hair done up in a ponytail, wearing her red dress.

  "I'm awake, babe," he said. "Go on and get your bus."

  "Okay, Daddy." She came over, kissed his slightly scruffy cheek, and bolted for the stairs.

  The dream was beginning to fade, to lose its coherence. A damn good thing too.

  "Gage!" he yelled. "Come give your dad a kiss!"

  Gage ignored this. He was following Ellie downstairs as rapidly as he could yelling "Get it! Get-it-get-it-GET-IT!" at the top of his lungs. Louis caught just a glimpse of his sturdy little kid's body, clad only in diapers and rubber pants.

  Rachel called up again, "Louis, was that you? You awake?"

  "Yeah," he said, sitting up.

  "Told you he was!" Ellie called. "I'm goin. Bye!" The slam of the front door and Gage's outraged bellow punctuated this.

  "One egg or two?" Rachel called.

  Louis pushed back the blankets and swung his feet out onto the nubs of the hooked rug, ready to tell her he'd skip the eggs, just a bowl of cereal and he'd run . . . and the words died in his throat.

  His feet were filthy with dirt and pine needles.

  His heart leaped up in his throat like a crazy jack-in-the-box. Moving fast, eyes bulging, teeth clamped unfeelingly on his tongue, he kicked the covers all the way back. The foot of his bed was littered with needles. The sheets were mucky and dirty.

  "Louis?"

  He saw a few errant pine needles on his knees, and suddenly he looked at his right arm. There was a scratch there on the bicep, a fresh scratch, exactly where the dead branch had poked him . . . in the dream.

  I'm going to scream. I can feel it.

  And he could too; it was roaring up from inside, nothing but a big cold bullet of fear. Reality shimmered. Reality--the real reality, he thought--was those needles, the filth on the sheets, the bloody scratch on his bare arm.

  I'm going to scream and then I'll go crazy and I won't have to worry about it anymore--

  "Louis?" Rachel was coming up the stairs. "Louis, did you go back to sleep?"

  He grappled for himself in those two or three seconds; he fought grimly for himself just as he had done in those moments of roaring confusion after Pascow had been brought into the Medical Center, dying in a blanket. He won. The thought which tipped the scales was that she must not see him this way, his feet muddy and coated with needles, the blanket tossed back onto the floor to reveal the muck-splashed ground sheet.

  "I'm awake," he called cheerfully. His tongue was bleeding from the sudden, involuntary bite he had given it. His mind swirled, and somewhere deep inside, away from the action, he wondered if he had always been within touching distance of such mad irrationalities; if everyone was.

  "One egg or two?" She had stopped on the second or third riser. Thank God.

  "Two," he said, barely aware of what he was saying. "Scrambled."

  "Good for you," she said, and went back downstairs again.

  He closed his eyes briefly in relief, but in the darkness he saw Pascow's silver eyes. His eyes flew open again. Louis began to move rapidly, putting off any further thought. He jerked the bedclothes off his bed. The blankets were okay. He separated out the two sheets, balled them up, took them into the hallway, and dumped them down the laundry chute.

  Almost running, he entered the bathroom, jerked the shower handle on, and stepped under water so hot it was nearly scalding, unmindful. He washed the dirt from his feet and legs.

  He began to feel better, more in control. Drying off, it struck him that this was how murderers must feel when they believe they have gotten rid of all the evidence. He began to laugh. He went on drying himself, but he also went on laughing. He couldn't seem to stop.

  "Hey, up there!" Rachel called. "What's so funny?"

  "Private joke," Louis called back, still laughing. He was frightened, but the fright didn't stop the laughter. The laughter came, rising from a belly that was as hard as stones mortared into a wall. It occurred to him that shoving his sheets down the laundry chute was absolutely the best thing he could have done. Missy Dandridge came in five days a week to vacuum, clean . . . and do the laundry. Rachel would never see those sheets at all until she put them back on his bed . . . clean. He supposed it was possible that Missy would mention it to Rachel, but he didn't think so. She would probably whisper to her husband that the Creeds were playing some strange sex game that involved mud and pine needles instead of body paints.

  This thought made Louis laugh all the harder.

  The last of the giggles and chuckles dried up as he was dressing, and he realized that he felt a little better. How that could be he didn't know, but he did. The room looked normal now except for his stripped bed. He had gotten rid of the poison. Maybe "evidence" was actually the word he was looking for, but in his mind it felt like poison.

  Perhaps this is what people do with the inexplicable, he thought. This is what they do with the irrational that refuses to be broken down into the normal causes and effects that run the Western world. Maybe this was how your mind coped with the flying saucer you saw hovering silently over your back field one morning, casting its own tight little pool of shadow; the rain of frogs; the hand from under the bed that stroked your bare foot in the dead of night. There was a giggling fit or a crying fit . . . and since it was its own inviolable self and would not break down, you simply passed terror intact, like a kidney stone.

  Gage was in his chair, eating Cocoa Bears and decorating the table with it. He was decorating the plastic mat under his high chair with Cocoa Bears and apparently shampooing with it.

  Rachel came out of the kitchen with his eggs and a cup of coffee. "What was the big joke, Lou? You were laughing like a loon up there. Scared me a little."

  Louis opened his mouth with no idea of what he was going to say, and what came out was a joke he had heard the week before at the corner market down the road--something about a Jewish tailor who bought a parrot whose only line was "Ariel Sharon jerks off."

  By the time he finished, Rachel was laughing too--so was Gage for that matter.

  Fine. Our hero has taken care of all the evidence--to wit: the muddy sheets and the loony laughter in the bathroom. Our hero will now read the morning paper--or at least look at it--putting the seal of normality on the morning.

  So thinking, Louis opened the paper.

  That's what you do, all right, he thought with immeasurable relief. You pass it like a stone, and that's the end of it . . . unless there comes a campfire some night with friends when the wind is high and the talk turns to inexplicable events. Because on campfire nights when the wind is high, talk is cheap.

  He ate his eggs. He kissed Rachel and Gage. He glanced at the square, white-painted laundry cabinet at the foot of the chute only as he left. Everything was okay. It was another knockout of a morning. Late summer showed every sign of just going on forever, and everything was okay. He glanced at the path as he backed the car out of the garage, but that was okay too. Never turned a hair. You passed it like a stone.

  Everything was okay until he had gotten ten miles down the road, and then the shakes hit him so hard that he had to pull off Route 2 and into the morning-deserted parking lot of Sing's, the Chinese restaurant not far from the Eastern Maine Medical Center . . . where Pascow's body would have been taken. The EMMC, that is, not Sing's. Vic Pascow was never going to eat another helping of moo goo gai pan, ha-ha.

  The shakes twisted his body, ripped at it, had their way with it. Louis felt helpless and terrified--not terrified of anything supernatural, not in this bright sunshine, but simply terrified of the possibility that he might be losing his mind. It felt as if a long, invisible wire was being twirled through his head.

  "No more," he said. "Please, no more."

  He fumbled for the radio and got Joan Baez singing about diamonds and rust. Her sweet, cool voice soothed him, and by the time she had finished, Louis felt that he could drive on.

  *

  When he got to the Medical Center, he called hello to Charlton
and then ducked into the bathroom, believing that he must look like hell. Not so. He was a little hollow under the eyes, but not even Rachel had noticed that. He slapped some cold water on his face, dried off, combed his hair, and went into his office.

  Steve Masterton and the Indian doctor, Surrendra Hardu, were in there, drinking coffee and continuing to go over the front file.

  "Morning, Lou," Steve said.

  "Morning."

  "Let's hope it is not like last morning," Hardu said.

  "That's right, you missed all the excitement."

  "Surrendra had plenty of excitement himself last night," Masterton said, grinning. "Tell him, Surrendra."

  Hardu polished his glasses, smiling. "Two boys bring in their lady friend around one o'clock in the morning," he said. "She is very happily drunk, celebrating the return to university, you understand. She has cut one thigh quite badly, and I tell her it will be at least four stitches, no scar. Stitch away, she tells me, and so I do, bending over like this--"

  Hardu demonstrated, salaaming over an invisible thigh. Louis began to grin, sensing what was coming.

  "And as I am suturing, she vomits on my head."

  Masterton broke up. So did Louis. Hardu smiled calmly, as if this had happened to him thousands of times in thousands of lives.

  "Surrendra, how long have you been on duty?" Louis asked, when the laughter died.

  "Since midnight," Hardu said. "I am just leaving. But I wanted to stay long enough to say hello again."

  "Well, hello," Louis said, shaking his small, brown hand. "Now go home and go to sleep."

  "We're almost through with the front file," Masterton said. "Say hallelujah, Surrendra."

  "I decline," Hardu said, smiling. "I am not a Christian."

  "Then sing the chorus of 'Instant Karma' or something."

  "May you both shine on," Hardu said, still smiling, and glided out the door.

  Louis and Steve Masterton looked after him for a moment, silent, and then looked at each other. They broke out laughing. To Louis, no laugh had ever felt so good . . . so normal.

  "Just as well we got the file finished up," Steve said. "Today's the day we put the welcome mat out for the dope pushers."