Pet Sematary Read online

  "I'm going to," she said, wiping at her face. "I loved Gage, Mr. Crandall."

  "I know you did, dear." He leaned in and kissed her, and when he withdrew, his eyes swept Louis and Rachel stonily. Rachel met his gaze, puzzled and a little hurt, not understanding. But Louis understood well enough: What are you doing for her? Jud's eyes asked. Your son is dead, but your daughter is not. What are you doing for her?

  Louis looked away. There was nothing he could do for her, not yet. She would have to swim in her grief as best she could. His thoughts were too full of his son.

  42

  By evening a fresh rack of clouds had come in and a strong west wind had begun to blow. Louis put on his light jacket, zipped it up, and took the Civic keys from the peg on the wall.

  "Where you going, Lou?" Rachel asked. She spoke without much interest. After supper she had begun crying again, and although her weeping was gentle, she had seemed incapable of stopping. Louis had forced her to take a Valium. Now she sat with the paper folded open to the barely started crossword puzzle. In the other room, Ellie sat silently watching "Little House on the Prairie" with Gage's picture on her lap.

  "I thought I'd pick up a pizza."

  "Didn't you get enough to eat earlier?"

  "I just didn't seem hungry then," he said, telling the truth and then adding a lie: "I am now."

  That afternoon, between three and six, the final rite of Gage's funeral had taken place at the Ludlow house. This was the rite of food. Steve Masterton and his wife had come with a hamburger-and-noodle casserole. Charlton had appeared with a quiche. "It will keep until you want it, if it doesn't all get eaten," she told Rachel. "Quiche is easy to warm up." The Dannikers from up the road brought a baked ham. The Goldmans appeared--neither of them would speak to Louis or even come close to him, for which he was not sorry--with a variety of cold cuts and cheeses. Jud also brought cheese--a large wheel of his old favorite, Mr. Rat. Missy Dandridge brought a key lime pie. And Surrendra Hardu brought apples. The rite of food apparently transcended religious differences.

  This was the funeral party, and although it was quiet, it was not quite subdued. There was rather less drinking than at an ordinary party, but there was some. After a few beers (only the night before he had sworn he would never touch the stuff again, but in the cold afternoon light the previous evening had seemed impossibly long ago) Louis thought to pass on a few little funerary anecdotes his Uncle Carl had told him--that at Sicilian funerals unmarried women sometimes snipped a piece of the deceased's shroud and slept with it under their pillows, believing it would bring them luck in love; that at Irish funerals mock weddings were sometimes performed, and the toes of the dead were tied together because of an ancient Celtic belief that it kept the deceased's ghost from walking. Uncle Carl said that the custom of tying D.O.A. tags to the great toes of corpses had begun in New York, and since all of the early morgue keepers had been Irish, he believed this to be a survival of that old superstition. Then, looking at their faces, he had decided such tales would be taken wrong.

  Rachel had broken down only once, and her mother was there to comfort her. Rachel clung to Dory Goldman and sobbed against her shoulder in an open, let-it-all-go way that had been so far impossible for her with Louis, perhaps because she saw them both as culpable in Gage's death or perhaps because Louis, lost in the peculiar half-world of his own fancies, had not encouraged her grief. Either way, she had turned to her mother for comfort, and Dory was there to give it, mingling her tears with her daughter's. Irwin Goldman stood behind them, his hand on Rachel's shoulder, and looked with sickly triumph across the room at Louis.

  Ellie circulated with a silver tray loaded with canapes, little rolls with a feathered toothpick poked through each one. Her picture of Gage was tucked firmly under her arm.

  Louis received condolences. He nodded and thanked the condolers. And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave robbing . . . only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied.

  It was not as if he intended to do anything.

  Louis stopped at the Orrington Corner Store, bought two six-packs of cold beer, and called ahead to Napoli's for a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza.

  "Want to give me a name on that, sir?"

  Oz the Gwest and Tewwible, Louis thought.

  "Lou Creed."

  "Okay, Lou, we're real busy, so it'll be maybe forty-five minutes--that okay for you?"

  "Sure," Louis said and hung up. As he got back into the Civic and keyed the engine, it occurred to him that although there were maybe twenty pizza joints in the Bangor area, he had picked the one closest to Pleasantview, where Gage was buried. Well, what the hell? he thought uneasily. They make good pizza. No frozen dough. Throw it up and catch it on their fists, right there where you can watch, and Gage used to laugh--

  He cut that thought off.

  *

  He drove past Napoli's to Pleasantview. He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None.

  He parked across the street and crossed the road to the wrought-iron gates, which glimmered in the final light of day. Above them, in a semicircle, were wrought-iron letters spelling PLEASANTVIEW. The view was, in Louis's mind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The cemetery was nicely landscaped on several rolling hills; there were long aisles of trees (ah, but in these last few minutes of fading daylight, the shadows those trees threw seemed deeply pooled and as blackly unpleasant as still quarry water) and a few isolated weeping willows. It wasn't quiet. The turnpike was near--the drone of traffic came on the steady, chill wind--and the glow in the darkening sky was Bangor International Airport.

  He stretched his hand out to the gate, thinking, They'll be locked, but they were not. Perhaps it was too early to lock them, and if they locked them at all it would only be to protect the place against drunks, vandals, and teenage neckers. The days of the Dickensian Resurrection Men

  (there's that word again)

  were over. The right-hand gate swung in with a faint screeing noise, and after a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, Louis stepped through. He closed the gate behind him and heard the click of the latch.

  He stood in this modest suburb of the dead, looking around.

  A fine and private place, he thought, but none, I think, do there embrace. Who? Andrew Marvel? And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk, anyway?

  Jud's voice spoke up in his mind then, worried and--frightened? Yes. Frightened.

  Louis, what are you doing here? You're looking up a road you don't want to travel.

  He pushed the voice aside. If he was torturing anyone, it was only himself. No one need know he had been here as the daylight wound down to the dark.

  He began to walk toward Gage's grave, taking one of the winding paths. In a moment he was in a lane of trees; they rustled their new leaves mysteriously over his head. His heart was thudding too loudly in his chest. The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretaker's building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantview's twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. One-room apartments. Sleepers.

  Not much like the Pet Sematary, he thought, and this caused him to stop and consider for a moment, surprised. No, it wasn't. The Pet Sematary had given him an impression of order rising almost unknown out of chaos. Those rough, concentric circles moving inward to the center, rude slates, crosses made out of boards. As if the children who buried their pets there had created the pattern out of their own collective unconsciousness, as if . . .

  For a moment Louis saw the Pet Sematary as a kind of advertisement . . . a come-on, like the kind they gave you on freak alley at the carni
val. They'd bring out the fire-eater and you got to watch his show for free because the owners knew you wouldn't buy the steak unless you saw the sizzle, you wouldn't cough up the cash if you didn't see the flash--

  Those graves, those graves in their almost Druidic circles.

  The graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked. It was a symbol the Egyptians had chiseled on the tombs of the Pharaohs, a symbol the Phoenicians had drawn on the barrows of their fallen kings; it was found on cave walls in ancient Mycenae; the guildkings of Stonehenge had created it as a clock to time the universe; it appeared in the Judeo-Christian Bible as the whirlwind from which God had spoken to Job.

  The spiral was the oldest sign of power in the world, man's oldest symbol of that twisty bridge which may exist between the world and the Gulf.

  Louis reached Gage's grave at last. The payloader was gone. The Astroturf had been removed, rolled up by some whistling workman with his mind on an after-work beer at the Fairmount Lounge, stored in an equipment shed somewhere. Where Gage lay there was a neat rectangle of bare, raked earth, perhaps five feet by three feet. The headstone had not been set up yet.

  Louis kneeled. The wind blew through his hair, tumbling it. The sky was almost entirely dark now. It raced with clouds.

  No one has shone a light in my face and asked me what I'm doing here. No watchdog has barked. The gate was unlocked. The days of the Resurrection Men are past. If I came up here with a pick and a shovel--

  He came back to himself with a jerk. He was only playing a dangerous mind game with himself if he pretended that Pleasantview stood unwatched during the night hours. Suppose he was discovered belly-deep in his son's new grave by the caretaker or the watchman? It might not get into the papers, but then again it might. He might be charged with a crime. What crime? Grave robbing? Unlikely. Malicious mischief or vandalism would be more likely. And in the paper or out of it, the word would get around. People would talk; it was a story too juicy not to be told: Local doctor is discovered digging up his two-year-old son, recently killed in a tragic road accident. He would lose his job. Even if not, Rachel would be chilled by the wind of such tales, and Ellie might be harried by them at school until her life was a misery of chanting children. There might be the humiliation of a sanity test in exchange for dropping charges.

  But I could bring Gage back to life! Gage could live again!

  Did he really, actually believe that?

  The fact was that he did. He had told himself time and time again, both before Gage's death and after it, that Church had not really been dead, only stunned. That Church had dug his way out and come home. A kiddie story with gruesome undertones--Winnie the Poe. Master unwittingly piles a cairn of stones over a living animal. Faithful beast digs itself out and comes home. Fine. Except it was not true. Church had been dead. The Micmac burying ground had brought it back to life.

  He sat by Gage's grave, trying to place all the known components in an order as rational and logical as this dark magic would allow.

  Timmy Baterman, now. First, did he believe the story? And second, did it make a difference?

  In spite of its convenience, he believed most of it. It was undeniable that if a place like the Micmac burying ground existed (as it did) and if people knew of it (as a few of the older Ludlowites did), then sooner or later someone would try the experiment. Human nature as Louis understood it made it more difficult to believe that it had stopped at a few pets and valuable breed animals.

  All right, then--did he also believe that Timmy Baterman had been transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?

  That was a more difficult question, and he was wary of it because he didn't want to believe it, and he had seen the results of that sort of mind-set before.

  No, he did not want to believe Timmy Baterman had been a daemon, but he would not--absolutely could not--allow himself to let what he wanted cloud his judgment.

  Louis thought about Hanratty, the bull. Hanratty, Jud said, had turned mean. So, in his way, had Timmy Baterman. Hanratty had later been "put down" by the same man who had somehow dragged the bull's body up to the Micmac burying ground on a sledge. Timmy Baterman had been "put down" by his father.

  But because Hanratty had gone bad, did that mean that all animals went bad? No. Hanratty the bull did not prove the general case; Hanratty was in fact an exception to the general case. Look back at the other animals--Jud's dog Spot, the old woman's parakeet, Church himself. They had all come back changed, and the change had been noticeable in all cases, but in the case of Spot, at least, the change hadn't been so great that Jud had forborne to recommend the process of . . . of . . .

  (resurrection)

  Yes, of resurrection to a friend years later. Of course, farther down the line he had tried to justify and hem and haw, and had spouted a lot of ominous, confused bullshit that could not even rightly be called philosophy.

  How could he refuse to take the chance available to him--this one, unbelievable chance--on the basis of the Timmy Baterman story? One swallow did not a summer make.

  You're slanting all the evidence in favor of the conclusion you want to produce, his mind protested. At least tell yourself the goddamned truth about the change in Church. Even if you want to disqualify the animals--the mice and the birds--what about the way he is? Muddled . . . that's the best word of all, that sums it up. The day we were out with the kite. You remember how Gage was that day? How vibrant and alive he was, reacting to everything? Wouldn't it be better to remember him that way? Do you want to resurrect a zombie from a grade-B horror picture? Or even something so prosaic as a retarded little boy? A boy who eats with his fingers and stares blankly at images on the TV screen and who will never learn to write his own name? What did Jud say about his dog? "It was like washing a piece of meat." Is that what you want? A piece of breathing meat? And even if you're able to be satisfied with that, how do you explain the return of your son from the dead to your wife? To your daughter? To Steve Masterton? To the world? What happens the first time Missy Dandridge pulls into the driveway and sees Gage riding his trike in the yard? Can't you hear her screams, Louis? Can't you see her harrowing her face with her fingernails? What do you say to the reporters? What do you say when a film crew from "Real People" turns up on your doorstep, wanting to shoot film of your resurrected son?

  Did any of this really matter, or was it only the voice of cowardice? Did he believe these things could not be dealt with? That Rachel would greet her dead son with anything but tears of joy?

  Yes, he supposed there was a real possibility that Gage might return . . . well . . . diminished. But would that change the quality of his love? Parents loved children who were born blind, children born as Siamese twins, children who were born with their guts abysmally rearranged. Parents pled for judicial mercy or executive clemency on behalf of children who had grown up to commit rape and murder and the torture of the innocent.

  Did he believe it would be impossible for him to love Gage even if Gage had to go on wearing diapers until he was eight? If he did not master the first-grade primer until he was twelve? If he never mastered it at all? Could he simply dismiss his son as a . . . a sort of divine abortion, when there was another recourse?

  But, Louis, my God, you don't live in a vacuum! People will say--

  He cut that thought off with rude, angry force. Of all the things not to consider now, public notice was probably the greatest of them.

  Louis glanced down at the raked dirt of Gage's grave and felt a wave of awe and horror course through him. Unknowing, moving by themselves, his fingers had drawn a pattern in the dirt--he had drawn a spiral.

  He swept the fingers of both hands through the dirt, rubbing the pattern out. Then he left Pleasantview, hurrying, feeling very much a trespasser now, believing that he would be seen, stopped, questioned at every turn of the p
ath.

  *

  He was late collecting his pizza, and although it had been left on top of one of the big ovens, it was semicold and greasy and every bit as tasty as cooked clay. Louis ate one piece and then tossed the rest out the window, box and all, as he headed back to Ludlow. He wasn't a litterbug by nature, but he did not want Rachel to see a mostly uneaten pizza at home in the wastebasket. It might raise a surmise in her mind--that a pizza wasn't really what he'd had in mind when he went to Bangor.

  Louis now began to think about the time and circumstance.

  Time. Time might be of extreme, even crucial, importance. Timmy Baterman had been dead a good while before his father could get him up to the Micmac burying ground. Timmy was shot the nineteenth . . . Timmy was buried--don't hold me to this, but I think it was July twenty-second. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn . . . saw Timmy walking up the road.

  All right, say that Bill Baterman had done it four days after his son's original interral . . . no. If he was going to err, let him err on the side of conservatism. Say three days. For the sake of argument, assume that Timmy Baterman returned from the dead on July twenty-fifth. That made six days between the boy's death and his return, and that was a conservative estimate. It might have been as long as ten days. For Gage, it had now been four days. Time had already gotten away from him to a degree, but it was still possible to cut Bill Baterman's best time considerably. If . . .

  If he could bring about circumstances similar to those which had made the resurrection of Church possible. Because Church had died at the best possible time, hadn't he? His family had been away when Church was struck and killed. No one was the wiser, except for him and Jud.

  His family had been in Chicago.

  For Louis, the final piece fell into place with a neat little click.

  *

  "You want us to what?" Rachel asked, staring at him, astounded.

  It was a quarter of ten. Ellie had gone to bed. Rachel had taken another Valium after cleaning up the detritus of the funeral party ("funeral party" was another of those horrible phrases full of unstated paradox, like "visiting hours," but there seemed no other phrase for the way they had spent their afternoon) and had seemed dazed and quiet ever since he returned from Bangor . . . but this had gotten through.