Pet Sematary Read online

  Maybe, he thought, Rachel is right. Maybe I'll just wake up one morning at the age of thirty-seven, put all these models in the attic, and take up hang gliding.

  Meanwhile Ellie looked serious.

  Far away, drifting in the clear air, he could hear that perfect Sunday morning sound of churchbells calling worshippers.

  "Hi, Dad," she said.

  "Hello, pumpkin. Waas happenin?"

  "Oh, nothing," she said, but her face said differently; her face said that plenty was up, and none of it was so hot, thank you very much. Her hair was freshly washed and fell loose to her shoulders. In this light it was still more blond than the brown it was inevitably becoming. She was wearing a dress, and it occurred to Louis that his daughter almost always put on a dress on Sundays, although they did not attend church. "What are you building?"

  Carefully glueing on a mudguard, he told her. "Look at this," he said, carefully handing her a hubcap. "See those linked R's? That's a nice detail, huh? If we fly back to Shytown for Thanksgiving and we get on an L-1011, you look out at the jet engines and you'll see those same R's."

  "Hubcap, big deal." She handed it back.

  "Please," he said. "If you own a Rolls-Royce, you call that a wheel covering. If you're rich enough to own a Rolls, you can strut a little. When I make my second million, I'm going to buy myself one. Rolls-Royce Corniche. Then when Gage gets carsick, he can throw up into real leather." And just by the way, Ellie, what's on your mind? But it didn't work that way with Ellie. You didn't ask things right out. She was wary of giving too much of herself away. It was a trait Louis admired.

  "Are we rich, Daddy?"

  "No," he said, "but we're not going away to starve either."

  "Michael Burns at school says all doctors are rich."

  "Well, you tell Michael Burns at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years . . . and you don't get rich running a university infirmary. You get rich being a specialist. A gynecologist or an orthopedist or a neurologist. They get rich quicker. For utility infielders like me, it takes longer."

  "Then why don't you be a specialist, Daddy?"

  Louis thought of his models again and of the way he had one day just not wanted to build any more warplanes, the way he had likewise gotten tired of Tiger tanks and gun emplacements, the way he had come to believe (almost overnight, it seemed in retrospect) that building boats in bottles was pretty dumb; and then he thought of what it would be like to spend your whole life inspecting children's feet for hammertoe or putting on the thin Latex gloves so you could grope along some woman's vaginal canal with one educated finger, feeling for bumps or lesions.

  "I just wouldn't like it," he said.

  Church came into the office, paused, inspected the situation with his bright green eyes. He leaped silently onto the windowsill and appeared to go to sleep.

  Ellie glanced at him and frowned, which struck Louis as exceedingly odd. Usually Ellie looked at Church with an expression of love so sappy it was almost painful. She began to walk around the office, looking at various models, and in a voice that was nearly casual, she said, "Boy, there were a lot of graves up in the Pet Sematary, weren't there?"

  Ah, here's the nub, Louis thought but did not look around; after examining his instructions, he began putting the carriage lamps on the Rolls.

  "There were," he said. "Better than a hundred, I'd say."

  "Daddy, why don't pets live as long as people?"

  "Well, some animals do live about as long," he said, "and some live much longer. Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really don't know how old they are . . . or maybe they do, and they just can't believe it."

  Ellie dismissed these simply enough. "Elephants and sea turtles aren't pets. Pets don't live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it's like nine of our years."

  "Seven," Louis corrected automatically. "I see what you're getting at, honey, and there's some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there's this thing called metabolism, and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too--some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people--me, for instance--just can't eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that's all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time."

  Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. "Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo--"

  "What about cats?" Ellie asked and looked at Church again.

  "Well, cats live as long as dogs," he said, "mostly, anyway." This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter's bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and--yes, Louis would have sworn it--cold delight. He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception--a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another tom got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car. Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

  But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.

  "I mean," he said, "Church is only three now, and you're five. He might still be alive when you're fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that's a long time away."

  "It doesn't seem long to me," Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. "Not long at all."

  Lois gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come. She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess.

  "Honey," he said, "if it was up to me, I'd let Church live to be a hundred. But I don't make the rules."

  "Who does?" she asked, and then, with infinite scorn: "God, I suppose."

  Louis stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious.

  "God or Somebody," he said. "Clocks run down--that's all I know. There are no guarantees, babe."

  "I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets!" she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. "I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!"

  There were footsteps across the kitchen, and Rachel looked in, startled. Ellie was now weeping against Louis's chest. The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.

  "Ellie," he said, rocking her, "Ellie, Ellie, Church isn't dead; he's right over there, sleeping."

  "But he could be," she wept. "He could be, any time."

  He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl's tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she
wept because of the human being's wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die

  (any time!)

  and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child's hands could feel.

  It would be easy to lie at this point, the way he had lied earlier about the life expectancy of tomcats. But a lie would be remembered later and perhaps finally totted up on the report card all children hand in to themselves on their parents. His own mother had told him such a lie, an innocuous one about women finding babies in the dewy grass when they really wanted them, and as innocuous as the lie had been, Louis had never forgiven his mother for telling it--or himself for believing it.

  "Honey," he said, "it happens. It's a part of life."

  "It's a bad part!" she cried. "It's a really bad part!"

  There was no answer for this. She wept. Eventually her tears would stop. It was a necessary first step on the way to making an uneasy peace with a truth that was never going to go away.

  He held his daughter and listened to churchbells on Sunday morning, floating across the September fields; and it was some time after her tears had stopped before he realized that, like Church, she had gone to sleep.

  *

  He put her up in her bed and then came downstairs to the kitchen, where Rachel was beating cake batter too hard. He mentioned his surprise that Ellie should just cork off like that in the middle of the morning; it wasn't like her.

  "No," Rachel said, setting the bowl down on the counter with a decisive thump. "It isn't, but I think she was awake most of the night. I heard her tossing around, and Church cried to go out around three. He only does that when she's restless."

  "Why would she . . . ?"

  "Oh, you know why!" Rachel said angrily. "That damned pet cemetery is why! It really upset her, Lou. It was the first cemetery of any kind for her, and it just . . . upset her. I don't think I'll write your friend Jud Crandall any thank-you notes for that little hike."

  All at once he's my friend, Louis thought, bemused and distressed at the same time.

  "Rachel--"

  "And I don't want her going up there again."

  "Rachel, what Jud said about the path is true."

  "It's not the path and you know it," Rachel said. She picked up the bowl again and began beating the cake batter even faster. "It's that damned place. It's unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path . . . fucking morbid is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don't want Ellie to catch it."

  Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends' marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.

  "Honey, it's just a pet cemetery," he said.

  "The way she was crying in there just now," Rachel said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter-covered spoon, "do you think it's just a pet cemetery to her? It's going to leave a scar, Lou. No. She's not going up there anymore. It's not the path, it's the place. Here she is already thinking Church is going to die."

  For a moment Louis had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Ellie; she had simply donned stilts, one of her mother's dresses, and a very clever, very realistic Rachel mask. Even the expression was the same--set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.

  He groped, because suddenly the issue seemed large to him, not a thing to be simply passed over in deference to that mystery . . . or that aloneness. He groped because it seemed to him that she was missing something so large it nearly filled the landscape, and you couldn't do that unless you were deliberately closing your eyes to it.

  "Rachel," he said, "Church is going to die."

  She stared at him angrily. "That is hardly the point," she said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. "Church is not going to die today, or tomorrow--"

  "I tried to tell her that--"

  "Or the day after that, or probably for years--"

  "Honey, we can't be sure of th--"

  "Of course we can!" she shouted. "We take good care of him, he's not going to die, no one is going to die around here, and so why do you want to go and get a little girl all upset about something she can't understand until she's much older?"

  "Rachel, listen."

  But Rachel had no intention of listening. She was blazing. "It's bad enough to try and cope with a death--a pet or a friend or a relative--when it happens, without turning it into a . . . a goddam tourist attraction . . . a F-F-Forest Lawn for a-animals . . ." Tears were running down her cheeks.

  "Rachel," he said and tried to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture.

  "Never mind," she said. "You don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about."

  He sighed. "I feel like I fell through a hidden trapdoor and into a giant Mixmaster," he said, hoping for a smile. He got none; only her eyes, locked on his, black and blazing. She was furious, he realized; not just angry, but absolutely furious. "Rachel," he said suddenly, not fully sure what he was going to say until it was out, "how did you sleep last night?"

  "Oh boy," she said scornfully, turning away--but not before he had seen a wounded flicker in her eyes. "That's really intelligent. Really intelligent. You never change, Louis. When something isn't going right, blame Rachel, right? Rachel's just having one of her weird emotional reactions."

  "That's not fair."

  "No?" She took the bowl of cake batter over to the far counter by the stove and set it down with another bang. She began to grease a cake tin, her lips pressed tightly together.

  He said patiently, "There's nothing wrong with a child finding out something about death, Rachel. In fact, I'd call it a necessary thing. Ellie's reaction--her crying--that seemed perfectly natural to me. It--"

  "Oh, it sounded natural," Rachel said, whirling on him again. "It sounded very natural to hear her weeping her heart out over her cat which is perfectly fine--"

  "Stop it," he said. "You're not making any sense."

  "I don't want to discuss it anymore."

  "Yes, but we're going to," he said, angry himself now. "You had your at-bats--how about giving me mine?"

  "She's not going up there anymore. And as far as I'm concerned, the subject is closed."

  "Ellie has known where babies come from since last year," Louis said deliberately. "We got her the Myers book and talked to her about it, do you remember that? We both agreed that children ought to know where they come from."

  "That has nothing to do with--"

  "It does, though!" he said roughly. "When I was talking to her in my office, about Church, I got thinking about my mother and how she spun me that old cabbage-leaf story when I asked her where women got babies. I've never forgotten that lie. I don't think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them."

>   "Where babies come from has nothing to do with a goddam pet cemetery!" Rachel cried at him, and what her eyes said to him was Talk about the parallels all night and all day, if you want to, Louis; talk until you turn blue, but I won't accept it.

  Still, he tried.

  "She knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It's perfectly natural. In fact, I think it's the most natural thing in the w--"

  "Will you stop saying that!" she screamed suddenly--really screamed--and Louis recoiled, startled. His elbow struck the open bag of flour on the counter. It tumbled off the edge and struck the floor, splitting open. Flour puffed up in a dry white cloud.

  "Oh fuck," he said dismally.

  In an upstairs room, Gage began to cry.

  "That's nice," she said, also crying now. "You woke the baby up too. Thanks for a nice, quiet, stressless Sunday morning."

  She started by him and Louis put a hand on her arm. "Let me ask you something," he said, "because I know that anything--literally anything--can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that. Do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if her cat gets distemper or leukemia--cats are very prone to leukemia, you know--or if he gets run over in that road? Do you want to be the one, Rachel?"