Pet Sematary by Stephen King
"Jud--"
"Don't question, Louis. Accept what's done and follow your heart."
"But--"
"But nothing. Accept what's done, Louis, and follow your heart. We did what was right this time . . . at least, I hope to Christ it was right. Another time it could be wrong--wrong as hell."
"Will you at least answer one question?"
"Well, let's hear what it is, and then we'll see."
"How did you know about that place?" This question had also occurred to Louis on the way back, along with the suspicion that Jud himself might be part Micmac--although he did not look like it; he looked as if every one of his ancestors had been one hundred percent card-carrying Anglos.
"Why, from Stanny B.," he said, looking surprised.
"He just told you?"
"No," Jud said. "It isn't the kind of place you just tell somebody about. I buried my dog Spot up there when I was ten. He was chasing a rabbit, and he run on some rusty barbed wire. The wounds infected and it killed him."
There was something wrong about that, something that didn't fit with something Louis had been previously told, but he was too tired to puzzle out the discontinuity. Jud said no more; only looked at him from his inscrutable old man's eyes.
"Goodnight, Jud," Louis said.
"Goodnight."
The old man crossed the road, carrying his pick and shovel.
"Thanks!" Louis called impulsively.
Jud didn't turn; he only raised one hand to indicate he had heard.
And in the house, suddenly, the telephone began to ring.
*
Louis ran, wincing at the aches that flared in his upper thighs and lower back, but by the time he had gotten into the warm kitchen, the phone had already rung six or seven times. It stopped ringing just as he put his hand on it. He picked it up anyway and said hello, but there was only the open hum.
That was Rachel, he thought. I'll call her back.
But suddenly it seemed like too much work to dial the number, to dance clumsily with her mother--or worse, her checkbook-brandishing father--to be passed on to Rachel . . . and then to Ellie. Ellie would still be up of course; it was an hour earlier in Chicago. Ellie would ask him how Church was doing.
Great, he's fine. Got hit by an Orinco truck. Somehow I'm absolutely positive it was an Orinco truck. Anything else would lack dramatic unity, if you know what I mean. You don't? Well, never mind. The truck killed him but didn't mark him up hardly at all. Jud and I planted him up in the old Micmac burying ground--sort of an annex to the Pet Sematary, if you know what I mean. Amazing walk, punkin. I'll take you up there sometime and we'll put flowers by his marker--excuse me, his cairn. After the quicksand's frozen over, that is, and the bears go to sleep for the winter.
He rehung the telephone, crossed to the sink, and filled it with hot water. He removed his shirt and washed. He had been sweating like a pig in spite of the cold, and a pig was exactly what he smelled like.
There was some leftover meatloaf in the refrigerator. Louis cut it into slabs, put them on a slice of Roman Meal bread, and added two thick rounds of Bermuda onion. He contemplated this for a moment before dousing it with ketchup and slamming down another slice of bread. If Rachel and Ellie had been around, they would have wrinkled their noses in identical gestures of distaste--yuck, gross.
Well, you missed it, ladies, Louis thought with undeniable satisfaction and gobbled his sandwich. It tasted great. Confucius say he who smell like pig eat like wolf, he thought and smiled. He chased the sandwich with several long swallows of milk directly from the carton--another habit Rachel frowned on strenuously--and then he went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed without even washing his teeth. His aches and pains had faded to one low throb that was almost comforting.
His watch was there where he had left it, and he looked at it. Ten minutes of nine. It really was incredible.
Louis turned off the light, turned over on his side, and slept.
He woke up sometime after three the next morning and shuffled to the bathroom. He was standing there urinating, blinking owlishly in the bright white fluorescent bathroom light, when the discrepancy suddenly showed up in his mind, and his eyes widened--it was as if two pieces of something which should have fitted together perfectly had instead thudded against one another and rebounded.
Tonight Jud had told him that his dog had died when he was ten--had died of infection after being scraped up in a snarl of rusty barbed wire. But on the late-summer day when all of them had walked up to the Pet Sematary together, Jud said that his dog had died of old age and was buried there--he had even pointed out the marker, although the years had worn the inscription away.
Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed. Something else was wrong, as well--and in a moment he had it. Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.
But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten.
Well, he's an old man, and old men get confused in their memories, he thought uneasily. He's said himself that he's noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness--groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age, he's getting off pretty goddamned light . . . senility's probably too strong a word for it in Jud's case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting when a dog died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.
But he wasn't able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.
At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought, Let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what's done is done and what's dead is dead--and the steps faded away.
And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.
23
He awoke at nine the next morning. Bright sunshine streamed in the bedroom's east windows. The telephone was ringing. Louis reached up and snared it. "Hello?"
"Hi!" Rachel said. "Did I wake you up? Hope so."
"You woke me up, you bitch," he said, smiling.
"Ooooh, such nasty language, you bad old bear," she said. "I tried to call you last night. Were you over at Jud's?"
He hesitated for only the tiniest fraction of a moment.
"Yes," he said. "Had a few beers. Norma was up at some sort of Thanksgiving supper. I thought about giving you a ring, but . . . you know."
They chatted awhile. Rachel updated him on her family, something he could have done without, although he took a small, mean satisfaction in the news that her father's bald spot seemed to be expanding at a faster rate.
"You want to talk to Gage?" Rachel asked.
Louis grinned. "Yeah, I guess so," he said. "Don't let him hang up the phone like he did the other time."
Much rattling at the other end. Dimly he heard Rachel cajoling the kid to say hi, Daddy.
At last Gage said, "Hi, Dayee."
"Hi, Gage," Louis said cheerfully. "How you doing? How's your life? Did you pull over your grandda's pipe rack again? I certainly hope so. Maybe this time you can trash his stamp collection as well."
Gage babbled on happily for thirty seconds or so, interspersing his gobbles and grunts with a few recognizable words from his growing vocabulary--mommy, Ellie, grandda, grandma, car (pronounced in the best Yankee tradition as kaaa, Louis was amused to n
At last Rachel pried the phone away from him to Gage's wail of indignation and Louis's measured relief--he loved his son and missed him like mad, but holding a conversation with a not-quite-two-year-old was like trying to play cribbage with a lunatic; the cards kept going everywhere and sometimes you found yourself pegging backwards.
"So how's everything there?" Rachel asked.
"Okay," Louis said, with no hesitation at all this time--but he was aware he had crossed a line, back when Rachel had asked him if he had gone over to Jud's last night and he told her he had. In his mind he suddenly heard Jud Crandall saying, The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis . . . a man grows what he can . . . and he tends it. "Well . . . a little dull, if you want to know the God's honest. Miss you."
"You actually mean to tell me you're not enjoying your vacation from this sideshow?"
"Oh, I like the quiet," he admitted, "sure. But it gets strange after the first twenty-four hours or so."
"Can I talk to Daddy?" It was Ellie in the background.
"Louis? Ellie's here."
"Okay, put her on."
He talked to Ellie for almost five minutes. She prattled on about the doll Grandma had gotten her, about the trip she and Grandda had taken to the stockyards ("Boy, do they stink, Daddy," Ellie said, and Louis thought, Your grandda's no rose, either, sweetie), about how she had helped make bread, and about how Gage had gotten away from Rachel while she was changing him. Gage had run down the hallway and pooped right in the doorway leading into Grandda's study (Atta boy, Gage! Louis thought, a big grin spreading over his face).
He actually thought he was going to get away--at least for this morning--and was getting ready to ask Ellie for her mother again so he could say goodbye to her when Ellie asked, "How's Church, Daddy? Does he miss me?"
The grin faded from Louis's mouth, but he answered readily and with the perfect note of offhanded casualness: "He's fine, I guess. I gave him the leftover beef stew last night and then put him out. Haven't seen him this morning, but I just woke up."
Oh boy, you would have made a great murderer--cool as a cucumber, Dr. Creed, when did you last see the deceased? He came in for supper. Had a plate of beef stew, in fact. I haven't seen him since then.
"Well, give him a kiss for me."
"Yuck, kiss your own cat," Louis said, and Ellie giggled.
"You want to talk to Mommy again, Daddy?"
"Sure. Put her on."
Then it was over. He talked to Rachel for another couple of minutes; the subject of Church was not touched upon. He and his wife exchanged love-you's, and Louis hung up.
"That's that," he said to the empty, sunny room, and maybe the worst thing about it was that he didn't feel bad, didn't feel guilty at all.
24
Steve Masterton called around nine-thirty and asked if Louis would like to come up to the university and play some racket ball--the place was deserted, he said gleefully, and they could play the whole goddamn day if they wanted to.
Louis could understand the glee--when the university was in session, the waiting list for a racket ball court was sometimes two days long--but he declined all the same, telling Steve he wanted to work on an article he was writing for The Magazine of College Medicine.
"You sure?" Steve asked. "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, you know."
"Check me later," Louis said. "Maybe I'll be up for it."
Steve said he would and hung up. Louis had told only a half-lie this time; he did plan to work on his article, which concerned itself with treating contagious ailments such as chicken-pox and mononucleosis in the infirmary environment, but the main reason he had turned down Steve's offer was that he was a mass of aches and pains. He had discovered this as soon as he finished talking to Rachel and went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. His back muscles creaked and groaned, his shoulders were sore from lugging the cat in that damned garbage bag, and the hamstrings in back of his knees, felt like guitar strings tuned three octaves past their normal pitch. Christ, he thought, and you had the stupid idea you were in some kind of shape. He would have looked cute trying to play racket ball with Steve, lumbering around like an arthritic old man.
And speaking of old men, he hadn't made that hike into the woods the night before by himself; he had gone with a guy who was closing in on eighty-five. He wondered if Jud was hurting as badly as he was this morning.
He spent an hour and a half working on his article, but it did not march very well. The emptiness and the silence began to get on his nerves, and at last he stacked his yellow legal pads and the offprints he had ordered from Johns Hopkins on the shelf above his typewriter, put on his parka, and crossed the road.
Jud and Norma weren't there, but there was an envelope tacked to the porch with his name written across the front of it. He took it down and opened the flap with his thumb.
Louis,
The good wife and me are off to Bucksport to do some shopping and to look at a welsh dresser at the Emporium Galorium that Norma's had her eye on for about a hundred years, it seems like. Probably we'll have a spot of lunch at McLeod's while we're there and come back in the late afternoon. Come on over for a beer or two tonight, if you want.
Your family is your family. I don't want to be no "buttinsky," but if Ellie were my daughter, I wouldn't rush to tell her that her cat got killed on the highway--why not let her enjoy her holiday?
By the way, Louis, I wouldn't talk about what we did last night either, not around North Ludlow. There are other people who know about that old Micmac burying ground, and there are other people in town who have buried their animals there . . . you might say it's another part of the "Pet Sematary." Believe it or not, there is even a bull buried up there! Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on Stackpole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or '68. Ha, ha! He told me that he and his two boys had taken that bull out there and I laughed until I thought I would rupture myself! But people around here don't like to talk about it, and they don't like people they consider to be "outsiders" to know about it, not because some of these old superstitions go back three hundred years or more (although they do), but because they sort of believe in those superstitions, and they think any "outsider" who knows that they do must be laughing at them. Does that make any sense? I suspect it doesn't, but nevertheless that's how it is. So just do me a favor and keep shut on the subject, will you?
We will talk more about this, probably tonight, and by then you will understand more, but in the meantime I want to tell you that you did yourself proud. I knew you would.
Jud
PS--Norma doesn't know what this note says--I told her something different--and I would just as soon keep it that way if it's all the same to you. I've told Norma more than one lie in the fifty-eight years we've been married, and I'd guess that most men tell their wives a smart of lies, but you know, most of them could stand before God and confess them without dropping their eyes from His.
Well, drop over tonight and we'll do a little boozing.
J.
Louis stood on the top step leading to Jud and Norma's porch--now bare, its comfortable rattan furniture stored to wait for another spring--frowning over this note. Don't tell Ellie the cat had been killed--he hadn't. Other animals buried there? Superstitions going back three hundred years?
. . . and by then you will understand more.
He touched this line lightly with his finger, and for the first time allowed his mind to deliberately turn back to what they had done the night before. It was blurred in his memory, it had the melting, cotton-candy texture of dreams or of waking actions performed under a light haze of drugs. He could recall climbing the deadfall and the odd, brighter quality of light in the bog--that and the way it had felt ten or twenty degrees warmer there--but all of it was like the conversation you had with the anesthetist just before he or she put you out like a light.
. . . and I'd guess most men tell their wives a smart of lies
Wives and daughters as well, Louis thought--but it was eerie, the way Jud seemed almost to know what had transpired this morning, both on the telephone and in his own head.
Slowly he refolded the note, which had been written on a sheet of lined paper like that in a schoolboy's Blue Horse tablet, and put it back into the envelope. He put the envelope into his hip pocket and crossed the road again.
25
It was around one o'clock that afternoon when Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme. Louis was in the garage, where he had been working off and on for the last six weeks on a fairly ambitious set of shelves; he wanted to put all of the dangerous garage stuff such as bottles of windshield wiper fluid, antifreeze, and sharp tools on these shelves, where they would be out of Gage's reach. He was hammering in a nail when Church strolled in, his tail high. Louis did not drop the hammer or even slam his thumb--his heart jogged in his chest but did not leap; a hot wire seemed to glow momentarily in his stomach and then cool immediately, like the filament of a light bulb that glows overbrightly for a moment and then burns out. It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their night hike up to the Micmac burying ground had meant all along.
He put the hammer down carefully, spat the nails he had been holding in his mouth back into his palm, and then dumped them into the pockets of his workman's apron. He went to Church and picked the cat up.
Live weight, he thought with a kind of sick excitement. He weighs what he did before he was hit. This is live weight. He was heavier in the bag. He was heavier when he was dead.
His heart took a bigger jog this time--almost a leap--and for a moment the garage seemed to swim in front of his eyes.
Church laid his ears back and allowed himself to be held. Louis carried him out into the sunlight and sat down on the back steps. The cat tried to get down then, but Louis stroked him and held him on his lap. His heart seemed to be taking regular jogs now.
He probed gently into the heavy ruff of fur at Church's neck, remembering the sick, boneless way Church's head had swiveled on his broken neck the night before. He felt nothing now but good muscle and tendon. He held Church up and looked at the cat's muzzle closely. What he saw there caused him to drop the cat onto the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole world was swimming now, and his head was full of a tottery, sick vertigo--it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started.