For the cairn.
56
Rachel slapped her face until it began to tingle, and still she kept nodding off. Once she snapped fully awake (she was in Pittsfield now and had the turnpike all to herself), and it seemed to her for a split second that dozens of silvery, merciless eyes were looking at her, twinkling like cold, hungry fire.
Then they resolved themselves into the small reflectors on the guardrail posts. The Chevette had drifted far over into the breakdown lane.
She wrenched the wheel to the left again, the tires wailing, and she believed she heard a faint tick! that might have been her right front bumper just kissing off one of those guardrail posts. Her heart leaped in her chest and began to bang so hard between her ribs that she saw small specks before her eyes, growing and shrinking in time with its beat. And yet a moment later, in spite of her close shave, her scare, and Robert Gordon shouting "Red Hot" on the radio, she was drowsing off again.
A crazy, paranoid thought came to her. "Paranoid, all right," she muttered under the rock and roll. She tried to laugh--but she couldn't. Not quite. Because the thought remained, and in the eye of the night, it gained a spooky kind of credibility. She began to feel like a cartoon figure who has run into the rubber band of a gigantic slingshot. Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner . . . inertia becomes . . . what? . . . elementary physics . . . something trying to hold her back . . . stay out of this, you . . . and a body at rest tends to remain at rest . . . Gage's body, for instance . . . once set in motion . . .
This time the scream of tires was louder, the shave a lot closer; for a moment there was the queeling, grailing sound of the Chevette running along the guardrail cables, scraping paint down to the twinkling metal, and for a moment the wheel didn't answer, and then Rachel was standing on the brake, sobbing; she had been asleep this time, not just dozing but asleep and dreaming at sixty miles an hour, and if there had been no guardrail . . . or if there had been an overpass stanchion . . .
She pulled over and put the car in park and wept into her hands, bewildered and afraid.
Something is trying to keep me away from him.
When she felt she had control of herself, she began to drive again--the little car's steering did not seem impaired, but she supposed the Avis company would have some serious questions for her when she returned the car to BIA tomorrow.
Never mind. One thing at a time. Got to get some coffee into me--that's the first thing.
When the Pittsfield exit came up, Rachel took it. About a mile down the road she came to bright arc-sodium lights and the steady mutter-growl of diesel engines. She pulled in, had the Chevette filled up ("Somebody put a pretty good ding along the side of her," the gas jockey said in an almost admiring voice), and then went into the diner, which smelled of deep-fat grease, vulcanized eggs . . . and, blessedly, of good strong coffee.
Rachel had three cups, one after another, like medicine--black, sweetened with a lot of sugar. A few truckers sat at the counter or in the booths, kidding the waitress, who somehow all managed to look like tired nurses filled with bad news under these fluorescent lights burning in the night's little hours.
She paid her check and went back out to where she had parked the Chevette. It wouldn't start. The key, when turned, would cause the solenoid to utter a dry click, but that was all.
Rachel began to beat her fists slowly and forcelessly against the steering wheel. Something was trying to stop her. There was no reason for this car, brand-new and with less than five thousand miles on its odometer, to have died like this, but it had. Somehow it had, and here she was, stranded in Pittsfield, still almost fifty miles from home.
She listened to the steady drone of the big trucks, and it came to her with a sudden, vicious certainty that the truck which had killed her son was here among them . . . not muttering but chuckling.
Rachel lowered her head and began to cry.
57
Louis stumbled over something and fell full-length on the ground. For a moment he didn't think he would be able to get up--getting up was far beyond him--he would simply lie here, listening to the chorus of peepers from Little God Swamp somewhere behind him and feeling the chorus of aches and pains inside his own body. He would lie here until he went to sleep. Or died. Probably the latter.
He could remember slipping the canvas bundle into the hole he had dug, and pushing most of the earth back into the hole with his bare hands. And he believed he could remember piling the rocks up, building from a broad base to a point . . .
From then to now he remembered very little. He had obviously gotten back down the steps again or he wouldn't be here, which was . . . where? Looking around, he thought he recognized one of the groves of great old pines not far beyond the deadfall. Could he have made it all the way back through Little God Swamp without knowing it? He supposed it was possible. Just.
This is far enough. I'll just sleep here.
But it was that thought, so falsely comforting, that got him to his feet and moving again. Because if he stayed here, that thing might find him . . . that thing might be in the woods and looking for him right this moment.
He scrubbed his hand up to his face, palm first, and was stupidly surprised to see blood on his hand . . . at some point he'd given himself a nosebleed. "Who gives a fuck?" he muttered hoarsely and grubbed apathetically around him until he had found the pick and shovel again.
Ten minutes later the deadfall loomed ahead. Louis climbed it, stumbling repeatedly but somehow not falling until he was almost down. Then he glanced at his feet, a branch promptly snapped (don't look down, Jud had said), another branch tumbled, spilling his foot outward, and he fell with a thud on his side, the wind knocked out of him.
I'll be goddamned if this isn't the second graveyard I've fallen into tonight . . . and I'll be goddamned if two isn't enough.
He began to feel around for the pick and shovel again, and laid his hands on them at last. For a moment he surveyed his surroundings, visible by starlight. Nearby was the grave of SMUCKY. He was obedient, Louis thought wearily. And TRIXIE, KILT ON THE HIGHWAY. The wind still blew strongly, and he could hear the faint ting-ting-ting of a piece of metal--perhaps it had once been a Del Monte can, cut laboriously by a grieving pet owner with his father's tinsnips and then flattened out with a hammer and nailed to a stick--and that brought the fear back again. He was too tired now to feel it as more than a somehow sickening pulsebeat. He had done it. That steady ting-ting-ting sound coming out of the darkness brought it home to him more than anything else.
He walked through the Pet Sematary, past the grave of MARTA OUR PET RABIT who had DYED MARCH 1 1965, and near the barrow of GEN. PATTON; he stepped over the ragged chunk of board that marked the final resting place of POLYNESIA. The tick of metal was louder now, and he paused, looking down. Here atop a slightly leaning board that had been driven into the ground, was a tin rectangle, and by starlight Louis read, RINGO OUR HAMSTER, 1964-1965. It was this piece of tin that was ticking repeatedly off the boards of the Pet Sematary's entry arch. Louis reached down to bend the piece of tin back . . . and then froze, scalp crawling.
Something was moving back there. Something was moving on the other side of the deadfall.
What he heard was a stealthy kind of sound--the furtive crackle of pine needles, the dry pop of a twig, the rattle of underbrush. They were almost lost under the sough of the wind through the pines.
"Gage?" Louis called hoarsely.
The very realization of what he was doing--standing here in the dark and calling his dead son--pulled his scalp stiff and brought his hair up on end. He began to shudder helplessly and steadily, as if with a sick and killing fever.
"Gage?"
The sounds had died away.
Not yet; it's too early. Don't ask me how I know, but I do. That isn't Gage over there. That's . . . something else.
He suddenly thought of Ellie telling him, He call
ed "Lazarus, come forth" . . . because if He hadn't called for Lazarus by name, everyone in that graveyard would have risen.
On the other side of the deadfall, those sounds had begun again. On the other side of the barrier. Almost--but not quite--hidden under the wind. As if something blind were stalking him with ancient instincts. His dreadfully overstimulated brain conjured horrible, sickening pictures: a giant mole, a great bat that flopped through the underbrush rather than flying.
Louis backed out of the Pet Sematary, not turning his back to the deadfall--that ghostlike glimmer, a livid scar on the dark--until he was well down the path. Then he began to hurry, and perhaps a quarter of a mile before the path ran out of the woods and into the field behind his house, he found enough left inside him to run.
*
Louis slung the pick and shovel indifferently inside the garage and stood for a moment at the head of his driveway, looking first back the way he had come and then up at the sky. It was quarter past four in the morning, and he supposed dawn could not be so far away. Light would already be three quarters of the way across the Atlantic, but for now, here in Ludlow, the night held hard. The wind blew steadily.
He went into the house, feeling his way along the side of the garage and unlocking the back door. He went through the kitchen without turning on a light and stepped into the small bathroom between the kitchen and the dining room. Here he did snap on a light, and the first thing he saw was Church, curled up on top of the toilet tank, staring at him with those muddy yellow-green eyes.
"Church," he said. "I thought someone put you out."
Church only looked at him from atop the toilet tank. Yes, someone had put Church out; he had done it himself. He remembered that very clearly. Just as he remembered replacing the window pane down-cellar that time and then telling himself that that had taken care of the problem. But exactly whom had he been kidding? When Church wanted to get in, Church got in. Because Church was different now.
It didn't matter. In this dull, exhausted aftermath, nothing seemed to matter. He felt like something less than human now, one of George Romero's stupid, lurching movie-zombies, or maybe someone who had escaped from T. S. Eliot's poem about the hollow men. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling through Little God Swamp and up to the Micmac burying ground, he thought and uttered a dry chuckle.
"Headpiece full of straw, Church," he said in his croaking voice. He was unbuttoning his shirt now. "That's me. You better believe it."
There was a nice bruise coming on his left side, about halfway up his ribcage, and when he rolled up his pants leg he saw that the knee he had banged on the gravestone was swelling up like a balloon. It had already turned a rotten purple-black, and he supposed that as soon as he stopped flexing it, the joint would become stiff and painfully obdurate--as if it had been dipped in cement. It looked like one of those injuries that might want to converse with him on rainy days for the rest of his life.
He reached out a hand to stroke Church, wanting some sort of comfort, but the cat leaped down from the toilet tank, staggering in that drunken and weirdly unfeline way, and left for some other place. It spared Louis one flat, yellow glance as it went.
There was Ben-Gay in the medicine cabinet. Louis lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and smeared a gob on his bad knee. Then he rubbed some more on the small of his back--a clumsy operation.
He left the toilet and walked into the living room. He turned on the hall light and stood there at the foot of the stairs for a moment, looking stupidly around. How strange it all seemed! Here was where he had stood on Christmas Eve when he had given Rachel the sapphire. It had been in the pocket of his robe. There was his chair, where he had done his best to explain the facts of death to Ellie after Norma Crandall's fatal heart attack--facts he had found ultimately unacceptable to himself. The Christmas tree had stood in that corner, Ellie's construction-paper turkey--the one that had reminded Louis of some sort of futuristic crow--had been Scotch-taped in that window, and much earlier the entire room had been empty except for the United Van Lines boxes, filled with their family possessions and trucked across half the country from the Midwest. He remembered thinking that their things looked very insignificant, boxed up like that--a small enough bulwark between his family and the coldness of all the outer world where their names and their family customs were not known.
How strange it all seemed . . . and how he wished they had never heard of the University of Maine, or Ludlow, or Jud and Norma Crandall, or any of it.
He went upstairs and in the bathroom at the top he got the stool, stood on it, and took down the small black bag from on top of the medicine cabinet. He took this into the master bedroom, sat down, and began to rummage through it. Yes, there were syringes in case he needed one, and amid the rolls of surgical tape and surgical scissors and neatly wrapped papers of surgical gut were several ampules of very deadly stuff.
If needed.
Louis snapped the bag shut and put it by the bed. He turned off the overhead light, then lay down, hands behind his head. To lie here on his back, at rest, was exquisite. His thoughts turned to Disney World again. He saw himself in a plain white uniform, driving a white van with the mouse-ears logo on it--nothing to indicate it was a rescue unit on the outside, of course, nothing to scare the paying customers.
Gage was sitting beside him, his skin deeply tanned, the whites of his eyes bluish with health. Here, just to the left, was Goofy, shaking hands with a little boy; the kid was in a trance of wonder. Here was Winnie the Pooh posing with two laughing grandmas in pants suits so a third laughing grandma could snap their pictures; here was a little girl in her best dress crying, "I love you, Tigger! I love you, Tigger!"
He and his son were on patrol. He and his son were the sentries in this magic land, and they cruised endlessly in their white van with the red dashboard flasher neatly and sensibly covered. They were not looking for trouble, not they, but they were ready for it should it show its face. That it was lurking even here, in a place dedicated to such innocent pleasures, could not be denied; some grinning man buying film along Main Street could clutch his chest as the heart attack struck, a pregnant woman might suddenly feel the labor pains start as she walked down the steps from the Sky Chariot, a teenage girl as pretty as a Norman Rockwell cover might suddenly collapse in a flopping epileptic fit, loafers rattling out a jagged backbeat on the cement as the signals in her brain suddenly jammed up. There were sunstroke and heatstroke and brainstroke, and perhaps at the end of some sultry Orlando summer afternoon there might even be a stroke of lightning; there was, even, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible himself here--he might be glimpsed walking around near the monorail's point of egress into the Magic Kingdom or peering down from one of the flying Dumbos with his flat and stupid gaze--down here Louis and Gage had come to know him as just another amusement park figure like Goofy or Mickey or Tigger or the estimable Mr. D. Duck. He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity--Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too--Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who's out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don't be afraid, it's just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leuk
emia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let's go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation--in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name's Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want--hell, we're old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can't stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I've got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.
And that thin voice is crying, "I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . ."
We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn't war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man's heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.
Thinking such troubled half-dreaming thoughts, Louis Creed slipped away, unplugging his connections to waking reality line by line, until all thoughts ceased and exhaustion dragged him down to black dreamless unconsciousness.
*
Just before the first signs of dawn touched the sky in the east, there were footsteps on the stairs. They were slow and clumsy but purposeful. A shadow moved in the shadows of the hall. A smell came with it--a stench. Louis, even in his thick sleep, muttered and turned away from that smell. There was the steady pull and release of respiration.
The shape stood outside the master bedroom door for some little time, not moving. Then it came inside. Louis's face was buried in his pillow. White hands reached out, and there was a click as the black doctor's bag by the bed was opened.