Pet Sematary

Louis, he thought, hearing nothing with his conscious mind after his own name. Oh my God he called me by my name.

  "Who are you?" Louis asked in a trembling, papery voice. "Who are you?"

  "Injun bring my fish."

  "How did you know my--"

  "Keep clear, us. Know--"

  "You--"

  "Caa," the young man said, and now Louis fancied he could smell death on his breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, ruin.

  "What?" A crazy urge came to shake him.

  "Gaaaaaaaa--"

  The young man in the red gym shorts began to shudder all over. Suddenly he seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression momentarily and seemed to find Louis's eyes. Then everything let go at once. There was a bad stink. Louis thought he would, must speak again. Then the eyes resumed their vacant expression . . . and began to glaze. The man was dead.

  Louis sat back, vaguely aware that all his clothes were sticking to him; he was drenched with sweat. Darkness bloomed, spreading a wing softly over his eyes, and the world began to swing sickeningly sideways. Recognizing what was happening, he half-turned from the dead man, thrust his head down between his knees, and pressed the nails of his left thumb and left forefinger into his gums hard enough to bring blood.

  After a moment the world began to clear again.

  13

  Then the room filled up with people, as if they were all only actors, waiting for their cue. This added to Louis's feeling of unreality and disorientation--the strength of these feelings, which he had studied in psychology classes but never actually experienced, frightened him badly. It was, he supposed, the way a person would feel shortly after someone had slipped a powerful dose of LSD into his drink.

  Like a play staged only for my benefit, he thought. The room is first conveniently cleared so the dying Sibyl can speak a few lines of oblique prophecy to me and me alone, and as soon as he's dead, everyone comes back.

  The candy-stripers bungled in, one on each end of the hard stretcher, the one they used for people with spinal or neck injuries. Joan Charlton followed them, saying that the campus police were on their way. The young man had been struck by a car while jogging. Louis thought of the joggers who had run in front of his car that morning and his guts rolled.

  Behind Charlton came Steve Masterton with two Campus Security cops. "Louis, the people who brought Pascow in are . . ." He broke off and said sharply, "Louis, are you all right?"

  "I'm okay," he said and got up. Faintness washed over him again and then withdrew. He groped. "Pascow is his name?"

  One of the campus cops said, "Victor Pascow, according to the girl he was jogging with."

  Louis glanced at his watch and subtracted two minutes. From the room where Masterton had sequestered the people who had brought Pascow in, he could hear a girl sobbing wildly. Welcome back to school, little lady, he thought. Have a nice semester. "Mr. Pascow died at 10:09 A.M.," he said.

  One of the cops wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  Masterton said again, "Louis, are you really okay? You look terrible."

  Louis opened his mouth to answer, and one of the candy-stripers abruptly dropped her end of the hard stretcher and ran out, vomiting down the front of her pinafore. A phone began to ring. The girl who had been sobbing now began to scream the dead man's name--"Vic! Vic! Vic!"--over and over. Bedlam. Confusion. One of the cops was asking Charlton if they could have a blanket to cover him up, and Charlton was saying she didn't know if she had the authority to requisition one, and Louis found himself thinking of a line from Maurice Sendak: "Let the wild rumpus start!"

  Those rotten giggles rose in his throat again, and somehow he managed to bottle them up. Had this Pascow really said the words Pet Sematary? Had this Pascow really spoken his name? Those were the things that were knocking him off kilter, the things that had sent him wobbling out of orbit. But already his mind seemed to be wrapping those few moments in a protective film--sculpting, changing, disconnecting. Surely he had said something else (if he had indeed spoken at all), and in the shock and unhappy passion of the moment, Louis had misinterpreted it. More likely, Pascow had only mouthed sounds, as he had at first thought.

  Louis groped for himself, for that part of himself that had caused the administration to give him this job over the other fifty-three applicants for the position. There was no one in command here, no forward motion; the room was full of milling people.

  "Steve, go give that girl a trank," he said, and just saying the words made him feel better. It was as if he were in a rocketship under power now, pulling away from a tiny moonlet. Said moonlet being, of course, that irrational moment when Pascow had spoken. Louis had been hired to take charge; he was going to do it.

  "Joan. Give the cop a blanket."

  "Doctor, we haven't inventoried--"

  "Give it to him anyway. Then check on that candy-striper." He looked at the other girl, who still held her end of the hard stretcher. She was staring at Pascow's remains with a kind of hypnotized fascination. "Candy-striper!" Louis said harshly, and her eyes jerked away from the body.

  "W-W-Wh--"

  "What's the other girl's name?"

  "W-Who?"

  "The one who puked," he said with deliberate harshness.

  "Juh-Juh-Judy. Judy DeLessio."

  "Your name?"

  "Carla." Now the girl sounded a little more steady.

  "Carla, you go check on Judy. And get that blanket. You'll find a pile of them in the little utility closet off Examining Room One. Go, all of you. Let's look a little professional here."

  They got moving. Very shortly the screaming in the other room quieted. The phone, which had stopped ringing, now began again. Louis pushed the hold button without picking up the receiver off its cradle.

  The older campus cop looked more together, and Louis spoke to him. "Who do we notify? Can you give me a list?"

  The cop nodded and said, "We haven't had one of these in six years. It's a bad way to start the semester."

  "It sure is," Louis said. He picked up the phone and punched off the hold button.

  "Hello? Who is--" an excited voice began, and Louis cut it off. He began to make his calls.

  14

  Things did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis and Richard Irving, the head of Campus Security, made a statement to the press. The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his fiancee. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women's gymnasium toward the center of campus at an excessive speed. Withers's car had struck Pascow and driven him head-first into a tree. Pascow had been brought to the infirmary in a blanket by his friends and two passersby. He had died minutes later. Withers was being held pending charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicular manslaughter.

  The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Pascow had died of head injuries. Louis, thinking of that broken window through which the brain itself could be seen, said he would rather let the Penobscot County coroner announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the four young people who had brought Pascow to the infirmary in the blanket might not have inadvertently caused his death.

  "No," Louis replied. "Not at all. Unhappily, Mr. Pascow was, in my opinion, mortally wounded upon being struck."

  There were other questions--a few--but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Louis sat in his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour before, immediately following the press conference--to catch himself on the evening news, Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of the day--or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it. He and Charlton were going over the cards in the "Front file"--those students who were pushing grimly through their college years in spite of some disability. There were twenty-three diabetics in the front file, fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics, and assorted
others: students with leukemia, students with cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy, blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle-cell anemia, which Louis had never even seen.

  Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left. Charlton came in and laid a pink memo slip on Louis's desk. Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.

  "Carpet?" he had asked.

  "It will have to be replaced," she said apologetically. "No way the stain's going to come out, Doctor."

  Of course not. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal--what his first med school roommate had called Tooners. "Hop up on the Toonerville Trolley, Louis," he'd say, "and I'll put on some Credence." More often than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and that was maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third semester and had ridden the Toonerville Trolley all the way to Vietnam as a medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured him over there, stoned to the eyeballs, listening to Credence do "Run Through the Jungle."

  But he needed something. If he was going to have to see that pink slip about the carpet on his note-minder board every time he glanced up from the front file spread out in front of them, he needed something.

  He was cruising fairly well when Mrs. Baillings, the night nurse, poked her head in and said, "Your wife, Dr. Creed. Line one."

  Louis glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly five-thirty; he had meant to be out of here an hour and a half ago.

  "Okay, Nancy. Thanks."

  He picked up the phone and punched line one. "Hi, honey. Just on my--"

  "Louis, are you all right?"

  "Yeah, fine."

  "I heard about it on the news. Lou, I'm so sorry." She paused a moment. "It was on the radio news. They had you on, answering some question. You sounded fine."

  "Did I? Good."

  "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "Yes, Rachel. I'm fine."

  "Come home," she said.

  "Yes," he said. Home sounded good to him.

  15

  She met him at the door, and his jaw dropped. She was wearing the net bra he liked, a pair of semitransparent panties, and nothing else.

  "You look delicious," he said. "Where are the kids?"

  "Missy Dandridge took them. We're on our own until eight-thirty . . . which gives us two and a half hours. Let's not waste it."

  She pressed against him. He could smell a faint, lovely scent--was it attar of roses? His arms went around her, first around her waist, and then his hands found her buttocks as her tongue danced lightly over his lips and then into his mouth, licking and darting.

  At last their kiss broke, and he asked her a bit hoarsely, "Are you for dinner?"

  "Dessert," she said and then began to rotate her lower body slowly and sensuously against his groin and abdomen. "But I promise you you don't have to eat anything you don't like."

  He reached for her, but she slipped out of his arms and took his hand. "Upstairs first," she said.

  *

  She drew him an extremely warm bath, then undressed him slowly and shooed him into the water. She donned the slightly rough sponge-glove that usually hung unused on the shower head, soaped his body gently, then rinsed it. He could feel the day--this horrible first day--slipping slowly off him. She had gotten quite wet, and her panties clung like a second skin.

  Louis started to get out of the tub, and she pushed him back gently.

  "What--"

  Now the sponge-glove gripped him gently--gently but with almost unbearable friction, moving slowly up and down.

  "Rachel--" Sweat had broken all over him, and not just from the heat of the tub.

  "Shush."

  It seemed to go on almost eternally--he would near climax, and the hand in the sponge-glove would slow, almost stop. Then it didn't stop but squeezed, loosened, squeezed again, until he came so strongly that he felt his eardrums bulge.

  "My God," he said shakily when he could speak again. "Where did you learn that?"

  "Girl Scouts," she said primly.

  *

  She had made a stroganoff which had been simmering during the bathtub episode, and Louis, who would have sworn at four o'clock that he would next want to eat sometime around Halloween, ate two helpings.

  Then she led him upstairs again.

  "Now," she said, "let's see what you can do for me."

  All things considered, Louis thought he rose to the occasion quite well.

  *

  Afterward, Rachel dressed in her old blue pajamas. Louis pulled on a flannel shirt and nearly shapeless corduroy pants--what Rachel called his grubs--and went after the kids.

  Missy Dandridge wanted to know about the accident, and Louis sketched it in for her, giving her less than she would probably read in the Bangor Daily News the following day. He didn't like doing it--it made him feel like the most rancid sort of gossip--but Missy would accept no money for sitting, and he was grateful to her for the evening he and Rachel had shared.

  Gage was asleep before Louis had gotten the mile between Missy's house and their own; even Ellie was yawning and glassy-eyed. He put Gage into fresh diapers, poured him into his sleeper suit, and popped him into his crib. Then he read Ellie a storybook. As usual, she clamored for Where the Wild Things Are, being a veteran wild thing herself. Louis convinced her to settle for The Cat in the Hat. She was asleep five minutes after he carried her up, and Rachel tucked her in.

  When he came downstairs again, Rachel was sitting in the living room with a glass of milk. A Dorothy Sayers mystery was open on one long thigh.

  "Louis, are you really all right?"

  "Honey, I'm fine," he said. "And thanks. For everything."

  "We aim to please," she said with a curving, slightly saucy smile. "Are you going over to Jud's for a beer?"

  He shook his head. "Not tonight. I'm totally bushed."

  "I hope I had something to do with that."

  "I think you did."

  "Then grab yourself a glass of milk, Doctor, and let's go to bed."

  *

  He thought perhaps he would lie awake, as he often had when he was interning, and days that were particularly hairy would play over and over in his mind. But he slid smoothly toward sleep, as if on a slightly inclined, frictionless board. He had read somewhere that it takes the average human being just seven minutes to turn off all the switches and uncouple from the day. Seven minutes for conscious and subconscious to revolve, like the trick wall in an amusement-park haunted house. Something a little eerie in that.

  He was almost there when he heard Rachel say, as if from a great distance, ". . . day after tomorrow."

  "Ummmmmm?"

  "Jolander. The vet. He's taking Church the day after tomorrow."

  "Oh." Church. Treasure your cojones while you got em, Church, old boy. Then he slipped away from everything, down a hole, sleeping deeply and without dreams.

  16

  Something woke him much later, a crash loud enough to cause him to sit up in bed, wondering if Ellie had fallen onto the floor or if maybe Gage's crib had collapsed. Then the moon sailed out from behind a cloud, flooding the room with cold white light, and he saw Victor Pascow standing in the doorway. The crash had been Pascow throwing open the door.

  He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian warpaint. His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.

  "Come on, Doctor," Pascow said. "We got places to go."

  Louis looked around. His wife was a vague hump under her yellow comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Pascow, who was dead but somehow not dead. Yet Louis felt no fear. He realized why almost at once.

  It's a dream, he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible. This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Bangor with the pathologist's tattoo--a Y-cut stitched back up--on him. Th
e pathologist probably tossed his brain into his chest cavity after taking a tissue sample and filled up the skull cavity with brown paper to prevent leaking--simpler than trying to fit the brain back into the skull like a jigsaw piece into a puzzle. Uncle Carl, father of the unfortunate Ruthie, had told him that pathologists did that, and all sorts of other random information that he supposed would give Rachel, with her death phobia, the screaming horrors. But Pascow was not here--no way, baby. Pascow was in a refrigerated locker with a tag around his toe. And he is most certainly not wearing those red jogging shorts in there.

  Yet the compulsion to get up was strong. Pascow's eyes were upon him.

  He threw back the covers and swung his feet onto the floor. The hooked rug--a wedding present from Rachel's grandmother long ago--pressed cold nubbles into the balls of his feet. The dream had a remarkable reality. It was so real that he would not follow Pascow until Pascow had turned and begun to go back down the stairs. The compulsion to follow was strong, but he did not want to be touched, even in a dream, by a walking corpse.

  But he did follow. Pascow's jogging shorts glimmered.

  They crossed the living room, dining room, kitchen. Louis expected Pascow to turn the lock and then lift the latch on the door which connected the kitchen to the shed where he garaged the station wagon and the Civic, but Pascow did no such thing. Instead of opening the door, he simply passed through it. And Louis, watching, thought with mild amazement: Is that how it's done? Remarkable! Anyone could do that!

  He tried it himself--and was a little amused to meet only unyielding wood. Apparently he was a hard-headed realist, even in his dreams. Louis twisted the knob on the Yale lock, lifted the latch, and let himself into the shed-garage. Pascow was not there. Louis wondered briefly if Pascow had just ceased to exist. Figures in dreams often did just that. So did locations--first you were standing nude by a swimming pool with a raging hardon, discussing the possibilities of wife swapping with, say, Roger and Missy Dandridge; then you blinked and you were climbing the side of a Hawaiian volcano. Maybe he had lost Pascow because this was the beginning of Act II.

  But when Louis emerged from the garage, he saw him again, standing in the faint moonlight at the back of the lawn--at the head of the path.

  Now fear came, entering softly, sifting through the hollow places of his body and filling them up with dirty smoke. He didn't want to go up there. He halted.