But the room was empty. He limped down to Ellie’s room, which was also empty, and then into the spare room. That room, which faced the highway, was also empty. But-.
There was a strange car across the road. Parked behind Jud’s truck.
So what?
So a strange vehicle over there could mean trouble, that was so what.
Louis drew the curtain aside and examined the vehicle more closely. It was a small blue car, a Chevette. And curled up on top of it, apparently sleeping, was Church.
He looked for a long time before letting the curtain go. Jud had company, that was all-so what? And it was maybe too early to worry about what was or was not going to happen with Gage; Church hadn’t come back until almost one o’clock, and it was only nine o’clock now. Nine o’clock on a beautiful May morning. He would simply go downstairs and make some coffee, get out the heating pad and wrap it around his knee, and-and what’s Church doing on top of that car?
“Oh, come on,” he said aloud and began to limp back down the hail. Cats slept anywhere and everywhere; it was the nature of the beast.
Except Church doesn’t cross the road anymore, remember?
“Forget it,” he muttered and paused halfway down the stairs (which he was working his way down almost sidesaddle). Talking to himself, that was bad. That was-What was that thing in the woods last night?
The thought came to him unbidden, making him tighten his lips the way the pain in his knee had done when he swung it out of’ bed. He had dreamed about the thing in the woods last night. His dreams of Disney World had seemed to blend naturally and with a deadly ease into dreams of that thing. He dreamed that it had touched him, spoiling all good dreams forever, rotting all good intentions.
It was the Wendigo, and it had turned him into not just a cannibal but the father of cannibals. In his dream he had been in the Pet Sematary again but not alone. Bill and Timmy Baterman had been there. Jud had been there, looking ghostly and dead, holding his dog Spot on a clothesrope leash. Lester Morgan was there with Hanratty the bull on a length of car-towing chain. Hanratty was lying on his side, looking around with a stupid, drugged fury. And for some reason Rachel was there too, and she’d had some sort of accident at the dinner table-spilled a bottle of catsup or maybe dropped a dish of cranberry jelly, maybe, because her dress was splattered with red stains.
And then, rising behind the deadfall to a titanic height, its skin a cracked reptilian yellow, its eyes great hooded foglamps, its ‘ears not ears at all but massive curling horns, was the Wendigo, a beast that looked like a lizard born of a woman. It pointed its horny, nailed finger at all of them as they craned their necks up and up to watch it.
“Stop,” he whispered and shuddered at the sound of his own voice. He would go out into the kitchen, he decided, and make himself breakfast just as if it were any ordinary day. A bachelor breakfast, full of comforting cholesterol. A couple of fried-egg sandwiches with mayo and a slice of Bermuda onion on each one. He smelled sweaty and dirty and cruddy, but he would save the shower for later; right now getting undressed seemed like too much work, and he was afraid he might have to get the scalpel out of his bag and actually cut the leg of the pants open in order to allow his bloated knee to escape. A hell of a way to treat good instruments, but none of the knives in the house would cut the heavy jeans fabric, and Rachel’s sewing scissors certainly would not do the trick.
But first, breakfast.
So he crossed the living room and then detoured into the front entry and looked out at the small blue car in Jud’s driveway. It was covered with dewfall, which meant it had been there for some time. Church was still on the roof but not sleeping. He appeared to be staring right at Louis with his ugly yellow-green eyes.
Louis stepped back hurriedly, as if someone had caught him peeking.
He went into the kitchen, rattled out a frying pan, put it on the stove, got eggs from the fridge. The kitchen was bright and crisp and clear. He tried to whistle-a whistle would bring the morning into its proper focus-but he could not. Things looked right, but they weren’t right. The house seemed dreadfully empty, and last night’s work weighed on him. Things were wrong, awry; he felt a shadow hovering, and he was afraid.
He limped into the bathroom and took a couple of aspirin with a glass of orange juice. He was working his way back to the stove when the telephone rang.
He did not answer it immediately but turned and looked at it, feeling slow and stupid, a sucker in some game which he was only now realizing he did not understand in the least.
Don’t answer that, you don’t want to answer that because that’s the bad news, that’s the end of the leash that leads around the corner and into the darkness, and I don’t think you want to see what’s on the other end of that leash, Louis, I really don’t think you do, so don’t answer that phone, run, run now, the car’s in the garage, get in it and take off, but don’t answer that phone-He crossed the room and picked it up, standing there with one hand on the dryer as he had so many times before, and it was Irwin Goldman, and even as Irwin said hello Louis saw the tracks crossing the kitchen-small, muddy tracks-and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest, and he believed he could feel his eyeballs swelling in his head, starting from their sockets; he believed that if he could have seen himself in a mirror at that moment he would have seen a face out of a seventeenth-century painting of a lunatic asylum. They were Gage’s tracks, Gage had been here, he had been here in the night, and so where was he now?
“It’s Irwin, Louis… Louis? Are you there? Hello?”
“Hello, Irwin,” he said, and already he knew what Irwin was going to say. He understood the blue car. He understood everything. The leash… the leash going into the darkness… he was moving fast along it now, hand over hand.
Ah, if he could drop it before he saw what was at the end! But it was his leash.
He had bought it.
“For a moment I thought we’d been cut off,” Goldman was saying.
“No, the phone slipped out of my hand,” Louis said. His voice was calm.
“Did Rachel make it home last night?”
“Oh yes,” Louis said, thinking of the blue car, Church perched on top of it, the blue car that was so still. His eye traced the muddy footprints on the floor.
“I ought to speak to her,” Goldman said. “Right away. It’s about Eileen.”
“Ellie? What about Ellie?”
“I really think Rachel-”
“Rachel’s not here right now,” Louis said harshly. “She’s gone to the store for bread and milk. What about Ellie? Come on, Irwin!”
“We had to take her to the hospital,” Goldman said reluctantly. “She had a bad dream or a whole series of them. She was hysterical and wouldn’t come out of it.
She-”
“Did they sedate her?”
“What?”
“Sedation,” Louis said impatiently, “did they give her sedation?”
“Yes, oh yes. They gave her a pill, and she went back to sleep.”
“Did she say anything? What scared her so badly?” He was gripping the phone white-knuckled now.
Silence from Irwin Goldman’s end-a long silence. This time Louis did not interrupt, much as he would have liked to.
“That was what scared Dory so badly,” Irwin said finally. “She babbled a lot before she got… before she was crying too hard to understand. Dory herself was almost… you know.”
“What did she say?”
“She said Oz the Great and Terrible had killed her mother. Only she didn’t say it that way. She said… she said ‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,’ which was the way our other daughter always used to say it. Our daughter Zelda. Louis, believe me when I say I would much rather have asked Rachel this question, but how much have you and she told Eileen about Zelda and how she died?”
Louis had closed his eyes; the world seemed to be rocking gently under his feet, and Goldman’s voice had the lost quality of a voice coming through thick mists.
You may hear sounds like voices, but they are only the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries.
“Louis, are you there?”
“Is she going to be all right?” Louis asked, his own voice distant. “Is Ellie going to be all right? Did you get a prognosis?”
“Delayed shock from the funeral,” Goldman said. “My own doctor came. Lathrop. A good man. Said she had a degree of fever and that when she woke up this afternoon, she might not even remember. But I think Rachel should come back.
Louis, I am frightened. I think you should come back too.”
Louis did not respond. The eye of God was on the sparrow; so said good King James. Louis, however, was a lesser being, and his eye was on those muddy footprints.
“Louis, Gage is dead,” Goldman was saying. “I know that must be hard to accept-for you and Rachel both-but your daughter is very much alive, and she needs you.”
Yes, I accept that. You may be a stupid old fart, Irwin, but perhaps the nightmare that passed between your two daughters on that April day in 1965 taught you something about sensitivity.
She needs me, but I can’t come, because I’m afraid-so terribly afraid-that my hands are filthy with her mother’s blood.
Louis regarded those hands. Louis regarded the dirt under his nails, which was so like the dirt which comprised those footprints on the kitchen floor.
“All right,” he said, “I understand. We’ll be there as soon as we can, Irwin. By tonight, if that’s possible. Thank you.”
“We did the best we could,” Goldman said. “Maybe we’re too old. Maybe, Louis, maybe we always were.”
“Did she say anything else?” Louis asked.
Goldman’s reply was like the toll of a funeral bell against the wall of his heart. “A lot, but only one other thing I could make out: ‘Paxcow says it’s too late.”
He hung up the telephone and moved back toward the stove in a daze, apparently meaning to continue on with breakfast or put the things away, he didn’t know which, and about halfway across the kitchen a wave of faintness poured over him, floating gray overcame his sight, and he swooned to the floor-”swoon” was the right word because it seemed to take forever. He fell down and down through cloudy depths; it seemed to him that he turned over and over, looped the loop, did a dipsy doodle or two, slipped an Immelmann. Then he struck on his bad knee and the chromium bolt of pain through his head brought him back with a scream of agony. For a moment he could only crouch, the tears starting from his eyes.
At last he made it back to his feet and stood there, swaying. But his head was clear again. That was something. wasn’t it?
The urge to flee came on him again for the last time, stronger than ever-he actually felt the comforting bulge of his car keys in his pocket. He would get in the Civic and drive to Chicago. He would get Ellie and go on from there. Of course by then Goldman would know something was wrong, that something was dreadfully amiss, but he would get her anyway… snatch her, if he had to.
Then his hand fell away from the bulge of the keys. What killed the urge was not a sense of futility, not guilt, not despair or the deep weariness inside him. It was the sight of those muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. In his mind’s eye he could see them tracing a path across the entire country-first to Illinois, then to Florida-across the entire world, if necessary. What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you.
There would come a day when he would open a door and there would be Gage, a demented parody of his former self, grinning a sunken grin, his clear blue eyes gone yellow and smart-stupid. Or Ellie would open the bathroom door for her morning shower, and there would be Gage in the tub, his body crisscrossed with the faded scars and bulges of his fatal accident, clean but stinking of the grave.
Oh yes, that day would come-he didn’t doubt it a bit.
“How could I have been so stupid?” he said to the empty room, talking to himself again, not caring. “How?”
Grief, not stupidity, Louis. There is a difference… small, but vital. The battery that burying ground survives on. Growing in power, Jud said, and of course he was right-and you’re part of its power now. It has fed on your grief.
