… no, more than that. It’s doubled it, cubed it, raised it to the nth power.
And it isn’t just grief it feeds on. Sanity. It’s eaten your sanity. The flaw is only the inability to accept, not uncommon. It’s cost you your wife, and it’s almost surely cost you your best friend as well as your son. This is it. What comes when you’re too slow wishing away the thing that knocks on your door in the middle of the night is simple enough: total darkness.
I would commit suicide now, he thought, and I suppose it’s in the cards, isn’t it? I have the equipment in my bag. It has managed everything, managed it from the first. The burying ground, the Wendigo, whatever it is. It forced our cat into the road, and perhaps it forced Gage into the road as well, it brought Rachel home, but only in its own good time. Surely I’m meant to do that and I want to.
But things have to be put right, don’t they?
Yes. They did.
There was Gage to think about. Gage was still out there. Somewhere.
He followed the footprints through the dining room and the living room and back up the stairs. They were smudged there because he had walked over them on his way down without seeing them. They led into the bedroom. He was here, Louis thought wonderingly, he was right here, and then he saw that his medical bag was unsnapped.
The contents inside, which he always arranged with careful neatness, were now in jumbled disorder. But it did not take Louis long to see that his scalpel was missing, and he put his hands over his face and sat that way for some time, a faint, despairing noise coming from his throat.
At last he opened the bag again and began to look through it.
Downstairs again.
The sound of the pantry door being opened. The sound of a cupboard being opened, then slammed shut. The busy whine of the can opener. Last the sound of the garage door opening and closing. And then the house stood empty in the May sunshine, as it had stood empty on that August day the year before, waiting for the new people to arrive… as it would wait for other new people to arrive at some future date. A young married couple perhaps, with no children (but with hopes and plans). Bright young marrieds with a taste for Mondavi wine and Lцwenbrдu beer-he would be in charge of the Northeast Bank’s credit department perhaps, she with a dental hygienist’s credential or maybe three years’ experience as an optometrist’s assistant. He would split half a cord of wood for the fireplace, she would wear high-waisted corduroy pants and walk in Mrs.
Vinton’s field, collecting November’s fall grasses for a table centerpiece, her hair in a ponytail, the brightest thing under the gray skies, totally unaware that an invisible Vulture rode the air currents overhead. They would congratulate themselves on their lack of superstition, on their hardheadedness in snaring the house in spite of its history-they would tell their friends that it had been firesale-priced and joke about the ghost in the attic, and all of them would have another Lцwenbrдu or another glass of Mondavi, and they would play backgammon or Mile Bourne.
And perhaps they would have a dog.
61
Louis paused on the soft shoulder to let an Orinco truck loaded with chemical fertilizer blast by him, and then he crossed the street to Jud’s house, trailing his shadow to the west behind him. He held an open can of Cab catfood in one hand.
Church saw him coming and sat up, his eyes watchful.
“Hi, Church,” Louis said, surveying the silent house. “Want some grub?”
He put the can of catfood down on the trunk of the Chevette and watched as Church leaped lightly down from its roof and began to eat. Louis put his hand in his jacket pocket. Church looked around at him, tensing, as if reading his mind.
Louis smiled and stepped away from the car. Church began to eat again, and Louis took a syringe from his pocket. He stripped the paper covering from it and filled it with 75 milligrams of morphine. He put the multidose vial back in his jacket and walked over to Church, who looked around again mistrustfully. Louis smiled at the cat and said, “Go on, eat up, Church. Hey-ho, let’s go, right?” He stroked the cat, felt its back arch, and when Church went back to his meal again, Louis seized it around its stinking guts and sank the needle deep into its haunch.
Church went electric in his grip, struggling against him, spitting and clawing, but Louis held on and depressed the plunger all the way. Only then did he let go. The cat leaped off the Chevette, hissing like a teakettle, yellow-green eyes wild and baleful. The needle and syringe dangled from its haunch as it leaped, then fell out and broke. Louis was indifferent. He had more of everything.
The cat started for the road, then turned back toward the house, as if remembering something. It got halfway there and then began to weave drunkenly.
It made the steps, leaped up to the first one, then fell off. It lay on the bare patch at the foot of the porch steps on its side, breathing weakly.
Louis glanced into the Chevette. If he had needed more confirmation than the stone that had replaced his heart, he had it: Rachel’s purse on the seat, her scarf, and a clutch of plane tickets spilling out of a Delta Airlines folder.
When he turned around again to walk to the porch, Church’s side had ceased its rapid, fluttery movement. Church was dead. Again.
Louis stepped over it and mounted the porch steps.
“Gage?”
It was cool in the front hail. Cool and dark. The single word fell into the silence like a stone down a deep-drilled well. Louis threw another.
“Gage?”
Nothing. Even the tick of the clock in the parlor had ceased. This morning there had been no one to wind it.
But there were tracks on the floor.
Louis went into the living room. There was the smell of cigarettes, stale and long since burned out. He saw Jud’s chair by the window. It was pushed askew, as if he had gotten up suddenly. There was an ashtray on the windowsill, and in it a neat roll of cigarette ash.
Jud sat here watching. Watching for what? For me of course, watching for me to come home. Only he missed me. Somehow he missed me.
Louis glanced at the four beer cans lined up in a neat row. Not enough to put him to sleep, but maybe he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. However it had been, it was just a little bit too good to have been perfectly accidental, wasn’t it?
The muddy tracks approached the chair by the window. Mixed among the human tracks were a few faded, ghostly catprints. As if Church had walked in and out of the gravedirt left by Gage’s small shoes. Then the tracks made for the swinging door leading into the kitchen.
Heart thudding, Louis followed the tracks.
He pushed the door open and saw Jud’s splayed feet, his old green workpants, his checked flannel shirt. The old man was lying sprawled in a wide pool of drying blood.
Louis clapped his hands to his face, as if to blight his own vision. But there was no way to do that; he saw eyes, Jud’s eyes, open, accusing him, perhaps even accusing himself for setting this in motion.
But did he? Louis wondered. Did he really do that?
Jud had been told by Stanny B., and Stanny B. had been told by his father, and Stanny B. ’s father had been told by his father, the last trader to the Indians, a Frenchman from the north country in the days when Franklin Pierce had been a living President.
“Oh Jud, I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
Jud’s blank eyes stared at him.
“So sorry,” Louis repeated.
His feet seemed to move by themselves, and he was suddenly back to last Thanksgiving in his mind, not to that night when he and Jud had taken the cat up to the Pet Sematary and beyond, but to the turkey dinner Norma had put on the table, all of them laughing and talking, the two men drinking beer and Norma with a glass of white wine, and she had taken the white lawn tablecloth from the lower drawer as he was taking it now, but she had put it on the table and then anchored it with lovely pewter candlestick holders, while he-Louis watched it billow down over Jud’s body like a collapsing parachute, mercifully covering that dead face. Almost immediately, tiny rosepetals of deepest, darkest scarlet began to stain the white lawn.
“I’m sorry,” he said for a third time. “So sor-”
Then something moved overhead, something scraped, and the word broke off between his lips. It had been soft, it had been stealthy, but it had been deliberate. Oh yes, he was convinced of that. A sound he had been meant to hear.
His hands wanted to tremble, but he would not allow them. He stepped over to the kitchen table with its checkered oilcloth covering and reached into his pocket.
He removed three more Becton-Dickson syringes, stripped them of their paper coverings, and laid them out in a neat row. He removed three more multidose vials and filled each of the syringes with enough morphine to kill a horse-or Hanratty the bull, if it came to that. He put them in his pocket again.
He left the kitchen, crossed the living room, and stood at the base of the stairs.
“Cage?”
From somewhere in the shadows above there came a giggling-a cold and sunless laughter that made the skin on Louis’s back prickle.
He started up.
It was a long walk to the top of those stairs. He could well imagine a condemned man taking a walk almost as long (and as horribly short) to the platform of a scaffold with his hands tied behind his back, knowing that he would piss when he could no longer whistle.
He reached the top at last, one hand in his pocket, staring only at the wall.
How long did he stand that way? He did not know. He could now feel his sanity beginning to give way. This was an actual sensation, a true thing. It was interesting. He imagined a tree overloaded with ice in a terrible storm would feel this way-if trees could feel anything-shortly before toppling. It was interesting… and it was sort of amusing.
“Gage, want to go to Florida with me?”
That giggle again.
Louis turned and was greeted by the sight of his wife, to whom he had once carried a rose in his teeth, lying halfway down the hall, dead. Her legs were splayed out as Jud’s had been. Her back and head were cocked at an angle against the wall. She looked like a woman who has gone to sleep while reading in bed.
He walked down toward her.
Hello, darling, he thought, you came home.
Blood had splashed the wallpaper in idiot shapes. She had been stabbed a dozen times, two dozen, who knew? His scalpel had done this work.
Suddenly he saw her, really saw her, and Louis Creed began to scream.
His screams echoed and racketed shrilly through this house where now only death lived and walked. Eyes bulging, face livid, hair standing on end, he screamed; the sounds came from his swollen throat like the bells of hell, terrible shrieks that signaled the end not of love but of sanity; in his mind all the hideous images were suddenly unloosed at once. Victor Pascow dying on the infirmary carpet, Church coming back with bits of green plastic in his whiskers, Gage’s baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood, but most of all that thing he had seen near Little Cod Swamp, the thing that
