had pushed the tree over, the thing with the yellow eyes, the Wendigo, creature of the north country, the dead thing whose touch awakens unspeakable appetites.
Rachel had not just been killed.
Something had been… something had been at her.
(! CLICK!) That click was in his head. It was the sound of some relay fusing and burning out forever, the sound of lightning stroking down in a direct hit, the sound of a door opening.
He looked up numbly, the scream still shivering in his throat and here was Cage at last, his mouth smeared with blood, his chin dripping, his lips pulled back in a hellish grin. In one hand he held Louis’s scalpel.
As he brought it down, Louis pulled back with no real thought at all. The scalpel whickered past his face, and Gage overbalanced. He is as clumsy as Church, Louis thought. Louis kicked his feet from under him. Gage fell awkwardly, and Louis was on him before he could get up, straddling him, one knee pinning the hand which held the scalpel.
“No,” the thing under him panted. Its face twisted and writhed. Its eyes were baleful, insectile in their stupid hate. “No, no, no-”
Louis clawed for one of the hypos, got it out. He would have to be quick. The thing under him was like a greased fish and it would not let go of the scalpel no matter how hard he bore down on its wrist. And its face seemed to ripple and change even as he looked at it. It was Jud’s face, dead and staring; it was the dented, ruined face of Victor Pascow, eyes rolling mindlessly; it was, mirrorlike, Louis’s own, so dreadfully pale and lunatic. Then it changed again and became the face of that creature in the woods-the low brow, the dead yellow eyes, the tongue long and pointed and bifurcated, grinning and hissing.
“No, no, no-no-no-”
It bucked beneath him. The hypo flew out of Louis’s hand and rolled a short way down the hail. He groped for another, brought it out, and jammed it straight down into the small of Gage’s back.
It screamed beneath him, body straining and sunfishing, nearly throwing him off.
Grunting, Louis got the third syringe and jammed this one home in Gage’s arm, depressing the plunger all the way. He got off then and began to back slowly down the hallway. Cage got slowly to his feet and began to stagger toward him.
Five steps and the scalpel fell from its hand. It struck the floor blade first and stuck itself in the wood, quivering. Ten steps and that strange yellow light in its eyes began to fade. A dozen and it fell to its knees.
Now Cage looked up at him and for a moment Louis saw his son-his real son-his face unhappy and filled with pain.
“Daddy!” he cried, and then fell forward on his face.
Louis stood there for a moment, then went to Gage, moving carefully, expecting some trick. But there was no trick, no sudden leap with clawed hands. He slid his fingers expertly down Gage’s throat, found the pulse, and held it. He was then a doctor for the last time in his life, monitoring the pulse, monitoring until there was nothing, nothing inside, nothing outside.
When it was gone at last, Louis got up and sauntered down the hail to a far corner. He crouched there, pulling himself into a ball, cramming himself into the corner, tighter and tighter. He found he could make himself smaller if he put a thumb in his mouth and so he did that.
He remained that way for better than two hours… and then, little by little, a dark and oh-so-plausible idea came to him. He pulled his thumb from his mouth.
It made a small pop. Louis got himself (hey-ho let’s go) going again.
In the room where Gage had hidden, he stripped the sheet from the bed and took it out into the hail. He wrapped his wife’s body in it, gently, with love. He was humming but did not realize it.
He found gasoline in Jud’s garage. Five gallons of it in a red can next to the Lawnboy. More than enough. He began in the kitchen where Jud still lay under the Thanksgiving tablecloth. He drenched that, then moved into the living room with the can still upended, spraying amber gas over the rug, the sofa, the magazine rack, the chairs, and so out into the downstairs hail and toward the back bedroom. The smell of gas was strong and rich.
Jud’s matches were by the chair where he had kept his fruitless watch, on top of his cigarettes. Louis took them. At the front door he tossed a lighted match back over his shoulder and stepped out. The blast of the heat was immediate and savage, making the skin on his neck feel too small. He shut the door neatly and only stood on the porch for a moment, watching the orange flickers behind Norma’s curtains. Then he crossed the porch, pausing for a moment, remembering the beers he and Jud had drunk here a million years ago, listening to the soft, gathering roar of fire within the house.
Then he stepped out.
62
Steve Masterton came around the curve just before Louis’s house and saw the smoke immediately-not from Louis’s place, but from the house that belonged to the old duck across the street.
He had come out this morning because he had been worried about Louis-deeply worried. Chariton had told him about Rachel’s call of the day before, and that had set him to wondering just where Louis was… and what he was up to.
His worry was vague, but it itched at his mind-he wasn’t going to feel right until he had gone out there and checked to see if things were okay… or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.
The spring weather had emptied the infirmary like white magic, and Surrendra had told him to go ahead; he could handle whatever came up. So Steve had jumped onto his Honda, which he had liberated from the garage only last weekend, and headed out for Ludlow. Maybe he pushed the cycle a little faster than was strictly necessary, but the worry was there; it gnawed. And with it came the absurd feeling that he was already too late. Stupid, of course, but in the pit of his stomach there was a feeling similar to the one he’d had there last fall when that Pascow thing cropped up-a feeling of miserable surprise and almost leaden disillusion. He was by no means a religious man (in college Steve had been a member of the Atheist’s Society for two semesters and had dropped out only when his advisor had told him-privately and very much off the record-that it might hurt his chances to obtain a med school scholarship later on), but he supposed he fell as much heir to whatever biological or biorhythmic conditions passed for premonitions as any other human being, and the death of Pascow had seemed to set a tone for the year which followed, somehow. Not a good year by any means. Two of Surrendra’s relatives had been clapped in jail back home, some political thing, and Surrendra had told him that he believed one of them-an uncle he cared for very much-might well now be dead. Surrendra had wept, and the tears from the usually benign Indian had frightened Steve. And Charlton’s mother had had a radical mastectomy. The tough nurse was not very optimistic about her mother’s chances for joining the Five-Year Club. Steve himself had attended four funerals since the death of Victor Pascow-his wife’s sister, killed in a car crash; a cousin, killed in a freak accident as the result of a barroom bet (he had been electrocuted while proving he could shinny all the way to the top of a power pole); a grandparent; and of course Louis’s little boy.
He liked Louis enormously, and he wanted to make sure Louis was all right. Louis had been through hell lately.
When he saw the billows of smoke, his first thought was that this was something else to lay at the door of Victor Pascow, who seemed, in his dying, to have removed some sort of crash barrier between these ordinary people and an extraordinary run of bad luck. But that was stupid, and Louis’s house was the proof. It stood calm and white, a little piece of clean-limbed New England architecture in the midmorning sun.
People were running toward the old duck’s house, and as Steve banked his bike across the road and pulled into Louis’s driveway, he saw a man dash up onto the old duck’s porch, approach the front door, and then retreat. It was well that he did; a moment later the glass pane in the center of the door blew out, and flames boiled through the opening. If the fool actually had gotten the door open, the blowout would have cooked him like a lobster.
Steve dismounted and put the Honda on its kickstand, Louis momentarily forgotten. He was drawn by all the old mystery of fire. Maybe half a dozen people had gathered; except for the would-be hero, who lingered on the Crandalls’ lawn, they kept a respectful distance. Now the windows between the porch and the house blew out. Glass danced in the air. The would-be hero ducked and ran for it. Flames ran up the inner wail of the porch like groping hands, blistering the white paint. As Steve watched, one of the rattan easy chairs smouldered and then exploded into flame.
Over the crackling sounds, he heard the would-be hero cry out with a shrill and absurd sort of optimism: “Gonna lose her! Gonna lose her sure! If Jud’s in there, he’s a gone goose! Told im about the creosote in that chimbly a hunnert times!”
Steve opened his mouth to holler across and ask if the fire department had been called, but just then he heard the faint wail of sirens, approaching. A lot of them. They had been called, but the would-be hero was right: the house was going. Flames probed through half a dozen broken windows now, and the front eave had grown an almost transparent membrane of fire over its bright green shingles.
He turned back, then, remembering Louis-but if Louis were here, wouldn’t he be with the others across the street?
Steve caught something then, just barely caught it with the tail of his eye.
Beyond the head of Louis’s hot-topped driveway there was a field that stretched up a long, gently rising hill. The timothy grass, although still green, had grown high already this May, but Steve could see a path, almost as neatly mowed as a putting green on a golf course. It wound and meandered its way up the slope of the field, rising to meet the woods that began, thick and green, just below the horizon. It was here, where the pale green of the timothy grass met the thicker, denser green of the woods, that Steve had seen movement-a flash of bright white that seemed to be moving. It was gone almost as soon as his eye registered it, but it had seemed to him for that brief moment that he had seen a man carrying a white bundle.
That was Louis, his mind told him with sudden irrational certainty. That was Louis, and you better get to him quick because something damn bad has happened and pretty quick something even more damn bad is going to happen if you don’t stop him.
He stood indecisively at the head of the driveway, shifting one foot for the other, his weight jittery between the two of them.
Steve baby, you’re scared shitless just about now, aren’t you?
Yes. He was. He was scared shitless and for no reason at all. But there was also a certain… a certain (attraction) yes, a certain attraction here, something about that path, that path leading up the hill and perhaps continuing on into the woods-surely that path had to go somewhere., didn’t it? Yes, of course it did. All paths eventually went somewhere.
Louis. Don’t forget about Louis, you dummy! Louis was the man you came out to see, remember? You didn’t come out to Ludlow to go exploring the goddam woods.
“What you got there, Randy?” the would-be hero cried. His voice, still shrill and somehow optimistic, carried well.
Randy’s reply was almost but not quite obscured by the growing wail of the fire sirens. “Dead cat.”
“Burnt up?”
“Don’t look burnt,” Randy returned. “Just looks dead.”
And Steve’s mind returned implacably, as if the exchange across the street had something to do with what he had seen-or what he thought he had seen: That was Louis.
He started to move then, trotting up the path toward the woods, leaving the fire behind him. He had worked up a good sweat by the time he reached the edge of the woods, and the shade felt cool and good. There was the sweet aroma of pine and spruce, bark and sap.
Once into the woods he broke into an all-out run, not sure why he was running, not sure why his heart was beating double time. His breath whistled in and out.
He was able to lengthen his run to a sprint going downhill-the path was admirably clear-but he reached the arch that marked the entrance to the Pet Sematary at little more than a fast walk. There was a hot stitch high in his right side, just under the armpit.
His eyes barely registered the circles of graves-the beaten tin squares, the bits of board and slate. His gaze was fixed on the bizarre sight at the far side of the circular clearing. It was fixed on
