Pet Sematary (32 page)

“Where goin, Daddy?” Gage asked companionably, giving his father his hand.

“Going over in Mrs. Vinton's field,” he said. “Gonna go fly a kite, my man.”

“Kiiiyte?” Gage asked doubtfully.

“You'll like it,” Louis said. “Wait a minute, kiddo.”

They were in the garage now. Louis found his keyring, unlocked the little storage closet, and turned on the light. He rummaged through the closet and found the Vulture, still in its store bag with the sales slip stapled to it. He had bought it in the depths of mid-February, when his soul had cried out for some hope.

“Dat?” Gage asked. This was Gage-ese for “Whatever in the world might you have there, Father?”

“It's the kite,” Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled the Vulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes stared out at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.

“Birt!” Gage yelled. “ ‘Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!”

“Yeah, it's a bird,” Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite and rummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He looked back over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: “You're gonna like it, big guy.”

*  *  *

Gage liked it.

They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton's field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky first shot, although he had not flown a kite since he was . . . what? Twelve? Nineteen years ago? God, that was horrible.

Mrs. Vinton was a woman of almost Jud's age but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick house at the head of her field, but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and the woods began—the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying ground beyond it.

“Kite's flyne, Daddy!” Gage screamed.

“Yeah, look at it go!” Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited. He payed out kite twine so fast that the string grew hot and branded thin fire across his palm. “Look at that Vulture, Gage! She's goin to beat shit!”

“Beat-shit!”
Gage cried and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray spring cloud, and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright, unreliable warmth of March straining to be April in the high dead grass of Mrs. Vinton's field; above them the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steady current of air, still higher, and as he had done as a child, Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it, staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in
their dreams; Mrs. Vinton's field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but a large parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straight black seam, and the river valley—the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the river like a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden, Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St. Regis Mill at Bucksport below its steaming fume of cloud, or even land's end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.

“Look at her go, Gage!” Louis yelled, laughing.

Gage was leaning so far back he was in danger of toppling over. A huge grin covered his face. He was waving to the kite.

Louis got some slack and told Gage to hold out one of his hands. Gage did, not even looking around. He couldn't take his eyes from the kite, which swung and danced in the wind and raced its shadow back and forth across the field.

Louis wound the kite string twice around Gage's hand and now he did look down, comically amazed at the strong tug and pull.

“What!” he said.

“You're flying it,” Louis said. “You got the hammer, my man. It's your kite.”

“Gage flyne it?” Gage said, as if asking not his father but himself for confirmation. He pulled the string experimentally; the kite nodded in the windy sky. Gage pulled
the string harder; the kite swooped. Louis and his son laughed together. Gage reached out his free hand, groping, and Louis took it in his own. They stood together that way in the middle of Mrs. Vinton's field, looking up at the Vulture.

It was a moment with his son that Louis never forgot. As he had gone up and into the kite as a child himself, he now found himself going into Gage, his son. He felt himself shrink until he was within Gage's tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes—looking out at a world that was so huge and bright, a world where Mrs. Vinton's field was nearly as big as the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the kite soared miles above him, the string drumming in his fist like a live thing as the wind blew around him, tumbling his hair.

“Kite flyne!” Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Gage's shoulders and kissed the boy's cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.

“I love you, Gage,” he said—it was between the two of them, and that was all right.

And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously.
“Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!”

*  *  *

They were still flying the kite when Rachel and Ellie came home. He and Gage had gotten it so high that they had nearly run out the string, and the face of the Vulture had been lost; it was only a small black silhouette in the sky.

Louis was glad to see the two of them, and he roared with laughter when Ellie dropped the string momentarily and chased it through the grass, catching it just before the tumbling, unraveling core tube gave up the last of its twine. But having them around also changed things a little, and he was not terribly sorry to go in when, twenty minutes later, Rachel said she believed Gage had had enough of the wind. She was afraid he would get a chill.

So the kite was pulled back in, fighting for the sky at every turn of the twine, at last surrendering. Louis tucked it, black wings, buggy bloodshot eyes, and all, under his arm and imprisoned it in the storage closet again. That night Gage ate an enormous supper of hot dogs and beans, and while Rachel was dressing him in his Dr. Dentons for bed, Louis took Ellie aside and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about leaving her marbles around. Under other circumstances, he might have ended up shouting at her because Ellie could turn quite haughty—insulting, even—when accused of some mistake. It was only her way of dealing with criticism, but that did not keep it from infuriating Louis when she laid it on too thick or when he was particularly tired. But this night the kite flying had left him in a fine mood, and Ellie was inclined to be reasonable. She agreed to be more careful and then went downstairs to watch TV until 8:30, a Saturday indulgence she treasured.
Okay, that's out of the way, and it might even do some good.
Louis thought, not knowing that marbles were really not the problem, and chills were really not the problem,
that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem . . . as Jud Crandall had warned them it might be on that first day of August.

*  *  *

He went upstairs that night about fifteen minutes after Gage had been put to bed. He found his son quiet but still awake, drinking the last of a bottle of milk and looking contemplatively up at the ceiling.

Louis took one of Gage's feet in one hand and raised it up. He kissed it, lowered it. “Goodnight, Gage,” he said.

“Kite flyne, Daddy,” Gage said.

“It really did fly, didn't it?” Louis said, and for no reason at all he felt tears behind his eyes. “Right up to the sky, my man.”

“Kite flyne,” Gage said. “Up to the kye.”

He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and slept. Just like that.

Louis was stepping into the hall when he glanced back and saw yellowy-green, disembodied eyes staring out at him from Gage's closet. The closet door was open . . . just a crack. His heart took a lurch into his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace.

He opened the closet door, thinking

(Zelda it's Zelda in the closet her black tongue puffing out between her lips)

he wasn't sure what, but of course it was only Church, the cat was in the closet, and when it saw Louis it arched its back like a cat on a Halloween card.
It hissed at him, its mouth partly open, revealing its needle-sharp teeth.

“Get out of there,” Louis whispered.

Church hissed again. It did not move.

“Get
out,”
I said. He picked up the first thing that came to hand in the litter of Gage's toys, a bright plastic Chuggy-Chuggy-Choo-Choo which in this dim light was the maroon color of dried blood. He brandished it at Church; the cat not only stood its ground but hissed again.

And suddenly, without even thinking, Louis threw the toy at the cat, not playing, not goofing around; he
pegged
the toy at the cat as hard as he could, furious at it, and scared of it too, that it should hide here in the darkened closet of his son's room and refuse to leave, as if it had a right to be there.

The toy locomotive struck the cat dead center. Church uttered a squawk and fled, displaying its usual grace by slamming into the door and almost falling over on its way out.

Gage stirred, muttered something, shifted position, and was still again. Louis felt a little sick. There was sweat standing out in beads on his forehead.

“Louis?” Rachel, from downstairs, sounding alarmed. “Did Gage fall out of his crib?”

“He's fine, honey. Church knocked over a couple of his toys.”

“Oh, all right.”

He felt—irrationally or otherwise—the way he might have felt if he had looked in on his son and found a snake crawling over him or a big rat perched on the bookshelf over
Gage's crib. Of
course
it was irrational. But when it had hissed at him from the closet like that . . .

(Zelda did you think Zelda did you think Oz the Gweat and Tewwible?)

He closed Gage's closet door, sweeping a number of toys back in with its moving foot. He listened to the tiny click of the latch. After a moment's further hesitation, he turned the closet's thumbbolt.

He went back to Gage's crib. In shifting around, the kid had kicked his two blankets down around his knees. Louis disentangled him, pulled the blankets up, and then merely stood there, watching his son, for a long time.

When Jesus came to Bethany, he found that Lazarus had lain in the grave four days already. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she hurried to meet him.

“Lord,” she said, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But now you are here, and I know that whatever you ask of God, God will grant.”

Jesus answered her: “Your brother shall rise again.”

—J
OHN'S
G
OSPEL
(paraphrase)

“Hey-ho, let's go.”

—T
HE
R
AMONES

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls—as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.

Louis Creed might have harbored such thoughts if he had been thinking rationally following the funeral of his son, Gage William Creed, on the seventeenth of May, but any rational thought—or attempt at it—ceased at the funeral parlor, where a fistfight with his father-in-law (bad enough) resulted in an event even more terrible—a final bit of outrageous gothic melodrama which shattered whatever remained of Rachel's fragile self-control. That day's penny dreadful events were only complete when she was pulled, screaming, from the East Room of the Brookings-Smith Mortuary, where Gage lay in his closed coffin, and sedated in the foyer by Surrendra Hardu.

The irony of it was that she would not have experienced that final episode at all, that
extravagance
of horror, one might say, if the fistfight between Louis Creed and Mr. Irwin Goldman of Dearborn had taken place at the morning visiting hours (10 to 11:30
A.M.
) instead of at the afternoon visiting hours (2 to 3:30
P.M.
). Rachel had not been in attendance at the morning visiting hours; she simply had not been able to come. She sat at home with Jud Crandall and Steve Masterton. Louis had no idea how he ever could have gotten through the previous forty-eight hours or so without Jud and Steve.

It was well for Louis—well for all three of the remaining family members—that Steve had shown up as promptly as he had, because Louis was at least temporarily unable to make any kind of decision, even one so minor as giving his wife a shot to mute her deep grief. Louis hadn't even noticed that Rachel had apparently
meant to go to the morning viewing in her housecoat, which she had misbuttoned. Her hair was uncombed, unwashed, tangled. Her eyes, blank brown orbits, bulged from sockets so sunken that they had almost become the eyes of a living skull. Her flesh was doughy. It hung from her face. She sat at the breakfast table that morning, munching unbuttered toast and talking in disjointed phrases that made no sense at all. At one point she had said abruptly, “About that Winnebago you want to buy, Lou—” Louis had last spoken about buying a Winnebago in 1981.