Pet Sematary (36 page)

An absurdity popped out of his mouth (but the day had sung and gibbered with absurdity): “That was a long time ago, Ellie.”

“I'm going to keep things ready for him,” she said. “I've got his picture, and I'm going to sit in his chair—”

“Ellie, you're too big for Gage's chair,” Louis said, taking her hot, feverish hand. “You'll break it.”

“God will help it not to break,” Ellie said. Her voice was serene, but Louis observed the brown half-moons under her eyes. Looking at her made his heart ache so badly that he turned away from her. Maybe when Gage's chair broke, she would begin to understand what had happened a little better.

“I'm going to carry the picture and sit in his chair,” she said. “I'm going to eat his breakfast too.” Gage and Ellie had each had their own breakfast cereals; Gage's, Ellie had once claimed, tasted like dead boogers. If Cocoa Bears was the only cereal in the house, Ellie would sometimes eat a boiled egg . . . or nothing at all. “I'll eat lima beans even though I hate them, and I'll read all of Gage's picturebooks and I'll . . . I'll . . .
you know . . . get things ready . . . in case . . .”

She was crying now. Louis did not try to comfort her but only brushed her hair back from her forehead. What she was talking about made a certain crazed sense. Keeping the lines open. Keeping things current. Keeping Gage in the present, in the Hot One Hundred, refusing to let him recede; remember when Gage did this . . . or that . . . yeah, that was great . . . good old Gage, wotta kid. When it started not to hurt, it started not to matter. She understood, perhaps, Louis thought, how easy it would be to let Gage be dead.

“Ellie, don't cry anymore,” he said. “This isn't forever.”

She
cried
forever . . . for fifteen minutes. She actually fell asleep before her tears stopped. But eventually she slept, and downstairs the clock struck ten in the quiet house.

Keep him alive, Ellie, if that's what you want,
he thought and kissed her.
The shrinks would probably say it's as unhealthy as hell, but I'm for it. Because I know the day will come—maybe as soon as this Friday—when you forget to carry the picture and I'll see it lying on your bed in this empty room while you ride your bike around the driveway or walk in the field behind the house or go over to Kathy McGown's house to make clothes with her Sew Perfect. Gage won't be with you, and that's when Gage drops off whatever Hot One Hundred there is that exists in little girls' hearts and starts to become Something That happened in 1984. A blast from the past.

Louis left the room and stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, thinking—not seriously—about going to bed.

He knew what he needed and went downstairs to get it.

*  *  *

Louis Albert Creed set methodically about getting drunk. Downstairs in the cellar were five cases of Schlitz Light beer. Louis drank beer, Jud drank it, Steve Masterton drank it, Missy Dandridge would occasionally have a beer or two while watching the kids (
kid,
Louis reminded himself, going down the cellar stairs). Even Charlton, on the few occasions she had come over to the house, preferred a beer—as long as it was a light beer—to a glass of wine. So one day last winter Rachel had gone out and bought a staggering ten cases when Schlitz Light went on sale at the Brewer A & P.
Stop you running down to Julio's in Orrington every time somebody drops in,
she had said.
And you're always quoting Robert Parker to me, love—any beer that's in the refrigerator after the stores close is good beer, right? So drink this and think about the dough you're saving.
Last winter. When things had been okay.
When things had been okay.
It was funny, how quickly and easily your mind made that crucial division.

Louis brought up a case of beer and shoved the cans into the fridge. Then he took one can, closed the fridge door, and opened the beer. Church came oiling slowly and rustily out of the pantry at the sound of the refrigerator door and stared inquiringly up at Louis. The cat
did not come too close; Louis had perhaps kicked it too many times.

“Nothing for you,” he told the cat. “You had your can of Calo today. If you want something else, go kill a bird.”

Church stood there, looking up at him. Louis drank off half the can of beer and felt it go to his head almost at once.

“You don't even eat them, do you?” he asked. “Just killing them is enough for you.”

Church strolled into the living room, apparently deciding there was going to be no food, and after a moment Louis followed it.

He thought again randomly,
Hey-ho, let's go.

Louis sat down in his chair and looked at Church again. The cat was reclining on the rug by the TV stand, watching Louis carefully, probably ready to run if Louis should suddenly become aggressive and decide to put his kicking-foot in gear.

Instead Louis raised his beer. “To Gage,” he said. “To my son, who might have been an artist or an Olympic swimmer or the motherfucking President of the United States. What do you say, asshole?”

Church regarded him with those dull, strange eyes.

Louis drank off the rest of his beer in big gulps that hurt his tender throat, arose, went to the fridge, and got a second one.

By the time Louis had finished three beers, he felt that he had some sort of equilibrium for the first time that day. By the time he had gotten through the first six-pack, he felt that sleep might actually be possible
in another hour or so. He came back from the fridge with his eighth or ninth (he had really lost count by then and was walking on a slant), and his eyes fell on Church; the cat was dozing—or pretending to—on the rug now. The thought came so naturally that it surely must have been there all along, simply waiting its time to come forward from the back of his mind:

When are you going to do it? When are you going to bury Gage in the annex to the Pet Sematary?

And on the heels of that:

Lazarus, come forth.

Ellie's sleepy, dazed voice:

The teacher said if he'd just said “Come forth,” probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out.

A chill of such elemental force struck him that Louis clutched himself as the shudder twisted through his body. He suddenly found himself remembering Ellie's first day of school, how Gage had gone to sleep on his lap while he and Rachel were listening to Ellie prattle on abut “Old MacDonald” and Mrs. Berryman; he had said
Just let me put the baby to bed,
and when he took Gage upstairs a horrible premonition had struck him, and now he understood: Back in September part of him had known Gage was going to die soon. Part of him had known that Oz the Gweat and Tewwible was at hand. It was nonsense, it was rot, it was superstitious bullshit of the purest ray serene . . . and it was true. He had
known.
Louis spilled some of his beer on his shirt, and Church looked up wearily to see if this was a signal that the evening's cat-kicking festivities were about to commerce.

Louis suddenly remembered the question he had asked Jud; he remembered the way Jud's arm had jerked, knocking two empty beer bottles off the table. One of them had shattered.
You don't even want to talk about such things, Louis!

But he
did
want to talk about them—or at least think about them. The Pet Sematary. What was beyond the Pet Sematary. The idea had a deadly attraction. It made a balance of logic which was impossible to deny. Church had been killed in the road; Gage had been killed in the road. Here was Church—changed of course, distasteful in some ways—but here. Ellie, Gage, and Rachel all had a working relationship with him. He killed birds, true, and had turned a few mice inside out, but killing small animals was a cat thing to do. Church had by no means turned into Frankencat. He was, in many ways, as good as ever.

You're rationalizing,
a voice whispered.
He's
not
as good as ever. He's spooky. The crow, Louis . . . remember the crow?

“Good God,” Louis said aloud in a shaky, distracted voice he was barely able to recognize as his own.

God, oh yes, fine, sure. If there had ever been a time to invoke the name of God outside of a novel about ghosts or vampires, this was it. So just what—what in the name of
God
—was he thinking about? He was thinking about a dark blasphemy which he was even now not wholly able to credit. Worse, he was telling himself lies. Not just rationalizing, but outright
lying.

So what's the truth? You want the truth so fucking bad, what's the truth?

That Church wasn't really a cat anymore at all—start with that. He
looked
like a cat, and he
acted
like a cat, but he was really only a poor imitation. People couldn't actually see through that imitation, but they could
feel
through it. He remembered a night when Charlton had been at the house. The occasion had been a small pre-Christmas dinner party. They'd been sitting in here, talking after the meal, and Church had jumped up in her lap. Charlton had pushed the cat off immediately, a quick and instinctive
moue
of distaste puckering her mouth.

It had been no big deal. No one had even commented on it. But . . . it was there. Charlton had felt what the cat
wasn't.
Louis killed his beer and went back for another. If Gage came back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity.

He popped the top and drank deeply. He was drunk now, drunk for fair, and there would be a big head for him to deal with tomorrow.
How I Went to My Son's Funeral with a Hangover
by Louis Creed, author of
How I Just Missed Him at the Crucial Moment
and numerous other works.

Drunk. Sure. And he suspected now that the reason he had gotten drunk was so he could consider this crazy idea soberly.

In spite of everything, the idea had that deadly attraction, that sick luster, that
glamour.
Yes, that above all else—it had
glamour.

Jud was back, speaking in his mind:

You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place, and you want to share the secret . . .
you make up reasons . . . they seem like good reasons . . . mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to.

Jud's voice, low and drawling with Yankee intonation, Jud's voice chilling his flesh, bringing out the goosebumps, making the hackles on the back of his neck rise.

These are secret things, Louis . . . the soil of a man's heart is stonier . . . like the soil up in the old Micmac burying ground. A man grows what he can . . . and he tends it.

Louis began to go over the other things Jud had told him about the Micmac burying ground. He began to collate the data, to sort through it, to compress it—he proceeded in exactly the same way he had once readied himself for big exams.

The dog. Spot.

I could see all the places where the barbed wire had hooked him—there was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in.

The bull. Another file turned over in Louis's mind.

Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus bull, named Hanratty . . . Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge . . . shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But he's the only animal I ever heard of that did.

He turned mean.

The soil of a man's heart is stonier.

He turned really mean.

He's the only animal I ever heard of that did.

Mostly you do it because once you've been up there, it's your place.

The flesh looked dimpled in.

Hanratty, ain't that a silly name for a bull?

A man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

They're my rats. And my birds. I bought the fuckers.

It's your place, a secret place, and it belongs to you, and you belong to it.

He turned mean, but he's the only animal I ever heard of that did.

What do you want to buy next, Louis, when the wind blows hard at night and the moon lays a white path through the woods to that place? Want to climb those stairs again? When they're watching a horror movie, everyone in the audience knows the hero or the heroine is stupid to go up those stairs, but in real life they always do—they smoke, they don't wear seat belts, they move their family in beside a busy highway where the big rigs drone back and forth all day and all night. So, Louis, what do you say? Want to climb the stairs? Would you like to keep your dead son or go for what's behind Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three?

Hey-ho, let's go.

Turned mean . . . only animal . . . the flesh looked . . . a man . . . yours . . . his . . .

Louis dumped the rest of the beer down the sink, feeling suddenly that he was going to vomit. The room was moving around in great swinging motions.

There was a knock at the door.

For a long time—it seemed like a long time, anyway—he believed it was only in his head, a hallucination. But the knocking just went on and on, patient, implacable. And suddenly Louis found himself thinking of the story of the monkey's paw, and a cold terror
slipped into him. He seemed to feel it with total physical reality—it was like a dead hand that had been kept in a refrigerator, a dead hand which had suddenly taken on its own disembodied life and slipped inside his shirt to clutch the flesh over his heart. It was a silly image, fulsome and silly, but oh, it didn't
feel
silly. No.