Pet Sematary (44 page)

Mr. and Mrs. Goldman showed up forty minutes before flight time. Irwin Goldman was natty (and apparently sweatless) in a cashmere topcoat in spite of the sixty-degree temperatures; he went over to the Avis desk to check his car in while Dory Goldman sat with Rachel and Ellie.

*  *  *

Louis and Goldman joined the others at the same time. Louis was a bit afraid that there might be a reprise of the
my son, my son
playlet, but he was spared. Goldman contented himself with a rather limp handshake and a muttered hello. The quick, embarrassed glance he afforded his son-in-law confirmed the certainty Louis had awakened with this morning; the man must have been drunk.

They went upstairs on the escalator and sat in the boarding lounge, not talking much. Dory Goldman thumbed nervously at her copy of an Erica Jong novel but did not open it. She kept glancing, a little nervously, at the picture Ellie was holding.

Louis asked his daughter if she would like to walk over to the bookstore with him and pick out something to read on the plane.

Ellie had been looking at him in that speculative way again. Louis didn't like it. It made him nervous.

“Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda's?” he asked her as they walked over.

“Yes,” she said. “Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there's a truant officer and he gets school skippers.”

“Don't you worry about the truant officer,” he said. “I'll take care of the school, and you can start again in the fall with no trouble.”

“I hope I'll be okay in the fall,” Ellie said. “I never was in a grade before. Only kindergarten. I don't know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably.”

“You'll be fine.”

“Daddy, are you still pissed off at Grandda?”

He gaped at her. “Why in the world would you think I was . . . that I didn't like your grandda, Ellie?”

She shrugged as if the topic held no particular interest for her. “When you talk about him, you always look pissed off.”

“Ellie, that's vulgar.”

“Sorry.”

She gave him that strange, fey look and then drifted off to look at the racks of kid books—Mercer Meyer and Maurice Sendak and Richard Scarry and Beatrix Potter and that famous old standby, Dr. Seuss.
How do they find this stuff out? Or do they just know? How much does Ellie know? How's it affecting her? Ellie, what's behind that pale little face? Pissed off at him—Christ!

“Can I have these, Daddy?” She was holding out a Dr. Seuss and a book Louis hadn't seen since his own childhood—the story of Little Black Sambo and how the tigers had gotten his clothes one fine day.

I thought they'd made that one an unbook,
Louis thought, bemused.

“Yes,”
he said, and they stood in a short line at the cash register. “Your grandda and I like each other fine,” he said and thought again of his mother's story of how when a woman really wanted a baby, she “found” one. He remembered his own foolish promises to himself that he would never lie to his own children. Over the last few days he had developed into quite a promising liar, he felt, but he would not let himself think about it now.

“Oh,” she said and fell silent.

The silence made him uneasy. To break it he said, “So do you think you'll have a good time in Chicago?”

“No.”

“No? Why not?”

She looked up at him with that fey expression. “I'm scared.”

He put his hand on her head. “Scared? Honey, what for? You're not scared of the plane, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I don't know what I'm scared of. Daddy, I dreamed we were at Gage's funeral and the funeral man opened his coffin and it was empty. Then I dreamed I was home and I looked in Gage's crib and that was empty too. But there was dirt in it.”

Lazarus, come forth.

For the first time in months he remembered the dream he had had after Pascow's death—the dream, and then waking up to find his feet dirty and the foot of the bed caked with pine needles and muck.

The hairs at the nape of his neck stirred.

“Just dreams,” he said to Ellie, and his voice sounded, to his ears at least, perfectly normal. “They'll pass.”

“I wish you were coming with us,” she said, “or that we were staying here. Can we stay, Daddy? Please? I don't want to go to Grandma and Grandda's . . . I just want to go back to school. Okay?”

“Just for a little while, Ellie,” he said. “I've got”—he swallowed—“a few things to do here, and then I'll be with you. We can decide what to do next.”

He expected an argument, perhaps even an Ellie-style tantrum. He might even have welcomed it—a known quantity, as that look was not. But there was only that pallid, disquieting silence which seemed so deep. He could have asked her more but found he didn't dare; she had already told him more than he perhaps wanted to hear.

*  *  *

Shortly after he and Ellie returned to the boarding lounge, the flight was called. Boarding passes were produced, and the four of them got in line. Louis embraced his wife and kissed her hard. She clung to him for a moment and then let him go so he could pick Ellie up and buss her cheek.

Ellie gazed at him solemnly with her sibyl's eyes. “I don't want to go,” she said again but so low only Louis could really hear over the shuffle and murmur of the boarding passengers. “I don't want Mommy to go either.”

“Ellie, come on,” Louis said. “You'll be fine.”

“I'll be fine,” she said, “but what about you? Daddy, what about you?”

The line had begun to move now. People were walking down the jetway to the 727. Rachel pulled Ellie's hand and for a moment she resisted, holding up the
line, her eyes fixed on her father—and Louis found himself remembering her impatience last time, her cries of
come on—come on—come on.

“Daddy?”

“Go now, Ellie. Please.”

Rachel looked at Ellie and saw that dark, dreamy look for the first time. “Ellie?” she said, startled and, Louis thought, a little afraid. “You're holding up the line, baby.”

Ellie's lips trembled and grew white. Then she allowed herself to be led into the jetway. She looked back at him, and he saw naked terror in her face. He raised his hand to her in false cheeriness.

Ellie did not wave back.

As Louis left the BIA terminal building, a cold cloak fell over his mind. He became aware that he meant to go through with this. His mind, which had been sharp enough to get him through med school mostly on a scholarship and what his wife could earn pushing coffee-and-danish on the 5 to 11
A.M.
shift six days a week, had taken the problem over and broken it down into components, as if this was just another prelim—the biggest one he had ever taken. And he intended to pass it with an A plus, one hundred percent.

He drove to Brewer, the little city across the Penobscot River from Bangor. He found a parking spot across the street from Watson's Hardware.

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked.

“Yes,” Louis said. “I'd like a heavy flashlight—one of the square ones—and something I can hood it with.”

The clerk was a small slim man with a high forehead and sharp eyes. He smiled now, but his smile was not particularly pleasant. “Going jacking, good buddy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Gonna jacklight a few deer tonight?”

“Not at all,” Louis said, unsmiling. “I haven't a license to jack.”

The clerk blinked and then decided to laugh. “In other words, mind my own business, huh? Well, look—you can't hood one of those big lights, but you can get a piece of felt and poke a hole in the middle of it. Cut the beam down to a penlite.”

“That sounds fine,” Louis said. “Thanks.”

“Surely. Anything else for you today “

“Yes indeed,” Louis said. “I need a pick, a shovel, and a spade. Short-handled shovel, long-handled spade. A stout length of rope, eight feet long. A pair of work gloves. A canvas tarpaulin, maybe eight by eight.”

“I can do all that,” the clerk said.

“I've got a septic tank to dig up,” Louis said. “It looks like I'm in violation of the zoning ordinances, and I've got some very nosy neighbors. I don't know if
hooding my light will do any good or not, but I thought I might give it a try. I could get a pretty good fine.”

“Oh-oh,” the clerk said, “better get a clothespin for your nose while you're at it.”

Louis laughed dutifully. His purchases came to $58.60. He paid cash.

*  *  *

As gas prices went up, they had used the big station wagon less and less. For some time it had had a bad wheel-bearing, but Louis had kept putting off the repair job. This was partly because he didn't want to part with the two hundred it was likely to cost, but mostly because it was a nuisance. Now, when he could have really used the big old dinosaur, he didn't dare chance it. The Civic was a hatchback, and Louis was nervous about going back to Ludlow with the pick, shovel, and spade in there. Jud Crandall's eyes were sharp, and there was nothing wrong with his brains either. He would know what was up.

Then it occurred to him that there was no real reason to go back to Ludlow anyway. Louis recrossed the Chamberlain Bridge into Bangor and checked into the Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge on the Odlin Road—once again near the airport, once again near Pleasantview Cemetery where his son was buried. He checked in under the name Dee Dee Ramone and paid cash for his room.

He tried to nap, reasoning that he would be glad of the rest before tomorrow morning. In the words of some Victorian novel or other, there was wild work
ahead of him tonight—enough wild work to last a lifetime.

But his brain simply would not shut down.

He lay on the anonymous motel bed beneath a nondescript motel print of picturesque boats at dock beside a picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet, coins, and keys on the night table beside him, his hands behind his head. That feeling of coldness still held; he felt totally unplugged from his people, the places that had become so familiar to him, even his work. This could have been any Howard Johnson's in the world—in San Diego or Duluth or Bangkok or Charlotte Amalie. He was nowhere, and now and then a thought of surpassing oddity struck him: before he saw any of those familiar places and faces again, he would see his son.

His plan kept unreeling in his mind. He looked at it from all angles, poked it, prodded it, looked for holes or soft places. And he felt that in truth he was walking along a narrow beam over a gulf of insanity. Madness was all around him, softly fluttering as the wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he was heading into madness.

The voice of Tom Rush echoed dreamily in his head:
O death your hands are clammy . . . I feel them on my knees . . . you came and took my mother . . . won't you come back after me?

Madness. Madness all around, close, hunting him.

He walked the balance beam of rationality; he studied his plan.

Tonight, around eleven o'clock, he would dig up his son's grave, remove the body from the coffin in which it lay, wrap Gage in a cutdown piece of the tarpaulin, and put it in the trunk of the Civic. He would replace the coffin and refill the grave. He would drive to Ludlow, take Gage's body from the trunk . . . and take a walk. Yes, he would take a walk.

If Gage returned, the single path forked into two possibilities. Along one, he saw Gage returning as Gage, perhaps stunned or slow or even retarded (only in the deepest recesses of his mind did Louis allow himself to hope that Gage would return whole, and just as he had been—but surely even that was possible, wasn't it?), but still his son, Rachel's son, Ellie's brother.

Along the other, he saw some sort of monster emerging from the woods behind the house. He had accepted so much that he did not balk at the idea of monsters, or even of daemons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworld which might well take charge of a reanimated body from which the original soul had fled.

Either way, he and his son would be alone. And he would . . .

I will make a diagnosis.

Yes. That is what he would do.

I will make a diagnosis, not only of his body but of his spirit. I will make allowances for the trauma of the accident itself, which he may or may not remember. Keeping the example of Church before me, I will expect retardation, perhaps mild, perhaps profound. I will judge our ability to reintegrate Gage into our family on the basis of what I see over a period
of from twenty-four to seventy-two hours. And if the loss is too great—or if he comes back as Timmy Baterman apparently came back, as a thing of evil—I will kill him.

As a doctor, he felt he could kill Gage, if Gage was only the vessel containing some other being, quite easily. He would not allow himself to be swayed by its pleadings or its wiles. He would kill it as he would kill a rat carrying bubonic plague. There need be no melodrama about it. A pill in solution, perhaps two or three of them. If necessary, a shot. There was morphine in his bag. The following night, he would return the lifeless clay to Pleasantview and reinter it, simply trusting that his luck would hold a second time
(you don't even know if it will hold once,
he reminded himself). He had considered the easier and safer alternative of the Pet Sematary, but he would not have his son up there. There were a lot of reasons. A child burying his pet five years or ten years or even twenty years later might stumble on the remains—that was one reason. But the most compelling one was simpler. The Pet Sematary might be . . . too close.

The reinterment completed, he would fly to Chicago and join his family. Neither Rachel nor Ellie would ever need to know about his failed experiment.