Pet Sematary (5 page)

He took Gage into his room and laid him in his crib. As he pulled the blanket up over his son, though, a shudder twisted up his back, and he thought suddenly of his Uncle Carl's “showroom.” No new cars there, no televisions with all the modern features, no dishwashers with glass fronts so you could watch the magical sudsing action. Only boxes with their lids up, a carefully hidden spotlight over each. His father's brother was an undertaker.

Good God, what gave you the horrors? Let it go! Dump it!

He kissed his son and went down to listen to Ellie tell about her first day at the big kid's school.

That Saturday, after Ellie had completed her first week of school and just before the college kids came back to campus, Jud Crandall came across the road and walked over to where the Creed family sat on their lawn. Ellie had gotten off her bike and was drinking a glass of iced tea. Gage was crawling in the grass, examining bugs, perhaps even eating a few; Gage was not particular where his protein came from.

“Jud,” Louis said, getting up. “Let me get you a chair.”

“No need.” Jud was wearing jeans, an open-throated work shirt, and a pair of green boots. He looked at Ellie. “You still want to see where yon path goes, Ellie?”

“Yes!” Ellie said, getting up immediately. Her eyes sparkled. “George Buck at school told me it was the pet cemetery, and I told Mommy, but she said to wait for you because you knew where it was.”

“I do, too,” Jud said. “If it's okay with your folks, we'll take us a stroll up there. You'll want a pair of boots though. Ground's a bit squishy in places.”

Ellie rushed into the house.

Jud looked after her with amused affection. “Maybe you'd like to come too, Louis,”

“I would,” Louis said. He looked at Rachel. “You want to come, honey?”

“What about Gage? I thought it was a mile.”

“I'll put him in the Gerrypack.”

Rachel laughed. “Okay . . . but it's your back, mister.”

*  *  *

They started off ten minutes later, all of them but Gage wearing boots. Gage was sitting up in the Gerrypack and looking at everything over Louis's shoulder, goggle-eyed. Ellie ranged ahead constantly, chasing butterflies and picking flowers.

The grass in the back field was almost waist high, and now there was goldenrod, that late-summer gossip which comes to tattle on autumn every year. But there was no autumn in the air today; today the sun was still all August, although calendar August was almost two weeks gone. By the time they had reached the top of the first hill, walking strung out along the mown path, there were big patches of sweat under Louis's arms.

Jud paused. At first Louis thought it might be because the old man was winded—then he saw the view that had opened out behind them.

“Pretty up here,” Jud said, putting a piece of timothy grass between his teeth. Louis thought he had just heard the quintessential Yankee understatement.

“It's
gorgeous,”
Rachel breathed and then turned to Louis, almost accusingly. “How come you didn't tell me about this?”

“Because I didn't know it was here,” Louis said, and was a little ashamed. They were still on their own property; he had just never found time to climb the hill in back of the house until today.

Ellie had been a good way ahead. Now she came back, also gazing with frank wonder. Church padded at her heels.

The hill was not a high one, but it did not need to be. To the east, heavy woods blocked any view, but looking this way, west, the land fell away in a golden and dozy late-summer dream. Everything was still, hazed, silent. There was not even an Orinco tanker on the highway to break the quiet.

It was the river valley they were looking into, of course; the Penobscot, where loggers had once floated their timber from the northeast down to Bangor and Derry. But they were south of Bangor and a bit north of Derry here. The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream. Louis could make out Hampden and Winterport on the far side, and over here he fancied he could trace the black, river-paralleling snake of Route 15 nearly all the way to Bucksport. They looked over the river, its lush hem of trees, the roads, the fields. The spire of the North Ludlow Baptist Church poked through one canopy of old elms, and to the right he could see the square brick sturdiness of Ellie's school.

Overhead, white clouds moved slowly toward a horizon the color of faded denim. And everywhere were the late-summer fields, used up at the end of the cycle, dormant but not dead, an incredible tawny color.

“Gorgeous is the right word,” Louis said finally.

“They used to call it Prospect Hill back in the old days,” Jud said. He put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth but did not light it. “There's a few that still do, but now that younger people have moved into town, it's mostly been forgot. I don't think there's very many people that even come up here. It don't look like you could see much because the hill's not very high. But you can see—” He gestured with one hand and fell silent.

“You can see everything,” Rachel said in a low, awed voice. She turned to Louis. “Honey, do we
own
this?”

And before Louis could answer, Jud said: “It's part of the property, oh yes.”

Which wasn't, Louis thought, quite the same thing.

*  *  *

It was cooler in the woods, perhaps by as much as eight or ten degrees. The path, still wide and occasionally marked with flowers in pots or in coffee cans (most of them wilted), was now floored with dry pine needles. They had gone about a quarter of a mile, moving downhill now, when Jud called Ellie back.

“This is a good walk for a little girl,” Jud said kindly, “but I want you to promise your mom and dad that if you come up here, you'll always stay on the path.”

“I promise,” Ellie said promptly. “Why?”

He glanced at Louis, who had stopped to rest. Toting Gage, even in the shade of these old pines and spruces, was heavy work. “Do you know where you are?” Jud asked Louis.

Louis considered and rejected answers: Ludlow, North Ludlow, behind my house, between Route 15 and Middle Drive. He shook his head.

Jud jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Plenty of stuff that way,” he said. “That's town. This way, nothing but woods for fifty miles or more. The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going onto those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back. I know it sounds funny to say your nice little house there on the main road, with its phone and electric lights and cable TV and all, is on the edge of a wilderness, but it is.” He looked back at Ellie. “All I'm saying is that you don't want to get messing around in these woods, Ellie. You might lose the path, and God knows where you might end up then.”

“I won't, Mr. Crandall.” Ellie was suitably impressed, even awed, but not afraid, Louis saw. Rachel, however, was looking at Jud uneasily, and Louis felt a little uneasy himself. It was, he supposed, the city-bred's almost instinctive fear of the woods. Louis hadn't held a compass in his hand since Boy Scouts, twenty years before, and his memories of how to find your way by things like the North Star or which side of the trees moss grew on were as vague as his memories of how to tie a sheepshank or a half hitch.

Jud looked them over and smiled a little. “Now, we ain't lost nobody in these woods since 1934,” he said. “At least, nobody local. The last one was Will
Jeppson—no great loss. Except for Stanny Bouchard, I guess Will was the biggest tosspot this side of Bucksport.”

“You said nobody local,” Rachel remarked in a voice that was not quite casual, and Louis could almost read her mind:
We're not local.
At least, not yet.

Jud paused and then nodded. “We do lose one of the tourists every two or three years because they think you can't get lost right off the main road. But we never lost even one of them for good, missus. Don't you fret.”

“Are there moose?” Rachel asked apprehensively, and Louis smiled. If Rachel wanted to fret, she would jolly well fret.

“Well, you might see a moose,” Jud said, “but he wouldn't give you any trouble, Rachel. During mating season they get a little irritated, but otherwise they do no more than look. Only people they take after out of their rutting time are people from Massachusetts. I don't know why that's so, but it is.” Louis thought the man was joking but could not be sure; Jud looked utterly serious. “I've seen it time and time again. Some fella from Saugus or Milton or Weston up a tree, yelling about a herd of moose, every damn one of em as big as a motorhome. Seems like moose can
smell
Massachusetts on a man or a woman. Or maybe it's just all those new clothes from L. L. Bean's they smell—I dunno. I'd like to see one of those animal husbandry students from the college do a paper on it, but I s'pose none ever will.”

“What's rutting time?” Ellie asked.

“Never mind,” Rachel said. “I don't want you up here unless you're with a grown-up, Ellie.” Rachel moved a step closer to Louis.

Jud looked pained. “I didn't want to scare you, Rachel—you or your daughter. No need to be scared in these woods. This is a good path; it gets a little buggy in the spring and it's a little sloppy all the time—except for '55, which was the driest summer I can remember—but hell, there isn't even any poison ivy or poison oak, which there is at the back of the schoolyard, and you want to stay away from it, Ellie, if you don't want to spend three weeks of your life takin starch baths.”

Ellie covered her mouth and giggled.

“It's a
safe
path,” Jud said earnestly to Rachel, who still didn't look convinced. “Why, I bet even Gage could follow it, and the town kids come up here a lot, I already told you that. They keep it nice. Nobody tells them to; they just do it. I wouldn't want to spoil that for Ellie.” He bent over her and winked. “It's like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all's well. You get off it and the next thing you know you're lost if you're not lucky. And then someone has to send out a searchin party.”

*  *  *

They walked on. Louis began to get a dull cramp of pain in his back from the baby carrier. Every now and then Gage would grab a double handful of his hair and tug enthusiastically or administer a cheerful kick to Louis's kidneys. Late mosquitoes cruised around his face and neck, making their eye-watering hum.

The path curved down, bending in and out between very old firs, and then cut widely through a brambly, tangled patch of undergrowth. The going
was
soupy here, and Louis's boots squelched in mud and some standing water. At one point they stepped over a marshy spot using a pair of good-sized tussocks as stepping stones. That was the worst of it. They started to climb again and the trees reasserted themselves. Gage seemed to have magically put on ten pounds, and the day had, with some similar magic, warmed up ten degrees. Sweat poured down Louis's face.

“How you doing, hon?” Rachel asked. “Want me to carry him for a while?”

“No, I'm fine,” he said, and it was true, although his heart was larruping along at a good speed in his chest. He was more used to prescribing physical exercise than he was to doing it.

Jud was walking with Ellie by his side; her lemon-yellow slacks and red blouse were bright splashes of color in the shady brown-green gloom.

“Lou, does he really know where he's going, do you think?” Rachel asked in a low, slightly worried tone.

“Sure,” Louis said.

Jud called back cheerily over his shoulder: “Not much farther now . . . you bearin up, Louis?”

My God,
Louis thought,
the man's well past eighty, but I don't think he's even broken a sweat.

“I'm fine,” he called back a little aggressively. Pride probably would have led him to say the same thing even if he had felt the onset of a coronary. He
grinned, hitched the straps of the Gerrypack up a bit, and went on.

They topped the second hill, and then the path sloped through a head-high swatch of bushes and tangled underbrush. It narrowed and then, just ahead, Louis saw Ellie and Jud go under an arch made of old weatherstained boards. Written on these in faded black paint, only just legible, were the words
PET SEMATARY
.

He and Rachel exchanged an amused glance and stepped under the arch, instinctively reaching out and grasping each other's hands as they did so, as if they had come here to be married.

For the second time that morning Louis was surprised into wonder.

There was no carpet of needles here. Here was an almost perfect circle of mown grass, perhaps as large as forty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw-jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous.
A man trying to pick his way through that or to climb over it would do well to put on a steel jock,
Louis thought. The clearing was crowded with markers, obviously made by children from whatever materials they could beg or borrow—the slats of crates, scrapwood, pieces of beaten tin. And yet, seen against the perimeter of low bushes and straggly trees that fought for living space and sunlight here, the very fact of their clumsy manufacture, and the fact that humans were responsible for what was here, seemed to emphasize what symmetry they had.
The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.

“It's lovely,” Rachel said, not sounding as if she meant it.

“Wow!”
Ellie cried.

Louis unshouldered Gage and pulled him out of the baby carrier so he could crawl. Louis's back sighed with relief.

Ellie ran from one monument to the next, exclaiming over each. Louis followed her while Rachel kept an eye on the baby. Jud sat down cross-legged, his back against a protruding rock, and smoked.