فصل شانزدهم

SIXTEEN

Something woke him much later, a crash loud enough to cause him to sit up in bed, wondering if Ellie had fallen on to the floor or if maybe Gage’s crib had collapsed. Then the moon sailed out from behind a cloud, flooding the room with cold white light, and he saw Victor Pascow standing in the doorway. The crash had been Victor Pascow throwing open the door.

He stood there with his head grotesquely bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian war-paint. His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.

‘Come on, doctor,’ Pascow said. ‘We got places to go.’

Louis looked around. His wife was a vague bump under her yellow comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Pascow, who was dead but somehow not dead. Yet Louis felt no fear. He realized why almost at once.

It’s a dream, he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible. This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Bangor with the pathologist’s tattoo – a Y-cut stitched back up – on him. The pathologist probably tossed his brain into his chest-cavity after taking a tissue sample and filled up the skull cavity with brown paper to prevent leaking – simpler than trying to fit the brain back into the skull like a jigsaw piece into a puzzle. Uncle Carl, father of the unfortunate Ruthie, had told him that pathologists did that, and all sorts of other random information that he supposed would give Rachel, with her deathphobia, the screaming horrors. But Pascow was not here; no way, baby. Pascow was in a refrigerated locker with a tag around his toe. And he is most certainly not wearing those red jogging shorts in there.

Yet the compulsion to get up was strong. Pascow’s eyes were upon him.

He threw back the covers and swung his feet on to the floor. The hooked rug – a wedding present from Rachel’s grandmother long ago – pressed cold nubbles into the balls of his feet. The dream had a remarkable reality. It was so real that he would not follow Pascow until Pascow had turned and begun to go back down the stairs. The compulsion to follow was strong, but he did not want to be touched, even in a dream, by a walking corpse.

But he did follow. Pascow’s jogging shorts glimmered.

They crossed the living room, dining room, kitchen. Louis expected Pascow to turn the lock and then lift the latch on the door which connected the kitchen to the shed where he garaged the station wagon and the Civic, but Pascow did no such thing. Instead of opening the door, he simply passed through it. And Louis, watching, thought with mild amazement: Is that how it’s done? Remarkable! Anyone could do that!

He tried it himself – and was a little amused to meet only unyielding wood. Apparently he was a hard-headed realist, even in his dreams. Louis twisted the knob on the Yale lock, lifted the latch, and let himself into the shed-garage. Pascow was not there. Louis wondered briefly if Pascow had just ceased to exist. Figures in dreams often did just that. So did locations – first you were standing nude by a swimming pool with a raging hard-on, discussing the possibilities of wife-swapping with, say, Roger and Missy Dandridge, then you blinked and you were climbing the side of a Hawaiian volcano. Maybe he had lost Pascow because this was the beginning of Act II.

But when Louis emerged from the garage he saw him again, standing in the faint moonlight at the back of the lawn – at the head of the path.

Now fear came, entering softly, sifting through the hollow places of his body and filling them up with dirty smoke. He didn’t want to go up there. He halted.

Pascow glanced back over his shoulder, and in the moon-light his eyes were silver. Louis felt a hopeless crawl of horror in his belly. That jutting bone, those dried clots of blood. But it was hopeless to resist those eyes. This was apparently a dream about being hypnotized, being dominated … being unable to change things, perhaps, the way he had been unable to change the fact of Pascow’s death. You could go to school for twenty years and you still couldn’t do a thing when they brought a guy in who had been rammed into a tree hard enough to open a window in his skull. They might as well have called a plumber, a rainmaker, or the Man from Glad.

And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he was drawn forward on to the path. He followed the jogging shorts, as maroon in this light as the dried blood on Pascow’s face.

He didn’t like this dream. Oh God, not at all. It was too real. The cold nubbles in the rug, the way he had not been able to pass through the shed door when a person could (or should) be able to walk through doors and walls in any self-respecting dream … and now the cool brush of dew on his bare feet, and the feel of the night wind, just a breath of it, on his body, which was naked except for his Jockey shorts. Once under the trees, fir needles stuck to the soles of his feet … another little detail that was just a bit more real than it needed to be.

Never mind. Never mind. I am home in my own bed. It’s just a dream, no matter how vivid, and like all other dreams, it will seem ridiculous in the morning. My waking mind will discover its inconsistencies.

The small branch of a dead tree poked his bicep rudely and he winced. Up ahead, Pascow was only a moving shadow, and now Louis’s terror seemed to have crystallized into a bright sculpture in his mind: I am following a dead man into the woods, I am following a dead man up to the Pet Sematary, and this is no dream. God help me, this is no dream. This is happening.

They walked down the far side of the wooded hill. The path curved in lazy S-shapes between the trees, and then plunged into the underbrush. No boots now. The ground dissolved into cold jelly under his feet, grabbing and holding, letting go only reluctantly. There were ugly sucking noises. He could feel the mud oozing between his toes, trying to separate them.

He tried desperately to hold on to the dream idea.

It wouldn’t wash.

They reached the clearing and the moon sailed free of its reef of clouds again, bathing the graveyard with ghastly effulgence. The leaning markers – bits of board and tin cans that had been cut with a father’s tinsnips and then hammered into rude squares, chipped chunks of shale and slate – stood out with three-dimensional clarity, casting shadows perfectly black and defined.

Pascow stopped near SMUCKY THE CAT HE WAS OBEDIANT and turned back toward Louis. The horror, the terror; he felt these things would grow in him until his body blew apart under their soft yet implacable pressure. Pascow was grinning. His bloody lips were wrinkled back from his teeth and his healthy road-crew tan in the moon’s bony light had become overlaid with the white of a corpse about to be sewn into its winding shroud.

He lifted one arm and pointed. Louis looked in that direction and moaned. His eyes grew wide, and he crammed his knuckles against his mouth. There was coolness on his cheeks and he realized that, in the extremity of his terror, he had begun to weep.

The deadfall from which Jud Crandall had called Ellie in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals. Fingerbones clittered. Here the remains of a foot flexed its pallid joints.

Ah, it was moving; it was creeping—

Pascow was walking toward him now, his bloody face grim in the moonlight, and the last of Louis’s coherent mind began to slip away in a yammering, cyclic thought: You got to scream yourself awake doesn’t matter if you scare Rachel Ellie Gage wake the whole household the whole neighborhood got to scream yourself awake screamscreamscreamyourselfawakeawakeawake— But only a thin whisper of air would come. It was the sound of a little kid sitting on a stoop somewhere and trying to teach himself to whistle.

Pascow came closer and then spoke.

‘The door must not be opened,’ Pascow said. He was looking down at Louis, because Louis had fallen to his knees. He was no longer grinning. A look was on his face which Louis at first mistook for compassion. It wasn’t really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. ‘Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old, and always restless. Remember.’ Louis tried again to scream. He could not.

‘I come as a friend,’ Pascow said, but was friend actually the word Pascow had used? Louis thought not. It was as if Pascow had spoken in a foreign language which Louis could understand through some dream-magic … and friend was as close to whatever word Pascow had actually used that Louis’s struggling mind could come. ‘Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor.’ He was close enough for Louis to be able to smell death on him.

Pascow, reaching for him.

The soft, maddening click of the bones.

Louis began to overbalance in his effort to get away from that hand. His own hand struck a monument and tilted it into the earth. Pascow’s face, leaning down, filled the sky.

‘Doctor – remember.’

Louis tried to scream, and the world whirled away – but still he heard the click of moving bones in the moonlit crypt of the night.