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TWENTY-TWO

The Thanksgiving dinner Jud and Norma put on was a fine one. When it was over, Louis went home feeling full and sleepy. He went upstairs to the bedroom, relishing the quiet a little, flipped off his loafers and lay down. It was just after three o’clock, the day outside lit with thin, wintry sunshine.

I’ll just doze a little, he thought, and then fell fast asleep.

It was the bedroom extension that woke him up. He groped for it, trying to pull himself together, disoriented by the fact that it was almost dark outside. He could hear the wind whining around the corners of the house and the faint, husky mutter of the furnace.

‘Hello,’ he said. It would be Rachel, calling from Chicago again to wish him a happy Thanksgiving. She would put Ellie on and Ellie would talk and then Gage would get on and Gage would babble and how the hell had he managed to sleep all afternoon when he had meant to watch the football game— But it wasn’t Rachel. It was Jud.

‘Louis? ‘Fraid maybe you’ve got a little spot of trouble.’

He swung out of bed, still trying to scrub the sleep out of his mind. ‘Jud? What trouble?’ ‘Well, there’s a dead cat over here on our lawn,’ Jud said. ‘I think it might be your daughter’s.’ ‘Church?’ Louis asked. There was a sudden sinking in his belly. ‘Are you sure, Jud?’ ‘No, I ain’t one hundred per cent sure,’ Jud said, ‘but it sure looks like him.’ ‘Oh. Oh shit. I’ll be right over, Jud.’

‘All right, Louis.’

He hung up and just sat there for a minute longer. Then he went in and used the bathroom, put his shoes on, and went downstairs.

Well, maybe it isn’t Church. Jud himself said he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure. Christ, the cat doesn’t even want to go upstairs anymore unless someone carries him … why would he cross the road?

But in his heart he felt sure that it was Church … and if Rachel called this evening as she almost certainly would, what was he going to say to Ellie?

Crazily, he heard himself saying to Rachel: I know that anything, literally anything, can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that … do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if he gets run over in the road? But he hadn’t really believed anything was going to happen to Church, had he?

He remembered one of the guys he played poker with, Wickes Sullivan, asking him once how he could get horny for his wife and not get horny for the naked women he saw day in and day out. Louis had tried to explain to him that it wasn’t the way people imagined in their fantasies – a woman coming in to get a pap smear or to learn how to give herself a breast self-examination didn’t suddenly drop a sheet and stand there like Venus on the half-shell. You saw a breast, a vulva, a thigh. The rest was draped in a sheet, and there was a nurse in attendance, more to protect the doctor’s reputation than anything else. Wicky wasn’t buying it. A tit is a tit, was Wicky’s thesis, and a twat was a twat. You should either be horny all the time or none of the time. All Louis could respond was that your wife’s tit was different.

Just like your family’s supposed to be different, he thought now. Church wasn’t supposed to get killed because he was inside the magic circle of the family. What he hadn’t been able to make Wicky understand was that doctors compartmentalized just as cheerfully and blindly as anyone else. A tit wasn’t a tit unless it was your wife’s tit. In the office, another woman’s tit wasn’t a tit, it was a case. You could stand up in front of a medical colloquium and cite leukemia figures in children until you were blue in the face and still not believe it if one of your own kids got a call on the Bone-Phone. My kid? My kid’s cat, even? Doctor, you must be joking.

Never mind. Take this one step at a time.

But that was hard when he remembered how hysterical Ellie had gotten at the prospect of Church someday dying.

Stupid fucking cat, why did we ever have to get a fucking cat, anyway?

But he wasn’t fucking any more. That was supposed to keep him alive.

‘Church?’ he called, but there was only the furnace, muttering and muttering, burning up dollars. The couch in the living room, where Church now spent most of his time, was empty. He was not lying on any of the radiators. Louis rattled the cat’s dish, the one thing absolutely guaranteed to bring Church running if he was in earshot, but no cat came running this time … or ever would again, he was afraid.

Reluctantly, he put on his coat and hat, and started for the door. Then he came back. Giving in to what his heart told him, he opened the cupboard under the sink and squatted down. There were two kinds of plastic bags in there – small white ones for the household trash-baskets and big green garbage can liners. Louis took one of the latter. Church had gotten larger since he had been fixed.

He poked the bag into one of the side pockets of his jacket, not liking the slick, cool way the plastic felt under his fingers. Then he let himself out the front door and crossed the street to Jud’s house.

It was about five-thirty. Twilight was ending. The landscape had a strange dead look. The remainder of sunset was a strange orange line on the horizon across the river. The wind howled straight down Route 15, numbing Louis’s cheeks and whipping away the white plume of his breath. He shuddered, but not from the cold. It was a feeling of aloneness that made him shudder. It was strong and persuasive. There seemed no way to concretize it with a metaphor. It was faceless. He just felt by himself, untouched and untouching.

He saw Jud across the road, bundled up in his big green duffle-coat, his face lost in the shadow cast by the fur-fringed hood. Standing on his frozen lawn, he looked like a piece of statuary, just another dead thing in this twilit landscape where no bird sang.

Louis started across, and then Jud moved – waved him back. Shouted something Louis could not make out over the pervasive whine of the wind. He stepped back, realizing suddenly that the wind’s whine had deepened and sharpened. A moment later an air-horn blatted and an Orinco truck roared past close enough to make his pants and jacket flap. Damned if he hadn’t almost walked right out in front of the thing.

This time he checked both ways before crossing. There was only the tanker’s tail lights, dwindling into the twilight.

‘Thought that ‘Rinco truck was gonna get you,’ Jud said. ‘Have a care, Louis.’ Even this close, Louis couldn’t see Jud’s face, and the uncomfortable feeling persisted that this could have been anyone … anyone at all.

‘Where’s Norma?’ he asked, still not looking down at the sprawled bundle of fur by Jud’s foot.

‘Went to the Thanksgiving church service,’ he said. ‘She’ll stay to the supper, I guess, although I don’t think she’ll eat nothing.’ The wind gusted, shifting the hood back momentarily and Louis saw that it was indeed Jud – who else would it have been? ‘It’s mostly an excuse for a hen-paaa-ty,’ Jud said. ‘They don’t eat much but sanwidges after the big meal at noon. She’ll be back around eight.’ Louis knelt down to look at the cat. Don’t let it be Church, he wished fervently, as he turned it over gently with gloved fingers. Let it be someone else’s cat, let Jud be wrong.

But of course it was Church. The cat was in no way mangled or disfigured, as if he had been run over by one of the big tankers or semis that cruised Route 15 (just what was that Orinco truck doing out on Thanksgiving? he wondered randomly). Church’s eyes were half-open, as glazed as green marbles. A small flow of blood had come from his mouth, which was also open. Not a great deal of blood; just enough to stain the white bib on his chest.

‘Yours, Louis?’

‘Mine,’ he agreed, and sighed.

He was aware for the first time that he had loved Church – maybe not as fervently as Ellie, but in his own absent way. In the weeks following his castration, Church had changed, had gotten fat and slow, had established a routine that took him between Ellie’s bed, the couch and his dish but rarely out of the house. Now, in death, he looked to Louis like the old Church. The mouth, so small and bloody, filled with needle-sharp cat’s teeth, was frozen in a shooter’s snarl. The dead eyes seemed furious. It was as if, after the short and placid stupidity of his life as a neuter, Church had rediscovered his real nature in dying.

‘Yeah, it’s Church,’ he said. ‘I’ll be damned if I know how I’m going to tell Ellie about it.’ Suddenly he had an idea. He would bury Church up in the Pet Sematary with no marker or any of that foolishness. He would say nothing to Ellie on the phone tonight about Church; tomorrow he would mention casually that he hadn’t seen Church around; the day after he would suggest that perhaps Church had wandered off. Cats did that sometimes. Ellie would be upset, sure, but there would be none of the finality … no reprise of Rachel’s upsetting refusal to deal with death … just a withering away … Coward, part of his mind pronounced.

Yes … no argument. But who needs this hassle?

‘Loves that cat pretty well, doesn’t she?’ Jud asked.

‘Yes,’ Louis said absently. Gently, he moved Church’s head. The cat had begun to stiffen, but the head still moved much more easily than it should have. Broken neck. Yeah. Given that, he thought he could reconstruct what had happened. Church had been crossing the road – for what reason God alone knew – and a car or truck had hit him, breaking his neck and throwing him aside on to Jud Crandall’s lawn. Or perhaps the cat’s neck had been broken when he struck the frozen ground. It didn’t matter. Either way the remains remained the same. Church was dead.

He glanced up at Jud, about to tell him his conclusions, but Jud was looking away toward that fading orange line of light at the horizon. His hood had fallen back halfway, and his face seemed thoughtful and stern … harsh, even.

Louis pulled the green garbage bag out of his pocket and unfolded it, holding it tightly to keep the wind from whipping it away. The brisk crackling sound of the bag seemed to bring Jud back to this here and now.

‘Yes, I guess she loves it pretty well,’ Jud said. His use of the present tense felt slightly eerie … the whole setting, with the fading light, the cold and the wind, struck him as eerie and gothic.

Here’s Heathcliff out on the desolate moors, Louis thought, grimacing against the cold. Getting ready to pop the family cat into a Hefty Bag. Yowza.

He grabbed Church’s tail, spread the mouth of the bag, and lifted the cat. He pulled a disgusted, unhappy face at the sound the cat’s body made coming up rrrriiippp as he pulled it out of the frost it had set into. The cat seemed almost unbelievably heavy, as if death had settled into it like a physical weight. Christ, he feels like a bucket of sand.

Jud held the other side of the bag and Louis dropped Church in, glad to be rid of that strange, unpleasant weight.

‘What are you going to do with it now?’ Jud asked. His face looked almost carved inside the hood. But his eyes held Louis’s own strongly.

‘Put him in the garage, I guess,’ Louis said. ‘Bury him in the morning.’

‘In the Pet Sematary?’

Louis shrugged. ‘Suppose so.’

‘Going to tell Ellie?’

‘I … I’ll have to mull that one over, a while.’

Jud was quiet a moment longer, and then he seemed to reach a decision. ‘Wait here a minute or two, Louis.’ Jud moved away, with no apparent thought that Louis might not want to wait just a minute on this bitter night. He moved away with assurance and that lithe ease that was so strange in a man of his age. And Louis found he had nothing to say anyway. He didn’t feel much like himself. He watched Jud go, quite content to stand here.

He raised his face into the wind after the door had clicked closed, the garbage bag with Church’s body in it riffling between his feet.

Content.

Yes; he was. For the first time since they had moved to Maine he felt that he was in his place, that he was home. Standing here by himself in the eerie afterglow of the day, standing on the rim of winter, he felt unhappy and yet oddly exhilarated and strangely whole – whole in a way he had not been, or could not remember feeling that he had been, since childhood.

Something gonna happen here, Bubba. Something pretty weird, I think.

He tilted his head back and saw cold winter stars in a blackening sky.

How long he stood like that he did not know, although it could not have been long in terms of seconds and minutes. Then a light flickered on Jud’s porch, bobbed, approached the porch door, and descended the steps. It was Jud behind a big four-cell flashlight. In his other hand he held what Louis at first thought was a large X … and then he saw that it was a pick and shovel.

He handed the shovel to Louis, who took it in his free hand.

‘Jud, what the hell are you up to? We can’t bury him tonight.’

‘Yeah, we can. And we’re gonna.’ Jud’s face was lost behind the glaring circle of the flashlight.

‘Jud, it’s dark. It’s late. And cold—’

‘Come on,’ Jud said. ‘Let’s get it done.’

Louis shook his head and tried to begin again, but the words came hard – the words of explanation and reason. They seemed so meaningless against the low shriek of the wind, the seedling bed of stars in the black.

‘It can wait till tomorrow when we can see—’

‘Does she love the cat?’

‘Yes, but—’

Jud’s voice, soft and somehow logical: ‘And do you love her?’

‘Of course I love her, she’s my dau—’

‘Then come on.’

Louis went.

Twice – maybe three times – on the walk up to the Pet Sematary that night Louis tried to talk to Jud, but Jud didn’t answer. Louis gave up. That feeling of contentment, odd under the circumstances but a pure fact, persisted. It seemed to come from everywhere. Even the steady ache in his muscles from carrying Church in one hand and the shovel in the other was a part of it. The wind, deadly cold, numbing exposed skin, was a part of it; it wound steadily in the trees. Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Jud’s flash was a part of it, glowing like some primitive torch borne deeper and deeper into the woods. He felt the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret.

The shadows fell away and there was a feeling of space. Snow shone pallidly.

‘Rest here,’ Jud said, and Louis set the bag down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Rest here? But they were here. He could see the markers in the moving, aimless sweep of Jud’s light as Jud sat down in the thin snow and put his face between his arms.

‘Jud? Are you all right?’

‘Fine. Need to catch my breath a bit, that’s all.’

Louis sat down next to him and deep-breathed half a dozen times.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I feel better than I have in maybe six years. I know that’s a crazy thing to say when you’re burying your daughter’s cat, but it’s the flat truth, Jud. I feel good.’ Jud breathed deeply once or twice himself. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said. ‘It is that way once in a while. You don’t pick your times for feeling good, any more than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it, too, but you don’t want to trust that. Heroin makes dope-addicts feel good when they’re putting it in their arms, but all the time it’s poisoning them. Poisoning their bodies and poisoning their way of thinking. This place can be like that, Louis, and don’t you ever forget it. I hope to God I’m doing right. I think I am, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes my head gets muddled. It’s senility coming, I think.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘This place has power, Louis. Not so much here, but … the place we’re going.’ ‘Jud—’

‘Come on,’ Jud said, and was on his feet again. The flashlight’s beam illuminated the deadfall. Jud was walking toward it. Louis suddenly remembered his episode of somnambulism. What was it Pascow had said in the dream that had accompanied it?

Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken.

But now, tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had been seemed years rather than months distant. Louis felt fine and fey and alive, ready to cope with anything, and yet full of wonder. It occurred to him that this was very much like a dream.

Then Jud turned toward him, the hood seeming to surround a blankness, and for one moment Louis imagined that it was Pascow himself who now stood before him, that the shining light would be reversed, trained on a grinning, gibbering skull framed in fur, and his fear returned like a dash of cold water.

‘Jud,’ he said, ‘we can’t climb over that. We’ll each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back.’ ‘Just follow me,’ Jud said. ‘Follow me and don’t look down. Don’t hesitate and don’t look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure.’ Louis began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had simply never awakened from his afternoon nap. If I was awake, he thought, I’d no more head up that deadfall than I’d get drunk and go skydiving. But I’m going to do it. I really think I am. So … I must be dreaming. Right?

Jud angled slightly left, away from the center of the deadfall. The flash’s beam centered brightly on the jumbled heap of (bones)

fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure himself that he was in the right place, Jud started up. He did not scramble; he did not climb bent over, the way a man will climb a rocky hillside or a sandy slope. He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. A man climbing stairs doesn’t bother to look down because he knows where each stair will be. Jud climbed like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from.

Louis followed in the same way.

He did not look down or search for footholds. It came to him with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to. It was a piece of utter assholery, of course; like the stupid confidence of a man who believes it’s safe to drive when totally shitfaced as long as he’s wearing his St Christopher medallion.

But it worked.

There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge, into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes (Hush Puppy loafers; hardly recommended for climbing deadfalls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.

For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist. The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the … the barrier. Yes, that’s what it was, why try to pretend it wasn’t? The barrier.

Louis reached the top himself and paused there momentarily, right foot planted on an old fallen tree that was canted up at a thirty-five-degree angle, left foot on something springier – a mesh of old fir branches? He didn’t look down to see, but only switched the heavy trashbag with Church’s body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. He turned his face up into the wind and felt it sweep past him in an endless current, lifting his hair. It was so cold, so clean … so constant.

Moving casually, almost sauntering, he started down again. Once a branch that felt to be the thickness of a brawny man’s wrist snapped loudly under his foot, but he felt no concern at all – and his plunging foot was stopped firmly by a heavier branch some four inches down. Louis hardly staggered. He supposed that now he could understand how company commanders in the First World War had been able to stroll along the top of the trenches with bullets snapping all around them, whistling ‘Tipperary’. It was crazy, but the very craziness made it tremendously exhilarating.

He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Jud’s light. Jud was standing there, waiting for him. Then he reached the bottom, and the exhilaration flared up in him like a shot of coal-oil on embers.

‘We made it!’ He shouted. He put the shovel down and clapped Jud on the shoulder. He remembered crossing a railroad trestle on a dare as a boy; he remembered climbing an apple tree to the top fork where it swayed in the wind like a ship’s mast. He had not felt so young or so viscerally alive in twenty years or more. ‘Jud, we made it!’ ‘Did you think we wouldn’t?’ Jud asked.

Louis opened his mouth to say something – Think we wouldn’t? We’re damn lucky we didn’t kill ourselves! – and then he shut it again. He had never really questioned at all, not from the moment Jud approached the deadfall. And he was not worried about getting back over again.

‘I guess not,’ he said.

‘Come on. Got a piece to walk yet. Three miles, I guess.’

They walked. The path did indeed go on. In places it seemed very wide, although the moving light revealed little clearly; it was mostly a feeling of space, that the trees had drawn back. Once or twice Louis looked up and saw stars wheeling between the massed dark border of trees. Once something loped across the path ahead of them, and the light picked up the reflection of greenish eyes – there and then gone.

At other times the path closed in until underbrush scratched stiff fingers across the shoulders of Louis’s coat. He switched the bag and the shovel more often, but the ache in his shoulders was now constant. He fell into a rhythm of walking and became almost hypnotized with it. There was power here, yes, he felt it. He remembered a time when he had been a senior in high school and he, his girl and some other couple had gone way out in the boonies and had ended up necking at the end of a dead-end dirt road near a power-station. They hadn’t been there long before Louis’s girl said that she wanted to go home, or at least to another place, because all of her teeth (all the ones with fillings, anyway, and that was most of them) were aching. Louis had been glad to leave himself. The air around the power-station made him feel nervous and too awake. This was like that, but it was stronger. Stronger but not unpleasant at all. It was— Jud had stopped at the base of a long slope and Louis ran into him.

Jud turned toward him. ‘We’re almost where we’re going now,’ he said calmly. ‘This next bit is like the deadfall – you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me, and don’t look down. You felt us going downhill?’ ‘Yes.’

‘This is the edge of what the Micmacs used to call Little God Swamp. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man’s Bog, and most of them who came once and got out never came again.’ ‘Is there quicksand?’

‘Oh, ayuh, quicksand aplenty! Streams that bubble up through a big deposit of quartz sand left over from the glacier. Silica-sand, we always called it, although there’s probably a proper name for it.’ Jud looked at him, and for a moment Louis thought he saw something bright and not completely pleasant in the old man’s eyes. It was strong and charged, as the air around the power-station had been on that long-ago school night. It struck Louis as distinctly unpleasant.

Then Jud shifted the flashlight and that look was gone.

‘There’s a lot of funny things down this way, Louis. The air’s heavier … more electrical … or somethin’.’ Louis started.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ Louis said.

‘You might see St Elmo’s fire, what the sailors call foo-lights. It makes funny shapes, but it’s nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way. You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny.’ ‘Loons?’ Louis said doubtfully. ‘This time of year?’

‘Oh, ayuh,’ Jud said again, and his voice was terribly bland and totally unreadable. For a moment Louis wished desperately he could see the old man’s face again. That look— ‘Jud, where are we going? What the hell are we doing out here in the back of the beyond?’ ‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’ Jud turned away. ‘Mind the tussocks.’

They began to walk again, stepping from one broad hummock to the next. Louis did not feel for them. His feet seemed to find them automatically, with no effort from him. He slipped only once, his left shoe breaking through a thin scum of ice and dipping into cold and somehow slimy standing water. He pulled it out quickly and went on, following Jud’s bobbing light. That light, floating through the woods, brought back memories of the pirate tales he had liked to read as a boy. Evil men off to bury gold doubloons by the dark of the moon … and of course one of them would be tumbled into the pit on top of the chest, a bullet in his heart, because the pirates had believed – or so the authors of these lurid tales solemnly attested – that the dead comrade’s ghost would remain there to guard the swag.

Except it’s not treasure we’ve come to bury. Just my daughter’s castrated cat.

He felt wild laughter bubble up inside and stifled it.

He did not hear any ‘sounds like voices’, nor did he see any St Elmo’s fire, but after stepping over half a dozen tussocks, he looked down and saw that his feet, calves, knees and lower thighs had disappeared into a groundfog that was perfectly smooth, perfectly white, and perfectly opaque. It was like moving through the world’s lightest drift of snow.

The air seemed to have a quality of light in it now, and it was warmer, he would have sworn it. He could see Jud before him, moving steadily along, the blunt end of the pick hooked over his shoulder. The pick enhanced the illusion of a man intent on burying treasure.

That crazy sense of exhilaration persisted, and he suddenly wondered if maybe Rachel was trying to call him; if, back in the house, the phone was ringing and ringing, making its rational, prosaic sound. If— He almost walked into Jud’s back again. The old man had stopped in the middle of the path. His head was cocked to one side. His mouth was pursed and tense.

‘Jud? What’s—’

‘Shhh!’

Louis hushed, looking around uneasily. Here the ground mist was thinner, but he still couldn’t see his own shoes. Then he heard crackling underbrush and breaking branches. Something was moving out there – something big.

He opened his mouth to ask Jud if it was a moose (bear was the thought that actually crossed his mind) and then he closed it again. The sound carries, Jud had said.

He cocked his head to one side in unconscious imitation of Jud, unaware that he was doing it, and listened. The sound seemed at first distant, then very close; moving away and then moving ominously toward them. Louis felt sweat break on his forehead and begin to trickle down his chapped cheeks. He shifted the Hefty Bag with Church’s body in it from one hand to the other. His palm had dampened and the green plastic now seemed greasy, wanting to slide through his fist. Now the thing out there seemed so close that Louis expected to see its shape at any moment, rising up on two legs, perhaps, blotting out the stars with some unthought-of, immense and shaggy body.

Bear was no longer what he was thinking of.

Now he didn’t know just what he was thinking of.

Then it moved away and disappeared.

Louis opened his mouth again, the words What was that? already on his tongue. Then a shrill, maniacal laugh came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling. To Louis it seemed that every joint in his body had frozen solid and that he had somehow gained weight, so much weight that if he turned to run he would plunge down and out of sight in the swampy ground.

The laughter rose, split into dry cackles like some rottenly friable chunk of rock along many fault-lines; it reached the pitch of a scream, then sank into a guttural chuckling noise that might have become sobs before it faded out altogether.

Somewhere there was a drip of water and above them, like a steady river in a bed of sky, the monotonous whine of the wind. Otherwise, Little God Swamp was silent.

Louis began to shudder all over. His flesh – particularly that of his lower belly – began to creep. Yes, creep was the right word; his flesh actually seemed to be moving on his body. His mouth was totally dry. There seemed to be no spit at all left in it. Yet that feeling of exhilaration persisted, an unshakable lunacy.

‘What in Christ’s name?’ he whispered hoarsely to Jud.

Jud turned to look at him, and in the dim light Louis thought the old man looked a hundred and twenty. There was no sign of that odd, dancing light in his eyes now. His face was drawn and there was stark terror in his eyes. But when he spoke, his voice was steady enough. ‘Just a loon,’ he said. ‘Come on. Almost there.’ They went on. The tussocks became firm ground again. For a few moments Louis had a sensation of open space, although that dim glow in the air had now faded and it was all he could do to make out Jud’s back three feet in front of him. Short grass stiff with frost was under foot. It broke like glass at every step. Then they were in the trees again. He could smell aromatic fir, feel needles. Occasionally a twig or a branch scraped against him.

Louis had lost all sense of time or direction, but they did not walk long before Jud stopped again and turned toward him.

‘Steps here,’ he said. ‘Cut into rock. Forty-two or forty-four, I disremember which. Just follow me. We get to the top and we’re there.’ He began to climb again, and again Louis followed.

The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoe gritted on a strew of pebbles and stone fragments.

… Twelve … thirteen … fourteen …

The wind was sharper, colder, quickly numbing his face. Are we above the treeline? he wondered. He looked up and saw a billion stars, cold lights in the darkness. Never in his life had the stars made him feel so completely small, infinitesimal, without meaning. He asked himself the old question – is there anything intelligent out there? – and instead of wonder, the thought brought a horrid cold feeling, as if he had asked himself what it might be like to eat a handful of squirming bugs.

… Twenty-six … twenty-seven … twenty-eight …

Who carved these, anyway? Indians? The Micmacs? Were they tool-bearing Indians? I’ll have to ask Jud. ‘Tool-bearing Indians’ made him think of ‘fur-bearing animals’, and that made him think of that thing that had been moving near them in the woods. One foot stumbled and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled. Like dry skin that’s almost worn out, he thought.

‘You all right, Louis?’ Jud murmured.

‘I’m okay,’ he said, although he was nearly out of breath and his muscles throbbed from the weight of Church in the bag.

… Forty-two … forty-three … forty-four …

‘Forty-five,’ Jud said. ‘I’ve forgot. Haven’t been up here in twelve years, I guess. Don’t suppose I’ll ever have a reason to come again. Here … up you come.’ He grabbed Louis’s arm and helped him up the last step.

‘We’re here,’ Jud said.

Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standing on a rocky, rubble-strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue. Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach the steps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird, flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or New Mexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa, or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was, was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bending before the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, and not an isolated mesa. Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees. But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in the context of New England’s low and somehow tired hills— Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenly spoke up.

‘Come on,’ Jud said, and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. Louis saw a number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees – trees which were the oldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness – but an emptiness which vibrated.

The dark shapes were cairns of stones.

‘Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here,’ Jud said. ‘No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have.’ ‘Why? Why did they do it?’

‘This was their burying ground,’ Jud said. ‘I brought you here so you could bury Ellie’s cat here. The Micmacs didn’t discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners.’ This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better: they had slaughtered the pets of royalty, so that the souls of the pets might go along to whatever afterlife there might be with the soul of the master. He remembered reading about the slaughter of more than ten thousand pets and domestic animals following the decease of one pharaoh’s daughter – included in the tally had been six hundred pigs, and two thousand peacocks. The pigs had been scented with attar of roses, the dead lady’s favorite perfume, before their throats were cut.

And they built pyramids, too. No one knows for sure what the Mayan pyramids are for – navigation and chronography, some say, like Stonehenge – but we know damn well what the Egyptian pyramids were and are great monuments to death, the world’s biggest gravestones. Here lies Ramses II. He Was Obedient, Louis thought, and uttered a wild, helpless cackle.

Jud looked at him, unsurprised.

‘Go on and bury your animal,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna have a smoke. I’d help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own. That’s the way it was done then.’ ‘Jud, what’s this all about? Why did you bring me here?’

‘Because you saved Norma’s life,’ Jud said, and although he sounded sincere – and Louis was positive he believed himself sincere – he had a sudden, overpowering sense that the man was lying … or that he was being lied to and was then passing the lie on to Louis. He remembered that look he had seen, or thought he had seen, in Jud’s eye.

But up here, none of that seemed to matter. The wind mattered more, pushing freely around him in that steady river, lifting his hair from his brow and off his ears.

Jud sat down with his back against one of the trees, cupped his hands around a match and lit a Chesterfield.

‘You want to rest a bit before you start?’

‘No, I’m okay,’ Louis said. He could have pursued the questions, but he found he didn’t really care to. This felt wrong but it also felt right, and he decided to let that be enough … for now. There was really only one thing he needed to know. ‘Will I really be able to dig him a grave? The soil looks thin.’ Louis nodded toward the place where the rock pushed out of the ground at the edge of the steps.

Jud nodded slowly. ‘Ayuh,’ he said. ‘Soil’s thin, all right. But soil deep enough to grow grass is generally deep enough to bury in, Louis. And people have been burying here for a long, long time. You won’t find it any too easy, though.’ Nor did he. The ground was stony and hard, and very quickly he saw that he was going to need the pick to dig the grave deep enough to hold Church. So he began to alternate, first using the pick to loosen the hard earth and stones, then the shovel to dig out what he had loosened. His hands began to hurt. His body began to warm up again, and he felt a strong and unquestionable need to do a good job. He began to hum under his breath, something he sometimes did when suturing a wound. Sometimes the pick would strike a rock hard enough to flash sparks, and the shiver would travel up the wooden haft to vibrate in his hands. He could feel blisters forming on his palms and didn’t care, although he was, like most doctors, usually careful of his hands. Above and around him, the wind sang and sang, playing a three-note melody.

Counterpointing this he heard the soft drop and chunk of rock. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jud, hunkered down and pulling out the bigger rocks he had dug up, making a heap of them.

‘For your cairn,’ he said when he saw Louis looking.

‘Oh,’ Louis said, and went back to work.

He made the grave about two feet wide and three feet long – a Cadillac of a grave for a damn cat, he thought – and when it was perhaps thirty inches deep and the pick was flashing sparks up from almost every stroke, he tossed it and the shovel aside and asked Jud if it was okay.

Jud got up and took a cursory look. ‘Seems fine to me,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s what you think that counts.’ ‘Will you tell me now what this is about?’

Jud smiled a little. ‘The Micmacs believed this hill was a magic place,’ he said. ‘Believed this whole forest, from the swamp on north and east, was magic. They made this place, and they buried their dead here, away from everything else. Other tribes steered clear of it – the Penobscots said these woods were full of ghosts. Later on the fur trappers started saying pretty much the same thing. I suppose some of them saw the foo-fire in Little God Swamp and thought they were seeing ghosts.’ Jud smiled and Louis thought: That isn’t what you think at all.

‘Later on, not even the Micmacs themselves would come here. One of them claimed he saw a Wendigo here, and that the ground had gone sour. They had a big pow-wow about it … or so I heard the tale in my green years, Louis, but I heard it from that old tosspot Stanny B. – which is what we all called Stanley Bouchard – and what Stanny B. didn’t know, he’d make up.’ Louis, who knew only that the Wendigo was supposed to be a spirit of the north country, said: ‘Do you think the ground’s gone sour?’ Jud smiled – or at least, his lips slanted. ‘I think it’s a dangerous place,’ he said softly, ‘but not for cats or dogs or pet hamsters. Go on and bury your animal, Louis.’ Louis lowered the Hefty Bag into the hole and slowly shovelled the dirt back in. He was cold now, and tired. The patter of the earth on the plastic was a depressing sound, and while he did not regret coming up here, that sense of exhilaration was fading and he had begun to wish the adventure over. It was a long walk back home.

The pattering sound muffled, then stopped – there was only the whump of dirt on more dirt. He scraped the last bit into the hole with the blade of his shovel (there’s never enough, he thought, recalling something his undertaker uncle had said to him at least a thousand years ago, never enough to fill the hole up again) and then turned to Jud.

‘Your cairn,’ Jud said.

‘Look, Jud, I’m pretty tired and—’

‘It’s Ellie’s cat,’ Jud said, and his voice, although soft, was implacable. ‘She’d want you to do it right.’ Louis sighed. ‘I suppose she would,’ he said.

It took another ten minutes to pile up the rocks Jud handed him, one by one. When it was done, there was a low, conical pile of stones on Church’s grave, and Louis did indeed feel a small, tired pleasure. It looked right, somehow, rising with the others in the starlight. He supposed Ellie would never see it – the thought of taking her through that patch of swamp where there was quicksand would make Rachel’s hair turn white – but he had seen it, and it was good.

‘Most of these have fallen over,’ he said to Jud, standing and brushing at the knees of his pants. He was seeing more clearly now, and in several places he could make out distinctly the scattered strews of loose stones. But Jud had seen to it that he built his own cairn only from stones taken from the grave he himself had dug.

‘Ayuh,’ Jud said. ‘Told you: the place is old.’

‘Are we done now?’

‘Ayuh.’ He clapped Louis on the shoulder. ‘You did good, Louis. I knew you would. Let’s go home.’ ‘Jud—’ he began again, but Jud only grabbed the pick and walked off toward the steps. Louis got the shovel, had to trot to catch up, and then saved his breath for walking. He looked back once, but the cairn marking the grave of his daughter’s cat Winston Churchill had melted into the shadows and he could not pick it out.

We just ran the film backwards, Louis thought tiredly as they emerged from the woods and into the field overlooking his own house some time later. He did not know how much later; he had taken off his watch when he had lain down to doze that afternoon, and it would still be there on the windowsill by his bed. He only knew that he was beat, used up, done in. He could not remember feeling so kicked-dog weary since his first day on Chicago’s rubbish-disposal crew one high-school summer sixteen or seventeen years ago.

They came back the same way they had gone, but he could remember very little about the trip. He stumbled on the deadfall, he remembered that: lurching forward and thinking absurdly of Peter Pan – oh Jesus, I lost my happy thoughts and down I come – and then Jud’s hand had been there, firm and hard, and a few moments later they had been trudging past the final resting places of Smucky and Trixie and Marta Our Pet Rabit and on to the path he had once walked not only with Jud but with his whole family.

It seemed that in some weary way he had pondered the dream of Victor Pascow, the one which had resulted in his somnambulistic episode, but any connection between that night walk and this had eluded him. It had also occurred to him that the whole adventure had been dangerous – not in any melodramatic, Wilkie Collins sense, but in a very real one. That he had outrageously blistered his hands while in a state that was nearly somnambulistic was really the least of it. He could have killed himself on the deadfall. Both of them could have. It was hard to square such behavior with sobriety. In his current exhaustion, he was willing to ascribe it to confusion and emotional upset over the death of a pet the whole family had loved.

And after a time, there they were, home again.

They walked toward it together, not speaking, and stopped again in Louis’s driveway. The wind moaned and whined. Wordlessly, Louis handed Jud his pick.

‘I best get across,’ Jud said at last. ‘Louella Bisson or Ruthie Perks will be bringin’ Norma home and she’ll wonder where the hell I am.’ ‘Do you have the time?’ Louis asked. He was surprised that Norma wasn’t home yet; in his muscles it seemed to him that midnight must have struck.

‘Oh, ayuh,’ Jud said. ‘I keep the time as long as I’m dressed and then I let her go.’ He fished a watch out of his pants pocket and flicked the scrolled cover back from its face.

‘It’s gone eight-thirty,’ he said, and snapped the cover closed again.

‘Eight-thirty?’ Louis repeated stupidly. ‘That’s all?’

‘How late did you think it was?’ Jud asked.

‘Later than that,’ Louis said.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Louis,’ Jud said, and began to move away.

‘Jud?’

He turned toward Louis, mildly questioning.

‘Jud, what did we do tonight?’

‘Why, we buried your daughter’s cat.’

‘Is that all we did?’

‘Nothing but that,’ Jud said. ‘You’re a good man, Louis, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. That seem right in their hearts, I mean. And if they do those things and then end up not feeling right, full of questions and sort of like they got indigestion, only inside their heads instead of in their guts, they think they made a mistake. Do you know what I mean?’ ‘Yes,’ Louis said, thinking that Jud must have been reading his mind as the two of them walked downhill through the field and toward the houselights.

‘What they don’t think is that maybe they should be questioning those feelings of doubt before they question their own hearts,’ Jud said, looking at him closely. ‘What do you think, Louis?’ ‘I think,’ Louis said slowly, ‘that you might be right.’

‘And the things that are in a man’s heart, it don’t do him much good to talk about those things, does it?’ ‘Well—’

‘No,’ Jud said, as if Louis had simply agreed. ‘It don’t.’ And in his calm voice that was so sure and so implacable, in that voice that somehow put the chill through Louis, he said: ‘They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she’s never really seen into any man’s heart. The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis – like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock’s close. A man grows what he can … and he tends it.’ ‘Jud—’

‘Don’t question, Louis. Accept what’s done and follow your heart.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing. Accept what’s done, Louis, and follow your heart. We did what was right at this time … at least, I hope to Christ it was right. Another time it could be wrong – wrong as hell.’ ‘Will you at least answer one question?’

‘Well, let’s hear what it is, and then we’ll see.’

‘How did you know about that place?’ This question had also occurred to Louis on the way back, along with the suspicion that Jud himself might be part Micmac – although he did not look like it; he looked as if every one of his ancestors had been one hundred per cent card-carrying Anglos.

‘Why, from Stanny B.,’ he said, looking surprised.

‘He just told you?’

‘No,’ Jud said. ‘It isn’t the kind of place you just tell somebody about. I buried my dog Spot up there when I was ten. He was chasing a rabbit and he run on some rusty barbed wire. The wounds infected and it killed him.’ There was something wrong about that, something that didn’t fit with something Louis had been previously told, but he was too tired to puzzle out the discontinuity. Jud said no more; only looked at him from his inscrutable old man’s eyes.

‘Goodnight, Jud,’ Louis said.

‘Goodnight.’

The old man crossed the road, carrying his pick and shovel.

‘Thanks!’ Louis called impulsively.

Jud didn’t turn; only raised one hand to indicate he had heard.

And in the house, suddenly, the telephone began to ring.

Louis ran, wincing at the aches that flared in his upper thighs and lower back, but by the time he had gotten into the warm kitchen, the phone had already rung six or seven times. It stopped ringing just as he put his hand on it. He picked it up anyway and said hello, but there was only the open hum.

That was Rachel, he thought, I’ll call her back.

But suddenly it seemed like too much work to dial the number, to dance clumsily with her mother – or worse, her checkbook-brandishing father – to be passed on to Rachel … and then to Ellie. Ellie would still be up, of course; it was an hour earlier in Chicago. Ellie would ask him how Church was doing.

Great, he’s fine. Got hit by an Orinco truck. Somehow I’m absolutely positive it was an Orinco truck. Anything else would lack dramatic unity, if you know what I mean. You don’t? Well, never mind. The truck killed him but didn’t mark him up hardly at all. Jud and I planted him up in the old Micmac burying ground – sort of an annex to the Pet Sematary, if you know what I mean. Amazing walk. I’ll take you up there sometime and we’ll put flowers by his marker – excuse me, his cairn. After the quicksand’s frozen over, that is, and the bears go to sleep for the winter.

He let go of the telephone, crossed to the sink and filled it with hot water. He removed his shirt and washed. He had been sweating like a pig in spite of the cold, and a pig was exactly what he smelled like.

There was some left-over meatloaf in the refrigerator. Louis cut it into slabs, put them on a slice of Roman Meal bread, and added two thick rounds of Bermuda onion. He contemplated this for a moment and then doused it liberally with ketchup before slamming down another slice of bread. If Rachel and Ellie had been around, they would have wrinkled their noses in identical gestures of distaste – yuck, gross.

Well, you missed it, ladies, Louis thought with undeniable satisfaction, and gobbled his sandwich. It tasted great. Confucius say he who smell like pig eat like wolf, he thought, and smiled. He chased the sandwich with several long swallows of milk directly from the carton – another habit Rachel frowned on strenuously – and then he went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed without even washing his teeth. His aches and pains had faded to one low throb that was almost comforting.

His watch was there, where he had left it, and he looked at it. Ten minutes of nine. It really was incredible. Already the whole thing seemed like a dream – another sleep-walking incident.

Louis turned off the light, turned over on his side, and slept.

He woke up sometime after three the next morning and shuffled to the bathroom. He was standing there urinating, blinking owlishly in the bright white fluorescent bathroom light, when the discrepancy suddenly showed up in his mind, and his eyes widened – it was as if two pieces of something which should have fitted together perfectly had instead thudded against one another and rebounded.

Tonight Jud had told him that his dog had died when he was ten – had died of infection after being scraped up in a snarl of rusty barbed wire. But on the late summer day when all of them had walked up to the Pet Sematary together, Jud said that his dog had died of old age and was buried there – he had even pointed out the marker, although the years had worn the inscription away.

Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed. Something else was wrong, as well – and in a moment he had it. Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.

But tonight he had said Spot died when he, Jud, was ten.

Well, he’s an old man, and old men get confused in their memories, he thought uneasily. He’s said himself that he’s noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness – groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age he’s getting off pretty goddamned light … senility’s probably too strong a word for it in Jud’s case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting the age of a dog that died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.

But he wasn’t able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.

At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought, let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead – and the steps faded away.

And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.