فصل چهل و چهار

FORTY-FOUR

As Louis left the BIA terminal building, a cold cloak seemed to fall 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 scholarship and on what his wife could earn pushing coffee-and-Danish on the five a.m. to eleven 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 per cent.

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 licence to jack.’

The clerk blinked, 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 fifty-eight-sixty. He paid cash.

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 re-crossed 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 picture of picturesque boats at dock beside a picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet and 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 HoJo’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 if with 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, use the rope to pull up the top of the graveliner, remove his son’s body from the coffin in which it lay, wrap Gage in a cut-down 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 demons, 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.

He discovered that he had advanced even further along these two paths.

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 burying Gage this second time in 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 need ever know about his failed experiment.

Then, looking further along the other path, the path he hoped for blindly with all his love for his son: he and Gage would leave the house when the examination period was over, leave at night. He would take certain papers with him, and plan never to return to Ludlow again. He and Gage would check into a motel – perhaps this very one in which he now lay.

The following morning he would cash every account they had, converting everything into American Express travellers’ checks (don’t leave home with your resurrected son without them, he thought, and a little giggle escaped his lips) and flat cash. He and Gage would fly somewhere – Florida, most likely. From there he would call Rachel, tell her where he was, tell her to take Ellie and catch a plane without telling her mother and father where she was going. Louis believed he could convince her to do this. Ask no questions, Rachel. Just come. Come now. This minute.

He would tell her where he (they) were staying. Some motel. She and Ellie would arrive in a rental car. He would bring Gage to the door when they knocked. Perhaps Gage would be wearing a bathing suit.

And then—

Ah, but beyond that he did not dare go; instead he turned back to the plan’s beginning and began to go over it again. He supposed that, if things worked out, it would mean accumulating the identification minutiae of whole new lives so that Irwin Goldman could not use his over-flowing check-book to trace them. Such things could be done.

Vaguely, he remembered arriving at the Ludlow house, tense, tired, and more than a little scared, and having some fantasy about just driving down to Orlando and hiring on as a medic at Disney World. Maybe that wasn’t so farfetched after all.

He saw himself, dressed in white, resuscitating a pregnant woman who had foolishly gone on the Magic Mountain ride and had fainted. Stand back, stand back, give her some air, he heard himself saying, and the woman opened her eyes and smiled gratefully at him.

As his mind spun out this not disagreeable fantasy, Louis fell asleep. He slept as his daughter awoke in an airplane somewhere above Niagara Falls, screaming from a nightmare of clutching hands and stupid yet merciless eyes; he slept as the stewardess rushed down the aisle to see what was wrong; he slept as Rachel, totally unnerved, tried to soothe her; he slept as Ellie cried over and over again: It’s Gage! Mommy! It’s Gage! It’s Gage! Gage is alive! Gage has got the knife from Daddy’s bag! Don’t let him get me! Don’t let him get Daddy!

He slept as Ellie quieted at last and lay shuddering against her mother’s breast, her eyes wide and tearless, and as Dory Goldman thought what an awful thing all of this had been for Ellie, and how much she reminded Dory of Rachel after Zelda had died.

He slept and woke up at quarter past five, with the afternoon light beginning to slant down toward the coming night.

Wild work, he thought stupidly, and got up.