فصل چهل و شش

FORTY-SIX

After he and Rachel were done talking, Jud put on his light coat – the day had clouded up and the wind had begun to blow – and crossed the road to Louis’s house, pausing on his side of the road to look carefully for trucks before crossing. It was the trucks that had been the cause of all this. The damned trucks.

Except it wasn’t.

He could feel the Pet Sematary pulling at him – and something beyond. Where once its voice had been a kind of seductive lullaby, the voice of possible comfort and a dreamy sort of power, it was now lower, and more than ominous – it was threatening and grim. Stay out of this, you.

But he would not stay out of it. His responsibility went back too far.

He saw that Louis’s Honda Civic was gone from the garage. He tried the back door and found it open.

‘Louis?’ he called, knowing that Louis was not going to answer, but needing to cut across the heavy silence of this house somehow. Oh, getting old was starting to be a pain in the ass – his limbs felt heavy and clumsy most of the time, his back was a misery to him after a mere two hours in the garden, and it felt like there was a screw-auger planted in his hip.

He began to go through the house methodically, looking for the signs he had to look for – world’s oldest house-breaker, he thought without much humor, and went right on looking. He found none of the things that would have seriously upset him: boxes of toys held back from the Salvation Army, clothes for a small boy put aside behind a door or in the closet or under a bed … perhaps worst of all, the crib carefully set up in Gage’s room again. There were absolutely none of the signs he had come looking for, but the house still had an unpleasant blank feel, as if it were waiting to be filled with … well, something.

P’raps I ought to take a little run out to Pleasantview Cemetery. See if anything’s doing out there. Might even run into Louis Creed. I could buy him a dinner, or somethin’.

But it wasn’t at Pleasantview Cemetery in Bangor that there was danger; the danger was here, in this house, and beyond it.

Jud left again and crossed the road to his own house. He pulled a six-pack of beer out of the kitchen fridge and took it into the living room. He sat down in front of the bay window that looked out on the Creed house, cracked a beer, and lit a cigarette. The afternoon drew down around him, and as it did so often these last few years, he found his mind turning back and back in a widening gyre, and if he had known the run of Rachel Creed’s earlier thoughts he could have told her what her psych teacher had told her was maybe the truth, but when you got older that dimming function of the memory broke down little by little, the same way that everything else in your body broke down, and you found yourself recalling places and faces and events with an eerie surety. Sepia-toned memories grew bright again, the colors trueing up, the voices losing that tinny echo of time and regaining their original resonance. It wasn’t informational breakdown at all, Jud could have told him. The name for it is senility.

In his mind Jud again saw Lester Morgan’s bull Hanratty, his eyes rimmed with red, charging at everything in sight, everything that moved. Charging at trees when the wind jigged the leaves. Before Lester gave up and called it off, every tree in Hanratty’s fenced meadow was gored with his brainless fury and his horns were splintered and his head was bleeding. When Lester put Hanratty down, Lester had been sick with dread – the way Jud himself was right now.

He drank beer and smoked. Daylight faded. He did not put on the light. Gradually the tip of his cigarette became a small red pip in the darkness. He sat and drank beer and watched Louis Creed’s driveway. He believed that when Louis came home from wherever he was, he would go over and have a little talk with him. Make sure Louis wasn’t planning to do anything he shouldn’t.

And still he felt the soft tug of whatever it was, whatever sick power it was that inhabited that devil’s place, reaching down from its bluff of rotted stone where all those cairns had been built.

Stay out of this, you. Stay out of it or you’re going to be very, very sorry. That voice was like runners of mist issuing from an open grave.

Ignoring it as best he could, Jud sat and smoked and drank beer. And waited.