فصل چهل و نه

FORTY-NINE

The trees were only moving shapes against the cloudy sky backlit by the glow from the airport not too far distant. Louis parked the Honda on Mason Street. Mason bordered Pleasantview on its south side, and here the wind was almost strong enough to rip the car door out of his hand. He had to push hard to shut it. The wind rippled at his jacket as he opened the Honda’s hatch and took out the piece of tarpaulin he had cut and wrapped around his tools.

He was in a wing of darkness between two street lights, standing on the curb with the canvas-wrapped bundle cradled in his arms, looking carefully for traffic before crossing to the wrought-iron fence which marked the boundary of the graveyard. He did not want to be seen at all, if he could help it, not even by someone who would notice him and forget him the next second. Beside him, the branches of an old elm groaned restlessly in the wind, making Louis think of jackleg necktie parties. God, he was so scared. This wasn’t wild work; it was the work of the mad.

No traffic. On the Mason Street side the street lamps marched away in perfect white circles, casting spotlights on the sidewalk where, during the days after Fairmount Grammar School let out, boys would ride bikes and girls would jump rope and play hopscotch, never noticing the nearby graveyard, except perhaps at Halloween, when it would acquire a certain spooky charm. Perhaps they would dare to cross their suburban street and hang a paper skeleton on the wrought-iron bars of the high fence, giggling at the old jokes: ‘It’s the most popular place in town, people are dying to get in. Why is it a sin to laugh in the grave-yard? Because everyone who lives there is always in a grave mood.

‘Gage,’ he muttered. Gage was in there, behind that wrought-iron fence, unjustly imprisoned under a blanket of dark earth. Gonna break you out, Gage, he thought. Gonna break you out, big guy, or die trying.

Louis crossed the street with his heavy bundle in his arms, stepped up on the other curb, glanced both ways again, and tossed the canvas roll over the fence. It clinked softly as it struck the ground on the far side. Dusting his hands, Louis walked away. He had marked the place in his mind. Even if he forgot, all he really had to do was follow the fence on the inside until he was standing opposite his Civic, and he would fall over it.

But would the gate be open this late?

He walked down Mason Street to the stop-sign, the wind chasing him and worrying his heels. Moving shadows danced and twined on the roadway.

He turned the corner on to Pleasant Street, still following the fence. Car headlights splashed up the street, and Louis stepped casually behind an elm tree. It wasn’t a cop car, he saw, only a van moving toward Hammond Street and, probably, the turnpike. When it was well past him, Louis walked on.

Of course it will be unlocked. It’s got to be.

He reached the gate, which formed a cathedral shape in wrought-iron, slim and graceful in the moving wind-shadows thrown by the street lights. He reached out and tried it.

Locked.

You stupid fool, of course it’s locked – did you really think anyone would leave a cemetery inside the municipal city limits of any American city unlocked after eleven o’clock? No one is that trusting, dear man, not any more. So what do you do now?

Now he would have to climb, and just hope no one happened to glance away from the Carson Show long enough to see him monkeying up the wrought-iron like the world’s oldest, slowest kid.

—Hey, police? I just saw the world’s oldest, slowest kid climbing into Pleasantview Cemetery. Looked like he was dying to get in. Yeah, looked like a grave matter to me. Kidding? Oh no, I’m in dead earnest. Maybe you ought to dig into it.

Louis continued up Pleasant Street and turned right at the next intersection. The high iron fence marched along beside him relentlessly. The wind cooled and evaporated the drops of sweat on his forehead and in the hollows of his temples. His shadow waxed and waned in the street lights. Every now and then he glanced at the fence, and then he stopped and forced himself to really look at it.

You’re going to climb that baby? Don’t make me laugh.

Louis Creed was a fairly tall man, standing a bit over six-two, but the fence was easily nine feet high, each wrought-iron stave ending in a decorative, arrow-like point. Decorative, that was, until you happened to slip while swinging your leg over and the force of your suddenly dropping two hundred pounds drove one of those arrow-points into your groin, exploding your testicles. And there you would be, skewered like a pig at a barbecue, hollering until someone called for the police and they came and pulled you off and took you to the hospital.

The sweat continued to flow, sticking his shirt to his back. All was silent except for the faint hum of late traffic on Hammond Street.

There had to be a way to get in there.

Had to be.

Come on, Louis, face the facts. You may be crazy, but you’re not that crazy. Maybe you could shinny up to the top of that fence, but it would take a trained gymnast to swing over those points without sticking himself on them. And even supposing you can get in, how are you going to get yourself and Gage’s body out?

He went on walking, vaguely aware that he was circling the cemetery but not doing anything constructive.

All right, here’s the answer. I’ll just go on home to Ludlow tonight and come back tomorrow, in the late afternoon. I’ll go in through the gate around four o’clock and find a place to hole up until it’s midnight or a little later. I will, in other words, put off until tomorrow what I should have been smart enough to think of today.

Good idea, o great Swami Louis … and in the meantime, what do I do about that great big bundle of stuff I threw over the wall? Pick, shovel, flashlight … you might as well stamp GRAVEROBBING EQUIPMENT on every damn piece of it.

It landed in the bushes. Who’s going to find it, for Christ’s sake?

On measure, that made sense. But this was no sensible errand he was on, and his heart told him quietly and absolutely that he couldn’t come back tomorrow. If he didn’t do it tonight, he would never do it. He would never be able to screw himself up to this crazy pitch again. This was the moment, the only time for it he was ever going to have.

There were fewer houses up this way – an occasional square of yellow light gleamed on the other side of the street, and once he saw the gray-blue flicker of a black-and-white TV – and looking through the fence he saw that the graves were older here, more rounded, sometimes leaning forward or backward with the freezes and thaws of many seasons. There was another stop-sign up ahead, and another right turn would put him on a street roughly parallel to Mason Street, where he had begun. And when he got back to the beginning, what did he do? Collect two hundred dollars and go around again? Admit defeat?

Car headlights turned down the street, and Louis stepped behind another tree, waiting for it to pass. This car was moving very slowly, and after a moment a white spotlight stabbed out from the passenger side and ran flickering along the wrought-iron fence. His heart squeezed painfully in his chest. It was a police car, checking the cemetery.

He pressed himself tight against the tree, rough bark against his cheek, hoping madly that it was big enough to shield him. The spotlight ran toward him. Louis put his head down, trying to shield the white blur of his face. The spotlight reached the tree, disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared on Louis’s right. He slipped around the tree a little to be out of the car’s line of sight. He had a momentary glimpse of the dark bubbles on the cruiser’s roof. He waited for the tail lights to flare a brighter red, for the doors to open, for the spotlight to suddenly turn back on its ball-joint, hunting for him like a big white finger. Hey you! You behind that tree! Come on out where we can see you, and we want to see both hands empty! Come out NOW!

The police car kept on going. It reached the corner, signalled with sedate propriety, and turned left. Louis collapsed back against the tree, breathing fast, his mouth sour and dry. He supposed they would cruise past his parked Honda, but that didn’t really matter. Parking from six p.m. to seven a.m. was legal on Mason Street. There were plenty of other cars parked along it. Their owners would belong to the scattering of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.

Louis found himself glancing up at the tree he had hidden behind.

Just above his head, the tree forked. He supposed he could—

Without allowing himself to think about it further, he reached into the fork and pulled himself up, scrambling with his tennis shoes for purchase, sending a little shower of bark down to the ground. He got a knee up and a moment later he had one foot planted solidly in the crotch of the elm. If the police car should happen to come back, their spotlight would find an extremely peculiar bird in this tree. He ought to move quickly.

He pulled himself up to a higher branch, one which overhung the very top of the fence. He felt absurdly like the twelve-year-old he supposed he had once been. The tree was not still; it rocked easily, almost soothingly, in the steady wind. Its leaves rustled and murmured. Louis assessed the situation and then, before he could get cold feet, he dropped off into space, holding on to the branch with his hands laced together over it. The branch was perhaps a little thicker than a brawny man’s forearm. Sneakers dangling about eight feet over the sidewalk, he pulled himself hand-for-hand toward the fence. The branch dipped but showed no sign of breaking. He was faintly aware of his shadow following along on the cement sidewalk below him, an amorphous black ape-shape. The wind chilled his hot armpits, and he found himself shivering in spite of the sweat running down his face and neck. The branch dipped and swayed with his movements. The further out he moved, the more pronounced the dip became. His hands and wrists were getting tired now, and he was afraid that his sweat-greasy palms might slip.

He reached the fence. His tennis shoes dangled perhaps a foot below the arrow-tips. The tips did not look blunt at all from this angle. They looked very sharp. Sharp or not, he suddenly realized it was not just his balls that were at stake here. If he fell, and hit it dead on, his weight would be enough to drive one of those spears all the way up into his lungs. The returning cops would find an early and extremely grisly Halloween decoration on the Pleasantview fence.

Breathing fast, not quite gasping, he groped for the fence-points with his feet, needing a moment’s rest. For a moment he hung there, feet moving in an air dance, searching but not finding.

Light touched him, and grew.

Oh Christ, that’s a car, there’s a car coming—!

He tried to shuffle his hands forward but his palms slipped. His interlaced fingers were coming apart.

Still groping for purchase, he turned his head to the left, looking under his straining arm. It was a car, but it shot through the intersection up the street without slowing. Lucky. If it had— His hands slipped again. He felt bark sift down on to his hair.

One foot found purchase, but now his other pantsleg had caught on one of the arrow-points. And Christ, he wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer. Desperately, Louis jerked his leg. The branch dipped. His hands slipped again. There was a mutter of tearing cloth and then he was standing on two of the arrow-points. They dug into the soles of tennis shoes and the pressure quickly became painful, but Louis stood on them for a moment anyway. The relief in his hands and arms was greater than the pain in his feet.

What a figure I must cut, Louis thought with dim and dismal amusement. Holding the branch with his left hand, he wiped his right hand across his jacket. Then he wiped off the left while he held with the right.

He stood on the points for a moment longer and then slipped his hands forward along the branch. It was slim enough for him to be able to lace his fingers together comfortably now. He swung forward like Tarzan, feet leaving the arrow-points. The branch dipped alarmingly, and he heard an ominous cracking sound. He let go, dropping blindly.

He landed badly. One knee thudded against a gravestone, sending a sickening lance of pain up his thigh. He rolled over on the grass, holding it, lips pulled back in something like a grin, hoping that he hadn’t shattered his kneecap. At last the pain began to fade a little, and he found that he could flex the joint. It would be all right if he kept moving and didn’t allow it to stiffen up on him. Maybe.

He got to his feet and started to walk along the fence back toward Mason Street and his equipment. His knee was bad at first and he limped, but the pain smoothed out to a dull ache as he went. There was aspirin in the Honda’s first-aid kit. He should have remembered to bring that with him. Too late now. He kept an eye out for cars and faded back deeper into the cemetery when one came.

On the Mason Street side, which was apt to be better travelled, he kept well back from the fence until he was opposite the Civic. He was about to trot down to the fence and pull his bundle out of the bushes when he heard footfalls on the sidewalk, and a woman’s low laughter. He sat down behind a large grave marker – it hurt his knee too much to squat – and watched a couple walk up the far side of Mason Street. They were walking with their arms about each other’s waists, and something about their movement from one white pool of light to the next made Louis think of some old TV show. In a moment he had it. The Jimmy Durante Hour. What would they do if he rose up now, a wavering shadow in this silent city of the dead, and cried hollowly across to them: ‘Goodnight, Mrs Calabash, wherever you are!’ They stopped in the pool of light just beyond his car and embraced. Watching them, Louis felt a kind of sick wonder and self-loathing. Here he was, crouched behind a tombstone like a ghoulish, subhuman character in some cheap comic-book story, watching lovers. Is the line so thin, then? he wondered, and that thought also had a ring of familiarity. So thin you can simply step over it with this little fuss, muss, and bother? Climb a tree, shinny along a branch, drop into a graveyard, watch lovers … dig holes? That simple? Is it lunacy? I spent eight years becoming a doctor, but I’ve become a grave-robber in one simple step – what I suppose people would call a ghoul.

He crammed his fists against his mouth to stop some sound from coming out, and felt for that interior coldness, that sense of disconnection. It was there, and Louis drew it gratefully around him.

When the couple finally walked on, Louis watched them with nothing but impatience. They climbed the steps of one of the apartment buildings. The man felt for a key, and a moment later they were inside. The street was silent again except for the constant beat of the wind, rustling the trees and tumbling his sweaty hair over his forehead.

Louis ran down to the fence, bent low, and felt through the brush for his canvas bundle. Here it was, rough under his fingers. He picked it up, listening to the muffled clank from inside. He carried it over to the broad gravelled drive that led in through the gates and paused to orient himself. Straight up here, go left at the fork. No problem.

He walked along the edge of the drive, wanting to be able to go further into the shadow of the elms if there did happen to be a full-time caretaker and if he happened to be out. Louis did not really expect trouble from that quarter – it was, after all, a graveyard in a small city – but it would not be wise to take chances.

He bore left at the fork, approaching Gage’s grave now, and suddenly, appallingly, realized he could not remember what his son had looked like. He paused, staring off into the rows of graves, the frowning facades of the monuments, and tried to summon him up. Individual features came to him – his blonde hair, still so fine and light, his slanting eyes, his small, white teeth, the little twist of scar on his chin from the time he had fallen down the back steps of their place in Chicago. He could see these things, but could not integrate them into a coherent whole. He saw Gage running toward the road, running toward his appointment with the Orinco truck, but Gage’s face was turned away. He tried to summon up Gage as he had been in his crib on the night of the kite-flying day, and could see only darkness in his mind’s eye.

Gage, where are you?

Have you ever thought, Louis, that you may not be doing your son any good service? Perhaps he’s happy where he is … maybe all of that isn’t the bullshit you always thought it was. Maybe he’s with the angels, or maybe he’s just sleeping. And if he’s sleeping, do you really know what it is you want to wake up?

Oh Gage, where are you? I want you home with us.

But was he really controlling his own actions? Why couldn’t he summon up Gage’s face, and why was he going against everyone’s warning – Jud’s, the dream of Pascow, the trepidation of his own troubled heart?

He thought of the grave markers in the Pet Sematary, those rude circles, spiraling down into the Mystery, and then the coldness came over him again. Why was he standing here, trying to summon up Gage’s face, anyway?

He would be seeing it soon enough.

The headstone was here now; it read simply GAGE WILLIAM CREED, followed by the two dates. Someone had been here today to pay his or her respects, he saw; there were fresh flowers. Who would that have been? Missy Dandridge?

His heart beat heavily but slowly in his chest. This was it, then; if he was going to do it, he had better start. There was only so much night ahead, and then the day would come.

Louis glanced into his heart one final time and saw that, yes, he did intend to go ahead with this. He nodded his head almost imperceptibly and fished in his pocket for his pocketknife. He had cinched his bundle with Scotch strapping tape, and now he cut it. He unrolled the tarp at the foot of Gage’s grave like a bedroll and then arranged items in exactly the same way he would have arranged instruments to suture a cut or to perform a small in-office operation.

Here was the flashlight with its lens felted as the hardware store clerk had suggested. The felt was also secured with strapping tape. He had made a small circle in the middle by placing a penny on the felt and cutting around it with a scalpel. Here was the short-handled pick which he should not have to use – he had brought it only as a contingency. He would have no sealed cap to deal with, and he shouldn’t run into any rocks in a newly filled grave. Here was the shovel, the spade, the length of rope, the work-gloves. He put the gloves on, grabbed the spade, and started.

The ground was soft, the digging easy. The grave’s shape was well-defined, the dirt he was throwing out softer than the earth at the verge. His mind made a kind of automatic comparison between the ease of this dig and the rocky, unforgiving ground of the place where, if all went well, he would be reburying his son later on this night. Up there, he would need the pick. Then he tried to stop thinking altogether. It only got in the way.

He threw the dirt on the ground to the left of the grave, working into a steady rhythm that only became more difficult to maintain as the hole deepened. He stepped into the grave, smelling that dank aroma of fresh dirt, a smell he remembered from his summers with Uncle Carl.

Digger, he thought, and stopped to wipe sweat from his brow. Uncle Carl had told him that was the nickname for every graveyard sexton in America. Their friends called them Digger.

He started in again.

He stopped only once more, and that was to check his watch. It was twenty minutes past twelve. He felt time slipping through his fist like something that had been greased.

Forty minutes later, the spade gritted across the top of the grave-liner, and Louis’s teeth came down on his upper lip hard enough to bring blood. He got the flashlight and shone it down. Here was more dirt, and scrawled across it in a diagonal slash, a grayish-silver line. It was the top of the grave-liner. Louis got the dirt off it as best he could, but he was wary of making too much noise, and nothing was much louder than a shovel scraping across concrete in the dead of night.

When he had gotten rid of as much of the dirt as he could, he climbed out of the grave and got the rope. This he threaded through the iron rings on one half of the segmented grave-liner top. He got out of the grave again, spread out the tarpaulin, lay down on it, and grasped the ends of the rope.

Louis, I think this is it. Your last chance.

You’re right. It’s my last chance and I’m damned well taking it.

He wound the ends of the rope around his hands and pulled. The square of concrete came up easily, gritting on the pivot end. It stood neatly upright over a square of blackness, now a vertical tombstone instead of a horizontal grave cover.

Louis pulled the rope out of the rings and tossed it aside. He wouldn’t need it for the other half; he could stand on the sides of the grave-liner and pull it up.

He got down into the grave again, moving carefully, not wanting to overturn the cement slab he had already pulled up and mash his toes or break the damned thing, which was quite thin. Pebbles rattled down into the hole, and he heard several of them chip hollowly off Gage’s coffin.

Bending, he grasped the other half of the grave-liner top and pulled upward. As he did so, he felt something squelch coldly under his fingers. When he had this second half of the top standing on end (the two halves now resembled bookends), he looked down at his hand and saw a fat earthworm wriggling feebly there. With a choked cry of disgust, Louis wiped it off on the earthen sidewall of his son’s grave.

Then he shone his flashlight downward.

Here was the coffin he had last seen resting on chrome runners over the grave at the funeral service, surrounded by that ghastly green Astroturf. This was the safety-deposit box in which he was supposed to bury all his hopes for his son. Fury, clean and white-hot, the antithesis of his former coldness, rose up in him. Idiotic! The answer was no!

Louis groped for the spade and found it. He raised it over his shoulder and brought it down on the coffin’s latch once, twice, a third time, a fourth. His lips were drawn back in a furious grimace.

Going to break you out, Gage, see if I don’t!

The latch had splintered on the first stroke and probably no more were necessary, but he went on, not wanting just to open the coffin but to hurt it. Some kind of sanity returned – more quickly than it might have done under other circumstances – and he stopped with the spade raised for another blow.

The blade was bent and scratched. He tossed it aside and scrambled out of the grave on legs that felt weak and rubbery. He felt sick to his stomach, and the anger had gone as quickly as it had come. In its place the coldness flooded back in and never in his life had his mind felt so alone and disconnected; it felt like an astronaut who has floated away from his ship during an EVA and now only drifts in a great blackness, breathing on borrowed time. Did Bill Baterman feel like this? he wondered.

He lay on the ground, on his back this time, waiting to see if he was under control and ready to proceed. When the rubbery feeling had left his legs, he sat up and slipped back down into the grave. He shone the flashlight on the latch and saw it was not just broken, but demolished. He had swung the spade in a blind fury, but every blow he had struck had gone directly there, bull’s eye, as if guided. The wood around it had splintered.

Louis slipped the flashlight into his armpit. He squatted down slightly. His hands groped, like the hands of a catcher in a troupe of circus flyers, waiting to perform his part in a mortal docking.

He found the groove in the lid, and he slipped his fingers into it. He paused for a moment – one could not rightly call it a hesitation – and then he opened his son’s coffin.