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FIFTY-FIVE

Louis had rediscovered his dream and was in its grip; every few moments he looked down to make sure it was a body in a tarpaulin he was carrying, and not one in a green Hefty Bag. He remembered how on awakening the morning after Jud had taken him up there with Church he had been barely able to remember what they had done – but now he also remembered how vivid those sensations had been, how alive each of his senses had felt, how they had seemed to reach out, touching the woods as if they were alive, and in some kind of telepathic contact with himself.

He followed the path up and down, rediscovering the places where it seemed as wide as Route 15, the places where it narrowed until he had to turn sideways to keep the head and foot of his bundle from getting tangled in the underbrush, the places where the path wound through great cathedral stands of trees. He could smell the clear tang of pine resin, and he could hear that strange crump-crump of the needles underfoot – a sound that is really more feeling than sound.

At last the path began to slant downward more steeply and constantly. A short time later one foot splashed through thin water and became mired in the sludgy stuff underneath … the quicksand, if Jud was to be believed. Louis looked down and could see the standing water between growths of reeds and low, ugly bushes with leaves so broad they were almost tropical. He remembered that the light had seemed brighter that other night, too. More electrical.

This next bit is like the deadfall – you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me and don’t look down.

Yes, okay … and just by the by, have you ever seen plants like these in Maine before? In Maine or anywhere else? What in Christ’s name are they?

Never mind, Louis. Just … let’s go.

He began to walk again, looking at the wet, marshy undergrowth just long enough to sight the first tussock and then only looking ahead of himself, his feet moving from one grassy hump to the next – faith is accepting gravity as a postulate, he thought; nothing he had been told in a college theology or philosophy course, but something his high school physics instructor had once tossed off near the end of a period … something Louis had never forgotten.

He accepted the ability of the Micmac burying ground to resurrect the dead and walked into Little God Swamp with his son in his arms, not looking down or back. These marshy bottoms were noisier now than they had been at the tag-end of autumn. Peepers sang constantly in the reeds, a shrill chorus which Louis found alien and uninviting. An occasional frog twanged a deep elastic somewhere in its throat. Twenty paces or so into Little God Swamp he was buzz-bombed by some shape … a bat, perhaps.

The ground mist began to swirl around him, first covering his shoes, then his shins, finally enclosing him in a glowing white capsule. It seemed to him that the light was brighter, a pulsing effulgence, like the beat of some strange heart. He had never before felt so strongly the presence of nature as a kind of coalescing force, a real being … possibly sentient. The swamp was alive, but not with the sound of music. If asked to define either the sense or the nature of that aliveness, he would have been unable. But it was rich with possibility, and textured with strength. Inside it, Louis felt very small and very mortal.

Then there was a sound, and he remembered this from the last time, as well: a high, gobbling laugh that became a sob. There was silence for a moment and then the laugh came again, this time rising to a maniacal shriek that froze Louis’s blood. The mist drifted dreamily around him. The laughter faded, leaving only the drone of the wind, heard but no longer felt. Of course not; this had to be some sort of geological cup in the earth. If the wind could have penetrated here, it would have torn this mist to tatters … and Louis wasn’t sure he would want to see what might have been revealed.

You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny.

‘Loons,’ Louis said, and barely recognized the cracked, somehow ghastly sound of his own voice.

He hesitated briefly, then moved on again. As if to punish him for his brief pause, his foot slipped from the next tussock, and he almost lost his shoe, pulling it free from the grasping ooze under the shallow water.

The voice – if that was what it was – came again, this time from the left. Moments later it came from behind him … from directly behind him, it seemed, as if he could have turned and seen some blood-drenched thing less than a foot from his back, all bared teeth and glittering eyes … but this time Louis did not slow. He looked straight ahead and kept walking.

Suddenly the mist lost its light and Louis realized that a face was hanging in the air ahead of him, leering and gibbering. Its eyes, tilted up like the eyes in a classical Chinese painting, were a rich yellowish-gray, sunken, gleaming. The mouth was drawn down in a rictus; the lower lip was turned inside out, revealing teeth stained blackish-brown and worn down almost to nubs. But what struck Louis were the ears, which were not ears at all, but curving horns … they were not like devil’s horns; they were ram’s horns.

This grisly, floating head seemed to be speaking – laughing. Its mouth moved, although that turned-down lower lip never came back to its natural shape and place. Veins in there pulsed black. Its nostrils flared, as if with breath and life, and blew out white vapors.

As Louis drew closer, the floating head’s tongue lolled out. It was long and pointed, dirty yellow in color. It was coated with peeling scales and as Louis watched, one of these flipped up and over like a manhole cover and a white worm oozed out. The tongue’s tip skittered lazily on the air somewhere below where its adam’s apple should have been … it was laughing.

He clutched Gage closer to him, hugging him, as if to protect him, and his feet faltered and began to slip on the grassy tussocks where they held slim purchase.

You might see St Elmo’s fire, what the sailors call foo-lights. It can make funny shapes, but it’s nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way … Jud’s voice in his head gave him a measure of resolve. He began to move steadily forward again, lurching at first, then finding his balance. He didn’t look away, but noticed that the face – if that was what it was and not just a shape made by the mist and his own mind – seemed to always remain the same distance away from him. And seconds or minutes later, it simply dissolved into drifting mist.

That was not St Elmo’s fire.

No, of course it wasn’t. This place was alive with spirits; it was tenebrous with them. You could look around and see something that would send you raving mad. He would not think about it. There was no need to think about it. There was no need to— Something was coming.

Louis came to a total halt, listening to that sound … that inexorable, approaching sound. His mouth fell open, every tendon that held his jaw shut simply giving up.

It was a sound like nothing he had ever heard in his life – a living sound; a big sound. Somewhere nearby, growing closer, branches were snapping off. There was a crackle of underbrush breaking under unimaginable feet. The jelly-like ground under Louis’s feet began to shake in sympathetic vibration. He became aware that he was moaning (oh my God oh my dear God what is that what is coming through this fog?)

and once more clutching Gage to his chest; he became aware that the peepers and frogs had fallen silent, he became aware that the wet, damp air had taken on an eldritch, sickening smell like warm, spoiled pork.

Whatever it was, it was huge.

Louis’s wondering, terrified face tilted up and up, like a man following the trajectory of a launched rocket. The thing thudded toward him, and there was the ratcheting sound of a tree – not a branch, but a whole tree – falling over somewhere close by.

Louis saw something.

The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better than sixty feet high. It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage, could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.

For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him. Sparks like eyes.

Then the sound began to fade. As it went away, a peeper called hesitantly – one. It was answered by another. A third joined the conversation; a fourth made it a bull-session; a fifth and sixth made it a peeper convention. The sounds of the thing’s progress (slow, but not blundering; perhaps that was the worst of it, that feeling of sentient progress) were moving away to the north. Little … less … gone.

At last Louis began to move again. His shoulders and back were a frozen ache of torment. He wore an undergarment of sweat from neck to ankles, close-fitting and hot. The season’s first mosquitoes, new-hatched and hungry, found him and sat down to a late snack.

The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo – the creature that moves through the north country, the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal. That was it. The Wendigo has just passed within sixty yards of me.

He told himself not to be ridiculous, to be like Jud and avoid ideas about what might be seen or heard beyond the Pet Sematary – they were loons, they were St Elmo’s fire, they were the members of the New York Yankees’ bullpen. Let them be anything but the creatures which leap and crawl and slither and shamble in the world between. Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices … but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.

Louis walked on with his son, and the ground began to firm up again under his feet. Only moments later he came to a felled tree, its crown visible in the fading mist like a gray-green feather duster dropped by a giant’s housekeeper.

The tree was broken off – splintered off – and the break was so fresh that the yellowish-white pulp still bled sap that was warm to Louis’s touch as he climbed over … and on the other side was a monstrous indentation out of which he had to scramble and climb, and although juniper and low pump-laurel bushes had been stamped right into the earth, he would not let himself believe it was a footprint. He could have looked back to see if it had any such configuration once he had climbed beyond and above it, but he would not. He only walked on, skin cold, mouth hot and arid, heart flying.

The squelch of mud under his feet soon ceased. For a while there was the faint cereal-sound of fir needles again. Then there was rock. He had nearly reached the end.

The ground began to rise faster. He barked his shin painfully on an outcropping. But this was not just a rock. Louis reached out clumsily with one hand (the strap of his elbow, which had grown numb, screamed briefly) and touched it.

Steps here. Cut into the rock. Just follow me. We get to the top and we’re there.

So he began to climb and the exhilaration returned, once more beating exhaustion back … at least a little way. His mind tolled off the steps as he rose into the chill, as he climbed back into that ceaseless river of wind, stronger now, rippling his clothes, making the piece of canvas tarp in which Gage was wrapped stutter gunshot sounds like a lifted sail.

He cocked his head back once and saw the mad sprawl of the stars. There were no constellations he recognized, and he looked away again, disturbed. Beside him was the rock wall, not smooth but splintered and gouged and friable, taking here the shape of a boat, here the shape of a badger, here the shape of a man’s face with hooded, frowning eyes. Only the steps that had been carved from the rock were smooth.

Louis gained the top and stood there with his head down, swaying, sobbing breath in and out of his lungs. They felt like cruelly punched bladders, and there seemed to be a large splinter sticking into his side.

The wind ran through his hair like a dancer, roared in his ears like a dragon.

The light was brighter this night; had it been overcast the other time, or had he just not been looking? It didn’t matter. But he could see, and that was enough to start another chill worming down his back.

It was just like the Pet Sematary.

Of course you knew that, his mind whispered as he surveyed the piles of rocks that had once been cairns. You knew that – or should have known it; not concentric circles but the spiral— Yes. Here on top of this rock table, its face turned up to cold starlight and to the black distances between the stars, was a gigantic spiral, made by what the oldtimers would have called Various Hands. But there were no cairns, Louis saw; every one of them had been burst apart as something buried beneath returned to life … and clawed its way out. Yet the rocks themselves had fallen in such a way that the shape of the spiral was apparent.

Has anyone ever seen this from the air? Louis wondered randomly, and thought of those desert-drawings that one tribe of Indians or another had made in South America. Has anyone ever seen it from the air, and if they did, what did they think, I wonder?

He knelt and set Gage’s body on the ground with a groan of relief.

At last his consciousness began to come back. He used his pocket knife to cut the tape holding the pick and shovel slung over his back. They fell to the ground with a clink. Louis rolled over and lay down for a moment, spread-eagled, staring blankly at the stars.

What was that thing in the woods? Louis, Louis, do you really think anything good can come at the climax of a play where something like that is among the cast of characters?

But now it was too late to back out, and he knew it …

Besides, he gibbered to himself, it may still come out all right, there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love. There’s still my bag, not the one downstairs but the one in our bathroom on the high shelf, the one I sent Ellie for the night Norma had her heart attack. There are syringes, and if something happens … something bad … no one has to know but me.

His thoughts dissolved into the inarticulate, droning mutter of prayer even as his hands groped for the pick … and still on his knees, Louis began to dig into the earth. Each time he brought the pick down he collapsed over the end of it, like an old Roman falling on his sword. Yet little by little the hole took shape and deepened. He clawed the rocks out, and most he simply pushed aside along with the growing pile of stony dirt. But some of them he saved.

For the cairn.