فصل شصت

SIXTY

Louis Creed woke up with the sun blazing full in his eyes. He tried to get up and grimaced at the stab of pain in his back. It was huge. He fell back on the pillow and glanced down at himself. Still fully dressed. Christ.

He lay there for a long moment, steeling himself against the stiffness that had settled into every muscle, and then he sat up.

‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered. For a few seconds the room see-sawed gently but perceptibly. His back throbbed like a bad tooth, and when he moved his head it felt as if the tendons in his neck had been replaced by rusty bandsaw blades. But his knee was really the worst. The Ben-Gay hadn’t done a thing for it. He should have given himself a fucking cortisone shot. His pants were drawn tightly against the knee by the swelling; it looked like there was a balloon under there.

‘Really jobbed it,’ he muttered. ‘Boy, oh boy, did I ever.’

He bent it very slowly so he could sit on the edge of the bed, lips pressed so tightly together that they were white. Then he began to flex it a bit, listening to the pain talk, trying to decide just how bad it really was, if it might be— Gage! Is Gage back?

That got him on his feet in spite of the pain. He lurched across the room like Matt Dillon’s old sidekick Chester. He went through the door and across the hall into Gage’s room. He looked around wildly, his son’s name trembling on his lips. But the room was empty. He limped down to Ellie’s room, which was also empty, and then into the spare room. That room, which faced the highway, was also empty. But— There was a strange car across the road. Parked behind Jud’s truck.

So what?

So a strange vehicle over there could mean trouble, that was so what.

Louis drew the curtain aside and examined it more closely. It was a small blue car, a Chevette. And curled up on top of it, apparently sleeping, was Church.

He looked for a long time before letting the curtain go. Jud had company, that was all, so what? And it was maybe too early to worry about what was or was not going to happen with Gage; Church hadn’t come back until noon or a little after, and it was only nine o’clock now. Nine o’clock of a beautiful May morning. He would simply go downstairs and make some coffee, get out the heating pad and wrap it around his knee and— —and what’s Church doing on top of that car?

‘Oh, come on,’ he said aloud, and began to limp back down the hall. Cats sleep anywhere and everywhere, it’s the nature of the beast— Except Church doesn’t cross the road any more, remember?

‘Just forget it,’ he muttered, and paused halfway down the stairs (which he was working his way down almost sidesaddle). Talking to himself, that was bad. That was— What was that thing in the woods last night?

The thought came to him unbidden, making him tighten his lips the way the pain in his knee had done when he swung it out of bed. He had dreamed about the thing in the woods last night. His dreams of Disney World had seemed to blend naturally and with a deadly ease into dreams of that thing. He dreamed that it had touched him, spoiling all good dreams for ever, rotting all good intentions. It was the Wendigo, and it had turned him into not just a cannibal but the father of cannibals. In his dream he had been in the Pet Sematary again, but not alone. Bill and Timmy Baterman had been there. Jud had been there, looking ghostly and dead, holding his dog Spot on a clothesrope leash. Lester Morgan was there with Hanratty the bull on a length of car towing chain. Hanratty was lying on his side, looking around with a stupid, drugged fury. And for some reason Rachel was there, too, and she’d had some sort of accident at the dinner table – spilled a bottle of catsup or maybe dropped a dish of cranberry jelly, maybe, because her dress was splattered with red stains.

And then, rising behind the deadfall to a titanic height, its skin a cracked reptilian yellow, its eyes great hooded foglamps, its ears not ears at all but massive curling horns, was the Wendigo, a beast that looked like a lizard born of a woman. It pointed its horny, nailed finger at all of them as they craned their necks up and up to watch it … ‘Stop it,’ he whispered, and shuddered at the sound of his own voice. He would go out into the kitchen, he decided, and make himself breakfast just as if it were any ordinary day. A bachelor breakfast, full of comforting cholesterol. A couple of fried egg sandwiches with mayo and a slice of Bermuda onion on each one. He smelled sweaty and dirty and cruddy, but he would save the shower for later; right now getting undressed seemed like too much work, and he was afraid he might have to get the scalpel out of his bag and actually cut the leg of the pants open in order to allow his bloated knee to escape. A hell of a way to treat good instruments, but none of the knives in the house would cut the heavy jeans fabric, and Rachel’s sewing scissors certainly would not do the trick.

But first, breakfast.

So he crossed the living room and then detoured into the front entry and looked out at the small blue car in Jud’s driveway. It was covered with dewfall, which meant it had been there for some time. Church was still on the roof, but not sleeping. He appeared to be staring right at Louis with his ugly yellow eyes.

Louis stepped back hurriedly, as if someone had caught him peeking.

He went into the kitchen, rattled out a frying pan, put it on the stove, got eggs from the fridge. The kitchen was bright and crisp and clear. He tried to whistle, a whistle would bring the morning into its proper focus, but he could not. Things looked right, but they weren’t right. The house seemed dreadfully empty, and last night’s work weighed on him like a millstone. Things were wrong, awry; he felt a shadow hovering, and he was afraid.

He limped into the bathroom and took a couple of aspirin with a glass of juice. He was working his way back to the stove when the telephone rang.

He did not answer it immediately but turned and looked at it, feeling slow and stupid, a sucker in some game which he was only now realizing he did not understand in the least.

Don’t answer that, you don’t want to answer that because that’s the bad news, that’s the end of the leash that leads around the corner and into the darkness, and I don’t think you want to see what’s on the other end of that leash, Louis, I really don’t think you do, so don’t answer that phone, run, run now, the car’s in the garage, get in it and take off but don’t answer that phone— He crossed the room and picked it up, standing there with one hand on the dryer as he had so many times before, and it was Irwin Goldman, and even as Irwin said hello he saw the tracks crossing the kitchen, small, muddy tracks, and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest and he believed he could feel his eyeballs swelling in his head, starting from their sockets; he believed that if he could have seen himself in a mirror at that moment he would have seen a face from a cheap pulp comic book. They were Gage’s tracks, Gage had been here, he had been here in the night, and so where was Gage now?

‘It’s Irwin, Louis … Louis? Are you there? Hello?’

‘Hello, Irwin,’ he said, and already he knew what Irwin was going to say. He understood the blue car. He understood everything. The leash … the leash going into the darkness … he was moving fast along it now, hand over hand. Ah, if he could drop it before he saw what was at the end! But it was his leash. He had bought it.

‘For a moment I thought we’d been cut off,’ Goldman was saying.

‘No, the phone slipped out of my hand,’ Louis said. His voice was calm.

‘Did Rachel make it home last night?’

‘Oh yes,’ Louis said, thinking of the blue car, Church perched on top of it, the blue car that was so still. His eye traced the muddy footprints on the floor.

‘I ought to speak to her,’ Goldman said. ‘Right away. It’s about Ellie.’

‘Ellie? What about Ellie?’

‘I really think Rachel—’

‘Rachel’s not here right now,’ Louis said harshly. ‘She’s gone to the store for bread and milk. What about Ellie? Come on, Irwin!’ ‘We had to take her to the hospital,’ Goldman said reluctantly. ‘She had a bad dream, or a whole series of them. She was hysterical, and wouldn’t come out of it. She—’ ‘Did they sedate her?’

‘What?’

‘Sedation,’ Louis said impatiently. ‘Did they give her sedation?’

‘Yes, oh yes. They gave her a pill and she went back to sleep.’

‘Did she say anything? What scared her so badly?’ He was gripping the phone white-knuckled now.

Silence from Irwin Goldman’s end – a long silence. This time Louis did not interrupt, much as he would have liked to.

‘That was what scared Dory so badly,’ Irwin said finally. ‘She babbled a lot before she got … before she was crying too hard to understand. Dory herself was almost … you know.’ ‘What did she say?’

‘She said Oz the Great and Terrible had killed her mother. Only she didn’t say it that way. She said … she said “Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,” which was the way our other daughter always used to say it. Our daughter Zelda. Louis, believe me when I say I would much rather have asked Rachel this question, but how much have you and she told Ellie about Zelda, and how she died?’ Louis had closed his eyes; the world seemed to be rocking gently under his feet, and Goldman’s voice had the lost quality of a voice coming through thick mists.

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

‘Louis, are you there?’

‘Is she going to be all right?’ Louis asked, his own voice distant. ‘Is Ellie going to be all right? Did you get a prognosis?’ ‘Delayed shock from the funeral,’ Goldman said. ‘My own doctor came. Lathrop. A good man. Said she had a degree of fever and that when she woke up this afternoon, she might not even remember. But I think Rachel should come back. Louis, I am frightened. I think you should come back, too.’ Louis did not respond. The eye of God was on the sparrow; so said good King James. He, however, was a lesser being, and his eye was on those muddy footprints.

‘Louis, Gage is dead,’ Goldman was saying. ‘I know that must be hard to accept – for you and Rachel both – but your daughter is very much alive, and she needs you.’ Yes, I accept that. You may be a stupid old fart, Irwin, but perhaps the nightmare that passed between your two daughters on that April day in 1963 taught you something about sensitivity. She needs me, but I can’t come, because I’m afraid – so terribly afraid – that my hands are filthy with her mother’s blood.

Louis regarded those hands. Louis regarded the dirt under his nails, which was so like the dirt which comprised those footprints on the kitchen floor.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I understand. We’ll be there as soon as we can, Irwin. By tonight, if that’s possible. Thank you.’ ‘We did the best we could,’ Goldman said. ‘Maybe we’re too old. Maybe, Louis, maybe we always were.’ ‘Did she say anything else?’ Louis asked.

Goldman’s reply was like the toll of a funeral bell against the wall of his heart. ‘A lot, but only one other thing I could make out. “Paxcow says it’s too late.”’ He hung up the telephone and moved back toward the stove in a daze, apparently meaning to continue on with breakfast or put the things away, he didn’t know which, and about halfway across the kitchen a wave of faintness poured over him, floating gray overcame his sight and he swooned to the floor – swoon was the right word because it seemed to take forever. He fell down and down through cloudy depths; it seemed to him that he turned over and over, looped the loop, did a dipsy-doodle or two, slipped an Immelmann. Then he struck on his bad knee and the chromium bolt of pain through his head brought him back with a scream of agony and for a moment he could only crouch, the tears starting from his eyes.

At last he made it back to his feet and stood there, swaying. But his head was clear again. That was something. Wasn’t it?

That urge to flee came on him again, for the last time, stronger than ever – he actually felt the comforting bulge of his car keys in his pocket. He would get in the Civic and drive to Chicago. He would get Ellie and go on from there. Of course by then Goldman would know something was wrong, that something was dreadfully amiss, but he would get her anyway … snatch her, if he had to.

Then his hand fell away from the bulge of the keys. What killed the urge was not a sense of futility, not guilt, not despair or the deep weariness inside him. It was the sight of those muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. In his mind’s eye he could see them tracing a path across the entire country – first to Illinois, then to Florida – across the entire world, if necessary. What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you.

There would come a day when he opened a door and there would be Gage, a demented parody of his former self, grinning a sunken grin, his clear blue eyes gone yellow and smart-stupid. Or Ellie would open the bathroom door for her morning shower and there would be Gage in the tub, his body criss-crossed with the faded scars and bulges of his fatal accident, clean but stinking of the grave.

Oh yes, that day would come – he didn’t doubt it a bit.

‘How could I have been so stupid?’ he said to the empty room, talking to himself again, not caring. ‘How?’ Grief, not stupidity, Louis. There is a difference … small, but vital. The battery that burying ground survives on. Growing in power, Jud said, and of course he was right – and you’re part of its power now. It has fed on your grief … no, more than that. It’s doubled it, cubed it, raised it to the nth power. And it isn’t just grief it feeds on. Sanity. It’s eaten your sanity. The flaw is only the inability to accept, not uncommon. It’s cost you your wife and it’s almost surely cost you your best friend as well as your son. This is it. What comes when you’re too slow wishing away the thing that knocks on your door in the middle of the night is simple enough. Total darkness.

I would commit suicide now, he thought, and I suppose it’s in the cards, isn’t it? I have the equipment in my bag. It has managed everything, managed it from the first. The burying ground, the Wendigo, whatever it is. It forced our cat into the road, and perhaps it forced Gage into the road as well, it brought Rachel home, but only in its own good time. Surely I’m meant to do that … and I want to.

But things have to be put right, don’t they?

Yes. They did.

There was Gage to think about. Gage was still out there. Somewhere.

He followed the footprints through the dining room and the living room and back up the stairs. They were smudged there, because he had walked over them on his way down without seeing them. They led into the bedroom. He was here, Louis thought wonderingly, he was right here, and then he saw that his medical bag was unsnapped.

The contents inside, which he always arranged with careful neatness, were now in jumbled disorder. But it did not take Louis long to see that his scalpel was missing, and he put his hands over his face and sat that way for some time, a faint, despairing noise coming from his throat.

At last he opened the bag again and began to look through it.

Downstairs again.

The sound of the pantry door being opened. The sound of a cupboard being opened, then slammed shut. The busy whine of the can-opener. Last, the sound of the garage door opening and closing. And then the house stood empty in the May sunshine, as it had stood empty on that August day the year before, waiting for the new people to arrive … as it would wait for other new people to arrive at some future date, a young married couple, perhaps, with no children (but hopes and plans). Bright young marrieds with a taste for Mondavi wine and Lowenbrau beer; he would be in charge of the Northeast Bank’s credit department, perhaps, she with a dental hygienist’s credential or maybe three years’ experience as an optometrist’s assistant. He would split half a cord of wood for the fireplace, she would wear high-waisted corduroy pants and walk in Mrs Vinton’s field, collecting November’s fall grasses for a table centerpiece, her hair in a ponytail, the brightest thing under the gray skies, totally unaware that an invisible Vulture rode the aircurrents overhead. They would congratulate themselves on their lack of superstition, on their hardheadedness in snaring the house in spite of its history – they would tell their friends that it had been fire-sale priced and joke about the ghost in the attic and all of them would have another Lowenbrau or another glass of Mondavi and perhaps they would play backgammon or Mille Bourne.

And perhaps they would have a dog.