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Louis paused on the soft shoulder to let an Orinco truck loaded with chemical fertilizer blast by him, and then he crossed the street to Jud’s house, trailing his shadow to the west behind him. He held an open can of Calo catfood in one hand.

Church saw him coming and sat up, his yellow eyes watchful.

‘Hi, Church,’ Louis said, surveying the silent house. ‘Want some grub?’

He put the can of catfood down on the trunk of the Chevette and watched as Church leaped lightly down from its roof and began to eat. Louis put his hand in his jacket pocket. Church looked around at him, tensing, as if reading his mind, Louis smiled and stepped away from the car. Church began to eat again, and Louis took a syringe from his pocket. He stripped the paper covering from it and filled it with 75 milligrams of morphine. He put the multi-dose phial back in his jacket and walked over to Church, who looked around again mistrustfully. Louis smiled at the cat and said, ‘Go on, eat up, Church. Hey-ho, let’s go, right?’ He stroked the cat, felt its back arch, and when Church went back to his meal again, Louis seized it around its stinking guts and sank the needle deep into its haunch.

Church went electric in his grip, struggling against him, spitting and clawing, but Louis held on and depressed the plunger all the way. Only then did he let go. The cat leaped off the Chevette, hissing like a tea kettle, yellow eyes wild and baleful. The needle and syringe dangled from its haunch as it leaped, then fell out and broke. Louis was indifferent. He had more.

The cat started for the road, then turned back toward the house, as if remembering something. It got halfway there and then began to weave drunkenly. It made the steps, leaped up to the first one, then fell off. It lay on the bare patch at the foot of the porch steps on its side, breathing weakly.

Louis glanced into the Chevette. If he had needed more confirmation than the stone that had replaced his heart, he had it: Rachel’s purse on the seat, her scarf, and a clutch of plane tickets spilling out of a Delta Airlines folder.

When he turned around again to walk to the porch, Church’s side had ceased its rapid, fluttery movement. Church was dead. Again.

Louis stepped over it and mounted the porch steps.

‘Gage?’

It was cool in the front hall. Cool and dark. The single word fell into the silence like a stone down a deep-drilled well. Louis threw another.

‘Gage?’

Nothing. Even the tick of the clock in the parlor had ceased. This morning there had been no one to wind it.

But there were tracks on the floor.

Louis went into the living room. There was the smell of cigarettes, stale and long since burned out. He saw Jud’s chair by the window. It was pushed askew, as if he had gotten up suddenly. There was an ashtray on the windowsill, and in it a neat roll of cigarette ash.

Jud sat here watching. Watching for what? For me, of course; watching for me to come home. Only he missed me. Somehow he missed me.

Louis glanced at the four beer cans lined up in a neat row. Not enough to put him to sleep, but maybe he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. However it had been, it was just a little bit too good to have been perfectly accidental, wasn’t it?

The muddy tracks approached the chair by the window. Mixed among the human tracks were a few faded, ghostly catprints. As if Church had walked in and out of the grave-dirt left by Gage’s small shoes. Then the tracks made for the swinging door leading into the kitchen.

Heart thudding, Louis followed the tracks.

He pushed the door open and saw Jud’s splayed feet, his old green workpants, his checked flannel shirt. The old man was lying sprawled in a wide pool of drying blood.

Louis clapped his hands to his face, as if to blight his own vision. But there was no way to do that; he saw eyes, Jud’s eyes, open, accusing him, perhaps even accusing himself for setting this in motion.

But did he? Louis wondered. Did he really do that?

Jud had been told by Stanny B., and Stanny B. had been told by his father, and Stanny B.’s father had been told by his father, the last trader to the Indians, a Frenchman from the Northcountry in the days when Franklin Pierce had been a living President.

‘Oh Jud, I’m so sorry,’ he whispered.

Jud’s blank eyes stared at him.

‘So sorry,’ Louis repeated.

His feet seemed to move by themselves, and he was suddenly back to last Thanksgiving in his mind, not that night when he and Jud had taken the cat up to the Pet Sematary and beyond, but at the turkey dinner Norma had put on the table, all of them laughing and talking, the two men drinking beer and Norma with a glass of white wine, and she had taken the white lawn tablecloth from the lower drawer as he was taking it now, but she had put it on the table and then anchored it with lovely pewter candlestick holders, while he— Louis watched it billow down over Jud’s body like a collapsing parachute, mercifully covering that dead face. Almost immediately, tiny rosepetals of deepest, darkest scarlet began to stain the white lawn.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said for a third time. ‘So so—’

Then something moved overhead, something scraped, and the word broke off between his lips. It had been soft, it had been stealthy, but it had been deliberate. Oh yes, he was convinced of that. A sound he had been meant to hear.

His hands wanted to tremble, but he would not allow them. He stepped over to the kitchen table with its checkered oilcloth covering, and reached into his pocket. He removed three more Becton-Dickson syringes, stripped them of their paper coverings, and laid them out in a neat row. He removed three more multi-dose phials and filled each of the syringes with enough morphine to kill a horse – or Hanratty the bull, if it came to that. He put them in his pocket again.

He left the kitchen, crossed the living room, and stood at the base of the stairs.

‘Gage?’ he called.

From somewhere in the shadows above, there came a giggling – a cold and sunless laughter that made the skin on Louis’s back prickle.

He started up.

It was a long walk to the top of those stairs. He could well imagine a condemned man taking a walk almost as long (and as horribly short) to the platform of a scaffold with his hands tied behind his back, knowing that he would piss when he could no longer whistle.

He reached the top at last, one hand in his pocket, staring only at the wall. How long did he stand that way? He did not know. He could now feel his sanity beginning to give way. This was an actual sensation, a true thing. It was interesting. He imagined a tree overloaded with ice in a terrible storm would feel this way – if trees could feel anything – shortly before toppling.

‘Gage, want to go to Florida with me?’ he called at last.

That giggle again.

Louis turned and was greeted by the sight of his wife, to whom he had once carried a rose in his teeth, lying halfway down the hall, dead. Her legs were splayed out as Jud’s had been. Her back and head were cocked at an angle against the wall. She looked like a woman who has gone to sleep while reading in bed.

He walked down toward her.

Hello, darling, he thought, you came home.

Blood had splashed the wallpaper in idiot shapes. She had been stabbed a dozen times, two dozen, who knew? His scalpel had done this work.

Suddenly he saw her, really saw her, and Louis Creed began to scream.

His screams echoed and racketed shrilly through this house where now only death lived and walked. Eyes bulging, face livid, hair standing on end, he screamed; the sounds came from his swollen throat like the bells of hell, terrible shrieks that signalled the end not of love but of sanity; in his mind all the hideous images were suddenly unloosed at once. Victor Pascow’s dying on the infirmary carpet, Church coming back with bits of green plastic in his whiskers, his son’s baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood, but most of all that thing he had seen near Little God Swamp, the thing that had pushed the tree over, the thing with the yellow eyes, the Wendigo, creature of the Northcountry, the dead thing whose touch awakens unspeakable appetites.

Rachel had not just been killed.

Something had been … something had been at her.

(! CLICK!)

That click was in his head. It was the sound of some relay fusing and burning out for ever, the sound of lightning stroking down in a direct hit, the sound of a door opening.

He looked up numbly, the scream still shivering in his throat and here was Gage at last, his mouth smeared with blood, his chin dripping, his lips pulled back in a hellish grin. In one hand he held Louis’s scalpel.

As he brought it down, Louis pulled back with no real thought at all. The scalpel whickered past his face, and Gage overbalanced. He is as clumsy as Church, Louis thought. Louis kicked his feet from under him. Gage fell awkwardly and Louis was on him before he could get up, straddling him, one knee pinning the hand which held the scalpel.

‘No,’ the thing under him panted. Its face twisted and writhed. Its eyes were baleful; insectile in their stupid hate. ‘No, no, no—’ Louis clawed for one of the hypos, got it out. He would have to be quick. The thing under him was like a greased fish and it would not let go of the scalpel no matter how hard he bore down on its wrist. And its face seemed to ripple and change even as he looked at it: it was Jud’s face, dead and staring; it was the dented, ruined face of Victor Pascow, eyes rolling mindlessly; it was, mirrorlike, Louis’s own, so dreadfully pale and lunatic. Then it changed again and became the face of that creature in the woods – the low brow, the dead yellow eyes, the tongue long and pointed and bifurcated, grinning and hissing.

‘No, no, no-no-no—’

It bucked beneath him. The hypo flew out of Louis’s hand and rolled a short way down the hall. He groped for another, brought it out, and jammed it straight down into the small of Gage’s back.

It screamed beneath him, body straining and sunfishing, nearly throwing him off. Grunting, Louis got the third syringe and jammed this one home in Gage’s arm, depressing the plunger all the way. He got off then and began to back slowly down the hallway. Gage got slowly to his feet and began to stagger toward him. Five steps and the scalpel fell from its hand. It struck the floor blade first and stuck itself in the wood, quivering. Ten steps and that strange yellow light in its eyes began to fade. A dozen and it fell to its knees.

Now Gage looked up at him and for a moment Louis saw his son – his real son – his face unhappy and filled with pain.

‘Daddy!’ he cried, and then fell forward on his face.

Louis stood there for a moment, then went to Gage, moving carefully, expecting some trick. But there was no trick, no sudden leap with clawed hands. He slid his fingers expertly down Gage’s throat, found the pulse, and held it. He was then a doctor for the last time in his life, monitoring the pulse, monitoring until there was nothing, nothing inside, nothing outside.

When it was gone at last, Louis got up and sauntered down the hall to a far corner. He crouched there, pulling himself into a ball, cramming himself into the corner, tighter and tighter. He found he could make himself smaller if he put a thumb in his mouth and so he did that.

He remained that way for better than two hours … and then, little by little, a dark and oh-so-plausible idea came to him. He pulled his thumb from his mouth. It made a small pop. Louis got himself (hey-ho, let’s go)

going again.

In the room where Gage had hidden, he stripped the sheet from the bed and took it out into the hall. He wrapped his wife’s body in it, gently, with love. He was humming but did not realize it.

He found gasoline in Jud’s garage. Five gallons of it in a red can next to the Lawnboy. More than enough. He began in the kitchen where Jud still lay under the Thanksgiving tablecloth. He drenched that, then moved into the living room with the can still upended, spraying amber gas over the rug, the sofa, the magazine rack, the chairs, and so out into the downstairs hall and toward the back bedroom. The smell of gas was strong and rich.

Jud’s matches were on top of his cigarettes by the chair where he had kept his fruitless watch. Louis took them. At the front door he tossed a lighted match back over his shoulder and stepped out. The blast of the heat was immediate and savage, making the skin on his neck feel too small. He shut the door neatly and only stood on the porch for a moment, watching the orange flickers behind Norma’s curtains. Then he crossed the porch, pausing for a moment, remembering the beers he and Jud had drunk here a million years ago, listening to the soft, gathering roar of fire within the house.

Then he stepped out.