Louis, Dory said againkindly, Louis thoughtand then they were past him, Irwin Goldman perhaps pulling his wife along, not looking to the left or the right, certainly not looking at Louis Creed. They approached the coffin, and Goldman fumbled a small black skullcap out of his suit coat pocket. You didnt sign the book, Louis thought, and then a silent belch of such malignantly acidic content rose through his digestive works that his face clenched in pain. The morning viewing ended at last. Louis called home. Jud answered and asked him how it had gone. All right, Louis said. He asked Jud if he could talk to Steve. If she can dress herself, Im going to let her come this afternoon, Steve said. Okay by you? Yes, Louis said. How are you, Lou? No bullshit and straight onhow are you? All right, Louis said briefly. Coping. I had all of them sign the book. All of them except Dory and Irwin, and they wouldnt. All right, Steve said. Look, shall we meet you for lunch? Lunch. Meeting for lunch. This seemed such an alien idea that Louis thought of the science fiction novels he had read as a teenagernovels by Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Gordon R. Dickson. The natives here on Planet Quark have an odd custom when one of their children dies, Lieutenant Abelson they meet for lunch. I know how grotesque and barbaric that sounds, but remember, this planet has not been terraformed yet. Sure, Louis said. Whats a good restaurant for half time between funeral viewings, Steve? Take it easy, Lou, Steve said, but he didnt seem entirely displeased. In this state of crazy calm, Louis felt better able to see into people than ever before in his life. Perhaps it was an illusion, but right now he suspected Steve was thinking that even a sudden spate of sarcasm, squirted out like an abrupt mouthful of bile, was preferable to his earlier state of disconnection. Dont worry, he said to Steve now. What about Benjamin's? Sure, Steve said. Benjamins would be fine. He had made the call from the office of the funeral director. Now, as Louis passed the East Room on his way out, he saw that the room was almost empty, but Irwin and Dory Goldman sat down in the front row, heads bowed. They looked to Louis as if they might sit there forever. Benjamins was the right choice. Bangor was an earlylunch town, and around one oclock it was nearly deserted. Jud had come along with Steve and Rachel, and the four of them ate fried chicken. At one point Rachel went to the ladies room and remained in there so long that Steve became nervous. He was on the verge of asking a waitress to check on her when she came back to the table, her eyes red. Louis picked at his chicken and drank a lot of Schlitz beer. Jud matched him bottle for bottle, not talking much. Their four meals went back almost uneaten, and with his preternatural insight, Louis saw the waitress, a fat girl with a pretty face, debating with herself about whether or not to ask them if their meals had been all right, finally taking another look at Rachels redrimmed eyes and deciding it would be the wrong question. Over coffee Rachel said something so suddenly and so baldly that it rather shocked them allparticularly Louis, who at last was becoming sleepy with the beer. Im going to give his clothes to the Salvation Army. Are you? Steve said after a moment. Yes, Rachel said. Theres a lot of wear in them yet. All his jumpers . . . his corduroy pants . . . his shirts. Someone will be glad to get them. Theyre all very serviceable. Except for the ones he was wearing, of course. Theyre . . . ruined. The last word became a miserable choke. She tried to drink coffee, but that was no good. A moment later she was sobbing into her hands. There was a queer moment then. There were crossing lines of tension then. They all seemed to focus on Louis. He felt this with the same preternatural insight hed had all this day, and of them all, this was the clearest and surest. Even the waitress felt those converging lines of awareness. He saw her pause at a table near the back where she was laying placemats and silver. For a moment Louis was puzzled, and then he understood they were waiting for him to comfort his wife. He couldnt do it. He wanted to do it. He understood it was his responsibility to do it. All the same, he couldnt. It was the cat that got in his way. Suddenly and with no rime or reason. The cat. The fucking cat. Church with his ripped mice and the birds he had grounded forever. When he found them, Louis had cleaned up the messes promptly, with no complaint or comment, certainly without protest. He had, after all, bought them. But had he bought this? He saw his fingers. Louis saw his fingers. He saw his fingers lightly skating over the back of Gages jacket. Then Gages jacket had been gone. Then Gage had been gone. He looked into his coffee cup and let his wife cry beside him, uncomforted. After a momentin terms of clock time probably quite short, but both then and in retrospect it seemed longSteve put an arm around her and hugged her gently. His eyes on Louiss were reproachful and angry. Louis turned from them toward Jud, but Jud was looking down, as if in shame. There was no help there. 37 I knew something like this would happen, Irwin Goldman said. That was how the trouble started. I knew it when she married you. Youll have all the grief you can stand and more, I said. And look at this. Look at this . . . this mess. Louis looked slowly around at his fatherinlaw, who had appeared before him like some malign jackinthebox in a skullcap; and then, instinctively, he looked around at where Rachel had been, by the book on the standthe afternoon shift was hers by defaultbut Rachel was gone. The afternoon viewing had been less crowded, and after half an hour or so, Louis had gone down to the front row of seats and sat there on the aisle, aware of very little (only peripherally aware of the cloying stink of the flowers) except the fact that he was very tired and sleepy. It was only partly the beer, he supposed. His mind was finally ready to shut down. Probably a good thing. Perhaps, after twelve or sixteen hours of sleep, he would be able to comfort Rachel a little. After a while his head had sunk until he was looking at his hands, loosely linked between his knees. The hum of voices near the back was soothing. He had been relieved to see that Irwin and Dory werent here when the four of them returned from lunch, but he should have known their continued absence was too good to be true. Wheres Rachel? Louis asked now. With her mother. Where she should be. Goldman spoke with the studied triumph of a man who has closed a big deal. There was Scotch on his breath. A lot of it. He stood before Louis like a banty little district attorney before a man in the bar of justice, a man who is patently guilty. He was unsteady on his feet. What did you say to her? Louis said, feeling the beginnings of alarm now. He knew Goldman had said something. It was in the mans face. Nothing but the truth. I told her this is what it gets you, marrying against your parents wishes. I told her Did you say that? Louis asked incredulously. You didnt really say that, did you? That and more, Irwin Goldman said, I always knew it would come to thisthis or something like it. I knew what kind of a man you were the first time I saw you. He leaned forward, exhaling Scotch fumes. I saw through you, you prancing little fraud of a doctor. You enticed my daughter into a stupid, feckless marriage and then you turned her into a scullery maid and then you let her son be run down in the highway like a . . . a chipmunk. Most of this went over Louiss head. He was still groping with the idea that this stupid little man could have You said that to her? he repeated. You said it? I hope you rot in hell! Goldman said, and heads turned sharply toward the sound of his voice. Tears began to squeeze out of Irwin Goldmans bloodshot brown eyes. His bald head glowed under the muted fluorescent lights. You made my wonderful daughter into a scullery maid . . . destroyed her future took her away . . . and let my grandson die a dirty death in a country road. His voice rose to a hectoring scream. Where were you? Sitting on your ass while he was playing in the road? Thinking about your stupid medical articles? What were you doing, you shit? You stinking shit! Killer of children! K There they were. There they were at the front of the East Room. There they were, and Louis saw his arm go out. He saw the sleeve of his suit coat pull back from the cuff of his white shirt. He saw the mellow gleam of one cufflink. Rachel had given him the set for their third wedding anniversary, never knowing that her husband would someday wear these cufflinks to the funeral ceremonies of their thenunborn son. His fist was just something tied to the end of his arm. It connected with Goldmans mouth. He felt the old mans lips squash and splay back. It was a sickening feeling, reallysquashing a slug with your fist might feel something like that. There was no satisfaction in it. Beneath the flesh of his fatherinlaws lips he could feel the stern, unyielding regularity of his dentures. Goldman went stumbling backward. His arm came down against Gages coffin, knocking it aslant. One of the vases, topheavy with flowers, fell over with a crash. Someone screamed. It was Rachel, struggling with her mother, who was trying to hold her back. The people who were thereten or fifteen in all seemed frozen between fright and embarrassment. Steve had taken Jud back to Ludlow, and Louis was dimly grateful for that. This was not a scene he would have wished Jud to witness. It was unseemly. Dont hurt him! Rachel screamed. Louis, dont hurt my father! You like to hit old men, do you? Irwin Goldman of the overflowing checkbook cried out shrilly. He was grinning through a mouthful of blood. You like to hit old men? I am not surprised, you stinking bastard. That does not surprise me at all. Louis turned toward him, and Goldman struck him in the neck. It was a clumsy, sidehanded, chopping blow, but Louis was unprepared for it. A paralyzing pain that would make it hard for him to swallow for the next two hours exploded in his throat. His head rocked back, and he fell to one knee in the aisle. First the flowers, now me, he thought. What is it the Ramones say? Heyho, lets go! He thought he wanted to laugh, but there was no laugh in him. What came out of his hurt throat was a little groan. Rachel screamed again. Irwin Goldman, his mouth dripping blood, marched over to where his soninlaw kneeled and kicked Louis smartly in the kidneys. The pain was a bright flare of agony. He put his hands down on the rug runner to keep from going flop on his belly. You dont do so good even against old men, sonny! Goldman cried with cracked excitement. He kicked out at Louis again, missing the kidney this time, getting Louis on the high part of the left buttock with one black old mans shoe. Louis grunted in pain, and this time he did go down on the carpet. His chin hit with an audible crack. He bit his tongue. There! Goldman cried. Theres the kick in the ass I should have given you the first time you came sucking around, you bastard. There! He kicked Louis in the ass again, this time connecting with the other buttock. He was weeping and grinning. Louis saw for the first time that Goldman was unshavena sign of mourning. The funeral director raced toward them. Rachel had broken Mrs. Goldmans hold and was also racing toward them, screaming. Louis rolled clumsily over on his side and sat up. His fatherinlaw kicked out at him again and Louis caught his shoe in both handsit thwapped solidly into his palms like a wellcaught footballand shoved backward as hard as he could. Bellowing, Goldman flew backward at an angle, pinwheeling his arms for balance. He fell on Gages Eternal Rest casket, which had been manufactured in the town of Storyville, Ohio, and which had not come cheap. Oz the Gweat and Tewwible has just fallen on top of my sons coffin, Louis thought dazedly. The casket fell from the trestle with a huge crash. The left end fell first, then the right. The latch snapped. Even over the screams and the crying, even over the bellows of Goldman, who after all was only playing a childrens party game of Pin the Blame on the Donkey, Louis heard the lock snap. The coffin did not actually open and spill Gages sad, hurt remains out onto the floor for all of them to gawp at, but Louis was sickly aware that they had only been spared that by the way the coffin had fallenon its bottom instead of on its side. It easily could have fallen that other way. Nonetheless in that split instant before the lid slammed shut on its broken latch again, he saw a flash of graythe suit they had bought to put in the ground around Gages body. And a bit of pink. Gages hand, maybe. Sitting there on the floor, Louis put his face in his hands and began to weep. He had lost all interest in his fatherinlaw, in the MX missile, in permanent versus dissolving sutures, in the heat death of the universe. At that moment, Louis Creed wished he were dead. And suddenly, weirdly, an image rose in his mind Gage in Mickey Mouse ears, Gage laughing and shaking hands with a great big Goofy on Main Street, in Disney World. He saw this with utter clarity. One of the trestle supports had fallen over; the other leaned with drunken casualness against the low dais where a minister might stand to offer a eulogy. Sprawled in the flowers was Goldman, also weeping. Water from the overturned vases trickled. The flowers, some of them crushed and mangled, gave off their turgid scent even more strongly. Rachel was screaming and screaming. Louis could not respond to her screams. The image of Gage in Mickey Mouse ears was fading, but not before he heard a voice announcing there would be fireworks later that evening. He sat with his face in his hands, not wanting them to see him anymore, his tearstained face, his loss, his guilt, his pain, his shame, most of all his cowardly wish to be dead and out of this blackness. The funeral director and Dory Goldman led Rachel out. She was still screaming. Later on, in another room (one that Louis assumed was reserved especially for those overcome with grief the Hysterics Parlor, perhaps) she became very silent. Louis himself, dazed but sane and in control, sedated her this time, after insisting that the two of them be left alone. At home he led her up to bed and gave her another shot. Then he pulled the covers up to her chin and regarded her waxy, pallid face. Rachel, Im sorry, he said. Id give anything in the world to take that back. Its all right, she said in a strange, flat voice and then rolled over on her side, turning away from him. He heard the tired old question Are you all right? rising to his lips and pushed it back. It wasnt a true question; it wasnt what he really wanted to know. How bad are you? he asked finally. Pretty bad, Louis, she said and then uttered a sound that could have been a laugh. I am terrible, in fact. Something more seemed required, but Louis could not supply it. He felt suddenly resentful of her, of Steve Masterton, of Missy Dandridge and her husband with his arrowheadshaped adams apple, of the whole damned crew. Why should he have to be the eternal supplier? What sort of shit was that? He turned off the light and left. He found that he could not give much more to his daughter. For one wild moment, regarding her in her shadowy room, he thought she was Gagethe thought came to him that the whole thing had been a hideous nightmare, like his dream of Pascow leading him into the woods, and for a moment his tired mind grasped at it. The shadows helpedthere was only the shifting light of the portable TV that Jud had taken up for her to pass the hours. The long, long hours. But it wasnt Gage, of course; it was Ellie, who was now not only grasping the picture in which she was pulling Gage on the sled, but sitting in Cages chair. She had taken it out of his room and brought it into hers. It was a small directors chair with a canvas seat and a canvas strip across the back. Stenciled across that strip was GAGE. Rachel had mailordered four of these chairs. Each member of the family had one with his or her name stenciled on the back. Ellie was too big for Gages chair. She was crammed into it, and the canvas bottom bulged downward dangerously. She held the Polaroid picture to her chest and stared at the TV, where some movie was showing. Ellie, he said, snapping off the TV, bedtime. She worked her way out of the chair, then folded it up. She apparently meant to take the chair into bed with her. Louis hesitated, wanting to say something about the chair, and finally settled on, Do you want me to tuck you in? Yes, please, she said. Do you . . . would you want to sleep with Mommy tonight? No, thanks. You sure? She smiled a little. Yes. She steals the covers. Louis smiled back. Come on then. Instead of trying to put the chair in bed with her, Ellie unfolded it by the head of the bed, and an absurd image came to Louishere was the consulting room of the worlds smallest psychiatrist. She undressed, putting the picture of her and Gage on her pillow to do it. She put on her baby doll pajamas, picked up the picture, went into the bathroom, put it down to wash up, brush, floss, and to take her fluoride tablet. Then she picked it up again and got into bed with it. Louis sat down beside her and said, I want you to know, Ellie, that if we keep on loving each other, we can get through this. Each word was like moving a handcar loaded with wet bales, and the total effort left Louis feeling exhausted. Im going to wish really hard, Ellie said calmly, and pray to God for Gage to come back. Ellie God can take it back if He wants to, Ellie said. He can do anything He wants to. Ellie, God doesnt do things like that, Louis said uneasily, and in his minds eye he saw Church squatting on the closed lid of the toilet, staring at him with those muddy eyes as Louis lay in the tub. He does so, she said. In Sunday School the teacher told us about this guy Lazarus. He was dead, and Jesus brought him back to life. He said Lazarus, come forth, and the teacher said if hed just said Come forth, probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out, and Jesus only wanted Lazarus. An absurdity popped out of his mouth (but the day had sung and gibbered with absurdity) That was a long time ago, Ellie. Im going to keep things ready for him, she said. Ive got his picture, and Im going to sit in his chair Ellie, youre too big for Gages chair, Louis said, taking her hot, feverish hand. Youll break it. God will help it not to break, Ellie said. Her voice was serene, but Louis observed the brown halfmoons under her eyes. Looking at her made his heart ache so badly that he turned away from her. Maybe when Gages chair broke, she would begin to understand what had happened a little better. Im going to carry the picture and sit in his chair, she said. Im going to eat his breakfast too. Gage and Ellie had each had their own breakfast cereals; Gages, Ellie had once claimed, tasted like dead boogers. If Cocoa Bears was the only cereal in the house, Ellie would sometimes eat a boiled egg . . . or nothing at all. Ill eat lima beans even though I hate them, and Ill read all of Gages picturebooks and Ill . . . Ill . . . you know . . . get things ready . . . in case . . . She was crying now. Louis did not try to comfort her but only brushed her hair back from her forehead. What she was talking about made a certain crazed sense. Keeping the lines open. Keeping things current. Keeping Gage in the present, in the Hot One Hundred, refusing to let him recede; remember when Gage did this . . . or that . . . yeah, that was great . . . good old Gage, wotta kid. When it started not to hurt, it started not to matter. She understood, perhaps, Louis thought, how easy it would be to let Gage be dead. Ellie, dont cry anymore, he said. This isnt forever. She cried forever . . . for fifteen minutes. She actually fell asleep before her tears stopped. But eventually she slept, and downstairs the clock struck ten in the quiet house. Keep him alive, Ellie, if thats what you want, he thought and kissed her. The shrinks would probably say its as unhealthy as hell, but Im for it. Because I know the day will comemaybe as soon as this Fridaywhen you forget to carry the picture and Ill see it lying on your bed in this empty room while you ride your bike around the driveway or walk in the field behind the house or go over to Kathy McGowns house to make clothes with her Sew Perfect. Gage wont be with you, and thats when Gage drops off whatever Hot One Hundred there is that exists in little girls hearts and starts to become Something That Happened in 1984. A blast from the past. Louis left the room and stood for a moment at the head of the stairs, thinkingnot seriouslyabout going to bed. He knew what he needed and went downstairs to get it.    Louis Albert Creed set methodically about getting drunk. Downstairs in the cellar were five cases of Schlitz Light beer. Louis drank beer, Jud drank it, Steve Masterton drank it, Missy Dandridge would occasionally have a beer or two while watching the kids (kid, Louis reminded himself, going down the cellar stairs). Even Chariton, on the few occasions she had come over to the house, preferred a beeras long as it was a light beerto a glass of wine. So one day last winter Rachel had gone out and bought a staggering ten cases when Schlitz Light went on sale at the Brewer A  P. Stop you running down to Julios in Orrington every time somebody drops in, she had said. And youre always quoting Robert Parker to me, loveany beer thats in the refrigerator after the stores close is good beer, right? So drink this and think about the dough youre saving. Last winter. When things had been okay. When things had been okay. It was funny, how quickly and easily your mind made that crucial division. Louis brought up a case of beer and shoved the cans into the fridge. Then he took one can, closed the fridge door, and opened the beer. Church came oiling slowly and rustily out of the pantry at the sound of the refrigerator door and stared inquiringly up at Louis. The cat did not come too close; Louis had perhaps kicked it too many times. Nothing for you, he told the cat. You had your can of Calo today. If you want something else, go kill a bird. Church stood there, looking up at him. Louis drank off half the can of beer and felt it go to his head almost at once. You dont even eat them, do you? he asked. Just killing them is enough for you. Church strolled into the living room, apparently deciding there was going to be no food, and after a moment Louis followed it. He thought again randomly, Heyho, lets go. Louis sat down in his chair and looked at Church again. The cat was reclining on the rug by the TV stand, watching Louis carefully, probably ready to run if Louis should suddenly become aggressive and decide to put his kickingfoot in gear. Instead Louis raised his beer. To Gage, he said. To my son, who might have been an artist or an Olympic swimmer or the motherfucking President of the United States. What do you say, asshole? Church regarded him with those dull, strange eyes. Louis drank off the rest of his beer in big gulps that hurt his tender throat, arose, went to the fridge, and got a second one. By the time Louis had finished three beers, he felt that he had some sort of equilibrium for the first time that day. By the time he had gotten through the first sixpack, he felt that sleep might actually be possible in another hour or so. He came back from the fridge with his eighth or ninth (he had really lost count by then and was walking on a slant), and his eyes fell on Church; the cat was dozingor pretending toon the rug now. The thought came so naturally that it surely must have been there all along, simply waiting its time to come forward from the back of his mind When are you going to do it? When are you going to bury Gage in the annex to the Pet Sematary? And on the heels of that Lazarus, come forth. Ellies sleepy, dazed voice The teacher said if hed just said Come forth, probably everybody in that graveyard would have come out. A chill of such elemental force struck him that Louis clutched himself as the shudder twisted through his body. He suddenly found himself remembering Ellies first day of school, how Gage had gone to sleep on his lap while he and Rachel were listening to Ellie prattle on about Old MacDonald and Mrs. Berryman; he had said Just let me put the baby to bed, and when he took Gage upstairs a horrible premonition had struck him, and now he understood Back in September part of him had known Gage was going to die soon. Part of him had known that Oz the Gweat and Tewwible was at hand. It was nonsense, it was rot, it was superstitious bullshit of the purest ray serene . . . and it was true. He had known. Louis spilled some of his beer on his shirt, and Church looked up wearily to see if this was a signal that the evening's catkicking festivities were about to commence. Louis suddenly remembered the question he had asked Jud; he remembered the way Juds arm had jerked, knocking two empty beer bottles off the table. One of them had shattered. You dont even want to talk about such things, Louis! But he did want to talk about themor at least think about them. The Pet Sematary. What was beyond the Pet Sematary. The idea had a deadly attraction. It made a balance of logic which was impossible to deny. Church had been killed in the road; Gage had been killed in the road. Here was Church changed of course, distasteful in some waysbut here. Ellie, Gage, and Rachel all had a working relationship with him. He killed birds, true, and had turned a few mice inside out, but killing small animals was a cat thing to do. Church had by no means turned into Frankencat. He was, in many ways, as good as ever. Youre rationalizing, a voice whispered. Hes not as good as ever. Hes spooky. The crow, Louis . . . remember the crow? Good God, Louis said aloud in a shaky, distracted voice he was barely able to recognize as his own. God, oh yes, fine, sure. If there had ever been a time to invoke the name of God outside of a novel about ghosts or vampires, this was it. So just whatwhat in the name of Godwas he thinking about? He was thinking about a dark blasphemy which he was even now not wholly able to credit. Worse, he was telling himself lies. Not just rationalizing, but outright lying. So whats the truth? You want the truth so fucking bad, whats the truth? That Church wasnt really a cat anymore at allstart with that. He looked like a cat, and he acted like a cat, but he was really only a poor imitation. People couldnt actually see through that imitation, but they could feel through it. He remembered a night when Chariton had been at the house. The occasion had been a small preChristmas dinner party. Theyd been sitting in here, talking after the meal, and Church had jumped up in her lap. Chariton had pushed the cat off immediately, a quick and instinctive moue of distaste puckering her mouth. It had been no big deal. No one had even commented on it. But . . . it was there. Chariton had felt what the cat wasnt. Louis killed his beer and went back for another. If Gage came back changed in such a way, that would be an obscenity. He popped the top and drank deeply. He was drunk now, drunk for fair, and there would be a big head for him to deal with tomorrow. How I Went to My Sons Funeral with a Hangover by Louis Creed, author of How I Just Missed Him at the Crucial Moment and numerous other works. Drunk. Sure. And he suspected now that the reason he had gotten drunk was so he could consider this crazy idea soberly. In spite of everything, the idea had that deadly attraction, that sick luster, that glamour. Yes, that above all elseit had glamour. Jud was back, speaking in his mind You do it because it gets hold of you. You do it because that burial place is a secret place, and you want to share the secret . . . you make up reasons . . . they seem like good reasons . . . but mostly you do it because you want to. Or because you have to. Juds voice, low and drawling with Yankee intonation, Juds voice chilling his flesh, bringing out the goosebumps, making the hackles on the back of his neck rise. These are secret things, Louis . . . the soil of a mans heart is stonier . . . like the soil up in the old Micmac burying ground. A man grows what he can . . . and he tends it. Louis began to go over the other things Jud had told him about the Micmac burying ground. He began to collate the data, to sort through it, to compress ithe proceeded in exactly the same way he had once readied himself for big exams. The dog. Spot. I could see all the places where the barbed wire had hooked himthere was no fur in any of those places, and the flesh looked dimpled in. The bull. Another file turned over in Louiss mind. Lester Morgan buried his prize hull up there. Black Angus bull, named Hanratty . . . Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge . . . shot him dead two weeks later. That bull turned mean, really mean. But hes the only animal I ever heard of that did. He turned mean. The soil of a mans heart is stonier. He turned really mean. Hes the only animal I ever heard of that did. Mostly you do it because once youve been up there, its your place. The flesh looked dimpled in. Hanratty, aint that a silly name for a bull? A man grows what he can . . . and tends it. Theyre my rats. And my birds. I bought the fuckers. Its your place, a secret place, and it belongs to you, and you belong to it. He turned mean, but hes the only animal I ever heard of that did. What do you want to buy next, Louis, when the wind blows hard at night and the moon lays a white path through the woods to that place? Want to climb those stairs again? When theyre watching a horror movie, everyone in the audience knows the hero or the heroine is stupid to go up those stairs, but in real life they always dothey smoke, they dont wear seat belts, they move their family in beside a busy highway where the big rigs drone back and forth all day and all night. So, Louis, what do you say? Want to climb the stairs? Would you like to keep your dead son or go for whats behind Door Number One, Door Number Two, or Door Number Three? Heyho, lets go. Turned mean . . . only animal . . . the flesh looked . . . a man . . . yours . . . his . . . Louis dumped the rest of the beer down the sink, feeling suddenly that he was going to vomit. The room was moving around in great swinging motions. There was a knock at the door. For a long timeit seemed like a long time, anywayhe believed it was only in his head, a hallucination. But the knocking just went on and on, patient, implacable. And suddenly Louis found himself thinking of the story of the monkeys paw, and a cold terror slipped into him. He seemed to feel it with total physical realityit was like a dead hand that had been kept in a refrigerator, a dead hand which had suddenly taken on its own disembodied life and slipped inside his shirt to clutch the flesh over his heart. It was a silly image, fulsome and silly, but oh, it didnt feel silly. No. Louis went to the door on feet he could not feel and lifted the latch with nerveless fingers. And as he swung it open, he thought Itll be Pascow. Like they said about Jim Morrison, back from the dead and bigger than ever. Pascow standing there in his jogging shorts, big as life and as mouldy as monthold bread, Pascow with his horribly ruined head, Pascow bringing the warning again Dont go up there. What was that old song by the Animals? Baby please dont go, baby PLEASE dont go, you know I love you so, baby please dont go . . .


The door swung open and standing there on his front step in the blowing dark of this midnight, between the day of the funeral parlor visitation and the day of his sons burial, was Jud Crandall. His thin white hair blew randomly in the chilly dark. Louis tried to laugh. Time seemed to have turned cleverly back on itself. It was Thanksgiving again. Soon they would put the stiff, unnaturally thickened body of Ellies cat Winston Churchill into a plastic garbage bag and start off. Oh, do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit. Can I come in, Louis? Jud asked. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket and poked one into his mouth. Tell you what, Louis said. Its late and Ive been drinking a pile of beer. Ayuh, I could smell it, Jud said. He struck a match. The wind snuffed it. He struck another around cupped hands, but the hands trembled and betrayed the match to the wind again. He got a third match, prepared to strike it, and then looked up at Louis standing in the doorway. I cant get this thing lit, Jud said. Gonna let me in or not, Louis? Louis stepped aside and let Jud walk in. 38 They sat at the kitchen table over beersfirst time weve ever tipped one in our kitchen, Louis thought, a little surprised. Halfway across the living room, Ellie had cried out in her sleep, and both of them had frozen like statues in a childrens game. The cry had not been repeated. Okay, Louis said, what are you doing over here at quarter past twelve on the morning my son gets buried? Youre a friend, Jud, but this is stretching it. Jud drank, wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, and looked directly at Louis. There was something clear and positive in his eyes, and Louis at last looked down from it. You know why Im here, Jud said. Youre thinking about things that are not to be thought of, Louis. Worse still, I fear youre considering them. I wasnt thinking about anything but going up to bed, Louis said. I have a burying to go to tomorrow. Im responsible for more pain in your heart than you should have tonight, Jud said softly. For all I know, I may even have been responsible for the death of your son. Louis looked up, startled. What? Jud, dont talk crazy! You are thinking of trying to put him up there, Jud said. Dont you deny the thought has crossed your mind, Louis. Louis did not reply. How far does its influence extend? Jud said. Can you tell me that? No. I cant answer that question myself, and Ive lived my whole life in this patch of the world. I know about the Micmacs, and that place was always considered to be a kind of holy place to them . . . but not in a good way. Stanny B. told me that. My father told me toolater on. After Spot died the second time. Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis. Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim ever stuck. Anson Ludlow, the greatgrandson of this towns founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But even then he would have been in a hell of a court fight because there was crossclaims to the land by other Ludlows and by a fellow named Peter Dimmart, who claimed he could prove pretty convincingly that he was a Ludlow on the other side of the sheets. And Joseph Ludlow the Elder was moneypoor but landrich toward the end of his life, and every now and then hed just gift somebody with two or four hundred acres when he got into his cups. Were none of those deeds recorded? Louis asked, fascinated in spite of himself. Oh, they were regular bears for recording deeds, were our grandfathers, Jud said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. The original grant on your land goes like this. Jud closed his eyes and quoted, From the great old maple which stands atop Quinceberry Ridge to the verge of Orrington Stream; thus runneth the tract from north until south. Jud grinned without much humor. But the great old maple fell down in 1882, lets say, and was rotted to moss by the year 1900, and Orrington Stream silted up and turned to marsh in the ten years between the end of the Great War and the crash of the stock market. A nice mess it made! It ended up not mattering to old Anson, anyways. He was struck and killed by lightning in 1921, right up around where that burying ground is. Louis stared at Jud. Jud sipped his beer. It dont matter. Theres lots of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never gets unraveled, only the lawyers end up makin money. Hell, Dickens knew that. I suppose the Indians will get it back in the end, and I think thats the way it should be. But that dont really matter, Louis. I came over here tonight to tell you about Timmy Baterman and his dad. Whos Timmy Baterman? Timmy Baterman was one of the twenty or so boys from Ludlow that went overseas to fight Hitler. He left in 1942. He come back in a box with a flag on the top of it in 1943. He died in Italy. His daddy, Bill Baterman, lived his whole life in this town. He about went crazy when he got the telegram . . . and then he quieted right down. He knew about the Micmac burying ground. you see. And hed decided what he wanted to do. The chill was back. Louis stared at Jud for a long time, trying to read the lie in the old mans eyes. It was not there. But the fact of this story surfacing just now was damned convenient. Why didnt you tell me this that other night? he said finally. After we . . . after we did the cat? When I asked you if anyone had ever buried a person up there, you said no one ever had. Because you didnt need to know, Jud said. Now you do. Louis was silent for a long time. Was he the only one? The only one I know of personally, Jud said gravely. The only one to ever try it? I doubt that, Louis. I doubt it very much. Im kind of like the preacher in ClesiastesI dont believe that theres anything new under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but thats all. Whats been tried once has been tried once before . . . and before . . . and before. He looked down at his liverspotted hands. In the living room, the clock softly chimed twelvethirty. I decided that a man in your profession is used to looking at symptoms and seeing the diseases underneath . . . and I decided I had to talk straight to you when Mortonson down at the funeral home told me youd ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing vault. Louis looked at Jud for a long time, saying nothing. Jud flushed deeply but didnt look away. Finally Louis said Sounds like maybe you did a little snooping, Jud. I am sorry because of it. I didnt ask him which you bought. Not right out, maybe. But Jud did not reply, and although his blush had deepened even morehis complexion was approaching a plum color nowhis eyes still didnt waver. At last, Louis sighed. He felt unutterably tired. Oh, fuck it. I dont care. Maybe youre even right. Maybe it was on my mind. If it was, it was on the downside of it. I didnt think much about what I was ordering. I was thinking about Gage. I know you were thinking about Gage. But you knew the difference. Your uncle was an undertaker. Yes, he had known the difference. A sealing vault was a piece of construction work, something which was meant to last a long, long time. Concrete was poured into a rectangular mould reinforced with steel rods, and then, after the graveside services were over, a crane lowered a slightly curved concrete top into place. The lid was sealed with a substance like the hotpatch highway departments used to fill potholes. Uncle Carl had told Louis that sealanttradenamed EverLockgot itself a fearsome grip after all that weight had been on it for a while. Uncle Carl, who liked to yarn as much as anyone (at least when he was with his own kind, and Louis, who had worked with him summers for a while, qualified as a sort of apprentice undertaker), told his nephew of an exhumation order hed gotten once from the Cook County D.A.s office. Uncle Carl went out to Groveland to oversee the exhumation. They could be tricky things, he saidpeople whose only ideas concerning disinterral came from those horror movies starring Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankensteins monster and Dwight Frye as Igor had an entirely wrong impression. Opening a sealing vault was no job for two men with picks and shovelsnot unless they had about six weeks to spend on the job. This one went all right . . . at first. The grave was opened, and the crane grappled onto the top of the vault. Only the top didnt just pull off, as it was supposed to do. The whole vault, its concrete sides already a little wet and discolored, started to rise out of the ground instead. Uncle Carl screamed for the crane operator to back off. Uncle Carl wanted to go back to the mortuary and get some stuff that would weaken the sealants grip a bit. The crane operator either didnt hear or wanted to go for the whole thing, like a little kid playing with a toy crane and junk prizes in a penny arcade. Uncle Carl said that the damned fool almost got it too. The vault was three quarters of the way out Uncle Carl and his assistant could hear water pattering from the underside of the vault onto the floor of the grave (it had been a wet week in Chicagoland) when the crane just tipped over and went kerplunk into the grave. The crane operator crashed into the windshield and broke his nose. That days festivities cost Cook County roughly 3,0002,100 over the usual price of such gay goingson. The real point of the story for Uncle Carl was that the crane operator had been elected president of the Chicago local of the Teamsters six years later. Grave liners were simpler matters. Such a liner was no more than a humble concrete box, open at the top. It was set into the grave on the morning of a funeral. Following the services, the coffin was lowered into it. The sextons then brought on the top, which was usually in two segments. These segments were lowered vertically into the ends of the grave, where they stood up like bookends. Iron rings were embedded into the concrete at the ends of each segment. The sextons would run lengths of chain through them and lower them gently onto the top of the grave liner. Each section would weigh sixty, perhaps seventy pounds eighty, tops. And no sealer was used. It was easy enough for a man to open a grave liner; thats what Jud was implying. Easy enough for a man to disinter the body of his son and bury it someplace else. Shhhhh . . . shhhh. We will not speak of such things. These are secret things. Yes, I guess I knew the difference between a sealing vault and a grave liner, Louis said. But I wasnt thinking about about what you think I was thinking about. Louis Its late, Louis said. Its late, Im drunk, and my heart aches. If you feel like you have to tell me this story, then tell me and lets get it over with. Maybe I should have started with martinis, he thought. Then I could have been safely passed out when he came knocking. All right, Louis. Thank you. Just go on. Jud paused a moment, thinking, then began to speak. 39 In those daysback during the war, I meanthe train still stopped in Orrington, and Bill Baterman had a funeral hack there at the loading depot to meet the freight carrying the body of his son Timmy. The coffin was unloaded by four railroad men. I was one of them. There was an army fellow on board from Graves and Registrationthat was the armys wartime version of undertakers, Louisbut he never got off the train. He was sitting drunk in a boxcar that still had twelve coffins in it. We put Timmy into the back of a mortuary Cadillacin those days it still wasnt uncommon to hear such things called hurryup wagons because in the old days, the major concern was to get them into the ground before they rotted. Bill Baterman stood by, his face stony and kinda . . . I dunno . . . kinda dry, I guess youd say. He wept no tears. Huey Garber was driving the train that day, and he said that army fella had really had a tour for himself. Huey said theyd flown in a whole shitload of those coffins to Limestone in Presque Isle, at which point both the coffins and their keeper entrained for points south. The army fella comes walking up to Huey, and he takes a fifth of rye whiskey out of his uniform blouse, and he says in this soft, drawly Dixie voice, Well, Mr. Engineer, youre driving a mystery train today, did you know that? Huey shakes his head.  Well, you are. At least, thats what they call a funeral train down in Alabama. Huey says the fella took a list out of his pocket and squinted at it. Were going to start by dropping two of those coffins off in Houlton, and then Ive got one for Passadumkeag, two for Bangor, one for Derry, one for Ludlow, and so on. I feel like a fugging milkman. You want a drink? Well, Huey declines the drink on the grounds that the Bangor and Aroostook is pretty fussy on the subject of train drivers with rye on their breaths, and the fella from Graves and Registration dont hold it against Huey, any more than Huey holds the fact of the army fellas drunkenness against him. They even shook on her, Huey said. So off they go, dropping those flagcovered coffins every other stop or two. Eighteen or twenty of em in all. Huey said it went on all the way to Boston, and there was weeping and wailing relatives at every stop except Ludlow . . . and at Ludlow he was treated to the sight of Bill Baterman, who, he said, looked like he was dead inside and just waiting for his soul to stink. When he got off that train, he said he woke up that army fella, and they hit some spotsfifteen or twentyand Huey got drunker than he had ever been and went to a whore, which hed never done in his whole life, and woke up with a set of crabs so big and mean they gave him the shivers, and he said that if that was what they called a mystery train, he never wanted to drive no mystery train again. Timmys body was taken up to the Greenspan Funeral Home on Fern Streetit used to be across from where the New Franklin Laundry stands nowand two days later he was buried in Pleasantview Cemetery with full military honors. Well, I tell you, Louis Missus Baterman was dead ten years then, along with the second child she tried to bring into the world, and that had a lot to do with what happened. A second child might have helped to ease the pain, dont you think? A second child might have reminded old Bill that theres others that feel the pain and have to be helped through. I guess in that way, youre luckierhaving another child and all, I mean. A child and a wife who are both alive and well. According to the letter Bill got from the lieutenant in charge of his boys platoon, Timmy was shot down on the road to Rome on July 15, 1943. His body was shipped home two days later, and it got to Limestone on the nineteenth. It was put aboard Huey Garbers mystery train the very next day. Most of the GIs who got killed in Europe were buried in Europe, but all of the boys who went home on that train were specialTimmy had died charging a machinegun nest, and he had won the Silver Star posthumously. Timmy was burieddont hold me to this, but I think it was on July 22. It was four or five days later that Marjorie Washburn, who was the mailwoman in those days, saw Timmy walking up the road toward Yorks Livery Stable. Well, Margie damn near drove right off the road, and you can understand why. She went back to the post office, tossed her leather bag with all her undelivered mail still in it on George Andersons desk, and told him she was going home and to bed right then.  Margie, are you sick? George asks. You are just as white as a gulls wing.  Ive had the fright of my life, and I dont want to talk to you about it, Margie Washburn says. I aint going to talk to Brian about it, or my mom, or anybody. When I get up to heaven, if Jesus asks me to talk to Him about it, maybe I will. But I dont believe it. And out she goes. Everybody knew Timmy was dead; there was his bituary in the Bangor Daily News and the Ellsworth American just the week before, picture and all, and half the town turned out for his funeral up to the city. And here Margie seen him, walking up the roadlurching up the road, she finally told old George Andersononly this was twenty years later, and she was dying, and George told me it seemed to him like she wanted to tell somebody what shed seen. George said it seemed to him like it preyed on her mind, you know. Pale he was, she said, and dressed in an old pair of chino pants and a faded flannel hunting shirt, although it must have been ninety degrees in the shade that day. Margie said all his hair was sticking up in the back. His eyes were like raisins stuck in bread dough. I saw a ghost that day, George. Thats what scared me so. I never thought Id see such a thing, but there it was. Well, word got around. Pretty soon some other people saw Timmy, too. Missus Strattonwell, we called her missus, but so far as anyone knew she could have been single or divorced or grasswidowed; she had a little tworoom house down where the Pedersen Road joins the Hancock Road, and she had a lot of jazz records, and sometimes shed be willing to throw you a little party if you had a tendollar bill that wasnt working too hard. Well, she saw him from her porch, and she said he walked right up to the edge of the road and stopped there. He just stood there, she said, his hands dangling at his sides and his head pushed forward, lookin like a boxer whos ready to eat him some canvas. She said she stood there on her porch, heart goin like sixty, too scared to move. Then she said he turned around, and it was like watching a drunk man try to do an aboutface. One leg went way out and the other foot turned, and he just about fell over. She said he looked right at her and all the strength just run out of her hands and she dropped the basket of washing she had, and the clothes fell out and got smutty all over again. She said his eyes . . . she said they looked as dead and dusty as marbles, Louis. But he saw her . . . and he grinned . . . and she said he talked to her. Asked her if she still had those records because he wouldnt mind cutting a rug with her. Maybe that very night. And Missus Stratton went back inside, and she wouldnt come out for most of a week, and by then it was over anyway. Lot of people saw Timmy Baterman. Many of them are dead nowMissus Stratton is, for one, and others have moved on, but there are a few old crocks like me left around wholl tell you. if you ask em right. We saw him, I tell you, walking back and forth along the Pedersen Road, a mile east of his daddys house and a mile west. Back and forth he went, back and forth all day, and for all anyone knew, all night. Shirt untucked, pale face, hair all stuck up in spikes, fly unzipped sometimes, and this look on his face . . . this look . . . Jud paused to light a cigarette, then shook the match out, and looked at Louis through the haze of drifting blue smoke. And although the story was, of course, utterly mad, there was no lie in Juds eyes. You know, they have these stories and these moviesI dont know if theyre trueabout zombies down in Haiti. In the movies they just sort of shamble along, with their dead eyes starin straight ahead, real slow and sort of clumsy. Timmy Baterman was like that, Louis, like a zombie in a movie, but he wasnt. There was somethin more. There was somethin goin on behind his eyes, and sometimes you could see it and sometimes you couldnt see it. Somethin behind his eyes, Louis. I dont think that thinkin is what I want to call it. I dont know what in the hell I want to call it. It was sly, that was one thing. Like him tellin Missus Stratton he wanted to cut a rug with her. There was somethin goin on in there, Louis, but I dont think it was thinkin and I dont think it had muchmaybe nothing at allto do with Timmy Baterman. It was more like a . . . a radio signal that was comin from somewhere else. You looked at him and you thought, If he touches me, Im gonna scream. Like that. Back and forth he went, up and down the road, and one day after I got home from workthis must have been, oh, Im going to say it was July 30 or sohere is George Anderson, the postmaster, dont you know, sitting on my back porch, drinking iced tea with Hannibal Benson, who was then our second selectman, and Alan Purinton, who was fire chief. Norma sat there too but never said a thing. George kept rubbing the stump at the top of his right leg. Lost most of that leg working on the railroad, he did, and the stump used to bother him something fierce on those hot and muggy days. But here he was, misery or not.  This has gone far enough, George says to me. I got a mailwoman who wont deliver out on the Pedersen Roadthats one thing. Its starting to raise Cain with the government, and thats something else.  What do you mean, its raising Cain with the government? I asked Hannibal said hed had a call from the War Department. Some lieutenant named Kinsman whose job it was to sort out malicious mischief from plain old tomfoolery. Four or five people have written anonymous letters to the War Department, Hannibal says, and this Lieutenant Kinsman is starting to get a little bit concerned. If it was just one fellow who had written one letter, theyd laugh it off. If it was just one fellow writing a whole bunch of letters, Kinsman says hed call the state police up in Derry Barracks and tell em they might have a psychopath with a hate on against the Baterman family in Ludlow. But these letters all came from different people. He said you could tell that by the handwriting, name or no name, and they all say the same crazy thingthat if Timothy Baterman is dead, he makes one hell of a lively corpse walking up and down Pedersen Road with his bare face hanging out.  This Kinsman is going to send a fellow out or come himself if this dont settle down, Hannibal finishes up. They want to know if Timmys dead, or AWOL, or what because they dont like to think their records are all at sixes and sevens. Also theyre gonna want to know who was buried in Timmy Batermans box, if he wasnt. Well, you can see what kind of a mess it was, Louis. We sat there most of an hour, drinking iced tea and talking it over. Norma asked us if we wanted sandwidges, but no one did. We talked it around and talked it around, and finally we decided we had to go out there to the Baterman place. Ill never forget that night, not if I live to be twice as olds I am now. It was hot, hotter than the hinges of hell, with the sun going down like a bucket of guts behind the clouds. There was none of us wanted to go, but we had to. Norma knew it before any of us. She got me inside on some pretext or other and said, Dont you let them dither around and put this off, Judson. You got to get this taken care of. Its an abomination. Jud measured Louis evenly with his eyes. That was what she called it, Louis. It was her word. Abomination. And she kind of whispers in my ear, If anything happens, Jud, you just run. Never mind these others; theyll have to look out for themselves. You remember me and bust your hump right out of there if anything happens. We drove over in Hannibal Bensons carthat son of a bitch got all the Acoupons he wanted, I dont know how. Nobody said much, but all four of us was smokin like chimblies. We was scared, Louis, just as scared as we could be. But the only one who really said anything was Alan Purinton. He says to George, Bill Baterman has been up to dickens in that woods north of Route 15, and Ill put my warrant to that. Nobody answered, but I remember George noddin his head. Well, we got there, and Alan knocked, but nobody answered, so we went around to the back and there the two of them were. Bill Baterman was sitting there on his back stoop with a pitcher of beer, and Timmy was at the back of the yard, just staring up at that red, bloody sun as it went down. His whole face was orange with it, like hed been flayed alive. And Bill . . . he looked like the devil had gotten him after his seven years of highfalutin. He was floatin in his clothes, and I judged hed lost forty pounds. His eyes had gone back in their sockets until they were like little animals in a pair of caves . . . and his mouth kep goin tickticktick on the left side. Jud paused, seemed to consider, and then nodded imperceptibly. Louis, he looked damned. Timmy looked around at us and grinned. Just seeing him grin made you want to scream. Then he turned and went back to looking at the sun go down. Bill says, I didnt hear you boys knock, which was a baldfaced lie, of course, since Alan laid on that door loud enough to wake the . . . to wake up a deaf man. No one seemed like they was going to say anything, so I says, Bill, I heard your boy was killed over in Italy.  That was a mistake, he says, looking right at me.  Was it? I says.  You see him standin right there, dont you? he says.  So who do you reckon was in that coffin you had buried out at Pleasantview? Alan Purinton asks him.  Be damned if I know, Bill says, and be damned if I care. He goes to get a cigarette and spills them all over the back porch, then breaks two or three trying to pick them up.  Probably have to be an exhumation, Hannibal says. You know that, dont you? I had a call from the goddam War Department, Bill. They are going to want to know if they buried some other mothers son under Timmys name.  Well, what in the hell of it? Bill says in a loud voice. Thats nothing to me, is it? I got my boy. Timmy come home the other day. Hes been shellshocked or something. Hes a little strange now, but hell come around.  Lets quit this, Bill, I says, and all at once I was pretty mad at him. If and when they dig up that army coffin, theyre gonna find it dead empty, unless you went to the trouble of filling it up with rocks after you took your boy out of it, and I dont think you did. I know what happened, Hannibal and George and Alan here know what happened, and you know what happened too. You been foolin around up in the woods, Bill, and you have caused yourself and this town a lot of trouble.  You fellas know your way out, I guess, he says. I dont have to explain myself to you, or justify myself to you, or nothing. When I got that telegram, the life ran right out of me. I felt her go, just like piss down the inside of my leg. Well, I got my boy back. They had no right to take my boy. He was only seventeen. He was all I had left of his dear mother, and it was illfuckinlegal. So fuck the army, and fuck the War Department, and fuck the United States of America, and fuck you boys too. I got him back. Hell come around. And thats all I got to say. Now you all just march your boots back where you came from. And his mouth is tickticktickin, and theres sweat all over his forehead in big drops, and that was when I saw he was crazy. It would have driven me crazy too. Living with that . . . that thing. Louis was feeling sick to his stomach. He had drunk too much beer too fast. Pretty soon it was all going to come up on him. The heavy, loaded feeling in his stomach told him it would be coming up soon. Well, there wasnt much else we could do. We got ready to go. Hannibal says, Bill, God help you. Bill says, God never helped me. I helped myself. That was when Timmy walked over to us. He even walked wrong, Louis. He walked like an old, old man. Hed put one foot high up and then bring it down and then kind of shuffle and then lift the other one. It was like watchin a crab walk. His hands dangled down by his legs. And when he got close enough, you could see red marks across his face on the slant, like pimples or little burns. I reckon thats where the Kraut machine gun got him. Must have damn near blowed his head off. And he stank of the grave. It was a black smell, like everything inside him was just lying there, spoiled. I saw Alan Purinton put a hand up to cover his nose and mouth. The stench was just awful. You almost expected to see grave maggots squirming around in his hair Stop, Louis said hoarsely. Ive heard enough. You aint, Jud said. He spoke with haggard earnestness. Thats it, you aint. And I cant even make it as bad as it was. Nobody could understand how bad it was unless they was there. He was dead, Louis. But he was alive too. And he . . . he . . . he knew things. Knew things? Louis sat forward. Ayuh. He looked at Alan for a long time, kind of grinning you could see his teeth, anywayand then he spoke in this low voice; you felt like you had to strain forward to hear it. It sounded like he had gravel down in his tubes. Your wife is fucking that man she works with down at the drugstore, Purinton. What do you think of that? She screams when she comes. What do you think of that? Alan, he kind of gasped, and you could see it had hit him. Alans in a nursing home up in Gardener now, or was the last I heardhe must be pushing ninety. Back when all this happened, he was forty or so, and there had been some talk around about his second wife. She was his second cousin, and she had come to live with Alan and Alans first wife, Lucy, just before the war. Well, Lucy died, and a year and a half later Alan up and married this girl. Laurine, her name was. She was no more than twentyfour when they married. And there had been some talk about her, you know. If you were a man, you might have called her ways sort of free and easy and let it go at that. But the women thought she might be loose. And maybe Alan had had a few thoughts in that direction too because he says, Shut up! Shut up or Ill knock you down, whatever you are!  Shush now, Timmy, Bill says, and he looks worse than ever, you know, like maybe hes going to puke or faint dead away, or do both. You shush, Timmy. But Timmy didnt take no notice. He looks around at George Anderson and he says, That grandson you set such a store by is just waiting for you to die, old man. The money is all he wants, the money he thinks you got socked away in your lockbox at the Bangor Eastern Bank. Thats why he makes up to you, but behind your back he makes fun of you, him and his sister. Old woodenleg, thats what they call you, Timmy says, and Louis, his voiceit changed. It got mean. It sounded like the way that grandson of Georges would have sounded if . . . you know, if the things Timmy was saying was true.  Old woodenleg, Timmy says, and wont they shit when they find out youre poor as a church mouse because you lost it all in 1938? Wont they shit, George? Wont they just shit? George, he backed away then, and his wooden leg buckled under him, and he fell back on Bills porch and upsat his pitcher of beer, and he was as white as your undershirt, Louis. Bill, he gets him back on his feet somehow, and hes roarin at his boy, Timmy, you stop it! You stop it! But Timmy wouldnt. He said somethin bad about Hannibal, and then he said something bad about me too, and by then he was . . . ravin, Id say. Yeah, he was ravin, all right. Screamin. And we started to back away, and then we started to run, draggin George along the best we could by the arms because hed gotten the straps and harnesses on that fake leg twisted somehow, and it was all off to one side with the shoe turned around backward and draggin on the grass. The last I seen of Timmy Baterman, he was on the back lawn by the clothesline, his face all red in the settin sun, those marks standin out on his face, his hair all crazy and dusty somehow . . . and he was laughin and screechin over and over again Old woodenleg! Old woodenleg! And the cuckold! And the whoremaster! Goodbye, gentlemen! Goodbye! Goodbye! And then he laughed, but it was screaming, really . . . something inside him . . . screaming . . . and screaming . . . and screaming. Jud stopped. His chest moved up and down rapidly. Jud, Louis said.


The thing this Timmy Baterman told you . . . was it true? It was true, Jud muttered. Christ! It was true. I used to go to a whorehouse in Bangor betimes. Nothing many a man hasnt done, although I spose there are plenty that walk the straight and narrow. I just would get the urgethe compulsion, maybe to sink it into strange flesh now and then. Or pay some woman to do the things a man cant bring himself to ask his wife to do. Men keep their gardens too, Louis. It wasnt a terrible thing, what I done, and all of that has been behind me for the last eight or nine years, and Norma would not have left me if she had known. But something in her would have died forever. Something dear and sweet. Juds eyes were red and swollen and bleary. The tears of the old are singularly unlovely, Louis thought. But when Jud groped across the table for Louiss hand, Louis took it firmly. He told us only the bad, he said after a moment. Only the bad. God knows there is enough of that in any human beings life, isnt there? Two or three days later, Laurine Purinton left Ludlow for good, and folks in town who saw her before she got on the train said she was sporting two shiners and had cotton stuffed up both bores of her pump. Alan, he would never talk about it. George died in 1950, and if he left anything to that grandson and granddaughter of his, I never heard about it. Hannibal got kicked out of office because of something that was just like what Timmy Baterman accused him of. I wont tell you exactly what it wasyou dont need to knowbut misappropriation of town funds for his own use comes close enough to cover it, I reckon. There was even talk of trying him on embezzlement charges, but it never came to much. Losing the post was enough punishment for him anyway; his whole life was playing the big cheese. But there was good in those men too. Thats what I mean; thats what folks always find it so hard to remember. It was Hannibal got the fund started for the Eastern General Hospital, right before the war. Alan Purinton was one of the most generous, openhanded men I ever knew. And old George Anderson only wanted to go on running the post office forever. It was only the bad it wanted to talk about though. It was only the bad it wanted us to remember because it was bad . . . and because it knew we meant danger for it. The Timmy Baterman that went off to fight the war was a nice, ordinary kid, Louis, maybe a little dull but goodhearted. The thing we saw that night, lookin up into that red sun . . . that was a monster. Maybe it was a zombie or a dybbuk or a demon. Maybe theres no name for such a thing as that, but the Micmacs would have known what it was, name or no. What? Louis said numbly. Something that had been touched by the Wendigo, Jud said evenly. He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, let it out, and looked at his watch. Welladay. The hours late, Louis. Ive talked nine times as much as I meant to. I doubt that, Louis said. Youve been very eloquent. Tell me how it came out. There was a fire at the Baterman place two nights later, Jud said. The house burned flat. Alan Purinton said there was no doubt about the fire being set. Range oil had been splashed from one end of that little house to the other. You could smell the reek of it for three days after the fire was out. So they both burned up. Oh, ayuh, they burned. But they was dead beforehand. Timmy was shot twice in the chest with a pistol Bill Baterman kept handy, an old Colts. They found it in Bills hand. What hed done, or so it looked like, was to kill his boy, lay him on the bed, and then spill out that range oil. Then he sat down in his easy chair by the radio, flicked a match, and ate the barrel of that Colt .45. Jesus, Louis said. They were pretty well charred, but the county medical examiner said it looked to him like Timmy Baterman had been dead two or three weeks. Silence, ticking out. Jud got up. I wasnt exaggerating when I said I might have killed your boy, Louis, or had a hand in it. The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesnt necessarily mean they made it what it was. The Micmacs werent always here. They came maybe from Canada, maybe from Russia, maybe from Asia way back in the beginning. They stayed here in Maine for a thousand years, or maybe it was two thousandits hard to tell, because they did not leave their mark deep on the land. And now they are gone again . . . same way well be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better or worse. But the place will stay no matter whos here, Louis. It isnt as though someone owned it and could take its secret when they moved on. Its an evil, curdled place, and I had no business taking you up there to bury that cat. I know that now. It has a power youll beware of if you know whats good for your family and whats good for you. I wasnt strong enough to fight it. You saved Normas life, and I wanted to do something for you, and that place turned my good wish to its own evil purpose. It has a power . . . and I think that power goes through phases, same as the moon. Its been full of power before, and Im ascared its coming around to full again. Im ascared it used me to get at you through your son. Do you see, Louis, what Im getting at? His eyes pleaded with Louis. Youre saying the place knew Gage was going to die, I think, Louis said. No, I am saying the place might have made Gage die because I introduced you to the power in the place. I am saying I may have murdered your son with good intentions, Louis. I dont believe it, Louis said at last, shakily. Didnt; wouldnt. Couldnt. He held Juds hand tightly. Were burying Gage tomorrow. In Bangor. And in Bangor he will stay. I dont plan to go up there to the Pet Sematary or beyond it ever again. Promise me! Jud said harshly. Promise. I promise, Louis said. But in the back of his mind, contemplation remaineda dancing flicker of promise that would not quite go away. 40 But none of those things happened. All of themthe droning Orinco truck, the fingers that just touched the back of Cages jumper and then slid off, Rachel preparing to go to the viewing in her housecoat, Ellie carrying Gages picture and putting his chair next to her bed, Steve Mastertons tears, the fight with Irwin Goldman, Jud Crandalls terrible story of Timmy Batermanall of them existed only in Louis Creeds mind during the few seconds that passed while he raced his laughing son to the road. Behind him, Rachel screamed againGage, come back, dont RUN!but Louis did not waste his breath. It was going to be close, very close, and yes, one of those things really happened from somewhere up the road he could hear the drone of the oncoming truck and somewhere inside a memory circuit opened and he could hear Jud Crandall speaking to Rachel on that very first day in Ludlow You want to watch em around the road, Missus Greed. Its a bad road for kids and pets. Now Gage was running down the gentle slope of lawn that merged with the soft shoulder of Route 15, his husky little legs pumping, and by all the rights of the world he should have fallen over sprawling but he just kept going and now the sound of the truck was very loud indeed, it was that low, snoring sound that Louis sometimes heard from his bed as he floated just beyond the rim of sleep. Then it seemed a comforting sound, but now it terrified him. Oh my dear God oh my dear Jesus let me catch him dont let him get into the road! Louis put on a final burst of speed and leaped, throwing himself out straight and parallel to the ground like a football player about to make a tackle; he could see his shadow tracking along on the grass below him in the lowest periphery of his vision, and he thought of the kite, the Vulture, printing its shadow all the way across Mrs. Vintons field, and just as Gages forward motion carried him into the road, Louiss fingers brushed the back of his jacket . . . and then snagged it. He yanked Gage backward and landed on the ground at the same instant, crashing his face into the rough gravel of the shoulder, giving himself a bloody nose. His balls signaled a much more serious flash of painOhhh, if lda known I was gonna be playing football, I woulda worn my jockbut both the pain in his nose and the driving agony in his testes were lost in the swelling relief of hearing Gages wail of pain and outrage as his bottom landed on the shoulder and he fell over backward onto the edge of the lawn, thumping his head. A moment later his wails were drowned by the roar of the passing truck and the almost regal blat of its air horn. Louis managed to get up in spite of the lead ball sitting in his lower stomach and cradled his son in his arms. A moment later Rachel joined them, also weeping, crying out to Gage, Never run in the road, Gage! Never, never, never! The road is bad! Bad! And Gage was so astonished at this tearful lecture that he left off crying and goggled up at his mother. Louis, your nose is bleeding, she said and then hugged him so suddenly and strongly that for a moment he could barely breathe. That isnt the worst of it, he said. I think Im sterile, Rachel. Oh boy, the pain. And she laughed so hysterically that for a few moments he was frightened for her, and the thought crossed his mind If Gage really had been killed, I believe it would have driven her crazy. But Gage was not killed; all of that had only been a hellishly detailed moment of imagination as Louis outraced his sons death across a green lawn on a sunshiny May afternoon. Gage went to grammar school, and at the age of seven he began going to camp, where he showed a wonderful and surprising aptitude for swimming. He also gave his parents a rather glum surprise by proving himself able to handle a months separation with no noticeable psychic trauma. By the time he was ten, he was spending the entire summer away at Camp Agawam in Raymond, and at eleven he won two blue ribbons and a red one at the Four Camps Swimathon that ended the summers activities. He grew tall, and yet through it all he was the same Gage, sweet and rather surprised at the things the world held out . . . and for Gage, the fruit was somehow never bitter or rotten. He was an honors student in high school and a member of the swimming team at John Bapst, the parochial school he had insisted on attending because of its swimming facilities. Rachel was upset, Louis not particularly surprised when, at seventeen, Gage announced his intention to convert to Catholicism. Rachel believed that all of it was because of the girl Gage was going out with; she saw marriage in his immediate future (if that little slut with the St. Christophers medal isnt balling him, Ill eat your shorts, Louis, she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nine or ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according to Rachel, anyway) a cigarsmoking truck driver with a beer belly, OurFathering and HailMarying his way into precardiac oblivion. Louis suspected his sons motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the day he actually did the deed, Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhaps youll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy soninlaw, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (and decidedly unslutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year. He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, and incredibly proud afternoon sixteen years after Louis had raced an Orinco truck for his sons life, he and Rachelwho had now gone almost entirely gray, although she covered it with a rinsewatched their son win a gold medal for the U.S.A. When the NBC cameras moved in for a closeup of him, standing with his dripping, sealsleek head back, his eyes open and calm and fixed on the flag as the national anthem played, the ribbon around his neck, and the gold lying against the smooth skin of his chest, Louis wept. He and Rachel both wept. I guess this caps everything, he said huskily and turned to embrace his wife. But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the national anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed. This caps everything. His cap. His cap is . . . . . . oh dear God, his cap is full of blood. Louis woke up in the cold dead light of a rainy seven oclock, clutching his pillow in his arms. His head thumped monstrously with his heartbeat; the ache swelled and faded, swelled and faded. He burped acid that tasted like old beer, and his stomach heaved miserably. He had been weeping; the pillow was wet with his tears, as if he had somehow stumbled in and then out of one of those hokey countryandwestern laments in his sleep. Even in the dream, he thought, some part of him had known the truth and had cried for it. He got up and stumbled to the bathroom, heart racing threadily in his chest, consciousness itself fragmented by the fierceness of his hangover. He reached the toilet bowl barely in time and threw up a glut of last nights beer. He kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, until he felt capable of actually making it to his feet. He groped for the handle and flushed the john. He went to the mirror to see how badly bloodshot his eyes were, but the glass had been covered with a square of sheeting. Then he recalled. Drawing almost randomly on a past she professed to barely remember, Rachel had covered all the mirrors in the house, and she took off her shoes before entering through the door. No Olympic swimming team, Louis thought dully as he walked back to his bed and sat down on it. The sour taste of beer coated his mouth and throat, and he swore to himself (not for the first time or the last) that he would never touch that poison again. No Olympic swimming team, no 3.0 in college, no little Catholic girlfriend or conversion, no Camp Agawam, no nothing. His sneakers had been torn off; his jumper turned inside out; his sweet little boys body, so tough and sturdy, nearly dismembered. His cap had been full of blood. Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all. 41 Gage was buried at two oclock that afternoon. By then the rain had stopped. Tattered clouds still moved overhead, and most of the mourners arrived carrying black umbrellas provided by the undertaker. At Rachels request, the funeral director, who officiated at the short, nonsectarian graveside service, read the passage from Matthew which begins Suffer the little children to come unto Me. Louis, standing on one side of the grave, looked across at his fatherinlaw. For a moment Goldman looked back at him, and then he dropped his eyes. There was no fight left in him today. The pouches under his eyes now resembled mailbags, and around his black silk skullcap, hair as fine and white as tattered spiderwebs flew randomly in the breeze. With his grayishblack beard scragging his cheeks, he looked more like a wino than ever. He gave Louis the impression of a man who did not really know where he was. Louis tried but could still find no pity in his heart for him. Gages small white coffin, its latch presumably repaired, sat on a pair of chromed runners over the grave liner. The verges of the grave had been carpeted with Astroturf so violently green it hurt Louiss eyes. Several baskets of flowers had been set on top of this artificial and strangely gay surface. Louiss eyes looked over the funeral directors shoulder. Here was a low hill, covered with graves, family plots, one Romanesque monument with the name PHIPPS engraved on it. Just above the sloping roof of PHIPPS, he could see a sliver of yellow. Louis looked at this, pondering it. He continued to look at it even after the funeral director said, Let us bow our heads for a moment of silent prayer. It took Louis a few minutes, but he got it. It was a payloader. A payloader parked over the hill where the mourners wouldnt have to look at it. And, when the funeral was over, Oz would crush his cigarette on the heel of his tewwible workboot, put it in whatever container he carried around with him (in a cemetery, sextons caught depositing their butts on the ground were almost always summarily firedit looked bad; too many of the clientele had died of lung cancer), jump in the payloader, fire that sucker up, and cut his son off from the sun forever . . . or at least until the day of the Resurrection. Resurrection . . . ah, theres a word (that you should put right the fuck out of your mind and you know it). When the funeral director said Amen, Louis took Rachels arm and guided her away. Rachel murmured some protestshe wanted to stay a bit longer, please, Louisbut Louis was firm. They approached the cars. He saw the funeral director taking umbrellas with the homes name discreetly printed on the handles from the mourners who passed and handing them to an assistant. The assistant put them in an umbrella stand which looked surreal, standing there on the dewy turf. He held Rachels arm with his right hand and Ellies whitegloved hand with his left. Ellie was wearing the same dress she had worn to Norma Crandalls funeral. Jud came over as Louis handed his ladies into the car. Jud also looked as if hed had a hard night. You okay, Louis? Louis nodded. Jud bent to look into the car. How are you, Rachel? he asked. Im all right, Jud, she whispered. Jud touched her shoulder gently and then looked at Ellie. How about you, dear one?" Im fine, Ellie said and produced a hideous smile of sharklike proportions to show him how fine she was. Whats that picture you got there? For a moment Louis thought she would hold it, refuse to show him, and then with a painful shyness she passed it to Jud. He held it in his big fingers, fingers that were so splayed and somehow clumsylooking, fingers that looked fit mostly for grappling with the transmissions of big road machines or making couplings on the B  M Linebut they were also the fingers that had pulled a bee stinger from Gages neck with all the offhand skill of a magician . . . or a surgeon. Why, thats real nice, Jud said. You pullin him on a sled. Bet he liked that, didnt he, Ellie? Beginning to weep, Ellie nodded. Rachel began to say something, but Louis squeezed her armbe still awhile. I used to pull im a lot, Ellie said, weeping, and hed laugh and laugh. Then wed go in and Mommy would fix us cocoa and say, Put your boots away, and Gage would grab them all up and scream Boots! Boots! so loud it hurt your ears. Remember that, Mom? Rachel nodded. Yeah, I bet that was a good time, all right, Jud said, handing the picture back. And he may be dead now, Ellie, but you can keep your memories of him. Im going to, she said, wiping at her face. I loved Gage, Mr. Crandall. I know you did, dear. He leaned in and kissed her, and when he withdrew, his eyes swept Louis and Rachel stonily. Rachel met his gaze, puzzled and a little hurt, not understanding. But Louis understood well enough What are you doing for her? Juds eyes asked. Your son is dead, but your daughter is not. What are you doing for her? Louis looked away. There was nothing he could do for her, not yet. She would have to swim in her grief as best she could. His thoughts were too full of his son. 42 By evening a fresh rack of clouds had come in and a strong west wind had begun to blow. Louis put on his light jacket, zipped it up, and took the Civic keys from the peg on the wall. Where you going, Lou? Rachel asked. She spoke without much interest. After supper she had begun crying again, and although her weeping was gentle, she had seemed incapable of stopping. Louis had forced her to take a Valium. Now she sat with the paper folded open to the barely started crossword puzzle. In the other room, Ellie sat silently watching Little House on the Prairie with Gages picture on her lap. I thought Id pick up a pizza. Didnt you get enough to eat earlier? I just didnt seem hungry then, he said, telling the truth and then adding a lie I am now. That afternoon, between three and six, the final rite of Gages funeral had taken place at the Ludlow house. This was the rite of food. Steve Masterton and his wife had come with a hamburgerandnoodle casserole. Charlton had appeared with a quiche. It will keep until you want it, if it doesnt all get eaten, she told Rachel. Quiche is easy to warm up. The Dannikers from up the road brought a baked ham. The Goldmans appearedneither of them would speak to Louis or even come close to him, for which he was not sorrywith a variety of cold cuts and cheeses. Jud also brought cheesea large wheel of his old favorite, Mr. Rat. Missy Dandridge brought a key lime pie. And Surrendra Hardu brought apples. The rite of food apparently transcended religious differences. This was the funeral party, and although it was quiet, it was not quite subdued. There was rather less drinking than at an ordinary party, but there was some. After a few beers (only the night before he had sworn he would never touch the stuff again, but in the cold afternoon light the previous evening had seemed impossibly long ago) Louis thought to pass on a few little funerary anecdotes his Uncle Carl had told himthat at Sicilian funerals unmarried women sometimes snipped a piece of the deceased's shroud and slept with it under their pillows, believing it would bring them luck in love; that at Irish funerals mock weddings were sometimes performed, and the toes of the dead were tied together because of an ancient Celtic belief that it kept the deceaseds ghost from walking. Uncle Carl said that the custom of tying D.O.A. tags to the great toes of corpses had begun in New York, and since all of the early morgue keepers had been Irish, he believed this to be a survival of that old superstition. Then, looking at their faces, he had decided such tales would be taken wrong. Rachel had broken down only once, and her mother was there to comfort her. Rachel clung to Dory Goldman and sobbed against her shoulder in an open, letitallgo way that had been so far impossible for her with Louis, perhaps because she saw them both as culpable in Gages death or perhaps because Louis, lost in the peculiar halfworld of his own fancies, had not encouraged her grief. Either way, she had turned to her mother for comfort, and Dory was there to give it, mingling her tears with her daughter's. Irwin Goldman stood behind them, his hand on Rachels shoulder, and looked with sickly triumph across the room at Louis. Ellie circulated with a silver tray loaded with canaps, little rolls with a feathered toothpick poked through each one. Her picture of Gage was tucked firmly under her arm. Louis received condolences. He nodded and thanked the condolers. And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave robbing . . . only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied. It was not as if he intended to do anything. Louis stopped at the Orrington Corner Store, bought two sixpacks of cold beer, and called ahead to Napolis for a pepperoniandmushroom pizza. Want to give me a name on that, sir? Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, Louis thought. Lou Creed. Okay, Lou, were real busy, so itll be maybe fortyfive minutes that okay for you? Sure, Louis said and hung up. As he got back into the Civic and keyed the engine, it occurred to him that although there were maybe twenty pizza joints in the Bangor area, he had picked the one closest to Pleasantview, where Gage was buried. Well, what the hell? he thought uneasily. They make good pizza. No frozen dough. Throw it up and catch it on their fists, right there where you can watch, and Gage used to laugh He cut that thought off. He drove past Napolis to Pleasantview. He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None. He parked across the street and crossed the road to the wroughtiron gates, which glimmered in the final light of day. Above them, in a semicircle, were wroughtiron letters spelling PLEASANTVIEW. The view was, in Louiss mind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The cemetery was nicely landscaped on several rolling hills; there were long aisles of trees (ah, but in these last few minutes of fading daylight, the shadows those trees threw seemed deeply pooled and as blackly unpleasant as still quarry water) and a few isolated weeping willows. It wasnt quiet. The turnpike was nearthe drone of traffic came on the steady, chill windand the glow in the darkening sky was Bangor International Airport. He stretched his hand out to the gate, thinking, Theyll be locked, but they were not. Perhaps it was too early to lock them, and if they locked them at all it would only be to protect the place against drunks, vandals, and teenage neckers. The days of the Dickensian Resurrection Men (theres that word again) were over. The righthand gate swung in with a faint screeing noise, and after a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, Louis stepped through. He closed the gate behind him and heard the click of the latch. He stood in this modest suburb of the dead, looking around. A fine and private place, he thought, but none, I think, do there embrace. Who? Andrew Marvel? And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk, anyway? Juds voice spoke up in his mind then, worried andfrightened? Yes. Frightened. Louis, what are you doing here? Youre looking up a road you dont want to travel. He pushed the voice aside. If he was torturing anyone, it was only himself. No one need know he had been here as the daylight wound down to the dark. He began to walk toward Gages grave, taking one of the winding paths. In a moment he was in a lane of trees; they rustled their new leaves mysteriously over his head. His heart was thudding too loudly in his chest. The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretakers building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantviews twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. Oneroom apartments. Sleepers. Not much like the Pet Sematary, he thought, and this caused him to stop and consider for a moment, surprised. No, it wasnt. The Pet Sematary had given him an impression of order rising almost unknown out of chaos. Those rough, concentric circles moving inward to the center, rude slates, crosses made out of boards. As if the children who buried their pets there had created the pattern out of their own collective unconsciousness, as if . . . For a moment Louis saw the Pet Sematary as a kind of advertisement . . . a comeon, like the kind they gave you on freak alley at the carnival. Theyd bring out the fireeater and you got to watch his show for free because the owners knew you wouldnt buy the steak unless you saw the sizzle, you wouldnt cough up the cash if you didnt see the flash Those graves, those graves in their almost Druidic circles. The graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked. It was a symbol the Egyptians had chiseled on the tombs of the Pharaohs, a symbol the Phoenicians had drawn on the barrows of their fallen kings; it was found on cave walls in ancient Mycenae; the guildkings of Stonehenge had created it as a clock to time the universe; it appeared in the JudeoChristian Bible as the whirlwind from which God had spoken to Job. The spiral was the oldest sign of power in the world, mans oldest symbol of that twisty bridge which may exist between the world and the Gulf. Louis reached Gages grave at last. The payloader was gone. The Astroturf had been removed, rolled up by some whistling workman with his mind on an afterwork beer at the Fairmount Lounge, stored in an equipment shed somewhere. Where Gage lay there was a neat rectangle of bare, raked earth, perhaps five feet by three feet. The headstone had not been set up yet. Louis kneeled. The wind blew through his hair, tumbling it. The sky was almost entirely dark now. It raced with clouds. No one has shone a light in my face and asked me what Im doing here. No watchdog has barked. The gate was unlocked. The days of the Resurrection Men are past. If I came up here with a pick and a shovel He came back to himself with a jerk. He was only playing a dangerous mind game with himself if he pretended that Pleasantview stood unwatched during the night hours. Suppose he was discovered bellydeep in his sons new grave by the caretaker or the watchman? It might not get into the papers, but then again it might. He might be charged with a crime. What crime? Grave robbing? Unlikely. Malicious mischief or vandalism would be more likely. And in the paper or out of it, the word would get around. People would talk; it was a story too juicy not to be told Local doctor is discovered digging up his twoyearold son, recently killed in a tragic road accident. He would lose his job. Even if not, Rachel would be chilled by the wind of such tales, and Ellie might be harried by them at school until her life was a misery of chanting children. There might be the humiliation of a sanity test in exchange for dropping charges. But I could bring Gage back to life! Gage could live again! Did he really, actually believe that? The fact was that he did. He had told himself time and time again, both before Gages death and after it, that Church had not really been dead, only stunned. That Church had dug his way out and come home. A kiddie story with gruesome undertonesWinnie the Poe. Master unwittingly piles a cairn of stones over a living animal. Faithful beast digs itself out and comes home. Fine. Except it was not true. Church had been dead. The Micmac burying ground had brought it back to life. He sat by Gages grave, trying to place all the known components in an order as rational and logical as this dark magic would allow. Timmy Baterman, now. First, did he believe the story? And second, did it make a difference? In spite of its convenience, he believed most of it. It was undeniable that if a place like the Micmac burying ground existed (as it did) and if people knew of it (as a few of the older Ludlowites did), then sooner or later someone would try the experiment. Human nature as Louis understood it made it more difficult to believe that it had stopped at a few pets and valuable breed animals. All right, thendid he also believe that Timmy Baterman had been transformed into some sort of allknowing daemon? That was a more difficult question, and he was wary of it because he didnt want to believe it, and he had seen the results of that sort of mindset before. No, he did not want to believe Timmy Baterman had been a daemon, but he would notabsolutely could notallow himself to let what he wanted cloud his judgment. Louis thought about Hanratty, the bull. Hanratty, Jud said, had turned mean. So, in his way, had Timmy Baterman. Hanratty had later been put down by the same man who had somehow dragged the bulls body up to the Micmac burying ground on a sledge. Timmy Baterman had been put down by his father.