Pet Sematary(105)

"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 wouldn't mind cutting a rug with her. Maybe that very night. And Missus Stratton went back inside, and she wouldn't 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 now-Missus Stratton is, for one, and others have moved on, but there are a few old crocks like me left around who'll 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 daddy's 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 Jud's eyes.

"You know, they have these stories and these movies-I don't know if they're true-about 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 wasn't. There was somethin more. There was somethin goin on behind his eyes, and sometimes you could see it and sometimes you couldn't see it. Somethin behind his eyes, Louis.

I don't think that thinkin is what I want to call it. I don't 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 don't think it was thinkin and I don't think it had much-maybe nothing at all-to 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, I'm gonna scream. ' Like that.

"Back and forth he went, up and down the road, and one day after I got home from work-this must have been, oh, I'm going to say it was July 30 or so-here is George Anderson, the postmaster, don't 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 mail-woman who won't deliver out on the Pedersen Road-that's one thing. It's starting to raise Cain with the government, and that's something else. ' "What do you mean, it's raising Cain with the government?' I asked "Hannibal said he'd 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, they'd laugh it off. If it was just one fellow writing a whole bunch of letters, Kinsman says he'd 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 thing-that 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 don't settle down,' Hannibal finishes up. 'They want to know if Timmy's dead, or AWOL, or what because they don't like to think their records are all at sixes and sevens.

Also they're gonna want to know who was buried in Timmy Baterman's box, if he wasn't. ' "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. I'll never forget that night, not if I live to be twice as old's 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, 'Don't you let them dither around and put this off, Judson. You got to get this taken care of. It's 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; they'll 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 Benson's car-that son of a bitch got all the A-coupons he wanted, I don't 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 I'll put my warrant to that. ' Nobody answered, but I remember George noddin his head.