Pet Sematary(124)

He drove to Brewer, the little city across the Penobscot River from Bangor. He found a parking spot across the street from Watson's Hardware.

"Can I help you?" the clerk asked.

"Yes," Louis said. "I'd like a heavy flashlight-one of the square ones-and something I can hood it with."

The clerk was a small slim man with a high forehead and sharp eves. He smiled now, but his smile was not particularly pleasant. "Going jacking, good buddy?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Gonna jacklight a few deer tonight?"

"Not at all," Louis said, unsmiling. "I haven't a license to jack." The clerk blinked and then decided to laugh. "In other words, mind my own business, huh?

Well, look-you can't hood one of those big lights, but you can get a piece of felt and poke a hole in the middle of it. Cut the beam clown to a penlight."

"That sounds fine," Louis said. "Thanks."

"Surely. Anything else for you today?"

"Yes indeed," Louis said. "I need a pick, a shovel, and a spade. Short-handled shovel, long-handled spade. A stout length of rope, eight feet long. A pair of work gloves. A canvas tarpaulin, maybe eight by eight."

"I can do all that," the clerk said.

"I've got a septic tank to dig up," Louis said. "It looks like I'm in violation of the zoning ordinances, and I've got some very nosy neighbors. I don't know if hooding my light will do any good or not, but I thought I might give it a try. I could get a pretty good fine."

"Oh-oh," the clerk said, "better get a clothespin for your nose while you're at it."

Louis laughed dutifully. His purchases came to $58. 60. He paid cash.

As gas prices went up, they had used the big station wagon less and less. For some time it had had a bad wheel-bearing, but Louis had kept putting off the repair job. This was partly because he didn't want to part with the two hundred it was likely to cost, hut mostly because it was a nuisance. Now, when he could have really used the big old dinosaur, lie didn't dare chance it. The Civic was a hatchback, and Louis was nervous about going hack to Ludlow with the pick, shovel, and spade in there. Jud Crandall's eyes were sharp, and there was nothing wrong with his brains either. He would know what was up.

Then it occurred to him that there was no real reason to go back to Ludlow anyway. Louis recrossed the Chamberlain Bridge into Bangor and checked into the Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge on the Odlin Road-once again near the airport, once again near Pleasantview Cemetery where his son was buried. He checked in under the name Dee Dee Ramone and paid cash for his room.

He tried to nap, reasoning that he would be glad of the rest before tomorrow morning. In the words of some Victorian novel or other, there was wild work ahead of him tonight-enough wild work to last a lifetime.

But his brain simply would not shut down.

He lay on the anonymous motel bed beneath a nondescript motel print of picturesque boats at dock beside a picturesque old wharf in a picturesque New England harbor, fully dressed except for his shoes, his wallet, coins, and keys on the night table beside him, his hands behind his head. That feeling of coldness still held; he felt totally unplugged from his people, the places that had become so familiar to him, even his work. This could have been any Howard Johnson's in the world-in San Diego or Duluth or Bangkok or Charlotte Amalie. He was nowhere, and now and then a thought of surpassing oddity struck him: before he saw any of those familiar places and faces again, he would see his son.

His plan kept unreeling in his mind. He looked at it from all angles, poked it, prodded it, looked for holes or soft places. And he felt that in truth he was walking along a narrow beam over a gulf of insanity. Madness was all around him, softly fluttering as the wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he was heading into madness.

The voice of Tom Rush echoed dreamily in his head: 0 death your hands are clammy... I feel them on my knees... you came and took my mother... won't you come back after me?

Madness. Madness all around, close, hunting him.

He walked the balance beam of rationality; he studied his plan.

Tonight, around eleven o'clock, he would dig up his son's grave, remove the body from the coffin in which it lay, wrap Gage in a cutdown piece of the tarpaulin, and put it in the trunk of the Civic. He would replace the coffin and refill the grave. He would drive to Ludlow, take Gage's body from the trunk... and take a walk. Yes, he would take a walk.

If Gage returned, the single path forked into two possibilities. Along one, he saw Gage returning as Gage, perhaps stunned or slow or even retarded (only in the deepest recesses of his mind did Louis allow himself to hope that Gage would return whole, and just as he had been-but surely even that was possible, wasn't it?), but still his son, Rachel's son, Ellie's brother.

Along the other, he saw some sort of monster emerging from the woods behind the house. He had accepted so much that he did not balk at the idea of monsters, or even of daemons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworid which might well take charge of a reanimated body from which the original soul had fled.

Either way, he and his son would be alone. And he would.

I will make a diagnosis.

Yes. That is what he would do.

I will make a diagnosis, not only of his body but of his spirit. I will make allowances for the trauma of the accident itself, which he may or may not remember. Keeping the example of Church before me, I will expect retardation, perhaps mild, perhaps profound. I will judge our ability to reintegrate Gage into our family on the basis of what I see over a period of from twenty-four to seventy-two hours. And if the loss is too great-or if he comes back as Timmy Baterman apparently came back, as a thing of evil-i will kill him.