Pet Sematary(151)

Think about that, not about the dreams you had as a kid, dreams of opening the closet and having Zelda spring out at you with her blackened, grinning face, dreams of being in the bathtub and seeing Zelda's eyes peering out of the drain, dreams of Zelda lurking in the basement behind the furnace, dreams-Church opened his mouth, exposing his sharp teeth and cried Waow! again.

Louis was right, we never should have had him fixed, he's never seemed right since then. But Louis said it would take away all of his aggressive instincts.

He was wrong about that, anyway; Church still hunts. He-Waow! Church cried again, then turned and darted up the stairs.

"Jud?" she called again. "Are you up there?"

Waow! Church cried from the top of the stairs, as if to confirm the fact, and then he disappeared down the hall.

How did he get in, anyway? Did Jud let him in? Why?

Rachel shifted from one foot to the other, wondering what to do next. The worst of it was that all of this seemed... seemed somehow managed, as if something wanted her to be here, and-And then there was a groan from upstairs, low and filled with pain-Jud's voice, surely Jud's voice. He's fallen in the bathroom or maybe tripped, broken a leg, or sprained his hip, maybe, the bones of the old are brittle, and what in the name of God are you thinking of, girl, standing down here and shifting back and forth like you had to go to the bathroom, that was blood on Church, blood, Jud's hurt and you're just standing here! What's wrong with you?

"Jud!" The groan came again, and she ran up the stairs.

She had never been up here before, and because the hail's only window faced west, toward the river, it was still very dark. The hallway ran straight and wide beside the stairwell and toward the back of the house, the cherrywood rail gleaming with mellow elegance. There was a picture of the Acropolis on the wall and (it's Zelda all these years she's been after you and now it's her time open the right door and she'll be there with her humped and twisted back smelling of piss and death it's Zelda it's her time and finally she caught up with you) the groan came again, low, from behind the second door on the right.

Rachel began to walk toward that door, her heels clacking on the boards. It seemed to her that she was going through some sort of warp-not a time warp or a space warp but a size warp. She was getting smaller. The picture of the Acropolis was floating higher and higher, and that cut-glass doorknob would soon be at eye level. Her hand stretched out for it... and before she could even touch it, the door was snatched open.

Zelda stood there.

She was hunched and twisted, her body so cruelly deformed that she had actually become a dwarf, little more than two feet high; and for some reason Zelda was wearing the suit they had buried Gage in. But it was Zelda, all right, her eyes alight with an insane glee, her face a raddled purple; it was Zelda screaming, "I finally came back for you, Rachel, I'm going to twist your back like mine and you'll never get out of bed again never get out of bed again NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN-"

Church was perched on one of her shoulders and Zelda's face swam and changed, and Rachel saw with spiraling, sickening horror that it really wasn't Zelda at all-how could she have made such a stupid mistake? It was Cage. His face was not black but dirty, smeared with blood. And it was swollen, as if he had been terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands.

She cried his name and held her arms out. He ran to her and climbed into them, and all the time one hand remained behind his back, as if with a bunch of posies picked in someone's back meadow.

"I brought you something, Mommy!" he screamed. "I brought you something, Mommy!

I brought you something, I brought you something!"

60

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

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

"Oh, shit," he whispered. For a few seconds the room seesawed gently but perceptibly. His back throbbed like a bad tooth, and when he moved his head, it felt as if the tendons in his neck had been replaced by rusty bandsaw blades.

But his knee was really the worst. The Ben-Gay hadn't done a thing for it. He should have given himself a f**king cortisone shot. His pants were drawn tightly against the knee by the swelling; it looked like there was a balloon under there.

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

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

That got him on his feet in spite of the pain. He lurched across the room like Matt Dillon's old sidekick Chester. He went through the door and across the hail into Gage's room. He looked around wildly, his son's name trembling on his lips.

But the room was empty. He limped down to Ellie's room, which was also empty, and then into the spare room. That room, which faced the highway, was also empty. But-.

There was a strange car across the road. Parked behind Jud's truck.

So what?

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

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