Pet Sematary(157)

His worry was vague, but it itched at his mind-he wasn't going to feel right until he had gone out there and checked to see if things were okay... or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.

The spring weather had emptied the infirmary like white magic, and Surrendra had told him to go ahead; he could handle whatever came up. So Steve had jumped onto his Honda, which he had liberated from the garage only last weekend, and headed out for Ludlow. Maybe he pushed the cycle a little faster than was strictly necessary, but the worry was there; it gnawed. And with it came the absurd feeling that he was already too late. Stupid, of course, but in the pit of his stomach there was a feeling similar to the one he'd had there last fall when that Pascow thing cropped up-a feeling of miserable surprise and almost leaden disillusion. He was by no means a religious man (in college Steve had been a member of the Atheist's Society for two semesters and had dropped out only when his advisor had told him-privately and very much off the record-that it might hurt his chances to obtain a med school scholarship later on), but he supposed he fell as much heir to whatever biological or biorhythmic conditions passed for premonitions as any other human being, and the death of Pascow had seemed to set a tone for the year which followed, somehow. Not a good year by any means. Two of Surrendra's relatives had been clapped in jail back home, some political thing, and Surrendra had told him that he believed one of them-an uncle he cared for very much-might well now be dead. Surrendra had wept, and the tears from the usually benign Indian had frightened Steve. And Charlton's mother had had a radical mastectomy. The tough nurse was not very optimistic about her mother's chances for joining the Five-Year Club. Steve himself had attended four funerals since the death of Victor Pascow-his wife's sister, killed in a car crash; a cousin, killed in a freak accident as the result of a barroom bet (he had been electrocuted while proving he could shinny all the way to the top of a power pole); a grandparent; and of course Louis's little boy.

He liked Louis enormously, and he wanted to make sure Louis was all right. Louis had been through hell lately.

When he saw the billows of smoke, his first thought was that this was something else to lay at the door of Victor Pascow, who seemed, in his dying, to have removed some sort of crash barrier between these ordinary people and an extraordinary run of bad luck. But that was stupid, and Louis's house was the proof. It stood calm and white, a little piece of clean-limbed New England architecture in the midmorning sun.

People were running toward the old duck's house, and as Steve banked his bike across the road and pulled into Louis's driveway, he saw a man dash up onto the old duck's porch, approach the front door, and then retreat. It was well that he did; a moment later the glass pane in the center of the door blew out, and flames boiled through the opening. If the fool actually had gotten the door open, the blowout would have cooked him like a lobster.

Steve dismounted and put the Honda on its kickstand, Louis momentarily forgotten. He was drawn by all the old mystery of fire. Maybe half a dozen people had gathered; except for the would-be hero, who lingered on the Crandalls' lawn, they kept a respectful distance. Now the windows between the porch and the house blew out. Glass danced in the air. The would-be hero ducked and ran for it. Flames ran up the inner wail of the porch like groping hands, blistering the white paint. As Steve watched, one of the rattan easy chairs smouldered and then exploded into flame.

Over the crackling sounds, he heard the would-be hero cry out with a shrill and absurd sort of optimism: "Gonna lose her! Gonna lose her sure! If Jud's in there, he's a gone goose! Told im about the creosote in that chimbly a hunnert times!"

Steve opened his mouth to holler across and ask if the fire department had been called, but just then he heard the faint wail of sirens, approaching. A lot of them. They had been called, but the would-be hero was right: the house was going. Flames probed through half a dozen broken windows now, and the front eave had grown an almost transparent membrane of fire over its bright green shingles.

He turned back, then, remembering Louis-but if Louis were here, wouldn't he be with the others across the street?

Steve caught something then, just barely caught it with the tail of his eye.

Beyond the head of Louis's hot-topped driveway there was a field that stretched up a long, gently rising hill. The timothy grass, although still green, had grown high already this May, but Steve could see a path, almost as neatly mowed as a putting green on a golf course. It wound and meandered its way up the slope of the field, rising to meet the woods that began, thick and green, just below the horizon. It was here, where the pale green of the timothy grass met the thicker, denser green of the woods, that Steve had seen movement-a flash of bright white that seemed to be moving. It was gone almost as soon as his eye registered it, but it had seemed to him for that brief moment that he had seen a man carrying a white bundle.

That was Louis, his mind told him with sudden irrational certainty. That was Louis, and you better get to him quick because something damn bad has happened and pretty quick something even more damn bad is going to happen if you don't stop him.

He stood indecisively at the head of the driveway, shifting one foot for the other, his weight jittery between the two of them.

Steve baby, you're scared shitless just about now, aren't you?

Yes. He was. He was scared shitless and for no reason at all. But there was also a certain... a certain (attraction) yes, a certain attraction here, something about that path, that path leading up the hill and perhaps continuing on into the woods-surely that path had to go somewhere., didn't it? Yes, of course it did. All paths eventually went somewhere.