Pet Sematary(22)

She went but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and interpreted it. This young man, who was deeply tanned and well-muscled-perhaps from a summer working on a roadcrew somewhere, or painting houses, or giving tennis lessons-and dressed now only in red gym shorts with white piping, was going to die no matter what they did. He would be just as dead even if their ambulance had been parked out front with the motor idling when the patient was brought in.

Incredibly, the dying man was moving. His eyes fluttered and opened. Blue eyes, the irises ringed with blood. They stared vacantly around, seeing nothing. He tried to move his head, and Louis exerted pressure to keep him from doing so, mindful of the broken neck. The cranial trauma did not preclude the possibility of pain.

The hole in his head, oh Christ, the hole in his head.

"What happened to him?" he asked Steve, aware that it was, under the circumstances, a stupid and pointless question. The question of a bystander. But the hole in the man's head confirmed his status; a bystander was all he was.

"Did the police bring him?"

"Some students brought him in a blanket sling. I don't know what the circumstances were."

There was what happened next to be thought of. That was his responsibility too.

"Go out and find them," Louis said. "Take them around to the other door. I want them handy, but I don't want them to see any more of this than they already have."

Masterton, looking relieved to be away from what was happening in here, went to the door and opened it, letting in a babble of excited, curious, confused conversation. Louis could also hear the warble of a police siren. Campus Security was here then. Louis felt a kind of miserable relief.

The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak.

Louis heard syllables-phonetics, at least-but the words themselves were slurred and unclear.

Louis leaned over him and said, "You're going to be all right, fella." He thought of Rachel and Ellie as he said it, and his stomach gave a great, unlovely lurch. He put a hand over his mouth and stifled a burp.

"Caaa," the young man said. "Gaaaaaa-"

Louis looked around and saw that he was momentarily alone with the dying man.

Dimly he could hear Joan Charlton yelling at the candy-stripers that the hard stretcher was in the supply closet off Room Two. Louis doubted if they knew Room Two from a frog's gonads; it was, after all, their first day on the job. They had gotten a hell of an introduction to the world of medicine. The green wall-to-wall carpet was now soaked a muddy purple in an expanding circle around the young man's ruined head; the leakage of intercranial fluid had, mercifully, stopped.

"In the Pet Sematary," the young man croaked... and he began to grin. This grin was remarkably like the mirthless hysterical grin of the candy-striper who had closed the drapes.

Louis stared down at him, at first refusing to credit what he had heard. Then Louis thought he must have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those phonetic sounds and my subconscious made them into something coherent, cross-patched the sounds into my own experience. But that was not what had happened, and a moment later he was forced to realize it. A swooning, mad terror struck him and his flesh began to creep avidly, seeming to actually move up and down his arms and along his belly in waves... but even then he simply refused to believe it Yes, the syllables had been on the bloody lips of the man on the carpet as well as in Louis's ears, but that only meant the hallucination had been visual as well as auditory.

'What did you say?" he whispered.

And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: "It's not the real cemetery." The eyes were vacant, not-seeing, rimmed with blood: the mouth grinning the large grin of a dead carp.

Horror rolled through Louis, gripping his warm heart in its cold hands, squeezing. It reduced him, made him less and less, until he felt like taking to his heels and running from this bloody, twisted, speaking head on the floor of the infirmary waiting room. He was a man with no deep religious training, no bent toward the superstitious or the occult. He was ill-prepared for this...

whatever it was.

Fighting the urge to run with everything in him, be forced himself to lean even closer. "What did you say?" he asked a second time The grin. That was bad.

"The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis," the dying man whispered. "A man grows what he can and tends it."

Louis. he thought, hearing nothing with his conscious mind after his own name.

Oh my God he called me by my name "Who are you?" Louis asked in a trembling, papery voice. "Who are you?"

"Injun bring my fish "How did you know my-" "Keep clear, us. Know-" "You-"

"Caa," the young man said, and now Louis fancied he could smell death on his breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, rein.

"What?" A crazy urge came to shake him.

"Gaaaaaaaa-"

The young man in the red gym shorts began to shudder all over. Suddenly he seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression momentarily and seemed to find Louis's eyes. Then everything let go at once.

There was a bad stink. Louis thought he would, must speak again. Then the eyes resumed their vacant expression... and began to glaze. The man was dead.