Pet Sematary(25)

He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian warpaint. His collarbone jutted whitely. He was grinning.

"Come on, Doctor," Pascow said. "We got places to go."

Louis looked around. His wife was a vague hump under her yellow comforter, sleeping deeply. He looked back at Pascow, who was dead but somehow not dead.

Yet Louis felt no fear. He realized why almost at once.

It's a dream, he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible. This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Bangor with the pathologist's tattoo-a Y-cut stitched back up-on him. The pathologist probably tossed his brain into his chest cavity after taking a tissue sample and filled up the skull cavity with brown paper to prevent leaking-simpler than trying to fit the brain back into the skull like a jigsaw piece into a puzzle. Uncle Carl, father of the unfortunate Ruthie, had told him that pathologists did that, and all sorts of other random information that he supposed would give Rachel, with her death phobia, the screaming horrors. But Pascow was not here-no way, baby.

Pascow was in a refrigerated locker with a tag around his toe. And he is most certainly not wearing those red jogging shorts in there.

Yet the compulsion to get up was strong. Pascow's eyes were upon him.

He threw back the covers and swung his feet onto the floor. The hooked rug-a wedding present from Rachel's grandmother long ago-pressed cold nubbles into the balls of his feet. The dream had a remarkable reality. It was so real that he would not follow Pascow until Pascow had turned and begun to go back down the stairs. The compulsion to follow was strong, but he did not want to be touched, even in a dream, by a walking corpse.

But he did follow. Pascow's jogging shorts glimmered.

They crossed the living room, dining room, kitchen. Louis expected Pascow to turn the lock and then lift the latch on the door which connected the kitchen to the shed where he garaged the station wagon and the Civic, but Pascow did no such thing. Instead of opening the door, he simply passed through it. And Louis, watching, thought with mild amazement: Is that how it's done? Remarkable! Anyone could do that!

He tried it himself-and was a little amused to meet only unyielding wood.

Apparently he was a hard-headed realist, even in his dreams. Louis twisted the knob on the Yale lock, lifted the latch, and let himself into the shed-garage.

Pascow was not there. Louis wondered briefly if Pascow had just ceased to exist.

Figures in dreams often did just that. So did locations-first you were standing nude by a swimming pool with a raging hardon, discussing the possibilities of wife swapping with, say, Roger and Missy Dandridge; then you blinked and you were climbing the side of a Hawaiian volcano. Maybe he had lost Pascow because this was the beginning of Act II.

But when Louis emerged from the garage, he saw him again, standing in the faint moonlight at the back of the lawn-at the head of the path.

Now fear came, entering softly, sifting through the hollow places of his body and filling them up with dirty smoke. He didn't want to go up there. He halted.

Pascow glanced back over his shoulder, and in the moonlight his eyes were silver. Louis felt a hopeless crawl of horror in his belly. That jutting bone, those dried clots of blood. But it was hopeless to resist those eyes. This was apparently a dream about being hypnotized, being dominated... being unable to change things, perhaps, the way he had been unable to change the fact of Pascow's death. You could go to school for twenty years and you still couldn't do a thing when they brought a guy in who had been rammed into a tree hard enough to open a window in his skull. They might as well have called a plumber, a rainmaker, or the Man from Glad.

And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, he was drawn forward onto the path. He followed the jogging shorts, as maroon in this light as the dried blood on Pascow's face.

He didn't like this dream. Oh God, not at all. It was too real. The cold nubbles in the rug, the way he had not been able to pass through the shed door when a person could (or should) be able to walk through doors and walls in any self-respecting dream... and now the cool brush of dew on his bare feet, and the feel of the night wind, just a breath of it, on his body, which was naked except for his Jockey shorts. Once under the trees, pine needles stuck to the soles of his feet... another little detail that was just a bit more real than it needed to be.

Never mind. Never mind. I am home in my own bed. It's just a dream, no matter how vivid, and like all other dreams, it will seem ridiculous in the morning. My waking mind will discover its inconsistencies.

The small branch of a dead tree poked his bicep rudely and he winced. Up ahead, Pascow was only a moving shadow, and now Louis's terror seemed to have crystallized into a bright sculpture in his mind: I am following a dead man into the woods, I am following a dead man up to the Pet Sematary, and this is no dream. God help me, this is no dream. This is happening.

They walked down the far side of the wooded hill. The path curved in lazy S-shapes between the trees and then plunged into the underbrush. No boots now.

The ground dissolved into cold jelly under his feet, grabbing and holding, letting go only reluctantly. There were ugly sucking noises. He could feel the mud oozing between his toes, trying to separate them.

He tried desperately to hold on to the dream idea.

It wouldn't wash.

They reached the clearing, and the moon sailed free of its reef of clouds again, bathing the graveyard with ghastly effulgence. The leaning markers-bits of board and tin cans that had been cut with a father's tinsnips and then hammered into rude squares, chipped chunks of shale and slate-stood out with three-dimensional clarity, casting shadows perfectly black and defined.