Pet Sematary(26)

Chapter 6

Pascow stopped near SMUCKY THE CAT, HE WAS OBEDIANT and turned back toward Louis. The horror, the terror-he felt these things would grow in him until his body blew apart under their soft yet implacable pressure. Pascow was grinning.

His bloody lips were wrinkled back from his teeth, and his healthy road-crew tan in the moon's bony light had become overlaid with the white of a corpse about to be sewn into its winding shroud.

He lifted one arm and pointed. Louis looked in that direction and moaned. His eyes grew wide, and he crammed his knuckles against his mouth. There was coolness on his cheeks, and he realized that in the extremity of his terror he had begun to weep.

The deadfall from which Jud Crandall had called Ellie in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals. Fingerbones clittered. Here the remains of a foot flexed its pallid joints.

Ah, it was moving; it was creeping-Pascow was walking toward him now, his bloody face grim in the moonlight, and the last of Louis's coherent mind began to slip away in a yammering, cyclic thought: You got to scream yourself awake doesn't matter if you scare Rachel Ellie Gage wake the whole household the whole neighborhood got to scream yourself awake screamscreamscreamyourselfawakeawakeawake-But only a thin whisper of air would come. It was the sound of a little kid sitting on a stoop somewhere and trying to teach himself to whistle.

Pascow came closer and then spoke.

"The door must not be opened," Pascow said. He was looking down at Louis because Louis had fallen to his knees. There was a look on his face which Louis at first mistook for compassion. It wasn't really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. "Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember."

Louis tried again to scream. He could not.

"I come as a friend," Pascow said-but was friend actually the word Pascow had used? Louis thought not. It was as if Pascow had spoken in a foreign language which Louis could understand through some dream magic... and "friend" was as close to whatever word Pascow had actually used that Louis's struggling mind could come. "Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor." He was close enough for Louis to be able to smell death on him.

Pascow, reaching for him.

The soft, maddening click of the bones.

Louis began to overbalance in his effort to get away from that hand. His own hand struck a monument and tilted it into the earth. Pascow's face, leaning down, filled the sky.

"Doctor-remember."

Louis tried to scream, and the world whirled away-but still he heard the click of moving bones in the moonlit crypt of the night.

17

It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand's Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering. When the sleeper wakes, he or she comes up by degrees, from deep sleep to light sleep to what is sometimes called "waking sleep," a state in which the sleeper can hear sounds and will even respond to questions without being aware of it later... except perhaps as fragments of dream.

Louis heard the click and rattle of bones, but gradually this sound became sharper, more metallic. There was a bang. A yell. More metallic sounds...

something rolling? Sure, his drifting mind agreed. Roll dem bones.

He heard his daughter calling "Get it, Cage! Go get it!"

This was followed by Gage's crow of delight, the sound to which Louis opened his eyes and saw the ceiling of his own bedroom.

He held himself perfectly still, waiting for the reality, the good reality, the blessed reality, to come home all the way.

All a dream. No matter how terrible, how real, it had all been dream. Only a fossil in the mind under his mind.

The metallic sound came again. It was one of Gage's toy cars being rolled along the upstairs hail.

"Get it, Gage!"

"Get it!" Gage yelled. "Get it-get it-get it!"

Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Gage's small bare feet thundering along the hallway runner. He and Ellie were giggling.

Louis looked to his right. Rachel's side of the bed was empty, the covers thrown back. The sun was well up. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly eight o'clock. Rachel had let him oversleep... probably on purpose.

Ordinarily this would have irritated him, but this morning it did not. He drew in a deep breath and let it out, content for the moment to lie here with a bar of sunlight slanting in through the window, feeling the unmistakable texture of the real world. Dust-motes danced in the sunlight.

Rachel called upstairs: "Better come down and get your snack and go out for the bus, El!"

"Okay!" The louder clack-clack of her feet. "Here's your car, Gage. I got to go to school."

Gage began to yell indignantly. Although it was garbled-the only clear words being Gage, car, geddit, and Ellie-bus, his text seemed clear enough: Ellie should stay. Public education could go hang for the day.

Rachel's voice again, "Give your dad a shake before you come clown, El."

Ellie came in, her hair done up in a ponytail, wearing her red dress.