Pet Sematary(31)

He would slide down toward sleep, think about how it would be to come fully, coldly awake in the Pet Sematary, to see those roughly concentric circles litten by moonlight, to have to walk back, awake, along the path through the woods. He would think these things and then snap fully awake again.

It was sometime after midnight when sleep finally crept up on his blind side and bagged him. There were no dreams. He woke up promptly at seven-thirty, to the sound of cold autumn rain beating against the window. He threw the sheets back with some apprehension. The ground sheet on his bed was flawless. No purist would describe his feet, with their rings of heel calluses, that way, but they were at least clean.

Louis caught himself whistling in the shower.

19

Missy Dandridge kept Gage while Rachel ran Winston Churchill to the vet's office. That night Ellie stayed awake until after eleven, complaining querulously that she couldn't sleep without Church and calling for glass after glass of water. Finally Louis refused to let her have any more on the grounds that she would wet the bed. This caused a crying tantrum of such ferocity that Rachel and Louis stared at each other blankly, eyebrows raised.

"She's scared for Church," Rachel said. "Let her work it out, Lou."

"She can't keep it up at that pitch for long," Louis said. "I hope."

He was right. Ellie's hoarse, angry cries became hitches and hiccups and moans.

Finally there was silence. When Louis went up to check on her, he found she was sleeping on the floor with her arms wrapped tightly around the cat bed that Church hardly even deigned to sleep in.

He removed it from her arms, put her back in bed, brushed her hair back from her sweaty brow gently, and kissed her, On impulse he went into the small room that served as Rachel's office, wrote a quick note in large block letters on a sheet of paper-I WILL BE BACK TOMORROW, LOVE, CHURCH-and pinned it to the cushion on the bottom of the cat bed. Then he went into his bedroom, looking for Rachel.

Rachel was there. They made love and fell asleep in each other's arms.

Church returned home on the Friday of Louis's first full week of work; Ellie made much of him, used part of her allowance to buy him a box of cat treats, and nearly slapped Gage once for trying to touch him. This made Cage cry in a way mere parental discipline could never have done. Receiving a rebuke from Ellie was like receiving a rebuke from Cod.

Looking at Church made Louis feel sad. It was ridiculous, but that didn't change the emotion. There was no sign of Church's former feistiness. No more did he walk like a gunslinger; now his walk was the slow, careful walk of the convalescent. He allowed Ellie to hand-feed him. He showed no sign of wanting to go outside, not even to the garage. He had changed. Perhaps it was ultimately for the better that he had changed.

Neither Rachel nor Ellie seemed to notice.

20

Indian summer came and went. Brazen color came into the trees, rioted briefly, and then faded. After one cold, driving rain in mid-October, the leaves started to fall. Ellie began to arrive home laden with Halloween decorations she had made at school and entertained Gage with the story of the Headless Horseman.

Gage spent that evening babbling happily about somebody named Itchybod Brain.

Rachel got giggling and couldn't stop. It was a good time for them, that early autumn.

Louis's work at the university had settled into a demanding but pleasant routine. He saw patients, he attended meetings of the Council of Colleges, he wrote the obligatory letters to the student newspaper, advising the university's co-ed population of the confidentiality of the infirmary's treatment for VD and exhorting the student population to get flu boosters, as the A-type was apt to be prevalent again that winter. He sat on panels. He chaired panels. During the second week in October, he went to the New England Conference on College and University Medicine in Providence and presented a paper on the legal ramifications of student treatment. Victor Pascow was mentioned in his paper under the fictitious name of "Henry Montez." The paper was well received. He began working up the infirmary budget for the next academic year.

His evenings fell into a routine: kids after supper, a beer or two with Jud Crandall later. Sometimes Rachel came over with him if Missy was available to sit for an hour, and sometimes Norma joined them, but mostly it was just Louis and Jud. Louis found the old man as comfortable as an old slipper, and he would talk about Ludlow history going back three hundred years almost as though he had lived all of it. He talked but never rambled. He never bored Louis, although he had seen Rachel yawning under her hand on more than one occasion.

He would cross the road to his house again before ten on most evenings, and, like as not, he and Rachel would make love. Never since the first year of their marriage had they made love so often, and never so successfully and pleasurably.

Rachel said she believed it was something in the artesian well water; Louis opted for the Maine air.

The nasty death of Victor Pascow on the first day of the fall semester began to fade in the memory of the student body and in Louis's own; Pascow's family no doubt still grieved. Louis had spoken to the tearful, mercifully faceless voice of Pascow's father on the telephone; the father had only wanted assurance that Louis had done everything he could, and Louis had assured him that everyone involved had. He did not tell him of the confusion, the spreading stain on the carpet, and how his son had been dead almost from the instant he was brought in, although these were things that Louis thought he himself would never forget. But for those to whom Pascow was only a casualty, he had already dimmed.