Pet Sematary(32)

Louis still remembered the dream and the sleepwalking incident that had accompanied it, but it now seemed almost as if it had happened to someone else, or on a television show he had once watched. His one visit to a whore in Chicago six years ago seemed like that flow; they were equally unimportant, side trips which held a false resonance, like sounds produced in an echo chamber.

He did not think at all about what the dying Pascow had or had not said.

There was a hard frost on Halloween night. Louis and Ellie began at the Crandalls'. Ellie cackled satisfyingly, pretended to ride her broom around Norma's kitchen, and was duly pronounced "Just the cutest thing I ever saw...

isn't she, Jud?"

Jud agreed that she was and lit a cigarette. "Where's Gage, Louis? Thought you'd have him dressed up too."

They had indeed planned on taking Gage around-Rachel in particular had been looking forward to it because she and Missy Dandridge had whomped together a sort of bug costume with twisted coat hangers wrapped in crepe paper for feelers-but Gage had come down with a troublesome, bronchial cold, and after listening to his lungs, which sounded a bit ratfly, and consulting the thermometer outside the window, which read only forty degrees at six o'clock, Louis had nixed it. Rachel, although disappointed, had agreed.

Ellie had promised to give Gage some of her candy, but the exaggerated quality of her sorrow made Louis wonder if she wasn't just a bit glad that Gage wouldn't be along to slow her down.

or steal part of the limelight.

"Poor Gage," she had said in tones usually reserved for those suffering terminal illness. Gage, unaware of what he was missing, sat on the sofa watching "Zoom"

with Church snoozing beside him.

"Ellie-witch," Gage had replied without a great deal of interest and went back to the TV.

"Poor Gage," Ellie had said again, fetching another sigh. Louis thought of crocodile tears and grinned. Ellie grabbed his hand and started pulling him.

"Let's go, Daddy. Let's go-let's go-let's go.

"Gage has got a touch of the croup," Louis said to Jud now.

"Well, that's a real shame," Norma said, "but it will mean more to him next year. Hold out your bag, Ellie... whoops!"

She had taken an apple and a bite-sized Snickers bar out of the treat bowl on the table, but both of them had fallen out of her hand. Louis was a little shocked at how clawlike that hand looked. He bent over and picked up the apple as it rolled across the floor. Jud got the Snickers and dropped it into Ellie's bag.

"Oh, let me get you another apple, honey," Norma said. "That one will bruise."

"It's fine," Louis said, trying to drop it into Ellie's bag, but Ellie stepped away, holding her bag protectively shut.

"I don't want a bruised apple, Daddy," she said, looking at her father as if he might have gone mad. "Brown spots... yuck!"

"Ellie, that's damned impolite!"

"Don't scold her for telling the truth, Louis," Norma said.

"Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

The brown spots are yucky."

"Thank you, Mrs. Crandall," Ellie said, casting a vindicated eye on her father.

"You're very welcome, honey," Norma said.

Jud escorted them out to the porch. Two little ghosts were coming up the walk, and Ellie recognized them both as friends from school. She took them back to the kitchen, and for a moment Jud and Louis were alone on the porch.

"Her arthritis has gotten worse," Louis said.

Jud nodded and pinched out his cigarette over an ashtray. "Yeah. It's come down harder on her every fall and winter, but this is the worst it's ever been."

"What does her doctor say?"

"Nothing. He can't say nothing because Norma hasn't been back to see him."

"What? Why not?"

Jud looked at Louis, and in the light cast by the headlamps of the station wagon waiting for the ghosts, he looked oddly defenseless. "I'd meant to ask you this at a better time, Louis, but I guess there isn't no good time to impose on a friendship. Would you examine her?"

From the kitchen, Louis could hear the two ghosts booo-ing and Ellie going into her cackles-which she had been practicing all week-again. It all sounded very fine and Halloweenish.

"What else is wrong with Norma?" he asked. "Is she afraid of something else, Jud?"

"She's been having pains in her chest," Jud said in a low voice. "She won't go see Dr. Weybridge anymore. I'm a little worried."

"Is Norma worried?"

Jud hesitated and then said, "I think she's scared. I think that's why she doesn't want to go to the doctor. One of her oldest friends, Betty Coslaw, died in the EMMC just last month. Cancer. She and Norma were of an age. She's scared."

"I'd be happy to examine her," Louis said. "No problem at all."

"Thanks, Louis," Jud said gratefully. "If we catch her one night, gang up on her, I think-"

Jud broke off, head cocking quizzically to one side. His eyes met Louis's.

Louis couldn't remember later exactly how one emotion slipped into the next. Trying to analyze it only made him feel dizzy. All he could remember for sure was that curiosity changed swiftly into a feeling that somewhere something had gone badly wrong. His eyes met Jud's, both unguarded. It was a moment before he could find a way to act.