Pet Sematary(41)

But it worked, There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes (Hush Puppy loafers-hardly recommended for climbing dead-falls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.

For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist.

The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the.

the barrier. Yes, that's what it was-why try to pretend it wasn't? The barrier.

Louis reached the top himself and paused there momentarily, right foot planted on an old fallen tree that was canted up at a thirty-five-degree angle, left foot on something springier-a mesh of old fir branches? He didn't look down to see, but only switched the heavy trashbag with Church's body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. He turned his face up into the wind and felt it sweep past him in an endless current, lifting his hair. It was so cold, so clean... so constant.

Moving casually, almost sauntering, he started down again. Once a branch that felt to be the thickness of a brawny man's wrist snapped loudly under his foot, but he felt no concern at all-and his plunging foot was stopped firmly by a heavier branch some four inches down. Louis hardly staggered. He supposed that now he could understand how company commanders in World War I had been able to stroll along the top of the trenches with bullets snapping all around them, whistling "Tipperary." It was crazy, but the very craziness made it tremendously exhilarating.

He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Jud's light. Jud was standing there, waiting for him. Then he reached the bottom, and the exhilaration flared up in him like a shot of coal oil on embers.

"We made it!" he shouted. He put the shovel down and clapped Jud on the shoulder. He remembered climbing an apple tree to the top fork where it swayed in the wind like a ship's mast. He had not felt so young or so viscerally alive in twenty years or more. "Jud, we made it!"

"Did you think we wouldn't?" Jud asked.

Louis opened his mouth to say something-Think we wouldn't?

We're damn lucky we didn't kill ourselves!-and then he shut it again. He had never really questioned at all, not from the moment Jud approached the deadfall.

And he was not worried about getting back over again.

"I guess not," he said.

"Come on. Cot a piece to walk yet. Three miles or more."

They walked. The path did indeed go on. In places it seemed very wide, although the moving light revealed little clearly; it was mostly a feeling of space, a feeling that the trees had drawn back. Once or twice Louis looked up and saw stars wheeling between the massed dark border of trees. Once something loped across the path ahead of them, and the light picked up the reflection of greenish eyes-there and then gone.

At other times the path closed in until underbrush scratched stiff fingers across the shoulders of Louis's coat. He switched the bag and the shovel more often, but the ache in his shoulders was now constant. He fell into a rhythm of walking and became almost hypnotized with it. There was power here, yes, he felt it. He remembered a time when he had been a senior in high school. He and his girl and some other couple had gone way out in the boonies and had ended up necking at the end of a dead-end dirt road near a power station. They hadn't been there long before Louis's girl said that she wanted to go home, or at least to another place, because all her teeth (all the ones with fillings, anyway, and that was most of them) were aching. Louis had been glad to leave himself. The air around the power station had made him feel nervous and too awake. This was like that, but it was stronger. Stronger but not unpleasant at all. It was-Jud had stopped at the base of a long slope. Louis ran into him.

Jud turned toward him. "We're almost where we're going now," he said calmly.

"This next bit is like the deadfall-you got to walk steady and easy. Just follow me and don't look down. You felt us going downhill?"

"Yes."

"This is the edge of what the Micmacs used to call Little Cod Swamp. The fur traders who came through called it Dead Man's Bog, and most of them who came once and got out never came gain."

"Is there quicksand?"

"Oh, ayuh, quicksand aplenty! Streams that bubble up through a big deposit of quartz sand left over from the glacier. Silica sand, we always called it, although there's probably a proper name for it."

Jud looked at him, and for a moment Louis thought he saw something bright and not completely pleasant in the old man's eyes.

Then Jud shifted the flashlight and that look was gone.

"There's a lot of funny things down this way, Louis. The air's heavier... more electrical... or somethin."

Louis started.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Louis said, thinking of that night on the dead-end road.

"You might see St. Elmo's fire-what the sailors call foo-lights. It makes funny shapes, but it's nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way. You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It's funny."