Pet Sematary(43)

"Steps here," he said. "Cut into rock. Forty-two or forty-four, I disremember which. Just follow me. We get to the top and we're there."

He began to climb again, and again Louis followed.

The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoe gritted on a strew of pebbles and stone fragments.

twelve... thirteen... fourteen.

The wind was sharper, colder, quickly numbing his face. Are we above the treeline? he wondered. He looked up and saw a billion stars, cold lights in the darkness. Never in his life had the stars made him feel so completely small, infinitesimal, without meaning. He asked himself the old question-is there anything intelligent out there?-and instead of wonder, the thought brought a horrid cold feeling, as if he had asked himself what it might be like to eat a handful of squirming bugs.

twenty-six... twenty-seven... twenty-eight.

Who carved these, anyway? Indians? The Micmacs? Were they tool-bearing Indians?

I'll have to ask Jud. "Tool-bearing Indians" made him think of "fur-bearing animals," and that made him think of that thing that had been moving near them in the woods. One foot stumbled, and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled.

Like dry skin that's almost worn out, he thought.

"You all right, Louis?" Jud murmured.

"I'm okay," he said, although he was nearly out of breath and his muscles throbbed from the weight of Church in the bag.

forty-two... forty-three... forty-four.

"Forty-five," Jud said. "I've forgot. Haven't been up here in twelve years, I guess. Don't suppose I'll ever have a reason to come again. Here... up you come and up you get."

He grabbed Louis's arm and helped him up the last step.

"We're here," Jud said.

Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standing on a rocky, rubble strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue. Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach the steps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird, flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or New Mexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa-or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was-was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bending before the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, not an isolated mesa. Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees. But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in the context of New England's low and somehow tired hills-Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenly spoke up.

"Come on," Jud said and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. Louis saw a number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees-trees which were the oldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness-but an emptiness which vibrated.

The dark shapes were cairns of stones.

"Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here," Jud said. "No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have."

"Why? Why did they do it?"

"This was their burying ground," Jud said. "I brought you here so you could bury Ellie's cat here. The Micmacs didn't discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners."

This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better: they had slaughtered the pets of royalty so that the souls of the pets might go along to whatever afterlife there might be with the souls of their masters. He remembered reading about the slaughter of more than ten thousand domestic animals following the decease of one pharaoh's daughter-included in the tally had been six hundred pigs and two thousand peacocks. The pigs had been scented with attar of roses, the dead lady's favorite perfume, before their throats were cut.

And they built pyramids too. No one knows for sure what the Mayan pyramids are for-navigation and chronography, some say, like Stonehenge-but we know damn well what the Egyptian pyramids were and are... great monuments to death, the world's biggest gravestones. Here Lies Ramses II, He Was Obedient, Louis thought and uttered a wild, helpless cackle.

Jud looked at him, unsurprised.

"Go on and bury your animal," he said. "I'm gonna have a smoke. I'd help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own. That's the way it was done then."

"Jud, what's this all about? Why did you bring me here?"

"Because you saved Norma's life," Jud said, and although he sounded sincere-and Louis was positive he believed himself sincere-he had a sudden, overpowering sense that the man was lying... or that he was being lied to and then passing the lie on to Louis. He remembered that look he had seen, or thought he had seen, in Jud's eye.

But up here none of that seemed to matter. The wind mattered more, pushing freely around him in that steady river, lifting his hair from his brow and off his ears.

Jud sat down with his back against one of the trees, cupped his hands around a match, and lit a Chesterfield. "You want to rest a bit before you start?"

"No, I'm okay," Louis said. He could have pursued the questions, but he found he didn't really care to. This felt wrong but it also felt right, and he decided to let that be enough... for now. There was really only one thing he needed to know. "Will I really be able to dig him a grave? The soil looks thin." Louis nodded toward the place where the rock pushed out of the ground at the edge of the steps.