Pet Sematary(46)

Jud didn't turn; he only raised one hand to indicate he had heard.

And in the house, suddenly, the telephone began to ring.

Louis ran, wincing at the aches that flared in his upper thighs and lower back, but by the time he had gotten into the warm kitchen, the phone had already rung six or seven times. It stopped ringing just as he put his hand on it. He picked it up anyway and said hello, but there was only the open hum.

That was Rachel, he thought. I'll call her back.

But suddenly it seemed like too much work to dial the number, to dance clumsily with her mother-or worse, her checkbook-brandishing father-to be passed on to Rachel... and then to Ellie. Ellie would still be up of course; it was an hour earlier in Chicago. Ellie would ask him how Church was doing.

Great, he's fine. Got hit by an Orinco truck. Somehow I'm absolutely positive it was an Orinco truck. Anything else would lack dramatic unity, if you know what I mean. You don't? Well, never mind. The truck killed him but didn't mark him up hardly at all. Jud and I planted him up in the old Micmac burying ground-sort of an annex to the Pet Sematary, if you know what I mean. Amazing walk, punkin.

I'll take you up there sometime and we'll put flowers by his marker-excuse me, his cairn. After the quicksand's frozen over, that is, and the bears go to sleep for the winter.

He rehung the telephone, crossed to the sink, and filled it with hot water. He removed his shirt and washed. He had been sweating like a pig in spite of the cold, and a pig was exactly what he smelled like.

There was some leftover meatloaf in the refrigerator. Louis cut it into slabs, put them on a slice of Roman Meal bread, and added two thick rounds of Bermuda onion. He contemplated this for a moment before dousing it with ketchup and slamming down another slice of bread. If Rachel and Ellie had been around, they would have wrinkled their noses in identical gestures of distaste-yuck, gross.

Well, you missed it, ladies, Louis thought with undeniable satisfaction and gobbled his sandwich. It tasted great. Confucius say he who smell like pig eat like wolf, he thought and smiled. He chased the sandwich with several long swallows of milk directly from the carton-another habit Rachel frowned on strenuously-and then he went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed without even washing his teeth. His aches and pains had faded to one low throb that was almost comforting.

His watch was there where he had left it, and he looked at it. Ten minutes of nine. It really was incredible.

Louis turned off the light, turned over on his side, and slept.

He woke up sometime after three the next morning and shuffled to the bathroom, He was standing there urinating, blinking owlishly in the bright white fluorescent bathroom light, when the discrepancy suddenly showed up in his mind, and his eyes widened-it was as if two pieces of something which should have fitted together perfectly had instead thudded against one another and rebounded.

Tonight Jud had told him that his dog had died when he was ten-had died of infection after being scraped up in a snarl of rusty barbed wire. But on the late-summer day when all of them had walked up to the Pet Sematary together, Jud said that his dog had died of old age and was buried there-he had even pointed out the marker, although the years had worn the inscription away.

Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed. Something else was wrong, as well-and in a moment he had it. Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.

But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten. Well, he's an old man, and old men get confused in their memories, he thought uneasily. He's said himself that he's noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness-groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age, he's getting off pretty goddamned light...

senility's probably too strong a word for it in Jud's case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting when a dog died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.

But he wasn't able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.

At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought, Let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what's done is done and what's dead is dead-and the steps faded away.

And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.

23

He awoke at nine the next morning. Bright sunshine streamed in the bedroom's east windows. The telephone was ringing. Louis reached up and snared it.

"Hello?"

"Hi!" Rachel said. "Did I wake you up? Hope so."

"You woke me up, you bitch," he said, smiling.

"Ooooh, such nasty language, you bad old bear," she said. "I tried to call you last night. Were you over at Jud's?"

He hesitated for only the tiniest fraction of a moment. "Yes," he said. "Had a few beers. Norma was up at some sort of Thanksgiving supper. I thought about giving you a ring, but you know."