Pet Sematary(54)

Jud smiled and nodded. "I remember reading somethin like that in one of Norma's newspapers, the Star or the Enquirer-one of those. But if my pop said Spot was gone, Louis, he was gone."

"All right," Louis said. "If you say that's how it was, that is how it was."

"Was your daughter's cat gone?"

"I sure thought it was," Louis said.

"You got to do better than that. You're a doctor."

"You make it sound like 'You got to do better than that, Louis, you're God. ' I'm not God. It was dark-"

"Sure, it was dark, and his head swiveled on his neck like it was full of ball bearings, and when you moved him, he pulled out of the frost, Louis-sounded like a piece of sticky tape comin off a letter. Live things don't do that. You only stop meltin the frost under where you're layin when you're dead."

In the other room, the clock struck ten-thirty.

"What did your father say when he came home and saw the dog?" Louis asked.

"I was out in the driveway, shooting marbles in the dirt, more or less waitin for him. I felt like I always felt when I'd done something wrong and knew I was probably gonna get a spankin. He come in through the gateposts about eight o'clock, wearin his bib overalls and his pillow-tick cap... you ever seen one of those?"

Louis nodded, then stifled a yawn with the back of his hand.

"Yeah, gettin late," Jud said. "Got to finish this up."

"It's not that late," Louis said. "I'm just a few beers ahead of my usual pace.

Go on, Jud. Take your time. I want to hear this."

"My dad had an old lard tin he kept his dinner in," Jud said, "and he come in through the gate swingin it, empty, by the handle, you know. Whisflin somethin.

It was gettin dark, but he seen me there in the gloom and he says, 'Hi there, Judkins!' like he would do, and then, 'Where's your-' "He got that far, and then here comes Spot out of the dark, not runnin like he usually did, ready to jump all over him he was so glad to see him, but just walkin, waggin his tail, and my dad dropped that lard bucket and stepped back. I don't know b'what he would have turned tail and run except his back hit the picket fence and then he just stood there, looking at the dog. And when Spot did jump up, Dad just caught his paws and held them, like you might hold a lady's hands you was gettin ready to dance with. He looked at the dog for a long time and then he looked at me, and he said, 'He needs a bath, Jud. He stinks of the ground you buried him in. ' And then he went in the house."

"What did you do?" Louis asked.

"Gave him another bath. He just sat there in the tub and took it again. And when I went in the house, my mother had gone to bed, even though it wasn't even nine o'clock. My dad said, 'We got to talk, Judkins. ' And I set down across from him, and he talked to me like a man for the first time in my life with the smell of the honeysuckle coming across the road from what's your house now and the smell of the wild roses from our own house."

Jud Crandall sighed. "I had always thought it would be good to have him talk to me that way, but it wasn't. It wasn't a bit good. All this tonight, Louis-it's like when you look into a mirror that's been set up right across from another mirror, and you can see yourself going down a whole hail of mirrors. How many times has this story been passed along, I wonder? A story that's just the same, except for the names? And that's like the sex thing too, isn't it?"

"Your dad knew all about it."

"Ayuh. 'Who took you up there, Jud?' he asked me, and I told him. He just nodded like it was what he would have expected. I guess it prob'ly was, although I found out later that there were six or eight people in Ludlow at that time that could have taken me up there. I guess he knew that Stanny B. was the only one crazy enough to have actually done it."

"Did you ask him why he didn't take you, Jud?"

"I did," Jud said. "Somewhere during that long talk I did ask him that. And he said it was a bad place, by and large, and that it didn't often do anything good for people who had lost their animals or for the animals themselves. He asked me if I liked Spot the way he was, and do you know, Louis, I had the hardest time answering that... and it's important that I tell you my feelings on that, because sooner or later you're going to ask me why I led you up there with your daughter's cat if it was a bad thing to do. Isn't that so?"

Louis nodded. What was Ellie going to think about Church when she got back? That had been much on his mind while he and Steve Masterton had been playing racket ball that afternoon.

"Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better," Jud said with some difficulty. "That's somethin your Ellie don't know, and I got a feelin that maybe she don't know because your wife don't know. Now, you go ahead and tell me if I'm wrong, and we'll leave it."

Louis opened his mouth and then closed it again.

Jud went on, now speaking very slowly, appearing to move from word to word as they had moved from hummock to hummock in Little God Swamp the night before.

"I've seen it happen over the years," he said. "I guess I told you that Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus named Hanratty. Ain't that a silly name for a bull?

Died of some sort of ulcer inside, and Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge. How he did it-how he got over the deadfall there I dunno-but it's said that what you want to do, you can. And at least as far as that burying ground goes, I'd say it's true.