Pet Sematary(90)

"Look at her go, Gage!" Louis yelled, laughing.

Gage was leaning so far back he was in danger of toppling over. A huge grin covered his face. He was waving to the kite.

Louis got some slack and told Gage to hold out one of his hands. Gage did, not even looking around. He couldn't take his eyes from the kite, which swung and danced in the wind and raced its shadow back and forth across the field.

Louis wound kite string twice around Gage's hand and now he did look down, comically amazed at the strong tug and pull.

"What!" he said.

"You're flying it," Louis said. "You got the hammer, my man. It's your kite."

"Gage flyne it?" Cage said, as if asking not his father but himself for confirmation. He pulled the string experimentally; the kite nodded in the windy sky. Gage pulled the string harder; the kite swooped. Louis and his son laughed together. Gage reached out his free hand, groping, and Louis took it in his own.

They stood together that way in the middle of Mrs. Vinton's field, looking up at the Vulture.

It was a moment with his son that Louis never forgot. As he had gone up and into the kite as a child himself, he now found himself going into Gage, his son. He felt himself shrink until he was within Gage's tiny house, looking out of the windows that were his eyes-looking out at a world that was so huge and bright, a world where Mrs. Vinton's field was nearly as big as the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the kite soared miles above him, the string drumming in his fist like a live thing as the wind blew around him, tumbling his hair.

"Kite flyne!" Gage cried out to his father, and Louis put his arm around Cage's shoulders and kissed the boy's cheek, in which the wind had bloomed a wild rose.

"1 love you, Gage," he said-it was between the two of them, and that was all right.

And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. "Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!"

They were still flying the kite when Rachel and Ellie came home. He and Gage had gotten it so high that they had nearly run out the string, and the face of the Vulture had been lost; it was only a small black silhouette in the sky.

Louis was glad to see the two of them, and be roared with laughter when Ellie dropped the string momentarily and chased it through the grass, catching it just before the tumbling, unraveling core tube gave up the last of its twine. But having them around also changed things a little, and he was not terribly sorry to go in when, twenty minutes later, Rachel said she believed Gage had had enough of the wind. She was afraid he would get a chill, So the kite was pulled back in, fighting for the sky at every turn of the twine, at last surrendering. Louis tucked it, black wings, buggy bloodshot eyes, and all, under his arm and imprisoned it in the storage closet again. That night Gage ate an enormous supper of hot dogs and beans, and while Rachel was dressing him in his Dr. Dentons for bed, Louis took Ellie aside and had a heart-to-heart talk with her about leaving her marbles around. Under other circumstances, he might have ended up shouting at her because Ellie could turn quite haughty-insulting, even-when accused of some mistake. It was only her way of dealing with criticism, but that did not keep it from infuriating Louis when she laid it on too thick or when he was particularly tired. But this night the kite flying had left him in a fine mood, and Ellie was inclined to be reasonable. She agreed to be more careful and then went downstairs to watch TV until 8:30, a Saturday indulgence she treasured. Okay, that's out of the way, and it might even do some good, Louis thought, not knowing that marbles were really not the problem, and chills were really not the problem, that a large Orinco truck was going to be the problem, that the road was going to be the problem... as Jud Crandall had warned them it might be on that first day of August.

He went upstairs that night about fifteen minutes after Cage had been put to bed. He found his son quiet but still awake, drinking the last of a bottle of milk and looking contemplatively up at the ceiling.

Louis took one of Gage's feet in one hand and raised it up. He kissed it, lowered it. "Goodnight, Gage," he said.

"Kite flyne, Daddy," Gage said.

"It really did fly, didn't it?" Louis said, and for no reason at all he felt tears behind his eyes. "Right up to the sky, my man."

"Kite flyne," Cage said. "Up to the kye."

He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and slept. Just like that.

Louis was stepping into the hail when he glanced back and saw yellowy-green, disembodied eyes staring out at him from Gage's closet. The closet door was open... just a crack. His heart took a lurch into his throat, and his mouth pulled back and down in a grimace.

He opened the closet door, thinking (Zelda it's Zelda in the closet her black tongue puffing out between her lips) he wasn't sure what, but of course it was only Church, the cat was in the closet, and when it saw Louis it arched its back like a cat on a Halloween card.

It hissed at him, its mouth partly open, revealing its needle-sharp teeth.

"Get out of there," Louis whispered.

Church hissed again. It did not move.

"Get out, I said." He picked up the first thing that came to hand in the litter of Gage's toys, a bright plastic Chuggy-ChuggyChoo-Choo which in this dim light was the maroon color of dried blood. He brandished it at Church; the cat not only stood its ground but hissed again.

And suddenly, without even thinking, Louis threw the toy at the cat, not playing, not goofing around; he pegged the toy at the cat as hard as he could, furious at it, and scared of it too, that it should hide here in the darkened closet of his son's room and refuse to leave, as if it had a right to be there.