You think Church is in again? Fine. Take a walk around and have a look. As you told Rachel, it won’t hurt. May even help. And checking to make sure all the doors are on the latch won’t even catch you a virus.
He took a deliberate tour of the entire downstairs, checking the locks on doors and windows. He had done everything right the first time, and Church was nowhere to be seen.
“There,” he said. “Let’s see you get in tonight, you dumb cat.” He followed this with a mental wish that Church would freeze its balls off. Except that Church of course no longer had any.
He switched off the lights and got into bed. The rod started to press into his back almost immediately, and Louis was thinking he would be awake half the night when he fell asleep. He fell asleep resting uncomfortably on his side in the hide-a-bed, but when he woke up he was.
in the burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary again. This time he was alone. He had killed Church himself this time and then had
decided for some reason to bring him back to life a second time.
God knew why; Louis didn’t. He had buried Church deeper this time, though, and Church couldn’t dig his way out. Louis could hear the cat crying somewhere under the earth, making a sound like a weeping child. The sound came up through the pores of the ground, through its stony flesh—the sound and the smell, that awful sickish-sweet smell of rot and decay. Just breathing it in made his chest feel heavy, as if a weight was on it. The crying. . .
the crying.
the crying was still going on. .
and the weight was still on his chest.
“Louis!” It was Rachel, and she sounded alarmed. “Louis, can you corner
She sounded more than alarmed; she sounded scared, and the crying had a choked, desperate quality to it. It was Cage.
He opened his eyes and stared into Church’s greenish-yellow eyes.
They were less than four inches from his own. The cat was on his chest, neatly curled up there like something from an old wives’ tale of breath-stealing. The stink came off it in slow, noxious waves. It was purring.
Louis uttered a cry of disgust and surprise. He shot both hands out in a primitive warding-off gesture. Church thumped off the bed, landed on its side, and walked away in that stumbling lurch.
Jesus! Jesus! It was on me! Oh God, it was right on me!
His disgust could not have been greater if he had awakened to find a spider in his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up.
“Louis!”
He pushed the blankets back and stumbled to the stairs. Faint light spilled from their bedroom. Rachel was standing at the head of the stairs in her nightgown.
“Louis, he’s vomiting again. . . choking on ft. . . I’m scared.”
“I’m here,” he said and came up to her, thinking: It got in.
Somehow it got in. From the cellar, probably. Maybe there’s a broken cellar window. In fact there must be a broken window down there. I’ll check it tomorrow when 1 get home. Hell, before I go to work. I’ll— Gage stopped crying and began to make an ugly, gargling choking sound.
“Louis!” Rachel screamed.
Louis moved fast. Gage was on his side and vomit was trickling out of his mouth onto an old towel Rachel had spread beside him.
He was vomiting, yes, but not enough. Most of it was inside, and Gage was blushing with the onset of asphyxiation.
Louis grabbed the boy under the arms, aware in a distant way of how hot his son’s armpits were under the Dr. Denton suit, and put him up on his shoulder as if to burp him. Then Louis snapped himself backward, jerking Cage with him. Gage’s neck whip-lashed. He uttered a loud bark that was not quite a belch, and an amazing flag of almost solid vomit flew from his mouth and spattered on the floor and the dresser. Cage began to cry again, a solid, bawling sound that was music to Louis’s ears. To cry like that you had to be getting an unlimited supply of oxygen.
Rachel’s knees buckled and she collapsed onto the bed, head supported in her hands. She was shaking violently. “He almost died, didn’t he, Louis? He almost ch-ch-ch—oh my God—”
Louis walked around the room with his son in his arms. Gage’s cries were tapering off to whimperings; he was already almost asleep again.
“The chances are fifty to one he would have cleared it himself, Rachel. I just gave him a hand.”
“But he was close,” she said. She looked up at him, and her white-ringed eyes were stunned and unbelieving. “Louis, he was so close.”
Suddenly he remembered her shouting at him in the sunny kitchen: He’s not going to die, no one is going to die around here.
“Honey,” Louis said, “we’re all close. All the time.”
It was milk that had almost surely caused the fresh round of vomiting. Gage had awakened around midnight, she said, an hour or so after Louis had gone to sleep, with his “hungry cry,” and Rachel had gotten him a bottle. She had drowsed off again herself while he was still taking it. About an hour later, the choking spell began.
No more milk, Louis said, and Rachel had agreed, almost humbly.
No more milk.
Louis got back downstairs at around a quarter of two and spent fifteen minutes hunting up the cat. During his search, he found the door which communicated between the kitchen and basement standing ajar, as he suspected he would. He remembered his mother telling him about a cat that had gotten quite good at pawing open old-fashioned latches, such as the one on their cellar door.
The cat would just climb the edge of the door, she’d said, and pat the thumb plate of the latch with its paw until the door opened. A cute enough trick, Louis thought, but not one he intended to allow Church to practice often. There was, after all, a lock on the cellar door, too. He found Church dozing under the stove and tossed it out the front door without ceremony. On his way back to the hide-a-bed, he closed the cellar door again.
And this time shot the bolt.
29
In the morning, Gage’s temperature was almost normal. His cheeks were chapped, but otherwise he was bright-eyed and full of beans.
All at once, in the course of a week it seemed, his meaningless gabble had turned into a slew of words; he would imitate almost anything you said. What Ellie wanted him to say was “shit.”
“Say shit, Gage,” Ellie said over her oatmeal.
“Shit-Gage,” Gage responded agreeably over his own cereal. Louis allowed the cereal on condition that Gage eat it with only a little sugar. And, as usual, Gage seemed to be shampooing with it rather than actually eating it.
Ellie dissolved into giggles.
“Say farts, Gage,” she said.
“Farz-Gage,” Gage said, grinning through the oatmeal spread across his face. “Farz-n-shit.”
Ellie and Louis broke up. It was impossible not to.
Rachel was not so amused. “That’s enough vulgar talk for one morning, I think,” she said, handing Louis his eggs.
“Shit-n-farz-n-farz-n-shit,” Gage sang cheerily, and Ellie hid her giggles in her hands. Rachel’s mouth twitched a little, and Louis thought she was looking a hundred percent better in spite of her broken rest. A lot of it was relief, Louis supposed. Gage was better and she was home.
“Don’t say that, Gage,” Rachel said.
“Pretty,” Gage said as a change of pace and threw up all the cereal he had eaten into his bowl.
“Oh, gross-OUT!” Ellie screamed and fled the table.
Louis broke up completely then. He couldn’t help it. He laughed until he was crying and cried until he was laughing again. Rachel and Gage stared at him as if he had gone crazy.
No, Louis could have told them. I’ve been crazy, but I think I’m going to be all right now. I really think I am.
He didn’t know if it was over or not, but it felt over; perhaps that would be enough.
And for a while, at least, it was.
30
Gage’s virus hung on for a week, then cleared up. A week later he came down with a bout of bronchitis. Ellie also caught this and then Rachel; during the period before Christmas, the three of them went around hacking like very old and wheezy hunting dogs. Louis didn’t catch it, and Rachel seemed to hold this against him.
The final week of classes at the university was a hectic one for Louis, Steve, Surrendra, and Charlton. There was no flu—at least not yet—but plenty of bronchitis and several cases of mononucleosis and walking pneumonia. Two days before classes broke for Christmas, six moaning, drunken fraternity boys were brought in by their concerned friends. There were a few moments of confusion gruesomely reminiscent of the Pascow affair. All six of the damned fools had crammed onto one medium-length toboggan (the sixth had actually been sitting on the shoulders of the tail man, from what Louis could piece together) and had set off to ride the toboggan down the hill above the steam plant. Hilarious.