(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.
The toy locomotive struck the cat dead center. Church uttered a squawk and fled, displaying its usual grace by slamming into the door and almost falling over on its way out.
Cage stirred, muttered something, shifted position, and was still again. Louis felt a little sick. There was sweat standing out in beads on his forehead.
“Louis?” Rachel, from downstairs, sounding alarmed. “Did Gage fall out of his crib?”
“He’s fine, honey. Church knocked over a couple of his toys.”
“Oh, all right.”
He felt—irrationally or otherwise—the way he might have felt if he had looked in on his son and found a snake crawling over him or a big rat perched on the bookshelf over Gage’s crib. Of course it was irrational. But when it had hissed at him from the closet like that.
(Zelda did you think Zelda did you think Oz the Gweat and Tewwible?)
He closed Gage’s closet door, sweeping a number of toys back in with its moving foot. He listened to the tiny click of the latch.
After a moment’s further hesitation, he turned the closet’s thumbbolt.
He went back to Gage’s crib. In shifting around, the kid had kicked his two blankets down around his knees. Louis disentangled him, pulled the blankets up, and then merely stood there, watching his son, for a long time.
PART TWO
THE MICMAC
BURYING GROUND
When Jesus came to Bethany, he found that Lazarus had lain in the grave four days already. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she hurried to meet him.
“Lord,” she said, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But now you are here, and I know that whatever you ask of God, God will grant.”
Jesus answered her: “Your brother shall rise again.”
—JOHN’S GOSPEL (paraphrase)
“Hey-ho, let’s go.”
—THE RAMONES
36
It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls—as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one’s sense of humor begins to reassert itself.
Louis Creed might have harbored such thoughts if he had been thinking rationally following the funeral of his son, Gage William Creed, on the seventeenth of May, but any rational thought—or attempt at it—ceased at the funeral parlor, where a fistfight with his father-in-law (bad enough) resulted in an event even more terrible—a final bit of outrageous gothic melodrama which shattered whatever remained of Rachel’s fragile self-control. That day’s penny dreadful events were only complete when she was pulled, screaming, from the East Room of the Brookings-Smith Mortuary, where Gage lay in his closed coffin, and sedated in the foyer by Surrendra Hardu.
The irony of it was that she would not have experienced that final episode at all, that extravagance of horror, one might say, if the fistfight between Louis Creed and Mr. Irwin Goldman of Dearborn had taken place at the morning visiting hours (10 to 11:30 A.M.) instead of at the afternoon visiting hours (2 to 3:30
P.M.). Rachel had not been in attendance at the morning visiting
hours; she simply had not been able to come. She sat at home with Jud Crandall and Steve Masterton. Louis had no idea how he ever could have gotten through the previous forty-eight hours or so without Jud and Steve.
It was well for Louis—well for all three of the remaining family members—that Steve had shown up as promptly as he had, because Louis was at least temporarily unable to make any kind of decision, even one so minor as giving his wife a shot to mute her deep grief. Louis hadn’t even noticed that Rachel had apparently meant to go to the morning viewing in her housecoat, which she had misbuttoned. Her hair was uncombed, unwashed, tangled. Her eyes, blank brown orbits, bulged from sockets so sunken that they had almost become the eyes of a living skull. Her flesh was doughy. It hung from her face. She sat at the breakfast table that morning, munching unbuttered toast and talking in disjointed phrases that made no sense at all. At one point she had said abruptly, “About that Winnebago you want to buy, Lou—” Louis had last spoken about buying a Winnebago in 1981.
Louis only nodded and went on eating his own breakfast. He was having a bowl of Cocoa Bears. Cocoa Bears had been one of Gage’s favorite cereals, and this morning Louis wanted them. The taste of them was appalling, but he still wanted them. He was neatly turned out in his best suit—not black, he didn’t have a black suit, but it was at least a deep charcoal gray. He had shaved, showered, and combed his hair. He looked fine, although he was lost in shock.
Ellie was dressed in blue jeans and a yellow blouse. She had brought a picture to the breakfast table with her. This picture, an enlargement of a Polaroid Rachel had taken with the SX-70 Louis and the kids had given her for her last birthday, showed Gage, grinning from the depths of his Sears ski-parka, sitting on her Speedaway sled as Ellie pulled him. Rachel had caught Ellie
looking back over her shoulder and smiling at Gage. Gage was grinning back at her.
Ellie carried the picture, but she didn’t talk much.
Louis was unable to see the condition of either his wife or his daughter; he ate his breakfast and his mind replayed the accident over and over and over, except in this mind-movie the conclusion was different. In the mind-movie he was quicker, and all that happened was that Gage got a spanking for not stopping when they yelled.
It was Steve who really saw how it was going with Rachel and with Ellie as well. He forbade Rachel to go to the morning viewing (although “viewing” was really a misnomer because of the closed coffin; if it was open, Louis thought, they’d all run screaming from the room, me included) and forbade Ellie to go at all. Rachel protested. Ellie only sat, silent and grave, with the picture of her and Gage in one hand.
It was Steve who gave Rachel the shot she needed and who gave Ellie a teaspoon of a colorless liquid to drink. Ellie usually whined and protested about taking medicine—any kind of medicine—but she drank this silently and without a grimace. By ten o’clock that morning she was asleep in her bed (the picture of her and Gage still held in her hand) and Rachel was sitting in front of the television set, watching “Wheel of Fortune.” Her responses to Steve’s questions were slow. She was stoned, but her face had lost that thoughtful look of madness which had so worried—and frightened—the P.A. when he came in that morning at a quarter past eight.
Jud, of course, had made all the arrangements. He made them with the same calm efficiency that he had made them for his wife three months before. But it was Steve Masterton who took Louis aside just before Louis left for the funeral home.
“I’ll see that she’s there this afternoon, if she seems capable of handling it,” he told Louis.