. . same way we’ll be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better or worse. But the place will stay no matter who’s here, Louis. It isn’t as though someone owned it and could take its secret when they moved on. It’s an evil, curdled place, and I had no business taking you up there to bury that cat. I know that now. It has a power you’ll beware of if you know what’s good for your family and what’s good for you. I wasn’t strong enough to fight it. You saved Norma’s life, and I wanted to do something for you, and that place turned my good wish to its own evil purpose. It has a power. . . and I think that power goes through phases, same as the moon. It’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared it’s coming around to full again. I’m ascared it used me to get at you through your son. Do you see, Louis, what I’m getting at?” His eyes pleaded with Louis.
“You’re saying the place knew Gage was going to die, I think,”
Louis said.
“No, I am saying the place might have made Gage die because I introduced you to the power in the place. I am saying I may have murdered your son with good intentions, Louis.”
“I don’t believe it,” Louis said at last, shakily. Didn’t; wouldn’t.
Couldn’t.
He held Jud’s hand tightly. “We’re burying Gage tomorrow. In Bangor. And in Bangor he will stay. I don’t plan to go up there to the Pet Sematary or beyond it ever again.”
“Promise me!” Jud said harshly. “Promise.”
“I promise,” Louis said.
But in the back of his mind, contemplation remained—a dancing flicker of promise that would not quite go away.
40
But none of those things happened.
All of them—the droning Orinco truck, the fingers that just touched the back of Cage’s jumper and then slid off, Rachel preparing to go to the viewing in her housecoat, Ellie carrying Gage’s picture and putting his chair next to her bed, Steve Masterton’s tears, the fight with Irwin Goldman, Jud Crandall’s terrible story of Timmy Baterman—all of them existed only in Louis Creed’s mind during the few seconds that passed while he raced
his laughing son to the road. Behind him, Rachel screamed again
—Gage, come back, don’t RUN!—but Louis did not waste his breath. It was going to be close, very close, and yes, one of those things really happened: from somewhere up the road he could hear the drone of the oncoming truck and somewhere inside a memory circuit opened and he could hear Jud Crandall speaking to Rachel on that very first day in Ludlow: You want to watch em around the road, Missus Greed. It’s a bad road for kids and pets.
Now Gage was running down the gentle slope of lawn that merged with the soft shoulder of Route 15, his husky little legs pumping, and by all the rights of the world he should have fallen over sprawling but he just kept going and now the sound of the truck was very loud indeed, it was that low, snoring sound that Louis sometimes heard from his bed as he floated just beyond the rim of sleep. Then it seemed a comforting sound, but now it terrified him.
Oh my dear God oh my dear Jesus let me catch him don’t let him get into the road!
Louis put on a final burst of speed and leaped, throwing himself out straight and parallel to the ground like a football player about to make a tackle; he could see his shadow tracking along on the grass below him in the lowest periphery of his vision, and he thought of the kite, the Vulture, printing its shadow all the way across Mrs. Vinton’s field, and just as Gage’s forward motion carried him into the road, Louis’s fingers brushed the back of his jacket. . . and then snagged it.
He yanked Gage backward and landed on the ground at the same instant, crashing his face into the rough gravel of the shoulder, giving himself a bloody nose. His balls signaled a much more serious flash of pain—Ohhh, if l’d’a known I was gonna be playing football, I woulda worn my jock—but both the pain in his nose and the driving agony in his testes were lost in the swelling relief of hearing Gage’s wail of pain and outrage as his bottom landed on the shoulder and he fell over backward onto the edge of the lawn, thumping his head. A moment later his wails were drowned by the roar of the passing truck and the almost regal blat of its air horn.
Louis managed to get up in spite of the lead ball sitting in his lower stomach and cradled his son in his arms. A moment later Rachel joined them, also weeping, crying out to Gage, “Never run in the road, Gage! Never, never, never! The road is bad! Bad!”
And Gage was so astonished at this tearful lecture that he left off crying and goggled up at his mother.
“Louis, your nose is bleeding,” she said and then hugged him so suddenly and strongly that for a moment he could barely breathe.
“That isn’t the worst of it,” he said. “I think I’m sterile, Rachel. Oh boy, the pain.”
And she laughed so hysterically that for a few moments he was frightened for her, and the thought crossed his mind: If Gage really had been killed, I believe it would have driven her crazy.
But Gage was not killed; all of that had only been a hellishly detailed moment of imagination as Louis outraced his son’s death across a green lawn on a sunshiny May afternoon.
Gage went to grammar school, and at the age of seven he began going to camp, where he showed a wonderful and surprising aptitude for swimming. He also gave his parents a rather glum surprise by proving himself able to handle a month’s separation with no noticeable psychic trauma. By the time he was ten, he was spending the entire summer away at Camp Agawam in Raymond, and at eleven he won two blue ribbons and a red one at the Four Camps Swimathon that ended the summer’s activities. He grew tall, and yet through it all he was the same Gage, sweet and rather surprised at the things the world held out .
and for Gage, the fruit was somehow never bitter or rotten.
He was an honors student in high school and a member of the swimming team at John Bapst, the parochial school he had insisted on attending because of its swimming facilities. Rachel was upset, Louis not particularly surprised when, at seventeen, Gage announced his intention to convert to Catholicism. Rachel believed that all of it was because of the girl Gage was going out with; she saw marriage in his immediate future (“if that little slut with the St.
Christopher’s medal isn’t balling him, I’ll eat your shorts, Louis,”
she said), the wreckage of his college plans and his Olympic hopes, and nine or ten little Catholics running around by the time Gage was forty. By then he would be (according to Rachel, anyway) a cigar-smoking truck driver with a beer belly, Our-Fathering and Hail-Marying his way into precardiac oblivion.
Louis suspected his son’s motives were rather more pure, and although Gage converted (and on the day he actually did the deed,
Louis sent an unabashedly nasty postcard to Irwin Goldman; it read, Perhaps you’ll have a Jesuit grandson yet. Your goy son-in-law, Louis), he did not marry the rather nice (and decidedly unslutty) girl he had dated through most of his senior year.
He went on to Johns Hopkins, made the Olympic swimming team, and on one long, dazzling, and incredibly proud afternoon sixteen years after Louis had raced an Orinco truck for his son’s life, he and Rachel—who had now gone almost entirely gray, although she covered it with a rinse—watched their son win a gold medal for the U.S.A. When the NBC cameras moved in for a close-up of him, standing with his dripping, seal-sleek head back, his eyes open and calm and fixed on the flag as the national anthem played, the ribbon around his neck, and the gold lying against the smooth skin of his chest, Louis wept. He and Rachel both wept.
“I guess this caps everything,” he said huskily and turned to embrace his wife. But she was looking at him with dawning horror, her face seeming to age before his eyes as if whipped by days and months and years of evil time; the sound of the national anthem faded and when Louis looked back at the TV he saw a different boy there, a black boy with a head of tight curls in which gems of water still gleamed.
This caps everything.
His cap.
His cap is…
oh dear God, his cap is full of blood.