And still he felt the soft tug of whatever it was, whatever sick power it was that inhabited that devil’s place, reaching down from its bluff of rotted stone where all those cairns had been built.
Stay out of this, you. Stay out of it or you’re going to be very, very sorry.
Ignoring it as best he could, Jud sat and smoked and drank beer.
And waited.
47
While Jud Crandall was sitting in the ladderbacked rocker and watching for him out of his bay window, Louis was eating a big tasteless dinner in the Howard Johnson’s dining room.
The food was plentiful and dull—exactly what his body seemed to want. Outside it had grown dark. The headlights of the passing cars probed like fingers. He shoveled the food in. A steak. A baked potato. A side dish of beans which were a bright green nature had never intended. A wedge of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream on top of it melting into a soft drool. He ate at a corner table, watching people come and go, wondering if he might not see someone he knew. In a vague way, he rather hoped that would happen. It would lead to questions—where’s Rachel, what are you doing here, how’s it going? —and perhaps the questions would lead to complications, and maybe complications were what he really wanted. A way out.
And as a matter of fact, a couple that he did know came in just as he was finishing his apple pie and his second cup of coffee. Rob Grinnell, a Bangor doctor, and his pretty wife Barbara. He waited for them to see him, sitting here in the corner at his table for one, but the hostess led them to the booths on the far side of the room, and Louis lost sight of them entirely except for an occasional glimpse of Grinnell’s prematurely graying hair.
The waitress brought Louis his check. He signed for it, jotting his room number under his signature, and left by the side door.
Outside the wind had risen to near-gale force. It was a steady droning presence, making the electrical wires hum oddly. He could see no stars but had a sense of clouds rushing past overhead at high speed. Louis stood on the walk for a moment, hands in pockets, face tilted into that wind. Then he turned back and went up to his
room and turned on the television. It was too early to do anything serious, and that nightwind was too full of possibilities. It made him nervous.
He watched four hours of TV, eight back-to-back half-hour comedy programs. He realized it had been a very long time since he had watched so much TV in a steady, uninterrupted stream. He thought that all the female leads on the sitcoms were what he and his friends had called “cockteasers” back in high school.
In Chicago, Dory Goldman was wailing, “Fly back? Honey, why do you want to fly back? You just got here!”
In Ludlow, Jud Crandall sat by his bay window, smoking and drinking beer, motionless, examining the mental scrapbook of his own past and waiting for Louis to come home. Sooner or later Louis would come home, just like Lassie in that old movie. There were other ways up to the Pet Sematary and the place beyond, but Louis didn’t know them. If he intended to do it, he would begin from his own dooryard.
Unaware of these other happenings, like slow-moving projectiles aimed not at where he was, but rather in the best ballistics tradition at the place where he would be, Louis sat and watched the HoJo color television set. He had never seen any of these programs before, but he had heard vague rumors of them: a black family, a white family, a little kid who was smarter than the rich grown-ups he lived with, a woman who was single, a woman who was married, a woman who was divorced. He watched it all, sitting in the HoJo chair and glancing out every now and then at the blowy night.
When the eleven o’clock news came on, he turned the television set off and went out to do what he had decided to do perhaps at the very moment he had seen Gage’s baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood. The coldness was on him again, stronger than ever, but there was something beneath it—an ember of eagerness, or
passion, or perhaps lust. No matter. It warmed him against the cold and kept him together in the wind. As he started the Honda’s engine, he thought that perhaps Jud was right about the growing power of that place, for surely he felt it around him now, leading (or pushing) him on, and he wondered:
Could I stop? Could I stop even if I wanted to?
48
“You want to what?” Dory asked again. “Rachel . . . you’re upset. .
. a night’s sleep. .
Rachel only shook her head. She could not explain to her mother why she had to go back. The feeling had risen in her the way a wind rises—an early stirring of the grasses, hardly noticed; then the air begins to move faster and harder, and there is no calm left; then the gusts become hard enough to make eerie screaming noises around the eaves; then they are shaking the house and you realize that this is something like a hurricane and if the wind gets much higher, things are going to fall down.
It was six o’clock in Chicago. In Bangor, Louis was just sitting down to his big, tasteless meal. Rachel and Ellie ‘had done no more than pick at their dinners. Rachel kept raising her eyes from her plate to find her daughter’s dark glance upon her, asking her what she was going to do about whatever trouble Daddy was in, asking her what she was going to do.
She waited for the telephone to ring, for Jud to call and tell her that Louis had come home, and once it did ring—she jumped, and Ellie almost spilled her glass of milk—but it was only a lady from Dory’s bridge club, wanting to know if she had gotten home all right.
They were having their coffee when Rachel had abruptly tossed down her napkin and said, “Daddy . . . Mom . . . I’m sorry, but I have to go home. If I can get a plane, I’m going tonight.”
Her mother and father had gaped at her, but Ellie had closed her eyes in an adult expression of relief—it would have been funny if not for the waxy, stretched quality of her skin.
They did not understand, and Rachel could no more explain than she could have explained how those tiny puffs of wind, so faint they can barely stir the tips of short grass, can gradually grow in power until they can knock a steel building flat. She did not believe that Ellie had heard a news item about the death of Victor Pascow and ified it away in her subconscious.
“Rachel. Honey.” Her father spoke slowly, kindly, the way one might speak to someone in the grip of a transitory but dangerous hysteria. “This is all just a reaction to your son’s death. You and Ellie are both reacting strongly to that, and who could blame you?
But you’ll just collapse if you try to—”
Rachel did not answer him. She went to the telephone in the hall, found AIRLINES in the Yellow Pages and dialed Delta’s number while Dory stood close by, telling her they ought to just think about this, didn’t she think, they ought to talk about it, perhaps make a list. . . and beyond her EWe stood, her face stifi dark— but now it was lit by enough hope to give Rachel some courage.
“Delta Airlines,” the voice on the other end said brightly. “This is Kim, may I help you?”
“I hope so,” Rachel said. “It’s extremely important that I get from Chicago to Bangor tonight. It’s . . . it’s a bit of an emergency, I’m afraid. Can you check the connections for me?”
Dubiously: “Yes, ma’am, but this is very short notice.”
“Well, please check,” Rachel said, her voice cracking a little. “I’ll take standby, anything.”
“All right, ma’am. Please hold.” The line became smoothly silent.
Rachel closed her eyes, and after a moment she felt a cool hand on her arm. She opened her eyes and saw that Ellie had moved next to her. Irwin and Dory stood together, talking quietly and looking at them. The way you look at people you suspect of being lunatics, Rachel thought wearily. She mustered a smile for Ellie.
“Don’t let them stop you, Mommy,” Ellie said in a low voice.
“Please.”
“No way, big sister,” Rachel said and then winced—it was what they had called her ever since Gage had been born. But she was no one’s big sister anymore, was she?