“No, ma’am. Not over the phone. I won’t. Rachel, I can’t. You go on now. Drive up to Portland and lay over.”
There was a long, considering pause.
“All right,” she said at last. “Maybe you’re right. Jud, tell me one thing. Tell me how bad it is.”
“I can handle it,” Jud said calmly. “Things have got as bad as they’re going to get.”
Outside the headlights of a car appeared, moving slowly. Jud hall-stood, watching it, and then sat down again when it accelerated past the Creed house and out of sight.
“All right,” she said. “I guess. The rest of this drive has seemed like a stone on my head.”
“Let the stone roll off, my dear,” Jud said. “Please. Save yourself for tomorrow. Things here will be all right.”
“You promise you’ll tell me the whole story?”
“Yes. We’ll have us a beer, and I’ll tell you the whole thing.”
“Goodbye, then,” Rachel said, “for now.”
“For now,” Jud agreed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel.”
Before she could say anything else, Jud hung up the telephone.
He thought there were caffeine pills in the medicine cabinet, but he could not find them. He put the rest of the beer back in the refrigerator—not without regret—and settled for a cup of black coffee. He took it back to the bow window and sat down again, sipping and watching.
The coffee—and the conversation with Rachel—kept him awake and alert for three quarters of an hour, but then he began to nod once more.
No sleeping on sentry duty, old man. You let it get hold of you; you bought something, and now you have to pay for it. So no sleeping on sentry duty.
He lit a fresh cigarette, drew deep, and coughed an old man’s rasping cough. He put the cigarette on the groove of the ashtray and rubbed his eyes with both hands. Outside a ten-wheeler blasted by, running lights glaring, cutting through the windy, uneasy night.
He caught himself dozing off again, snapped awake, and abruptly slapped himself across the face, forehand and backhand, causing his ears to ring. Now terror awakened in his heart, a stealthy visitor who had broken into that secret place.
It’s puttin me to sleep . . . hypnotizin me . . . somethin. It doesn’t want me awake. Because he’ll be comin back pretty soon. Yeah, I feel that. And it wants me out of the way.
“No,” he said grimly. “No way at all. You hear me? I’m puttin a stop to this. This has gone far enough.”
The wind whined around the eaves, and the trees on the other side of the road shook their leaves in hypnotic patterns. His mind went back to that night around the Defiant stove in the coupling shed, which had stood right where the Evarts Furniture Mart stood in Brewer now. They had talked the night away, he and George and René Michaud, and now he was the only one left— René crushed between two boxcars on a stormy night in March of 1939, George Chapin dead of a heart attack just last year. Of so many, he was the only one left, and the old get stupid. Sometimes the stupidity masquerades as kindness, and sometimes it masquerades as pride—a need to tell old secrets, to pass things on, to pour from the old glass to the new one, to.
So dis Jew peddler come in and he say “I got sumpin you never seen before. These pos’cards, dey jus look like wimmin in bathin suits until you rub dem wit a wet cloth, and den—”
Jud’s head nodded. His chin settled slowly, gently, against his chest.
“—dey’s as nakid as the day dey was born! But when dey dry, the clo’es, dey come back on! And dat ain’t all! I got—”
René telling this story in the coupling shed, leaning forward, smiling, and Jud holds the bottle—he feels the bottle and his hand closes around it on thin air.
In the ashtray, the cigarette ash on the end of the cigarette grew longer. At last it tipped forward into the ashtray and burned out, its shape recalled in the neat roll of ash like a rune.
Jud slept.
And when the taillights flashed outside and Louis turned the Honda Civic into his driveway some forty minutes later and drove
it into the garage, Jud did not hear, stir, or awaken, any more than Peter awoke when the Roman soldiers came to take a tramp named Jesus into their custody.
53
Louis found a fresh dispenser of strapping tape in one of the kitchen drawers, and there was a coil of rope in the corner of the garage near last winter’s snow tires. He used the tape to bind the pick and shovel together in a single neat bundle and the rope to fashion a rough sling.
Tools in the sling. Gage in his arms.
He looped the sling over his back, then opened the passenger door of the Civic, pulling the bundle out. Gage was much heavier than Church had been. He might well be crawling by the time he got his boy up to the Micmac burying ground—and he would still have the grave to dig, lighting his way through that stony, unforgiving soil.
Well, he would manage. Somehow.
Louis Creed stepped out of his garage, pausing to thumb off the light switch with his elbow, and stood for a moment at the place where asphalt gave way to grass. Ahead of him he could see the path leading to the Pet Sematary well enough in spite of the blackness; the path, with its short grass, glowed with a kind of luminescence.
The wind pushed and pulled its fingers through his hair, and for a moment the old, childlike fear of the dark rushed through him, making him feel weak and small and terrorized. Was he really going into the woods with this corpse in his arms, passing under
the trees where the wind walked, from darkness into darkness?
And alone this time?
Don’t think about it. Just do it.
Louis got walking.
By the time he got to the Pet Sematary twenty minutes later, his arms and legs were trembling with exhaustion, and he collapsed with the rolled-up tarpaulin across his knees, gasping. He rested there for another twenty minutes, almost dozing, no longer fearful—exhaustion had driven fear out, it seemed.
Finally he got to his feet again, not really believing he could climb the deadfall, only knowing in some numb sort of way that he must try. The bundle in his arms seemed to weigh two hundred pounds instead of forty.
But what had happened before happened again; it was like suddenly, vividly remembering a dream., No, not remembering; reliving. When he placed his foot on the first dead treetrunk, that queer sensation rushed through him again, a feeling that was almost exultation. The weariness did not leave him, but it became bearable—unimportant, really.
Just follow me. Follow me and don’t look down, Louis. Don’t hesitate and don’t look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure.
Quick and sure, yes—the way Jud had removed the stinger.
I know the way through.
But there was only one way through, Louis thought. Either it let you through or it did not. Once before, he had tried to climb the deadfall by himself and hadn’t been able to. This time he mounted it quickly and surely, as he had on the night Jud had shown him the way.
Up and up, not looking down, his son’s body in its canvas shroud cradled in his arms. Up until the wind funneled secret passages and chambers through his hair again, flipping it, parting it widdershins.
He stood on the top for a moment and then descended quickly, as if going down a set of stairs. The pick and shovel rattled and clinked dully against his back. In no more than a minute, he was standing on the springy, needle-covered ground of the path again, the deadfall bulking behind him, higher than the graveyard fence had been.
He moved up the path with his son, listening to the wind moan in the trees. The sound held no terror for him now. The night’s work was almost done.
54
Rachel Creed passed the sign reading EXIT 8 KEEP RIGHT FOR
PORTLAND WESTBROOK, put on her blinker, and guided the Avis Chevette toward the exit ramp. She could see a green Holiday Inn sign clearly against the night sky. A bed, sleep. An end to this constant, racking, sourceless tension. Also an end—for a little while, at least—to her grieving emptiness for the child who was no longer there. This grief, she had discovered, was like a massive tooth extraction. There was numbness at first, but even through the numbness you felt pain curled up like a cat swishing its tail, pain waiting to happen. And when the novocaine wore off, oh boy, you sure weren’t disappointed.