But now it was too late to back out, and he knew it.
Besides, he gibbered to himself, it may still come out all right; there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love. There’s still my bag, not the one downstairs but the one in our bathroom on the high shelf, the one I sent Jud for the night Norma’ had her heart attack. There are syringes, and if something happens. . . something bad. . . no one has to know but me.
His thoughts dissolved into the inarticulate, droning mutter of prayer even as his hands groped for the pick . . . and still on his knees, Louis began to dig into the earth. Each time he brought the pick down he collapsed over the end of it, like an old Roman falling on his sword. Yet little by little the hole took shape and deepened. He clawed the rocks out, and most he simply pushed
aside along with the growing pile of stony dirt. But some of them he saved.
For the cairn.
56
Rachel slapped her face until it began to tingle, and still she kept nodding off. Once she snapped fully awake (she was in Pittsfield now and had the turnpike all to herself), and it seemed to her for a split second that dozens of silvery, merciless eyes were looking at her, twinkling like cold, hungry fire.
Then they resolved themselves into the small reflectors on the guardrail posts. The Chevette had drifted far over into the breakdown lane.
She wrenched the wheel to the left again, the tires wailing, and she believed she heard a faint tick! that might have been her right front bumper just kissing off one of those guardrail posts. Her heart leaped in her chest and began to bang so hard between her ribs that she saw small specks before her eyes, growing and shrinking in time with its beat. And yet a moment later, in spite of her close shave, her scare, and Robert Gordon shouting “Red Hot” on the radio, she was drowsing off again.
A crazy, paranoid thought came to her. “Paranoid, all right,” she muttered under the rock and roll. She tried to laugh—but she couldn’t. Not quite. Because the thought remained, and in the eye of the night, it gained a spooky kind of credibility. She began to feel like a cartoon figure who has run into the rubber band of a gigantic slingshot. Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner . . . inertia becomes what? . . . elementary physics. . . something trying to hold her back. . . stay out of this, you. . . and a body at rest tends to remain at rest . . . Gage’s body, for instance . . . once set in motion.
This time the scream of tires was louder, the shave a lot closer; for a moment there was the queeling, grailing sound of the Chevette running along the guardrail cables, scraping paint down to the twinkling metal, and for a moment the wheel didn’t answer, and then Rachel was standing on the brake, sobbing; she had been asleep this time, not just dozing but asleep and dreaming at sixty miles an hour, and if there had been no guardrail. . . or if there had been an overpass stanchion. .
She pulled over and put the car in park and wept into her hands, bewildered and afraid.
Something is trying to keep me away from him.
When she felt she had control of herself, she began to drive again—the little car’s steering did not seem impaired, but she supposed the Avis company would have some serious questions for her when she returned their car to BIA tomorrow.
Never mind. One thing at a time. Got to get some coffee into me—
that’s the first thing.
When the Pittsfield exit came up, Rachel took it. About a mile down the road she came to bright arc-sodium lights and the steady mutter-growl of diesel engines. She pulled in, had the Chevette filled up (“Somebody put a pretty good ding along the side of her,”
the gas jockey said in an almost admiring voice), and then went into the diner, which smelled of deep-fat grease, vulcanized eggs . .
. and, blessedly, of good strong coffee.
Rachel had three cups, one after another, like medicine—black, sweetened with a lot of sugar. A few truckers sat at the counter or in the booths, kidding the waitresses, who somehow all managed to look like tired nurses filled with bad news under these fluorescent lights burning in the night’s little hours.
She paid her check and went back out to where she had parked the Chevette. It wouldn’t start. The key, when turned, would cause the solenoid to utter a dry click, but that was all.
Rachel began to beat her fists slowly and forcelessly against the steering wheel. Something was trying to stop her. There was no reason for this car, brand-new and with less than five thousand miles on its odometer, to have died like this, but it had. Somehow it had, and here she was, stranded in Pittsfield, still almost fifty miles from home.
She listened to the steady drone of the big trucks, and it came to her with a sudden, vicious certainty that the truck which had killed her son was here among them . . . not muttering but chuckling.
Rachel lowered her head and began to cry.
57
Louis stumbled over something and fell full-length on the ground.
For a moment he didn’t think he would be able to get up
—getting up was far beyond him—he would simply lie here, listening to the chorus of peepers from Little God Swamp somewhere behind him and feeling the chorus of aches and pains inside his own body. He would lie here until he went to sleep. Or died. Probably the latter.
He could remember slipping the canvas bundle into the hole he had dug, and pushing most of the earth back into the hole with his bare hands. And he believed he could remember piling the rocks up, building from a broad base to a point.
From then to now he remembered very little. He had obviously gotten back down the steps again or he wouldn’t be here, which was . . . where? Looking around, he thought he recognized one of the groves of great old pines not far beyond the deadfall. Could he
have made it all the way back through Little God Swamp without knowing it? He supposed it was possible. Just.
This is far enough. I’ll just sleep here.
But it was that thought, so falsely comforting, that got him to his feet and moving again. Because if he stayed here, that thing might find him. . . that thing might be in the woods and looking for him right this moment.
He scrubbed his hand up to his face, palm first, and was stupidly surprised to see blood on his hand. . . at some point he’d given himself a nosebleed. “Who gives a fuck?” he muttered hoarsely and grubbed apathetically around him until he had found the pick and shovel again.
Ten minutes later the deadfall loomed ahead. Louis climbed it, stumbling repeatedly but somehow not falling until he was almost down. Then he glanced at his feet, a branch promptly snapped (don’t look down, Jud had said), another branch tumbled, spilling his foot outward, and he fell with a thud on his side, the wind knocked out of him.
I’ll be goddamned if this isn’t the second graveyard I’ve fallen into tonight. . . and I’ll be goddamned if two isn’t enough.
He began to feel around for the pick and shovel again, and laid his hands on them at last. For a moment he surveyed his surroundings, visible by starlight. Nearby was the grave of SMUCKY. He was obediant, Louis thought wearily. And TRIXIE, KILT ON THE
HIGHWAY. The wind still blew strongly, and he could hear the faint ting-ting-ting of a piece of metal—perhaps it had once been a Del Monte can, cut laboriously by a grieving pet owner with his father’s tinsnips and then flattened out with a hammer and nailed to a stick—and that brought the fear back again. He was too tired now to feel it as more than a somehow sickening pulsebeat. He had
done it. That steady ting-ting-ting sound coming out of the darkness brought it home to him more than anything else.
He walked through the Pet Sematary, past the grave of MARTA OUR PET RABIT who had DYED MARCH 1 1965, and near the barrow of GEN. PATTON; he stepped over the ragged chunk of board that marked the final resting place of POLYNESIA. The tick of metal was louder now, and he paused, looking down. Here atop a slightly leaning board that had been driven into the ground, was a tin rectangle, and by starlight Louis read, RINGO OUR