There was a strange car across the road. Parked behind Jud’s truck.
So what?
So a strange vehicle over there could mean trouble, that was so what.
Louis drew the curtain aside and examined the vehicle more closely. It was a small blue car, a Chevette. And curled up on top of it, apparently sleeping, was Church.
He looked for a long time before letting the curtain go. Jud had company, that was all—so what? And it was maybe too early to worry about what was or was not going to happen with Gage; Church hadn’t come back until almost one o’clock, and it was only nine o’clock now. Nine o’clock on a beautiful May morning. He would simply go downstairs and make some coffee, get out the heating pad and wrap it around his knee, and—
—and what’s Church doing on top of that car?
“Oh, come on,” he said aloud and began to limp back down the hail. Cats slept anywhere and everywhere; it was the nature of the beast.
Except Church doesn’t cross the road anymore, remember?
“Forget it,” he muttered and paused halfway down the stairs (which he was working his way down almost sidesaddle). Talking to himself, that was bad. That was—
What was that thing in the woods last night?
The thought came to him unbidden, making him tighten his lips the way the pain in his knee had done when he swung it out of’ bed.
He had dreamed about the thing in the woods last night. His dreams of Disney World had seemed to blend naturally and with a deadly ease into dreams of that thing. He dreamed that it had touched him, spoiling all good dreams forever, rotting all good intentions. It was the Wendigo, and it had turned him into not just a cannibal but the father of cannibals. In his dream he had been in the Pet Sematary again but not alone. Bill and Timmy Baterman had been there. Jud had been there, looking ghostly and dead, holding his dog Spot on a clothesrope leash. Lester Morgan was there with Hanratty the bull on a length of car-towing chain.
Hanratty was lying on his side, looking around with a stupid, drugged fury. And for some reason Rachel was there too, and she’d had some sort of accident at the dinner table
—spilled a bottle of catsup or maybe dropped a dish of cranberry jelly, maybe, because her dress was splattered with red stains.
And then, rising behind the deadfall to a titanic height, its skin a cracked reptilian yellow, its eyes great hooded foglamps, its ‘ears not ears at all but massive curling horns, was the Wendigo, a beast that looked like a lizard born of a woman. It pointed its horny, nailed finger at all of them as they craned their necks up and up to watch it.
“Stop,” he whispered and shuddered at the sound of his own voice.
He would go out into the kitchen, he decided, and make himself breakfast just as if it were any ordinary day. A bachelor breakfast,
full of comforting cholesterol. A couple of fried-egg sandwiches with mayo and a slice of Bermuda onion on each one. He smelled sweaty and dirty and cruddy, but he would save the shower for later; right now getting undressed seemed like too much work, and he was afraid he might have to get the scalpel out of his bag and actually cut the leg of the pants open in order to allow his bloated knee to escape. A hell of a way to treat good instruments, but none of the knives in the house would cut the heavy jeans fabric, and Rachel’s sewing scissors certainly would not do the trick.
But first, breakfast.
So he crossed the living room and then detoured into the front entry and looked out at the small blue car in Jud’s driveway. It was covered with dewfall, which meant it had been there for some time. Church was still on the roof but not sleeping. He appeared to be staring right at Louis with his ugly yellow-green eyes.
Louis stepped back hurriedly, as if someone had caught him peeking.
He went into the kitchen, rattled out a frying pan, put it on the stove, got eggs from the fridge. The kitchen was bright and crisp and clear. He tried to whistle—a whistle would bring the morning into its proper focus—but he could not. Things looked right, but they weren’t right. The house seemed dreadfully empty, and last night’s work weighed on him. Things were wrong, awry; he felt a shadow hovering, and he was afraid.
He limped into the bathroom and took a couple of aspirin with a glass of orange juice. He was working his way back to the stove when the telephone rang.
He did not answer it immediately but turned and looked at it, feeling slow and stupid, a sucker in some game which he was only now realizing he did not understand in the least.
Don’t answer that, you don’t want to answer that because that’s the bad news, that’s the end of the leash that leads around the corner and into the darkness, and I don’t think you want to see what’s on the other end of that leash, Louis, I really don’t think you do, so don’t answer that phone, run, run now, the car’s in the garage, get in it and take off, but don’t answer that phone— He crossed the room and picked it up, standing there with one hand on the dryer as he had so many times before, and it was Irwin Goldman, and even as Irwin said hello Louis saw the tracks crossing the kitchen—small, muddy tracks—and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest, and he believed he could feel his eyeballs swelling in his head, starting from their sockets; he believed that if he could have seen himself in a mirror at that moment he would have seen a face out of a seventeenth-century painting of a lunatic asylum. They were Gage’s tracks, Gage had been here, he had been here in the night, and so where was he now?
“It’s Irwin, Louis. . . Louis? Are you there? Hello?”
“Hello, Irwin,” he said, and already he knew what Irwin was going to say. He understood the blue car. He understood everything. The leash . . . the leash going into the darkness . . . he was moving fast along it now, hand over hand. Ah, if he could drop it before he saw what was at the end! But it was his leash. He had bought it.
“For a moment I thought we’d been cut off,” Goldman was saying.
“No, the phone slipped out of my hand,” Louis said. His voice was calm.
“Did Rachel make it home last night?”
“Oh yes,” Louis said, thinking of the blue car, Church perched on top of it, the blue car that was so still. His eye traced the muddy footprints on the floor.
“I ought to speak to her,” Goldman said. “Right away. It’s about Eileen.”
“Ellie? What about Ellie?”
“I really think Rachel—”
“Rachel’s not here right now,” Louis said harshly. “She’s gone to the store for bread and milk. What about Ellie? Come on, Irwin!”
“We had to take her to the hospital,” Goldman said reluctantly.
“She had a bad dream or a whole series of them. She was hysterical and wouldn’t come out of it. She—”
“Did they sedate her?”
“What?”
“Sedation,” Louis said impatiently, “did they give her sedation?”
“Yes, oh yes. They gave her a pill, and she went back to sleep.”
“Did she say anything? What scared her so badly?” He was gripping the phone white-knuckled now.
Silence from Irwin Goldman’s end—a long silence. This time Louis did not interrupt, much as he would have liked to.
“That was what scared Dory so badly,” Irwin said finally. “She babbled a lot before she got . . . before she was crying too hard to understand. Dory herself was almost. . . you know.”
“What did she say?”
“She said Oz the Great and Terrible had killed her mother. Only she didn’t say it that way. She said . . . she said ‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,’ which was the way our other daughter always used to say it. Our daughter Zelda. Louis, believe me when I say I would much rather have asked Rachel this question, but how much have you and she told Eileen about Zelda and how she died?”
Louis had closed his eyes; the world seemed to be rocking gently under his feet, and Goldman’s voice had the lost quality of a voice coming through thick mists.
You may hear sounds like voices, but they are only the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries.
“Louis, are you there?”
“Is she going to be all right?” Louis asked, his own voice distant.
“Is Ellie going to be all right? Did you get a prognosis?”