As Louis drew closer, the floating head’s tongue lolled out. It was long and pointed, dirty yellow in color. It was coated with peeling scales and as Louis watched, one of these flipped up and over like a manhole cover and a white worm oozed out. The tongue’s tip skittered lazily on the air somewhere below where its adam’s apple should have been. . . it was laughing.
He clutched Gage closer to him, hugging him, as if to protect him, and his feet faltered and began to slip on the grassy tussocks where they held slim purchase.
You might see St. Elmo’s fire, what the sailors call foo-lights. It can make funny shapes, but it’s nothing. If you should see some of those shapes and they bother you, just look the other way.
Jud’s voice in his head gave him a measure of resolve. He began to move steadily forward again, lurching at first, then finding his balance. He didn’t look away but noticed that the face
—if that was what it was and not just a shape made by the mist and his own mind—seemed to always remain the same distance away from him. And seconds or minutes later, it simply dissolved into drifting mist.
That was not St. Elmo’s fire.
No, of course it wasn’t. This place was thick with spirits; it was tenebrous with them. You could look around and see something that would send you raving mad. He would not think about it.
There was no need to think about it. There was no need to—
Something was coming.
Louis came to a total halt, listening to that sound. . . that inexorable, approaching sound. His mouth fell open, every tendon that held his jaw shut simply giving up.
It was a sound like nothing he had ever heard in his life—a living sound, a big sound. Somewhere nearby, growing closer, branches were snapping off. There was a crackle of underbrush breaking under unimaginable feet. The jellylike ground under Louis’s feet began to shake in sympathetic vibration. He became aware that he was moaning
(oh my God oh my dear God what is that what is coming through this fog?)
and once more clutching Gage to his chest; he became aware that the peepers and frogs had fallen silent, he became aware that the wet, damp air had taken on an eldritch, sickening smell like warm, spoiled pork.
Whatever it was, it was huge.
Louis’s wondering, terrified face tilted up and up, like a man following the trajectory of a launched rocket. The thing thudded toward him, and there was the ratcheting sound of a tree—not a branch, but a whole tree—falling over somewhere close by.
Louis saw something.
The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better than sixty feet high. It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage, could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.
For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him. Sparks like eyes.
Then the sound began to fade. As it went away, a peeper called hesitantly—one. It was answered by another. A third joined the conversation; a fourth made it a bull session; a fifth and sixth made it a peeper convention. The sounds of the thing’s progress (slow but not blundering; perhaps that was the worst of it, that feeling of sentient progress) were moving away to the north. Little. . . less. . .
gone.
At last Louis began to move again. His shoulders and back were a frozen ache of torment. He wore an undergarment of sweat from neck to ankles. The season’s first mosquitoes, new-hatched and hungry, found him and sat down to a late snack.
The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo—the creature that moves through the north country, the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal. That was it. The Wendigo has just passed within sixty yards of me.
He told himself not to be ridiculous, to be like Jud and avoid ideas about what might be seen or heard beyond the Pet Sematary—they were loons, they were St. Elmo’s fire, they were the members of the New York Yankees’ bullpen. Let them be anything but the
creatures which leap and crawl and slither and shamble in the world between. Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices .
. . but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.
Louis walked on with his son, and the ground began to firm up again under his feet. Only moments later he came to a felled tree, its crown visible in the fading mist like a gray-green feather duster dropped by a giant’s housekeeper.
The tree was broken off—splintered off—and the break was so fresh that the yellowish-white pulp still bled sap that was warm to Louis’s touch as he climbed over . . . and on the other side was a monstrous indentation out of which he had to scramble and climb, and although juniper and low pump-laurel bushes had been stamped right into the earth, he would not let himself believe it was a footprint. He could have looked back to see if it had any such configuration once he had climbed beyond and above it, but he would not. He only walked on, skin cold, mouth hot and arid, heart flying.
The squelch of mud under his feet soon ceased. For a while there was the faint cereal sound of pine needles again. Then there was rock. He had nearly reached the end.
The ground began to rise faster. He barked his shin painfully on an outcropping. But this was not just a rock. Louis reached out clumsily with one hand (the strap of his elbow, which had grown numb, screamed briefly) and touched it.
Steps here. Cut into the rock. Just follow me. We get to the top and we’re there.
So he began to climb and the exhilaration returned, once more beating exhaustion back. . . at least a little way. His mind tolled off the steps as he rose into the chill, as he climbed back into that
ceaseless river of wind, stronger now, rippling his clothes, making the piece of canvas tarp Gage was wrapped in stutter gunshot sounds like a lifted sail.
He cocked his head back once and saw the mad sprawl of the stars.
There were no constellations he recognized, and he looked away again, disturbed. Beside him was the rock wall, not smooth but splintered and gouged and friable, taking here the shape of a boat, here the shape of a badger, here the shape of a man’s face with hooded, frowning eyes. Only the steps that had been carved from the rock were smooth.
Louis gained the top and only stood there with his head down, swaying, sobbing breath in and out of his lungs. They felt like cruelly punched bladders, and there seemed to be a large splinter sticking into his side.
The wind ran through his hair like a dancer, roared in his ears like a dragon.
The light was brighter this night; had it been overcast the other time or had he just not been looking? It didn’t matter. But he could see, and that was enough to start another chill worming down his back.
It was just like the Pet Sematary.
Of course you knew that, his mind whispered as he surveyed the piles of rocks that had once been cairns. You knew that, or should have known it—not concentric circles but the spiral . .
Yes. Here on top of this rock table, its face turned up to cold starlight and to the black distances between the stars, was a gigantic spiral, made by what the old-timers would have called Various Hands. But there were no real cairns, Louis saw; every one of
them had been burst apart as something buried beneath returned to life. . . and clawed its way out. Yet the rocks themselves had fallen in such a way that the shape of the spiral was apparent.
Has anyone ever seen this from the air? Louis wondered randomly and thought of those desert drawings that one tribe of Indians or another had made in South America. Has anyone ever seen it from the air, and if they did, what did they think, I wonder?
He kneeled and set Gage’s body on the ground with a groan of relief.
At last his consciousness began to come back. He used his pocketknife to cut the tape holding the pick and shovel slung over his back. They fell to the ground with a clink. Louis rolled over and lay down for a moment, spread-eagled, staring blankly at the stars.
What was that thing in the woods? Louis, Louis, do you really think anything good can come at the climax of a play where something like that is among the cast of characters?