Pet Sematary (13 page)

He began to feel better, more in control. Drying off,
it struck him that this was how murderers must feel when they believe they have gotten rid of all the evidence. He began to laugh. He went on drying himself, but he also went on laughing. He couldn't seem to stop.

“Hey, up there!” Rachel called. “What's so funny?”

“Private joke,” Louis called back, still laughing. He was frightened, but the fright didn't stop the laughter. The laughter came, rising from a belly that was as hard as stones mortared into a wall. It occurred to him that shoving his sheets down the laundry chute was absolutely the best thing he could have done. Missy Dandridge came in five days a week to vacuum, clean . . . and do the laundry. Rachel would never see those sheets at all until she put them back on his bed . . . clean. He supposed it was possible that Missy would mention it to Rachel, but he didn't think so. She would probably whisper to her husband that the Creeds were playing some strange sex game that involved mud and pine needles instead of body paints.

This thought made Louis laugh all the harder.

The last of the giggles and chuckles dried up as he was dressing, and he realized that he felt a little better. How that could be he didn't know, but he did. The room looked normal now except for his stripped bed. He had gotten rid of the poison. Maybe “evidence” was actually the word he was looking for, but in his mind it felt like poison.

Perhaps this is what people do with the inexplicable,
he thought.
This is what they do with the irrational that refuses to be broken down into the normal causes and effects that run the
Western world.
Maybe this was how your mind coped with the flying saucer you saw hovering silently over your back field one morning, casting its own tight little pool of shadow; the rain of frogs; the hand from under the bed that stroked your bare foot in the dead of night. There was a giggling fit or a crying fit . . . and since it was its own inviolable self and would not break down, you simply passed terror intact, like a kidney stone.

Gage was in his chair, eating Cocoa Bears and decorating the table with it. He was decorating the plastic mat under his high chair with Cocoa Bears and apparently shampooing with it.

Rachel came out of the kitchen with his eggs and a cup of coffee. “What was the big joke, Lou? You were laughing like a loon up there. Scared me a little.”

Louis opened his mouth with no idea of what he was going to say, and what came out was a joke he had heard the week before at the corner market down the road—something about a Jewish tailor who bought a parrot whose only line was “Ariel Sharon jerks off.”

By the time he finished, Rachel was laughing too—so was Gage for that matter.

Fine. Our hero has taken care of all the evidence—to wit: the muddy sheets and the loony laughter in the bathroom. Our hero will now read the morning paper—or at least look at it—putting the seal of normality on the morning.

So thinking, Louis opened the paper.

That's what you do, all right,
he thought with immeasurable relief.
You pass it like a stone, and that's the end of it . . . unless there comes a campfire some night with friends
when the wind is high and the talk turns to inexplicable events. Because on campfire nights when the wind is high, talk is cheap.

He ate his eggs. He kissed Rachel and Gage. He glanced at the square, white-painted laundry cabinet at the foot of the chute only as he left. Everything was okay. It was another knockout of a morning. Late summer showed every sign of just going on forever, and everything was okay. He glanced at the path as he backed the car out of the garage, but that was okay too. Never turned a hair. You passed it like a stone.

Everything was okay until he had gotten ten miles down the road, and then the shakes hit him so hard that he had to pull off Route 2 and into the morning-deserted parking lot of Sing's, the Chinese restaurant not far from the Eastern Maine Medical Center . . . where Pascow's body would have been taken. The EMMC, that is, not Sing's. Vic Pascow was never going to eat another helping of moo goo gai pan, ha-ha.

The shakes twisted his body, ripped at it, had their way with it. Louis felt helpless and terrified—not terrified of anything supernatural, not in this bright sunshine, but simply terrified of the possibility that he might be losing his mind. It felt as if a long, invisible wire was being twirled through his head.

“No more,” he said. “Please, no more.”

He fumbled for the radio and got Joan Baez singing about diamonds and rust. Her sweet, cool voice soothed him, and by the time she had finished, Louis felt that he could drive on.

*  *  *

When he got to the Medical Center, he called hello to Charlton and then ducked into the bathroom, believing that he must look like hell. Not so. He was a little hollow under the eyes, but not even Rachel had noticed that. He slapped some cold water on his face, dried off, combed his hair, and went into his office.

Steve Masterton and the Indian doctor, Surrendra Hardu, were in there, drinking coffee and continuing to go over the front file.

“Morning, Lou,” Steve said.

“Morning.”

“Let's hope it is not like last morning,” Hardu said.

“That's right, you missed all the excitement.”

“Surrendra had plenty of excitement himself last night,” Masterton said, grinning. “Tell him, Surrendra.”

Hardu polished his glasses, smiling. “Two boys bring in their lady friend around one o'clock in the morning,” he said. “She is very happily drunk, celebrating the return to university, you understand. She has cut one thigh quite badly, and I tell her it will be at least four stitches, no scar. Stitch away, she tells me, and so I do, bending over like this—”

Hardu demonstrated, salaaming over an invisible thigh. Louis began to grin, sensing what was coming.

“And as I am suturing, she vomits on my head.”

Masterton broke up. So did Louis. Hardu smiled calmly, as if this had happened to him thousands of times in thousands of lives.

“Surrendra, how long have you been on duty?” Louis asked, when the laughter died.

“Since midnight,” Hardu said. “I am just leaving. But I wanted to stay long enough to say hello again.”

“Well, hello,” Louis said, shaking his small, brown hand. “Now go home and go to sleep.”

“We're almost through with the front file,” Masterton said. “Say hallelujah, Surrendra.”

“I decline,” Hardu said, smiling. “I am not a Christian.”

“Then sing the chorus of ‘Instant Karma' or something.”

“May you both shine on,” Hardu said, still smiling, and glided out the door.

Louis and Steve Masterton looked after him for a moment, silent, and then looked at each other. They broke out laughing. To Louis, no laugh had ever felt so good . . . so normal.

“Just as well we got the file finished up,” Steve said. “Today's the day we put the welcome mat out for the dope pushers.”

Louis nodded. The first of the drug salesmen would begin arriving at ten. As Steve liked to crack, Wednesday might be Prince Spaghetti Day, but at UMO every Tuesday was D-day. The D stood for Darvon, the all-time favorite.

“A word of advice, O Great Boss,” Steve said. “I don't know what dese guys were like out in Chicago, but around here they'll stoop to just about anything, from all-expenses-paid hunting junkets into the Allagash in November to free bowling at Family Fun
Lanes in Bangor. I had one guy try to give me one of those inflatable Judy dolls. Me! And I'm only a P.A.! If they can't sell you drugs, they'll drive you to them.”

“Should have taken the Judy doll.”

“Nah, she was a redhead. Not my type.”

“Well, I agree with Surrendra,” Louis said. “Just as long as it's not like yesterday.”

When the rep from Upjohn didn't turn up promptly at ten, Louis gave in and called the registrar's office. He spoke with a Mrs. Stapleton, who said she would send over a copy of Victor Pascow's records immediately. When Louis hung up, the Upjohn guy was there. He didn't try to give Louis anything, only asked him if he had any interest in buying a season ticket to the New England Patriots' games at a discount.

“Nope,” Louis said.

“I didn't think you would,” the Upjohn guy said glumly and left.

At noon Louis walked up to the Bear's Den and got a tuna fish sandwich and a Coke. He brought them back to his office and ate lunch while going over Pascow's records. He was looking for some connection with himself or with North Ludlow, where the Pet Sematary was . . . a vague belief, he supposed, that
there must be some sort of rational explanation even for such a weird occurrence as this. Maybe the guy had grown up in Ludlow—had, maybe, even buried a dog or a cat up there.

He didn't find the connection he was looking for. Pascow was from Bergenfield, New Jersey, and had come to UMO to study electrical engineering. In those few typed sheets, Louis could see no possible connection between himself and the young man who had died in the reception room—other than the mortal one, of course.

He sucked the last Coke out of his cup, listening to the straw crackle in the bottom, and then tossed all his trash into the wastebasket. Lunch had been light, but he had eaten it with good appetite. Nothing much wrong with the way he felt, really. Not now. There had been no recurrence of the shakes, and now even that morning's horror began to seem more like a nasty, pointless surprise, dreamlike itself, of no consequence.

He drummed his fingers on his blotter, shrugged, and picked up the phone again. He dialed the EMMC and asked for the morgue.

After he was connected with the pathology clerk, he identified himself and said, “You have one of our students there, a Victor Pascow—”

“Not anymore,” the voice at the other end said. “He's gone.”

Louis's throat closed. At last he managed, “What?”

“His body was flown back to his parents late last night. Guy from Brookings-Smith Mortuary came and took custody. They put him on Delta, uh”—papers
riffling—“Delta flight 109. Where did you think he went? Out dancing at the Show Ring?”

“No,” Louis said. “No, of course not. It's just . . .” It was just what? What the Christ was he doing pursuing this, anyway? There was no sane way to deal with it. It had to be let go, marked off, forgotten. Anything else was asking for a lot of pointless trouble. “It's just that it seemed very quick,” he finished lamely.

“Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon”—that faint riffle of papers again— “at around three-twenty by Dr. Rynzwyck. By then his father had made all the arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning.”

“Oh. Well, in that case—”

“Unless one of the carriers screwed up and sent it somewhere else,” the pathology clerk said brightly. “We've had that happen, you know, although never with Delta. Delta's actually pretty good. We had a guy who died on a fishing trip way up in Aroostook County, in one of those little towns that just have a couple of map coordinates for a name. Asshole strangled on a pop-top while he was chugging a can of beer. Took his buddies two days to buck him out of the wilderness, and you know that by then it's a toss-up whether or not the Forever Goop will take. But they shoved it in and hoped for the best. Sent him home to Grand Falls, Minnesota, in the cargo compartment of some airliner. But there was a screw-up. They shipped him first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo, North Dakota. Finally somebody wised up, but by then another three days had gone by. Nothing took.
They might as well have injected him with Kool-Aid instead of Jaundaflo. The guy was totally black and smelled like a spoiled pork roast. That's what I heard, anyway. Six baggage handlers got sick.”

The voice on the other end of the line laughed heartily.

Louis closed his eyes and said, “Well, thank you—”

“I can give you Dr. Rynzwyck's home phone if you want it, Doctor, but he usually plays golf up in Orono in the morning.”

“That's okay,” Louis said

He hung up the telephone.
Let that put paid to it,
he thought.
When you were having that crazy dream, or whatever it was, Pascow's body was almost certainly in a Bergenfield funeral home. That closes it off; let that be the end of it.

*  *  *

Driving home that afternoon, a simple explanation of the filth at the foot of the bed finally occurred to him, flooding him with relief.

He had experienced an isolated incident of sleepwalking, brought on by the unexpected and extremely upsetting happenstance of having a student mortally injured and then dying in his infirmary during his first real day on the job.

It explained everything. The dream had seemed extremely real because large parts of it
were
real—the feel of the carpet, the cold dew, and, of course, the dead branch that had scratched his arm. It explained why Pascow had been able to walk through the door and he had not.

A picture rose in his mind, a picture of Rachel coming downstairs last night and catching him bumping against the back door, trying in his sleep to walk through it. The thought made him grin. It would have given her a hell of a turn, all right.

With the sleepwalking hypothesis in mind, he was able to analyze the causes of the dream—and he did so with a certain eagerness. He had walked to the Pet Sematary because it had become associated with another moment of recent stress. It had in fact been the cause of a serious argument between him and his wife . . . and also, he thought with growing excitement, it was associated in his mind with his daughter's first encounter with the idea of death—something his own subconscious must have been grappling with last night when he went to bed.

Damn lucky I got back to the house okay—I don't even remember that part. Must have come back on autopilot.