Pet Sematary - Stephen King [13]
They topped the second hill, and then the path sloped through a head-high swatch of bushes and tangled underbrush. It narrowed and then, just ahead, Louis saw Ellie and Jud go under an arch made of old weather stained boards. Written on these in faded black paint, only just legible, were the words PET SEMATARY.
He and Rachel exchanged an amused glance and stepped under the arch, instinctively reaching out and grasping each others hands as they did so, as if they had come here to be married.
For the second time that morning Louis was surprised into wonder.-
There was no carpet of needles here. Here was an almost perfect circle of mown grass, perhaps as large as forty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous. A man trying so pick his way through that or to climb over it would do well to put on a steel jock, Louis thought. The clearing was crowded with markers, obviously made by children from whatever materials they could beg or borrow-the slats of crates, scrapwood, pieces of beaten -tin. And yet, seen against the perimeter of low bushes and straggly trees that fought for living space and sunlight here, the very fact of their clumsy manufacture, and the fact that humans were responsible for what was here, seemed to emphasize what symmetry they had. The forested backdrop lent the place a crazy sort of profundity, a charm that was not Christian but pagan.
Its lovely, Rachel said, not sounding as if she meant it.
Wow! Ellie cried.
Louis unshouldered Gage and pulled him out of the baby carrier so he could crawl. Louiss back sighed with relief.
Ellie ran from one monument to the next, exclaiming over
each. Louis followed her while Rachel kept an eye on the baby. Jud sat down cross-legged, his back against a protruding rock, and smoked.
Louis noticed that the place did not just seem to have a sense of order, a pattern; the memorials had arranged in rough concentric circles.
SMUCKY THE CAT, one crate-board marker proclaimed. The hand was childish but careful. HE WAS OBEDIANT. And below this: 1971-1974. A little way around the outer circle he came to a piece of natural slate with a name written on it in fading but perfectly legible red paint: BIFFER. And below this a bit of
verse: BIFFER, BIFFER. A HELLUVA SNIFFER / UNTIL HE DIED HE MADE US RICHER.
Buffer was the Desslers cocker spaniel, Jud said. He had dug a bald place in the earth with the heel of his shoe and was carefully tapping all his ashes into it. Got run over by a dumpster last year. Aint that some poime?
It is, Louis agreed.
Some of the graves were marked with flowers, some fresh, most old, not a few almost totally decomposed. Over half of the painted and penciled inscriptions that Louis tried to read had faded away to partial or total illegibility. Others bore no discernible mark at all, and Louis guessed that the writing on these might have been done with chalk or crayon.
Mom! Ellie yelled. Heres a goldfishie! Come and see!
Ill pass, Rachel said, and Louis glanced at her. She was standing by herself, outside the outermost circle, looking more uncomfortable than ever. Louis thought: Even here shes upset. She never had been easy around the appearances of death (not, he supposed, that anyone really was), probably because of her sister. Rachels sister had died very young, and it had left a scar which Louis had learned early in their marriage not to touch. Her name had been Zelda, and her death had been from spinal meningitis. Her mortal Illness had probably been long and painful and ugly, and Rachel would have been at an impressionable age. If she Wanted to forget it, he thought there could be no harm in that.
Louis tipped her a wink, and Rachel smiled gratefully at him.
Louis looked up. They were in a natural clearing.