Pet Sematary - Stephen King [158]
Louis stared down into the ditch as if hypnotized. At last he dragged his gaze away with a little gasp-the gasp of one who has come to, or who has been called from a mesmerists trance by the final number in a count of ten.
He went on. He hadnt walked far before he found what he was looking for, and he suspected that his mind had neatly stored this bit of information on the day of Gages burial.
Here, looming in the windy dark, was the cemeterys crypt.
Coffins were stored there in the winter when it was too cold for even the payloaders to dig in the frozen earth. It was also used when there was a rush of business.
There were such rushes of cold custom from time to time, Louis knew; in any given population there were times when, for no reason anyone could understand, lots of people died.
It all balances out, Uncle Carl told him. If I have a two-week period in May when nobody dies, Lou, I can count on a two-week period in November when Ill have ten funerals. Only its rarely November, and its never around Christmas, although people always think thats when a lot of people die. That stuff about Christmas depression is just a load of bullshit. Just ask any funeral director. Most people are real happy around Christmas, and they want to live. So they do live. Its usually February when we get a big bulge. The flu gets the old people and theres pneumonia, of course-but thats not all. Therell be people whove been battling cancer like mad bastards for a year, sixteen months. Then bad old February comes around and it seems as if they get tired and the cancer just rolls them up like a rug. On January 31 theyre in remission, and they feel as if theyre in the pink. Come February 24 theyre planted. People have heart attacks in February, strokes in February, renal failure in February. Its a bad month. People get tired in February. Were used to it, in the business. But then, for no reason, the same thing will happen in June or in October. Never in August. Augusts a slow month. Unless a gas main explodes or a city bus goes off a bridge, you never fill up a cemetery crypt in August. But there have been Februarys when weve had caskets stacked up three deep, hoping like hell for a thaw so we can plant some of them before we have to rent a figging apartment.
Uncle Carl had laughed. And Louis, feeling a party to something not even his instructors in med school knew, had laughed too.
The crypts double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and attractive as the swell of a womans breast. This hill (which Louis suspected was landscaped rather than natural) crested only a foot or two below the decorative arrow tips of the wrought-iron fence, which remained even at the top rather than rising with the contour.
Louis glanced around, then scrambled up the slope. On the other side was an empty square of ground, perhaps two acres in all. No not quite empty. There was a single outbuilding, like a disconnected shed. Probably belongs to the cemetery, Louis thought. That would be where they kept their grounds equipment.
The streetlights shone through the moving leaves of a belt of
trees-old elms and maples-that screened this area from Mason Street. Louis saw no other movement.
He slid back down on his butt, afraid of falling and reinjuring his knee, and returned to his sons grave. He almost stumbled over the roll of the tarpaulin. He saw he would have to make two trips, one with the body and another for the tools. He bent, grimacing at his backs protest, and got the stiff canvas roll in his arms. He could feel the shift of Gages body within and steadfastly ignored that part of his mind which whispered constantly that he had gone mad.
He carried the body over to the hill which housed Pleasant-views crypt with its two steel sliding doors (the doors made it look queerly like a two-car garage). He saw what would have to be done if he were going to get his forty-pound bundle up that steep slope now that his rope was gone and prepared to do it. He backed up and then ran at the slope, leaning