Pet Sematary - Stephen King [161]
It doesnt matter, his mind responded with a shrill fury born of exhaustion. Will you get that through your head? it just doesnt matter!
But it does. it does matter. Its Gage in there, not a bundle of towels!
He reached over and gently began to press his hands against the canvas tarpaulin, feeling for the contours underneath. He looked like a blind man trying to determine what a specific object might be. At last he came upon a protuberance that could only be Gages nose-facing in the right direction.
Only then could he bring himself to put the Civic in gear and start the twenty-five minute drive back to Ludlow.
52
At one oclock that morning, Jud Crandalls telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B & A coupling shed with George Chapin and René Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey-jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it-while outside a noreaster blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B & A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, these were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around. He was twenty-three, and Norma was very much alive (although in bed now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and
René Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucks-port who- That was when the phone began to ring and he jerked up in his
chair, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, feeling a sour heaviness drop into him like a stone-it was, he thought, all those years between twenty-three and eighty-three, all sixty of them, dropping into him at once. And on the heels of that thought: You been sleepin, boyo. Thats no way to run this railroad not tonight.
He got up, holding himself straight against the stiffness that had also settled into his back, and crossed to the phone.
It was Rachel.
Jud? Has he come home?
No, Jud said. Rachel, where are you? You sound closer.
I am closer, Rachel said. And although she did sound closer somehow, there was a distant humming on the wire. It was the sound of the wind, somewhere between here and wherever she was. The wind was high tonight. That sound that always made Jud think of dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out. Im at the rest area at Biddeford on the Maine Turnpike.
"Biddeford!
I couldnt stay in Chicago. It was getting to me, too
whatever it was that got Ellie, it was getting me too. And you feel it. Its in your voice.
Ayuh. He picked a Chesterfield out of his pack and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. He popped a wooden match alight and watched it flicker as his hand trembled. His hands hadnt trembled-not before this nightmare had commenced anyway. Outside, he heard that dark wind gust. It took the house in its hand and shook it.
Powers growing. I can feel it.
Dim terror in his old bones. It was like spun glass, fine and fragile.
Jud, please tell me whats going on!
He supposed she had a right to know-a need to know. And he supposed he would tell her. Eventually he would tell her the whole story. He would show her the chain that had been forged link by link. Normas heart attack, the death of the cat, Louiss question-has anyone ever buried a person up there?-Cages death and God alone knew what further link Louis might be
forging right now. Eventually he would tell her. But not over the phone.
Rachel, how come you