Pet Sematary - Stephen King [168]
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 didnt 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 Gages 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?
But now it was too late to back out, and he knew it.
Besides, he gibbered to himself, it may still come out all right; there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love. Theres still my bag, not the one downstairs but the one in our bathroom on the high shelf, the one I sent Jud for the night Norma had her heart attack. There are syringes, and if something happens something bad no one has to know but me.
His thoughts dissolved into the inarticulate, droning mutter of prayer even as his hands groped for the pick and still on his knees, Louis began to dig into the earth. Each time he brought the pick down he collapsed over the end of it, like an old Roman falling on his sword. Yet little by little the hole took shape and deepened. He clawed the rocks out, and most he simply pushed aside along with the growing pile of stony dirt. But some of them he saved.
For the cairn.
56
Rachel slapped her face until it began to tingle, and still she kept nodding off. Once she snapped fully awake (she was in Pittsfield now and had the turnpike all to herself), and it seemed to her for a split second that dozens of silvery, merciless eyes were looking at her, twinkling like cold, hungry fire.
Then they resolved themselves into the small reflectors on the guardrail posts. The Chevette had drifted far over into the breakdown lane.
She wrenched the wheel to the left again, the tires wailing, and she believed she heard a faint tick! that might have been her right front bumper just kissing off one of those guardrail posts. Her heart leaped in her chest and began to bang so hard between her ribs that she saw small specks before her eyes, growing and shrinking in time with its beat. And yet a moment later, in spite of her close shave, her scare, and Robert Gordon shouting Red Hot on the radio, she was drowsing off again.
A crazy, paranoid thought came to her. Paranoid, all right, she muttered under the rock and roll. She tried to laugh-but she couldnt. Not quite. Because the thought remained, and in the eye of the night, it gained a spooky kind of credibility. She began to feel like a cartoon figure who has run into the rubber band of a gigantic slingshot. Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner inertia becomes
what? elementary