Pet Sematary - Stephen King [171]
Church, he said. I thought someone put you out.
Church only looked at him from atop the toilet tank. Yes, someone had put Church out; he had done it himself. He remembered that very clearly. Just as he remembered replacing the window pane down-cellar that time and then telling himself that that had taken care of the problem. But exactly whom had he been kidding? When Church wanted to get in, church got in. Because Church was different now.
It didnt matter. In this dull, exhausted aftermath, nothing seemed to matter. He felt like something less than human now, one of George Romeros stupid, lurching movie-zombies, or
maybe someone who had escaped from T. S. Eliots poem about the hollow men. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling through Little God Swamp and up to the Micmac burying ground, he thought and uttered a dry chuckle.
Headpiece full of straw, Church, he said in his croaking voice. He was unbuttoning his shirt now. Thats me. You better believe it.
There was a nice bruise coming on his left side, about halfway up his ribcage, and when he shucked his pants he saw that the knee he had banged on the gravestone was swelling up like a balloon. It had already turned a rotten purple-black, and he supposed that as soon as he stopped flexing it, the joint would become stiff and painfully obdurate-as if it had been dipped in cement. It looked like one of those injuries that might want to converse with him on rainy days for the rest of his life.
He reached out a hand to stroke Church, wanting some sort of comfort, but the cat leaped down from the toilet tank, staggering in that drunken and weirdly unfeline way, and left for some other place. It spared Louis one flat, yellow glance as it went.
There was Ben-Gay in the medicine cabinet. Louis lowered the toilet seat, sat down, and smeared a gob on his bad knee. Then he rubbed some more on the small of his back-a clumsy operation.
He left the toilet and walked into the living room. He turned on the hall light and stood there at the foot of the stairs for a moment, looking stupidly around. How strange it all seemed! Here was where he had stood on Christmas Eve when he had given Rachel the sapphire. It had been in the pocket of his robe. There was his chair, where he had done his best to explain the facts of death to Ellie after Norma Crandalls fatal heart attack-facts he had found ultimately unacceptable to himself. The Christmas tree had stood in that corner, Ellies construction-paper turkey- the one that had reminded Louis of some sort of futuristic crow- had been Scotch-taped in that window, and much earlier the entire room had been empty except for the United Van Lines boxes, filled with their family possessions and trucked across half the country from the Midwest. He remembered thinking that their things looked very insignificant, boxed up like that-a small enough bulwark between his family and the coldness of all the outer world where their names and their family customs were not known.
How strange it all seemed and how he wished they had never heard of the University of Maine, or Ludlow, or Jud and Norma Crandall, or any of it.
He went upstairs in his skivvies, and in the bathroom at the top he got the stool, stood on it, and took down the small black bag from on top of the medicine cabinet. He took this into the master bedroom, sat down, and began to rummage through it. Yes, there were syringes in case he needed one, and amid the rolls of surgical tape and surgical scissors and neatly wrapped papers of surgical gut were several ampules of very deadly stuff.
If needed.
Louis snapped the bag shut and put it by the bed. He turned off the overhead light, then lay down, hands behind his head. To lie here on his back, at rest, was exquisite. His thoughts turned to Disney World again. He saw himself in a plain white uniform, driving a white van with the mouse-ears logo on it-nothing to indicate it was a rescue unit on the outside,