Pet Sematary - Stephen King [38]
His body was flown back to his parents late last night. Guy from Brookings-Smith Mortuary came and took custody. They put him on Delta, uh-papers riffling-Delta Flight 109. Where did you think he went? Out dancing at the Show Ring?
No, Louis said. No, of course not. Its just It was just what? What the Christ was he doing pursuing this, anyway? There was no sane way to deal with it. It had to be let go, marked off, forgotten. Anything else was asking for a lot of pointless trouble. Its just that it seemed very quick, he finished lamely.
Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon-that faint riffle of papers again-at around three-twenty by Dr. Rynzwyck. By then his father had made all the arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning.
Oh. Well, in that case-
Unless one of the carriers screwed up and sent it somewhere else, the pathology clerk said brightly. Weve had that happen, you know, although never with Delta. Deltas actually pretty good. We had a guy who died on a fishing trip way up in Aroostook County, in one of those little towns that just have a couple of map coordinates for a name. Asshole strangled on a pop-top while he was chugging a can of beer. Took his buddies two days to buck him out of the wilderness, and you know that by then its a toss-up whether or not the Forever Goop will take. But they shoved it in and hoped for the best. Sent him home to Grand Falls, Minnesota, in the cargo compartment of some airliner. But there was a screw-up. They shipped him first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo, North Dakota. Finally somebody wised up, but by then another three days had gone by. Nothing took. They might as well have injected him with Kool-Aid instead of Jaundaflo. The guy was totally black and smelled like a spoiled pork roast. Thats what I heard, anyway. Six baggage handlers got sick.
The voice on the other end of the line laughed heartily.
Louis closed his eyes and said, Well, thank you-
I can give you Dr. Rynzwycks home phone if you want it, Doctor, but he usually plays golf up in Orono in the morning.
Thats okay, Louis said.
He hung up the telephone. Let that put paid to it, he thought. When you were having that crazy dream, or whatever it was, Pascows body was almost certainly in a Bergenfield funeral home. That closes it off; let that be the end of it.
Driving home that afternoon, a simple explanation of the filth at the foot of the bed finally occurred to him, flooding him with relief.
He had experienced an isolated incident of sleepwalking, brought on by the unexpected and extremely upsetting happenstance of having a student mortally injured and then dying in his infirmary during his first real day on the job.
It explained everything. The dream had seemed extremely real because large parts of it were real-the feel of the carpet, the cold
dew, and, of course, the dead branch that had scratched his arm. It explained why Pascow had been able to walk through the door and he had not.
A picture rose in his mind, a picture of Rachel coming downstairs last night and catching him bumping against the back door, trying in his sleep to walk through it. The thought made him grin. It would have given her a hell of a turn, all right.
With the sleepwalking hypothesis in mind, he was able to analyze the causes of the dream-and he did so with a certain eagerness. He had walked to the Pet Sematary because it had become associated with another moment of recent stress. It had in fact been the cause of a serious argument between him and his wife and also, he thought with growing excitement, it was associated in his mind with his daughters first encounter with the idea of death-something his own subconscious must have been grappling with last night when he went to bed.
Damn lucky I got back to the house okay-I dont even remember that part. Must have come back on autopilot.
It was a good thing he had. He couldnt imagine what it would have been like to have awakened this morning by the grave of Smucky the Cat, disoriented, covered with dew, and probably scared shitless-as