Pet Sematary - Stephen King [53]
Jud, he said, we cant climb over that. Well each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back.
Just follow me, Jud said. Follow me and dont look down. Dont hesitate and dont look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure.
Louis began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had simply never awakened from his afternoon nap. If I was awake, he thought, Id no more head up that deadfall than Id get drunk and go skydiving. But Im going to do it. I really think I am. So
I must be dreaming. Right?
Jud angled slightly left, away from the center of the deadfall. The flashs beam centered brightly on the jumbled heap of
(bones)
fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure himself that he was in the right place, Jud started up. He did not scramble; he did not climb bent over, the way a man will climb a rocky hillside or a sandy slope. He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. He walked like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from.
Louis followed in the same way.
He did not look down or search for footholds. It came to him with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to. It was a piece of utter assholery of course, like the stupid confidence of a man who believes its safe to drive when totally shitfaced as long as hes wearing his St. Christophers medallion.
But it worked,
There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes
(Hush Puppy loafers-hardly recommended for climbing dead-falls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.
For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist. The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the.
the barrier. Yes, thats what it was-why try to pretend it wasnt? The barrier.
Louis reached the top himself and paused there momentarily, right foot planted on an old fallen tree that was canted up at a thirty-five-degree angle, left foot on something springier-a mesh of old fir branches? He didnt look down to see, but only switched the heavy trashbag with Churchs body in it from his right hand to his left, exchanging it for the lighter shovel. He turned his face up into the wind and felt it sweep past him in an endless current, lifting his hair. It was so cold, so clean so constant.
Moving casually, almost sauntering, he started down again. Once a branch that felt to be the thickness of a brawny mans wrist snapped loudly under his foot, but he felt no concern at all
-and his plunging foot was stopped firmly by a heavier branch some four inches down. Louis hardly staggered. He supposed that now he could understand how company commanders in World War I had been able to stroll along the top of the trenches with bullets snapping all around them, whistling Tipperary. It was crazy, but the very craziness made it tremendously exhilarating.
He walked down, looking straight ahead at the bright circle of Juds light. Jud was standing there, waiting for him. Then he reached the bottom, and the exhilaration flared up in him like a shot of coal oil on embers.
We made it! he shouted. He put the shovel down and clapped Jud on the shoulder. He remembered climbing an apple tree to the top fork where it swayed in the wind like a ships mast. He had not felt so young or so viscerally alive in twenty years or more. Jud, we made it!
Did you think we wouldnt? Jud asked.
Louis opened