Pet Sematary - Stephen King [56]
Louis had lost all sense of time or direction, but they did not walk long before Jud stopped again and turned toward him.
Steps here, he said. Cut into rock. Forty-two or forty-four, I disremember which. Just follow me. We get to the top and were there.
He began to climb again, and again Louis followed.
The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoe gritted on a strew of pebbles and stone fragments.
twelve thirteen fourteen.
The wind was sharper, colder, quickly numbing his face. Are we above the treeline? he wondered. He looked up and saw a billion stars, cold lights in the darkness. Never in his life had the stars made him feel so completely small, infinitesimal, without meaning. He asked himself the old question-is there anything intelligent out there?-and instead of wonder, the thought brought a horrid cold feeling, as if he had asked himself what it might be like to eat a handful of squirming bugs.
twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight.
Who carved these, anyway? Indians? The Micmacs? Were they tool-bearing Indians? I'll have to ask Jud. Tool-bearing Indians made him think of fur-bearing animals, and that made him think of that thing that had been moving near them in the woods. One foot stumbled, and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled. Like dry skin thats almost worn out, he thought.
You all right, Louis? Jud murmured.
Im okay, he said, although he was nearly out of breath and his muscles throbbed from the weight of Church in the bag.
forty-two forty-three forty-four.
Forty-five, Jud said. Ive forgot. Havent been up here in twelve years, I guess. Dont suppose Ill ever have a reason to come again. Here up you come and up you get.
He grabbed Louiss arm and helped him up the last step.
Were here, Jud said.
Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standing on a rocky, rubble strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue. Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach the steps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird,
flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or New Mexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa-or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was-was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bending before the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, not an isolated mesa. Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees. But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in the context of New Englands low and somehow tired hills- Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenly spoke up.
Come on, Jud said and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. Louis saw a number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees-trees which were the oldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness-but an emptiness which vibrated.
The dark shapes were cairns of stones.
Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here, Jud said. No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have.
Why? Why did they do it?
This was their burying ground, Jud said. I brought you here so you could bury Ellies cat here. The Micmacs didnt discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners.
This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better: they had slaughtered the pets of royalty so