Pet Sematary - Stephen King [69]
He told me the same things I told you last night-about the loons, and the St. Elmos fire, and how I wasnt to take any notice of anything I saw or heard. Most of all, he said, dont speak to anything if it should speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I aint going to tell you what,
only that Ive been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and Ive never seen anything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was my last trip.
Im not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally-the three beers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own minds ear. I am not sitting here believing this story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets that come back to life, am I? For Christs sake, the cat was stunned, thats all, a car hit it and stunned it-no big deal. This is a senile old mans maunderings.
Except that it wasnt, and Louis knew it wasnt, and three beers wasnt going to cure that knowing, and thirty-three beers wouldnt.
Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was something fundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened. Jud had repaid what he saw as a favor
but the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, and Louis now saw something in Juds eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he had seen-or thought he had seen-in Juds eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. He remembered thinking that Juds decision to take Louis and Ellies cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Juds own.
If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortable question away.
I buried Spot and built the cairn, Jud went on flatly, and by the time I was done, Stanny B. was fast asleep. I had to shake the hell out of him to get him going again, but by the time we got down those forty-four stairs-
Forty-five, Louis murmured.
Jud nodded. Yeah, thats right, aint it? Forty-five. By the time we got down those forty-five stairs, he was walking as steady as if he was sober again. We went back through the swamp and the woods and over the deadfall, and finally we crossed the road and we was at my house again. It seemed to me like ten hours must have gone past, but it was still full dark.
What happens now? I ask Stanny B. Now you wait and see
what may happen, Stanny says, and off he walks, staggering and lurching again. I imagine he slept out in back of the livery that night, and as things turned out, my dog Spot outlived Stanny B. by two years. His liver went bad and poisoned him, and two little kids found him in the road on July 4, 1912, stiff as a poker.
But me, that night, I just climbed back up the ivy and got into bed and fell asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.
Next morning 1 didnt get up until almost nine oclock, and then my mother was calling me. My dad worked on the railroad, and he would have been gone since six. Jud paused, thinking. My mother wasnt just calling me, Louis. She was screaming for me.
Jud went to the fridge, got himself a Millers, and opened it on the drawer handle below the breadhox and toaster. His face looked yellow in the overhead light, the color of nicotine. He drained half his beer, uttered a belch like a gunshot, and then glanced down the hail toward the room where Norma slept. He looked back at Louis.
This is hard for me to talk about, he said. I have turned it over in my mind, years and years, but Ive never told anyone about it. Others knew what had happened, but they never talked to me about it. The way it is about