Pet Sematary - Stephen King [79]
Louis uttered a cry of disgust and surprise. He shot both hands out in a primitive warding-off gesture. Church thumped off the bed, landed on its side, and walked away in that stumbling lurch.
Jesus! Jesus! It was on me! Oh God, it was right on me!
His disgust could not have been greater if he had awakened to find a spider in his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up.
Louis!
He pushed the blankets back and stumbled to the stairs. Faint light spilled from their bedroom. Rachel was standing at the head of the stairs in her nightgown.
Louis, hes vomiting again choking on ft Im scared.
Im here, he said and came up to her, thinking: It got in. Somehow it got in. From the cellar, probably. Maybe theres a broken cellar window. In fact there must be a broken window down there. Ill check it tomorrow when 1 get home. Hell, before I go to work. Ill- Gage stopped crying and began to make an ugly, gargling choking sound.
Louis! Rachel screamed.
Louis moved fast. Gage was on his side and vomit was trickling out of his mouth onto an old towel Rachel had spread beside him. He was vomiting, yes, but not enough. Most of it was inside, and Gage was blushing with the onset of asphyxiation.
Louis grabbed the boy under the arms, aware in a distant way of how hot his sons armpits were under the Dr. Denton suit, and put him up on his shoulder as if to burp him. Then Louis snapped himself backward, jerking Cage with him. Gages neck whip-lashed. He uttered a loud bark that was not quite a belch, and an amazing flag of almost solid vomit flew from his mouth and spattered on the floor and the dresser. Cage began to cry again, a
solid, bawling sound that was music to Louiss ears. To cry like that you had to be getting an unlimited supply of oxygen.
Rachels knees buckled and she collapsed onto the bed, head supported in her hands. She was shaking violently. He almost died, didnt he, Louis? He almost ch-ch-ch--oh my God-
Louis walked around the room with his son in his arms. Gages cries were tapering off to whimperings; he was already almost asleep again.
The chances are fifty to one he would have cleared it himself, Rachel. I just gave him a hand.
But he was close, she said. She looked up at him, and her white-ringed eyes were stunned and unbelieving. Louis, he was so close.
Suddenly he remembered her shouting at him in the sunny kitchen: Hes not going to die, no one is going to die around here.
Honey, Louis said, were all close. All the time.
It was milk that had almost surely caused the fresh round of vomiting. Gage had awakened around midnight, she said, an hour or so after Louis had gone to sleep, with his hungry cry, and Rachel had gotten him a bottle. She had drowsed off again herself while he was still taking it. About an hour later, the choking spell began.
No more milk, Louis said, and Rachel had agreed, almost humbly. No more milk.
Louis got back downstairs at around a quarter of two and spent fifteen minutes hunting up the cat. During his search, he found the door which communicated between the kitchen and basement standing ajar, as he suspected he would. He remembered his mother telling him about a cat that had gotten quite good at pawing open old-fashioned latches, such as the one on their cellar door. The cat would just climb the edge of the door, shed said, and pat the thumb plate of the latch with its paw until the door opened. A cute enough trick, Louis thought, but not one he intended to allow Church to practice often. There was, after all, a lock on the cellar door, too. He found Church dozing under the stove and tossed it out the front door without ceremony. On his way back to the hide-a-bed, he closed the cellar door again.
And this time shot the bolt.
29
In the morning, Gages temperature was almost normal. His cheeks were chapped, but otherwise he was bright-eyed and full of beans. All at once, in the course of a week it seemed, his meaningless gabble had turned into a slew of words; he would imitate almost anything you said. What Ellie wanted him to say was shit.
Say shit, Gage, Ellie