Pet Sematary - Stephen King [90]
She looked at him, amazed almost hopeful. Then distrust stole back into her face. Youre making that up.
He smiled grimly. Want me to show you the textbooks? How about the suicide statistics? Want to see those? In families where a terminal patient has been nursed at home, the suicide statistics spike right up into the stratosphere in the six months following the patients death.
Suicide!
They swallow pills, or sniff a pipe, or blow their brains out. Their hate their weariness their disgust their sorrow He shrugged and brought his closed fists gently together. The survivors start feeling as if theyd committed murder. So they step out.
A crazy, wounded kind of relief had crept into Rachels puffy face. She was demanding hateful. Sometimes shed piss in her bed deliberately. My mother would ask her if she wanted help getting to the bathroom and later, when she couldnt get up anymore, if she wanted the bedpan and Zelda would say no and then shed piss the bed so my mother or my mother and I would have to change the sheets and shed say it was an accident, but you could see the smile in her eyes, Louis. You could see it. The room always smelled of piss and her drugs
she had bottles of some dope that smelled like Smith Brothers Wild Cherry cough drops and that smell was always
there some nights I wake up even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry cough drops and I think.
if Im not really awake I think Is Zelda dead yet? Is she?.I think..
Rachel caught her breath. Louis took her hand and she squeezed his fingers with savage, brilliant tightness.
When we changed her you could see the way her back was twisting and knotting. Near the end, Louis, near the end it seemed like her like her ass had somehow gotten all the way up to the middle of her back.
Now Rachels wet eyes had taken on the glassy, horrified look of a child remembering a recurrent nightmare of terrible power.
And sometimes shed touch me with her her hands.
her birdy hands and sometimes Id almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of her soup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream and I cried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.
Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom our dirty secret.
Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.
My parents were gone when she finally when she. you know, when she
With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.
When she died, my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover season, and they went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in the kitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting -for it to be time to give her some more medicine because she was screaming. Shed been screaming ever since my folks left, almost. I couldnt read with her screaming that way. And then
see, what happened was well Zelda stopped screaming. Louis, I was eight bad dreams every night I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didnt have the constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live I started to imagine she wanted to kill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I dont really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I dont really
think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way turned me out of it like in a fairy story
I think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was all right to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in and I looked at her and I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis-Rachels voice rose again, teary and frighteningly