There was a knock at the door.
For a long time-it seemed like a long time, anyway-he believed it was only in his head, a hallucination. But the knocking just went on and on, patient, implacable. And suddenly Louis found himself thinking of the story of the monkey's paw, and a cold terror slipped into him. He seemed to feel it with total physical reality-it was like a dead hand that had been kept in a refrigerator, a dead hand which had suddenly taken on its own disembodied life and slipped inside his shirt to clutch the flesh over his heart. It was a silly image, fulsome and silly, but oh, it didn't feel silly. No.
Louis went to the door on feet he could not feel and lifted the latch with nerveless fingers. And as he swung it open, he thought: It'll be Pascow. Like they said about Jim Morrison, back from the dead and bigger than ever. Pascow standing there in his jogging shorts, big as life and as mouldy as month-old bread, Pascow with his horribly ruined head, Pascow bringing the warning again: Don't go up there. What was that old song by the Animals? Baby please don't go, baby PLEASE don't go, you know I love you so, baby please don't go.
The door swung open and standing there on his front step in the blowing dark of this midnight, between the day of the funeral parlor visitation and the day of his son's burial, was Jud Crandall. His thin white hair blew randomly in the chilly dark.
Louis tried to laugh. Time seemed to have turned cleverly back on itself. It was Thanksgiving again. Soon they would put the stiff, unnaturally thickened body of Ellie's cat Winston Churchill into a plastic garbage bag and start off. Oh, do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.
"Can I come in, Louis?" Jud asked. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket and poked one into his mouth.
"Tell you what," Louis said. "It's late and I've been drinking a pile of beer."
"Ayuh, I could smell it," Jud said. He struck a match. The wind snuffed it. He struck another around cupped hands, but the hands trembled and betrayed the match to the wind again. He got a third match, prepared to strike it, and then looked up at Louis standing in the doorway. "I can't get this thing lit," Jud said. "Gonna let me in or not, Louis?"
Louis stepped aside and let Jud walk in.
38
They sat at the kitchen table over beers-first time we've ever tipped one in our kitchen, Louis thought, a little surprised. Halfway across the living room, Ellie had cried out in her sleep, and both of them had frozen like statues in a children's game. The cry had not been repeated.
"Okay," Louis said, "what are you doing over here at quarter past twelve on the morning my son gets buried? You're a friend, Jud, but this is stretching it."
Jud drank, wiped his mouth with the heel of his hand, and looked directly at Louis. There was something clear and positive in his eyes, and Louis at last looked down from it.
"You know why I'm here," Jud said. "You're thinking about things that are not to be thought of, Louis. Worse still, I fear you're considering them."
"I wasn't thinking about anything but going up to bed," Louis said. "I have a burying to go to tomorrow."
"I'm responsible for more pain in your heart than you should have tonight," Jud said softly. "For all I know, I may even have been responsible for the death of your son."
Louis looked up, startled. "What-? Jud, don't talk crazy!"
"You are thinking of trying to put him up there," Jud said. "Don't you deny the thought has crossed your mind, Louis."
Louis did not reply.
"How far does its influence extend?" Jud said. "Can you tell me that? No. I can't answer that question myself, and I've lived my whole life in this patch of the world. I know about the Micmacs, and that place was always considered to be a kind of holy place to them... but not in a good way. Stanny B. told me that.
My father told me too-later on. After Spot died the second time. Now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows, Louis.
Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim ever stuck. Anson Ludlow, the great-grandson of this town's founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But even then he would have been in a hell of a court fight because there was cross-claims to the land by other Ludlows and by a fellow named Peter Dimmart, who claimed he could prove pretty convincingly that he was a Ludlow on the other side of the sheets. And Joseph Ludlow the Elder was money-poor but land-rich toward the end of his life, and every now and then he'd just gift somebody with two or four hundred acres when he got into his cups."