Rachel clung to Dory Goldman and sobbed against her shoulder in an open, let-it-all-go way that had been so far impossible for her with Louis, perhaps because she saw them both as culpable in Gage's death or perhaps because Louis, lost in the peculiar half-world of his own fancies, had not encouraged her grief. Either way, she had turned to her mother for comfort, and Dory was there to give it, mingling her tears with her daughter's. Irwin Goldman stood behind them, his hand on Rachel's shoulder, and looked with sickly triumph across the room at Louis.
Ellie circulated with a silver tray loaded with canapes, little rolls with a feathered toothpick poked through each one. Her picture of Gage was tucked firmly under her arm.
Louis received condolences. He nodded and thanked the condolers. And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave robbing... only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied.
It was not as if he intended to do anything.
Louis stopped at the Orrington Corner Store, bought two six-packs of cold beer, and called ahead to Napoli's for a pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza.
"Want to give me a name on that, sir?"
Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, Louis thought.
"Lou Creed."
"Okay, Lou, we're real busy, so it'll be maybe forty-five minutes-that okay for you?"
"Sure," Louis said and hung up. As he got back into the Civic and keyed the engine, it occurred to him that although there were maybe twenty pizza joints in the Bangor area, he had picked the one closest to Pleasantview, where Gage was buried. Well, what the hell? he thought uneasily. They make good pizza. No frozen dough. Throw it up and catch it on their fists, right there where you can watch, and Gage used to laugh-He cut that thought off.
He drove past Napoli's to Pleasantview. He supposed he had known that he would do that, but what harm? None.
He parked across the street and crossed the road to the wrought-iron gates, which glimmered in the final light of day. Above them, in a semicircle, were wrought-iron letters spelling PLEASANTVIEW. The view was, in Louis's mind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The cemetery was nicely landscaped on several rolling hills; there were long aisles of trees (ah, but in these last few minutes of fading daylight, the shadows those trees threw seemed deeply pooled and as blackly unpleasant as still quarry water) and a few isolated weeping willows. It wasn't quiet. The turnpike was near-the drone of traffic came on the steady, chill wind-and the glow in the darkening sky was Bangor International Airport.
He stretched his hand out to the gate, thinking, They'll be locked, but they were not. Perhaps it was too early to lock them, and if they locked them at all it would only be to protect the place against drunks, vandals, and teenage neckers. The days of the Dickensian Resurrection Men (there's that word again) were over. The right-hand gate swung in with a faint screeing noise, and after a glance over his shoulder to make sure he was unobserved, Louis stepped through.
He closed the gate behind him and heard the click of the latch.
He stood in this modest suburb of the dead, looking around.
A fine and private place, he thought, but none, I think, do there embrace. Who?
Andrew Marvel? And why did the human mind store up such amazing middens of useless junk, anyway?
Jud's voice spoke up in his mind then, worried and-frightened? Yes. Frightened.
Louis, what are you doing here? You're looking up a road you don't want to travel.
He pushed the voice aside. If he was torturing anyone, it was only himself. No one need know he had been here as the daylight wound down to the dark.
He began to walk toward Gage's grave, taking one of the winding paths. In a moment he was in a lane of trees; they rustled their new leaves mysteriously over his head. His heart was thudding too loudly in his chest. The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretaker's building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantview's twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. One-room apartments. Sleepers.
Not much like the Pet Sematary, he thought, and this caused him to stop and consider for a moment, surprised. No, it wasn't. The Pet Sematary had given him an impression of order rising almost unknown out of chaos. Those rough, concentric circles moving inward to the center, rude slates, crosses made out of boards. As if the children who buried their pets there had created the pattern out of their own collective unconsciousness, as if.