She heard Pascow's name somewhere else, that's all. My God, you don't raise a kid in a glass box like a... a hamster or some-thing. She heard an item about it on the radio. Or some kid mentioned it to her at school, and her mind stored it away. Even that word she couldn't say-suppose it was a jawbreaker like "discorporated" or "discorporeal," so what? That proves nothing except that the subconscious is exactly the kind of sticky flypaper the Sunday supplements say it is.
She remembered a college psych instructor who had asserted that under the right conditions, your memory could play back the names of every person to whom you had ever been introduced, every meal you had ever eaten, the weather conditions which had obtained on every day of your life. He made a persuasive case for this incredible assertion, telling them that the human mind was a computer with staggering numbers of memory chips-not i6K, or 32K, or 64K, but perhaps as much as one billion K: literally, a thousand billion. And how much might each of these organic "chips" be capable of storing? No one knew. But there were so many of them, he said, that there was no need for any of them to be erasable so they could be re-used. In fact the conscious mind had to turn down the lights on some of them as a protection against informational insanity. "You might not be able to remember where you keep your socks," the psych instructor had said, "if the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica was stored in the adjacent two or three memory cells."
This had produced dutiful laughter from the class.
But this isn't a psych class under good fluorescent lights with all that comforting jargon written on the board and some smartass assistant prof cheerfully blueskying his way through the last fifteen minutes of the period.
Something is dreadfully wrong here and you know it-you feel it. I don't know what it has to do with Pascow, or Gage, or Church, but it has something to do with Louis. What? Is it-Suddenly a thought as cold as a handful of jelly struck her. She picked up the telephone receiver again and groped in the coin-return for her dime. Was Louis contemplating suicide? Was that why he had gotten rid of them, nearly pushed them out the door? Had Ellie somehow had a... a... oh, f**k psychology! Had she had a psychic flash of some sort?
Chapter 8
This time she made the call collect to Jud Crandall. It rang five times...
six... seven. She was about to hang up when his voice, breathless, answered.
"H'lo?"
"Jud! Jud, this is-"
"Just a minute, ma'axn," the operator said. "Will you accept a collect call from Mrs. Louis Creed?"
"Ayuh," Jud said.
"Pardon, sir, is that yes or no?"
"I guess I will," Jud said.
There was a doubtful pause as the operator translated Yankee into American.
Then: "Thank you. Go ahead, ma'am."
"Jud, have you seen Louis today?"
"Today? I can't say I have, Rachel. But I was away to Brewer this mornin, gettin my groceries. Been out in the garden this afternoon, behind the house. Why?"
"Oh, it's probably nothing, but Ellie had a bad dream on the plane and I just thought I'd set her mind at ease if I could."
"Plane?" Jud's voice seemed to sharpen a trifle. "Where are you, Rachel?"
"Chicago," she said. "Ellie and I came back to spend some time with my parents."
"Louis didn't go with you?"
"He's going to join us by the end of the week," Rachel said, and now it was a struggle to keep her voice even. There was something in Jud's voice she didn't like.
"Was it his idea that you should go out there?"
"Well... yes. Jud, what's wrong? Something is wrong, isn't it? And you know something about it."
"Maybe you ought to tell me the child's dream," Jud said after a long pause. "I wish you would."
46
After he and Rachel were done talking, Jud put on his light coat-the day had clouded up and the wind had begun to blow-and crossed the road to Louis's house, pausing on his side of the road to look carefully for trucks before crossing. It was the trucks that had been the cause of all this. The damned trucks.
Except it wasn't.
He could feel the Pet Sematary pulling at him-and something beyond. Where once its voice had been a kind of seductive lullabye, the voice of possible comfort and a dreamy sort of power, it was now lower and more than ominous-it was threatening and grim. Stay out of this, you.
But he would not stay out of it. His responsibility went back too far.
He saw that Louis's Honda Civic was gone from the garage. There was only the big Ford wagon, looking dusty and unused. He tried the back door of the house and found it open.