The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better than sixty feet high. It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage, could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.
For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him. Sparks like eyes.
Then the sound began to fade. As it went away, a peeper called hesitantly-one.
It was answered by another. A third joined the conversation; a fourth made it a bull session; a fifth and sixth made it a peeper convention. The sounds of the thing's progress (slow but not blundering; perhaps that was the worst of it, that feeling of sentient progress) were moving away to the north. Little...
less... gone.
At last Louis began to move again. His shoulders and back were a frozen ache of torment. He wore an undergarment of sweat from neck to ankles. The season's first mosquitoes, new-hatched and hungry, found him and sat down to a late snack.
The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo-the creature that moves through the north country, the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal.
That was it. The Wendigo has just passed within sixty yards of me.
He told himself not to be ridiculous, to be like Jud and avoid ideas about what might be seen or heard beyond the Pet Sematary-they were loons, they were St.
Elmo's fire, they were the members of the New York Yankees' bullpen. Let them be anything but the creatures which leap and crawl and slither and shamble in the world between. Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices... but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.
Louis walked on with his son, and the ground began to firm up again under his feet. Only moments later he came to a felled tree, its crown visible in the fading mist like a gray-green feather duster dropped by a giant's housekeeper.
The tree was broken off-splintered off-and the break was so fresh that the yellowish-white pulp still bled sap that was warm to Louis's touch as he climbed over... and on the other side was a monstrous indentation out of which he had to scramble and climb, and although juniper and low pump-laurel bushes had been stamped right into the earth, he would not let himself believe it was a footprint. He could have looked back to see if it had any such configuration once he had climbed beyond and above it, but he would not. He only walked on, skin cold, mouth hot and arid, heart flying.
The squelch of mud under his feet soon ceased. For a while there was the faint cereal sound of pine needles again. Then there was rock. He had nearly reached the end.
The ground began to rise faster. He barked his shin painfully on an outcropping.
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
But this was not just a rock. Louis reached out clumsily with one hand (the strap of his elbow, which had grown numb, screamed briefly) and touched it.
Steps here. Cut into the rock. Just follow me. We get to the top and we're there.
So he began to climb and the exhilaration returned, once more beating exhaustion back... at least a little way. His mind tolled off the steps as he rose into the chill, as he climbed back into that ceaseless river of wind, stronger now, rippling his clothes, making the piece of canvas tarp Gage was wrapped in stutter gunshot sounds like a lifted sail.
He cocked his head back once and saw the mad sprawl of the stars. There were no constellations he recognized, and he looked away again, disturbed. Beside him was the rock wall, not smooth but splintered and gouged and friable, taking here the shape of a boat, here the shape of a badger, here the shape of a man's face with hooded, frowning eyes. Only the steps that had been carved from the rock were smooth.
Louis gained the top and only stood there with his head down, swaying, sobbing breath in and out of his lungs. They felt like cruelly punched bladders, and there seemed to be a large splinter sticking into his side.
The wind ran through his hair like a dancer, roared in his ears like a dragon.
The light was brighter this night; had it been overcast the other time or had he just not been looking? It didn't matter. But he could see, and that was enough to start another chill worming down his back.
It was just like the Pet Sematary.
Of course you knew that, his mind whispered as he surveyed the piles of rocks that had once been cairns. You knew that, or should have known it-not concentric circles but the spiral...
Yes. Here on top of this rock table, its face turned up to cold starlight and to the black distances between the stars, was a gigantic spiral, made by what the old-timers would have called Various Hands. But there were no real cairns, Louis saw; every one of them had been burst apart as something buried beneath returned to life... and clawed its way out. Yet the rocks themselves had fallen in such a way that the shape of the spiral was apparent.