She paid her check and went back out to where she had parked the Chevette. It wouldn't start. The key, when turned, would cause the solenoid to utter a dry click, but that was all.
Rachel began to beat her fists slowly and forcelessly against the steering wheel. Something was trying to stop her. There was no reason for this car, brand-new and with less than five thousand miles on its odometer, to have died like this, but it had. Somehow it had, and here she was, stranded in Pittsfield, still almost fifty miles from home.
She listened to the steady drone of the big trucks, and it came to her with a sudden, vicious certainty that the truck which had killed her son was here among them... not muttering but chuckling.
Rachel lowered her head and began to cry.
57
Louis stumbled over something and fell full-length on the ground. For a moment he didn't think he would be able to get up-getting up was far beyond him-he would simply lie here, listening to the chorus of peepers from Little God Swamp somewhere behind him and feeling the chorus of aches and pains inside his own body. He would lie here until he went to sleep.
Or died. Probably the latter.
He could remember slipping the canvas bundle into the hole he had dug, and pushing most of the earth back into the hole with his bare hands. And he believed he could remember piling the rocks up, building from a broad base to a point.
From then to now he remembered very little. He had obviously gotten back down the steps again or he wouldn't be here, which was... where? Looking around, he thought he recognized one of the groves of great old pines not far beyond the deadfall. Could he have made it all the way back through Little God Swamp without knowing it? He supposed it was possible. Just.
This is far enough. I'll just sleep here.
But it was that thought, so falsely comforting, that got him to his feet and moving again. Because if he stayed here, that thing might find him... that thing might be in the woods and looking for him right this moment.
He scrubbed his hand up to his face, palm first, and was stupidly surprised to see blood on his hand... at some point he'd given himself a nosebleed. "Who gives a f**k?" he muttered hoarsely and grubbed apathetically around him until he had found the pick and shovel again.
Ten minutes later the deadfall loomed ahead. Louis climbed it, stumbling repeatedly but somehow not falling until he was almost down. Then he glanced at his feet, a branch promptly snapped (don't look down, Jud had said), another branch tumbled, spilling his foot outward, and he fell with a thud on his side, the wind knocked out of him.
I'll be goddamned if this isn't the second graveyard I've fallen into tonight...
. and I'll be goddamned if two isn't enough.
He began to feel around for the pick and shovel again, and laid his hands on them at last. For a moment he surveyed his surroundings, visible by starlight.
Nearby was the grave of SMUCKY. He was obediant, Louis thought wearily. And TRIXIE, KILT ON THE HIGHWAY. The wind still blew strongly, and he could hear the faint ting-ting-ting of a piece of metal-perhaps it had once been a Del Monte can, cut laboriously by a grieving pet owner with his father's tinsnips and then flattened out with a hammer and nailed to a stick-and that brought the fear back again. He was too tired now to feel it as more than a somehow sickening pulsebeat. He had done it. That steady ting-ting-ting sound coming out of the darkness brought it home to him more than anything else.
He walked through the Pet Sematary, past the grave of MARTA OUR PET RABIT who had DYED MARCH 1 1965, and near the barrow of GEN. PATTON; he stepped over the ragged chunk of board that marked the final resting place of POLYNESIA. The tick of metal was louder now, and he paused, looking down. Here atop a slightly leaning board that had been driven into the ground, was a tin rectangle, and by starlight Louis read, RINGO OUR HAMSTER, 1964-1965. It was this piece of tin that was ticking repeatedly off the boards of the Pet Sematary's entry arch.
Louis reached down to bend the piece of tin back... and then froze, scalp crawling.
Something was moving back there. Something was moving on the other side of the deadfall.
What he heard was a stealthy kind of sound-the furtive crackle of pine needles, the dry pop of a twig, the rattle of underbrush. They were almost lost under the sough of the wind through the pines.
"Gage?" Louis called hoarsely.
The very realization of what he was doing-standing here in the dark and calling his dead son-pulled his scalp stiff and brought his hair up on end. He began to shudder helplessly and steadily, as if with a sick and killing fever.
"Gage?"
The sounds had died away.
Not yet; it's too early. Don't ask me how I know, but I do. That isn't Gage over there. That's... something else.