Louis looked around and saw that he was momentarily alone with the dying man.
Dimly he could hear Joan Charlton yelling at the candy-stripers that the hard stretcher was in the supply closet off Room Two. Louis doubted if they knew Room Two from a frog's gonads; it was, after all, their first day on the job. They had gotten a hell of an introduction to the world of medicine. The green wall-to-wall carpet was now soaked a muddy purple in an expanding circle around the young man's ruined head; the leakage of intercranial fluid had, mercifully, stopped.
"In the Pet Sematary," the young man croaked... and he began to grin. This grin was remarkably like the mirthless hysterical grin of the candy-striper who had closed the drapes.
Louis stared down at him, at first refusing to credit what he had heard. Then Louis thought he must have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those phonetic sounds and my subconscious made them into something coherent, cross-patched the sounds into my own experience. But that was not what had happened, and a moment later he was forced to realize it. A swooning, mad terror struck him and his flesh began to creep avidly, seeming to actually move up and down his arms and along his belly in waves... but even then he simply refused to believe it Yes, the syllables had been on the bloody lips of the man on the carpet as well as in Louis's ears, but that only meant the hallucination had been visual as well as auditory.
'What did you say?" he whispered.
And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: "It's not the real cemetery." The eyes were vacant, not-seeing, rimmed with blood: the mouth grinning the large grin of a dead carp.
Horror rolled through Louis, gripping his warm heart in its cold hands, squeezing. It reduced him, made him less and less, until he felt like taking to his heels and running from this bloody, twisted, speaking head on the floor of the infirmary waiting room. He was a man with no deep religious training, no bent toward the superstitious or the occult. He was ill-prepared for this...
whatever it was.
Fighting the urge to run with everything in him, be forced himself to lean even closer. "What did you say?" he asked a second time The grin. That was bad.
"The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis," the dying man whispered. "A man grows what he can and tends it."
Louis. he thought, hearing nothing with his conscious mind after his own name.
Oh my God he called me by my name "Who are you?" Louis asked in a trembling, papery voice. "Who are you?"
"Injun bring my fish "How did you know my-" "Keep clear, us. Know-" "You-"
"Caa," the young man said, and now Louis fancied he could smell death on his breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, rein.
"What?" A crazy urge came to shake him.
"Gaaaaaaaa-"
The young man in the red gym shorts began to shudder all over. Suddenly he seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression momentarily and seemed to find Louis's eyes. Then everything let go at once.
There was a bad stink. Louis thought he would, must speak again. Then the eyes resumed their vacant expression... and began to glaze. The man was dead.
Louis sat back, vaguely aware that all his clothes were sticking to him; he was drenched with sweat. Darkness bloomed, spreading a wing softly over his eyes, and the world began to swing sickeningly sideways. Recognizing what was happening, he half-turned from the dead man, thrust his head down between his knees, and pressed the nails of his left thumb and left forefinger into his gums hard enough to bring blood.
After a moment the world began to clear again.
13
Then the room filled up with people, as if they were all only actors, waiting for their cue. This added to Louis's feeling of unreality and disorientation-the strength of these feelings, which he had studied in psychology classes but never actually experienced, frightened him badly. It was, he supposed, the way a person would feel shortly after someone had slipped a powerful dose of LSD into his drink.
Like a play staged only for my benefit, he thought. The room is first conveniently cleared so the dying Sibyl can speak a few lines of oblique prophecy to me and me alone, and as soon as he's dead, everyone comes back.
The candy-stripers bungled in, one on each end of the hard stretcher, the one they used for people with spinal or neck injuries. Joan Charlton followed them, saying that the campus police were on their way. The young man had been struck by a car while jogging. Louis thought of the joggers who had run in front of his car that morning and his guts rolled.
Behind Charlton came Steve Masterton with two Campus Security cops. "Louis, the people who brought Pascow in are... " He broke off and said sharply, "Louis, are you all right?"
"I'm okay," he said and got up. Faintness washed over him again and then withdrew. He groped. "Pascow is his name?"