Twice-maybe three times-on the walk up to the Pet Sematary that night Louis tried to talk to Jud, but Jud didn't answer. Louis gave up. That feeling of contentment, odd under the circumstances but a pure fact, persisted. It seemed to come from everywhere. The steady ache in his muscles from carrying Church in one hand and the shovel in the other was a part of it. The wind, deadly cold, numbing exposed skin, was a part of it; it wound steadily in the trees. Once they got into the woods, there was no snow to speak of. The bobbing light of Jud's flash was a part of it. He felt the pervasive, undeniable, magnetic presence of some secret. Some dark secret.
The shadows fell away and there was a feeling of space. Snow shone pallidly.
"Rest here," Jud said, and Louis set the bag down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with his arm. Rest here? But they were here. He could see the markers in the moving, aimless sweep of Jud's light as Jud sat down in the thin snow and put his face between his arms.
"Jud? Are you all right?"
"Fine. Need to catch my breath a bit, that's all."
Louis sat down next to him and deep-breathed half a dozen times.
"You know," he said, "I feel better than I have in maybe six years. I know that's a crazy thing to say when you're burying your daughter's cat, but it's the flat truth, Jud. I feel good."
Jud breathed deeply once or twice himself. "Yeah, I know," he said. "It is that way once in a while. You don't pick your times for feeling good, any more than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it too, but you don't want to trust that. Heroin makes dope addicts feel good when they're putting it in their arms, but all the time it's poisoning them. Poisoning their bodies and poisoning their way of thinking. This place can be like that, Louis, and don't you ever forget it. I hope to God I'm doing right. I think I am, but I can't be sure. Sometimes my head gets muddled. It's senility coming, I think."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"This place has power, Louis. Not so much here, but... the place we're going."
"Jud-"
"Come on," Jud said and was on his feet again. The flashlight's beam illuminated the deadfall. Jud was walking toward it. Louis suddenly remembered his episode of somnambulism. What was it Pascow had said in the dream that had accompanied it?
Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken.
But now, tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had been seemed years rather than months distant. Louis felt fine and fey and alive, ready to cope with anything, and yet full of wonder. It occurred to him that this was very much like a dream.
Then Jud turned toward him, the hood seeming to surround a blankness, and for one moment Louis imagined that it was Pascow himself who now stood before him, that the shining light would be reversed, trained on a grinning, gibbering skull framed in fur, and his fear returned like a dash of cold water.
"Jud," he said, "we can't climb over that. We'll each break a leg and then probably freeze to death trying to get back."
"Just follow me," Jud said. "Follow me and don't look down. Don't hesitate and don't look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure."
Louis began to think that perhaps it was a dream, that he had simply never awakened from his afternoon nap. If I was awake, he thought, I'd no more head up that deadfall than I'd get drunk and go skydiving. But I'm going to do it. I really think I am. So I must be dreaming. Right?
Jud angled slightly left, away from the center of the deadfall. The flash's beam centered brightly on the jumbled heap of (bones) fallen trees and old logs. The circle of light grew smaller and even brighter as they approached. Without the slightest pause, without even a brief scan to assure himself that he was in the right place, Jud started up. He did not scramble; he did not climb bent over, the way a man will climb a rocky hillside or a sandy slope. He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. He walked like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from.
Louis followed in the same way.
He did not look down or search for footholds. It came to him with a strange but total surety that the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to. It was a piece of utter ass**lery of course, like the stupid confidence of a man who believes it's safe to drive when totally shitfaced as long as he's wearing his St. Christopher's medallion.
But it worked, There was no pistol-shot snap of an old branch giving way, no sickening plunge into a hole lined with jutting, weather-whitened splinters, each one ready to cut and gore and mangle. His shoes (Hush Puppy loafers-hardly recommended for climbing dead-falls) did not slip on the old dry moss which had overgrown many of the fallen trees. He pitched neither forward nor backward. The wind sang wildly through the fir trees all around them.
For a moment he saw Jud standing on top of the deadfall, and then he began down the far side, calves dropping out of sight, then thighs, then hips and waist.
The light bounced randomly off the whipping branches of the trees on the other side of the.