Pet Sematary

All was silent except for the faint hum of late traffic on Hammond Street.
There had to be a way to get in there.
Had to be.
Come on, Louis, face the facts. You may be crazy, hut you’re not that crazy.
Maybe you could shinny up to the top of that fence, but it would take a trained gymnast to swing over those points without sticking himself on them. And even supposing you can get in, how are you going to get yourself and Gage’s body out?
He went on walking, vaguely aware that he was circling the cemetery but not doing anything constructive.
All right, here’s the answer. I’ll just go on home to Ludlow tonight and come back tomorrow, in the late afternoon… I’ll go in through the gate around four o’clock and find a place to hole up until it’s midnight or a little later. I will, in other words, put off until tomorrow what I should have been smart enough to think of today.
Good idea, 0 Great Swami Louis… and in the meantime, what do I do about that great big bundle of stuff 1 threw over the wall? Pick, shovel, flashlight…
you might as well stamp GRAVE-ROBBING EQUIPMENT on every damn piece of it.
It landed in the bushes. Who’s going to find it, for Chrissake?
On measure that made sense. But this was no sensible errand he was on, and his heart told him quietly and absolutely that he couldn’t come back tomorrow. If he didn’t do it tonight, he would never do it. He would never be able to screw himself up to this crazy pitch again. This was the moment, the only time for it he was ever going to have.
There were fewer houses up this way-an occasional square of yellow light gleamed on the other side of the street, and once he saw the gray-blue flicker of a black-and-white TV-and looking through the fence he saw that the graves were older here, more rounded, sometimes leaning forward or backward with the freezes and thaws of many seasons. There was another stop sign up ahead, and another right turn would put him on a street roughly parallel to Mason Street, where he had begun. And when he got back to the beginning, what did he do? Collect two hundred dollars and go around again? Admit defeat?
Car headlights turned down the street. Louis stepped behind another tree, waiting for it to pass. This car was moving very slowly, and after a moment a white spotlight stabbed out from the passenger side and ran flickering along the wrought-iron fence. His heart squeezed painfully in his chest. It was a police car, checking the cemetery.
He pressed himself tight against the tree, the rough bark against his cheek, hoping madly that it was big enough to shield him. The spotlight ran toward him.
Louis put his head down, trying to shield the white blur of his face. The spotlight reached the tree, disappeared for a moment, and then reappeared on Louis’s right. He slipped around the tree a little. He had a momentary glimpse of the dark bubbles on the cruiser’s roof. He waited for the taillights to flare a brighter red, for the doors to open, for the spotlight to suddenly turn back on its ball joint, hunting for him like a big white finger. Hey, you! You behind that tree! Come on out where we can see you, and we want to see both hands empty! Come out NOW!
The police car kept on going. It reached the corner, signaled with sedate propriety, and turned left. Louis collapsed back against the tree, breathing fast, his mouth sour and dry. He supposed they would cruise past his parked Honda, but that didn’t really matter. Parking from 6 P. M. to 7 A. M. was legal on Mason Street. There were plenty of other cars parked along it. Their owners would belong to the scattering of apartment buildings on the other side of the street.
Louis found himself glancing up at the tree he had hidden behind.
Just above his head, the tree forked. He supposed he could-Without allowing himself to think about it further, he reached into the fork and pulled himself up, scrambling with his tennis shoes for purchase, sending a little shower of bark down to the sidewalk. He got a knee up and a moment later he had one foot planted solidly in the crotch of the elm. If the police car should happen to come back, their spotlight would find an extremely peculiar bird in this tree.
He ought to move quickly.
He pulled himself up onto a higher branch, one which overhung the very top of the fence. He felt absurdly like the twelve-year-old he supposed he had once been. The tree was not still; it rocked easily, almost soothingly, in the steady wind. Its leaves rustled and murmured. Louis assessed the situation and then, before he could get cold feet, he dropped off into space, holding on to the branch with his hands laced together over it. The branch was perhaps a little thicker than a brawny man’s forearm. With his sneakers dangling about eight feet