Pet Sematary

over the sidewalk, he pulled himself hand for hand toward the fence.
The branch dipped but showed no sign of breaking. He was faintly aware of his shadow following along on the cement sidewalk below him, an amorphous black ape-shape. The wind chilled his hot armpits, and he found himself shivering in spite of the sweat running down his face and neck. The branch dipped and swayed with his movements. The farther out he moved, the more pronounced the dip became. His hands and wrists were getting tired now, and he was afraid that his sweat-greasy palms might slip.
He reached the fence. His tennis shoes dangled perhaps a foot below the arrow tips. The tips did not look blunt at all from this angle. They looked very sharp. Sharp or not, he suddenly realized it was not just his balls that were at risk here. If he fell and hit one of those things dead on, his weight would be enough to drive it all the way up into his lungs. The returning cops would find an early and extremely grisly Halloween decoration on the Pleasant-view fence.
Breathing fast, not quite gasping, he groped for the fence points with his feet, needing a moment’s rest. For a moment he hung there, his feet moving in an air dance, searching but not finding.
Light touched him and grew.
Oh Christ, that’s a car, there’s a car coming-!
He tried to shuffle his hands forward, but his palms slipped. His interlaced fingers were coming apart.
Still groping for purchase, he turned his head to the left, looking under his straining arm. It was a car, but it shot through the intersection up the street without slowing. Lucky. If it had-His hands slipped again. He felt bark sift down onto his hair. One foot found purchase, but now his other pants leg had caught on one of the arrow points. And Christ, he wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer. Desperately, Louis jerked his leg. The branch dipped. His hands slipped again. There was a mutter of tearing cloth, and then he was standing on two of the arrow points. They dug into the soles of his tennis shoes, and the pressure quickly became painful, but Louis stood on them any-way. The relief in his hands and arms was greater than the pain in his feet.
What a figure I must cut, Louis thought with dim and dismal amusement. Holding the branch with his left hand, he wiped his right hand across his jacket. Then he wiped off the left while he held with the right.
He stood on the points for a moment longer and then slipped his hands forward along the branch. It was slim enough for him to be able to lace his fingers together comfortably now. He swung forward like Tarzan, feet leaving the arrow points. The branch dipped alarmingly, and he heard an ominous cracking sound. He let go, dropping on faith.
He landed badly. One knee thudded against a gravestone, sending a lance of pain up his thigh. He rolled over on the grass, holding the knee, lips skinned back in something like a grin, hoping that he hadn’t shattered his kneecap. At last the pain began to fade a little, and he found that he could flex the joint. It would be all right if he kept moving and didn’t allow it to stiffen up on him.
Maybe.
He got to his feet and started to walk along the fence back toward Mason Street and his equipment. His knee was bad at first, and he limped, but the pain smoothed out to a dull ache as he went. There was aspirin in the Honda’s first-aid kit. He should have remembered to bring that with him. Too late now.
He kept an eye out for cars and faded back deeper into the cemetery when one came.
On the Mason Street side, which was apt to be better traveled, he kept well back from the fence until he was opposite the Civic. He was about to trot down to the fence and pull his bundle out of the bushes when he heard footfalls on the sidewalk and a woman’s low laughter. He sat down behind a large grave marker-it hurt his knee too much to squat-and watched a couple walk up the far side of Mason Street. They were walking with their arms about each other’s waists, and something about their movement from one white pool of light to the next made Louis think of some old TV show. In a moment he had it: “The Jimmy Durante Hour.” What would they do if he rose up now, a wavering shadow in this silent city of the dead, and cried hollowly across to them: “Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!”
They stopped in the pool of light just beyond his car and embraced. Watching them, Louis felt a kind of sick wonder and self-loathing. Here he was, crouched behind a tombstone like a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book story, watching lovers, is the line so thin, then? he wondered, and that thought also had a ring of familiarity. So thin you can simply step over it with this little fuss, muss, and bother? Climb a tree, shinny along a branch, drop into a graveyard,