Pet Sematary

he could not. Things looked right, but they weren’t right. The house seemed dreadfully empty, and last night’s work weighed on him. Things were wrong, awry; he felt a shadow hovering, and he was afraid.
He limped into the bathroom and took a couple of aspirin with a glass of orange juice. He was working his way back to the stove when the telephone rang.
He did not answer it immediately but turned and looked at it, feeling slow and stupid, a sucker in some game which he was only now realizing he did not understand in the least.
Don’t answer that, you don’t want to answer that because that’s the bad news, that’s the end of the leash that leads around the corner and into the darkness, and I don’t think you want to see what’s on the other end of that leash, Louis, I really don’t think you do, so don’t answer that phone, run, run now, the car’s in the garage, get in it and take off, but don’t answer that phone-He crossed the room and picked it up, standing there with one hand on the dryer as he had so many times before, and it was Irwin Goldman, and even as Irwin said hello Louis saw the tracks crossing the kitchen-small, muddy tracks-and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest, and he believed he could feel his eyeballs swelling in his head, starting from their sockets; he believed that if he could have seen himself in a mirror at that moment he would have seen a face out of a seventeenth-century painting of a lunatic asylum. They were Gage’s tracks, Gage had been here, he had been here in the night, and so where was he now?
“It’s Irwin, Louis… Louis? Are you there? Hello?”
“Hello, Irwin,” he said, and already he knew what Irwin was going to say. He understood the blue car. He understood everything. The leash… the leash going into the darkness… he was moving fast along it now, hand over hand.
Ah, if he could drop it before he saw what was at the end! But it was his leash.
He had bought it.
“For a moment I thought we’d been cut off,” Goldman was saying.
“No, the phone slipped out of my hand,” Louis said. His voice was calm.
“Did Rachel make it home last night?”
“Oh yes,” Louis said, thinking of the blue car, Church perched on top of it, the blue car that was so still. His eye traced the muddy footprints on the floor.
“I ought to speak to her,” Goldman said. “Right away. It’s about Eileen.”
“Ellie? What about Ellie?”
“I really think Rachel-”
“Rachel’s not here right now,” Louis said harshly. “She’s gone to the store for bread and milk. What about Ellie? Come on, Irwin!”
“We had to take her to the hospital,” Goldman said reluctantly. “She had a bad dream or a whole series of them. She was hysterical and wouldn’t come out of it.
She-”
“Did they sedate her?”
“What?”
“Sedation,” Louis said impatiently, “did they give her sedation?”
“Yes, oh yes. They gave her a pill, and she went back to sleep.”
“Did she say anything? What scared her so badly?” He was gripping the phone white-knuckled now.
Silence from Irwin Goldman’s end-a long silence. This time Louis did not interrupt, much as he would have liked to.
“That was what scared Dory so badly,” Irwin said finally. “She babbled a lot before she got… before she was crying too hard to understand. Dory herself was almost… you know.”
“What did she say?”
“She said Oz the Great and Terrible had killed her mother. Only she didn’t say it that way. She said… she said ‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,’ which was the way our other daughter always used to say it. Our daughter Zelda. Louis, believe me when I say I would much rather have asked Rachel this question, but how much have you and she told Eileen about Zelda and how she died?”
Louis had closed his eyes; the world seemed to be rocking gently under his feet, and Goldman’s voice had the lost quality of a voice coming through thick mists.
You may hear sounds like voices, but they are only the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries.
“Louis, are you there?”
“Is she going to be all right?” Louis asked, his own voice distant. “Is Ellie going to be all right? Did you get a prognosis?”
“Delayed shock from the funeral,” Goldman said. “My own doctor came. Lathrop. A good man. Said she had a degree of fever and that when she woke up this afternoon, she might not even remember. But I think Rachel should come back.
Louis, I am frightened. I think you should come back too.”
Louis did not respond. The eye of God was on the sparrow; so said good King James. Louis, however, was a lesser being, and his eye was on those muddy footprints.
“Louis, Gage is dead,” Goldman was saying. “I know that must be hard to accept-for you and Rachel both-but your daughter is very much alive, and she needs you.”
Yes, I