Pet Sematary

accept that. You may be a stupid old fart, Irwin, but perhaps the nightmare that passed between your two daughters on that April day in 1965 taught you something about sensitivity.
She needs me, but I can’t come, because I’m afraid-so terribly afraid-that my hands are filthy with her mother’s blood.
Louis regarded those hands. Louis regarded the dirt under his nails, which was so like the dirt which comprised those footprints on the kitchen floor.
“All right,” he said, “I understand. We’ll be there as soon as we can, Irwin. By tonight, if that’s possible. Thank you.”
“We did the best we could,” Goldman said. “Maybe we’re too old. Maybe, Louis, maybe we always were.”
“Did she say anything else?” Louis asked.
Goldman’s reply was like the toll of a funeral bell against the wall of his heart. “A lot, but only one other thing I could make out: ‘Paxcow says it’s too late.”
He hung up the telephone and moved back toward the stove in a daze, apparently meaning to continue on with breakfast or put the things away, he didn’t know which, and about halfway across the kitchen a wave of faintness poured over him, floating gray overcame his sight, and he swooned to the floor-”swoon” was the right word because it seemed to take forever. He fell down and down through cloudy depths; it seemed to him that he turned over and over, looped the loop, did a dipsy doodle or two, slipped an Immelmann. Then he struck on his bad knee and the chromium bolt of pain through his head brought him back with a scream of agony. For a moment he could only crouch, the tears starting from his eyes.
At last he made it back to his feet and stood there, swaying. But his head was clear again. That was something. wasn’t it?
The urge to flee came on him again for the last time, stronger than ever-he actually felt the comforting bulge of his car keys in his pocket. He would get in the Civic and drive to Chicago. He would get Ellie and go on from there. Of course by then Goldman would know something was wrong, that something was dreadfully amiss, but he would get her anyway… snatch her, if he had to.
Then his hand fell away from the bulge of the keys. What killed the urge was not a sense of futility, not guilt, not despair or the deep weariness inside him. It was the sight of those muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. In his mind’s eye he could see them tracing a path across the entire country-first to Illinois, then to Florida-across the entire world, if necessary. What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you.
There would come a day when he would open a door and there would be Gage, a demented parody of his former self, grinning a sunken grin, his clear blue eyes gone yellow and smart-stupid. Or Ellie would open the bathroom door for her morning shower, and there would be Gage in the tub, his body crisscrossed with the faded scars and bulges of his fatal accident, clean but stinking of the grave.
Oh yes, that day would come-he didn’t doubt it a bit.
“How could I have been so stupid?” he said to the empty room, talking to himself again, not caring. “How?”
Grief, not stupidity, Louis. There is a difference… small, but vital. The battery that burying ground survives on. Growing in power, Jud said, and of course he was right-and you’re part of its power now. It has fed on your grief.
… no, more than that. It’s doubled it, cubed it, raised it to the nth power.
And it isn’t just grief it feeds on. Sanity. It’s eaten your sanity. The flaw is only the inability to accept, not uncommon. It’s cost you your wife, and it’s almost surely cost you your best friend as well as your son. This is it. What comes when you’re too slow wishing away the thing that knocks on your door in the middle of the night is simple enough: total darkness.
I would commit suicide now, he thought, and I suppose it’s in the cards, isn’t it? I have the equipment in my bag. It has managed everything, managed it from the first. The burying ground, the Wendigo, whatever it is. It forced our cat into the road, and perhaps it forced Gage into the road as well, it brought Rachel home, but only in its own good time. Surely I’m meant to do that and I want to.
But things have to be put right, don’t they?
Yes. They did.
There was Gage to think about. Gage was still out there. Somewhere.
He followed the footprints through the dining room and the living room and back up the stairs. They were smudged there because he had walked over them on his way down without seeing them. They led into the bedroom. He was here, Louis thought wonderingly, he was right here, and then he saw that his medical bag was unsnapped.
The contents inside, which he always arranged with careful neatness, were now in jumbled disorder. But it did not take