Pet Sematary

so she told Louis; it had actually been years, eight of them) afterward she would awaken from nightmares in which her sister died over and over again, and in the dark Rachel’s hands would fly to her back to make sure it was all right. In the frightful aftermath of these dreams she often thought that the closet door would bang open and Zelda would lurch out, blue and twisted, her eyes rolled up to shiny whites, her black tongue puffing out through her lips, her hands hooked into claws to murder the murderer cowering in her bed with her hands jammed into the small of her back.
She had not attended Zelda’s funeral or any funeral since.
“If you’d told me this before,” Louis said, “it would have explained a hell of a lot.”
“Lou, I couldn’t,” she said simply. She sounded very sleepy now. “Since then I’ve been… I guess a little phobic on the subject.”
Just a little phobic, Louis thought. Yeah, right.
“I can’t… seem to help it. In my mind I know you’re right, that death is perfectly natural-good, even-but what my mind knows and what happens… inside me…
“Yeah,” he said.
“That day I blew up at you,” she said, “I knew that Ellie was just crying over the idea… a way of getting used to it… but I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry, Louis.”
“No apology needed,” he said, stroking her hair. “But what the hell, I accept it anyway, if it’ll make you feel better.”
She smiled. “It does, you know. And I feel better. I feel as if I just sicked up something that’s poisoned part of me for years.”
“Maybe you have.”
Rachel’s eyes slipped closed and then opened again.
slowly. “And don’t blame it all on my father, Louis. Please. That was a terrible time for them. The bills-Zelda’s bills-were sky-high. My dad had missed his chance to expand into the suburbs, and the sales in the downtown store were off.
On top of that, my mother was half-crazy herself.
“Well, it all worked out. It was as if Zelda’s death was the signal for good times to come around again. There had been a recession, but then the money loosened up and Daddy got his loan, and since then he’s never looked back. But that’s why they’ve always been possessive of me, I think. It’s not just because I’m the only one left-”
“It’s guilt,” Louis said.
“Yes, I suppose. And you won’t be mad at me if I’m sick when they bury Norma?”
“No, honey, I won’t be mad.” He paused and then took her hand. “May I take Ellie?”
Her hand tightened in his. “Oh, Louis, I don’t know,” she said. “She’s so young-”
“She’s known where babies come from for a year or more,” he reminded her again.
She was quiet for a long time, looking up at the ceiling and biting her lips.
“If you think it’s best,” she said finally. “If you think it won’t… won’t hurt her.”
“Come over here, Rachel,” he said, and that night they slept back-to-stomach in Louis’s bed, and when she woke up trembling in the middle of the night, the Valium worn off, he soothed her with his hands and whispered in her ear that everything was okay, and she slept again.

“For man-and woman-is like the flowers in the valley, which bloom today and are tomorrow cast into the oven: the time of man is but a season; it cometh, and so it passeth away. Let us pray.”
Ellie, resplendent in a navy blue dress bought especially for the occasion, dropped her head so abruptly that Louis, sitting next to her in the pew, heard her neck creak. Ellie had been in few churches, and of course it was her first funeral; the combination had awed her to unaccustomed silence.
For Louis, it had been a rare occasion with his daughter. Mostly blinded by his love for her, as he was by his love for Gage, he rarely observed her in a detached way; but today he thought he was seeing what was almost a textbook case of the child nearing the end of life’s first great developmental stage; an organism of almost pure curiosity, storing up information madly in almost endless circuits. Ellie had been quiet even when Jud, looking strange but elegant in his black suit and lace-up shoes (Louis believed it was the first time he had ever seen him in anything but loafers or green rubber boots), had bent over, kissed her, and said: “Glad you could come, honey. And I bet Norma is too.”
Ellie had gazed at him, wide-eyed.
Now the Methodist minister, Reverend Laughlin, was pronouncing the benediction, asking God to lift up His countenance upon them and give them peace.
“Will the pallbearers come forward?” he asked.
Louis started to rise, and Ellie halted him, tugging his arm frantically. She looked scared. “Daddy!” she stage-whispered. “Where are you going?”
“I’m one of the pallbearers,