Stephen King - Pet Sematary

“Mommy?”

Rachel turned slowly to her daughter, and Ellie could hear the tendons in her neck creak. She took her hand away from her mouth.

“Did the man in your dream tell you his first name, Eileen?”

“Mommy, are you all-”

“Did the man in your dream tell you his first name?”

Dory was looking at her daughter and granddaughter as if they might have both gone crazy.

“Yes, but I can’t remember… Mommy, you’re hurrrrting me-”

Rachel looked down and saw that her free hand was clamped around Ellie’s lower forearm like a manacle.

“Was it Victor?”

Ellie drew sharp breath. “Yes, Victor! He said his name was Victor! Mommy, did you dream of him too?”

“Not Paxcow,” Rachel said. “Pascow.”

“That’s what I said. Paxcow.”

“Rachel, what’s wrong?” Dory said. She took Rachel’s free hand and winced at its chill. “And what’s wrong with Eileen?”

“It’s not Eileen,” Rachel said. “It’s Louis, I think. Something is wrong with Louis. Or something is going to be wrong. Sit with Ellie, Mom. I want to call home.”

She got up and crossed to the telephones, digging in her purse for a quarter.

She made the call collect, but there was no one to accept the charges. The phone simply rang.

“Will you try your call later?” the operator asked her.

“Yes,” Rachel said and hung up.

She stood there, staring at the phone.

He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was… that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis-dis-I can’t remember!

“Discorporated,” Rachel whispered. Her fingers dug at the fabric of her handbag.

“Oh my God, was that the word?”

She tried to catch at her thoughts, to arrange them. Was something going on here, something beyond their natural upset at Gage’s death and this queer cross-country trip that was so much like flight? How much had Ellie known about the young man who had died on Louis’s first day at work?

Nothing, her mind answered inexorably. You kept it from her, the way you tried to keep anything from her that had to do with death-even the possible death of her cat, remember the dumb, stupid argument we had that day in the pantry? You kept it from her. Because you were scared then and you’re scared now. His name was Pascow, Victor Pascow, and how desperate is the situation now, Rachel? How bad is this? What in the name of God is happening?

Her hands were trembling so badly that it took her two tries to redeposit her quarter. This time she called the infirmary at the university and got Chariton, who accepted the call, a little mystified. No, she hadn’t seen Louis and would have been surprised if he had come in today. That said, she offered her sympathies to Rachel again. Rachel accepted them and then asked Chariton to have Louis call her at her folks’ house if he did come in. Yes, he had the number, she answered Charlton’s question, not wanting to tell the nurse (who probably knew anyway; she had a feeling that Chariton didn’t miss much) that her folks’ house was half the continent away.

She hung up, feeling hot and trembly.

She heard Pascow’s name somewhere else, that’s all. My God, you don’t raise a kid in a glass box like a… a hamster or some-thing. She heard an item about it on the radio. Or some kid mentioned it to her at school, and her mind stored it away. Even that word she couldn’t say-suppose it was a jawbreaker like “discorporated” or “discorporeal,” so what? That proves nothing except that the subconscious is exactly the kind of sticky flypaper the Sunday supplements say it is.

She remembered a college psych instructor who had asserted that under the right conditions, your memory could play back the names of every person to whom you had ever been introduced, every meal you had ever eaten, the weather conditions which had obtained on every day of your life. He made a persuasive case for this incredible assertion, telling them that the human mind was a computer with staggering numbers of memory chips-not i6K, or 32K, or 64K, but perhaps as much as one billion K: literally, a thousand billion. And how much might each of these organic “chips” be capable of storing? No one knew. But there were so many of them, he said, that there was no need for any of them to be erasable so they could be re-used. In fact the conscious mind had to turn down the lights on some of them as a protection against informational insanity. “You might not be able to remember where you keep your socks,” the psych instructor had said, “if the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica was stored in the adjacent two or three memory cells.”

This had produced dutiful laughter from the class.

But this isn’t a psych class under good fluorescent lights with all that comforting jargon written on the board and some smartass assistant prof cheerfully blueskying his way through the last fifteen minutes of the period.

Something is dreadfully wrong here and you know it-you feel it. I don’t know what it has to do with Pascow, or Gage, or Church, but it has something to do with Louis. What? Is it-Suddenly a thought as cold as a handful of jelly struck her. She picked up the telephone receiver again and groped in the coin-return for her dime. Was Louis contemplating suicide? Was that why he had gotten rid of them, nearly pushed them out the door? Had Ellie somehow had a… a… oh, fuck psychology! Had she had a psychic flash of some sort?

This time she made the call collect to Jud Crandall. It rang five times…

six… seven. She was about to hang up when his voice, breathless, answered.

“H’lo?”

“Jud! Jud, this is-”

“Just a minute, ma’axn,” the operator said. “Will you accept a collect call from Mrs. Louis Creed?”

“Ayuh,” Jud said.

“Pardon, sir, is that yes or no?”

“I guess I will,” Jud said.

There was a doubtful pause as the operator translated Yankee into American.

Then: “Thank you. Go ahead, ma’am.”

“Jud, have you seen Louis today?”

“Today? I can’t say I have, Rachel. But I was away to Brewer this mornin, gettin my groceries. Been out in the garden this afternoon, behind the house. Why?”

“Oh, it’s probably nothing, but Ellie had a bad dream on the plane and I just thought I’d set her mind at ease if I could.”

“Plane?” Jud’s voice seemed to sharpen a trifle. “Where are you, Rachel?”

“Chicago,” she said. “Ellie and I came back to spend some time with my parents.”

“Louis didn’t go with you?”

“He’s going to join us by the end of the week,” Rachel said, and now it was a struggle to keep her voice even. There was something in Jud’s voice she didn’t like.

“Was it his idea that you should go out there?”

“Well… yes. Jud, what’s wrong? Something is wrong, isn’t it? And you know something about it.”

“Maybe you ought to tell me the child’s dream,” Jud said after a long pause. “I wish you would.”

After he and Rachel were done talking, Jud put on his light coat-the day had clouded up and the wind had begun to blow-and crossed the road to Louis’s house, pausing on his side of the road to look carefully for trucks before crossing. It was the trucks that had been the cause of all this. The damned trucks.

Except it wasn’t.

He could feel the Pet Sematary pulling at him-and something beyond. Where once its voice had been a kind of seductive lullabye, the voice of possible comfort and a dreamy sort of power, it was now lower and more than ominous-it was threatening and grim. Stay out of this, you.

But he would not stay out of it. His responsibility went back too far.