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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmforty-two. . . forty-three. . . forty-four.“Forty-five,” Jud said. “I’ve forgot. Haven’t been up here in twelve years, I guess. Don’t suppose I’llever have a reason to come again. Here. . . up you come and up you get.”He grabbed Louis’s arm and helped him up the last step.“We’re here,” Jud said.Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standingon a rocky, rubble strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue.Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach thesteps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird,flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or NewMexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa—or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was—was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bendingbefore the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, not an isolated mesa.Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees. But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in thecontext of New England’s low and somehow tired hills— Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenlyspoke up.“Come on,” Jud said and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but itfelt clean. Louis saw a number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees—trees which were theoldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness—but anemptiness which vibrated.The dark shapes were cairns of stones.“Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here,” Jud said. “No one knows how, no more than anyoneknows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like theMayans have.”“Why? Why did they do it?”“This was their burying ground,” Jud said. “I brought you here so you could bury Ellie’s cat here. TheMicmacs didn’t discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners.”This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better: they had slaughtered the pets ofroyalty so that the souls of the pets might go along to whatever afterlife there might be with the souls oftheir masters. He remembered reading about the slaughter of more than ten thousand domestic animalsfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (104 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM