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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmfollowing the decease of one pharaoh’s daughter—included in the tally had been six hundred pigs andtwo thousand peacocks. The pigs had been scented with attar of roses, the dead lady’s favorite perfume,before their throats were cut.And they built pyramids too. No one knows for sure what the Mayan pyramids are for—navigation andchronography, some say, like Stonehenge—but we know damn well what the Egyptian pyramids wereand are . . . great monuments to death, theworld’s biggest gravestones. Here Lies Ramses II, He Was Obedient, Louis thought and uttered a wild,helpless cackle.Jud looked at him, unsurprised.“Go on and bury your animal,” he said. “I’m gonna have a smoke. I’d help you, but you got to do ityourself. Each buries his own. That’s the way it was done then.”“Jud, what’s this all about? Why did you bring me here?”“Because you saved Norma’s life,” Jud said, and although he sounded sincere—and Louis was positivehe believed himself sincere—he had a sudden, overpowering sense that the man was lying. . . or that hewas being lied to and then passing the lie on to Louis. He remembered that look he had seen, or thoughthe had seen, in Jud’s eye.But up here none of that seemed to matter. The wind mattered more, pushing freely around him in thatsteady river, lifting his hair from his brow and off his ears.Jud sat down with his back against one of the trees, cupped his hands around a match, and lit aChesterfield. “You want to rest a bit before you start?”“No, I’m okay,” Louis said. He could have pursued the questions, but he found he didn’t really care to.This felt wrong but it also felt right, and he decided to let that be enough. . . for now. There was reallyonly one thing he needed to know. “Will I really be able to dig him a grave? The soil looks thin.” Louisnodded toward the place where the rock pushed out of the ground at the edge of the steps.Jud nodded slowly. “Ayuh,” he said. “Soil’s thin, all right. But soil deep enough to grow grass isgenerally deep enough to bury in, Louis. And people have been burying here for a long, long time. Youwon’t find it any too easy, though.”Nor did he. The ground was stony and hard, and very quickly he saw that he was going to need the pickto dig the grave deep enough to hold Church. So he began to alternate, first using the pick to loosen thehard earth and stones, then the shovel to dig out what he had loosened. His hands began to hurt. Hisbody began to warm up again. He felt a strong, unquestionable need to do a good job. He began to humfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (105 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM