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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmAnimals moving around out there. Deer, most likely, but back then there were moose too and bears andcatamounts. I dragged Spot. After a while I started to get the funny idea that old Stanny B. was gone andI was following an Indian. Following an Indian and somewhere farther along he’d turn around, allgrinning and black-eyed, his face streaked up with that stinking paint they made from bearfat; that he’dhave a tommyhawk made out of a wedge of slate and a hake of ashwood all tied together with rawhide,and he’d grab me by the back of the neck and whack off my hair—along with the top of my skull.Stanny wasn’t staggerin or fallin anymore; he just walked straight and easy, with his head up, and thatsort of helped to feed the idea. But when we got to the edge of the Little God Swamp and he turnedaround to talk to me, I seen it was Stanny, all right, and the reason he wasn’t staggerin or fallin anymorewas because he was scared. Scairt himself sober, he did.“He told me the same things I told you last night—about the loons, and the St. Elmo’s fire, and how Iwasn’t to take any notice of anything I saw or heard. Most of all, he said, don’t speak to anything if itshould speak to you. Then we started across the swamp. And I did see something. I ain’t going to tellyou what,only that I’ve been up there maybe five times since that time when I was ten, and I’ve never seenanything like it again. Nor will I, Louis, because my trip to the Micmac burial place last night was mylast trip.”I’m not sitting here believing all of this, am I? Louis asked himself almost conversationally—the threebeers helped him to sound conversational, at least to his own mind’s ear. I am not sitting here believingthis story of old Frenchmen and Indian burying grounds and something called the Wendigo and pets thatcome back to life, am I? For Christ’s sake, the cat was stunned, that’s all, a car hit it and stunned it—nobig deal. This is a senile old man’s maunderings.Except that it wasn’t, and Louis knew it wasn’t, and three beers wasn’t going to cure that knowing, andthirty-three beers wouldn’t.Church had been dead, that was one thing; he was alive now and that was another; there was somethingfundamentally different, fundamentally wrong about him, and that was a third. Something had happened.Jud had repaid what he saw as a favorbut the medicine available at the Micmac burying ground was perhaps not such good medicine, andLouis now saw something in Jud’s eyes that told him the old man knew it. Louis thought of what he hadseen—or thought he had seen—in Jud’s eyes the night before. That capering, gleeful thing. Heremembered thinking that Jud’s decision to take Louis and Ellie’s cat on that particular night journeyhad not entirely been Jud’s own.If not his, then whose? his mind asked. And because he had no answer, Louis swept the uncomfortablequestion away.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (125 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM