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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmthere. . . some nights I wake up. . . even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry coughdrops. . . and I think.if I’m not really awake . . . I think ‘Is Zelda dead yet? Is she?’ .I think. .Rachel caught her breath. Louis took her hand and she squeezed his fingers with savage, brillianttightness.“When we changed her you could see the way her back was twisting and knotting. Near the end, Louis,near the end it seemed like her. . . like her ass had somehow gotten all the way up to the middle of herback.”Now Rachel’s wet eyes had taken on the glassy, horrified look of a child remembering a recurrentnightmare of terrible power.“And sometimes she’d touch me with her . . . her hands .her birdy hands . . . and sometimes I’d almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of hersoup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream . . . and Icried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.“Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us couldremember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thingin the back bedroom . . . our dirty secret.”Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.“My parents were gone when she finally . . . when she . you know, when she. . .“With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.“When she died, my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover season, andthey went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in thekitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting -for it to be time to give her some moremedicine because she was screaming. She’d been screaming ever since my folks left, almost. I couldn’tread with her screaming that way. And thensee, what happened was . . . well . . . Zelda stopped screaming. Louis, I was eight. . . bad dreams everynight. . . I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn’t have theconstant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live . . . I started to imagine she wanted tokill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I don’t really think it was all my imagination. I do think shefile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (163 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM