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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmhated me. I don’t reallythink she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way. . . turned me out ofit like in a fairy storyI think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was allright. . . to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in and I looked at herand I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis”—Rachel’svoice rose again, teary and frighteningly childish, as if she were regressing, reliving the experience—”Louis, I didn’t know what to do! I was eight!”“No, of course you didn’t,” Louis said. He turned to her and hugged her, and Rachel gripped him withthe panicky strength of a poor swimmer whose boat has suddenly overturned in the middle of a largelake. “Did someone actually give you a hard time about it, babe?”“No,” she said, “no one blamed me. But nobody could make it better either. No one could change it. Noone could make it an unhappening, Louis. She hadn’t swallowed her tongue. She started making asound, a kind of, I don’t know—gaaaaaa—like that—”In her distressed, total recall of that day she did a more than creditable imitation of the way her sisterZelda must have sounded, and Louis’s mind Bashed to Victor Pascow. His grip on his wife tightened.“—and there was spit, spit coming down her chin—”“Rachel, that’s enough,” he said, not quite steadily. “I am aware of the symptoms.”“I’m explaining,” she said stubbornly. “I’m explaining why I can’t go to poor Norma’s funeral, for onething, and why we had that stupid fight that day—”“Shh—that’s forgotten.”“Not by me, it isn’t,” she said. “I remember it well, Louis. I remember it as well as I remember my sisterZelda choking to death in her bed on April 14, 1965.”For a long moment there was silence in the room.“I turned her over on her belly and thumped her back,” Rachel went on at last. “It’s all I knew to do. Herfeet were beating up and down . . . and her twisted legs . . . and I remember there was a sound likefarting . . . I thought she was farting or I was, but it wasn’t farts, it was the seams under both arms of myblousefile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (164 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM