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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmripping out when I turned her over. She started to . . . to convulse . . . and I saw that her face was turnedsideways, turned into the pillows, and I thought, oh, she’s choking, Zelda’s choking, and they’ll comehome and say I murdered her by choking, they’ll say you hated her, Rachel, and that was true, andthey’ll say you wanted her to be dead, and that was true too. Because, Louis, see, the first thought thatwent through my mind when she started to go up and down in the bed like that, I remember it, my firstthought was Oh good, finally, Zelda’s choking and this is going to be over. So I turned her over againand her face had gone black, Louis, and her eyes were bulging and her neck was swelled up. Then shedied. I backed across the room. I guess I wanted to back out the door, but I hit the wall and a picture felldown—it was a picture from one of the Oz books that Zelda liked before she got sick with themeningitis, when she was well, it was a picture of Oz the Great and Terrible, only Zelda always calledhim Oz the Gweat and Tewwible because she couldn’t make that sound, and so she sounded like ElmerFudd. My mother got that picture framed because . . . because Zelda liked it most of allOz the Gweat and Tewwible . . . and it fell down and hit the floor and the glass in the frame shatteredand I started to scream because I knew she was dead and I thought . . . I guess I thought it was her ghost,coming back to get me, and I knew that her ghost would hate me like she did, but her ghost wouldn’t bestuck in bed, so I screamed . . . I screamed and I ran out of the house screaming ‘Zelda’s dead! Zelda’sdead! Zelda’s dead!’ And the neighbors. . . they came and they looked . . . they saw me running downthe street with my blouse all ripped out under the arms . . . I was yelling ‘Zelda’s dead!’ Louis, and Iguess maybe they thought I was crying but I think . . . I think maybe I was laughing, Louis. I thinkmaybe that’s what I was doing.”“If you were, I salute you for it,” Louis said.“You don’t mean that, though,” Rachel said with the utter surety of one who has been over a point andover it and over it. He let it go. He thought she might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memorythat had haunted her for so long—most of it, anyway—but never this part. Never completely. LouisCreed was no psychiatrist, but he knew that there are rusty, half-buried things in the terrain of any lifeand that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even thoughthey cut. Tonight Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, like some grotesque and stinking rotten tooth, itscrown black, its nerves infected, its roots fetid. It was out. Let that last noxious cell remain; if God wasgood it would remain dormant except in her deepest dreams. That she had been able to remove as muchas she had was well nigh incredible—it did not just speak of her courage; it clarioned it. Louis was inawe of her. He felt like cheering.He sat up now and turned on the light. “Yes,” he said, “I salute you for it. And if I needed another reasonto . . . to really dislike your mother and father, I’ve got it now. You never should have been left alonewith her, Rachel. Never.”Like a child—the child of eight she had been when this dirty, incredible thing had happened—shereprimanded him, “Lou, it was Passover season—”file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (165 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM