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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm“It’s the kite,” Louis said and pulled it out of the bag. Gage watched, interested, as Louis unfurled theVulture, which spread its wings over perhaps five feet of tough plastic. Its bulgy, bloodshot eyes staredout at them from its small head atop its scrawny, pinkly naked neck.“Birt!” Gage yelled. “Birt, Daddy! Got a birt!”“Yeah, it’s a bird,” Louis agreed, slipping the sticks into the pockets at the back of the kite andrummaging again for the five hundred feet of kite twine that he had bought the same day. He lookedback over his shoulder and repeated to Gage: “You’re gonna like it, big guy.”Gage liked it.They took the kite over into Mrs. Vinton’s field and Louis got it up into the blowy late-March sky firstshot, although he had not flown a kite since he was . . . what? Twelve? Nineteen years ago? God, thatwas horrible.Mrs. Vinton was a woman of almost Jud’s age but immeasurably more frail. She lived in a brick houseat the head of her field, but now she came out only rarely. Behind the house, the field ended and thewoods began—the woods that led first to the Pet Sematary and then to the Micmac burying groundbeyond it.“Kite’s flyne, Daddy!” Gage screamed.“Yeah, look at it go!” Louis bellowed back, laughing and excited. He payed out kite twine so fast thatthe string grew hot andbranded thin fire across his palm. “Look at that Vulture, Gage! She’s goin to beat shit!”“Beat-shit!” Gage cried and laughed, high and joyously. The sun sailed out from behind a fat gray springcloud, and the temperature seemed to go up five degrees almost at once. They stood in the bright,unreliable warmth of March straining to be April in the high dead grass of Mrs. Vinton’s field; abovethem the Vulture soared up toward the blue, higher, its plastic wings spread taut against that steadycurrent of air, still higher, and as he had done as a child, Louis felt himself going up to it, going into it,staring down as the world took on its actual shape, the one cartographers must see in their dreams; Mrs.Vinton’s field, as white and still as cobwebs following the retreat of the snow, not just a field now but alarge parallelogram bounded by rock walls on two of its sides, and then the road at the bottom, a straightblack seam, and the river valley—the Vulture saw it all with its soaring, bloodshot eyes. It saw the riverlike a cool gray band of steel, chunks of ice still floating in it; on the other side it saw Hampden,Newburgh, Winterport, with a ship at dock; perhaps it saw the St. Regis Mill at Bucksport below itssteaming fume of cloud, or even land’s end itself, where the Atlantic pounded the naked rock.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (177 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM