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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmNothing, her mind answered inexorably. You kept it from her, the way you tried to keep anything fromher that had to do with death—even the possible death of her cat, remember the dumb, stupid argumentwe had that day in the pantry? You kept it from her. Because you were scared then and you’re scarednow. His name was Pascow, Victor Pascow, and how desperate is the situation now, Rachel? How bad isthis? What in the name of God is happening?Her hands were trembling so badly that it took her two tries to redeposit her quarter. This time she calledthe infirmary at the university and got Chariton, who accepted the call, a little mystified. No, she hadn’tseen Louis and would have been surprised if he had come in today. That said, she offered hersympathies to Rachel again. Rachel accepted them and then asked Chariton to have Louis call her at herfolks’ house if he did come in. Yes, he had the number, she answered Charlton’s question, not wantingto tell the nurse (who probably knew anyway; she had a feeling that Chariton didn’t miss much) that herfolks’ house was half the continent away.She hung up, feeling hot and trembly.She heard Pascow’s name somewhere else, that’s all. My God, you don’t raise a kid in a glass box likea. . . a hamster or something.She heard an item about it on the radio. Or some kid mentioned it to her at school, and her mindstored it away. Even that word she couldn’t say—suppose it was a jawbreaker like “discorporated” or“discorporeal,” so what? That proves nothing except that the subconscious is exactly the kind of stickyflypaper the Sunday supplements say it is.She remembered a college psych instructor who had asserted that under the right conditions, yourmemory could play back the names of every person to whom you had ever been introduced, every mealyou had ever eaten, the weather conditions which had obtained on every day of your life. He made apersuasive case for this incredible assertion, telling them that the human mind was a computer withstaggering numbers of memory chips—not i6K, or 32K, or 64K, but perhaps as much as one billion K:literally, a thousand billion. And how much might each of these organic “chips” be capable of storing?No one knew. But there were so many of them, he said, that there was no need for any of them to beerasable so they could be re-used. In fact the conscious mind had to turn down the lights on some ofthem as a protection against informational insanity. “You might not be able to remember where youkeep your socks,” the psych instructor had said, “if the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannicawas stored in the adjacent two or three memory cells.”This had produced dutiful laughter from the class.But this isn’t a psych class under good fluorescent lights with all that comforting jargon written on theboard and some smartass assistant prof cheerfully blueskying his way through the last fifteen minutes ofthe period. Something is dreadfully wrong here and you know it—you feel it. I don’t know what it has todo with Pascow, or Gage, or Church, but it has something to do with Louis. What? Is it— Suddenly afile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (256 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM