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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmnickname for every graveyard sexton in America. Their friends called them Digger.He started in again.He stopped only once more, and that was to check his watch. It was twenty minutes past twelve. He felttime slipping through his fist like something that had been greased.Forty minutes later, the spade gritted across something, and Louis’s teeth came down on his upper liphard enough to bring blood. He got the flashlight and shone it down. Here was more dirt, and scrawledacross it in a diagonal slash, a grayish-silver line. It was the top of the grave liner. Louis got most of thedirt off, but he was wary of making too much noise, and nothing was much louder than a shovel scrapingacross concrete in the dead of night.He climbed out of the grave and got the rope. This he threaded through the iron rings on one half of thesegmented grave-liner top. He got out of the grave again, spread out the tarpaulin, lay down on it, andgrasped the ends of the rope.Louis, I think this is it. Your last chance.You’re right. It’s my last chance and I’m damned well taking it.He wound the ends of the rope around his hands and pulled. The square of concrete came up easily,gritting on the pivot end.It stood neatly upright over a square of blackness, now a vertical tombstone instead of a horizontal gravecover.Louis pulled the rope out of the rings and tossed it aside. He wouldn’t need it for the other hail; he couldstand on the sides of the grave liner and pull it up.He got down into the grave again, moving carefully, not wanting to overturn the cement slab he hadalready pulled up and mash his toes or break the damned thing, which was quite thin. Pebbles rattleddown into the hole, and he heard several of them chip hollowly off Gage’s coffin.Bending, he grasped the other half of the grave-liner top and pulled upward. As he did so, he feltsomething squelch coldly under his fingers. When he had this second half of the top standing on end, helooked down at his hand and saw a fat earthworm wriggling feebly there. With a choked cry of disgust,Louis wiped it off on the earthen sidewall of his son’s grave.Then he shone his flashlight downward.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (272 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM