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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmhappy around Christmas, and they want to live. So they do live. It’s usually February when we get a bigbulge. The flu gets the old people and there’s pneumonia, of course—but that’s not all. There’ll bepeople who’ve been battling cancer like mad bastards for a year, sixteen months. Then bad old Februarycomes around and it seems as if they get tired and the cancer just rolls them up like a rug. On January 31they’re in remission, and they feel as if they’re in the pink. Come February 24 they’re planted. Peoplehave heart attacks in February, strokes in February, renal failure in February. It’s a bad month. Peopleget tired in February. We’re used to it, in the business. But then, for no reason, the same thing willhappen in June or in October. Never in August. August’s a slow month. Unless a gas main explodes or acity bus goes off a bridge, you never fill up a cemetery crypt in August. But there have been Februaryswhen we’ve had caskets stacked up three deep, hoping like hell for a thaw so we can plant some of thembefore we have to rent a figging apartment.”Uncle Carl had laughed. And Louis, feeling a party to something not even his instructors in med schoolknew, had laughed too.The crypt’s double doors were set into a grassy rise of hill, a shape as natural and attractive as the swellof a woman’s breast. This hill (which Louis suspected was landscaped rather than natural) crested only afoot or two below the decorative arrow tips of the wrought-iron fence, which remained even at the toprather than rising with the contour.Louis glanced around, then scrambled up the slope. On the other side was an empty square of ground,perhaps two acres in all. No. . . not quite empty. There was a single outbuilding, like a disconnectedshed. Probably belongs to ‘the cemetery, Louis thought. That would be where they kept their groundsequipment.The streetlights shone through the moving leaves of a belt oftrees—old elms and maples—that screened this area from Mason Street. Louis saw no other movement.He slid back down on his butt, afraid of falling and reinjuring his knee, and returned to his son’s grave.He almost stumbled over the roll of the tarpaulin. He saw he would have to make two trips, one with thebody and another for the tools. He bent, grimacing at his back’s protest, and got the stiff canvas roll inhis arms. He could feel the shift of Gage’s body within and steadfastly ignored that part of his mindwhich whispered constantly that he had gone mad.He carried the body over to the hill which housed Pleasant-view’s crypt with its two steel sliding doors(the doors made it look queerly like a two-car garage). He saw what would have to be done if he weregoing to get his forty-pound bundle up that steep slope now that his rope was gone and prepared to do it.He backed up and then ran at the slope, leaning forward, letting his forward motion carry him as far as itwould. He got almost to the top before his feet skidded out from under him on the short, slick grass, andhe tossed the canvas roll as far as he could as he came down. It landed almost at the crest of the hill. Hescrambled the rest of the way up, looked around again, saw no one, and laid the rolled-up tarp againstfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (280 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM