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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmLouis saw something.The mist stained to a dull slate-gray for a moment, but this diffuse, ill-defined watermark was better thansixty feet high. It was no shade, no insubstantial ghost; he could feel the displaced air of its passage,could hear the mammoth thud of its feet coming down, the suck of mud as it moved on.For a moment he believed he saw twin yellow-orange sparks high above him. Sparks like eyes.Then the sound began to fade. As it went away, a peeper called hesitantly—one. It was answered byanother. A third joined the conversation; a fourth made it a bull session; a fifth and sixth made it apeeper convention. The sounds of the thing’s progress (slow but not blundering; perhaps that was theworst of it, that feeling of sentient progress) were moving away to the north. Little. . . less. . . gone.At last Louis began to move again. His shoulders and back were a frozen ache of torment. He wore anundergarment of sweat from neck to ankles. The season’s first mosquitoes, new-hatched and hungry,found him and sat down to a late snack.The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo—the creature that moves through the north country,the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal. That was it. The Wendigo has just passedwithin sixty yards of me.He told himself not to be ridiculous, to be like Jud and avoid ideas about what might be seen or heardbeyond the Pet Sematary—they were loons, they were St. Elmo’s fire, they were the members of theNew York Yankees’ bullpen. Let them be anything but the creatures which leap and crawl and slitherand shamble in the world between. Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smilingEpiscopalian ministers in shining white surplices . . . but let there not be these dark and dragglinghorrors on the nightside of the universe.Louis walked on with his son, and the ground began to firm up again under his feet. Only moments laterhe came to a felled tree, its crown visible in the fading mist like a gray-green feather duster dropped by agiant’s housekeeper.The tree was broken off—splintered off—and the break was so fresh that the yellowish-white pulp stillbled sap that was warm to Louis’s touch as he climbed over . . . and on the other side was a monstrousindentation out of which he had to scramble and climb, and although juniper and low pump-laurelbushes had been stamped right into the earth, he would not let himself believe it was a footprint. Hecould have looked back to see if it had any such configuration once he had climbed beyond and above it,but he would not. He only walked on, skin cold, mouth hot and arid, heart flying.The squelch of mud under his feet soon ceased. For a while there was the faint cereal sound of pineneedles again. Then there was rock. He had nearly reached the end.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (295 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM