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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmLouis backed out of the Pet Sematary, not turning his back to the deadfall—that ghostlike glimmer, alivid scar on the dark—until he was well down the path. Then he began to hurry, and perhaps a quarterof a mile before the path ran out of the woods and into the field behind his house, he found enough leftinside him to run.Louis slung the pick and shovel indifferently inside the garage and stood for a moment at the head of hisdriveway, looking first back the way he had come and then up at the sky. It was quarter past four in themorning, and he supposed dawn could not be so far away. Light would already be three quarters of theway across the Atlantic, but for now, here in Ludlow, the night held hard. The wind blew steadily.He went into the house, feeling his way along the side of the garage and unlocking the back door. Hewent through the kitchen without turning on a light and stepped into the small bathroom between thekitchen and the dining room. Here he did snap on a light, and the first thing he saw was Church, curledup on top of the toilet tank, staring at him with those muddy yellow-green eyes.“Church,” he said. “I thought someone put you out.”Church only looked at him from atop the toilet tank. Yes, someone had put Church out; he had done ithimself. He remembered that very clearly. Just as he remembered replacing the window pane downcellarthat time and then telling himself that that had taken care of the problem. But exactly whom hadhe been kidding? When Church wanted to get in, church got in. Because Church was different now.It didn’t matter. In this dull, exhausted aftermath, nothing seemed to matter. He felt like something lessthan human now, one of George Romero’s stupid, lurching movie-zombies, ormaybe someone who had escaped from T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men. I should have been apair of ragged claws, scuttling through Little God Swamp and up to the Micmac burying ground, hethought and uttered a dry chuckle.“Headpiece full of straw, Church,” he said in his croaking voice. He was unbuttoning his shirt now.“That’s me. You better believe it.”There was a nice bruise coming on his left side, about halfway up his ribcage, and when he shucked hispants he saw that the knee he had banged on the gravestone was swelling up like a balloon. It hadalready turned a rotten purple-black, and he supposed that as soon as he stopped flexing it, the jointwould become stiff and painfully obdurate—as if it had been dipped in cement. It looked like one ofthose injuries that might want to converse with him on rainy days for the rest of his life.He reached out a hand to stroke Church, wanting some sort of comfort, but the cat leaped down from thetoilet tank, staggering in that drunken and weirdly unfeline way, and left for some other place. It sparedLouis one flat, yellow glance as it went.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (301 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM