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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmThat was stupid. Ridiculous. But Rachel began to push the little car along faster nonetheless.At five o’clock, as Jud was trying to ward off a scalpel stolen from the black bag of his good friend Dr.Louis Creed, and as her daughter was awakening bolt-upright in bed, screaming in the grip of anightmare which she could mercifully not remember, Rachel left the turnpike, drove the HammondStreet Cutoff close to the cemetery where a spade was now the only thing buried in her son’s coffin, andcrossed the Bangor-Brewer Bridge. By quarter past five, she was on Route 15 and headed for Ludlow.She had decided to go directly to Jud’s; she would make good on at least that much of her promise. TheCivic was not in their driveway, anyway, and although she supposed it might be in the garage, theirhouse had a sleeping, unoccupied look. No intuition suggested to her that Louis might be home.Rachel parked behind Jud’s pickup and got out of the Chevette, looking around carefully. The grass washeavy with dew, sparkling in this clear, new light. Somewhere a bird sang and then was silent. On thefew occasions since her preteenage years when she had been awake and alone at dawn without someresponsibility to fulfill as the reason, she had a lonely but somehow uplifted feeling—a paradoxicalsense of newness and continuity. This morning she felt nothing so clean and good. There was only adragging sense of unease which she could not entirely charge off to the terrible twenty-four hours justgone by and her recent bereavement.She mounted the porch steps and opened the screen door, meaning to use the old-fashioned bell on thefront door. She had been charmed by that bell the first time she and Louis came over together; youtwisted it clockwise, and it uttered a loud but musical cry that was anachronistic and delightful.She reached for it now, then glanced down at the porch floor and frowned. There were muddy tracks onthe mat. Lookingaround, she saw that they led from the screen door to this one. Very small tracks. A child’s tracks, by thelook of them. But she had been driving all night, and there had been no rain. Wind, but no rain.She looked at the tracks for a long time—too long, really—and discovered she had to force her handback to the turn bell. She grasped it. . . and then her hand fell away again.I’m anticipating, that’s all. Anticipating the sound of that bell in this stillness. He’s probably gone tosleep after all and it will startle him awake.But that wasn’t what she was afraid of. She had been nervous, scared in some deep and diffuse way eversince she had found it so hard to stay awake, but this sharp fear was something new, something whichhad solely to do with those small tracks. Tracks that were the size— Her mind tried to block thisthought, but it was too tired, too slow.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (310 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM