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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmthen to Florida—across the entire world, if necessary. What you bought, you owned, and what youowned eventually came home to you.There would come a day when he would open a door and there would be Gage, a demented parody ofhis former self, grinning a sunken grin, his clear blue eyes gone yellow and smart-stupid. Or Ellie wouldopen the bathroom door for her morning shower, and there would be Gage in the tub, his bodycrisscrossed with the faded scars and bulges of his fatal accident, clean but stinking of the grave.Oh yes, that day would come—he didn’t doubt it a bit.“How could I have been so stupid?” he said to the empty room, talking to himself again, not caring.“How?”Grief, not stupidity, Louis. There is a difference. . . small, but vital. The battery that burying groundsurvives on. Growing in power, Jud said, and of course he was right—and you’re part of its power now.It has fed on your grief. . . no, more than that. It’s doubled it, cubed it, raised it to the nth power. And itisn’t just grief it feeds on. Sanity. It’s eaten your sanity. The flaw is only the inability to accept, notuncommon. It’s cost you your wife, and it’s almost surely cost you your best friend as well as your son.This is it. What comes when you’re too slow wishing away the thing that knocks on your door in themiddle of the night is simple enough: total darkness.I would commit suicide now, he thought, and I suppose it’s in the cards, isn’t it? I have the equipment inmy bag. It has managed everything, managed it from the first. The burying ground, the Wendigo,whatever it is. It forced our cat into the road, and perhaps it forced Gage into the road as well, it broughtRachel home, but only in its own good time. Surely I’m meant to do thatand I want to.But things have to be put right, don’t they?Yes. They did.There was Gage to think about. Gage was still out there. Somewhere.He followed the footprints through the dining room and the living room and back up the stairs. Theywere smudged there because he had walked over them on his way down without seeing them. They ledinto the bedroom. He was here, Louis thought wonderingly, he was right here, and then he saw that hismedical bag was unsnapped.The contents inside, which he always arranged with careful neatness, were now in jumbled disorder. Butit did not take Louis long to see that his scalpel was missing, and he put his hands over his face and satfile:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20St...20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (319 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:50 PM