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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmThings did not slow down until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis and Richard Irving, the head ofCampus Security, made a statement to the press. The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging withtwo friends, one of them his fiancée. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine,had come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women’s Gymnasium toward the center of campus at anexcessive speed. Withers’s car had struck Pascow and driven him head-first into a tree. Pascow had beenbrought to the infirmary in a blanket by his friends and two passersby. He had died minutes later.Withers was being held pending charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and vehicularmanslaughter.The editor of the campus newspaper asked if he could say that Pascow had died of head injuries. Louis,thinking of that broken window through which the brain itself could be seen, said he would rather let thePenobscot County coroner announce the cause of death. The editor then asked if the four young peoplewho had brought Pascow to the infirmary in the blanket might not have inadvertently caused his death.“No,” Louis replied. “Not at all. Unhappily, Mr. Pascow was in my opinion, mortally wounded uponbeing struck.”There were other questions—a few—but that answer really ended the press conference. Now Louis satin his office (Steve Masterton had gone home an hour before, immediately following the pressconference—to catch himself on the evening news Louis suspected) trying to pick up the shards of theday—or maybe he was just trying to cover what had happened, to paint a thin coating of routine over it.He and Charlton were going over the cards in the “front file”—those students who were pushing grimlythrough their college years in spite of some disability There were twenty-three diabetics in the front file,fifteen epileptics, fourteen paraplegics, and assorted others: students with leukemia, students withcerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy blind students, two mute students, and one case of sickle-cellanemia, which Louis had never even seen.Perhaps the lowest point of the afternoon had come just after Steve left. Charlton came in and laid a pinkmemo slip on Louis’s desk. Bangor Carpet will be here at 9:00 tomorrow, it read.“Carpet?” he had asked.“It will have to be replaced,” she said apologetically. “No way the stain’s going to come out, Doctor.”Of course not. At that point Louis had gone into the dispensary and taken a Tuinal—what his first medschool roommate had called Tooners. “Hop up on the Toonerville Trolley, Louis,” he’d say, “and I’ll puton some Creedence.” More often than not Louis had declined the ride on the fabled Toonerville, and thatwas maybe just as well; his roomie had flunked out halfway through his third semester and had riddenthe Toonerville Trolley all the way to Vietnam as a medical corpsman. Louis sometimes pictured himover there, stoned to the eyeballs, listening to Creedence do “Run Through the Jungle.”file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (57 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM