ebEpvI

file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmhim if Missy was available to sit for an hour, and sometimes Norma joined them, but mostly it was justLouis and Jud. Louis found the old man as comfortable as an old slipper, and he would talk aboutLudlow history going back three hundred years almost as though he had lived all of it. He talked butnever rambled. He never bored Louis, although he had seen Rachel yawning under her hand on morethan one occasion.He would cross the road to his house again before ten on most evenings, and, like as not, he and Rachelwould make love. Never since the first year of their marriage had they made love so often, and never sosuccessfully and pleasurably. Rachel said she believed it was something in the artesian well water; Louisopted for the Maine air.The nasty death of Victor Pascow on the first day of the fall semester began to fade in the memory of thestudent body and in Louis’s own; Pascow’s family no doubt still grieved. Louis had spoken to thetearful, mercifully faceless voice of Pascow’s father on the telephone; the father had only wantedassurance that Louis had done everything he could, and Louis had assured him that everyone involvedhad. He did not tell him of the confusion, the spreading stain on the carpet, and how his son had beendead almost from the instant he was brought in, although these were things that Louis thought he himselfwould never forget. But for those to whom Pascow was only a casualty, he had already dimmed.Louis still remembered the dream and the sleepwalking incident that had accompanied it, but it nowseemed almost as if it had happened to someone else, or on a television show he had once watched. Hisone visit to a whore in Chicago six years ago seemed like that flow; they were equally unimportant, sidetrips which held a false resonance, like sounds produced in an echo chamber.He did not think at all about what the dying Pascow had or had not said.There was a hard frost on Halloween night. Louis and Ellie began at the Crandalls’. Ellie cackledsatisfyingly, pretended to ride her broom around Norma’s kitchen, and was duly pronounced “Just thecutest thing I ever saw. . . isn’t she, Jud?”Jud agreed that she was and lit a cigarette. “Where’s Gage, Louis? Thought you’d have him dressed uptoo.”They had indeed planned on taking Gage around—Rachel in particular had been looking forward to itbecause she and Missy Dandridge had whomped together a sort of bug costume with twisted coathangers wrapped in crepe paper for feelers—but Gage had come down with a troublesome, bronchialcold, and after listening to his lungs, which sounded a bit ratfly, and consulting the thermometer outsidethe window, which read only forty degrees at six o’clock, Louis had nixed it. Rachel, althoughdisappointed, had agreed.Ellie had promised to give Gage some of her candy, but the exaggerated quality of her sorrow madeLouis wonder if she wasn’t just a bit glad that Gage wouldn’t be along to slow her down.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (76 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM