18

When the rep from Upjohn didn’t turn up promptly at ten, Louis gave in and called the registrar’s office. He spoke with a Mrs. Stapleton, who said she would send over a copy of Victor Pascow’s records immediately. When Louis hung up, the Upjohn guy was there. He didn’t try to give Louis anything, only asked him if he had any interest in buying a season ticket to the New England Patriots’ games at a discount.

“Nope,” Louis said.

“I didn’t think you would,” the Upjohn guy said glumly and left.

At noon Louis walked up to the Bear’s Den and got a tuna fish sandwich and a Coke. He brought them back to his office and ate lunch while going over Pascow’s records. He was looking for some connection with himself or with North Ludlow, where the Pet Sematary was… a vague belief, he supposed, that there must be some sort of rational explanation even for such a weird occurrence as this. Maybe the guy had grown up in Ludlow-had, maybe, even buried a dog or a cat up there.

He didn’t find the connection he was looking for. Pascow was from Bergenfield, New Jersey, and had come to UMO to study electrical engineering. In those few typed sheets, Louis could see no possible connection between himself and the young man who had died in the reception room-other than the mortal one, of course.

He sucked the last Coke out of his cup, listening to the straw crackle in the bottom, and then tossed all his trash into the wastebasket. Lunch had been light, but he had eaten it with good appetite. Nothing much wrong with the way he felt, really. Not now. There had been no recurrence of the shakes, and now even that morning’s horror began to seem more like a nasty, pointless surprise, dreamlike itself, of no consequence.

He drummed his fingers on his blotter, shrugged, and picked up the phone again.

He dialed the EMMC and asked for the morgue.

After he was connected with the pathology clerk, he identified himself and said, “You have one of our students there, a Victor Pascow-”

“Not anymore,” the voice at the other end said. “He’s gone.”

Louis’s throat closed. At last he managed, “What?”

“His body was flown back to his parents late last night. Guy from Brookings-Smith Mortuary came and took custody. They put him on Delta, uh”-papers riffling-”Delta Flight 109. Where did you think he went? Out dancing at the Show Ring?”

“No,” Louis said. “No, of course not. It’s just… “ It was just what? What the Christ was he doing pursuing this, anyway? There was no sane way to deal with it. It had to be let go, marked off, forgotten. Anything else was asking for a lot of pointless trouble. “It’s just that it seemed very quick,” he finished lamely.

“Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon”-that faint riffle of papers again-”at around three-twenty by Dr. Rynzwyck. By then his father had made all the arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning.”

“Oh. Well, in that case-”

“Unless one of the carriers screwed up and sent it somewhere else,” the pathology clerk said brightly. “We’ve had that happen, you know, although never with Delta. Delta’s actually pretty good. We had a guy who died on a fishing trip way up in Aroostook County, in one of those little towns that just have a couple of map coordinates for a name. Asshole strangled on a pop-top while he was chugging a can of beer. Took his buddies two days to buck him out of the wilderness, and you know that by then it’s a toss-up whether or not the Forever Goop will take. But they shoved it in and hoped for the best. Sent him home to Grand Falls, Minnesota, in the cargo compartment of some airliner. But there was a screw-up. They shipped him first to Miami, then to Des Moines, then to Fargo, North Dakota. Finally somebody wised up, but by then another three days had gone by. Nothing took. They might as well have injected him with Kool-Aid instead of Jaundaflo. The guy was totally black and smelled like a spoiled pork roast.

That’s what I heard, anyway. Six baggage handlers got sick.”

The voice on the other end of the line laughed heartily.

Louis closed his eyes and said, “Well, thank you-”

“I can give you Dr. Rynzwyck’s home phone if you want it, Doctor, but he usually plays golf up in Orono in the morning.”

“That’s okay,” Louis said.

He hung up the telephone. Let that put paid to it, he thought. When you were having that crazy dream, or whatever it was, Pascow’s body was almost certainly in a Bergenfield funeral home. That closes it off; let that be the end of it.

Driving home that afternoon, a simple explanation of the filth at the foot of the bed finally occurred to him, flooding him with relief.

He had experienced an isolated incident of sleepwalking, brought on by the unexpected and extremely upsetting happenstance of having a student mortally injured and then dying in his infirmary during his first real day on the job.

It explained everything. The dream had seemed extremely real because large parts of it were real-the feel of the carpet, the cold dew, and, of course, the dead branch that had scratched his arm. It explained why Pascow had been able to walk through the door and he had not.

A picture rose in his mind, a picture of Rachel coming downstairs last night and catching him bumping against the back door, trying in his sleep to walk through it. The thought made him grin. It would have given her a hell of a turn, all right.

With the sleepwalking hypothesis in mind, he was able to analyze the causes of the dream-and he did so with a certain eagerness. He had walked to the Pet Sematary because it had become associated with another moment of recent stress.

It had in fact been the cause of a serious argument between him and his wife…

. and also, he thought with growing excitement, it was associated in his mind with his daughter’s first encounter with the idea of death-something his own subconscious must have been grappling with last night when he went to bed.

Damn lucky I got back to the house okay-I don’t even remember that part. Must have come back on autopilot.

It was a good thing he had. He couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have awakened this morning by the grave of Smucky the Cat, disoriented, covered with dew, and probably scared shitless-as Rachel also would have been, undoubtedly.

But it was over now.

Put paid to it, Louis thought with immeasurable relief. Yes, but what about the things he said when he was dying?, his mind tried to ask, and Louis shut it up fast.

That evening, with Rachel ironing and Ellie and Gage sitting in the same chair, both of them engrossed with “The Muppet Show,” Louis told Rachel casually that he believed he might go for a short walk-to get a little air.

“Will you be back in time to help me put Gage to bed?” she asked without looking up from her ironing. “You know he goes better when you’re there.”

“Sure,” he said.

“Where you going, Daddy?” Ellie asked, not looking away from the TV. Kermit was about to be punched in the eye by Miss Piggy.

“Just out back, hon.”

Louis went out.

Fifteen minutes later he was in the Pet Sematary, looking around curiously and coping with a strong feeling of dйjа vu. That he had been here was beyond doubt: the little grave marker put up to honor the memory of Smucky the Cat was knocked over. He had done that when the vision of Pascow approached, near the end of what he could remember of the dream. Louis righted it absently and walked over to the deadfall.

He didn’t like it. The memory of all these weather-whitened branches and dead trees turning into a pile of bones still had the power to chill. He forced himself to reach out and touch one. Balanced precariously on the jackstraw pile, it rolled and fell, bouncing down the side of the heap. Louis jumped back a step before it could touch his shoe.