“It’s going to be awfully late for her, Louis.”

“We’ll take the car,” he said. “Come on, Rachel. She’s been looking forward to this for a month.”

“Well… “ She smiled. Ellie saw it and shouted again. She ran for the coat closet. “Is Norma all right?”

“I think so.” He felt good. Tired but good. “It was a small one. She’s going to have to be careful, but when you’re seventy-five you have to recognize that your pole-vaulting days are done anyway.”

“It’s lucky you were there. Almost God’s providence.”

“I’ll settle for luck.” He grinned as Ellie came back. “You ready, Witch Hazel?”

“I’m ready,” she said. “Come on-come on-come on!”

On the way home with half a bag of candy an hour later (Ellie protested when Louis finally called a halt, but not too much; she was tired), his daughter startled him by saying: “Did I make Missus Crandall have the heart attack, Daddy? When I wouldn’t take the apple with the bruise on it?”

Louis looked at her, startled, wondering where children got such funny, half-superstitious ideas. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Loves me, loves me not. Daddy’s stomach, Daddy’s head, smile at midnight, Daddy’s dead.

That made him think of the Pet Sematary again and those crude circles. He wanted to smile at himself and was not quite able.

“No, honey,” he said. “When you were in with those two ghosts-”

“Those weren’t ghosts, just the Buddinger twins.”

“Well, when you were in with them, Mr. Crandall was telling me that his wife had been having little chest pains. In fact, you might have been responsible for saving her life or at least for keeping it from being much worse.”

Now it was Ellie’s turn to look startled.

Louis nodded. “She needed a doctor, honey. I’m a doctor. But I was only there because it was your night to go trick-or-treating.”

Ellie considered this for a long time and then nodded. “But she’ll probably die anyway,” she said matter-of-factly. “People who have heart attacks usually die.

Even if they live, pretty soon they have another one and another one and another one until…boom!”

“And where did you learn these words of wisdom, may I ask?” Ellie only shrugged-a very Louislike shrug, he was amused to see.

She allowed him to carry in her bag of candy-an almost ultimate sign of trust-and Louis pondered her attitude. The thought of Church’s death had brought on near-hysteria. But the thought of grandmotherly Norma Crandall dying…

that Ellie seemed to take calmly, a matter of course, a given. What had she said? Another one and another one, until… boom!

The kitchen was empty, but Louis could hear Rachel moving around upstairs. He set Ellie’s candy down on the counter and said, “It doesn’t necessarily work that way, Ellie. Norma’s heart attack was a very small one, and I was able to administer the treatment right away. I doubt if her heart was damaged much at all. She-”

“Oh, I know,” Ellie agreed, almost cheerfully. “But she’s old, and she’ll die pretty soon anyway. Mr. Crandall too. Can I have an apple before I go to bed, Daddy?”

“No,” he said, looking at her thoughtfully. “Go up and brush your teeth, babe.”

Does anyone really think they understand kids? he wondered.

When the house was settled and they were in their side-by-side twin beds, Rachel asked softly, “Was it very bad for Ellie, Lou? Was she upset?”

No, he thought. She knows old people croak at regular intervals, just like she knows to let the grasshopper go when it spits like she knows that if you stumble on the number thirteen when you’re skipping rope, your best friend will die…

. like she knows that you put the graves in diminishing circles up in the Pet Sematary.

“Nope,” he said. “She handled herself very well. Let’s go to sleep, Rachel, okay?”

That night, as they slept in their house and as Jud lay wakeful in his, there was another hard frost. The wind rose in the early morning, ripping most of the remaining leaves, which were now an uninteresting brown, from the trees.

The wind awoke Louis, and he started up on his elbows, mostly asleep and confused. There were steps on the stairs.

slow, dragging steps. Pascow had come back. Only now, he thought, two months had passed. When the door opened he would see a rotting horror, the jogging shorts caked with mould, the flesh fallen away in great holes, the brain decayed to paste. Only the eyes would be alive… hellishly bright and alive. Pascow would not speak this time; his vocal cords would be too decayed to produce sounds. But his eyes… they would beckon him to come.

“No,” he breathed, and the steps died out.

He got up, went to the door, and pulled it open, his lips drawn back in a grimace of fear and resolution, his flesh cringing. Pascow would be there, and with his raised arms he would look like a long-dead conductor about to call for the first thundering phrase of Walpurgisnacht.

No such thing, as Jud might have said. The landing was empty silent. There was no sound but the wind. Louis went back to bed and slept.

21

The next day Louis called the intensive care unit at the EMMC. Norma’s condition was still listed as critical; that was standard operating procedure for the first twenty-four hours following a heart attack. Louis got a cheerier assessment from Weybridge, her doctor, however. “I wouldn’t even call it a minor myocardial infarction,” he said. “No scarring. She owes you a hell of a lot, Dr.

Creed.”

On impulse, Louis stopped by the hospital later that week with a bouquet of flowers, and found that Norma had been moved to a semiprivate room downstairs-a very good sign. Jud was with her.

Norma exclaimed over the flowers and buzzed a nurse for a vase. Then she directed Jud until they were in water, arranged to her specifications, and placed on the dresser in the corner.

Mother s feeling ever s much better, Jud said dryly after he had fiddled with the flowers for the third time.

“Don’t be smart, Judson,” Norma said.

“No, ma’am.”

At last Norma looked at Louis. “I want to thank you for what you did,” she said with a shyness that was utterly unaffected and thus doubly touching. “Jud says I owe you my life.”

Embarrassed, Louis said, “Jud exaggerates.”

“Not very damn much, he don’t,” Jud said. He squinted at Louis, almost smiling but not quite. “Didn’t your mother tell you never to slip a thank-you, Louis?”

She hadn’t said anything about that, at least not that Louis could remember, but he believed she had said something once about false modesty being half the sin of pride.

“Norma,” he said, “anything I could do, I was pleased to do.”

“You’re a dear man,” Norma said. “You take this man of mine out somewhere and let him buy you a glass of beer. I’m feeling sleepy again, and I can’t seem to get rid of him.”

Jud stood up with alacrity. “Hot damn! I’ll go for that, Louis. Quick, before she changes her mind.”

The first snow came a week before Thanksgiving. They got another four inches on the twenty-second of November, but the day before the holiday itself was clear and blue and cold. Louis took his family to Bangor International Airport and saw them off on the first leg of their trip back to Chicago for a visit with Rachel’s parents.

“It’s not right,” Rachel said for perhaps the twentieth time since discussions on this matter had commenced in earnest a month ago. “I don’t like thinking of you rattling around the house alone on Thanksgiving Day. That’s supposed to be a family holiday, Louis.”

Louis shifted Gage, who looked gigantic and wide-eyed in his first big-boy parka, to his other arm. Ellie was at one of the big windows, watching an Air Force helicopter take off.

“I’m not exactly going to be crying in my beer,” Louis said. “Jud and Norma are going to have me over for turkey and all the trimmings. Hell, I’m the one who feels guilty. I’ve never liked these big holiday group gropes anyway. I start drinking in front of some football game at three in the afternoon and fall asleep at seven, and the next day it feels like the Dallas Cowgirls are dancing around and yelling boola-boola inside my head. I just don’t like sending you off with the two kids.”