Well, you missed it, ladies, Louis thought with undeniable satisfaction and gobbled his sandwich. It tasted great. Confucius say he who smell like pig eat like wolf, he thought and smiled. He chased the sandwich with several long swallows of milk directly from the carton-another habit Rachel frowned on strenuously-and then he went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed without even washing his teeth. His aches and pains had faded to one low throb that was almost comforting.

His watch was there where he had left it, and he looked at it. Ten minutes of nine. It really was incredible.

Louis turned off the light, turned over on his side, and slept.

He woke up sometime after three the next morning and shuffled to the bathroom, He was standing there urinating, blinking owlishly in the bright white fluorescent bathroom light, when the discrepancy suddenly showed up in his mind, and his eyes widened-it was as if two pieces of something which should have fitted together perfectly had instead thudded against one another and rebounded.

Tonight Jud had told him that his dog had died when he was ten-had died of infection after being scraped up in a snarl of rusty barbed wire. But on the late-summer day when all of them had walked up to the Pet Sematary together, Jud said that his dog had died of old age and was buried there-he had even pointed out the marker, although the years had worn the inscription away.

Louis flushed the toilet, turned out the light, and went back to bed. Something else was wrong, as well-and in a moment he had it. Jud had been born with the century, and that day at the Pet Sematary he had told Louis his dog had died during the first year of the Great War. That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war.

But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten. Well, he’s an old man, and old men get confused in their memories, he thought uneasily. He’s said himself that he’s noticed signs of increasing forgetfulness-groping for names and addresses that used to come to him easily, sometimes getting up in the morning and having no memory of the chores he planned to do just the night before. For a man of his age, he’s getting off pretty goddamned light…

senility’s probably too strong a word for it in Jud’s case; forgetfulness is actually better, more accurate. Nothing too surprising about a man forgetting when a dog died some seventy years ago. Or the circumstances in which it died, for that matter. Forget it, Louis.

But he wasn’t able to fall asleep again right away; for a long while he lay awake, too conscious of the empty house and the wind that whined around the eaves outside it.

At some point he slept without even being aware that he had gone over the edge; it must have been so, because as he slipped away, it seemed to him that he heard bare feet slowly climbing the stairs and that he thought, Let me alone, Pascow, let me alone, what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead-and the steps faded away.

And although a great many other inexplicable things happened as that year darkened, Louis was never bothered by the specter of Victor Pascow again, either waking or dreaming.

23

He awoke at nine the next morning. Bright sunshine streamed in the bedroom’s east windows. The telephone was ringing. Louis reached up and snared it.

“Hello?”

“Hi!” Rachel said. “Did I wake you up? Hope so.”

“You woke me up, you bitch,” he said, smiling.

“Ooooh, such nasty language, you bad old bear,” she said. “I tried to call you last night. Were you over at Jud’s?”

He hesitated for only the tiniest fraction of a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Had a few beers. Norma was up at some sort of Thanksgiving supper. I thought about giving you a ring, but you know.”

They chatted awhile. Rachel updated him on her family, something he could have done without, although he took a small, mean satisfaction in the news that her father’s bald spot seemed to be expanding at a faster rate.

“You want to talk to Gage?” Rachel asked.

Louis grinned. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Don’t let him hang up the phone like he did the other time.”

Much rattling at the other end. Dimly he heard Rachel cajoling the kid to say hi, Daddy.

At last Gage said, “Hi, Dayee.”

“Hi, Gage,” Louis said cheerfully. “How you doing? How’s your life? Did you pull over your grandda’s pipe rack again? I certainly hope so. Maybe this time you can trash his stamp collection as well.”

Gage babbled on happily for thirty seconds or so, interspersing his gobbles and grunts with a few recognizable words from his growing vocabulary-mommy, Ellie, grandda, grandma, car (pronounced in the best Yankee tradition as kaaa, Louis was amused to note), twuck, and shit.

At last Rachel pried the phone away from him to Gage’s wail of indignation and Louis’s measured relief-he loved his son and missed him like mad, but holding a conversation with a not-quite-two-year-old was a little bit like trying to play cribbage with a lunatic; the cards kept going everywhere and sometimes you found yourself pegging backwards.

“So how’s everything there?” Rachel asked.

“Okay,” Louis said, with no hesitation at all this time-but he was aware he had crossed a line, back when Rachel had asked him if he had gone over to Jud’s last night and he told her he had. In his mind he suddenly heard Jud Crandall saying, The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis… a man grows what he can and he tends ft. “Well… a little dull, if you want to know the God’s honest.

Miss you.”

“You actually mean to tell me you’re not enjoying your vacation from this sideshow?”

“Oh, I like the quiet,” he admitted, “sure. But it gets strange after the first twenty-four hours or so.”

“Can I talk to Daddy?” It was Ellie in the background.

“Louis? Ellie’s here.”

“Okay, put her on.”

He talked to Ellie for almost five minutes. She prattled on about the doll Grandma had gotten her, about the trip she and Grandda had taken to the stockyards (“Boy, do they stink, Daddy,” Ellie said, and Louis thought, Your grandda’s no rose, either, sweetie), about how she had helped make bread, and about how Gage had gotten away from Rachel while she was changing him. Gage had run down the hallway and pooped right in the doorway leading into Grandda’s study (Atta boy, Gage! Louis thought, a big grin spreading over his face).

He actually thought he was going to get away-at least for this morning-and was getting ready to ask Ellie for her mother again so he could say goodbye to her when Ellie asked, “How’s Church, Daddy? Does he miss me?”

The grin faded from Louis’s mouth, but he answered readily. and with the perfect note of offhanded casualness: “He’s fine, I guess. I gave him the leftover beef stew last night and then put him out. Haven’t seen him this morning, but I just woke up.”

Oh boy, you would have made a great murderer-cool as a cucumber. Dr. Creed, when did you last see the deceased? He came in for supper. Had a plate of beef stew, in fact. I haven’t seen him since then.

“Well, give him a kiss for me.”

“Yuck, kiss your own cat,” Louis said, and Ellie giggled.

“You want to talk to Mommy again, Daddy?”

“Sure. Put her on.”

Then it was over. He talked to Rachel for another couple of minutes; the subject of Church was not touched upon. He and his wife exchanged love-you’s, and Louis hung up.

“That’s that,” he said to the empty, sunny room, and maybe the worst thing about it was that he didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel guilty at all.