The voice of Tom Rush echoed dreamily in his head: 0 death your hands are clammy… I feel them on my knees… you came and took my mother… won’t you come back after me?

Madness. Madness all around, close, hunting him.

He walked the balance beam of rationality; he studied his plan.

Tonight, around eleven o’clock, he would dig up his son’s grave, remove the body from the coffin in which it lay, wrap Gage in a cutdown piece of the tarpaulin, and put it in the trunk of the Civic. He would replace the coffin and refill the grave. He would drive to Ludlow, take Gage’s body from the trunk… and take a walk. Yes, he would take a walk.

If Gage returned, the single path forked into two possibilities. Along one, he saw Gage returning as Gage, perhaps stunned or slow or even retarded (only in the deepest recesses of his mind did Louis allow himself to hope that Gage would return whole, and just as he had been-but surely even that was possible, wasn’t it?), but still his son, Rachel’s son, Ellie’s brother.

Along the other, he saw some sort of monster emerging from the woods behind the house. He had accepted so much that he did not balk at the idea of monsters, or even of daemons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworid which might well take charge of a reanimated body from which the original soul had fled.

Either way, he and his son would be alone. And he would.

I will make a diagnosis.

Yes. That is what he would do.

I will make a diagnosis, not only of his body but of his spirit. I will make allowances for the trauma of the accident itself, which he may or may not remember. Keeping the example of Church before me, I will expect retardation, perhaps mild, perhaps profound. I will judge our ability to reintegrate Gage into our family on the basis of what I see over a period of from twenty-four to seventy-two hours. And if the loss is too great-or if he comes back as Timmy Baterman apparently came back, as a thing of evil-i will kill him.

As a doctor, he felt he could kill Gage, if Gage was only the vessel containing some other being, quite easily. He would not allow himself to be swayed by its pleadings or its wiles. He would kill it as he would kill a rat carrying bubonic plague. There need be no melodrama about it. A pill in solution, perhaps two or three of them. If necessary, a shot. There was morphine in his bag. The following night, he would return the lifeless clay to Pleasantview and reenter it, simply trusting that his luck would hold a second time (you don’t even know if it will hold once, he reminded himself). He had considered the easier and safer alternative of the Pet Sematary, but he would not have his son up there.

There were a lot of reasons. A child burying his pet five years or ten years or even twenty years later might stumble on the remains-that was one reason. But the most compelling one was simpler. The Pet Sematary might be…

too close.

The reinterment completed, he would fly to Chicago and join his family. Neither Rachel nor Ellie would ever need to know about his failed experiment.

Then, looking along the other path-the path he hoped for blindly with all his love for his son: he and Gage would leave the house when the examination period was over, would leave at night. He would take certain papers with him and plan never to return to Ludlow again. He and Gage would check into a motel-perhaps this very one in which he now lay.

The following morning he would cash every account they had, converting everything into American Express traveler’s checks (don’t leave home with your resurrected son without them, he thought) and flat cash. He and Gage would fly somewhere-Florida, most likely. From there he would call Rachel, tell her where he was, tell her to take Ellie and catch a plane without telling her mother and father where she was going. Louis believed he could convince her to do this. Ask no questions, Rachel. Just come. Come now. This minute.

He would tell her where he (they) were staying. Some motel. She and Ellie would arrive in a rental car. He would bring Gage to the door when they knocked.

Perhaps Gage would be wearing a bathing suit.

And then-Ah, but beyond that he did not dare go; instead he turned back to the plan’s beginning and began to go over it again. He supposed that if things worked out, it would mean accumulating the identification minutae of whole new lives so that Irwin Goldman could not use his overflowing checkbook to trace them. Such things could be done.

Vaguely, he remembered arriving at the Ludlow house, tense, tired, and more than a little scared, and having some fantasy about just driving down to Orlando and hiring on as a medic at Disney World. Maybe that wasn’t so farfetched after all.

He saw himself, dressed in white, resuscitating a pregnant woman who had foolishly gone on the Magic Mountain ride and had fainted. Stand back, stand back, give her some air, he heard himself saying, and the woman opened her eyes and smiled gratefully at him.

As his mind spun out this not disagreeable fantasy, Louis fell asleep. He slept as his daughter awoke in an airplane somewhere above Niagara Falls, screaming from a nightmare of clutching hands and stupid yet merciless eyes; he slept as the stewardess rushed down the aisle to see what was wrong; he slept as Rachel, totally unnerved, tried to soothe her; he slept as Ellie cried over and over again: It’s Gage! Mommy! It’s Gage! it’s Gage! Gage is alive! Gage has got the knife from Daddy’s bag! Don’t let him get me! Don’t let him get Daddy!

He slept as Ellie quieted at last and lay shuddering against her mother’s breast, her eyes wide and tearless, and as Dory Goldman thought what an awful thing all of this had been for Eileen, and how much she reminded Dory of Rachel after Zelda had died.

He slept and woke up at a quarter past five, with the afternoon light beginning to slant down toward the coming night.

Wild work, he thought stupidly and got up.

45

By the time United Airlines flight 419 touched down at O’Hare Airport and offloaded its passengers at ten minutes past three, central standard time, Ellie Creed was in a state of low hysteria, and Rachel was very frightened.

If you touched Ellie casually on the shoulder, she jumped and stared around at you with big walleyes, and her whole body quivered steadily and without letup.

It was as if she were full of electricity. The nightmare on the airplane had been bad enough, but this… Rachel simply didn’t know how to cope with it.

Going into the terminal, Ellie tripped over her own feet and fell down. She did not get up but merely lay there on the carpet with people passing around her (or looking down at her with that mildly sympathetic but disconnected glance of people who are in transit and cannot be bothered) until Rachel picked her up in her arms.

“Ellie, what’s wrong with you?” Rachel asked.

But Ellie would not answer. They moved across the lobby toward the luggage carousels, and Rachel saw her mother and father waiting there for them. She waved at them with her free hand, and they came over.

“They told us not to go to the gate and wait for you,” Dory said, “so we thought… Rachel? How’s Eileen?”

“Not good.”

“Is there a ladies’ room, Mommy? I’m going to throw up.”

“Oh, God,” Rachel said despairingly and took her by the hand. There was a ladies’ room across the lobby, and she led Ellie toward it quickly.

“Rachel, shall I corner’ Dory called.

“No, get the luggage, you know what it looks like. We’re okay.”

Mercifully the ladies’ room was deserted. Rachel led Ellie to one of the stalls, fumbling in her purse for a dime, and then she saw-thank God-that the locks on three of them were broken. Over one broken lock, someone had written in grease pencil: SIR JOHN CRAPPER WAS A SEXIST PIG!