Rachel pulled the door open quickly; Ellie was now moaning and holding her stomach. She retched twice, but there was no vomiting; they were the dry heaves of total nervous exhaustion.

When Ellie told her she felt a little better, Rachel took her over to the basins and washed her daughter’s face. Ellie was wretchedly white, and there were circles under her eyes.

“Ellie, what is wrong? Can’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. “But I knew something was wrong ever since Daddy told me about the trip. Because something was wrong with him.”

Louis, what are you hiding? You were hiding something. I could see it; even Ellie could see it.

It occurred to her that she had also been nervous all day, as though waiting for a blow to fall. She felt the way she did in the two or three days before her period, tense and on edge, ready to laugh or cry or get a headache that would come bulleting through like a fast express, there and then gone three hours later.

“What?” she said now to Ellie’s reflection in the mirror. “Honey, what could be wrong with Daddy?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “It was the dream. Something about Gage. Or maybe it was Church. I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

“Ellie, what was your dream?”

“I dreamed I was in the Pet Sematary,” Ellie said. “Paxcow took me to the Pet Sematary and said Daddy was going to go there and something terrible was going to happen.”

“Paxcow?” A bolt of terror both sharp and yet undefined struck her. What was that name, and why did it seem familiar? It seemed that she had heard that name-or one like it-but she could not for the life of her remember where. “You dreamed someone named Paxcow took you to the Pet Sematary?”

“Yes, that’s what he said his name was. And-” Her eyes suddenly widened.

“Do you remember something else?”

“He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was… I don’t know… that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis-dis-I can’t remember!” she wailed.

“Honey,” Rachel said, “I think you dreamed about the Pet Sematary because you’re still thinking about Gage. And I’m sure Daddy is fine. Do you feel any better now?”

“No,” Ellie whispered. “Mommy, I’m scared. Aren’t you scared?”

“Huh-uh,” Rachel said, with a brisk little shake of her head and a smile-but she was, she was scared; and that name, Fax-cow, haunted her with its familiarity.

She felt she had heard it in some dreadful context months or even years ago, and that nervy feeling would not leave her.

She felt something-something pregnant, swollen, and waiting to burst. Something terrible that needed to be averted. But what? What?

“I’m sure everything is fine,” she told Ellie. “Want to go back to Grandma and Grandda?”

“I guess so,” Ellie said listlessly.

A Puerto Rican woman led her very young son into the ladies’, scolding him. A large wet stain had spread on the crotch of the little boy’s Bermudas and Rachel found herself reminded of Gage with a kind of paralyzing poignancy. This fresh sorrow was like novocaine, smothering her jitters.

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll call Daddy from Grandda’s house.”

“He was wearing shorts,” Ellie said suddenly, looking back at the little boy.

“Who was, honey?”

“Paxcow,” Ellie said. “He was wearing red shorts in my dream.

That brought the name momentarily into focus, and Rachel felt that knee-weakening fear again… then it danced away.

They could not get close to the luggage carousel; Rachel could just see the top of her father’s hat, the one with the feather. Dory Goldman was holding two seats against the wall for them and waving. Rachel brought Ellie over.

“Are you feeling any better, dear?” Dory asked.

“A little bit,” Ellie said. “Mommy-”

She turned to Rachel and broke off. Rachel was sitting bolt upright, her hand clapped to her mouth, her face white. She had it. It had suddenly gone through with a terrible thud. Of course she should have known at once, but she had tried to put it out of her mind. Of course.

“Mommy?”

Rachel turned slowly to her daughter, and Ellie could hear the tendons in her neck creak. She took her hand away from her mouth.

“Did the man in your dream tell you his first name, Eileen?”

“Mommy, are you all-”

“Did the man in your dream tell you his first name?”

Dory was looking at her daughter and granddaughter as if they might have both gone crazy.

“Yes, but I can’t remember… Mommy, you’re hurrrrting me-”

Rachel looked down and saw that her free hand was clamped around Ellie’s lower forearm like a manacle.

“Was it Victor?”

Ellie drew sharp breath. “Yes, Victor! He said his name was Victor! Mommy, did you dream of him too?”

“Not Paxcow,” Rachel said. “Pascow.”

“That’s what I said. Paxcow.”

“Rachel, what’s wrong?” Dory said. She took Rachel’s free hand and winced at its chill. “And what’s wrong with Eileen?”

“It’s not Eileen,” Rachel said. “It’s Louis, I think. Something is wrong with Louis. Or something is going to be wrong. Sit with Ellie, Mom. I want to call home.”

She got up and crossed to the telephones, digging in her purse for a quarter.

She made the call collect, but there was no one to accept the charges. The phone simply rang.

“Will you try your call later?” the operator asked her.

“Yes,” Rachel said and hung up.

She stood there, staring at the phone.

He said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was… that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis-dis-I can’t remember!

“Discorporated,” Rachel whispered. Her fingers dug at the fabric of her handbag.

“Oh my God, was that the word?”

She tried to catch at her thoughts, to arrange them. Was something going on here, something beyond their natural upset at Gage’s death and this queer cross-country trip that was so much like flight? How much had Ellie known about the young man who had died on Louis’s first day at work?

Nothing, her mind answered inexorably. You kept it from her, the way you tried to keep anything from her that had to do with death-even the possible death of her cat, remember the dumb, stupid argument we had that day in the pantry? You kept it from her. Because you were scared then and you’re scared now. His name was Pascow, Victor Pascow, and how desperate is the situation now, Rachel? How bad is this? What in the name of God is happening?

Her hands were trembling so badly that it took her two tries to redeposit her quarter. This time she called the infirmary at the university and got Chariton, who accepted the call, a little mystified. No, she hadn’t seen Louis and would have been surprised if he had come in today. That said, she offered her sympathies to Rachel again. Rachel accepted them and then asked Chariton to have Louis call her at her folks’ house if he did come in. Yes, he had the number, she answered Charlton’s question, not wanting to tell the nurse (who probably knew anyway; she had a feeling that Chariton didn’t miss much) that her folks’ house was half the continent away.

She hung up, feeling hot and trembly.

She heard Pascow’s name somewhere else, that’s all. My God, you don’t raise a kid in a glass box like a… a hamster or some-thing. She heard an item about it on the radio. Or some kid mentioned it to her at school, and her mind stored it away. Even that word she couldn’t say-suppose it was a jawbreaker like “discorporated” or “discorporeal,” so what? That proves nothing except that the subconscious is exactly the kind of sticky flypaper the Sunday supplements say it is.

She remembered a college psych instructor who had asserted that under the right conditions, your memory could play back the names of every person to whom you had ever been introduced, every meal you had ever eaten, the weather conditions which had obtained on every day of your life. He made a persuasive case for this incredible assertion, telling them that the human mind was a computer with staggering numbers of memory chips-not i6K, or 32K, or 64K, but perhaps as much as one billion K: literally, a thousand billion. And how much might each of these organic “chips” be capable of storing? No one knew. But there were so many of them, he said, that there was no need for any of them to be erasable so they could be re-used. In fact the conscious mind had to turn down the lights on some of them as a protection against informational insanity. “You might not be able to remember where you keep your socks,” the psych instructor had said, “if the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica was stored in the adjacent two or three memory cells.”