So he began to climb and the exhilaration returned, once more beating exhaustion back… at least a little way. His mind tolled off the steps as he rose into the chill, as he climbed back into that ceaseless river of wind, stronger now, rippling his clothes, making the piece of canvas tarp Gage was wrapped in stutter gunshot sounds like a lifted sail.

He cocked his head back once and saw the mad sprawl of the stars. There were no constellations he recognized, and he looked away again, disturbed. Beside him was the rock wall, not smooth but splintered and gouged and friable, taking here the shape of a boat, here the shape of a badger, here the shape of a man’s face with hooded, frowning eyes. Only the steps that had been carved from the rock were smooth.

Louis gained the top and only stood there with his head down, swaying, sobbing breath in and out of his lungs. They felt like cruelly punched bladders, and there seemed to be a large splinter sticking into his side.

The wind ran through his hair like a dancer, roared in his ears like a dragon.

The light was brighter this night; had it been overcast the other time or had he just not been looking? It didn’t matter. But he could see, and that was enough to start another chill worming down his back.

It was just like the Pet Sematary.

Of course you knew that, his mind whispered as he surveyed the piles of rocks that had once been cairns. You knew that, or should have known it-not concentric circles but the spiral…

Yes. Here on top of this rock table, its face turned up to cold starlight and to the black distances between the stars, was a gigantic spiral, made by what the old-timers would have called Various Hands. But there were no real cairns, Louis saw; every one of them had been burst apart as something buried beneath returned to life… and clawed its way out. Yet the rocks themselves had fallen in such a way that the shape of the spiral was apparent.

Has anyone ever seen this from the air? Louis wondered randomly and thought of those desert drawings that one tribe of Indians or another had made in South America. Has anyone ever seen it from the air, and if they did, what did they think, I wonder?

He kneeled and set Gage’s body on the ground with a groan of relief.

At last his consciousness began to come back. He used his pocketknife to cut the tape holding the pick and shovel slung over his back. They fell to the ground with a clink. Louis rolled over and lay down for a moment, spread-eagled, staring blankly at the stars.

What was that thing in the woods? Louis, Louis, do you really think anything good can come at the climax of a play where something like that is among the cast of characters?

But now it was too late to back out, and he knew it.

Besides, he gibbered to himself, it may still come out all right; there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love. There’s still my bag, not the one downstairs but the one in our bathroom on the high shelf, the one I sent Jud for the night Norma’ had her heart attack. There are syringes, and if something happens… something bad… no one has to know but me.

His thoughts dissolved into the inarticulate, droning mutter of prayer even as his hands groped for the pick… and still on his knees, Louis began to dig into the earth. Each time he brought the pick down he collapsed over the end of it, like an old Roman falling on his sword. Yet little by little the hole took shape and deepened. He clawed the rocks out, and most he simply pushed aside along with the growing pile of stony dirt. But some of them he saved.

For the cairn.

56

Rachel slapped her face until it began to tingle, and still she kept nodding off. Once she snapped fully awake (she was in Pittsfield now and had the turnpike all to herself), and it seemed to her for a split second that dozens of silvery, merciless eyes were looking at her, twinkling like cold, hungry fire.

Then they resolved themselves into the small reflectors on the guardrail posts.

The Chevette had drifted far over into the breakdown lane.

She wrenched the wheel to the left again, the tires wailing, and she believed she heard a faint tick! that might have been her right front bumper just kissing off one of those guardrail posts. Her heart leaped in her chest and began to bang so hard between her ribs that she saw small specks before her eyes, growing and shrinking in time with its beat. And yet a moment later, in spite of her close shave, her scare, and Robert Gordon shouting “Red Hot” on the radio, she was drowsing off again.

A crazy, paranoid thought came to her. “Paranoid, all right,” she muttered under the rock and roll. She tried to laugh-but she couldn’t. Not quite. Because the thought remained, and in the eye of the night, it gained a spooky kind of credibility. She began to feel like a cartoon figure who has run into the rubber band of a gigantic slingshot. Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner… inertia becomes what?… elementary physics… something trying to hold her back… stay out of this, you… and a body at rest tends to remain at rest… Gage’s body, for instance… once set in motion.

This time the scream of tires was louder, the shave a lot closer; for a moment there was the queeling, grailing sound of the Chevette running along the guardrail cables, scraping paint down to the twinkling metal, and for a moment the wheel didn’t answer, and then Rachel was standing on the brake, sobbing; she had been asleep this time, not just dozing but asleep and dreaming at sixty miles an hour, and if there had been no guardrail… or if there had been an overpass stanchion…

She pulled over and put the car in park and wept into her hands, bewildered and afraid.

Something is trying to keep me away from him.

When she felt she had control of herself, she began to drive again-the little car’s steering did not seem impaired, but she supposed the Avis company would have some serious questions for her when she returned their car to BIA tomorrow.

Never mind. One thing at a time. Got to get some coffee into me-that’s the first thing.

When the Pittsfield exit came up, Rachel took it. About a mile down the road she came to bright arc-sodium lights and the steady mutter-growl of diesel engines.

She pulled in, had the Chevette filled up (“Somebody put a pretty good ding along the side of her,” the gas jockey said in an almost admiring voice), and then went into the diner, which smelled of deep-fat grease, vulcanized eggs…

. and, blessedly, of good strong coffee.

Rachel had three cups, one after another, like medicine-black, sweetened with a lot of sugar. A few truckers sat at the counter or in the booths, kidding the waitresses, who somehow all managed to look like tired nurses filled with bad news under these fluorescent lights burning in the night’s little hours.

She paid her check and went back out to where she had parked the Chevette. It wouldn’t start. The key, when turned, would cause the solenoid to utter a dry click, but that was all.

Rachel began to beat her fists slowly and forcelessly against the steering wheel. Something was trying to stop her. There was no reason for this car, brand-new and with less than five thousand miles on its odometer, to have died like this, but it had. Somehow it had, and here she was, stranded in Pittsfield, still almost fifty miles from home.

She listened to the steady drone of the big trucks, and it came to her with a sudden, vicious certainty that the truck which had killed her son was here among them… not muttering but chuckling.

Rachel lowered her head and began to cry.