Louis glanced at the four beer cans lined up in a neat row. Not enough to put him to sleep, but maybe he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. However it had been, it was just a little bit too good to have been perfectly accidental, wasn’t it?

The muddy tracks approached the chair by the window. Mixed among the human tracks were a few faded, ghostly catprints. As if Church had walked in and out of the gravedirt left by Gage’s small shoes. Then the tracks made for the swinging door leading into the kitchen.

Heart thudding, Louis followed the tracks.

He pushed the door open and saw Jud’s splayed feet, his old green workpants, his checked flannel shirt. The old man was lying sprawled in a wide pool of drying blood.

Louis clapped his hands to his face, as if to blight his own vision. But there was no way to do that; he saw eyes, Jud’s eyes, open, accusing him, perhaps even accusing himself for setting this in motion.

But did he? Louis wondered. Did he really do that?

Jud had been told by Stanny B., and Stanny B. had been told by his father, and Stanny B. ’s father had been told by his father, the last trader to the Indians, a Frenchman from the north country in the days when Franklin Pierce had been a living President.

“Oh Jud, I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

Jud’s blank eyes stared at him.

“So sorry,” Louis repeated.

His feet seemed to move by themselves, and he was suddenly back to last Thanksgiving in his mind, not to that night when he and Jud had taken the cat up to the Pet Sematary and beyond, but to the turkey dinner Norma had put on the table, all of them laughing and talking, the two men drinking beer and Norma with a glass of white wine, and she had taken the white lawn tablecloth from the lower drawer as he was taking it now, but she had put it on the table and then anchored it with lovely pewter candlestick holders, while he-Louis watched it billow down over Jud’s body like a collapsing parachute, mercifully covering that dead face. Almost immediately, tiny rosepetals of deepest, darkest scarlet began to stain the white lawn.

“I’m sorry,” he said for a third time. “So sor-”

Then something moved overhead, something scraped, and the word broke off between his lips. It had been soft, it had been stealthy, but it had been deliberate. Oh yes, he was convinced of that. A sound he had been meant to hear.

His hands wanted to tremble, but he would not allow them. He stepped over to the kitchen table with its checkered oilcloth covering and reached into his pocket.

He removed three more Becton-Dickson syringes, stripped them of their paper coverings, and laid them out in a neat row. He removed three more multidose vials and filled each of the syringes with enough morphine to kill a horse-or Hanratty the bull, if it came to that. He put them in his pocket again.

He left the kitchen, crossed the living room, and stood at the base of the stairs.

“Cage?”

From somewhere in the shadows above there came a giggling-a cold and sunless laughter that made the skin on Louis’s back prickle.

He started up.

It was a long walk to the top of those stairs. He could well imagine a condemned man taking a walk almost as long (and as horribly short) to the platform of a scaffold with his hands tied behind his back, knowing that he would piss when he could no longer whistle.

He reached the top at last, one hand in his pocket, staring only at the wall.

How long did he stand that way? He did not know. He could now feel his sanity beginning to give way. This was an actual sensation, a true thing. It was interesting. He imagined a tree overloaded with ice in a terrible storm would feel this way-if trees could feel anything-shortly before toppling. It was interesting… and it was sort of amusing.

“Gage, want to go to Florida with me?”

That giggle again.

Louis turned and was greeted by the sight of his wife, to whom he had once carried a rose in his teeth, lying halfway down the hall, dead. Her legs were splayed out as Jud’s had been. Her back and head were cocked at an angle against the wall. She looked like a woman who has gone to sleep while reading in bed.

He walked down toward her.

Hello, darling, he thought, you came home.

Blood had splashed the wallpaper in idiot shapes. She had been stabbed a dozen times, two dozen, who knew? His scalpel had done this work.

Suddenly he saw her, really saw her, and Louis Creed began to scream.

His screams echoed and racketed shrilly through this house where now only death lived and walked. Eyes bulging, face livid, hair standing on end, he screamed; the sounds came from his swollen throat like the bells of hell, terrible shrieks that signaled the end not of love but of sanity; in his mind all the hideous images were suddenly unloosed at once. Victor Pascow dying on the infirmary carpet, Church coming back with bits of green plastic in his whiskers, Gage’s baseball cap lying in the road, full of blood, but most of all that thing he had seen near Little Cod Swamp, the thing that had pushed the tree over, the thing with the yellow eyes, the Wendigo, creature of the north country, the dead thing whose touch awakens unspeakable appetites.

Rachel had not just been killed.

Something had been… something had been at her.

(! CLICK!) That click was in his head. It was the sound of some relay fusing and burning out forever, the sound of lightning stroking down in a direct hit, the sound of a door opening.

He looked up numbly, the scream still shivering in his throat and here was Cage at last, his mouth smeared with blood, his chin dripping, his lips pulled back in a hellish grin. In one hand he held Louis’s scalpel.

As he brought it down, Louis pulled back with no real thought at all. The scalpel whickered past his face, and Gage overbalanced. He is as clumsy as Church, Louis thought. Louis kicked his feet from under him. Gage fell awkwardly, and Louis was on him before he could get up, straddling him, one knee pinning the hand which held the scalpel.

“No,” the thing under him panted. Its face twisted and writhed. Its eyes were baleful, insectile in their stupid hate. “No, no, no-”

Louis clawed for one of the hypos, got it out. He would have to be quick. The thing under him was like a greased fish and it would not let go of the scalpel no matter how hard he bore down on its wrist. And its face seemed to ripple and change even as he looked at it. It was Jud’s face, dead and staring; it was the dented, ruined face of Victor Pascow, eyes rolling mindlessly; it was, mirrorlike, Louis’s own, so dreadfully pale and lunatic. Then it changed again and became the face of that creature in the woods-the low brow, the dead yellow eyes, the tongue long and pointed and bifurcated, grinning and hissing.

“No, no, no-no-no-”

It bucked beneath him. The hypo flew out of Louis’s hand and rolled a short way down the hail. He groped for another, brought it out, and jammed it straight down into the small of Gage’s back.

It screamed beneath him, body straining and sunfishing, nearly throwing him off.

Grunting, Louis got the third syringe and jammed this one home in Gage’s arm, depressing the plunger all the way. He got off then and began to back slowly down the hallway. Cage got slowly to his feet and began to stagger toward him.

Five steps and the scalpel fell from its hand. It struck the floor blade first and stuck itself in the wood, quivering. Ten steps and that strange yellow light in its eyes began to fade. A dozen and it fell to its knees.

Now Cage looked up at him and for a moment Louis saw his son-his real son-his face unhappy and filled with pain.

“Daddy!” he cried, and then fell forward on his face.

Louis stood there for a moment, then went to Gage, moving carefully, expecting some trick. But there was no trick, no sudden leap with clawed hands. He slid his fingers expertly down Gage’s throat, found the pulse, and held it. He was then a doctor for the last time in his life, monitoring the pulse, monitoring until there was nothing, nothing inside, nothing outside.