Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

“Don’t scold her for telling the truth, Louis,” Norma said. “Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children. The brown spots are yucky.”

like that he did not know, although it could not have been long in terms of seconds and minutes. Then a light flickered on Jud’s porch, bobbed, approached the porch door, and descended

Maybe she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.

He bought her six dresses and I brought her goddamn cat back from the dead, so who loves her more?

He laughed until he was crying and cried until he was laughing again. Rachel and Gage stared at him as if he had gone crazy. No, Louis could have told them. I’ve been crazy, but I think I’m going to be all right now. I really think I am.

still be here tomorrow?” “Yeah, sure.” “Then you have faith it will be here. As it so happens, I do, too. Faith is believing a thing will be, or is. Get it?” “Yes,”

I guess that’s why she’s such a… secret to all of us. Because we wanted her to die, Louis, we wished for her to die, and it wasn’t just so she wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was so we wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was because she was starting to look like a monster, and she was starting to be a monster…

and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some—Louis, for instance—would have said) to stop behaving

and those orange roadside signs which pay homage to the Great God BUMP. The immediate, personal, and most agonizing grief of Jud Crandall passed, that grief which the psychologists say begins about three days after the death of a loved one and holds hard from four to six

He saw her pause at a table near the back where she was laying placemats and silver. For a moment Louis was puzzled, and then he understood: they were waiting for him to comfort his wife. He couldn’t do it. He wanted to do it. He understood it was his responsibility to do it. All the same, he couldn’t. It was the cat that got in his way. Suddenly and with no rhyme