Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

She’s dead and I think that maybe Louis has killed her, Louis has gone mad, utterly mad, but— But there was something worse than madness here—something much, much worse. It was as if there was a magnet somewhere out in those woods and he could feel it pulling at something in his brain. Pulling him toward that place where Louis was taking Rachel. Come on, walk the path… walk the path and see where it goes. We got stuff to show you out here, Steverino, stuff they never told you about in the Atheists’ Society back in Lake Forest. And then, perhaps simply because it had enough for one day to feed on and lost interest in him, the call of the place in his mind simply ceased. Steve took two plunging, drunken steps back down the side of the downfall. Then more branches let go with a grinding rattle and his left foot plunged into the tangled deadwood; harsh sharp splinters pulled off his sneaker and then tore into his flesh as he yanked free. He fell forward into the Pet Sematary, barely missing a piece of orange crate that could easily have punched into his stomach. He got to his feet, staring around, bewildered, wondering what had happened to him… or if anything had happened to him. Already it had begun to seem like a dream. Then, from the deep woods behind the deadfall, woods so deep that the light looked green and tarnished even on the brightest days, a low, chuckling laugh arose. The sound was huge. Steve could not even begin to imagine what sort of creature could have made su...

have made such a sound. He ran, one shoe off and one shoe on, trying to shriek but unable. He was still running when he reached Louis’s house, and still trying to shriek when he finally got his bike started and slued out onto Route 15. He very nearly sideswiped an arriving fire engine from Brewer. Inside his Bell helmet, his hair was standing on end. By the time he got back to his apartment in Orono, he could not precisely remember having gone to Ludlow at all. He called in sick at the infirmary, took a pill, and went to bed. Steve Masterton never really remembered that day . . . except in deep dreams, those that come in the small hours of the morning. And in these dreams he would sense that something huge had shrugged by him—something which had reached out to touch him . . . and had then withdrawn its inhuman hand at the very last second. Something with great yellow eyes which gleamed like foglamps. Steve sometimes awoke shrieking from these dreams, his eyes wide and bulging, and he would think: You think you are screaming, but it’s only the sound of the loons, down south, in Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny. But he did not know, could not remember, what such a thought might mean. The following year he took a job halfway across the country, in St. Louis. In the time between his last sight of Louis Creed and his departure for the Midwest, Steve never went into the town of Ludlow again.