Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

In this dull, exhausted aftermath, nothing seemed to matter. He felt like something less than human now, one of George Romero’s stupid, lurching movie-zombies, or maybe someone who had escaped from T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling through Little God Swamp and up to the Micmac burying ground, he thought and uttered a dry chuckle. “Headpiece full of straw, Church,” he said in his croaking voice. He was unbuttoning his shirt now. “That’s me. You better believe it.” There was a nice bruise coming on his left side, about halfway up his ribcage, and when he rolled up his pants leg he saw that the knee he had banged on the gravestone was swelling up like a balloon. It had already turned a rotten purple-black, and he supposed that as soon as he stopped flexing it, the joint would become stiff and painfully obdurate—as if it had been dipped in cement. It looked like one of those injuries that might want to converse with him on rainy days for the rest of his life.