Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

Not much like the Pet Sematary, he thought, and this caused him to stop and consider for a moment, surprised. No, it wasn’t. The Pet Sematary had given him an impression of order rising almost unknown out of chaos. Those rough, concentric circles moving inward to the center, rude slates, crosses made out of boards. As if the children who buried their pets there had created the pattern out of their own collective unconsciousness, as if… For a moment Louis saw the Pet Sematary as a kind of advertisement… a come-on, like the kind they gave you on freak alley at the carnival. They’d bring out the fire-eater and you got to watch his show for free because the owners knew you wouldn’t buy the steak unless you saw the sizzle, you wouldn’t cough up the cash if you didn’t see the flash— Those graves, those graves in their almost Druidic circles. The graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked. It was a symbol the Egyptians had chiseled on the tombs of the Pharaohs, a symbol the Phoenicians had drawn on the barrows of their fallen kings; it was found on cave walls in ancient Mycenae; the guildkings of Stonehenge had created it as a clock to time the universe; it appeared in the Judeo-Christian Bible as the whirlwind from which God had spoken to Job. The spiral was the oldest sign of power in...