Pet Sematary

by Stephen King

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nerdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, mun...

munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

Gage Creed came in, dressed in his burial suit. Moss was growing on the suit’s shoulders and lapels. Moss had fouled his white shirt. His fine blond hair was caked with dirt. One eye had gone to the wall; it stared off into space with terrible concentration. The other was fixed on Jud. Gage was grinning at him. “Hello, Jud,” Gage piped in a babyish but perfectly understandable voice. “I’ve come to send your rotten, stinking old soul straight to hell. You fucked with me once. Did you think I wouldn’t come back sooner or later and fuck with you?” Jud raised the cleaver. “Come on and get your pecker out then, whatever you are. We’ll see who fucks with who.” “Norma’s dead, and there’ll be no one to mourn you,” Gage said. “What a cheap slut she was. She fucked every one of your friends, Jud. She let them put it up her ass. That’s how she liked it best. She’s burning down in hell, arthritis and all. I saw her there, Jud. I saw her there.” It lurched two steps toward him, shoes leaving muddy tracks on the worn linoleum. It held one hand out in front of it as if to shake with him; the other hand was curled behind its back. “Listen, Jud,” it whispered—and then its mouth hung open, baring small milk teeth, and although the lips did not move, Norma’s voice issued forth. “I laughed at you! We all laughed at you! How we laaaaaauuughed—” “Stop it!” The cleaver jittered in his hand. “We did it in our bed, Herk and I did it, I did it with George, I did it with all of them. I knew about yo...

your whores but you never knew you married a whore and how we laughed, Jud! We rutted together and we laaaaaaaaaughed at—” “STOP IT!” Jud screamed. He sprang at the tiny, swaying figure in its dirty burial suit, and that was when the cat arrowed out of the darkness under the butcher block where it had been crouched. It was hissing, its ears laid back along the bullet of its skull, and it tripped Jud up just as neat as you please. The cleaver flew out of his hand. It skittered across the humped and faded linoleum, blade and handle swiftly changing places as it whirled. It struck the baseboard with a thin clang and slid under the refrigerator.

Jud realized that he had been fooled again, and the only consolation was that it was for the final time. The cat was on his legs, mouth open, eyes blazing, hissing like a teakettle. And then Gage was on him, grinning a happy black grin, eyes moon-shaped, rimmed with red, and his right hand came out from behind his back, and Jud saw that what he had been holding when he came in was a scalpel from Louis’s black bag. “Oh m’ dear Jesus,” Jud managed and put his right hand up to block the blow. And here was an optical illusion; surely his mind had snapped because it appeared that the scalpel was on both sides of his palm at the same time. Then something warm began to drizzle down on his face, and he understood. “I’m gonna fuck with you, old man!” the Gage-thing chortled, blowing its poisoned breath in his face. “I’m gonna fuck with you! I’m gonna fuck with you all… I… want!” Jud flailed and got hold of Gage’s wrist. Skin peeled off like parchment in his hand. The scalpel was yanked out of his hand, leaving a vertical mouth. “ALL… I… WANT!” The scalpel came down again. And again. And again.

Rachel shifted from one foot to the other, wondering what to do next. The worst of it was that all of it seemed… seemed somehow managed, as if something wanted her to be here, and— And then there was a groan from upstairs, low and filled with pain—Jud’s voice, surely Jud’s voice. He’s fallen in the bathroom or maybe tripped, broken a leg, or sprained his hip, maybe, the bones of the old are brittle, and what in the name of God are you thinking of, girl, standing down here and shifting back and forth like you had to go to the bathroom, that was blood on Church, blood. Jud’s hurt and you’re just standing here! What’s wrong with you? “Jud!” The groan came again, and she ran up the stairs. She had never been up here before, and because the hall’s only window faced west, toward the river, it was still very dark. The hallways ran straight and wide beside the stairwell and toward the back of the house, the cherrywood rail gleaming with mellow elegance. There was a picture of the Acropolis on the wall and (it’s Zelda all these years she’s been after you and now it’s her time open the right door and she’ll be there with her humped and twisted back smelling of piss and death it’s Zelda it’s her time and finally she caught up with you) the groan came again, low, from behind the second door on the right. Rachel began to walk toward that door, her heels clacking on the boards. It seemed to her that she was going through some sort of warp—not a time warp or a space warp but a size warp....

warp. She was getting smaller. The picture of the Acropolis was floating higher and higher, and that cut-glass doorknob would soon be at eye level. Her hand stretched out for it . . . and before she could even touch it, the door was snatched open. Zelda stood there. She was hunched and twisted, her body so cruelly deformed that she had actually become a dwarf, little more than two feet high; and for some reason Zelda was wearing the suit they had buried Gage in. But it was Zelda, all right, her eyes alight with an insane glee, her face a raddled purple; it was Zelda screaming, “I finally came back for you, Rachel, I’m going to twist your back like mine and you’ll never get out of bed again never get out of bed again NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN—” Church was perched on one of her shoulders and Zelda’s face swam and changed, and Rachel saw with spiraling, sickening horror that it really wasn’t Zelda at all—how could she have made such a stupid mistake? It was Gage. His face was not black but dirty, smeared with blood. And it was swollen, as if he had been terribly hurt and then put back together again by crude, uncaring hands. She cried his name and held her arms out. He ran to her and climbed into them, and all the time one hand remained behind his back, as if with a bunch of posies picked in someone’s back meadow. “I brought you something, Mommy!” he screamed. “I brought you something, Mommy! I brought you something, I brought you something!”

What was that thing in the woods last night? The thought came to him unbidden, making him tighten his lips the way the pain in his knee had done when he swung it out of bed. He had dreamed about the thing in the woods last night. His dreams of Disney World had seemed to blend naturally and with a deadly ease into dreams of that thing. He dreamed that it had touched him, spoiling all good dreams forever, rotting all good intentions. It was the Wendigo, and it had turned him into not just a cannibal but the father of cannibals. In his dream he had been in the Pet Sematary again but not alone. Bill and Timmy Baterman had been there. Jud had been there, looking ghostly and dead, holding his dog Spot on a clothesrope leash. Lester Morgan was there with Hanratty the bull on a length of car-towing chain. Hanratty was lying on his side, looking around with a stupid, drugged fury. And for some reason Rachel was there too, and she’d had some sort of accident at the dinner table—spilled a bottle of catsup or maybe dropped a dish of cranberry jelly, maybe, because her dress was splattered with red stains. And then, rising behind the deadfall to a titanic height, its skin a cracked reptilian yellow, its eyes great hooded foglamps, its ears not ears at all but massive curling horns, was the Wendigo, a beast that looked like a lizard born of a woman. It pointed its horny, nailed finger at all of them as they craned their necks up and up to watch it…

“Did she say anything? What scared her so badly?” He was gripping the phone white-knuckled now. Silence from Irwin Goldman’s end—a long silence. This time Louis did not interrupt, much as he would have liked to. “That was what scared Dory so badly,” Irwin said finally. “She babbled a lot before she got… before she was crying too hard to understand. Dory herself was almost… you know.” “What did she say?” “She said Oz the Great and Terrible had killed her mother. Only she didn’t say it that way. She said… she said ‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,’ which was the way our other daughter always used to say it. Our daughter Zelda. Louis, believe me when I say I would rather have asked Rachel this question, but how much have you and she told Eileen about Zelda and how she died?” Louis had closed his eyes; the world seemed to be rocking gently under his feet, and Goldman’s voice had the lost quality of a voice coming through thick mists. You may hear sounds like voices, but they are only the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries.

“Did she say anything else?” Louis asked. Goldman’s reply was like the toll of a funeral bell against the wall of his heart. “A lot, but only one other thing I could make out: ‘Paxcow says it’s too late.’ ”

The urge to flee came on him again for the last time, stronger than ever—he actually felt the comforting bulge of his car keys in his pocket. He would get in the Civic and drive to Chicago. He would get Ellie and go on from there. Of course by then Goldman would know something was wrong, that something was dreadfully amiss, but he would get her anyway… snatch her, if he had to. Then his hand fell away from the bulge of the keys. What killed the urge was not a sense of futility, not guilt, not despair or the deep weariness inside him. It was the sight of those muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. In his mind’s eye he could see them tracing a path across the entire country—first to Illinois, then to Florida—across the entire world, if necessary. What you bought, you owned, and what you owned eventually came home to you. There would come a day when he would open a door and there would be Gage, a demented parody of his former self, grinning a sunken grin, his clear blue eyes gone yellow and smart-stupid. Or Ellie would open the bathroom door for her morning shower, and there would be Gage in the tub, his body crisscrossed with the faded scars and bulges of his fatal accident, clean but stinking of the grave. Oh yes, that day would come—he didn’t doubt it a bit. “How could I have been so stupid?” he said to the empty room, talking to himself again, not caring. “How?” Grief, not stupidity, Louis. There is a difference… small, but vital. The battery that burying ground survives...

ground survives on. Growing in power, Jud said, and of course he was right—and you’re part of its power now. It has fed on your grief . . . no, more than that. It’s doubled it, cubed it, raised it to the nth power. And it isn’t just grief it feeds on. Sanity. It’s eaten your sanity. The flaw is only the inability to accept, not uncommon. It’s cost you your wife, and it’s almost surely cost you your best friend as well as your son. This is it. What comes when you’re too slow wishing away the thing that knocks on your door in the middle of the night is simple enough: total darkness. I would commit suicide now, he thought, and I suppose it’s in the cards, isn’t it? I have the equipment in my bag. It has managed everything, managed it from the first. The burying ground, the Wendigo, whatever it is. It forced our cat into the road, and perhaps it forced Gage into the road as well, it brought Rachel home, but only in its own good time. Surely I’m meant to do that . . . and I want to. But things have to be put right, don’t they? Yes. They did. There was Gage to think about. Gage was still out there. Somewhere.

Downstairs again. The sound of the pantry door being opened. The sound of a cupboard being opened, then slammed shut. The busy whine of the can opener. Last the sound of the garage door opening and closing. And then the house stood empty in the May sunshine, as it had stood empty on that August day the year before, waiting for the new people to arrive… as it would wait for other new people to arrive at some future date. A young married couple perhaps, with no children (but with hopes and plans). Bright young marrieds with a taste for Mondavi wine and Löwenbräu beer—he would be in charge of the Northeast Bank’s credit department perhaps, she with a dental hygienist’s credential or maybe three years’ experience as an optometrist’s assistant. He would split half a cord of wood for the fireplace, she would wear high-waisted corduroy pants and walk in Mrs. Vinton’s field, collecting November’s fall grasses for a table centerpiece, her hair in a ponytail, the brightest thing under the gray skies, totally unaware that an invisible Vulture rode the air currents overhead. They would congratulate themselves on their lack of superstition, on their hardheadedness in snaring the house in spite of its history—they would tell their friends that it had been fire-sale-priced and joked about the ghost in the attic, and all of them would have another Löwenbräu or another glass of Mondavi, and they would play backgammon or Mille Bourne. And perhaps they would have a dog.

Louis paused on the soft shoulder to let an Orinco truck loaded with chemical fertilizer blast by him, and then he crossed the street to Jud’s house, trailing his shadow to the west behind him. He held an open can of Calo catfood in one hand. Church saw him crossing and sat up, his eyes watchful. “Hi, Church,” Louis said, surveying the silent house. “Want some grub?” He put the can of catfood down on the trunk of the Chevette and watched as Church leaped lightly down from its roof and began to eat. Louis put his hand in his jacket pocket. Church looked around at him, tensing, as if reading his mind. Louis smiled and stepped away from the car. Church began to eat again, and Louis took a syringe from his pocket. He stripped the paper covering from it and filled it with 75 milligrams of morphine. He put the multidose vial back in his jacket and walked over to Church, who looked around again mistrustfully. Louis smiled at the cat and said, “Go on, eat up, Church. Hey-ho, let’s go, right?” He stroked the cat, felt its back arch, and when Church went back to his meal again, Louis seized it around its stinking guts and sank the needle deep into its haunch. Church went electric in his grip, struggling against him, spitting and clawing, but Louis held on and depressed the plunger all the way. Only then did he let go. The cat leaped off the Chevette, hissing like a teakettle, yellow-green eyes wild and baleful. The needle and syringe dangled from its haunch as it leaped, then fell o...

out and broke. Louis was indifferent. He had more of everything. The cat started for the road, then turned back toward the house, as if remembering something. It got halfway there and then began to weave drunkenly. It made the steps, leaped up to the first one, then fell off. It lay on the bare patch at the foot of the porch steps on its side, breathing weakly. Louis glanced into the Chevette. If he had needed more confirmation than the stone that had replaced his heart, he had it: Rachel’s purse on the seat, her scarf, and a clutch of plane tickets spilling out of a Delta Airlines folder. When he turned around again to walk to the porch, Church’s side had ceased its rapid, fluttery movement. Church was dead. Again. Louis stepped over it and mounted the porch steps.

“Gage?” 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 had 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 dead 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 God 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 f...

He looked up numbly, the scream still shivering in his throat and here was Gage 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 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. Gage 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 Gage 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. When it was gone at last, Louis got up and sauntered down the hall to a far corner. He crouched there, pulling himself into a ball, cramming himself into the corner, tighter and tighter. He found he could make himself smaller if he put a thumb in his mouth and so he did that.

Steve Masterton came around the curve just before Louis’s house and saw the smoke immediately—not from Louis’s place, but from the house that belonged to the old duck across the street. He had come out this morning because he had been worried about Louis—deeply worried. Charlton had told him about Rachel’s call of the day before, and that had set him to wondering just where Louis was… and what he was up to. His worry was vague, but it itched at his mind—he wasn’t going to feel right until he had gone out there and checked to see if things were okay… or as okay as they could be under the circumstances. The spring weather had emptied the infirmary like white magic, and Surrendra had told him to go ahead; he could handle whatever came up. So Steve had jumped into his Honda, which he had liberated from the garage only last weekend, and headed out for Ludlow. Maybe he pushed the cycle a little faster than was strictly necessary, but the worry was there; it gnawed. And with it came the absurd feeling that he was already too late. Stupid, of course, but in the pit of his stomach there was a feeling similar to the one he’d had there last fall when that Pascow thing cropped up—a feeling of miserable surprise and almost leaden disillusion. He was by no means a religious man (in college Steve had been a member of the Atheists’ Society for two semesters and had dropped out only when his advisor had told him—privately and very much off the record—that it might hurt his chances to obtai...

chances to obtain a med school scholarship later on), but he supposed he fell as much heir to whatever biological or biorhythmic conditions passed for premonitions as any other human being, and the death of Pascow had seemed to set a tone for the year which followed, somehow. Not a good year by any means. Two of Surrendra’s relatives had been clapped in jail back home, some political thing, and Surrendra had told him that he believed one of them—an uncle he cared for very much—might well now be dead. Surrendra had wept, and the tears from the usually benign Indian had frightened Steve. And Charlton’s mother had had a radical mastectomy. The tough nurse was not very optimistic about her mother’s chances for joining the Five-Year Club. Steve himself had attended four funerals since the death of Victor Pascow—his wife’s sister, killed in a car crash; a cousin, killed in a freak accident as the result of a barroom bet (he had been electrocuted while proving he could shinny all the way to the top of a power pole); a grandparent; and of course Louis’s little boy.

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.

The police came late that afternoon. They asked questions but voiced no suspicions. The ashes were still hot; they had not yet been raked. Louis answered their questions. They seemed satisfied. They spoke outside and he wore a hat. That was good. If they had seen his gray hair, they might have asked more questions. That would have been bad. He wore his gardening gloves, and that was good too. His hands were bloody and ruined. He played solitaire that night until long after midnight. He was just dealing a fresh hand when he heard the back door open. What you buy is what you own, and sooner or later what you own will come back to you, Louis Creed thought. He did not turn around but only looked at his cards as the slow, gritting footsteps approached. He saw the queen of spades. He put his hand on it. The steps ended directly behind him. Silence. A cold hand fell on Louis’s shoulder. Rachel’s voice was grating, full of dirt. “Darling,” it said. —February 1979–December 1982