Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we continue Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapters 55-57. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Ongoing content warning for child death, also maggots.
On his second trip beyond the Pet Sematary, Louis doesn’t carry Church in a Hefty Bag but his son wrapped in a canvas tarp. As before, his senses sharpen, touching woods that feel “in some kind of telepathic contact with himself.” The path is sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, passing from tangled underbrush to “cathedral stands” of pines, then plunging downhill to the miry edge of Little God Swamp. Here, as at the deadfall, one must walk without looking down, believing that safe passage will be granted. Once a high school teacher told Louis’s class that “faith is accepting gravity as a postulate.” What Louis must accept now is that these woods are alive with “a kind of coalescing force, a real being… possibly sentient,” and that the Micmac burying ground can resurrect the dead.
Mist encloses Louis “in a glowing white capsule… a pulsing effulgence like the beat of some strange heart.” A constant shrill chorus of peepers is rent by the crazy laughter Jud insisted was only loons, and voices whisper around him. A face appears in the air, “leering and gibbering.” Its eyes are a sunken yellowish-gray. Its mouth is drawn down in a rictus that exposes black-stained teeth. Its ears are missing, replaced by ram’s horns, and it lolls out a long pointed tongue coated with yellow scales, one of which peels back to release a white worm. It laughs, and Louis knows the face is no illusion conjured by St. Elmo’s fire. Nor can he believe that the ground-shaking tread crashing through the trees, or the “twin yellow-orange sparks” like eyes peering through the canopy, are other than the Wendigo’s.
He thinks, “Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices… but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.”
Beyond the swamp is the anomalous rock spire with a staircase cut into its side. Louis bears his burden to its flat top and toppled cairns. This time he notices that the rock-piles form a gigantic spiral, exposed to stars that form no recognizable constellations.
Nothing good can come from this place, but it’s too late to back down. Besides, “there’s no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.” At home in his black doctor’s bag are syringes and life-saving… or life-ending… drugs. If something goes too badly, he can fix the situation without anyone ever knowing.
Louis gets to work with his pick and shovel, setting aside the likeliest rocks for Gage’s cairn.
* * *
Though Rachel slaps her face until it smarts, she keeps dozing and letting her rental car drift off the highway pavement onto the shoulder. After two close calls with guardrails, she pulls over and weeps into her hands. Whether she’s being paranoid or not, it feels like something is trying to stop her from getting to Louis: Stay out of this, you…
She pulls into a truck stop where she slugs back coffee like medicine. Revived, she returns to her car. But it won’t start, this new vehicle with less than five thousand miles on it. She’s stranded just fifty miles from home. She’s hit with “a sudden vicious certainty” that the truck that killed Gage is here at the stop, chuckling at her quandary.
She begins to cry again.
* * *
Descending the deadfall back into the Pet Sematary, Louis falls heavily. He struggles up and lurches through child-made graves. Something moves stealthily on the other side of the deadfall. It can’t be Gage, not so soon. Instead he envisions something blind and ancient, a giant mole, a huge bat flopping through the underbrush…
He finally makes it home. In the downstairs bathroom, Church lies on the toilet tank. Louis knows he put the cat out, but Church is different now, and if Church wants in, Church gets in.
What does that matter when Louis himself feels like a George Romero zombie himself, or maybe like one of T. S. Eliot’s hollow men. His left side ribcage is severely bruised, his knee swollen to a “rotten purple-black.” He gives his wounds cursory treatment and heads through the empty house, thinking back to Christmas, the family all together. To their arrival in Ludlow. It’s all too strange, and he wishes he never heard of Ludlow, Jud and Norma, any of it.
Upstairs, he checks his doctor’s bag contents. Finding syringes and ampules of potentially deadly stuff is a relief. He lies down and sinks into the old Disney World fantasy, just him and Gage, driving the medic’s van around the park, “sentries in this magic land.” Let Oz the Gweat and Tewwible stare down from the flying Dumbo ride and catalog all his deaths. Somewhere a little girl is calling out, “I love you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young.” In her heart, Oz is just a gentle faker, no threat. Louis and Gage know the truth and are on patrol.
He sleeps too deeply to hear the predawn footsteps that mount the stairs and come into the bedroom. White hands search his bag. They pull out something that gleams silver in the growing light.
The shadowy visitor leaves the room.
What’s Cyclopean: Both the demonic face and Louis himself gibber, a classically horrific word. But also the mist is “tenebrous with spirits” and has “an eldritch, sickening smell like warm, spoiled pork.”
Libronomicon: Louis feels like an escapee from “T.S. Eliot’s poem about the hollow men,” a “pair of ragged claws.”
Weirdbuilding: King’s not the first to posit the story of Lazarus as horror.
Madness Takes Its Toll: If you look around on the path, you may see something to send you “raving mad.” Better not.
Anne’s Commentary
Up front, I want to pitch a new series to the Disney Channel. If they were to catch Stephen King in a warm and fuzzy mood, maybe they could convince him to endorse an alternate ending to Pet Sematary. Say Gage returns from his second grave in decent shape, just a little slow and confused but otherwise as adorable as Baby Yoda. Or, at least, as adorable as Baby Yoda would be if he’d just clawed his way out of a shallow grave in the dark middle of nowhere. Louis could pack Gage and a couple of bags into the Civic and head south. Church could accompany them as a hilariously acerbic but still cuddly sidekick.
Rachel and Ellie? Let’s keep them and gruff but grandfatherly Jud for a Season Two reunion with Louis and Gage. For Season One, focus on the father/son/snarky cat dynamic, complicated by the fact that two of the three were recently dead and remain prone to tear the heads off small animals. Especially if said heads get scattered around the Disney World parks for toddlers to masticate, and Cinderella to impale on the heels of her glass slippers.
Louis and Gage can gather around them a zany cast of other Disney employees from whom Gage’s secret MUST BE KEPT. The comedic and dramatic possibilities are as legion as the demonic presences that may have accompanied the Creeds from Maine. Guest appearances from the Wendigo! Crimes solved and relationship problems mended! Deep philosophical and ethical questions addressed with a leavening touch of whimsy! Additional revenue streams from merch and crossovers with Walking Dead spin-offs!
I, for one, need a death-size Church plushy right now!
Pitch over. Back to serious literary commentary. By its lack of frivolous exclamation points shall ye know it.
Louis’s labors in the Pleasantview cemetery were physically and emotionally torturous. That neatly laid-out and sanitized place held no compensatory magic. The woods encompassing the Micmac burial ground offer magic in simultaneously narcotic and exhilarating dosages; entering them, Louis has “rediscovered his dream” and recaptured the keenness of sensation that delivers some of King’s most evocative descriptions. My favorite is how, in “the great cathedral stands of trees,” he “could smell the clear tang of pine resin, and he could hear that strange crump-crump of the needles underfoot—a sensation that is really more feeling than sound.” I love to walk in groves of Eastern white pine, where the thick carpets of fallen needles do have a unique sound and feel under your feet.
The “cathedral stands” of pines might have been a clean, even sacred place to bury Gage. But they give way to the sludge of Little God Swamp, where the dominant flora are “low, ugly bushes with leaves so broad they were almost tropical.” Not only has the wilderness become unlovely and hazardous, it’s taken on a disorientingly alien appearance to Louis. He asks himself, “Have you ever seen plants like these in Maine before? In Maine or anywhere else? What in Christ’s name are they?” Instead of Christ, Louis should invoke some older god. Adding to the mind-eroding weirdness of the setting are the spring choruses of the peeper frogs, which Louis finds “alien and uninviting.” Voices dog him through heavy mist that could be hiding anything, including a “blood-drenched thing… all bared teeth and glittering eyes.” That could be one of the Wendigo’s human victims, driven to madness and cannibalism.
Two still more terrible monsters accost Louis before he reaches the burial ground. The first is a “grisly, floating head [that] seemed to be speaking—laughing.” In addition to uptilted yellow eyes, blackened nubs of teeth, and a lolling worm-infested tongue, it sports ram horns. The images of wendigos I’ve seen often have skeletal heads crowned with deer or elk horns, but who’s going to stop a mutton-loving wendigo from going for the ram look? It’s the image of a scaly tongue harboring under-scale worms that’s stayed with me all the decades since I first read this novel. Louis is looking maggoty death square in the face and reflexively hugging Gage closer. Death isn’t taking Gage from him, which is the point of this night-journey.
The floating face, always equidistant from Louis and dissolving into nothingness, can be passed off as hallucination. Not so the colossus that stomps through the forest—it leaves proof of its reality in snapped-off trees and pit-deep footprints. Let there be Sunday morning gods, he thinks, but “let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.”
It’s a futile wish—clearly, Louis has slipped into the nightside, where there are no familiar constellations; clearly, there’s nothing for him to do but drop exhausted into a rococo fantasy of the 20th-century American “dayside” which is Disney World. Wholesome normality with its “innocent pleasures” may still have glitches in which a man suddenly crumples under a coronary or a Norman Rockwell girl collapses in a “flopping epileptic fit.” Louis isn’t denying that Oz the Gweat and Tewwible lurks even in Disney World. He’s just envisioning himself and Gage as knights in a white medical van, ever ready to join in “that sickening, noble, hopeless battle with Oz.”
Or is the battle hopeless? Dawn will bring Louis the answer, even if he’s not awake to receive it.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
We’re here! We’re finally here! Oh, crap.
Even aside from actually getting the disinterred corpse reburied in the worst possible spot, where we are is pretty interesting. Unlike the trip with Church’s body, this time we get every detail of the “loons” and “swamp gas” between deadfall and burial ground. Demonic faces float in the air (complete with wormy tongues, ewwwwww). Unknown plants crowd the path. And something 60 feet high, with glowing eyes and (at least) four legs shakes the ground as it passes through the mist.
King, like Lovecraft, is known for writing in a semi-coherent mythos. We’ve already seen the turnoff to Jerusalem’s Lot. Have we just found out where the mist from “The Mist” came from? That giant walker-monster sure looks familiar. And is this the route that Mrs. Todd takes to trim a few minutes off her commute?
Now that it’s too late, Louis wonders how this route could possibly lead to anything good. But he’s caught in the grip of the force that touches you and turns you into a cannibal. Or touches the dead and turns them into… cannibals? Predators? Church hasn’t been eating other cats, but his killer instincts have been turned way up. And—here’s an important factor that Louis forgot—cats don’t have opposable thumbs. Undead-Gage, at the very end of this week’s section, seems to be taking full advantage of his/its manipulative appendages. And Louis, exhausted, has left some very dangerous substances and sharp objects accessible at child height, something you aren’t supposed to do even when said child is alive in the normal sense.
Louis’s fatigue, and Rachel’s, struck me both on the visceral oh-god-don’t-drive-like-that level, and on the authorial level. I once wrote a scene in which a character got a good night’s sleep, which my editor (Carl Engle-Laird, of local renown) responded to with, “but what if she didn’t.” Which indeed added a good deal of tension to the subsequent plot. In my next book, therefore, I wrote a character with insomnia, a trait I promptly found to be ontologically contagious. I hope that King didn’t keep himself up, miserably exhausted, along with his characters—but I suspect he did.
Speaking of Rachel, why is Wendy still trying to keep her away from home? Louis’s already done the deed; what would she be in a position to do if her car and brain were both online? Maybe it’s just pointless cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Or maybe Wendy only wants Undead Gage to have to face off against one sympathetic adult at a time. He only has the strength of a six-year-old now, not exactly a teenage soldier.
Or maybe some other force is trying to keep Rachel safe. But then, Pascow couldn’t actually interfere, only warn, and this seems like interference. Nor would running her off the road in a sleep-deprived accident be any favor other than, perhaps, the better of two awful fates.
Because when Louis gets home, Church is there to remind him—and us—that what returns from the burial ground isn’t lacking in its former intelligence. It’s lacking in love. Desperate, Louis reaches out to pat, to seek comfort, and is rejected by a “flat, yellow glance.” Undead Gage isn’t going to want to fly kites, or hug his/its father. Nor is he/it going to want to, as Louis hopes in dreams, travel the world’s innocent Disneyesque surface looking for more chances to claw something back from death.
No, he/it is going to be a tool of Oz the Gweat and Tewwible—of the terrible fragility of the tissue between life and death, and of the singsong litany of a thousand ways to cross that boundary. Needles, beetles, wires, fires. Cars and doctor’s bags and knives, and toddlers who aren’t quite alive.
Next week, more disturbing mist drifts in through H.F. Arnold’s “The Night Wire.” You can find it in The Weird.
