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 Chapter 23-25. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
The morning after Jud takes him to the Micmac burial ground, Louis wakes up to a call from Rachel. She asks how everything’s going at home. Louis already feels he “crossed a line” when he described his Thanksgiving evening: Oh, he just went over to Jud’s. Remembering how Jud said, The soil of a man’s heart is stonier…a man grows what he can…and he tends it, he gives Rachel a verbal shrug: Things were okay, a little dull, actually.
Ellie then gets on the line asks about Church. He manages his lie with “the perfect note of offhanded casualness”: Church is fine, he had beef stew for dinner, Louis hasn’t seen him yet this morning, nor will he give Church a kiss for Ellie when he does see him—Ellie can kiss her own cat.
The call over, he says “That’s that.” The worst thing about his dishonesty? He doesn’t feel guilty at all.
* * *
His assistant Steve calls to see if Louis wants to play racquetball, but Louis says he has an article to write. In truth, exercise is the last thing he needs after the previous night’s exertions. He does work on the article, but the silent emptiness gets on his nerves, and he goes over to the Crandalls. No one’s home. Jud’s left a note to say that he and Norma have gone shopping. He invites Louis to stop in that evening, then abruptly switches the subject to Church. Jud doesn’t want to butt in on Louis’s family business, but he wouldn’t rush to tell Ellie about the cat’s death. Also, Louis shouldn’t talk around Ludlow about their last night’s doings. Others besides Jud know about the Micmac burying ground and don’t like to discuss it with “outsiders.” The superstitions surrounding that place go back three hundred years; people sort of believe in them and don’t like to think they’re being laughed at.
They can talk more later. By then, Louis should understand more. In the meantime, Jud wants him to know he did himself proud, as Jud knew he would.
PS: Jud would rather Louis not tell Norma about the situation. He’s told Norma more than one lie in fifty-eight years, as he guesses most married men do. Most, he adds, could confess those lies before God “without dropping their eyes from His.”
Louis’s memory of the night has become blurred, dreamlike. Men tell their wives “a smart of lies”? Wives and daughters as well. It’s eerie how Jud seems almost to know about Louis’s call from Rachel that morning. About what’s been going on in Louis’s mind, too.
* * *
Around 1pm Church comes back, “like the cat in the nursery rhyme.” He strolls into the garage where Louis has been building shelves. Louis’s shock is momentary—it’s like he’s known “in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind” what the hike to the burial ground meant.
He picks Church up and with “sick excitement” feels that he’s “live weight” again. He probes the cat’s neck. It’s no longer broken, if it ever was. However, there’s dried blood on Church’s muzzle, and caught in his whiskers are two shreds of Hefty Bag. So Louis will understand more about this soon? He understands more than he wants to right now.
He takes Church inside and feeds him. The way the cat purrs unevenly and rubs slickly against his ankles is loathsome. Louis swears Church’s fur smells of sour earth. He wonders if Church has always smacked over his food like he does now.
He rushes upstairs and takes a hot bath. As the tension leaves his muscles, he begins to feel better, more reasonable. It was a mistake to think Church died. After all, hadn’t he looked remarkably whole for roadkill? He must have been stunned, nothing more. And Louis was no vet, and it had been nearly dark on Jud’s lawn—
A misshapen shadow rises on the bathroom wall. Something touches his shoulder. Louis cringes to see Church perched on the toilet seat cover, his eyes a muddy yellow-green, his body swaying like that of a snake hypnotizing prey. Briefly he tries to believe this is not Ellie’s pet but a strange cat that wandered into the garage by chance. Only the markings are Church’s, and the one ragged ear and funny-looking foot that was caught in a door when he was a kitten.
Get out of here, Louis whispers hoarsely.
Church stares at him with eyes somehow changed, then leaps awkwardly to the floor and is gone.
Louis decides to meet Steve for racquetball, after all. Heading downstairs, he trips over a sprawled Church. Louis barely saves himself from a fall. Church, unperturbed, stands and stretches, seeming to grin at Louis.
Louis leaves the house without putting the cat out. Right now he doesn’t think he can bring himself to touch him—to touch it.
Libronomicon: Louis is writing an article for The Magazine of College Medicine about treating contagious diseases in an infirmary environment. Or at least, he’s trying.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Louis fears that if he learns more about what happened to Church, he’ll “understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.” Less alarmingly, a phone conversation with a two-year-old is “like trying to play cribbage with a lunatic”.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
One doesn’t come to literature expecting the very model of a healthy marriage. While horror, as a genre, isn’t as dependent on failed relationships as some others, it’s not unusual for out-of-the-ordinary terrors to grow from everyday miseries, or to mirror them back at supernatural scale.
My problem is that it high bar for communication screw-ups to get more reaction from me than “OMG just talk to each other and don’t act like idiots.” It’s not a matter of realism—I’ve been known to annoy people by having this bar in real life too. But the feeling leaks. Once I’m groaning over the assumption that Louis and Rachel couldn’t possibly have an honest conversation touching her phobia, Louis’s inability to handle the consequences of his necromancy get the same response. Not to mention Jud’s inability to have a serious talk with Louis beforehand about “how might you feel if the cat comes back wrong”.
No, in fact, lemme mention that one. If you’re going to find a belated father figure, I highly recommend one who will encourage you to talk with your wife. As opposed to, say, take it as given that all husbands lie and that’s fine. The apple, unfortunately, don’t fall far from the retroactive tree. Among the issues that are particularly important for honest discussion are the facts of life: sex, death, taxes, and anything that causes or is caused by that basic list, including violations of the natural order with respect to same. Deal with the devil? Planning an eschatological orgy? Going into the resurrection business? Please talk with your significant other. Ideally beforehand, but after is good too if they’re out of town and cell phones haven’t been invented yet.
All of which would’ve been helped if Jud had explained what was going on, or if Louis had expressed his suspicions aloud and thus had to deal with them in advance. Clearly not everyone finds resurrected pets distasteful, or Jud wouldn’t have kept his dog for so long and certainly wouldn’t have thought the whole business an excellent expression of fatherly affection. But presumably Louis is not the first to notice changes in burial ground returnees.
Then again, Louis was also convinced that fixing Church completely changed his personality. So we know he’s either (1) exceedingly sensitive to small biological shifts, or (2) exceedingly prone to imagining distressing changes when he knows something’s happened. He reminds himself that post-surgery—not just post-resurrection—Church is “it” rather than “he.” This is not normally how pronouns work and wasn’t in the 80s either. Rachel’s not the only one with phobias getting in the way of common sense.
There’s a bit of Frankenstein here—maybe a lot of Frankenstein. Shelley’s protagonist goes at resurrection more consciously than Louis, and yet screams and runs away the instant it works. If he’d stuck around, he’d have discovered a gentle, moral creature with a taste for literature, and perhaps learned to be a good parent—it’s his profound failure of parenting that turns the creature into a miserably self-conscious monster. The parallels run close.
I’m being unfair, because careful consideration of necromantic ventures is definitely not what one comes to King for. But by the time Louis is flinching at The Cat Came Back Wrong, I’m already annoyed at him for not flinching about lying to his family. And inclined to think that the cat is maybe just fine, and the doctor is wigged out about the cat coming back at all, because if there’s one thing a doctor knows it’s that death is a fact of life. And doctors hate being wrong.
The cat, in fact, is probably not just fine. But for the moment, I’m taking that on faith. Because one doesn’t come to King for anything being fine.
Anne’s Commentary
To what does Louis refer when he thinks that “Church came back like the cat in the nursery rhyme”? My first idea was the adage about the perils of curiosity. King paraphrased this one in his earlier novel, The Shining:
“Curiosity killed the cat, my dear redrum. Redrum my dear, satisfaction brought him back.”
Since ancient times, people have attributed magical powers to cats. Conspicuous among these powers is the cat’s possession of nine lives; put another way, a cat will revivify eight times before he stays buried or cremated or mummified, whatever. I bought this superstition when I was in second grade, thanks to a Disney live-action movie called The Three Lives of Thomasina (1963). Though different cultures allow cats different numbers of resurrections, Thomasina did have nine. The movie, being 90ish minutes long, only covered three of them. The scene burned into my young brain took place after Thomasina’s first death, when she arrived in cat heaven (pristine white stairs floating among clouds, with the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet upon the highest.) Bastet informed Thomasina she had eight lives left, so no more paradise for her—back to that little girl who was broken-hearted over how her veterinarian father had euthanized her tetanus-stricken pet.
It turns out that death’s erased Thomasina’s memory. It will take a near-lightning strike to bring it back. Or maybe the lightning strike caused her second death? I forget. Anyhow, in her third life she remembers all and returns to the little girl. Happy Disney ending!
I’m afraid Church didn’t meet Bastet after his interment, but rather a darker god like the Wendigo supposed to prowl Ludlow’s backwoods. Curiosity killed the cat, the adage says, but was it Church’s curiosity that killed him, Church’s satisfaction that brought him back, or the curiosity and satisfaction of his impromptu undertakers? The real “sematary” lures as powerfully as any drug, rewards as deeply, probably addicts even more insidiously.
The other reference I found to a cat’s uncanny return is the folksong “The Cat Came Back”. I never learned this one at summer camp, but apparently generations of kids have been regaled with the macabre tale of a cat sent off to probable death. [RE: Including me: it’s been going through my head for the last couple posts.] He always escapes, while the humans involved meet gruesome ends. Here’s the chorus:
“But the cat came back the very next day.
The cat came back, we thought he was a goner
But the cat came back; it just couldn’t stay away.
Away, away, yea, yea, yea.
It doesn’t take Louis long to wish Church had stayed away, away, away. Remember that Jud didn’t give Louis specifics about why taking the cat to the Micmac burial ground would benefit Ellie. Yet in his “deeper, more primitive” brain, Louis has known to expect Church’s homecoming. His shallower, up-to-date brain comes up with possible explanations for Church’s reanimation, but they aren’t probable explanations. Church wasn’t dead, just stunned. It’s not Church strolling into the garage but some stray that looks like him. He knows the truth, though. Even as he feels Church’s “live weight,” he remembers how much heavier Church felt in the Hefty bag. How much heavier Church felt when he was dead.
His “sick excitement” gives way to “tottery, sick vertigo,” the sort he’s experienced at “the bitter end of long drunks.” He’s coming down from the necromantic high, all right. And where’s Jud? Taking a daylong shopping trip, when he must know Louis will need him!
Jud’s been losing some Old Yankee wholesome-homespun luster in the last chapters, going from a pleasant stereotype to living (sometimes dark) complexity. I didn’t expect this, perhaps because when I read the book decades ago, I overlooked Jud’s darker side in favor of my initial impressions. I wanted him to be the father Louis never knew and the benevolent old sage, conveniently placed to guide the Creeds through their acclimatization.
This reread I’m seeing that Jud can lie. Jud can be devious. Jud isn’t a saint immune to uncanny, maybe evil influences. Something in his man’s stonier heart can thrill to the outward-seeping power of the Micmac burial ground and want to get to its stony heart and share its potency. And he senses that Louis could share his secret.
Louis could get it. He could do himself proud beyond the deadfall barrier, just as Jud knew he could.
Just as Victor Pascow, or his revenant’s controlling angel, feared he could. After the Creeds visit the pet sematary, we see Louis’s essential honesty, his willingness to tell Ellie hard truths about living organisms and their mortal clocks even though it triggers Rachel’s death-phobia. In the face of her anger, he sticks to hard truths. All kinds of shit can happen to living things. And the big one: Dead is dead, Pascow notwithstanding.
Has Louis always told his family the absolute truth prior to the burial ground trip? I doubt it. But after that barrier-breaching, he tells an escalating series of lies. He tells Rachel, yeah, he did go to Jud’s Thanksgiving night, but just for the usual beers. He tells her everything’s fine at home. Then he tells the biggest lie to Ellie, sure, Church is okay, stuffed with beef stew in fact. Louis knows he’s “crossed a line” with his people. He’s joined Jud’s Society of Married Gentlemen Who Lie to Their Wives (and Daughters), and without guilt.
On the other hand, he only half-lied to Ellie. Church is alive, if not quite well. Alive again, unless there’s a state of existence between life and death.
Undeath, maybe?
Chill those beers, Jud, and see Norma to bed early. Your day trip must have tired her out. As it was planned to, I figure.
Next week, we explore one of the dustier shelves of the archival weird with Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Gray Man.”
