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 49-51. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Ongoing content warning for child death.
The gale is blowing when Louis arrives at Pleasantview Cemetery. Unlike the Pet Sematary, this boneyard is far from ideal for a novice resurrection man. Streetlamp-guarded streets surround it with houses, apartment buildings, even an elementary school. Louis imagines the students ignore Pleasantview except at Halloween, when they may repeat time-honored graveyard jokes. He hurriedly crosses the street into the shadow of old trees and tosses his tarp-wrapped tools over the fence.
The fence is nine feet high, wrought-iron staves topped by arrowheads. The gate is locked. Louis can too vividly imagine himself arrow-impaled through the testicles if he tries shimmying over the fence. A passing patrol car adds further urgency. He considers returning the next day and hiding in the cemetery until dark, but he knows if he doesn’t do the wild thing—no, the insane thing—right now, he never will.
He climbs a tree with a branch overhanging the fence, and swings along it like an ape. Luckily the branch doesn’t break until he’s above the cemetery; unluckily, dropping, he bangs his knee on a tombstone. Luck again, or driving fate, he’s not too injured to walk. He follows the fence back to his tool bundle. He crouches behind a tombstone to hide from a couple strolling the street, and thinks with self-loathing that he’s become like “a subhuman character in some cheap comic-book, watching lovers.” After they pass, Louis grabs his tools and heads to Gage’s grave. En route, he “suddenly, appallingly” realizes he can’t recall Gage’s appearance, and wonders whether Gage wouldn’t be best left wherever he’s gone. Is Louis really in control of his actions? Does it matter? He wants Gage home.
The fresh grave is much easier to dig than the earth where he’ll soon bury Gage. By 1AM, Louis reaches the grave liner. He opens it to stand above the coffin, this “safe-deposit box in which he was supposed to bury all his hopes for his son.” Fury fills him, and he demolishes the coffin latch with his spade. Cold replaces his rage, leaving him to feel as disconnected as a space-stranded astronaut. He wonders if Bill Baterman felt like this, looking into Timmy’s grave.
He opens his son’s coffin.
* * *
Rachel’s first flight connections go smoothly, but she arrives in Boston with only thirteen minutes to make her flight to Portland. The Logan shuttlebus is also late, forcing her to shed her heeled shoes and run from one end of the terminal to the other. She makes it to her gate a heart-breaking four minutes too late. A sympathetic security guard suggests she rent a car. The distance to Bangor is 250 miles; driving the turnpike all the way, she can make the trip in about four hours.
As the security guard says, if there was ever a lady who looked like she really had to get to her destination, Rachel’s the lady. She heads for the car rental desks.
* * *
The smell from the open coffin sickens Louis. When he shines his flashlight at Gage, he gets another shock. Gage’s head is gone. Can’t be. He trains the light from Gage’s new shoes up the suit no two-year-old should ever wear, outrage returning to drown fear. He realizes that rain has accelerated moss growth on Gage’s skin. He gently wipes the concealing film off his son’s face. The mortician did all he could, but Gage’s head still “bulged in strange directions,” like “a badly made doll.”
As Louis lifts Gage from the coffin, he prays no cemetery watchman will come around now. If one does, Louis will have to use the spade on him. Gage’s body lolls bonelessly, and his head falls back to reveal the “grinning circlet of stitches” that keeps it on his shoulders. Sitting on the edge of the grave, Louis cradles the “miserably smashed body” and whispers that it will be all right, he swears, this will end, please, Gage, Daddy loves you.
He carefully wraps Gage in tarpaulin and refills the hole. The grave looks sway-backed, but Louis can’t worry about that. There’s still more work to do, and he’s already exhausted. He finds a hillock-covered crypt in which coffins are stored when the ground is frozen. It’s set against the fence, its summit a foot or two below the arrowed top. On the other side is the cemetery’s unfenced but tree-screened utility yard. Overworked back protesting, Louis manages to get Gage, his tools, and himself up the hill and over the fence. He gets his graverobber’s gear safely back to his car. The next scare: His keys aren’t in his pockets, he must have dropped them somewhere in the cemetery. But no, he’s just stupidly left them in the unlocked car! The scare after that: As he carries Gage to the car, a dog starts howling, “attacking sleep, [Louis’s] only friend.” The dog’s owner hustles it indoors. Louis gets to his car.
And then, Gage’s body won’t fit into the hatchback. A car approaches. Panicked, Louis deposits Gage in the front passenger seat. Danger passed, a horror seizes him that he may have crammed Gage in backwards, joints misbent, sunken eyes staring out the rear window. He makes sure Gage is properly oriented. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
That done, Louis starts back to Ludlow.
What’s Cyclopean: “Don’t help a good boy go bad. Lock your car. Take your keys.” is from a 1967 PSA, its script clearly memorable to a teenage Louis.
Libronomicon: A whole Baumian mythos is building here: “Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of mystery.” God—Louis doesn’t consider—of lies that aren’t nearly so enticing once you see what’s behind the curtain.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Louis questions his mental state so many times this week that I lost track. Many synonyms are required: lunacy, madness, insanity.
Anne’s Commentary
As Ruthanna commented in our last Pet Sematary blog, grief of the magnitude the Creeds are experiencing can throw “Time out of joint, stretched out.” And so “Why shouldn’t the process of making terrible decisions take place in slow motion?” By Chapter 49, Louis has been inching forever towards the terrible decision of resurrecting Gage. Or is it our reading the novel a few chapters at a time that makes his decision-making process creep along for endless tomorrows, to the last syllable of the last word of the last chapter?
When I’ve read and reread Pet Sematary on my own, the last third of the book has always raced by. My tolerance for Louis’s back-and-forthing could stem from this phenomenon: Horror’s supremely the genre where the constant reader knows the worst possible thing is going to happen, whether the book ends in total disaster or as happily as could be expected. Even knowing this, Constant Reader still hopes characters don’t trigger the worst possibles; the friction between the expected worst outcomes and the hoped-for better outcomes is what creates propulsive suspense.
As Chapter 49 opens, Louis has finally made it to Pleasantview Cemetery. The place’s pleasant view isn’t rolling countryside but suburban streets lined with a school, private houses, apartment buildings and, most problematically, bright streetlights. Late-hour vehicle and pedestrian traffic is light but not nonexistent, and not all the residential windows are dark. Lack of privacy is obstacle one for Louis. Locked cemetery gates and a tall spiky fence are obstacles two and three. Plus police do patrol the area—Louis must hide while a cop car lances the boneyard with a spotlight. That’s four good reasons to return the next afternoon when the gates are open.
Louis deems this option sensible. Problem is, if he starts making sensible decisions, he’ll never go ahead with what’s a profoundly unsensible act. His heart, not his brain, tells him there’s no tomorrow. Quit tonight, and he’ll “never be able to screw himself up to this crazy pitch again.” And won’t Jud have noticed his absence? Won’t Rachel have been calling home? Getting no answer, won’t she have called Jud? He already suspects Louis is succumbing to the burial ground’s pull. Another intervention from him could force Louis back into sanity.
And then Gage will be gone forever, when he doesn’t have to be. That doesn’t-have-to-be is the hook with which the burial ground power reels Louis in.
Louis gets three more chances to spit out the hook. He overcomes the fence problem at the cost of a tombstone-bashed knee. Physical disability would be a perfect out. Too bad Louis can still walk. A passing couple delays Louis’s retrieval of tools; the contrast between their practically stereotypical normality and his current situation makes Louis realize how far from normal he’s come. He pictures himself as a comic-book ghoul. Is this what Louis wants to be? Sane, Louis would shout No. Instead he retreats into “that interior coldness, that sense of disconnection” that may be a product of the power’s influence, and so the hook stays in place.
Lugging his tools to Gage’s grave, Louis realizes he can’t remember what Gage looked like, can’t “integrate [his memories] into a coherent whole.” Appallingly, Gage already recedes from Louis’s reality. If he’s happy wherever he’s gone, or even if he’s just “sleeping,” would bringing him back be a disservice? Again Louis avoids a sane answer by wrapping himself in “interior coldness.”
Cold, winter, hunger, selfishness. All are associated with the wendigo, an evil spirit that turns humans into cannibals. What threatens Louis could be self-cannibalism, a gnawing away of rationality and social normality, leaving only the blind fury with which he shatters the latch of Gage’s coffin.
Rachel, meanwhile, rushes toward Louis like a classic Western cavalry troop. Her struggles at Logan are agonizing to read and all for nothing. Switching from airplane to car rental, she could get home in four hours, around 4:30 a.m. Louis finishes exhuming Gage around 2 a.m. Add about an hour before he and Gage are en route to Ludlow, a half-hour drive. Louis could be home around 3:30 a.m., beating Rachel by an hour during which Jud, the Ludlow cavalry, could stall him.
Now we’ve got some clocks ticking! Let them tick loudly—we need that steady beat to get over the terrible Pieta of Louis sitting on the edge of the dug-up grave, rocking Gage’s “miserably smashed body” while murmuring impossible promises that things will be all right. Why, how? Because after tonight, the horror will end. Because Daddy loves him, and love is stronger than death. Isn’t it? Mustn’t it be?
Hard to say, after we’ve looked with Louis into that drainage ditch full of rotting funeral flowers and realized they were meant to propitiate not the Christian God but a much older one. You could call it Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. Or the God of the Mystery.
And the Mystery lies ahead, just a little farther. I promise.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
And at last we’re here: over the fence and into the cemetery if not yet the sematary. Even at the last, there are opportunities to turn back. Some are opportunities for Louis to be turned back: to decide that a barrier can’t be crossed, that he tried but it wasn’t meant to be.
Under other circumstances, pushing past those barriers could be heroic. For Louis, circling the graveyard looking for an entry, it’s stubbornness taken to the point of mania. The decision is made, the die cast, the ships burnt, etc. He’s going to make it happen or impale himself on those arrow-sharp fenceposts.
It’s an intense scene—wild work indeed. I assume, politely, that Stephen King has never personally robbed a grave, but his descriptions are vivid and visceral. I can easily imagine the chill of unnatural wind, the weight of the concrete slab, the clang of shovel against coffin latch. The fury of the mourner against death, given even the faintest hope that it might not be inevitable.
The limp body of the beloved child, still cradled with love amid wendigo-fueled madness.
Part of what grounds those intense details, though, is Louis’s experience with his gravedigger uncle. He knows not only the little quirks that make access feasible, but the black humor jokes that people “in the business” make about those quirks. There’s the horrible non-random randomness of when people die, the times when coffins build up in storage or when fresh graves are a dime a dozen. The stupid puns, digging into a grave matter. If people can joke about something, it’s got to be real.
Rachel, meanwhile, is having her own series of almosts. Unlike grave robbery, running for a plane is a pretty common experience, and Gate 31 at Logan is still way too far down the terminal. But the reader knows, as she herself intuits, that there’s a deadline: when she rents her car at midnight, that means she’ll be halfway home at best while Louis is frantically trying to fit Gage’s body into their car.
There’s a certain sort of person who is better at dramatic gestures than at love’s little everyday mundanities. Who would rather swoop to the rescue than do the dishes, or solve problems together, or freely verbalize affection. In my head this is typified by the guy who, seeing his girlfriend trip, knocked me to the ground racing to her side rather than take an extra second to get there. (She was, in fact, fine.) This was a good thirty years ago, but some things stick with you. Louis is like that. Wendigo-hooked or not, he’s consistently either too focused on his own feelings to help others, or too focused on his own solutions to invite alternatives. He could never ask Rachel, “Hey, do you have any ideas for how a guy might break into a cemetery?” Which is a task—just guessing here, mind—that is probably easier with a partner in crime. But he doesn’t trust either her judgment or her thanatophobia enough to bring it up. He can’t have it both ways: either any parent would do as much, or else even Gage’s other parent wouldn’t.
It’s a fatal flaw, so to speak, on several levels. His tunnel vision doesn’t permit real input from anyone else. Jud, at least, he consults occasionally. With Rachel, he’s sure he knows best. And won’t think too hard about what happens when he presents the fait accompli.
Much really good horror contains a touch of tragedy. Switch Hamlet and Othello, and the number of bodies at Elsinore is minimized while Desdemona gets a chance to defend herself. Switch Louis and Eleanor and… I don’t know? The wendigo leverages Louis’s ego while Hill House leverages Eleanor’s desperate lack of self-confidence, but they’re both flexible entities. Still, one imagines an Eleanor more cocky about her ability to find love elsewhere, or a Louis more willing to admit that individual rationality can’t cover all bases. Who they actually are, unfortunately, matched with where they are, makes gruesome fate inevitable.
Next week, we delve into some work in translation with “Shanxiao” by Goodnight, Xiaoqing. You can read along with us in Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror, translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni.
