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 52-54. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Ongoing content warning for child death.
At one in the morning, the phone rings in the Crandall house, startling Jud from a vivid dream. In it, he is twenty-three, sitting with two work buddies in the B&A coupling shed and passing the whiskey bottle during a nor’easter. The three tell the kind of stories men store up for such nights: “dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around.”
The sixty years between twenty-three and eighty-three drop into Jud with “a sour heaviness” as he heads for the phone. Rachel Creed is on the other end. She tells him she’s just driven over the Maine state line—she couldn’t stay in Chicago, not with the dread that Ellie felt first getting into her—and into Jud as well, from the sound of his voice.
The dread is “dim terror in his old bones.” There’s a power growing. When Rachel begs for answers, Jud realizes she has a right to the whole story, but he can’t tell it over the phone. He tells Rachel not to try driving to Ludlow now, but to stay at a motel in Portland. Whatever’s happening tonight, he’ll have to take care of it, because it’s his fault. He’s watching for Louis. He’ll tell her everything tomorrow.
Rachel agrees. After hanging up, Jud makes coffee to get him through his vigil. However, he keeps dozing off. The power in the woods is hypnotizing him, he fears. Louis will return soon, and that power doesn’t want Jud interfering with its plans.
For all his efforts, Jud slips back into the dream of the coupling shed. When Louis pulls into the driveway, Jud doesn’t waken.
* * *
Back home at last, Louis fashions a rope sling for his pick and shovel, and hangs them at his back. He carries Gage in his arms, a tarp-swaddled bundle much heavier than Church was. Already exhausted, he may be crawling before he reaches the Micmac burial ground, and then he’ll still have the fresh grave to dig. And he’ll be alone this time, in the dark.
When he reaches the Pet Sematary, he collapses for a breather, Gage across his knees. Next comes the deadfall. It should be impassable, but he passed it once before. Jud told him how: Don’t look down, don’t hesitate. Do it quick and sure. Either the barrier will let you through, or it won’t.
Once again Louis makes the climb, and the descent to the path into the wilderness. The wind moans in the trees, but it holds no more terror for him.
His night’s work is almost done.
* * *
In Portland, Rachel heads toward an exit ramp beyond which rears the electric-green sign of a Holiday Inn. A bed, sleep, and at least temporary escape from her fear and grief. Victor Pascow told Ellie he had been sent to warn Louis, but couldn’t interfere. Jud hasn’t explained what’s going on with Louis. It can’t be suicide. But Louis lied to her about why she and Ellie should go to Chicago, how he’d follow them. She saw it in his pale, watchful face.
He was scared, Louis who was never scared—
She jerks the rental car off the ramp and back onto the highway north. Jud said he’d take care of things in Ludlow overnight, but he’s past eighty and a recent widower. She can’t put her trust in him alone. She has to get to Louis, because as much as she’s longed through the nights since Gage’s death to hate Louis for not comforting her, for not letting her comfort him, she still loves him too much to delay her return home.
Pushing the speed limit, she could get to Ludlow in a couple of hours, maybe even beating the sunrise. And so Rachel finds a radio station to sing along to, rolls down her window, and lets “the restless night air blow in on her.”
What’s Cyclopean: In Jud’s memory, wind blows “its randy shriek over the world.” In the present, it reminds him of “dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out.”
The Degenerate Dutch: In Jud’s memory, his friend tells a story about “a Jew peddler” with a dubious accent and a stack of gimmicky pin-up postcards. Ah, the sweet smell of nostalgia!
Weirdbuilding: Rachel drives past the exit for Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. It strikes her as an unpleasant name: possibly she senses the turnoff for a whole different King novel.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
This week’s theme is “everyone f@#&s up except Rachel”. Which maybe makes the follow-up theme “please tell women things already”. But Jud, who recommends lying to your wife as a marriage strategy, can’t possibly have an awkward conversation about violations of natural law over the phone. Does he think it’s going to be easier in person? Is he going to draw a diagram?
Herewith my marriage advice:
1. Tell your wife the first time something supernatural happens. You have a go bag for when the Doctor shows up, right, like in any good relationship? So you can mention the portal, the ghost, the magical evil resurrection area, etc.
2. Run your bad ideas by your wife. This is one of the things having a wife is for.
2a. Yes, even if your bad ideas require magic. I promise that many of mine do. Just ask my wife.
2b. “I can’t tell her now, so I’ll tell her later when it’s worse and more complicated” counts as a bad idea.
3. Tell your kids you love them every day. Also your wife. And wash the dishes. Love is expressed through words and actions, not drama. Nobody likes a bouquet of drama for Valentine’s Day.
4. If your soil is stony, till in a load of compost. Or go to a therapist.
Admittedly, I live in hope that my wife and I are not living in a Stephen King novel. Not being in a King novel is also good for your marriage.
In this particular one, much of the problem is that anyone in a marriage with Jud or Louis is actually in a weird non-consensual triangle with the burial ground—and the burial ground has the upper hand. Jud’s judgment has been off since he and… let’s call it Wendy… were introduced. He can’t resist passing on the infatuation, any more than he can resist falling asleep on watch, or discouraging his backup from arriving on time. Gotta protect the ladies, after all. Wendy most of all.
Rachel knows better. Despite the thanatophobic trauma from her sister’s death, she’s managed to keep her head far better than Louis. Compare his “rational” planning for Gage’s resurrection to her consideration of what Louis might actually be hiding, how she works out that taking a rest break might be the worst decision of her life.
She and Louis are both pushing through a sleepless night, struggling to stay awake to do what they think needs to be done. It’s just that Rachel’s right. Being right means she’s stuck using rural radio and fresh air to keep her eyes open. Louis, meanwhile, is slinging bodies, half-asleep on his feet, depending on the drug-like euphoria of the burial ground’s influence to dig in “stony, unforgiving soil.” Whose heart is that, do you suppose?
I want to think that Jud’s annoying memory of the pin-up postcard story has some sort of thematic meaning beyond “there are things men talk about that are too much for wimminfolk.” Maybe a hint that Jud’s problem, like Louis’s, involves denying female agency, making decisions for and about women as if they were just objects for appreciation: wet and naked, dry and clothed, change it just like magic. I’m not sure my faith in King runs that far, but for sure the connection is there.
And for all Rachel’s doing her best—and Jud’s doing his not-so-effective best—Louis is already ahead of them, beyond the deadfall, making the worst decision of all their lives.
Anne’s Commentary
As it has for some narrative time in Pet Sematary, wind pervades this week’s chapters both as a meteorological phenomenon and a core metaphor. It’s one of those relentless atmospheric disturbances that wears the nerves down until, like a continually blasted branch, they near breaking. If you think that certain winds can affect your mood for the worse, you’re not crazy. It could be the way that strong winds strip electrons from neutrally charged air molecules like oxygen and nitrogen, creating positive ions. Positive ions in the air are a negative for us humans, research indicates. They can increase our fatigue and tension, distraction and irritability, anxiety and stress. Classic regional culprits are such seasonal blows as California’s Santa Ana, the Pacific Northwest’s Chinook, Western Europe’s Sirocco and Mistral and Foehn, North Africa and Arabia’s Khamsin or Sharav. I don’t know if the wind bedeviling Maine on Gage’s first full day under the earth is seasonal, or if it’s a custom production of the waxing Power in the Woods.
If that Power is the Wendigo, a weaponized wind makes sense. Among the entity’s many powers is said to be weather control. Or the Wendigo might just (super)naturally breathe forth gales that gust more violently as it closes on its prey. I imagine winds as its poisonous/exhilarating expirations, to inspire the pursued.
Speaking of inspiration, King seems to get an extra lungful at the beginning of Chapter 52. Here’s the literary magic that is a slide from perfectly serviceable prose to something more, something unexpected, something come into the house of composition through a window that can’t be raised at will, can’t be forced, must be blown open from outside, or perhaps from an inside so deep it may well feel exterior. Jud is dozing when he’s supposed to be keeping watch on the Creed house. The phone rings. He starts awake. Serviceable prose would have him immediately grab the receiver and start talking to Rachel. Instead King gives us a fullish page describing Jud’s dream, which seems to have nothing to do with the current action. Could it be time for an editorial slash through extraneous paragraphs?
I’m not slashing. Instead I’m snuggling back into my armchair and enjoying what Thomas McCormack in The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist calls an “unimplied prelibation.” This is another way to describe the slide from serviceable prose to the something more, something unexpected I mentioned above. Discussing the “outstanding, unmistakable mark” of Charles Dickens’s writing, George Orwell calls the phenomenon “the unnecessary detail.” McCormack’s neologism “prelibation” means something like a chef’s imaginative pretasting of a flavor that may not be necessary to a dish but which will enrich it. You need just lentils and water to make a rudimentary lentil soup. You need just “the phone rings” and “Jud answers” and “it’s Rachel calling” to supply the fiction-rudiments of stimulus, response, and plot-step-forward. Instead we pause to savor Jud as a full-meal of a character rather than as a cog cranking on to the next action-point. Jud has a past that includes innumerable small events as well as the big ones like his dog’s resurrection and Timmy Baterman’s malicious soothsaying. In his past there were companionable coworkers and bad whiskey and dark stories with wind wrapped around them and a nor’easter with a “randy shriek” of a bellow. Jud’s dream is scored with winds, while in his waking reality a high wind blows, and it’s the sort that makes Jud think of “dead voices sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out.” Sixty years on, his railroad buddies would both be dead voices. Rachel’s is a living voice, though one that speaks through a “distant humming” that’s “the sound of the wind, somewhere between [Jud] and wherever she was.”
Is it with a dead or an undying voice that the wind whines around the eaves, while Jud struggles to stay alert? Does it purposefully shake the tree leaves outside Jud’s window with “hypnotic patterns”?
The wind that hurries Louis toward the Pet Sematary is a harsh master that “pushed and pulled its fingers through his hair… making him feel weak and small and terrorized.” It’s a wind that walks under the trees, drawing him “from darkness into darkness… and alone this time.” As Louis reaches the top of the deadfall barrier, the wind’s back at him, “[funneling] secret passages and chambers through his hair again, flipping it, parting it widdershins.” Once he descends to the path into the deep woods, however, the wind moaning in the trees “[holds] no terror for him.” He is the wind’s now, and the “night’s work [it has] for him was almost done.”
As for Rachel, driving nonstop to Ludlow against her promise to Jud, it’s a “restless night air” that blows through her rolled-down window, keeping her awake while it sends Jud to sleep, because awake is what it needs her to be for the coming catastrophe.
A last delicious foretaste (prelibation) of approaching doom is the exit sign Rachel passes on her dash north: “NEXT EXIT ROUTE 12 CUMBERLAND CUMBERLAND CENTER JERUSALEM’S LOT…” She muses “randomly” about what an odd name it is, that last, and unpleasant. “Come and sleep in Jerusalem” is the little tourist come-on she thinks up for the town.
Folks do a lot of sleeping in the Lot, during the day. Even so, I wonder how much worse it might be for Rachel if she were to turn off onto Route 12 instead of continuing on to Route 15, and home.
Next week, the chosen one has some things to say about the apocalypse in Gemma Files’s “Little Horn.”
