Read Online Pet Sematary by Stephen King - Free Book Online

she was awake most of the night. I heard her tossing around, and Church cried to go out around three. He only does that when she’s restless.”
    â€œWhy would she . . . ?”
    â€œOh, you know why!” Rachel said angrily. “That damned pet cemetery is why! It really upset her, Lou. It was the first cemetery of any kind for her, and it just . . . upset her. I don’t think I’ll write your friend Jud Crandall any thank-you notes for that little hike.”
    All at once he’s my friend, Louis thought, bemused and distressed at the same time.
    â€œRachel—”
    â€œAnd I don’t want her going up there again.”
    â€œRachel, what Jud said about the path is true.”
    â€œIt’s not the path and you know it,” Rachel said. She picked up the bowl again and began beating the cake batter even faster. “It’s that damned place. It’s unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path . . . fucking morbid is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don’t want Ellie to catch it.”
    Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends’ marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery—the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage,no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.
    â€œHoney, it’s just a pet cemetery,” he said.
    â€œThe way she was crying in there just now,” Rachel said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter-covered spoon, “do you think it’s just a pet cemetery to her? It’s going to leave a scar, Lou. No. She’s not going up there anymore. It’s not the path, it’s the place. Here she is already thinking Church is going to die.”
    For a moment Louis had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Ellie; she had simply donned stilts, one of her mother’s dresses, and a very clever, very realistic Rachel mask. Even the expression was the same—set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.
    He groped, because suddenly the issue seemed large to him, not a thing to be simply passed over in deference to that mystery . . . or that aloneness. He gropedbecause it seemed to him that she was missing something so large it nearly filled the landscape, and you couldn’t do that unless you were deliberately closing your eyes to it.
    â€œRachel,” he said, “Church is going to die.”
    She stared at him angrily. “That is hardly the point,” she said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. “Church is not going to die today, or tomorrow—”
    â€œI tried to tell her that—”
    â€œOr the day after that, or probably for years—”
    â€œHoney, we can’t be sure of th—”
    â€œOf course we can!” she shouted. “We take good care of him, he’s not going to die, no one is going to die around here, and so why do you want to go and