The first thing he noticed turning into the University grounds was how
suddenly and spectacularly the traffic swelled. There was car traffic, bike traffic,
joggers in gym shorts. He had to stop quickly to avoid two of the joggers coming
from the direction of Dunn Hall toward the athletic grounds beyond the fieldhouse. Louis braked hard enough to lock his shoulder-belt and honked. He was
always annoyed at the way joggers (bicyclers had the same irritating habit) seemed
to automatically assume that their responsibility lapsed completely the moment
they began to run. They were, after all, exercising. One of them gave Louis the
finger without even looking around. Louis sighed and drove on.
The second thing he noticed was that the ambulance was gone from its slot in
the small infirmary parking lot, and that gave him a nasty start. The infirmary was
equipped to treat almost any illness or accident on a short-term basis; there were
three well-equipped examination-and-treatment rooms opening off the big foyer,
and beyond this were two wards with fifteen beds each. But there was no
operating theater, nor anything even resembling one. In case of serious accidents,
there was the ambulance, which would rush an injured or seriously ill person to
the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Steve Masterton, the physician's assistant who
had given Louis his first tour of the facility, had shown Louis the log from the
previous two academic years with justifiable pride; there had only been thirty-eight
ambulance runs in that time, not bad when you considered that the student
population here was over ten thousand and the total University population was
almost seventeen thousand.
And here he was, on his first real day of work, with the ambulance gone.
He parked in the slot headed with a freshly-painted sign reading RESERVED
FOR DR CREED, and hurried in.
He found Charlton, a graying little woman of about fifty, in the first examining
room, taking the temperature of a girl who was wearing jeans and a halter top. The
girl had gotten a bad sunburn not too long ago, Louis observed; the peeling was
well advanced.
'Good morning, Joan,' he said. 'Where's the ambulance?'
'Oh, we had a real tragedy, all right,' Charlton said, taking the thermometer out
of the student's mouth and reading it. 'Steve Masterton came in this morning at
seven and saw a great big puddle under the engine and the front wheels. Radiator
let go. They hauled it away.'
'Great,' Louis said, but he felt relieved nonetheless. At least it wasn't out on a
run, which was what he had first feared. 'When do we get it back?'
Joan Charlton laughed. 'Knowing the University Motor Pool,' she said, 'it'll come
back around December 15th wrapped in Christmas ribbon.' She glanced at the
student.
'You've got half a degree of fever,' she said. 'Take two aspirins and stay out of
bars and dark alleys.'
The girl got down. She gave Louis a quick appraising glance and then went out.
'Our first customer of the new semester,' Charlton said sourly. She began to
shake the thermometer down with brisk snaps.
'You don't seem too pleased about it.'
'I know the type,' she said. 'Oh, we get the other type too—athletes who go on
playing with bone chips and tendonitis and everything else because they don't
want to be benched, they got to be macho men, not let the team down, even if
they're jeopardizing pro careers later on. Then you've got little Miss Half-Degree of
Fever—' She jerked her head toward the window, where Louis could see the girl
with the peeling sunburn walking in the direction of the Gannett-CumberlandAndroscoggin complex of dorms. In the examining room the girl had given the
impression of someone who did not feel well at all but was trying not to let on. Now
she was walking briskly, her hips swinging prettily, noticing and being noticed.
'Your basic college hypochondriac.' Charlton dropped the thermometer into a
sterilizer. 'We'll see her two dozen times this year. Her visits will be more frequent
before each round of prelims. A week or so before finals she'll be convinced she
has either mono or pneumonia. Bronchitis is the fall-back position. She'll get out
of four or five tests—the ones where the instructors are wimps, to use the word
they use—and get easier makeups. They always get sicker if they know the prelim
or final is going to be an objective test rather than an essay exam.'
'My, aren't we cynical this morning,' Louis said. He was, in fact, a little
nonplussed.
She tipped him a wink that made him grin. 'I don't take it to heart, doctor.
Neither should you.'
'Where's Stephen now?'
'In your office, answering mail and trying to figure out the latest ton of updates
from Blue Cross-Blue Shield,' she said.
Louis went in. Charlton's cynicism not withstanding, he felt comfortably in
harness.
Looking back on it, Louis would think—when he could bear to think about it at
all—that the nightmare really began when they brought the dying boy, Victor
Pascow, into the infirmary around ten that morning.
Until then, things were very quiet. At nine, half an hour after he arrived, the two
candy-stripers who would be working the nine-to-three shift came in. Louis gave
them each a doughnut and cup of coffee and talked to them for about fifteen
minutes, outlining their duties and, what was perhaps more important, what was
beyond the scope of their duties. Then Charlton took over. As she led them out of
Louis's office, Louis heard her ask: 'Either of you allergic to shit or puke? You'll
see a lot of both here.'
'Oh God,' Louis murmured, and covered his eyes. But he was smiling. A tough
old babe like Charlton was not always a liability.
Louis began filling out the long Blue Cross-Blue Shield forms, which amounted
to a complete inventory of drug-stock and medical equipment ('Every year,' Steve
Masterton said in an aggrieved voice. 'Every goddam year the same thing. Why
don't you write down COMPLETE HEART TRANSPLANT FACILITY, APPROX.
VALUE 8 MILLION DOLLARS, Louis? That'll foozle 'em!'), and he was totally
engrossed, thinking only marginally that a cup of coffee would go down well, when
Masterton screamed from the direction of the foyer-waiting room: 'Louis! Hey,
Louis get out here! We got a mess!'
The near-panic in Masterton's voice got Louis going in a hurry. He bolted out of
his chair almost as though he had, in some subconscious way, been expecting
this. A shriek, as thin and sharp as a shard of broken glass, arose from the
direction of Masterton's shout. It was followed by a sharp slap and Charlton
saying, 'Stop that or get the hell out of here! Stop it right now!'
Louis burst into the waiting room and was first only conscious of the blood –
there was a lot of blood. One of the candy-stripers was sobbing. The other, pale as
cream, had put her fisted hands to the corners of her mouth, pulling her lips into
a big revolted grin. Masterton was kneeling down, trying to hold the head of the
boy sprawled on the floor.
Steve looked up at Louis, eyes grim and wide and frightened. He tried to speak.
Nothing came out.
People were congregating at the Student Medical Center's big glass doors,
peering in, their hands cupped around their faces to butt out the glare. Louis's
mind conjured up an insanely appropriate image: sitting in the living room as a
boy of no more than six with his mother in the morning before she went to work,
watching the television. Watching the old Today show, with Dave Garroway. People
were outside, gaping in at Dave and Frank Blair and good old J. Fred Muggs. He
looked around and saw other people standing at the windows. He couldn't do
anything about the doors, but—
'Shut the drapes,' he snapped at the candy-striper who had screamed.
When she didn't move immediately, Charlton slapped her can. 'Do it, girl!'
The candy-striper got in gear. A moment later green drapes were jerked across
the windows. Charlton and Steve Masterton moved instinctively between the boy
on the floor and the doors, cutting off the view as best they could.
'Hard stretcher, Doctor?' Charlton asked.
'If we need it, get it.' Louis said, squatting beside Masterton. 'I haven't even had
a chance to look at him.'
'Come on,' Charlton said to the girl who had closed the drapes. She was pulling
the corners of her mouth with her fists again, making that humorless, screaming
grin. She looked at Charlton and moaned, 'Oh, ag.'
'Yeah, oh, ag is right. Come on.' She gave the girl a hard yank and got her
moving, her red-and-white-pinstriped skirt swishing against her legs.
Louis bent over his first patient at the University of Maine in Orono.
He was a young man, age approximately twenty, and it took Louis less than
three seconds to make the only diagnosis that mattered: the young man was going
to die. Half of his head was crushed. His neck had been broken. One collarbone
jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a
yellow, pussy fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Louis could see the man's
brain, whitish-gray and pulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like
looking through a broken window. The incursion was perhaps five centimeters
wide; if he had had a baby in his skull, he could almost have birthed it, like Zeus
delivering from his forehead. That he was still alive at all was incredible. In his
mind suddenly he heard Jud Crandall saying sometimes you could feel it bite your
ass. And his mother: dead is dead. He felt a crazy urge to laugh. Dead was dead,
all right. That's affirmative, good buddy.
'Holler for the ambulance,' he snapped at Masterton. 'We—'
'Louis, the ambulance is—'
'Oh Christ,' Louis said, slapping his own forehead. He shifted his gaze to
Charlton. 'Joan, what do you do in a case like this? Call Campus Security or the
EMMC?'
Joan looked flustered and upset, an extreme rarity with her, Louis guessed. But
her voice was composed enough as she replied. 'Doctor, I don't know. We've never
had a situation like this before in my time at the Medical Center.'
Louis thought as fast as he could. 'Call the campus police. We can't wait for
EMMC to send out their own ambulance. If they have to, they can take him up to
Bangor in one of the fire engines. At least it has a siren, flashers. Go do it, Joan.'
She went, but not before he caught her deeply sympathetic glance and
interpreted it. This young man, who was deeply tanned and well-muscled—
perhaps from a summer working on a roadcrew somewhere, or painting houses, or
giving tennis lessons—and dressed now only in red gym shorts with white piping,
was going to die no matter what they did. He would be just as dead even if their
ambulance had been parked out front with the motor idling when the patient was
brought in.
Incredibly, the dying man was moving. His eyes fluttered and opened. Blue eyes,
the irises ringed with blood. They stared vacantly around, seeing nothing. He tried
to move his head and Louis exerted pressure to keep him from doing so, mindful
of the broken neck. The terrible cranial trauma did not preclude the possibility of
pain.
The hole in his head, oh Christ, the hole in his head.
'What happened to him?' he asked Steve, aware that it was, under the
circumstances, a stupid and pointless question. The question of a bystander. But
the hole in the man's head confirmed his status; a bystander was all he was. 'Did
the police bring him?'
'Some students brought him in a blanket sling. I don't know what the
circumstances were.'
There was what happened next to be thought of. That was his responsibility,
too. 'Go out and find them,' Louis said. 'Take them around to the other door. I
want them handy, but I don't want them to see any more of this than they already
have.'
Masterton, looking relieved to be away from what was happening in here, went
to the door and opened it, letting in a babble of excited, curious, confused
conversation. Louis could also hear the warble of a police siren. Campus Security
was here, then. Louis felt a kind of miserable relief.
The dying man was making a gurgling sound in his throat. He tried to speak.
Louis heard syllables—phonetics, at least—but the words themselves were slurred
and unclear.
Louis leaned over him and said, 'You're going to be all right, fella.' He thought of
Rachel and Ellie as he said it and his stomach gave a great, unlovely lurch. He put
a hand over his mouth and stifled a burp.
'Caaa,' the young man said. 'Gaaaaaa—'
Louis looked around and saw he was momentarily alone with the dying man.
Dimly he could hear Joan Charlton yelling at the candy-stripers that the hard
stretcher was in the supply closet off Room Two. Louis doubted if they knew Room
Two from a frog's gonads; it was, after all, their first day on the job. They had
gotten a hell of an introduction to the world of medicine. The green wall-to-wall
carpet was now soaked a muddy purple in an expanding circle around the young
man's ruined head; the leakage of intercranial fluid had, mercifully, stopped.
'In the Pet Sematary,' the young man croaked… and he began to grin. This grin
was remarkably like the mirthless, hysterical grin of the candy-striper who had
closed the drapes.
Louis stared down at him, at first refusing to credit what he had heard. Then he
thought he must have had an auditory hallucination. He made some more of those
phonetic sounds and my subconscious made them into something coherent; crosspatched the sounds into my own experience, he thought. But that was not what
had happened, and a moment later he was forced to know it. A swooning, mad
terror struck him and his flesh began to creep avidly, seeming to actually move up
and down his arms and along his belly in waves… but even then he simply refused
to believe it. Yes, the syllables had been on the bloody lips of the man on the
carpet as well as in Louis's ears, but that only meant the hallucination had been
visual as well as auditory.
'What did you say?' he whispered.
And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose
tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: 'It's not the real Sematary…'
The eyes were vacant, not seeing, rimmed with blood; the mouth, grinning the
large grin of a dead carp.
Horror rolled through Louis, gripping his warm heart in its cold hands,
squeezing. It reduced him, made him less and less, until he felt like taking to his
heels and running from this bloody, twisted, speaking head on the floor of the
infirmary waiting room. He was a man with no deep religious training, no bent
toward the superstitious or the occult. He was ill-prepared for this… whatever it
was.
Fighting the urge to run with everything in him, he forced himself to lean even
closer. 'What did you say?' he asked a second time.
The grin. That was bad.
'The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis,' the dying man whispered. 'A man
grows what he can… and tends it.'
Louis, he thought, hearing nothing with his conscious mind after his own name.
Oh my God he called me by my name.
'Who are you?' Louis asked in a trembling, papery voice. 'Who are you?'
'Injun bring my fish.'
'How did you know my—'
'Keep clear, us. Know—'
'You—'
'Caa,' the young man said, and now Louis fancied he could smell death on his
breath, internal injuries, lost rhythm, failure, ruin.
'What?' A crazy urge came to shake him.
'Gaaaaaaaa—'
The young man in the red gym shorts began to shudder all over. Suddenly he
seemed to freeze with every muscle locked. His eyes lost their vacant expression
momentarily and seemed to find Louis's eyes. Then everything let go at once. Louis
thought he would, must, speak again. Then the eyes resumed their vacant
expression… and began to glaze. He was dead.
Louis sat back, vaguely aware that all his clothes were sticking to him; he was
drenched with sweat. Darkness bloomed, spreading a wing softly over his eyes,
and the world began to swing sickeningly sideways. Recognizing what was
happening, he half-turned from the dead man, thrust his head down between his
knees, and pressed the nails of his left thumb and left forefinger into his gums
hard enough to bring blood.
After a moment the world began to clear again.