It made the steps, leaped up to the first one, then fell off. It lay on the bare patch at the foot of the porch steps on its side, breathing weakly.
Louis glanced into the Chevette. If he had needed more confirmation than the stone that had replaced his heart, he had it: Rachel's purse on the seat, her scarf, and a clutch of plane tickets spilling out of a Delta Airlines folder.
When he turned around again to walk to the porch, Church's side had ceased its rapid, fluttery movement. Church was dead. Again.
Louis stepped over it and mounted the porch steps.
"Gage?"
It was cool in the front hail. Cool and dark. The single word fell into the silence like a stone down a deep-drilled well. Louis threw another.
"Gage?"
Nothing. Even the tick of the clock in the parlor had ceased. This morning there had been no one to wind it.
But there were tracks on the floor.
Louis went into the living room. There was the smell of cigarettes, stale and long since burned out. He saw Jud's chair by the window. It was pushed askew, as if he had gotten up suddenly. There was an ashtray on the windowsill, and in it a neat roll of cigarette ash.
Jud sat here watching. Watching for what? For me of course, watching for me to come home. Only he missed me. Somehow he missed me.
Louis glanced at the four beer cans lined up in a neat row. Not enough to put him to sleep, but maybe he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. However it had been, it was just a little bit too good to have been perfectly accidental, wasn't it?
The muddy tracks approached the chair by the window. Mixed among the human tracks were a few faded, ghostly catprints. As if Church had walked in and out of the gravedirt left by Gage's small shoes. Then the tracks made for the swinging door leading into the kitchen.
Heart thudding, Louis followed the tracks.
He pushed the door open and saw Jud's splayed feet, his old green workpants, his checked flannel shirt. The old man was lying sprawled in a wide pool of drying blood.
Louis clapped his hands to his face, as if to blight his own vision. But there was no way to do that; he saw eyes, Jud's eyes, open, accusing him, perhaps even accusing himself for setting this in motion.
But did he? Louis wondered. Did he really do that?
Jud had been told by Stanny B., and Stanny B. had been told by his father, and Stanny B. 's father had been told by his father, the last trader to the Indians, a Frenchman from the north country in the days when Franklin Pierce had been a living President.
"Oh Jud, I'm so sorry," he whispered.
Jud's blank eyes stared at him.
"So sorry," Louis repeated.
His feet seemed to move by themselves, and he was suddenly back to last Thanksgiving in his mind, not to that night when he and Jud had taken the cat up to the Pet Sematary and beyond, but to the turkey dinner Norma had put on the table, all of them laughing and talking, the two men drinking beer and Norma with a glass of white wine, and she had taken the white lawn tablecloth from the lower drawer as he was taking it now, but she had put it on the table and then anchored it with lovely pewter candlestick holders, while he-Louis watched it billow down over Jud's body like a collapsing parachute, mercifully covering that dead face. Almost immediately, tiny rosepetals of deepest, darkest scarlet began to stain the white lawn.
"I'm sorry," he said for a third time. "So sor-"
Then something moved overhead, something scraped, and the word broke off between his lips. It had been soft, it had been stealthy, but it had been deliberate. Oh yes, he was convinced of that. A sound he had been meant to hear.
His hands wanted to tremble, but he would not allow them. He stepped over to the kitchen table with its checkered oilcloth covering and reached into his pocket.
He removed three more Becton-Dickson syringes, stripped them of their paper coverings, and laid them out in a neat row. He removed three more multidose vials and filled each of the syringes with enough morphine to kill a horse-or Hanratty the bull, if it came to that. He put them in his pocket again.
He left the kitchen, crossed the living room, and stood at the base of the stairs.
"Cage?"
From somewhere in the shadows above there came a giggling-a cold and sunless laughter that made the skin on Louis's back prickle.
He started up.
It was a long walk to the top of those stairs. He could well imagine a condemned man taking a walk almost as long (and as horribly short) to the platform of a scaffold with his hands tied behind his back, knowing that he would piss when he could no longer whistle.
He reached the top at last, one hand in his pocket, staring only at the wall.
How long did he stand that way? He did not know. He could now feel his sanity beginning to give way. This was an actual sensation, a true thing. It was interesting. He imagined a tree overloaded with ice in a terrible storm would feel this way-if trees could feel anything-shortly before toppling. It was interesting... and it was sort of amusing.
"Gage, want to go to Florida with me?"