Characters in Pet Sematary

She had never attended a funeral with him, he realized—not even that of Al Locke, a fellow med student who had been killed when his motorcycle had collided with a city bus. Al had been a regular visitor at their apartment, and Rachel had always liked him.

… Benson, who was then our second selectman, and Alan Purinton, who was fire chief. Norma sat there too but never said a thing. “George kept rubbing the stump at the top of his right leg. Lost most of that leg working on the railroad, he did, and the stump used …

If you went across this spacious white building that looked misleadingly like a comfortable old house, you came to an identical foyer, this one outside the West Room, where the sign on the easel read ALBERTA BURNHAM NEDEAU. At the back of the house was the Riverfront Room.

“That there was Pete LaVasseur’s dog, if I remember right, and there’s three of Albion Groatley’s barncats buried right in a row there. “Old Man Fritchie kept racing pigeons. Me and Al Groatley and Carl Hannah buried one of them that a dog got. He’s right there.” He paused thoughtfully.

It made him nervous. “Will you be good at Grandma and Grandda’s?” he asked her as they walked over. “Yes,” she said. “Daddy, will the truant officer get me? Andy Pasioca says there’s a truant officer and he gets school skippers.” “Don’t you worry about the truant officer,” he said.

Anson Ludlow, the great-grandson of this town’s founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A way out. And as a matter of fact, a couple that he did know came in just as he was finishing his apple pie and his second cup of coffee. Rob Grinnell, a Bangor doctor, and his pretty wife Barbara.

I’m a little worried.” “Is Norma worried?” Jud hesitated and then said, “I think she’s scared. I think that’s why she doesn’t want to go to the doctor. One of her oldest friends, Betty Coslaw, died in the EMMC just last month. Cancer. She and Norma were of an age.

… it in fading but perfectly legible red paint: BIFFER. And below this a bit of verse: BIFFER, BIFFER, A HELLUVA SNIFFER / UNTIL HE DIED HE MADE US RICHER. “Biffer was the Desslers’ cocker spaniel,” Jud said. He had dug a bald place in the earth with the heel of …

Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland—they that lived here before you—gave me a set, oh, must have been fourteen, fifteen years ago. They lived here a long time. Joan Cleveland was my wife’s best friend. She died two years ago. Bill went to that old folks’ apartment complex over in Orrington.

He died in Italy. His daddy, Bill Baterman, lived his whole life in this town. He about went crazy when he got the telegram . . . and then he quieted right down. He knew about the Micmac burying ground, you see. And he’d decided what he wanted to do.”

Then his dog died—ate some poisoned bait was all anyone in town could figure, wasn’t it, Jud?” “Poisoned bait,” Jud said, nodding. “That’s what most people thought, ayuh. That was 1925. Billy Holloway was maybe ten then. Went on to become a state senator. Ran for the U.S.

The Hall boys said they ought to be the ones to do it since they made the coffin, and also because they were twins—sort of a matched set, y’see. Billy said they didn’t know Bowser—that was the dog—well enough to be the pallbearers.

George asks. ‘You are just as white as a gull’s wing.’ “ ‘I’ve had the fright of my life, and I don’t want to talk to you about it,’ Margie Washburn says. ‘I ain’t going to talk to Brian about it, or my mom, or anybody.

“That there was Pete LaVasseur’s dog, if I remember right, and there’s three of Albion Groatley’s barncats buried right in a row there. “Old Man Fritchie kept racing pigeons. Me and Al Groatley and Carl Hannah buried one of them that a dog got. He’s right there.” He paused thoughtfully.

One of them, a tough little lady named Carla Shavers, had returned the next day and had worked out so well that even Charlton was impressed. The other they had never seen again. Louis was not surprised and did not blame her. Where was the nurse?

Two of the bigger boys made a coffin, didn’t they, Jud?” Jud nodded and drained his iced tea. “Dean and Dana Hall,” he said. “Them and that other kid Billy chummed with—I can’t remember his first name, but I’m sure he was one of the Bowie kids.

She signed for herself and her husband—Mr. and Mrs. David Dandridge—in round Palmer-method script; to this she added their address—Rural Box 67, Old Bucksport Road—and then raised her eyes to Louis’s and quickly dropped them, as if her very address on the road where Gage had died constituted a crime.

Two of the bigger boys made a coffin, didn’t they, Jud?” Jud nodded and drained his iced tea. “Dean and Dana Hall,” he said. “Them and that other kid Billy chummed with—I can’t remember his first name, but I’m sure he was one of the Bowie kids.

The smell of a gangrenous wound—what old Doctor Bracermunn at med school had called “hot flesh”—was worse too. Even the smell which came from the Civic’s catalytic converter when it had been idling in the garage for a while was worse. But this smell was pretty damn bad.

In his confusion and mounting fear, he had seized upon this as the most important question. It was a genuine conundrum, like who cut the town barber’s hair. I imagine that Donny Donahue will do it, his mother replied. Her eyes were red-rimmed; most of all she had looked tired.

They could not get close to the luggage carousel; Rachel could just see the top of her father’s hat, the one with the feather. Dory Goldman was holding two seats against the wall for them and waving. Rachel brought Ellie over. “Are you feeling any better, dear?” Dory asked.

It was Zelda’s revenge. No one could talk Rachel out of this belief—not her mother, her father, or Dr. Murray, who diagnosed a mild backsprain and then told Rachel brusquely (cruelly, some—Louis, for instance—would have said) to stop behaving so badly.

“It’s just that it seemed very quick,” he finished lamely. “Well, he was autopsied yesterday afternoon”—that faint riffle of papers again— “at around three-twenty by Dr. Rynzwyck. By then his father had made all the arrangements. I imagine the body got to Newark by two in the morning.” “Oh.

He felt a nagging disappointment that there was nothing else he could do or suggest for her, but her Dr. Weybridge had things as under control as they were ever going to be for Norma Crandall—barring some sudden breakthrough, which was possible but not to be counted upon.

He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen’s cat.

A moment later a hoarse voice cried, “Shut up, Fred!” Auggggh-ROOOOOO! Fred responded. “Shut him up, Scanlon, or I’m calling the police!” someone yelled from the side of the street Louis was on, making him jump, making him realize just how false the illusion of emptiness and desertion was.

A row farther in was: GEN. PATTON (OUR! GOOD! DOG! the inscription amplified), who had died in 1958; and POLYNESIA (who would have been a parrot, if Louis remembered his Doctor Doolittle correctly), who had squawked her last “Polly want a cracker” in the summer of 1953.

Well, Margie damn near drove right off the road, and you can understand why. She went back to the post office, tossed her leather bag with all her undelivered mail still in it on George Anderson’s desk, and told him she was going home and to bed right then.

Her eyes sparkled. “George Buck at school told me it was the pet cemetery, and I told Mommy, but she said to wait for you because you knew where it was.” “I do, too,” Jud said. “If it’s okay with your folks, we’ll take us a stroll up there.

In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B&A coupling shed with George Chapin and René Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey—jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it—while outside a …

He wasn’t having any trouble holding his head up—that would have been a dead giveaway—but Louis had nevertheless taken him to George Tardiff, who was perhaps the best neurologist in the Midwest.

There was nothing readable in the next two rows, and then, still a long way in from the center, chiseled roughly on a piece of sandstone, was HANNAH THE BEST DOG THAT EVER LIVED 1929-1939.

… on my back porch, drinking iced tea with Hannibal Benson, who was then our second selectman, and Alan Purinton, who was fire chief. Norma sat there too but never said a thing. “George kept rubbing the stump at the top of his right leg. Lost most of that leg working …

Believe it or not, there is even a bull buried up there! Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on Stackpole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or ’68. Ha, ha!

Bill Baterman stood by, his face stony and kinda . . . I dunno . . . kinda dry, I guess you’d say. He wept no tears. Huey Garber was driving the train that day, and he said that army fella had really had a tour for himself.

Then something happened which Rachel did not know about and never would . . . not from Louis, anyway. Irwin Goldman had offered to pay Louis’s entire tuition through med school. The price of this “scholarship” (Goldman’s word) was that Louis should break off his engagement with Rachel at once.

“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 fifteenth wrapped in Christmas ribbon.”

Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland—they that lived here before you—gave me a set, oh, must have been fourteen, fifteen years ago. They lived here a long time. Joan Cleveland was my wife’s best friend. She died two years ago. Bill went to that old folks’ apartment complex over in Orrington.

Anson Ludlow, the great-grandson of this town’s founding father, for one. His claim was maybe the best for a white man, since Joseph Ludlow the Elder had the whole shebang as a grant from Good King Georgie back when Maine was just a big province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Small ones, but some of them are good ones. He stopped laughing and held out the hand that wasn’t supporting Gage’s bottom—Gage’s decidedly damp bottom. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr.—” “Jud Crandall,” he said and shook. “You’re the doc, I guess.” “Yes. Louis Creed.

“W-Who?” “The one who puked,” he said with deliberate harshness. “Juh-Juh-Judy. Judy DeLessio.” “Your name?” “Carla.” Now the girl sounded a little more steady. “Carla, you go check on Judy. And get that blanket. You’ll find a pile of them in the little utility closet off Examining Room One.

… field behind the house or go over to Kathy McGown’s house to make clothes with her Sew Perfect. Gage won’t be with you, and that’s when Gage drops off whatever Hot One Hundred there is that exists in little girls’ hearts and starts to become Something That happened in 1984.

“Delta Airlines,” the voice on the other end said brightly. “This is Kim, may I help you?” “I hope so,” Rachel said. “It’s extremely important that I get from Chicago to Bangor tonight. It’s . . . it’s a bit of an emergency, I’m afraid.

Two or three days later, Laurine Purinton left Ludlow for good, and folks in town who saw her before she got on the train said she was sprouting two shiners and had cotton stuffed up both bores of her pump. Alan, he would never talk about it.

“I guess I told you that Lester Morgan buried his prize bull up there. Black Angus named Hanratty. Ain’t that a silly name for a bull? Died of some sort of ulcer inside, and Lester dragged him all the way up there on a sledge.

Some lieutenant named Kinsman whose job it was to sort out malicious mischief from plain old tomfoolery. ‘Four or five people have written anonymous letters to the War Department,’ Hannibal says, ‘and this Lieutenant Kinsman is starting to get a little bit concerned.

“That’s why, but it ain’t why,” he said in a strangled, choked voice. “I did it for the same reason Stanny B. did it and for the same reason Lester Morgan did it. Lester took Linda Lavesque up there after her dog got run over in the road.

They walked toward it together, not speaking, and stopped again in Louis’s driveway. The wind moaned and whined. Wordlessly, Louis handed Jud his pick. “I’d best get across,” Jud said at last. “Louella Bisson or Ruthie Parks will be bringin Norma home and she’ll wonder where the hell I am.”

… 1 Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened . . . although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must …

Back when all this happened, he was forty or so, and there had been some talk around about his second wife. She was his second cousin, and she had come to live with Alan and Alan’s first wife, Lucy, just before the war.

” Jud and Norma both laughed at this, and Louis grinned. “They was just about ready to fight over it when Mandy Holloway, Billy’s sister, fetched out the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica,” Jud said.

George asks. ‘You are just as white as a gull’s wing.’ “ ‘I’ve had the fright of my life, and I don’t want to talk to you about it,’ Margie Washburn says. ‘I ain’t going to talk to Brian about it, or my mom, or anybody.

“Marie told me at school,” Ellie said. Marie was Ellie’s self-proclaimed best friend, a malnourished, dirty little girl who always looked as if she might be on the edge of impetigo, or ringworm, or perhaps even scurvy.

In the same circle was a wide flat board planted deep in the earth. Frost and thaw had warped it and canted it to one side, but Louis could still make out IN MEMORY OF MARTA OUR PET RABIT DYED MARCH 1 1965. A row farther in was: GEN.

Funny to think of those two almost old enough to drive. Were they broken up over that coon? I guess they were. Matty Ryder cried so long his mom got scared and wanted to take him to the doctor. I spose he’s over it now, but they never forget.

“No,” he said, “but we’re not going away to starve either.” “Michael Burns at school says all doctors are rich.” “Well, you tell Michael Burns at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years . . . and you don’t get rich running a university infirmary.

“Well, I tell you, Louis: Missus Baterman was dead ten years then, along with the second child she tried to bring into the world, and that had a lot to do with what happened. A second child might have helped to ease the pain, don’t you think?

But if it’s all the time crossing back and forth, its luck will run out, and it’ll end up there with the Ryder kids’ coon and little Timmy Dessler’s cocker spaniel and Missus Bradleigh’s parakeet. Not that the parakeet got run over in the road, you understand.

Asked her if she still had those records because he wouldn’t mind cutting a rug with her. Maybe that very night. And Missus Stratton went back inside, and she wouldn’t come out for most of a week, and by then it was over anyway. “Lot of people saw Timmy Baterman.

She was wearing the net bra he liked, a pair of semitransparent panties, and nothing else. “You look delicious,” he said. “Where are the kids?” “Missy Dandridge took them. We’re on our own until eight-thirty . . . which gives us two and a half hours. Let’s not waste it.”

“I decided that a man in your profession is used to looking at symptoms and seeing the diseases underneath . . . and I decided I had to talk straight to you when Mortonson down at the funeral home told me you’d ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing …

Ellie ran over to him, trying to show him her picture, her new scrape, and tell him about “Old MacDonald” and Mrs. Berryman all at the same time. Church was twining in and out between her legs, purring loudly, and Ellie was somehow, almost miraculously, not tripping over him.

The woman, who introduced herself as Mrs. Buddinger from down the road, helped him and then said she thought she had better go back to the car. Her two boys were frightened. “Thank you for your help, Mrs. Buddinger,” Louis said. “I didn’t do anything,” she said flatly.

… her parents out of her—they were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father’s business. By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone.

He spoke with a Mrs. Stapleton, who said she would send over a copy of Victor Pascow’s records immediately. When Louis hung up, the Upjohn guy was there.

Louis listened to the early spring wind gust around the house, sending big blinkers of light and shadow across Mrs. Vinton’s field next door, and he suddenly thought of the Vulture he had bought on a whim five or six weeks before, while on his way home from the university.

Line one.” Louis glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly five-thirty; he had meant to be out of here an hour and a half ago. “Okay, Nancy. Thanks.” He picked up the phone and punched line one. “Hi, honey. Just on my—” “Louis, are you all right?”

… “You’ll end up getting Norma Crandall to tell you where it hurts and what kind of mattress she sleeps on.”

“That there was Pete LaVasseur’s dog, if I remember right, and there’s three of Albion Groatley’s barncats buried right in a row there. “Old Man Fritchie kept racing pigeons. Me and Al Groatley and Carl Hannah buried one of them that a dog got. He’s right there.” He paused thoughtfully.

Spot wasn’t dead but he was going, and my dad sent me away to check on some chickenfeed, which old Yorky sold back then. We didn’t need chickenfeed any more than a cow needs a blackboard, and I knew well enough why he sent me down there.”

No radiation treatments back in the 1920s! Two wars, murders, suicides . . .” He fell silent for a moment. “We knew it as a friend and as an enemy,” he said finally. “My brother Pete died of a burst appendix in 1912, back when Taft was President.

Digging here ain’t that easy, either—ground’s awful stony, you know, hard to turn. And I helped them sometimes.” He pointed here and there with a horny finger. “That there was Pete LaVasseur’s dog, if I remember right, and there’s three of Albion Groatley’s barncats buried right in a row there.

… were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Cabron across town; Peter Cabron was an accountant in her father’s business. By that evening, great changes had taken place in the Goldman household. Zelda was gone. Her room had been cleaned and fumigated. All of the furniture was gone. The room was a bare …

But even then he would have been in a hell of a court fight because there was cross-claims to the land by other Ludlows and by a fellow named Peter Dimmart, who claimed he could prove pretty convincingly that he was a Ludlow on the other side of the sheets.

The flu epidemic passed. They had to send two students to the EMMC in Bangor, and Surrendra Hardu probably saved the life of one woefully sick freshman boy with the terrible name of Peter Humperton, who went into convulsions shortly after being admitted.

A row farther in was: GEN. PATTON (OUR! GOOD! DOG! the inscription amplified), who had died in 1958; and POLYNESIA (who would have been a parrot, if Louis remembered his Doctor Doolittle correctly), who had squawked her last “Polly want a cracker” in the summer of 1953.

Louis got the telephone book, looked up a number, and jotted it on a blank memo sheet. Below the number he wrote: Quentin L. Jolander, D.V.M.—call for appointment re Church—if Jolander doesn’t neuter animals, he will refer.

If he had known the run of Rachel Creed’s earlier thoughts he could have told her that what her psych teacher had told her was maybe the truth, but when you got older that dimming function of the memory broke down little by little, the same way that everything else …

You didn’t come out to Ludlow to go exploring the goddamn woods. “What you got there, Randy?” the would-be hero cried. His voice, still shrill and somehow optimistic, carried well. Randy’s reply was almost but not quite obscured by the growing wail of the fire sirens. “Dead cat.” “Burnt up?”

In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B&A coupling shed with George Chapin and René Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey—jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it—while outside a …

Ellie had gazed at him, wide-eyed. Now the Methodist minister, Reverend Laughlin, was pronouncing the benediction, asking God to lift up His countenance upon them and give them peace. “Will the pallbearers come forward?” he asked. Louis started to rise, and Ellie halted him, tugging his arm frantically.

… until nearly four that afternoon, after Louis and Richard Irving, the head of Campus Security, made a statement to the press. The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his fiancée. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had come up …

A way out. And as a matter of fact, a couple that he did know came in just as he was finishing his apple pie and his second cup of coffee. Rob Grinnell, a Bangor doctor, and his pretty wife Barbara.

So they had gotten down on their knees in the kitchen, he and his mother, and they prayed, and it was the praying that finally brought it home to him; if his mother was praying for Ruthie Creed’s soul, then it meant that her body was gone.

They walked toward it together, not speaking, and stopped again in Louis’s driveway. The wind moaned and whined. Wordlessly, Louis handed Jud his pick. “I’d best get across,” Jud said at last. “Louella Bisson or Ruthie Parks will be bringin Norma home and she’ll wonder where the hell I am.”

That must have cost him a country fortune! “Ryder, he worked for IBM in Bangor. They went out to Colorado five years ago . . . or maybe it was six. Funny to think of those two almost old enough to drive. Were they broken up over that coon?

A moment later a hoarse voice cried, “Shut up, Fred!” Auggggh-ROOOOOO! Fred responded. “Shut him up, Scanlon, or I’m calling the police!” someone yelled from the side of the street Louis was on, making him jump, making him realize just how false the illusion of emptiness and desertion was.

Louis noticed that the place did not just seem to have a sense of order, a pattern; the memorials had been arranged in rough concentric circles. SMUCKY THE CAT, one crate-board marker proclaimed. The hand was childish but careful. HE WAS OBEDIANT. And below this: 1971-1974.

That would have been when Jud was fourteen, if he had meant when the war actually started in Europe. When he was seventeen, if he had meant when America entered the war. But tonight he had said that Spot died when he, Jud, was ten.

They had a big powwow about it . . . or so I heard the tale in my green years, Louis, but I heard it from that old tosspot Stanny B.—which is what we all called Stanley Bouchard—and what Stanny B. didn’t know, he’d make up.”

“Her dad, Stephen Holloway, was the only doctor this side of Bangor and that side of Bucksport in those days, Louis, and they was the only family in Ludlow that could afford a set of encyclopedia.” “They were also the first to have electric lights,” Norma broke in.

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 …

He slapped some cold water on his face, dried off, combed his hair, and went into his office. Steve Masterton and the Indian doctor, Surrendra Hardu, were in there, drinking coffee and continuing to go over the front file. “Morning, Lou,” Steve said. “Morning.”

But that don’t really matter, Louis. I came over here tonight to tell you about Timmy Baterman and his dad.” “Who’s Timmy Baterman?” “Timmy Baterman was one of the twenty or so boys from Ludlow that went overseas to fight Hitler. He left in 1942.

But if it’s all the time crossing back and forth, its luck will run out, and it’ll end up there with the Ryder kids’ coon and little Timmy Dessler’s cocker spaniel and Missus Bradleigh’s parakeet. Not that the parakeet got run over in the road, you understand.

She was dark-skinned, almost Levantine. Tony Benton, one of the doctors he had worked with in Chicago, used to call her the Indian Princess. “Honey,” he said, “if it was up to me, I’d let Church live to be a hundred. But I don’t make the rules.” “Who does?”

The young man, Victor Pascow, had been jogging with two friends, one of them his fiancée. A car driven by Tremont Withers, twenty-three, of Haven, Maine, had come up the road leading from the Lengyll Women’s gymnasium toward the center of campus at an excessive speed.

Moving inward, the pet graves became older; fewer and fewer of the inscriptions could be read, but those that could yielded a rough timeline extending into the past. Here was TRIXIE, KILT ON THE HIGHWAY SEPT 15, 1968.

As he pulled the blanket up over his son, though, a shudder twisted up his back, and he thought suddenly of his Uncle Carl’s “showroom.” No new cars there, no televisions with all the modern features, no dishwashers with glass fronts so you could watch the magical sudsing action.

Louis went in. Charlton’s cynicism notwithstanding, 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.

The Wendigo, dear Christ, that was the Wendigo—the creature that moves through the north country, the creature that can touch you and turn you into a cannibal. That was it. The Wendigo has just passed within sixty yards of me.

He remembered one of the guys he played poker with, Wickes Sullivan, asking him once how he could get horny for his wife and not get horny for the naked women he saw day in and day out.

Jud looked them over and smiled a little. “Now, we ain’t lost nobody in these woods since 1934,” he said. “At least, nobody local. The last one was Will Jeppson—no great loss. Except for Stanny Bouchard, I guess Will was the biggest tosspot this side of Bucksport.”

He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen’s cat.

… Old Zack McGovern, who used to live out on Stackpole Road, buried his prize bull Hanratty in the Micmac burying ground back in 1967 or ’68.

… he suddenly saw Zelda Goldman in the background, an unquiet ghost in a stinking bed, her cheesy face full of spite and agony, her hands pulled into claws.