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 27-29. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
Coming home after his debriefing with Jud, Louis realizes how drunk he’s gotten. He can’t find the switch for his garage lights. The kitchen door eludes him. He’s afraid he’ll fall over some toy. He wishes for a hand to guide him, then realizes that if a hand took his in the darkness, he’d scream. He bumbles into a wall and gets a splinter, then barks a shin on the station wagon. At least then he knows where he is.
But—where’s the damn cat? “Church’s hot, furry body oiled against his ankle like a low eddy of water, followed by its loathsome tail, curling against his calf like a clutching snake.” And then Louis does scream.
* * *
Rachel and the kids return from Chicago. Louis grins through his embarrassment as Ellie and Gage both run to him yelling “Daddy!” Rachel comes up behind, looking beat. Their trip was long but uneventful until Gage threw up. She hopes it was airsickness, not a virus.
Ellie’s face turns anxious as she asks about Church. Over Thanksgiving, she dreamed that he’d been run over. Church is fine, Louis says. He doesn’t add that the cat lies around all day staring with “strange, muddy eyes—as if he’d seem something that had blasted away most of whatever intelligence a cat has.” Nor does he mention he now sweeps Church outside nights with a broom, or that Church has started leaving messily dead mice as little presents.
As they reach the car, Gage throws up on Louis. By the time they get home, he has a fever. Louis hides another eviscerated mouse. After dinner, Ellie calls Church inside and hugs him, but her joy turns to puzzlement. She puts him down and, distressed, tells Louis the cat smells funny. Maybe he rolled in something, Louis says. The bad smell will go away.
“I certainly hope so,” Ellie says. Listening to the wind blow outside, “thin and wild, coming from the north, bringing down winter,” Louis is “simply, stupidly afraid.”
Gage’s fever rises. Rachel frets at Louis about his viral diagnosis, until he snaps that she can go get a second opinion. When Louis apologizes, she briefly stokes his anger again by admitting that her parents bought the kids new clothes. Then Elly yells for help. Though Louis put him out earlier, Church has somehow gotten back inside and is sprawled on her bed, stinking. Can he just pass through doors like Pascow’s ghost?
Louis carries Church downstairs. It’s the first time he’s held him since his return, and he breathes through his mouth to avoid the smell. It’s not as bad as, say, shit or gangrenous flesh. Yet something makes it unnaturally foul. Louis tosses Church outside, hard, getting a look of “green, ugly hate” in return. Christ, Jud, Louis thinks. I wish you’d kept your mouth shut.
He can’t blame him, though. He remembers the man talking about how the burial ground “gets hold of you.” And Louis went of his own free will. Maybe the secret place is his, too, now. No, he tells himself. Not if he doesn’t want it to be.
Rachel takes Gage to bed with her. After making sure, again, that all the doors and windows are shut against feline intrusion, Louis beds down on the pull-out couch. (Beds were smaller in the ’80s.) He dreams of killing Church and reburying him in the Micmac ground, but so deep that the cat is trapped in the stony earth. He wakes up to a weight on his chest: Church perched like a breath-stealing spirit from old-wives’ tales. He shoves it off in disgust. Meanwhile Rachel’s shouting for help.
Gage is vomiting again, and choking on it. Louis quickly helps clear his airway, but Rachel remains terrified at what she believes was Gage’s near-miss with death. “He was so close,” she says. “Honey,” Louis replies, “we’re all close. All the time.”
Rachel says Gage woke hungry around midnight and she gave him a bottle of milk. So, says Louis, no more milk. Rachel agrees, “almost humbly.” Back downstairs, Louis hunts around until he discovers how Church keeps getting in the house: The basement door, which he closed on both his previous patrols, now stands ajar. If Church has found some overlooked egress to the basement and learned how to paw open the inner latch of the basement door, mystery solved.
After ejecting Church once more, Louis shoots home the bolt.
* * *
In the morning, Gage’s fever has dropped near normal. At breakfast he shows off his new ability to copy others’ speech. What Ellie wants him to say is “shit” and “fart.” Even Rachel can’t entirely suppress her amusement as Gage cheerfully chants, “Farz-n-shit.” Then he throws up in his cereal bowl. Ellie flees from the kitchen. Louis breaks up completely, laughing, then crying, then laughing again. Rachel and Gage stare as if he’s gone crazy, but actually he was crazy before the fit. Now with his family home and Gage recovering, he thinks he’s going to be all right.
Is the weirdness of the past week over with? Louis doesn’t know, but it feels over.
“And, for a while, at least, it was.”
What’s Cyclopean: Church “oils” against Louis’s ankle and glares with “green, ugly hate”. Later Church lies “hotly in his arms, like a quiescent disease”.
The Degenerate Dutch: Okay, look. If you’re convinced that your outdoor cat hasn’t been killing mice, not to mention small songbirds—or that a fixed cat won’t bother with hunting—then you are working with a very weird model of both predation and hormonal effects.
Madness Takes Its Toll: After Gage recovers, Louis believes that he’s been crazy, but he’s going to be fine now. Sure, man. Absolutely.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Jud is the man who should’ve been Louis’s father. This is the first thing we learn as Pet Sematary opens, and it sounds like a good thing. Men who grow up without fathers—and in Louis’s case even without grandfathers—yearn for gender-matched role models, for sources of masculine wisdom and care. It’s particularly tough for such a man to find his way as a father. This is a bit trite and gender essentialist, but based on the men I’ve known in this position, it’s also not completely wrong. Groping around in the dark, like Louis in his garage, you want a clear light to follow—even if you’re technically capable of figuring the terrain out on your own.
But in King’s universe, having parents is far from an unalloyed good. Charlie’s father in Firestarter tries as hard as he can, but also responsible for her pyrokinetic and bureaucratic problems. Carrie’s mother is an abusive monster. Richie Grenadine has the world’s worst drinking problem. Rachel’s father tried to bribe her fiancé out of her life. And Jud… as a father figure, Jud’s very free with guidance, and Louis welcomes it. No one likes to grope around in the dark—and if you feel like that’s what you’re doing, you definitely don’t want to think of the first light on offer as an oncoming train. But Louis would’ve done better to listen to Pascow’s possessing spirit than to his friendly neighbor.
This week’s chapters show the aftermath of a terrible choice, as now-unavoidable repercussions pile up. Worse, most of the people facing those repercussions don’t know about Louis’s, and Louis’s not in a position to explain. “I’m so sorry, but Church got hit by a car” was more doable than it felt, even with Rachel’s phobia. “I’m sorry, but Church got hit by a car just like you dreamed, only Jud helped me resurrect him and that’s why he’s Not Right, sorry about the smell” is probably beyond the kind of relationship Louis has with either Rachel or his kids. He loves them and wants to do right by them, but that’s a pretty high bar for honesty – and would be even for someone who reacted appropriately to Jud’s lie-to-your-wife advice.
So now he’s terrified of the cat, and Ellie’s also stuck with a pet she knows she should love but is repulsed by, and Rachel has to deal with having Death right there in the building and almost perfectly deniable. It’s going to tear them apart.
My literal nightmares sometimes follow this script: I’ve done something horrible, something that’s going to hurt my family irreparably, and there’s no taking it back. The climactic-tipping-point level of mistake is a particular terror of parents. Rachel faces a mundane version: the question of how to handle the worst childhood fevers. Go to the hospital when you don’t have to, and you spend hours in the ER with a miserable kid and get a Tylenol for your troubles, and maybe a sicker and worse-rested kid. Stay home when you should go in, and… what if? Louis may be right that “we’re all close,” but some moments make that proximity all too obvious.
Louis tries to convince himself that the burial ground hasn’t become “my place now.” But he’s not stronger than Jud, nor the exception to his belated warning. Whatever has claimed that place claims the people who make use of it—and I suspect one of the ways it does that is by undermining the places that were theirs before. Undead Church brings something malign into the house—something from which Louis can’t protect his family because he let it enter to begin with, and because he can never admit that he did so.
Which means that for however long Church 2.0 lasts, something will continue to eat away at the home-ness of their house. And at any healthy sense of what it means for a place to be one’s own, until the burial ground is all that’s left.
Anne’s Commentary
When I read about Louis waking up to find Church lying on his chest “like something from the old wives’ tale of breath-stealing,” I could relate. My first cat, Robin, much preferred the human chest to his plush cat bed. Since I sleep on my side, I was a poor choice of mattress. My back-sleeping mother, however, soon took to shutting him in the cellar at night. I protested until she told me cats perch on sleeping people to suck the breath out of their lungs. My grandmother added that with the breath, they also sucked out the soul. So no matter how good the person was while alive, when they died they went straight to Purgatory and stayed there forever. You’ve got to have a soul to go to heaven, or to hell for that matter.
I didn’t buy the story, but I liked it. Losing your soul to a breath-sucking cat could be a good thing as well as a bad one. Not having a soul meant you could be as bad as you wanted and still avoid the eternal flames of damnation. Purgatory forever would be an easy berth by comparison, and the cat would have to go to hell for you.
Ergo cats couldn’t be sucking breath and souls from people. Cats were too smart to risk taking a fall for any damn human.
Later experience has convinced me that cats sleep on chests for two reasons. One, in addition to your warmth, they like the wave-like rise and fall of your ribcage under their tummies. Two, they’re perfectly positioned to tap your nose if you’re oversleeping their feeding time. So, unless you have a cat so obese it really will put you into anoxia if it plops on your diaphragm region, just chill. And wear a nose-guard, because if you oversleep long enough, the claws could come out.
What we’ve got to remember with regards to Church is that he’s been dead and then resurrected, making him no ordinary chest-perching house cat. His “strange, muddy eyes” make Louis imagine that he’s seen something that “blasted away most of whatever intelligence a cat has.” If that’s so, what has replaced the cat intelligence?
I’ve noticed that while I still assign Church his male pronouns, King much of the time has Louis refer to Church by the neuter pronoun it. Louis formerly hypermasculinized the cat, but it’s death rather than the vet’s scalpel that has truly neutered Church for him. While Rachel and Ellie didn’t much notice the difference, for Louis, the “gunslinger” tom came home from the clinic less active, less swaggering, all around less. The revenant Church is even sleepier and duller than post-vet Church, and much clumsier. So why shouldn’t Louis think of the cat as “it,” neither male nor female, gone beyond neutered to neutralized?
“It” is applied to neuter things, lifeless objects. “It” can also be applied to creatures with plenty of life or at least liveliness, creatures with volition and with agency of dangerous-to-deadly potential. Creatures beyond human ken, like monsters, demons, ghosts and ghouls and supernatural entities of every kind and culture. Church could fit into multiple supernatural categories. Undead, for sure. Possessed, for pretty sure. Would that make a former “him” a monster “it”?
The hell, if only out of fellowship with Louis, I’ll go with “it” henceforth. A monster “it,” mind. An “it” with lots going on in “its” feline skull.
Or feline shell? Either way, I don’t see revenant Church as witless, bumbling along on a poorly rebooted autopilot. Its languor and clumsiness are more likely assumed than constitutional. After all, the only revenant Church Louis can possibly accept is one like the revenant Spot Jud describes: dulled-down, brain-injured maybe, but still Spot, still a good dog, or good enough to go on loving until its next death. After which, enough already, now you can accept it passing on.
Church is no dog. Church is a cat, and cats are weird beasts, more fitting receptacles, let’s say, for something smart enough to feign harmless (if grotesque) dimness until… its time comes. If revenant Church really were so dull and awkward as it shows itself to Louis, how could it be so proficient a hunter of swift and canny rodents? So adroit an unpuzzler of latches?
The one aspect of undeath its creatures can’t much mollify is that stench of the grave that rebirthed them. That grave in unhallowed, soured earth. By their smell shall you know them, after all. Yet in far less than strange aeons, people can get sufficiently used to the undead fetor to let its carriers remain in the household, kinda-sorta cherished pets. During the day, anyhow, and even on the Christmas hearth.
As we’ll see in the next chapter.
Next week, we return to the Parrington Museum for a deadly-dull reception in Sarah Monette’s “The Haunting of Dr. Claudius Winterson”.
