Elephants live a very long time, and there are some sea turtles so old that people really don’t know how old they are… or maybe they do, and they just can’t believe it.”

Ellie dismissed these simply enough. “Elephants and sea turtles aren’t pets.

Pets don’t live very long at all. Michael Burns says that every year a dog lives, it’s like nine of our years.”

“Seven,” Louis corrected automatically. “I see what you’re getting at, honey, and there’ amp; some truth to it. A dog who lives to be twelve is an old dog. See, there’s this thing called metabolism, and what metabolism seems to do is tell time. Oh, it does other stuff too-some people can eat a lot and stay thin because of their metabolism, like your mother. Other people-me, for instance-just can’t eat as much without getting fat. Our metabolisms are different, that’s all. But what metabolism seems to do most of all is to serve living things as a body clock. Dogs have a fairly rapid metabolism. The metabolism of human beings is much slower. We live to be about seventy-two, most of us. And believe me, seventy-two years is a very long time.”

Because Ellie looked really worried, he hoped he sounded more sincere than he actually felt. He was thirty-five, and it seemed to him that those years had passed as quickly and ephemerally as a momentary draft under a door. “Sea turtles, now, have an even slower metabo-”

“What about cats?” Ellie asked and looked at Church again.

“Well, cats live as long as dogs,” he said, “mostly, anyway.” This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter’s bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and-yes, Louis would have sworn it-cold delight.

He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception-a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another torn got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car.

Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

But those were maybe not things to tell your five-year-old daughter, who was for the first time examining the facts of death.

“I mean,” he said, “Church is only three now, and you’re five. He might still be alive when you’re fifteen, a sophomore in high school. And that’s a long time away.”

“It doesn’t seem long to me,” Ellie said, and now her voice trembled. “Not long at all.”-Louis gave up the pretense of working on his model and gestured for her to come.

She sat on his lap, and he was again struck by her beauty, which was emphasized now by her emotional upset. 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?” she asked, and then, with infinite scorn: “God, I suppose.”

Louis stifled the urge to laugh. It was too serious. “God or Somebody,” he said.

“Clocks run down-that’s all I know. There are no guarantees, babe.”

“I don’t want Church to be like all those dead pets!” she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. “I don’t want Church to ever be dead! He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!”

There were footsteps across the kitchen, and Rachel looked in, startled. Ellie was now weeping against Louis’s chest. The horror had been articulated; it was out; its face had been drawn and could be regarded. Now, even if it could not be changed, it could at least be wept over.

“Ellie,” he said, rocking her, “Ellie, Ellie, Church isn’t dead; he’s right over there, sleeping.”

“But he could be,” she wept. “He could be, any time.” He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and beburied; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real.

In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.

It would be easy to lie at this point, the way he had lied earlier about the life expectancy of tomcats. But a lie would be remembered later and perhaps finally totted up on the report card all children hand in to themselves on their parents. His own mother had told him such a lie, an innocuous one about women finding babies in the dewy grass when they really wanted them, and as innocuous as the lie had been, Louis had never forgiven his mother for telling it-or himself for believing it.

“Honey,” he said, “it happens. It’s a part of life.”

“It’s a bad part!” she cried. “It’s a really bad part!”

There was no answer for this. She wept. Eventually her tears would stop. It was a necessary first step on the way to. making an uneasy peace with a truth that was never going to go away.

He held his daughter and listened to church bells on Sunday morning, floating across the September fields; and it was some time after her tears had stopped before he realized that, like Church, she had gone to sleep.

He put her up in her bed and then, came downstairs to the kitchen, where Rachel was beating cake batter too hard. He mentioned his surprise that Ellie should just cork off like that in the middle of the morning; it wasn’t like her.

“No,” Rachel said, setting the bowl down on the counter with a decisive thump.

“It isn’t, but I think she was awake most of last night. I heard her tossing around, and Church cried to go out around three. He only does that when she’s restless.”

“Why would she…?”

“Oh, 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.

“Rachel-”

“And I don’t want her going up there again.”

“Rachel, what Jud said about the path is true.”

“It’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.