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Even the Green Beans Are an Omen: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 16)

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Even the Green Beans Are an Omen: Stephen King’s <i>Pet Sematary</i> (Part 16)

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Even the Green Beans Are an Omen: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 16)

An ill wind blows across King's characters in this week's chapters, as Louis inches closer to the inevitable...

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Published on January 29, 2025

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Cover of Stephen King's Pet Sematary

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 46-48. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Ongoing content warning for child death.


After the call from Rachel, Jud goes across the road to the Creed house. It was the road and the damned trucks that caused all these troubles, he thinks. But he knows it’s actually what lies beyond the Pet Sematary that’s to blame. He feels its pull, once a “seductive lullaby,” now a grim threat: “Stay out of this, you.

Jud can’t stay out. His responsibility goes back too far.

The back door is open. Jud enters calling for Louis. As he expected, there’s no reply. He checks for certain telltale signs: Gage’s toys or clothes retained, his crib set up again. He finds none. Should he run out to the Pleasantview Cemetery, maybe meet up with Louis there? No, it’s here the danger is, back up in the woods.

He goes home and settles down to watch the Creed house from his front room bay window, six-pack of beer and cigarettes by his side. The afternoon drags on, while he sinks into vivid memories, including some of Lester’s resurrected bull Hanratty. He remembers how sick dread drove Lester when he put the crazed animal down. That’s what Jud feels right now. He sits, drinks, smokes, watches the house across the road. When Louis returns, he’s going to have a talk with him.

Still, “whatever sick power it was that inhabited that devil’s place” continues to tug at him. He tries to ignore its repeated warnings: “Stay out of this, you. Stay out of it or you’re going to be very, very sorry.”

* * *

Louis eats a “big tasteless dinner” at his motel. It’s what his body seems to want. He wonders if someone he knows will come into the restaurant and ask what he’s up to, complicate his plans, give him “a way out.” A couple acquaintances do arrive, but don’t notice him. Outside, a near-gale makes the electrical wires hum weirdly. He goes to his room and passes the four hours before he can begin his work watching sit-coms.

In Chicago at that moment Dory Goldman wails, demanding to know why Rachel wants to fly home immediately. In Ludlow Jud sits in his bay window, waiting for Louis’s return. Coldness holds Louis, stronger than ever, but underneath it, there’s “an ember of eagerness, or passion, or perhaps lust.” At eleven, he goes to his Honda, feeling the power of the secret place in the woods.

And he wonders: “Could I stop? Could I stop even if I wanted to?

* * *

Rachel can’t explain to her parents why she’s dead-set on returning to Ludlow that night. The feeling has “risen in her the way a wind rises,” from “an early stirring of the grasses, hardly noticed,” to gusts that make “screaming noises around the eaves.” Then there’s Ellie’s “dark glance” that keeps “asking [Rachel] what she was going to do about whatever trouble Daddy was in.”

Her father treats her with the slow kindness reserved for “someone in the grip of a transitory but dangerous hysteria,” while her mother hovers, saying they ought to just think about this, talk this through, make lists maybe. But Ellie’s look of rising hope gives Rachel the courage to persist. She calls Delta Airlines, then waits on hold while the reservations clerk figures out a flight plan that can get her to Bangor that night. Irwin and Dory withdraw to confer. Ellie moves close to Rachel and murmurs, “Don’t let them stop you, Mommy.”

“No way, big sister,” Rachel says, then winces, realizing Ellie’s no one’s big sister anymore. She asks if Ellie can tell her more, whether she’s afraid for her Daddy just because of her nightmare. No, Ellie replies. The dread is everything now, running through her like—

Like a wind, Rachel says, and Ellie sighs shakily. She tries to remember more of the dream. It was about Daddy, Church, and Gage, but she can’t recall how they go together! As Rachel hugs her daughter, the airline clerk returns with a complicated set of flight connections. It sounds like they’ll work, barely.

Irwin sparks Ellie to sudden fury when he suggests refusing to drive Rachel to the airport. Dory steps in. Now she feels nervous for Louis, too. Irwin agrees and even offers to accompany Rachel to Maine, but there would be no available plane seats. It’s as if God has saved them for Rachel.

Before Rachel goes to pack a tote bag, Ellie tells her, “Be careful, Mommy.”

The Degenerate Dutch: No one really needed the word “cockteasers” here. Or anywhere.

Libronomicon: Jud’s mind turns “back and back in a widening gyre.” In this version of the poem, presumably, Louis is the falcon who cannot hear the falconer.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Irwin and Dory look at Rachel and Ellie like “people you suspect of being lunatics.” Ellie, though, is firm that they aren’t crazy—and convincing enough to get them to listen.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There’s an interesting generational play going on this week. Louis lies suspended between children and grandparents, lacking the wisdom of both. No, it’s worse than that. All the wisdom has gone out of him, compressed to either side. Even Rachel’s parents—normally a source of overprotective irrationality—get a share.

Speaking of generations, Ellie’s precognitive sense turns out not to have fallen far from the tree. It’s strongest in her unresisting six-year-old self, but Rachel too feels the “wind” picking up, and Dory even gets a twinge. Irwin has only the sense not to suggest “hysteria” aloud, and to drive his daughter to the airport.

No… maybe I’m being unfair to Irwin. He’s been an ass, but he hasn’t been completely off-base either. Was that scene with the checkbook due to classism and a prejudice against interfaith marriage, or was it a real premonition of its own? “You’ll have all the grief you can stand and more.” It’s true, isn’t it? Perhaps there are men who would’ve drawn closer to Rachel in mourning, rather than pulling away. Who would’ve been honest and firm with themselves about the burial ground’s powers. The temptation is large, but people do resist large temptations every day.

In the same generation, twelve hundred miles away, Jud has much more concrete suspicions due to having made much more concrete contributions to the Bad Decision. Unfortunately, he’s missed that Louis is literally going out of his way to avoid him. Old bones and all, he’d do better waiting in the Sematary than trusting his ability to guard the path. The power that urged a responsible driver to unsafe speeds can surely get an aging widower to take a nap—or just to look the wrong direction at the wrong time. But then, that same power may be what keeps Jud at home, drinking beer by the window.

As an aside, what the hell does Jud think he’ll learn from cribs not taken down or clothing not donated? It’s been less than a week. How freaking fast does he think that people normally erase all trace of their dead child’s existence, even under non-necromantic circumstances?

As a more trivial aside, what color are green beans in nature, if not bright green? Has Louis found neon ones? I am confused and disturbed and double-checking my fridge.

Back on topic: The dice are loaded, now. Or blown to snake-eyes by that wind. Jud’s unlikely to catch Louis. Rachel has that tight connection in Boston. Acquaintances at the HoJo’s don’t spot Louis, let alone question his presence. And my e-reader tells me we’re at 79%, about the right point for everything to get much, much worse, very quickly.

At least, I hope it’ll be quick. This is now enough chapters of almost-counterfactual that I’m ready to march up that hill myself if it means I’m done begging Louis not to.

Maybe Jud’s expectation of post-Gage cleaning isn’t an aside after all. Time is out of joint, stretched out—as it surely does feel in the throes of grief. Jud imagines that the past comes closer with age, with senility as a window to the photographic memories described by Louis’s psych teacher. And if time is broken, why shouldn’t mourning parents take down cribs and donate toys over a week that’s lasted a year? Why shouldn’t the process of making terrible decisions take place in slow motion?

And why shouldn’t that make us, like the wendigo moving all its pieces into place, eager for the point of no return to arrive at last?

Anne’s Commentary

Having made it through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I with his head still firmly attached to his body, playwright and poet John Heywood might have had special feeling for this adage in his 1546 collection of “All the Proverbes in the Englishe Tongue”:

“An ill wind that bloweth no man to good.”

The generally accepted meaning of which is that you can hardly find a misfortune or calamity that doesn’t benefit someone, somehow. But a really bad-ass wind—say, one that originates in the lightless gulfs of the black stars, that’s bound to mess up everyone it touches.

Such a super-ill wind scuds through Chapters 46, 47 and 48 of Pet Sematary both actually and metaphorically. As Jud crosses Route 15 to the Creed House following Rachel’s phone call, he finds that the wind has picked up, clouding over the spring afternoon. The change in the weather reflects the change in the voice of the burial-ground power; from a zephyr of “seductive lullaby,” it’s taken on the grim threat of imminent cyclone.

Outside Louis’s motel, the wind approaches gale force. It drives clouds that obscure the stars and makes itself a “steady, droning presence”—a “nightwind… too full of possibilities.”

In Chicago, Rachel feels foreboding as a wind that rises from “an early stirring of the grasses, hardly noticed, to “gusts…hard enough to make eerie screaming noises around the eaves.” It’s “something like a hurricane.” Any stronger, and “things are going to fall down.” Ellie feels that her own foreboding has gone beyond dreams to “everything now… running all through me.” When Rachel suggests their shared anxiety feels “something like a wind,” Ellie’s sigh speaks to her agreement.

Chapters 46 through 48 set King’s principal “chess pieces” in position for the novel’s endgame. Chapter 47 belongs to Louis, but it also contains a precis from the author-chessmaster’s point of view. Forced to cool his heels before venturing to Pleasantview Cemetery, Louis immerses himself in the lethe of sitcoms. He’s never seen these shows before, only “heard vague rumors of them.” Around the clinic water-cooler, I imagine. Like a first-time opiate user, he’s probably supernumbed by these stories of families that, however diverse, however dysfunctional, all end up laughing as each episode closes. Often there are cute dogs (less often cats) who don’t get run over by trucks. Ratings forbid any kid get run over. Ratings forbid even more that surviving family members should fail in comforting each other. Yet, outside the motel room windows, the wind still howls.

In Chicago, Rachel resolves to fly home immediately.

And, in Ludlow, Jud waits for Louis to come home. Louis has to come home, because the only way he knows to the burial ground starts in his backyard.

King closes his authorial interjection with a killer simile: Louis is “unaware of these other happenings [which are] like slow-moving projectiles aimed not at where he was, but rather in the best ballistics tradition at the place where he would be.” I don’t think the power that draws these three character-projectiles toward rendezvous is Fate Its Own Self. That would imply that Jud, Louis, and Rachel never had any personal agency once they came within range of the power’s influence. For each, however, the point of no return has either been reached or is perilously near. The monster that Louis senses beneath his all-enveloping chill is “an ember of eagerness, or passion, or perhaps lust.” It doesn’t matter what propels the monster, as long as that propulsion warms Louis as well and keeps him together in the wind.

Yet Louis can still ask himself the critical question: “Could I stop? Could I stop even if I wanted to?” If Fate is at least the monster’s partner, is that because Louis’s psyche is such that it can readily intermesh with the monster’s? Was the wild work ahead of him foreordained the very moment when Louis saw Gage’s blood-filled cap in the road?

The “nightwind” power blowing through these chapters is truly too full of possibilities. It could be the devil Jud pictures. It could be a more neutral god, one Louis hopes will resurrect Gage neither as devil nor angel, but as a child Louis can nurture into a tolerable second life. It could be the benevolent God Rachel’s close to believing “held” last-minute plane connections for her.

Last minute plane connections, that could be a miracle all right. But whether it’s a force of light or darkness that draws Rachel into the climax of this story, along with Jud, along with Louis, that’s yet to be decided.

Or, perhaps, only to be revealed.


Next week, we encounter a different set of parenting challenges in Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s “Mommy.” You can find it in Weird Sisters: Tales from the Queens of the Pulp Era. icon-paragraph-end

About the Author

Ruthanna Emrys

Author

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden, Winter Tide, and Deep Roots, as well as co-writer of Reactor's Reading the Weird column with Anne M. Pillsworth. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. There she creates real versions of imaginary foods, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.
Learn More About Ruthanna

About the Author

Anne M. Pillsworth

Author

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. She currently lives in a Victorian “trolley car” suburb of Providence, Rhode Island. Summoned is her first novel.

Learn More About Anne M.
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Jeff Wright
15 days ago

Winds can be foul things…as it turns out, we are nearing the centennial of the Great Tri-State tornado of 1925…which may have inspired HPL.

In my own state something made up of rushing, airy presences became an actual kaiju…full of squirming ropes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tornado/comments/1hbwvtt/the_tuscaloosa_tornado_moved_like_a_living_thing/?rdt=59527

https://stormtrack.org/threads/tornadoes-with-tentacle-like-external-vortices.24624/

Figure 8b shows a sub-vortex draped over the side of a mall—figure 9d-f depicts what for all intents and purposes is a shoggoth.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/12/BAMS-D-20-0251.1.xml

Many horror writers use wicked weather as an embellishment to the “real” horror…we saw Poltergeist and Something Wicked This Way Comes…but the power of violent and unusual weather deserves tales of its own.

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