Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.
— Stephen King
I know very few people who get Maine. Most people enjoy it, they appreciate it, they drive up to Acadia during the summer and spend a week in Portland in June and take a family photo in front of Portland Head Light. They eat lobster so fresh you can taste the salt of the ocean it was pulled from, drawn butter dripping down their chin, and they sit on docks and sigh in the evenings as the sky flares pink and orange over the cold Atlantic waters.
I know far fewer people who understand and are at home in Maine, who can move through it without eventually feeling confused or affronted by Mainers’ dry, off-color humor. Hardly anyone I know would willingly make the drive up to Moosehead Lake in the winter or go clamming in Searsport rather than purchase paper boats of crispy bellies from a shoreside shack.
Maine is in my blood. Both of my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandfather were born and raised in Maine, and I have branches of my family tree stretching across the state, some as far north as the Canadian border. I can still hear my grandfather’s downeast accent, his growl of Bang-oah. A logger, he worked in the Maine backwoods for most of his life before moving to Connecticut with my Nana, who gave birth to my father, who would eventually move us even further down the east coast to Pennsylvania—what my cousins jokingly call “down south.” When my parents told me we’d be leaving New England, I knew I’d be saying an indefinite goodbye to my grounding place.
***
As a child, I often laid in bed and leveled with the certainty that one day I will die. I would soak in the realization that there will be no exceptions made for me. It doesn’t matter how badly I might want to live—eventually, I’ll die, and so will everyone I know and love. These thoughts filled me with a cold, jittery feeling: pure horror. What chilled me most was the inevitability of it. There was nothing, absolutely nothing anyone could ever do to pardon me from what felt like a very dark fate.
I don’t remember why, in the midst of these existential episodes, my brother and I started reading Pet Sematary. Neither of us had yet read any Stephen King books. All we knew was that he was a scary guy from Maine who a distant relative had once seen in passing at a gas station north of Portland. This distant relative had reported that he had been so creeped out he left without paying for his gas.
Maybe it was just one of the few books my parents kept stacked in odd places around the house. Maybe we knew it was scary—the cover certainly was, anyway. Mostly black, with STEPHEN KING in blocky red letters across the top and PET SEMATARY in crude yellowing white scrawl below, it wasn’t a subtle book cover. The bottom third was taken up by an illustration of a hissing cat’s face, the eyes virus-green, the fur on the top of its head fading into the dark silhouette of many cross-shaped cemetery markers. Looking it over, we hardly expected fairy tales.
For months we alternated chapters, night after night, reading aloud until we had torn through the whole book. Some nights we’d read until our eyes were dry, their lids heavy and sinking closed every few words. At the time my parents were on the verge of divorce. Escaping into a book was something I was practicing regularly, but those 411 pages were the spark that started the fire that has kept me warm for the better part of three decades.
From then forward, it was all King. I sourced every book of his I could, obsessively combing the dollar racks at local libraries. I also frequented the used bookstore in town. In middle and high school, it was the kind of place a kid could go with a drip coffee and a spare afternoon and be just fine. I would stride automatically to the horror section, kneeling down to peer along the bottom shelf where I knew the ‘K’s would be. I bought every book I didn’t yet have, as well as alternate editions for ones I did.
I read them as I had bought them- feverishly, almost obsessively. It was a perfect meeting of my two worlds: the Maine that I felt called to, and the darkness that I lived with. The monsters on the page mirrored the monsters in my head. At the time I was struggling with extreme and unpredictable swings in my mood, and I felt morose, so much like vapor most of the time. When happiness did visit it was like a lightning strike- hot and sudden and out of control.
***
When my daughter, Cal, was diagnosed with leukemia three months into the pandemic, I felt like I was captaining a ship that had pitched suddenly into an eddy. I tried first to steer against it, then to go with it, and eventually it pulled me under.
I had pretended for years that our life was on an upward trajectory. I fed myself psychological lies about how my love for my children would keep any serious horrors at bay. Nothing bad could happen; that’s how concretely we loved each other. It was, to my mind, a fortress standing guard against the worst of life’s terrors. Now, the horror of potentially losing my child and of watching her slowly suffer ate at me constantly.
Never in my adult life have I believed in ghosts or monsters or any forces beyond the chemical, physical or biological. Growing up I consumed horror stories because it felt like an art to draw as powerful an emotion as terror out of a reader. It felt like magic to plant something so firmly in a person’s brain that they would carry it with them into bed at night, startling at every sound and shadow. I never let any of it occupy real estate in my own brain. I still slept with my feet over the edge of the bed at night.
But now something was alive in the darkness and coming for us. I thought about a line from The Shining: monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win. The leeches hadn’t flown out of a discarded refrigerator to suck the jelly of my eyeballs out of their thin films, but they had seeped out of some blackness in the universe to take up residence in my daughter’s blood and marrow. Cancer was the creature in the closet and under the bed and in the drain and deep within the pipes; it had been sleeping inside my child like the monster had slept beneath Derry, and when it was time it rose up and tried to eat her alive. It wouldn’t happen quickly like with Georgie. It would be slow. It could take years, but eventually, I thought, it would take her.
***
It was Pet Sematary I went back to, at first because it was the most Maine. Jud Crandall reminded me of every old male family member I’d ever known. I could hear his backwoods drawl, the familiar cadence that felt like a loping stride, the voice sounding like cracked leather. I imagined him saying Bang-oah with that same grinding drawn-out sound that had been ever-present throughout my earlier years.
I picked up my old copy, the one with the missing cover, its spine and first dozen pages held together by strips of clear packing tape. I went back to Ludlow. Again over the deadfall, again to the Micmac burial grounds, again to the singular grief of a parent facing the same tides of horror I was now swimming. I would read it seven times over the course of Cal’s cancer treatments. The first time I finished it almost before I knew that I had started. I read it cover to cover in three days and put it down and thought a moment and then picked it back up to turn to the first page and begin all over again.
When I had sucked all of the marrow from one book, I moved on to another, steadily reading through every King book that had offered me refuge as a teenager. I read them all in order. Then I read them in order of my preference. Then the reverse. Then IT again, three times in a row, to try to see into the deeper layers and make connections that might have eluded me during earlier reads. I found Christine’s key fob in The Stand and Cujo in Pet Sematary and I kept digging, like bringing up a body, and everywhere there was Maine.
There were days I’d take off of work to attend to Cal, spending hours stretched alongside her in the hospital bed while her little body hovered somewhere below consciousness, chemo-exhausted and feverish against my side. Occasionally I would get up to help her to the bathroom or hold the bedpan while she puked, but mostly I would read. The nurses filtered around us. Some would want to make small talk, which in the beginning I obliged but later shrugged off. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to disappear.
***
Falling into Stephen King’s work was like collapsing into my bed after four nights on the plastic hospital pull-out chair. It was something warm and familiar, never mind the odd crumb in the sheets; it was what I knew. At the turn of a page, I could bike around Derry with the Losers, visit the standpipe, gaze at the stony bed of the Kenduskeag, and stand in the shadow of Paul Bunyan looming over Main Street. I could open to Norma Crandall’s burial, with Lou and Ellie Creed hand-in-hand, and see the same view I know from my grandfather’s headstone in Mount Hope Cemetery.
When I was 15, I served as a pallbearer at his funeral. It was the first time I had been to the cemetery outside of King’s books. I remember returning to my grandfather’s grave after the reception had ended, all of the food wrapped and stored in the rec center refrigerators, relatives hugged and comforted and hugged again. As I stood next to my mother on the top of the hill while she said her final goodbyes to her father, I suddenly shrieked, “he’s got me, he’s got me!” and pretended to be gripped by a hand protruding from the dirt. It is a testament to her love for me that she has since forgiven this adolescent cruelty.
I was chasing strangeness, the jokes that weren’t funny but were if you looked at them just right, if you had a taste for the macabre. I read Stephen King for the stories and for the language, but I also read to get back to a place I knew was safe. I could sit at the end of the rocky pier in Ogunquit next to Frannie Goldsmith as the tourists packed up for the season and she contemplated her unexpected pregnancy, the gulls swirling overhead, Captain Trips already slinking its way across the country.
I could find both humor and horror in Lou Creed’s stumbling journey along the haunted, shrieking woods beyond the Pet Sematary, his son’s corpse heavy in his arms while a mocking, maniacal voice echoed, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! and visions of Mickey Mouse danced through his head. Lazarus, come forth. Hey-ho, let’s go. Here was a language I could read and understand. In that, I felt understood.
My Maine is not a postcard Maine. It’s not anything you’d send home to your mother. I wasn’t searching for the perfect panoramas from the bubbles of Acadia. I wanted the thorny berry bushes that lined the logging roads around Camp—a cabin in Phippsburg where we spent summers when I was a child, where my brother fell 20 feet down a cliffside and gashed open his head, and where my cousin once stepped on a rusted nail protruding from the old boards that formed a path down to the docks over the water. I still remember the perfect circle it punched into her arch, the red blood just beginning to fill it in as she lifted it to our faces.
I wanted the overgrown paths through the dense woods where you can lose yourself even when you’re careful, even when you think you know the way. I needed the hard truths I had been raised on, the ever-bubbling water in the lobster pot in which each evening we boiled animals alive and then ate them, relishing in their sweetness. In Stephen King’s books I found the deep forests of my grandfathers and the ghosts of the Maine men who passed their Maine blood on to me.
***
At one point in her treatment Cal was undergoing monthly lumbar punctures to test for leukemia cells and also to administer intrathecal chemo—medication injected directly into her spinal fluid. Her sedation procedure for these initially included a drug called Versed, which was supposed to help her relax prior to the procedure. In reality, it resulted in what her doctors called ‘agitation’ and I called Hurricane Cal. She would wake up and dissolve into hysterics, shrieking at anyone who touched her and wedging herself between her hospital bed and the wall, as far away from all of us as she could possibly move herself. She would sob until she was red-faced, screaming so loud and so long I could see her tonsils shivering with the force of it. She told me she hated me, that she wished I was dead, and that she was going to rip her PICC line out of her arm.
There were real side effects for me, too. There was a constant fog of depression that I walked through and below and alongside of for two and a half years. There were several months of serious alcohol abuse, repeated instances of self-harming, ongoing suicidal ideation, and one attempt. There was isolation beyond anything I have ever experienced. We were at the height of COVID, and I was caught between needing connection with my community and wanting to be a responsible human and keep my daughter safe.
I unraveled just as a chorus of voices was shouting about how well I was handling everything. I drank and screamed and cried and threw myself into walls and lashed out at anyone I felt was abandoning me. At my worst moments, I felt like I had been bitten by something during a moment of bad luck and now it had poisoned me. I couldn’t get control over my spiraling brain.
***
People often told me that everything happens for a reason, or that we were lucky it was just leukemia (the saltine cracker of cancer!), or that I should stay strong and think positive! These were easy platitudes for people to offer who didn’t have to spend their days and nights holding their child’s head over a bucket while the medicine that was saving their life also tried to kill them. It’s hard to stay positive when your kid’s doctor pulls you aside during a particularly tough round of chemo and gently but gravely reminds you, some kids die of cancer, and some kids die of cancer treatment.
You don’t think positive after that. It is horror within horror, the relentless and senseless cruelty of pediatric cancer, the treatment seeming worse than the actual disease. I read Stephen King continuously because the scariest possible imaginings on those pages now felt like fairytales. Now, again, I had found a mirror for the darkness I was living with. The worst thing had happened, and it had happened to us, in real life. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore. The monsters were in the room, and I read to escape them. I ran to other, lesser monsters.
***
I knew that if my child was going to die, it would happen despite all of my pleading and protesting. No matter how badly I didn’t want it to happen, it would come anyway, like a train rumbling steadily along a track, our stop somewhere down the line. There would be no exceptions made for her.
For years I had lessened my anxiety by telling myself the things that were meant for me were waiting somewhere along the road of my future. Maybe I didn’t have a bestselling book out, but if it was meant to be, it would happen if I kept showing up at my computer every day. Maybe I haven’t yet met the person I am destined to be with, but I know they are somewhere along the timeline of my life, and it is just a matter of patience and getting there. Here was the flipside of that: if my child is going to die, if that is truly meant to be, it will happen eventually regardless of what I do. The mental exercises which had become such reliable tools for me were suddenly an enemy.
I drowned in my anxiety for nearly a year. At one point I questioned whether time wasn’t somehow as physical as space, and that we were simply limited in our ability to move through it. This led to the certainty that somewhere along the timeline of my life, there was a point at which Cal would die, and then there would be an infinite number of moments following which I would have to endure before finally finding mercy in joining her. The panic that filled me was constant and all-consuming. It was like looking over the edge of a hundred-story building and suddenly feeling your knees give and the floor rush up to meet you, except it was continuous, rolling on and on for months. I had loved my child with everything inside of myself and still I might lose her to something vicious and cold in its ever-forward motion, untroubled by my desperate need for my daughter to remain alive.
In the 2000 edition of Pet Sematary, there is an introduction that grips me every time I read it. It is my psalm, my bible verse that I take with me to bed every night.
Perhaps ‘sometimes dead is better’ is grief’s last lesson, the one we get to when we finally tire of jumping up and down on the plastic blisters and crying out for God to get his own cat (or his own child) and leave ours alone. That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe. That may sound like corny, new-age crap, but the alternative looks to me like a darkness too awful for mortal creatures as us to bear.
I have not found comfort in positive thinking, nor do I take refuge in religion or spirituality as so many people in my position do. Instead, I have found relief in the haunted hallways of the Overlook Hotel and the abandoned America of The Stand. I walk the lime green floors of the Green Mile and despair for Carrie as she stands, wide-eyed and dripping in front of her classmates, her sanity cleaved in quarters and scattered. I soak myself in the only terrors that can match my own, and I, often reluctantly, leave the rest to whatever shadowed future waits for us ahead.
Elizabeth Austin’s writing has appeared in Past Ten, Driftwood Press, Sybil, and PANK, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently lives in Bucks County with her two children and their two hamsters. Elizabeth and her kids take any opportunity to travel together and are looking forward to one day spending all their summers in Maine. Find her on Instagram: @writingelizabeth
