Amanda's Literature Spot: Pet Sematary Where loss is everything.

While Louis was on his first day at work, a man bleeding from his head is rushed into Louis' office. The man was hit by a car and flung at a tree. His name is Victor Pascow and dies within minutes of entering Louis' office. Louis wants to help him but is in shock from what Victor manages to say to him.

"And this time, as clear as the words of a speaking parrot or a crow whose tongue had been split, the words were unmistakable: 'It's not the real cemetery.' The eyes were vacant, not-seeing, rimmed with blood: the mouth grinning the large grin of a dead carp" (King 74).

"'The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis,' the dying man whispered. 'A man grows what he can . . . and tends it'" (King 74).

Louis is stunned and Victor dies shortly after talking to him. Then later on in the night, Louis is woken up from a deep sleep when he hears a loud crash. When he gets up, he sees Victor standing at the door.

"He stood there with his head bashed in behind the left temple. The blood had dried on his face in maroon stripes like Indian warpaint. His collarbone jutted whitely. he was grinning" (King 83).

Victor takes Louis to the pet cemetery where Jud had taken him a few days before. He stops at the deadfall in the woods.

"The deadfall from which Jud Crandall had called Ellie in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals. Finger bones clittered. here the remains of a food flexed its pallid joints" (King 86).

He warns Louis to not go over the deadfall no matter what happens.

"'The door must not be opened,' Pascow said. he was looking down at Louis because Louis had fallen to his knees. There was a look on his face which Louis at first mistook for compassion. It wasn't really compassion at all; only a dreadful kind of patience. Still he pointed at the moving pile of bones. 'Don't go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember'" (King 87).

Louis doesn't listen to Victor, because he thinks it's only a dream, even though he wakes up the next morning with his feet covered in dirt and pine needles seemingly proving it wasn't. However, he still cannot bring himself to believe it wasn't a dream. If Louis would have listened to Victor's warning about the deadfall, would there have been a chance that Gage would not have been killed by a truck? If it was true that the cemetery brought Louis in because of the night that Jud brought Louis to the cemetery to bury Ellie's cat, could the whole situation have been prevented by not doing this?