Chapter 28 Twenty-eight

"Daddy!" Ellie screamed. She ran down the gangway to Louis, weaving through the disembarking passengers, most of whom laughed to make way for her.Louis was a little embarrassed by his daughter's fiery behavior, but he thought he had the same goofy smile on his face. Rachel held Gage in her arms, and Gage saw him when Ellie called out to Papa. "Daddy!" Gage yelled gleefully, and began writhing restlessly in Rachel's arms.The wife smiled (a little tiredly—Louis thought) and put Gage on the ground, and he started chasing Allie, running on his little legs, yelling, "Daddy! Daddy!"

Louis noticed that his son was wearing a jumpsuit he hadn't seen before—it must have been bought by his grandpa; and Ally rushed up to him and climbed on top of him like a tree. "Hi, Daddy!" she called out, kissing him affectionately. "Hi, baby," Louis said, bending over to pick up Gage, and he held his son in his arms, hugging the two children and saying, "I'm so glad to see you all back." Rachel followed, carrying her duffel bag and purse on one shoulder and Gage's diaper bag on the other.Printed on one side of the diaper are the words "I'm going to be a big boy soon," an ad that appeals more to the emotions of parents than diaper-wearing children.The wife looked like a photographer who had done a long, hard job and was coming to an end.

Luis hugged his two children, kissed his wife and said, "Hi!" Rachel smiled and said, "Hi, Doctor." "You look exhausted." "I'm exhausted. We flew all the way to Boston and it was fine, and when we changed planes it was fine. When we took off after changing planes it was fine, but when the plane banked over the city, Gage looked down and said ' Nice, nice', then threw up all over himself." "Oh, God." "I took him to the toilet and changed his clothes and diapers," Rachel said. "I don't think it's a virus or something, just airsick."

Louis said, "Come on, go home, I made chili rice on the stove." Allie excitedly screamed in Louis's ear, "Chili rice! Chili rice!" Without flinching, Gage screamed in Louis's other ear, "Spicy! Spicy!" Louis said, "Come on, let's get the suitcase and get out of here." Louis put Ellie down and heard his daughter ask, "Daddy, how is Church?" Louis expected his daughter to ask, but he didn't expect her daughter to have an anxious expression on her face, and deep blue eyes flashed deeply. Worried look.Louis frowned, then glanced at Rachel.

Rachel said quietly, "She had a nightmare over the weekend and woke up screaming." Allie said: "I dreamed that Church was hit by a car and died." Rachel said, "I think she ate too many turkey sandwiches over the holidays, and she got diarrhea once or twice. Calm her down, Louise, let's get out of the airport. I've seen enough airports this week. , I don't want to watch it for five years." Louis said slowly, "Oh, baby, Church is fine." Yes, it's pretty good.He lay in the house all day, looking at me with those strange blurry eyes, stupid as if he saw something that took all the cat's intelligence away.This cat can really do it.I broom it out of the house at night because I don't like to touch it, just sweep it out with the broom and it's out.And the next day I opened the door, Ellie, and I saw it had a mouse in its mouth—or what was left of a mouse, and it probably ate the whole thing for breakfast.Speaking of breakfast, I didn't have it that morning.otherwise--

"It's pretty good." "Oh." Allie said, and the brows that were tightly locked were relaxed. "Oh, that's great. When I was dreaming, I thought it must be dead." "Really?" Luis laughed. "Dreams are funny sometimes, aren't they?" "Boring! Boring!" Gage yelled—Louis remembered Elle growing up, Gage reaching the babbling stage.Gage happily tugged at Louis's hair, and shouted again: "Bored!" "Come on, guys," Louis said.The family walked to the luggage claim area. By the time they were near the family's station wagon in the parking lot, Gage started saying in a strange hiccupping voice, "Nice, nice." This time he threw up all over Louis, who had just picked them up at the airport. Put on a new pair of slacks.Apparently Gage thought "good-looking" was a simple way of saying "I'm going to throw up now, I'm sorry, please get out of the way."

It turned out that Gage had a viral cold. On the 17-mile drive back from Bangor Airport to Delou, Gage had developed a fever and appeared uncomfortably lethargic.When Louis backed the car into the garage when he got home, out of the corner of his eye he saw Church skulking along the wall with his tail up, his eyes fixed on the car strangely, before disappearing into the setting sun.Moments later Louis saw an eviscerated rat next to the stack of four summer wheels, the rat's entrails pink in the dim light of the garage, and looking fleshy. Louis got out of the car in a hurry and deliberately bumped into the pile of tires, and the top two fell down and crushed the dead rat.Louis said, "Whoa, bad luck."

Allie teased him, saying, "Daddy, you're a little fool." "You're right," Louis said gleefully, feeling as if Gage had said "nice, nice" and then vomited."Daddy's a little fool," he added, before remembering that Church had only eaten a mouse before his strange resurrection.It used to sometimes corner mice and play cat and mouse.He or Ellie or Rachel always had to stop it before it killed and ate the mouse. He knew that after cats were castrated, as long as they could eat enough, almost no cats were interested in eating mice anymore, at most they would take a look at them.

Rachel asked: "Are you going to daydream there or help me with the baby? Hey, Doctor Creed, come back from your planet Mungo, the people of the earth need you." His wife's voice It sounds angry and tired. Louis said, "I'm sorry, honey," and he came over to hug Gage, who was as hot as coals in a stove. So only three of us ate Louis' signature dish that night.Gage was leaning on the sofa in the living room, with a fever and a cold expression, drinking a bottle of warm chicken soup and watching cartoons on TV. After dinner, Ellie went to the garage door and called the kitten Church.Rachel was upstairs packing her bags and Louis was washing dishes in the kitchen, and he wished the kitten would not come in, but the kitten did; it came in slowly with that new staggering gait, and it was almost Hearing the sound of calling it, he came in immediately, as if it had been sneaking and hiding outside, lurking outside.These words immediately appeared in Louis's mind.

Ellie called, "Church! Hi, Church." She picked up the cat and hugged it.Louis looked at his daughter and the cat out of the corner of his eye. The hand that had been touching the sink to see if there were any dirty dishes stopped moving. He saw the happy expression on Ellie's face slowly change to A look of bewilderment.The kitten lay quietly in her arms, ears behind her, eyes fixed on Ellie's. After a while—it seemed a long time to Louis—Ellie put the cat on the ground, and the kitten shuffled toward the dining room without looking back.Louis thought blankly, the rat killer.God, what did we do that night?

He wanted to recall it honestly, but the memory was blurred and seemed far away, as distant as Pascoe's panicky death on the infirmary floor.He could only remember the howling of the cold wind in the sky and the white light of the snow in the fields behind the forest.Just remembered these. Allie said in a low, restrained voice, "Dad?" "What's wrong, Allie?" "Church smells strange." "Really?" Louis asked carefully, pretending to be nonchalant. Ellie said dejectedly, "Yeah, yeah. It smells weird, it's never smelled like that before! It smells like—it smells like a parrot!" "Oh, maybe it's rolled in some dirty place, honey, and whatever that smell is, it'll be gone." "I hope so." Allie said in a voice like a widow in a comedy, and then she walked away. Louis reached for the last fork and uncorked the water when he was done washing.Standing by the sink, he listened to the splash of washing liquid foam in the sink flowing down the sewer, but his eyes were looking outside.The sound of the water stopped, and he heard the shrill whistling of the strong wind outside, coming from the north, it was the north wind in the cold winter, and he realized that he was afraid.It's a purely silly fear, like the fear of a dark cloud suddenly covering the sun just in time for you to hear an unexplained clicking sound from nowhere. Rachel asked, "103 degrees? Jesus, Louis, are you sure?" "It's a cold caused by a virus," Louis said, trying not to irritate himself with Rachel's almost accusing voice.My wife is already very tired. Today is too long for her. Today she flew halfway across the United States with her two children.It's already 11 o'clock, and she hasn't rested yet.Ellie was already fast asleep in her room.Gage lay on their bed, in a state that could best be described as semi-comatose.Louis, who had started his fluids an hour earlier, said to his wife, "Honey, the aspirin will bring his temperature down in the morning." "Aren't you going to give him some apicillin or something?" Louis said patiently, "Honey, if he had the flu or the strep, I'd give him that drug. He didn't have any of those things. He had a viral cold, and that drug wasn't good for the virus." It doesn't help, it just makes him dehydrated even more." "Are you sure it's a viral cold?" Louis said angrily: "Well, if you don't believe me, you can be a doctor." Rachel yelled, "You don't have to yell at me!" Louis also exclaimed, "I didn't yell!" "You're yelling!" Rachel continued, "You're yelling—yelling—yelling—" and then her lips began to tremble, and she put one hand over her face.Louis saw two dark halos under her eyes, and he was terribly ashamed of what he had done. He sat next to his wife and said, "I'm sorry, God, I don't know what happened to me, Rachel, and I apologize." Rachel smiled wearily and said, "Never complain, never explain. Didn't you say that to me before? Mainly because today's trip sucked, and I was always afraid that you would see Gage's pretending The roof would blow off the clothes drawer. I thought I'd tell you now, before you feel sorry for me." "Why would I blow the roof off in anger?" Rachel smiled wearily again and said, "My parents bought Gage 10 new suits, and he wore one today." Louis said curtly, "I noticed." "I know you noticed," Rachel said with a funny scowl.This made Louis laugh, though he didn't really want to.Rachel went on to say: "I also bought 6 new clothes for Elle." "Six pieces!" Louis tried his best not to yell.He was suddenly angry—angry and hurt, and he couldn't explain why.He continued, "Why? Rachel, why did you let him do this? We don't need...we can buy..." He stopped, too angry to speak, and for a moment he saw himself carrying Ellie's dead cat through the woods, switching plastic bags from one hand to the other... while Rui Kier's father, that damn old guy, was busy tearing up checks and signing them with designer pens to buy clothes for his daughter in exchange for Ellie's favor. There was a moment when Luis felt like he was about to shout: he bought his daughter 6 dresses, and I traded that damn kitten back from the dead for my daughter, so who loves our daughter more? But Louis suppressed the words.He would never say those words, ever. Rachel stroked his neck tenderly and said, "Louis, my parents bought it together, please try to understand them. Please, they love children and don't see them often. And, They're getting older, Louis, and you can barely recognize my father, really." Louis mumbled, "I'll recognize him." "Honey, please try to understand them, be nice to them, it won't hurt you." Louis looked at his wife for a long time before finally saying, "No, it hurts me. Maybe it shouldn't hurt me, but it does." Rachel opened her mouth to answer when Ellie's voice came from her room: "Dad! Mom! There's someone!" Rachel stood up suddenly, but Louis pulled her up on the bed and said, "You stay here with Gage, I'll go and see." Louis thought he knew something was wrong.But he's got the kitten out, damn it.After Ellie had gone to bed, Louis saw the kitten in the kitchen sniffing its feeding plate and chased it out.He didn't want the kitten to sleep with Ellie anymore, never again.When he thought of Church sleeping in Ellie's bed, strange thoughts of illness and memories of Uncle Carl's funeral home came to his mind. Elle will know something is wrong, and Church is better than ever. Louis had chased the cat out, but when he entered his daughter's room, he found Church sprawled on the bedspread like a shadow.Ellie sat straight on the bed, looking sleepy.The cat's open eyes gleamed in the hall light. Ellie whispered almost in pain, "Dad, get him out of here. It smells awful." "Shh, Allie, go to bed," Louis said.He was startled by his own calm voice, which reminded him of the morning after Pascoe's sleepwalking, the day after Pascoe's death.After he's in the infirmary, he ducks into the bathroom and looks in the mirror to make sure he must be looking horrific.But he looked good enough to make one wonder how many people around were keeping some terrible secrets away. It's no secret, damn it!It's just a cat! But Ellie was right, the kitten stinks. Louis grabbed the kitten and walked out of Ellie's bedroom, carrying it downstairs, breathing with his mouth open.There were all kinds of bad smells, the stench of feces, rotting wounds, and catalyst cylinders for cars.However, the smell on the cat is particularly bad. Where did it get the strange smell?Louis had broomed him out of the house when the other three were upstairs; it was the first time in a week that Louis had actually held the kitten since it returned, lying in his arms, body Warmth, like a silent disease.Louis wondered: You villain, what hole did you get in through? Louis suddenly remembered the night he dreamed of Pascoe. He dreamed that Pascoe broke in through the door between the kitchen and the garage. Maybe there was no gap at all, maybe the kitten could walk through the door like a ghost. And pass. "It's a sure thing." Louis said hoarsely.He suddenly thought that the kitten would definitely struggle and twist in his arms, and it would scratch himself.But Church lay perfectly still, steaming and reeking, looking into Louis's face as if it could read his thoughts in his eyes.Louis opened the door, threw the cat into the garage, perhaps a little too hard, and said, "Go ahead, catch another mouse or something." Staggered, almost fell to the ground.It seemed to have green eyes, gave Louis a vicious and hateful look, and then staggered away as if drunk. Louis thought, God, Chad, I wish you'd shut up and not tell me all this, that would be great! He walked back to the sink and scrubbed his hands and arms vigorously as if for an operation, thinking of Chad's words: people do it because they're controlled... people make up reasons... see Seems like a good reason...but mostly people do it because once you've been there, it's your place, you belong there...so you make up the best reason in the world... No, he couldn't blame Chad, he did it all voluntarily, he couldn't blame Chad. Louis turned off the water and began drying his hands and arms with a towel.Suddenly his movements stopped and he stared straight ahead, at the night out of the window over the sink, and thought to himself, does that mean that's my place now, too?Is that my place too?No, not if I don't want to belong there, be controlled by it.He hung the towels on the rack and went upstairs. Rachel was in bed, covered up to her chin, and Gage was tucked up beside her.She looked at Louis apologetically and said, "Honey, don't you mind? Just tonight, he's hot all over, and I'll feel better if he sleeps with me." Louis said, "It's okay, I'll make another bed downstairs." Just a bed." "You really don't mind?" "No. It won't do your son any harm, and it will make you feel better." Luis paused and smiled, "But you'll catch him. Viruses. Sure, I don't think it's going to change your mind, is it?" Rachel also smiled, shook her head and said, "Why is Ellie making such a fuss?" "For the sake of Church, she asked me to drive Church away." "Ellie wants to drive Church away? It's not the same as she used to be." "Yeah, it's different." Louis nodded yes, and then said, "Daughter said the kitten smelled weird, and I did think it smelled a little bit. Maybe it rolled in someone's dung." "That's too bad," Rachel said, leaning over, "I really think Ellie misses Kitty as much as she misses you." "Really?" Louis said, bending down, kissing his wife lightly, "Go to sleep, Rachel." "I love you, Louis. I'm so glad to be home again. Sorry you have to sleep on the couch." "It's okay," Louis said, turning off the light. Once downstairs, Louis piled up the sofa cushions, pulled out the folds, and made the daybed, ready to suffer a night of lying on the thin cushions.The bed was covered with a sheet, and he took two blankets from the hall closet, spread them on the bed, and began to undress, then stopped suddenly, thinking, "Do you think Church is in again? Well, go around Take a look around. Like you told your wife, there's no harm in it. It might be good. Check that all the doors are locked and you won't get the virus." So Louis deliberately walked the entire downstairs, checking the locks of all the doors and windows.He had already locked everything up, and he hadn't seen the kitten anywhere."Okay, let's see how you get in tonight, you stupid cat," said Louis, hoping that the kitten would freeze well. Louis turned off the light and went to bed.The crossbar of the sofa on the bed immediately anviled his back.Before he fell asleep, he thought that he might stay awake and couldn't fall asleep.He fell asleep uncomfortably on the sofa bed, but when he awoke he was... It's in the graveyard over there at the pet cemetery again.This time he was alone, this time he killed Church himself, and then decided to bring him back from the dead again; why, he didn't know, maybe only God knows, but this time he put Church It was buried so deep that Church could not get out of the ground.Louis could hear the kitten meowing in the ground, like a child crying.The sound came through the pores of the earth—the sound and the smell of decay.Breathing the smell made his chest feel heaving, as if something was weighing on it. All I heard was cries... cries. The crying continued...the weight was still on his chest. "Louis!" it was his wife calling him, sounding disturbed, "Louis, can you come here?" Her voice sounded not just disturbed, but terrified.The child's cry was choked, and there was a feeling of choking when crying desperately. It turned out to be Gage's cry. Louis opened his eyes and suddenly saw Church's glowing yellow-green eyes, only four inches from his own.The kitten was curled up on his chest like a smothering ghost in a granny tale.It emits a foul smell, slowly like a poisonous air wave, and the kitten purrs when it is satisfied. Louis yelled in surprise and disgust, and immediately clenched his fists into a primitive self-defense posture. Church jumped out of bed with a bang, fell sideways on the ground, then got up and staggered away. God!God!The cat is on me!Oh god, it's all over me! Louis felt like waking up with a spider in his mouth, no, worse than that, and for a moment he thought he was going to throw up. "Louis!" Louis flung the blankets back and staggered up the stairs to see the lights on in his and his wife's bedroom and Rachel standing on the landing in her pajamas. "Louis, Gage threw up again...and choked...I'm scared to death." "Here I am," Louis said, approaching his wife.But I was thinking in my heart: the cat came in, I don't know how it got in; maybe it came from the basement, maybe the window in the basement was broken.In fact there must have been a broken window in the basement.I'm going to check it out tomorrow when I get home.Heck, before I go to work, I'm... Gage stopped crying and started making nasty choked gurgling noises. Rachel screamed, "Louis!" Louis ran a little faster.Gage was lying on his side, spit dripping down his mouth onto an old towel that Rachel had laid beside him.Yes, he's throwing up, but he's not finished, with a lot of food still in his mouth and throat.Due to suffocation, the son's face was flushed. Louis reached into his son's armpit and picked him up, feeling dazed that his son's armpits were hot.He held the baby on his shoulders, as if to burp the baby on the back, and then Louis himself jerked back, leading his son forward, Gage's neck like a quilt. It was like a blow, and then he let out a short yelp, not the hiccup-like cry, and spit out a large amount of solid food, spraying the floor and the dresser.Gage started crying again, loud and in one piece, but it was like music to Louis, because crying like that required a lot of oxygen. Rachel's knees went limp, she slumped on the bed, her head in her hands, and trembling, she said, "He almost died, didn't he? Louis, he almost choked-choked-choked-oh my God !" As Louis walked around the house with his son in his arms, Gage's loud cries faded to whimpers, and he fell asleep again. "Rachel, Gage's chances of spitting out a choke himself is one in fifty kids, and I just helped him out, or he'd suffocate." Rachel looked up at Louis with surprise in her eyes and said, "But he's our son, and he's so close to us. Louis, he's so close to us." Suddenly Louis remembered what Rachel had yelled at him in the kitchen the other day: It can't die, no one here will die... Louise said: "Honey, we are all very dear and will always be dear to each other." Rachel said that about an hour after Louis went to bed, Gage woke up in the middle of the night. Hearing him crying as if he was hungry, Rachel fed him a bottle of milk. The milk must have made him vomit. Because the child hadn't finished eating, Rachel fell asleep in a daze.About an hour later, Gage was choking. "Don't give him any more milk," Louis said. Rachel agreed almost deferentially, "Okay, no more milk for him." Louis came downstairs again at about a quarter past two, spent fifteen minutes looking for the cat, and found the door between the kitchen and the basement ajar, as suspected.He remembered what his mother had told him before that cats were good at the old-fashioned latches, the kind they had on the door between the kitchen and the basement.Louis thought the kitten's door-opening skills were good, but he wouldn't let him use it again.And there is a lock on the basement door.He found the kitten under the stove, where it was napping.Louis threw it out the front door, closing the basement door again before he walked back to bed. This time he locked the latch dead.