Average Pet Sematary Quiz | 10 Questions | Literature

Answer: Local teenagers

The Creed family, moving into their new house in a new house in Maine, quickly settles into rural life. Coming from Chicago, Louis Creed has gotten a job working at the University of Maine; his wife, Rachel, stays home with their children Ellie and Gage.

The move goes well and Louis makes a quick friend of the neighbour across the street, Jud Crandall, who lives there with his wife. As the weeks go by, Jud decides to take the Creeds down a path leading behind their house and into the woods. Maintained by local teens, the trail leads back into an old pet cemetery set in an eerie clearing.

While this upsets Rachel and, eventually, Ellie, the visit is otherwise uneventful. But weird occurrences already seem to be happening below the surface.

Answer: Doctor

Louis starts his first day of work at the university medical center and things immediately take a turn. A local student, having been hit by a car and impaled in the skull by a tree branch, is brought to the ward and there's no chance of his survival.

While others frantically try to deal with the situation, Louis is with the boy, Victor Pascow, while he dies. The boy's final words are concerning since he cryptically claims that the pet sematary isn't the real cemetery. That night, Louis has what appears to be a prophetic dream in which Victor arrives at his house and leads him through the woods to the pet sematary, claiming that "your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near." When Louis wakes up the next morning, he finds that the foot of the bed is littered with dirt and pine needles.

Answer: He's hit by a car

Louis, thinking logically, pins the recent forest walk on sleepwalking brought on by emotional trauma and he puts the event behind him. He is, however, forced to face the reality of mortality soon after when, on Halloween, Norma has what appears to be a heart attack. Fortunately, Louis is able to attend to her immediately and she makes a recovery soon after.
Rachel takes the kids to Boston to visit her parents over Thanksgiving and Louis, staying back in Maine, is the only one around when Church, Ellie's cat, is hit by a car on the road out front. Jud informs him and insists that they bury it that night up at the pet sematary, but instead of simply digging a hole where they visited earlier in the year, Jud takes him up over the seemingly treacherous pile of deadfall circling the site and brings him to the actual burial site where the Micmac tribes brought their bodies to repay him for saving Norma. Louis has to dig through stony ground, but eventually he has a grave for Church that he can be satisfied with. He piles a cairn of stones atop the spot and they return home soon after, both exhausted with the interesting trip.
Church returns the next day.

Answer: A wendigo

Louis almost isn't taken aback by Church's return, and Jud has to explain himself that night over drinks. He says that the land around the alternative burial site is the real deal, but the Micmac tribe knew there was something wrong with the area; the land around it was dangerous and the spot may have been soured by a wendigo. Seventy years earlier, someone from town convinced him to bring his dog up to the mound and bury him, and sure enough, the dog came back...changed. Jud acknowledges that he felt supernaturally compelled to help Louis and show him the way just like he was shown back then, but Church is not the same Church he was, and sometimes, according to Jud, dead is better, and Louis will learn that. The family returns soon after, and when Ellie reunites with her father, she claims she had a nightmare in which Church was hit by a car.

Answer: His smell

Rachel, Ellie, and Gage get back to the house and Gage is sick for a while after, having developed the flu and then, after, bronchitis. Ellie seems unphased from the get-go, but upon returning home she notices that Church is oddly different and, at the very least, smells really bad. Louis ends up putting the cat out more than usual, often locking the doors and windows, but somehow he always manages to get back inside.

When Christmas rolls around, Louis and Rachel set up for the big morning and Louis finds a dead and torn-apart crow out on the back steps.

He disposes of it, thinking it odd of Church to do. A couple of weeks after this, Norma, Jud's wife, passes away of a cerebral accident.

Answer: Spinal meningitis

After Norma's passing, the Creed family ends up by Jud's side during his period of mourning and the funeral is planned. During this time, Rachel opens up to Louis about her sister at long last, having kept the memory deep inside due to the strain it's placed on her and her family.

Her sister, Zelda, was afflicted with spinal meningitis at a young age and she and her parents had to take care of her. Zelda died when Rachel was eight years old on a night when her parents left her to take care of her. Louis admits that it was a horrible thing to happen, but blames her parents. After the funeral, Louis and Gage fly a kite together, bonding in one of Louis' last great memories with his son.

This is two months before Gage dies and things change irreparably.

Answer: He's hit by a car

In mid-May, Gage is hit by one of the Orinoco trucks that have been speeding down the road in front of the family house. An adventurous, playful toddler, he wandered out before Louis could reach him and was killed instantly. The funeral doesn't go all too well either. Jud helps Louis make the arrangements while Rachel struggles to cope.

When her parents arrive, they blame Louis and it results in a fist-fight between him and Rachel's father at the visitation. That night, Ellie asks her father whether or not Gage can come back like Lazarus, and it gets him thinking about the powers of the pet sematary. Jud, almost as though he senses what Louis is considering, comes by to talk him out of whatever he has in his mind.

Answer: Yes

Jud's story for Louis is a concerning one because it talks about Timmy Baterman, whose brother buried him in the ground in the forest after he was killed in the Vietnam War. Timmy, of course, returned from the dead, just like the animals, and when he did there was something horribly wrong about him.

Others came looking only to come face to face with Timmy, at least the outside of him. Whatever was in Timmy was much more insidious. Two days later, the Baterman house burned down and both brothers died in the blaze. Soon after, Louis is convinced that he must visit Gage's gravesite, and shortly after that he convinces Rachel to head back to Chicago with Ellie and her parents; he would catch up. Rachel is leery about this, but accepts it. Ellie, however, seems to have recurring dreams of Gage coming back and Pascow taking her to the sematary.

Answer: No one

Rachel and Ellie make it to Chicago but upon arriving, they both think that something needs to be done and Rachel opts to find a way to head back on her own. After some quick flight planning, she ends up getting as far back as the east coast, but has no choice but to drive the rest of the way, well into the night. Jud also feels like something is wrong and when Rachel calls him later, he says that he will be able to stand guard.

He tries to convince her to stay in Portland to get some rest and he falls asleep in his living room, almost as though the sematary is controlling their movements. Despite all warnings, Louis purchases some hardware and digs Gage out from his grave in Pleasantview Cemetery. Reburying the coffin, he grabs a tarp, rolls up his son, and places him in the car's passenger seat. Jud is asleep when he gets home, and before long he crosses the deadfall, reaching the sematary, and perhaps even encountering the spirits of the forest on the way. Eventually, he succeeds in reburying the boy and returns home exhausted.

Answer: Morphine

After Louis returns home, he passes out, exhausted by the supernatural goings-on. What he doesn't notice is the figure that enters the house and roots through is medical bag, taking something sharp and silver. It turns out to be the scalpel, and when Jud wakes up across the road, he's killed by Church and Gage...or whatever seems to have possessed their reanimated bodies.
Rachel arrives shortly after sunrise, heading to Jud's immediately. She finds Gage there, seeing Zelda's face in his own, and she goes for an embrace. Gage, however, has other plans.
Louis wakes up and receives a phone call from his father-in-law asking after Rachel. As it turns out, Ellie awakened from a nightmare and went to the hospital needing sedation. She dreamed that Rachel had been killed. Realizing what has happened, Louis grabs syringes from his bag and heads across the road, sticking Church with one and loading him with morphine, then entering Jud's house to kill his reanimated son. Driven mad with grief and, likely, supernaturally motivated, Jud grabs Rachel's body and takes her back into the woods and over the deadfall while Jud's house burns to the ground.
That night, while sitting on his front porch, Rachel returns to him.