May 17, 1984

May 17, 1984, was the day Gage William Creed was buried. For the Creed family, the funeral at Pleasantview Cemetery in Bangor was the public culmination of a week of shock and grief following the two-year-old's death on Route 15. But for Louis Creed, the day also became the hinge on which his sanity turned: the moment he ordered a grave liner instead of a sealing vault, a choice that Jud Crandall immediately recognized as the first step toward an attempt to bring the dead back. The funeral itself was a catastrophe. Louis's father-in-law, Irwin Goldman, refused to shake his hand at the morning viewing, and during the afternoon hours the two men came to blows in the East Room of the Brookings-Smith Mortuary. Goldman struck Louis, Louis struck back, and in the scuffle Goldman fell against Gage's coffin, knocking it from its trestle and snapping the latch. Rachel Creed, already fragile, witnessed the fight and the fallen casket and had to be sedated by Steve Masterton in the foyer. That night, alone in the house after Rachel and Ellie had gone to Chicago, Louis drank beer after beer and began to think seriously about what Jud had told him: that the Micmac burying ground could bring the dead back, that Church had come back, that a man grows what he can and tends it. By the time he fell asleep, the decision was made. May 17, 1984, was the last day Louis Creed lived as a sane man; everything that followed—the exhumation, the journey through Little God Swamp, the resurrection of Gage, the murders of Jud and Rachel, and the final return of Rachel as a zombie—flowed from the choices he made on that single, terrible day.