Coffin (Gage's)

Gage Creed's coffin, the American Casket Company's rosewood Eternal Rest model lined with pink silk, was selected by his father Louis at the Brookings-Smith Mortuary on the Sunday after the boy's death. Louis paid for it with his MasterCard, a transaction that struck him as grotesquely ordinary. The coffin measured no more than four feet long—a dwarf coffin—yet cost slightly over six hundred dollars. Louis chose a grave liner instead of a sealing vault, a decision that Jud Crandall later recognized as a sign that Louis might attempt to disinter the body.

Selection and Funeral

At the funeral home, Louis was positioned beside a book on a stand where mourners signed their names and addresses. The coffin rested on trestles, nearly hidden by flowers, and Louis did not approach it closely. During the afternoon visitation, a fistfight erupted between Louis and his father-in-law Irwin Goldman. Goldman, drunk and grieving, accused Louis of letting Gage die and struck him. In the struggle, Goldman fell against the coffin, knocking it from its trestle. The latch snapped, and for a split second Louis glimpsed a flash of gray suit and pink—Gage's hand, perhaps—before the lid slammed shut again. The coffin was later repaired.

Exhumation

On the night after the funeral, Louis returned to Pleasantview Cemetery. He climbed a tree to vault the nine-foot wrought-iron fence, then dug down to the grave liner. Using a rope threaded through iron rings, he lifted the concrete segments. He smashed the coffin's latch with a spade, opened the lid, and was struck by the smell of damp decay. Gage's head appeared to be missing, but Louis discovered it was only covered by dark moss. He wiped the moss away with his handkerchief, revealing his son's badly damaged face. The mortician had done what he could, but Gage's head bulged in strange directions; his eyes had sunk deep behind closed lids; cotton protruded from his mouth. Louis removed the cotton and lifted the body, which lolled bonelessly. He wrapped Gage in a tarpaulin, closed the coffin, and placed the bent spade inside it as a decoy. He lowered the grave-liner segments back into place and refilled the hole, leaving the grave slightly sunken.

Aftermath

Louis carried the tarpaulin bundle to his Honda Civic, drove to Ludlow, and then carried his son's body through the Pet Sematary and beyond the deadfall to the Micmac burying ground. There he dug a grave in the stony soil and built a cairn. The coffin itself remained in Pleasantview, its latch broken, its contents replaced by a spade. The following day, the resurrected Gage—now a murderous entity—used a scalpel stolen from Louis's medical bag to kill Jud Crandall and Rachel Creed before Louis finally subdued and killed him with morphine injections.