St. Louis

St. Louis appears in the novel's closing pages as the destination of Steve Masterton's professional and psychological retreat. After witnessing Louis Creed carrying his wife's body into the woods beyond the Pet Sematary and hearing the inhuman laughter that followed, Masterton—the physician's assistant who had been Louis's colleague and friend—finds himself unable to remain in Maine. The following year he takes a job halfway across the country, in St. Louis, a city that represents the farthest possible remove from the rural New England landscape where the Creed family's tragedy unfolded.

Flight from Unassimilable Horror

Masterton's move to St. Louis is not a career advancement but an act of survival. In the immediate aftermath of his encounter with Louis in the woods, he cannot precisely remember having gone to Ludlow at all; he calls in sick at the infirmary, takes a pill, and goes to bed. The memory of that day never fully returns to his waking mind, persisting only in deep dreams that come in the small hours of the morning. In these dreams he senses that something huge has shrugged by him—something that reached out to touch him and then withdrew its inhuman hand at the very last second. He sometimes awakens shrieking from these dreams, his eyes wide and bulging, and thinks: "You think you are screaming, but it's only the sound of the loons, down south, in Prospect. The sound carries. It's funny." He does not know, cannot remember, what such a thought might mean.

The Geography of Denial

St. Louis functions as the terminus of a trajectory that begins with the Pet Sematary and the Micmac burying ground beyond it. Where Louis Creed, unable to accept death, follows the path deeper into the woods and into madness, Masterton follows the opposite trajectory: he drives west, away from the woods, away from Ludlow, away from the entire state of Maine. The city's flat Midwestern landscape, its inland location far from the Penobscot River valley and the North Ludlow Woods, offers no physical analogue to the terrain that holds the Wendigo's power. St. Louis is a place where the spiral of graves, the deadfall, the stone steps, and the cairns do not exist—a place where the secret cannot find him. Yet the dreams follow him even there, suggesting that geographical distance cannot undo the imprint of what he witnessed.

Narrative Significance

St. Louis marks the outer boundary of the novel's geography of horror. Every other significant location in the book—Ludlow, the Pet Sematary, the Micmac burying ground, Little God Swamp, Pleasantview Cemetery—lies within a tight radius in central Maine, connected by Route 15 and the paths that branch from it. Masterton's relocation to St. Louis breaks that geography, placing him in a city that has no connection to the Creed family's story. His departure is the only successful escape from the power of the place that the novel records, but it is an escape purchased at the cost of memory itself: he cannot remember what he fled from, only that he had to flee. St. Louis thus becomes the city of forgetting, the place where the survivor lives on but cannot say what he survived.