Cujo

'Nixon, Nixon, Nixon!' Vic said, surprised by his own angry vehemence. 'You're getting blinded by that particular comparison, I've heard you make it two hundred times since this thing blew, and it doesn't fit!'

Roger was looking at him, stunned.

'Nixon was a crook, he knew he was a crook, and he said he wasn't a crook. The Sharp Cereal Professor said there was nothing wrong with Red Razberry Zingers and there was something wrong, but he didn't know it.' Vic leaned forward and pushed his finger gently against Roger's arm, emphasizing. 'There was no breach of faith. He has to say that, Rog. He has to get up in front of the American people and tell them there was no breach of faith. What there was, there was a mistake made by a company which manufactures food dye. The mistake was not made by the Sharp Company. He has to say that. And most important of all, he has to say he's sorry that mistake happened and that, although no one was hurt, he's sorry people were frightened.'

Roger nodded, then shrugged. 'Yes, I see the thrust of it. But neither the old man or the kid will go for it, Vic. They want to bury the b -'

'Yes, yes, yes!' Vic cried, actually making Roger flinch. He jumped to his feet and began to walk jerkily up and down the screening room's short aisle. 'Sure they do, and they're right, he's dead and he has to be buried, the Sharp Cereal Professor has to be buried, Zingers has already been buried. But the thing we've got to make them see is that it can't be a midnight burial. That's the exact point! Their impulse is to go at this thing like a Mafia button man ... or a scared relative burying a cholera victim.'

He leaned over Roger, so close that their noses were almost touching.

'Our job is to make them understand that the Cereal Professor will never rest easy unless he's interred in broad daylight. And I'd like to make the whole country mourners at his burial.'

'You're cr –' Roger began then closed his mouth with a snap.

At long last Vic saw that scared, vague expression go out of his partner's eyes. A sudden sharpening happened in Roger's face, and the scared expression was replaced by a slightly mad one. Roger began to grin. Vic was so relieved to see that grin that he forgot about Donna and what had happened with her for the first time since he had gotten Kemp's note. The job took over completely, and it was only later that he would wonder, slightly dumbfounded, how long it had been since he had felt that pure, trippy, wonderful feeling of being fully involved with something he was good at.

'On the surface, we just want him to repeat the things Sharp has been saying since it happened,' Vic went on. 'But when the Cereal Professor himself says them

'It comes full circle,' Roger murmured. He lit another cigarette.

'Sure, right. We can maybe pitch it to the old man as the final scene in the Red Razberry Zingers farce. Coming clean. Getting it behind us ~'

'Taking the bitter medicine. Sure, that'd appeal to the old goat. Public penance ... scourging himself with whips. . .'

'And instead of going out like a dignified guy that took a pratfall in a mudpuddle, everyone laughing at him, he goes out like Douglas MacArthur, saying old soldiers never die, they just fade away. That's the surface of the thing. But underneath, we're looking for a tone ... a feeling. . . .' He was crossing the border into Roger's country now. If he could only delineate the shape of what he meant, the idea that had come to him over coffee at Bentley's, Roger would take it from there.

'MacArthur,' Roger said softly. 'But that's it, isn't it? The tone is farewell. The feeling is regret. Give people the feeling that he's been unjustly treated, but it's too late now. And

He looked at Vic, almost startled.

'What?'

'Prime time,' Roger said.

'Huh?'

'The spots. We run em in prime time. These ads are for the parents, not the kids. Right?'

'Yeah, yeah.'

'If we ever get the damned things made.'

Vic grinned. 'We'll get them made.' And using one of Roger's terms for good ad copy: 'It's a tank, Roger. We'll drive it right to fuck over them if we have to. As long as we can get something concrete down before we go to Cleveland. . . .'

They sat and talked it over in the tiny screening room for another hour, and when they left to go back to the hotel, both of them sweaty and exhausted, it was full dark.

'Can we go home now, Mommy?' Tad asked apathetically.

'Pretty soon, honey.'

She looked at the key in the ignition switch. Three other keys on the ring: house key, garage key, and the key that opened the Pinto's hatchback. There was a piece of leather attached to the ring with a mushroom branded on it. She had bought the keyring in Swanson's, a Bridgton department store, back in April. Back in April when she had been so disillusioned and scared, never knowing what real fear was, real fear was trying to crank your kid's window shut while a rabid dog drooled on the backs of your hands.

She reached out. She touched the leather tab. She pulled her hand back again.

The truth was this: She was afraid to try.

It was quarter past seven. The day was still bright, although the Pinto's shadow trailed out long, almost to the garage door. Although she did not know it, her husband and his partner were still watching kinescopes of the Sharp Cereal Professor at ImageEye in Cambridge. She didn't know why no one had answered the SOS she had been beeping out. In a book, someone would have come. It was the heroine's reward for having thought up such a clever idea. But no one had come.

Surely the sound had carried down to the ramshackle house at the foot of the hill. Maybe they were drunk down there. Or maybe the owners of the two cars in the driveway (dooryard, her mind corrected automatically, up here they call it a dooryard) had both gone off somewhere in a third car. She wished she could see that house from here, but it was out of sight beyond the descending flank of the hill.

Finally she had given the SOS up. She was afraid that if she kept tooting the horn it would drain the Pinto's battery, which had been in since they got the car. She still believed the Pinto would start when the engine was cool enough. It always had before.

But you're afraid to try, because if it doesn't start what then?

She was reaching for the ignition again when the dog stumbled back into view. It had been lying out of sight in front of the Pinto. Now it moved slowly toward the barn, it's head down and its tail drooping. It was staggering and weaving like a drunk near the bitter end of a long toot. Without looking back, Cujo slipped into the shadows of the building and disappeared.

She drew her hand away from the key again.

'Mommy? Aren't we going?'

'Let me think, hon,' she said.

She looked to her left, out the driver's side window. Eight running steps would take her to the back door of the Camber house. In high school she had been the star of her high school's girls' track team, and she still jogged regularly. She could beat the dog to the door and inside, she was sure of that. There would be a telephone. One call to Sheriff Bannerman's office and this horror would end. On the other hand, if she tried cranking the engine again, it might not start ... but it would bring the dog on the run. She knew hardly anything about rabies, but she seemed to remember reading at some time or other that rabid animals were almost supernaturally sensitive to sounds. Loud noises could drive them into a frenzy.

'Mommy?'

'Shhh, Tad. Shhh!'

Eight running steps. Dig it.

Even if Cujo was lurking and watching inside the garage just out of sight, she felt sure - she knew - she could win a footrace to the back door. The telephone, yes. And ... a man like Joe Camber surely kept a gun. Maybe a whole rack of them. What pleasure it would give her to blow that fucking dog 'S head to so much oatmeal and strawberry jam!

Eight running steps.

Sure. Dig on it awhile.

And what if that door giving on the porch was locked? Worth the risk?

Her heart thudded heavily in her breast as she weighed the chances. If she had been alone, that would have been one thing. But suppose the door was locked? She could beat the dog to the door, but not to the door and then back to the car. Not if it came running, not if it charged her as it had done before. And what would Tad do? What if Tad saw his mother being savaged by a two-hundred-pound mad dog, being ripped and bitten, being pulled open

No. They were safe here.

Try the engine again!

She reached for the ignition, and part of her mind clamored that it would he safer to wait longer, until the engine was perfectly cool

Perfectly cool? They had been here three hours or more already.

She grasped the key and turned it.

The engine cranked briefly once, twice, three times - and then caught with a roar.

'Oh, thank God!' she cried.

'Mommy?' Tad asked shrilly. 'Are we going? Are we going?'

'We're going,' she said grimly, and threw the transmission into reverse. Cujo lunged out of the barn ... and then just stood there, watching. 'Fuck you dog!' she yelled at it triumphantly.

She touched the gas pedal. The Pinto rolled back perhaps two feet - and stalled.

'No!' she screamed as the red idiot lights came on again. Cujo had taken another two steps when the engine cut out, but now he only stood there silent, his head down. Watching me, the thought occurred again. His shadow trailed out behind him, as clear as a silhouette cut out of black crepe paper.

Donna fumbled for the ignition switch and turned it from ON to START. The motor began to rum over again, but this time it didn't catch. She could hear a harsh panting sound in her own ears and didn't realize for several seconds that she was making the sound herself - in some vauge way she had the idea that it must be the dog. She ground the starter, grimacing horribly, ;wearing at it, oblivious of Tad, using words she had hardly known she knew. And A the time Cujo stood there, trailing his shadow from his heels like some surreal funeral drape, watching.

At last he lay down in the driveway, as if deciding there was no chance for them to escape. She hated it more than she had when it had tried to force its way in through Tad's window.

'Mommy ... Mommy ... Mommy!'

From far away. Unimportant. What was important now was this goddamned sonofabitching little car. It was going to start. She was going to make it start by pure ... force... of will!

She had no idea how long, in real time, she sat hunched over the wheel with her hair hanging in her eyes, futilely grinding the starter. What at last broke through to her was not Tad's cries - they had trailed off to whimpers - but the sound of the engine. It would crank briskly for five seconds, then lag off, then crank briskly for another five, then lag off again. A longer lag each time, it seemed.

She was killing the battery.

She stopped.

She came out of it a little at a time, like a woman coming out of a faint. She remembered a bout of gastroenteritis she'd had in college - everything inside her had either come up by the elevator or dropped down the chute - and near the end of it she had grayed out in one of the dorm toilet stalls. Coming back had been like this, as if you were the same but some invisible painter was adding color to the world, bringing it first up to full and then to overfull. Colors shrieked at you. Everything looked plastic and phony, like a display in a department store window -SWING INTO SPRING, perhaps, or READY FOR THE FIRST KICKOFF.

Tad was cringing away from her, his eyes squeezed shut, the thumb of one hand in his mouth. The other hand was pressed against his hip pocket, where the Monster Words were. His respiration was shallow and rapid.

'Tad,' she said. 'Honey, don't worry.'

'Mommy, are you all right?' His voice was little more than a husky whisper.

'Yeah. So are you. At least we're safe. This old car will go. just wait and see.'

'I thought you were mad at me.'

She took him in her arms and hugged him tight. She could smell sweat in his hair and the lingering undertone of Johnson's No More Tears shampoo. She thought of that bottle sitting safely and sanely on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. If only she could touch it! But all that was here was that faint, dying perfume.

'No, honey, not at you,' she said. 'Never at you.'

Tad hugged her back. 'He can't get us in here, can he?'

'No.'

'He can't ... he can't eat his way in, can he?'

'No.'

'I hate him,' Tad said reflectively. 'I wish he'd die.'

'Yes. Me too.'

She looked out the window and saw that the sun was getting ready to go down. A superstitious dread settled into her at the thought. She remembered the childhood games of hide-and-seek that had always ended when the shadows joined each other and grew into purple lagoons, that mystic call drifting through the suburban streets of her childhood, talismanic and distant, the high voice of a child announcing suppers that were ready, doors ready to be shut against the night:

'Alleee-alleee-infree! Alleee-alleee-infree!'

The dog was watching her. It was crazy, but she could no longer doubt it. Its mad, senseless eyes were fixed unhesitatingly on hers.

No, you're imagining it. It's only a dog, and a sick dog at that. Things are bad enough without you seeing something in that dog's eyes that can't be there.

She told herself that. A few minutes later she told herself that Cujo's eyes were like the eyes of some portraits which seem to follow you wherever you move in the room where they are hung.

But the dog was looking at her. And ... and there was something familiar about it.

No, she told herself, and tried to dismiss the thought, but it was too late

You've seen him before, haven't you? The morning after Tad bad the first of his bad dreams, the morning that the blankets and sheets were back on the chair, his Teddy on top of them, and for a moment when you opened the closet door YOU only saw a slumped shape with red eyes, something in Tad's closet ready to spring, it was him, it was Cujo, Tad was right all along, only the monster wasn't in his closet... it was out here. It was

(stop it)

out here just waiting to

(! YOU STOP IT DONNA!)

She stared at the dog and imagined she could bear its thoughts. Simple thoughts. The same simple pattern, repeated over and over in spite of the whirling boil of its sickness and delirium.

Kill THE WOMAN Kill THE BOYWOMAN. Kill THE WOMAN Kill -Stop it, she commanded herself roughly. It doesn't think and it's not some goddamned bogeyman out of a child's closet. It's a

sick dog and that's all it is. Next you'll believe the dog is God's punishment for committing

Cujo suddenly got up -almost as if she had called him - and disappeared into the barn again.

(almost as if I called it)

She uttered a shaky, semi-hysterical laugh.

Tad looked up. 'Mommy?'

'Nothing, hon.'

She looked at the dark maw of the garage-barn, then at the back door of the house. Locked? Unlocked? Locked? Unlocked? She thought of a coin rising in the air, flipping over and over. She thought of whirling the chamber drum of a pistol, five holes empty, one full. Locked? Unlocked

The sun went down, and what was left of the day was a white line painted on the western horizon. It looked no thicker than the white stripe painted down the center of the highway. That would be gone soon enough. Crickets sang in the high grass to the right of the driveway, making a mindlessly cheerful rickety-rickety sound.

Cujo was still in the barn. Sleeping? she wondered. Eating?

That made her remember that she had packed them some food. She crawled between the two front buckets and got the Snoopy lunchbox and her own brown bag. Her Thermos had rolled all the way to the back, probably when the car had started to buck and jerk coming up the road. She had to stretch, her blouse coming untucked, before she could hook it with her fingers. Tad, who had been in a half doze, stirred awake. His voice was immediately filled with a sharp fright that made her hate the damned dog even more.

'Mommy? Mommy? What are you -'

'- Just getting the food,' she soothed him. 'And my Thermos -see?'

'Okay.' He settled back into his seat and put his thumb in his mouth again.

She shook the big Thermos gently beside her ear, listening for the grating sound of broken glass. She only heard milk swishing around inside. That was something, anyhow.

:Tad? You want to cat?'

I want to take a nap,' he said around his thumb, not opening his eyes.

'You gotta feed the machine, chum,' she said.

He didn't even smile. 'Not hungry. Sleepy.'

She looked at him, troubled, and decided it would be wrong to force the issue any further. Sleep was Tad's natural weapon -maybe his only one - and it was already half an hour past his regular bedtime. Of course, if they had been home, he would have had a glass of milk and a couple of cookies before brushing his teeth ... and a story, one of his Mercer Mayer books, maybe ... and ...

She felt the hot sting of tears and tried to push all those thoughts away. She opened her Thermos with shaky hands and poured herself half a cup of milk. She set it on the dashboard and took one of the figbars. After one bite she realized she was absolutely ravenous. She ate three more figbars, drank some milk, popped four or five of the green olives, then drained her cup. She burped gently... and then looked more sharply at the barn.

There was a darker shadow in front of it now. Except it wasn't just a shadow. It was the dog. It was Cujo.

He's standing watch over us.

No, she didn't believe that. Nor did she believe she had seen a vision of Cujo in a pile of blankets stacked in her son's closet. She didn't ... except ... except part of her did. But that part wasn't in her mind.

She glanced up into the rearview mirror at where the road was. It was too dark now to see it, but she knew it was there, just as she knew that nobody was going to go by. When they had come out that other time with Vic's Jag, all three of them (the dog was nice then, her brain muttered, the Tadder patted him and laughed, remember?), laughing it up and having a great old time, Vic had told her that until five years ago the Castle Rock Dump had been out at the end of Town Road No. 3. Then the new waste treatment plant had gone into operation on the other side of town, and now, a quarter of a mile beyond the Camber place, the road simply ended at a place where a heavy chain was strung across it. The sign which hung from the chain read NO TRESPASSING DUMP CLOSED. Beyond Cambers', there was just no place to go.

Donna wondered if maybe some people in search of a really private place to go parking might not ride by, but she couldn't imagine that even the horniest of local kids would want to neck at the old town dump. At any rate, no one had passed yet.

The white line on the western horizon had faded to a bare afterglow now . . . and she was afraid that even that was mostly wishful thinking. There was no moon.

Incredibly, she felt drowsy herself. Maybe sleep was her natural weapon, too. And what else was there to do? The dog was still out there (at least she thought it was; the darkness had gotten just deep enough to make it hard to tell if that was a real shape or just a shadow). The battery had to rest. Then she could try again. So why not sleep?

The package on his mailbox. That package from J.C. Whitney.

She sat up a little straighter, a puzzled frown creasing her brow. She turned her head, but from here the front corner of the house blocked her view of the mailbox. But she had seen the package, hung from the front of the box. Why had she thought of that? Did it have some significance?

She was still holding the Tupperware dish with the olives and slices of cucumbers inside, each wrapped neatly in Saran Wrap. Instead of eating anything else, she carefully put the white plastic cover on the Tupperware dish and stowed it back in Tad's lunchbox. She did not let herself think much about why she was being so careful of the food. She settled back in the bucket seat and found the lever that tipped it back. She meant to think about the package hooked over the mailbox -there was something there, she was almost sure of it - but soon her mind had slipped away to another idea, one that took on the bright tones of reality as she began to doze off.

The Cambers had gone to visit relatives. The relatives were m some town that was two, maybe three hours' drive away. Kennebunk, maybe. Or Hollis. Or Augusta. It was a family reunion.

Her beginning-to-dream mind saw a gathering of fifty people or more on a green lawn of TV-commercial size and beauty. There was a fieldstone barbecue pit with a shimmer of heat over it. At a long trestle table there were at least four dozen people, passing platters of corn on the cob and dishes of home-baked beans - pea beans, soldier beans, red kidney beans. There were plates of barbecued franks (Donna's stomach made a low goinging sound at this vision). On the table was a homely checked tablecloth. All this was being presided over by a lovely old woman with pure white hair that had been rolled into a bun at the nape of her neck. Fully inserted into the capsule of her dream now, Donna saw with no surprise at all that this woman was her mother.

The Cambers were there, but they weren't really the Cambers at all. Joe Camber looked like Vic in a clean Sears work coverall, and Mrs. Camber was wearing Donna's green watered-silk dress. Their boy looked the way Tad was going to look when he was in the fifth grade ...

'Mommy?'

The picture wavered, started to break up. She tried to hold on to it because it was peaceful and lovely: the archetype of a family life she had never had, the type she and Vic would never have with their one planned child and their carefully programmed lives. With sudden rising sadness, she wondered why she had never thought of things in that light before.

'Mommy?'

The picture wavered again and began to darken. That voice from outside, piercing the vision the way a needle may pierce the shell of an egg. Never mind. The Cambers were at their family reunion and they would pull in later, around ten, happy and full of barbecue. Everything would be all right. The Joe Camber with Vic's face would take care of everything. Everything would be all right again. There were some things that God never allowed. It would

'Mommy!'

She came out of the doze, sitting up, surprised to find herself behind the wheel of the Pinto instead of at home in bed ... but only for a second. Already the lovely, surreal image of the relatives gathered around the trestle picnic table were beginning to dissolve, and in fifteen minutes she would not even remember that she had dreamed.

'Huh? What?'

Suddenly, shockingly, the phone inside the Cambers' house began to ring. The dog rose to its feet, moving shadows that resolved themselves into its large and ungainly form.

'Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom.'

Cujo began to roar at the sound of the telephone. He was not barking; he was roaring. Suddenly he charged at the house. He struck the back door hard enough to shake it in its frame.

No. she thought sickly. oh no, stop, please, stop

'Mommy, I have to -'

The dog was snarling, biting at the wood of the door. She could hear the sick splintering sounds its teeth made.

'go weewee.'

The phone rang six times. Eight times. Ten. Then it stopped.

She realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out through her teeth in a low, hot sigh.

Cujo stood at the door, his back paws on the ground, his forepaws on the top step. He continued to growl low in his chest - a hateful, nightmarish sound. At last he turned and looked at the Pinto for a time - Donna could see the dried foam caked on his muzzle and chest - then he padded back into the shadows and grew indistinct. It was impossible to tell exactly where he went. In the garage, maybe. Or maybe down the side of the barn.

Tad was tugging desperately at the sleeve of her shirt.

'Mommy, I have to go bad!'

She looked at him helplessly.

Brett Camber put the phone down slowly. 'No one answered. He's not home, I guess.'

Charity nodded, not terribly surprised. She was glad that Jim had suggested they make the call from his office, which was downstairs and off the 'family room'. The family room was soundproofed. There were shelves of board games in there, a Panasonic large-screen TV with a video recorder and an Atari video-games setup attached to it. And standing m one corner was a lovely old Wurlitzer jukebox that really worked.

'Down at Gary's, I guess,' Brett added disconsolately.

'Yes, I imagine he's with Gary,' she agreed, which wasn't exactly the same as saying they were together at Gary's house. She had seen the faraway look that had come into Joe's eyes when she had finally struck the deal with him, the deal that had gotten her and her son down here. She hoped Brett wouldn't think of calling directory assistance for Gary Pervier's number, because she doubted if there would he any answer there either. She suspected that there were two old dogs out somewhere tonight howling at the moon.

'Do you think Cuje is okay, Mom?'

'Why, I don't think your father would go off and leave him if he wasn't, she said, and that was true - she didn't believe he would 'Why don't we leave it for tonight and you call him in the morning? You ought to be getting to bed anyway. It's past ten. You've had a big day.'

'I'm not tired.'

'Well, it's not good to go too long on nervous excitement. I put your toothbrush out, and your Aunt Holly put out a washcloth and a towel for you. Do you remember which bedroom -?'

'Yeah, sure. You going to bed, Mom?'

'Soon. I'm going to sit up with Holly for a while. We've got a lot of history to catch up on, she and V

Shyly, Brett said, 'She looks like you. Y'know that?'

Charity looked at him, surprised. 'Does she? Yes, I suppose she does. A little.'

'And that little kid, Jimmy. He's got a real right hook. Pow!' Brett burst out laughing.

'Did he hurt your stomach?'

'Heck, no.' Brett was looking around Jim's study carefully, noting the Underwood typewriter on the desk, the Rolodex, the neat open file of folders with the names on the tabs in alphabetical order. There was a careful, measuring look in his eyes that she couldn't understand or evaluate. He seemed to come back from far away. 'Nah, he didn't hurt me. He's just a Iittle kid.' He cocked his head at her. 'My cousin, right?'

'Right.'

'Blood relation.' He seemed to muse over it.

'Brett, do you like your Uncle Jim and Aunt Holly?'

I like her. I can't tell about him yet. That jukebox. That's really neat. But He shook his head in a kind of impatience.

'What about it, Brett?'

'He takes so much pride in it!' Brett said. 'It was the first thing he showed me, like a kid with a toy, isn't this neat, you know -'

'Well, he's only had it for a little while,' Charity said. An unformed dread had begun to swirl around inside of her, connected somehow with Joe - what had he told Brett when he took him out on the sidewalk? 'Anyone's partial to Something new. Holly wrote me when they finally got it, said Jim had wanted one of those things since he was a young man. People ... honey, different people buy different things to ... to show themselves that they're successful, I suppose. There's no accounting for it. But usually it's something they couldn't have when they were poor.'

'Was Uncle Jim poor?'

'I really don't know,' she said. 'But they're not poor now.'

'All I meant was that he didn't have anything to do with it. You get what I mean?' He looked at her closely. 'He bought it with money and hired some people to fix it and hired some more people to bring it here, and he says it's his, but he didn't ... you know, he didn't ... aw, I don't know.'

'He didn't make it with his own hands?' Although her fear was greater now, more coalesced, her voice was gentle.

'Yeah! That's right! He bought it with money, but he didn't really have nothing to do

'Anything -'

'Okay, yeah, anything to do with it, but now he's, like, takin credit for it -~

'He said a jukebox is a delicate, complicated machine

'Dad could have gotten it running,' Brett said flatly, and Charity thought she heard a door bang shut suddenly, closing with a loud, toneless, frightening bang. It wasn't in the house. It was in her heart. 'Dad would have tinkered it up and it would have been his.'

'Brett,' she said (and her voice sounded weak and justifying to her own ears), 'not everybody is good at tinkering and fixing like your father is.'

'I know that,' he said, still looking around the office. 'Yeah. But Uncle Jim shouldn't take credit for it just because he had the money. See? It's him taking the credit that I don't h -that bothers me.'

She was suddenly furious with him. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him back and forth; to raise her voice until it was loud enough to shout the truth into his brain. That money did not come by accident; that it almost always resulted from some sustained act of will, and that will was the core of character. She would tell him that while his father was perfecting his skills as a tinkerer and swilling down Black Label with the rest of the boys in the back of Emerson's Sunoco, sitting in piles of dead bald tires and telling frenchman jokes, Jim Brooks had been in law school, knocking his brains out to make grades, because when you made the grades you got the diploma, and the diploma was your ticket, you got to ride the merry-go-round. Getting on didn't mean you'd catch the brass ring, no, but it guaranteed you the chance to at least try.

'You go on up now and get ready for bed,' she said quietly. 'What you think of your Uncle Jim is between you and you. But ... give him a chance, Brett. Don't just judge him on that.' They had gone through into the family room now, and she jerked a thumb at the jukebox.

'No, I won't,' he said.

She followed him up into the kitchen, where Holly was making cocoa for the four of them. Jim junior and Gretchen had gone to bed long before.

'You get your man?' Holly asked.

'No, he's probably down chewing the fat with that friend of his,' Charity said. 'We'll try tomorrow.'

'Want some cocoa, Brett?' Holly asked.

'Yes, please.'

Charity watched him sit down at the table. She saw him put his elbow on it and then take it off again quickly, remembering that it was impolite. Her heart was so full of love and hope and fear that it seemed to stagger in her chest.

Time, she thought. Time and perspective. Give him that. If you force him, you'll lose him for sure.

But how much time was there? Only a week, and then he would be back under Joe's influence. And even as she sat down next to her son and thanked Holly for her cup of hot cocoa, her thoughts had turned speculatively to the idea of divorce again.

In her dream, Vic had come.

He simply walked down the driveway to the Pinto and opened her door. He was dressed in his best suit, the three-piece charcoal-gray one (when he put it on she always teased him that he looked like Jerry Ford with hair). Come on, you two, he said, and that quirky little grin was on his face. Time to go home before the vampires come out.

She tried to warn him, to tell him the dog was rabid, but no words came. And suddenly Cujo was advancing out of the dark, his head down, a steady low growl rumbling in his chest. Watch out! she tried to cry. His bite is death I But no sound came out.

But just before Cujo launched himself at Vic, he turned and pointed his finger at the dog. Cujo's fur went dead white instantly. His red, rheumy eyes dropped back into his head like marbles into a cup. His muzzle fell off and shattered against the crushed gravel of the driveway like black glass. A moment later all that was left in front of the garage was a blowing fur coat.

Don't you worry, Vic said in a dream. Don't you worry about that old dog, it's nothing but a fur coat. Did you get the mail yet? Never mind the dog, the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing. Right? The mail

His voice was disappearing down a long tunnel, growing echoey and faint. And suddenly it was not a dream of Vic's voice but a memory of a dream - she was awake and her cheeks were wet with tears. She had cried in her sleep. She looked at her watch and could just make out the time: quarter past one. She looked over at Tad and saw he was sleeping soundly, his thumb hooked into his mouth.

Never mind the dog the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing.

And suddenly the significance of the package hung over the mailbox door came to her, hit her like an arrow fired up from her subconscious mind, an idea she had not quite been able to get hold of before. Perhaps because it was so big, so simple, so elementarymy-dear-Watson. Yesterday was Monday and the mail had come. The J. C. Whitney package for Joe Camber was ample proof of that.

Today was Tuesday and the mail would come again.

Tears of relief began to roll down her not-yet-dry cheeks. She actually had to restrain herself from shaking Tad awake and telling him it was going to be all right, that by two o'clock this afternoon at the lastest - and more probably by ten or eleven in the morning, if the mail delivery out here was as prompt as it was most other places in town -this nightmare would end.

The mailman would come even if he had no mail for the Cambers, that was the beauty of it. It would be his job to see if the flag was up, signifying outgoing mail. He would have to come up here, to his last stop on Town Road No. 3, to check that out, and today he was going to be greeted by a woman who was semi-hysterical with relief.

She eyed Tad's lunchbox and thought of the food inside. She thought of herself carefully saving some of it aside, in case ... well, in case. Now it didn't matter so much, although Tad was likely to be hungry in the morning. She ate the rest of the cucumber slices. Tad didn't care for cucumbers much anyway. It would be an odd breakfast for him, she thought, smiling. Figbars, olives, and a Slim Jim or two.

Munching the last two or three cucumber slices, she realized it was the coincidences that had scared her the most. That series of coincidences, utterly random but mimicking a kind of sentient fate, had been what seemed to make the dog so horribly purposeful, so ... so out to get her personally. Vic being gone for ten days, that was coincidence number one. Vic calling early today, that was coincidence number two. If he hadn't got them then, he would have tried later, kept trying, and begun to wonder where they were. The fact that all three of the Cambers were gone, at least for overnight, the way it looked now. That was number three. Mother, son, and father. All gone. But they had left their dog. Oh yes. They had

A sudden horrible thought occurred to her, freezing her jaws on the last bite of cucumber. She tried to thrust it away. but it came back. It wouldn't go away because it had its own gargoyle-like logic.

What if they were all dead in the barn?

The image rose behind her eyes in an instant. It had the unhealthy vividness of those waking visions which sometimes come in the morning's small hours. The three bodies tumbled about like badly made toys on the floor in there, the sawdust around them stained red, their dusty eyes staring up into the blackness where barnswallows cooed and fluttered, their clothing ripped and chewed, parts of them

Oh that's crazy, that's

Maybe he had gotten the boy first. The other two are in the kitchen, or maybe upstairs having a quickie, they hear screams. they rush out

(stop it won't you stop it)

- they rush out but the boy is already dead, the dog has tom his throat out, and while they're still stunned by the death of their son, the Saint Bernard comes lurching out of the shadows, old and terrible engine of destruction, yes, the old monster comes from the shadows, rabid and snarling. He goes for the woman first and the man tries to save her

(no, be would have gotten his gun or brained it with a wrench or something and where's the cad There was a car here before they all went off on a family trip - do you bear me FAMILY TRIP - took the car left the truck)

Then why had no one come to feed the dog?

That was the logic of the thing, part of what frightened her. Why hadn't anyone come to feed the dog? Because if you were going to be away for a day or for a couple of days. you made an arrangement with somebody. They fed your dog for you, and then when they were gone, you fed their cat for them, or their fish, or their parakeet, or whatever. So where

And the dog kept going back into the barn.

Was it eating in there?

That's the answer, her mind told her, relieved. He didn't have anyone to feed the dog, so he poured it a tray of food. Gaines Meal, or something.

But then she stuck upon what Joe Camber himself had stuck upon earlier on that long, long day. A big dog would gobble it all at once and then go hungry. Surely it would be better to get a friend to feed the dog if you were going to be gone. On the other hand, maybe they had been held- up. Maybe there really had been a family reunion, and Camber had gotten drunk and passed out. Maybe this, maybe that, maybe anything.

Is the dog eating in the barn?

(what is it eating in there? Gaines Meal? or people?)

She spat the last of the cucumber into her cupped hand and felt her stomach roll, wanting to send up what she had already eaten. She set her will upon keeping it down, and because she could be very determined when she wanted to, she did keep it down. They had left the dog some food and had gone off in the car. You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that. The rest of it was nothing but a bad case of the willies.

But that image of death kept trying to creep back in. The dominant image was the bloody sawdust, sawdust which had gone the dark color of natural-casing franks.

Stop. Think about the mail, if you have to think about anything. Think about tomorrow. Think about being safe.

There was a soft, scuffling, scratching noise on her side of the car.

She didn't want to look but was helpless to stop herself. Her head began to turn as if forced by invisible yet powerful hands. She could hear the low creak of the tendons in her neck. Cujo was there, looking in at her. His face was less than six inches from her own. Only the Saf-T-Glas of the driver's side window separated them. Those red, bleary eyes stared into hers. The dog's muzzle looked as if it had been badly lathered with shaving cream that had been left to dry.

Cujo was grinning at her.

She felt a scream building in her chest, coming up in her throat like iron, because she could feel the dog thinking at her, telling her I'm going to get you, babe. I'm going to get you, kiddo. Think about the mailman all you want to. I'll kill him too if I have to, the way I killed all three of the Cambers, the way I'm going to kill you and your son. You might as well get used to the idea. You might as well

The scream, coming up her throat. It was a live thing struggling to get out, and everything was coming on her at once: Tad having to pee, she had unrolled his window four inches and held him up so he could do it out the window, watching all the time for the dog, and for a long time he hadn't been able to go and her arms had begun to ache; then the dream, then the images of death, and now this

The dog was grinning in at her; he was grinning in at her, Cujo was his name, and his bite was death.

The scream had to come

(but Tad's) or she would go mad.

(sleeping)

She locked her jaws against the scream the way she had locked her throat against the urge to vomit a few moments ago. She struggled with it, she fought it. And at last her heart began to slow down and she knew she had it licked.

She smiled at the dog and raised both of her middle fingers from closed fists. She held them against the glass, which was now slightly fogged on the outside with Cujo's breath. 'Go get fucked,' she whispered.

After what seemed an endless time, the dog put its forepaws down and went back into the barn. Her mind turned down the same dark track again

(what's it eating in there?)

and then she slammed a door shut somewhere in her mind.

But there would be no more sleep, not for a long time, and it was so long until dawn. She sat upright behind the wheel, trembling, telling herself over and over again that it was ridiculous, really ridiculous, to feel that the dog was some kind of a hideous revenant which had escaped from Tad's closet, or that it knew more about the situation than she did.

Vic jerked awake in total darkness, rapid breath as dry as salt in his throat. His heart was triphammering in his chest, and he was totally disoriented - so disoriented that for a moment he thought he was falling, and reached out to clutch the bed.

He closed his eyes for a moment, forcibly holding himself together, making himself coalesce.

(you are in)

He opened his eyes and saw a window, a bedstand, a lamp.

(the Ritz-CarIton Hotel in Boston Massachusetts)

He relaxed. That reference point given, everything came together with a reassuring click, making him wonder how he could have been so lost and totally apart, even momentarily. It was being in a strange place, he supposed. That, and the nightmare.

Nightmare! Jesus, it had been a beaut. He couldn't remember having such a bad one since the failing dreams that had plagued him off and on during early puberty. He reached for the TravelEtte clock on the nightstand, gripped it in both hands, and brought it close to his face. It was twenty minutes of two. Roger was snoring lightly in the other bed, and now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark he could see him, sleeping flat on his back. He had kicked the sheet over the end of the bed. He was wearing an absurd pair of pajamas covered with small yellow college pennants.

Vic swung his legs out of bed, went quietly into the bathroom, and closed the door. Roger's cigarettes were on the washstand and he helped himself to one. He needed it. He sat on the toilet and smoked, tapping ashes into the sink.

An anxiety dream, Donna would have said, and God knew he had enough to be anxious about. Yet he had gone to bed around ten thirty in better spirits than he had been in for the last week. After arriving back at the hotel, he and Roger had spent half an hour in the Ritz-CarIton's bar, kicking the apology idea around, and then, from the bowels of the huge old wallet he hauled around, Roger produced the home number of Yancey Harrington. Harrington was the actor who played the Sharp Cereal Professor.

'Might as well see if he'll do it before we go any further,' Roger said. He had picked up the phone and dialed Harrington, who lived in Westport, Connecticut. Vic hadn't known just what to expect. If pressed for his best guess, he would have said that probably Harrington would have to be stroked a little - he had been just miserable over the Zingers affair and what he considered it had done to his image.

Both of them had been in for a happy surprise. Harrington had agreed instantly. He recognized the realities of the situation and knew the Professor was pretty well finished ('Poor old guy's a gone goose,' Harrington had said glumly). But he thought the final ad might he just the thing to get the company over the affair. Put it back on the rails, so to speak.

'Bullshit,' Roger said, grinning, after he had hung up. 'He just likes the idea of one final curtain call. Not many actors in advertising get a chance like that. He'd buy his own plane ticket to Boston if we asked him to.'

So Vic had gone to bed happy and had fallen asleep almost instantly. Then, the dream. He was standing in front of Tad's closet door in the dream and telling Tad that there was nothing in there, nothing at all, I'll show you once and for all, he told Tad. He opened the closet door and saw that Tad's clothes and toys were gone. There was a forest growing in Tad's closet - old pines and spruces, ancient hardwoods. The closet floor was covered with fragrant needles and leafy mulch. He had scraped at it, wanting to see if the floor of painted boards was beneath. It wasn't; his foot scraped up rich black forest earth instead.

He stepped into the closet and the door closed behind him. That was all right. There was enough light to see by. He found a trail and began to hike along it. All at once he realized there was a pack on his back and a canteen slung over one shoulder. He could hear the mysterious sound of the wind, soughing through the firs, and faint birdsong. Seven years ago, long before Ad Worx, they had all gone hiking on part of the Appalachian Trail during one of their vacations, and that land had looked a good deal like the geography of his dream. They had done it only that once, sticking to the seacoast after that. Vic, Donna, and Roger had had a wonderful time, but Althea Breakstone loathed hiking and had come down with a good, itchy case of poison oak on top of that.

The first part of the dream had been rather pleasant. The thought that all this had been right inside Tad's closet was, in its own strange way, wonderful. Then he had come into a clearing and he had seen ... but it was already beginning to tatter, the way dreams do when they are exposed to waking thought.

The other side of the clearing had been a sheer gray wall rising maybe a thousand feet into the sky. About twenty feet up there was a cave - no, not really deep enough to be a cave. It was more of a niche, just a depression in the rock that happened to have a flat floor. Donna and Tad were cowering inside. Cowering from some sort of monster that was trying to reach up, trying to reach up and then reach in. Get them. Eat them.

It had been like that scene in the original King Kong after the great ape has shaken Fay Wray's would-be rescuers from the log and is trying to get the lone survivor. But the guy has gotten into a hole, and Kong isn't quite able to get him.

The monster in his dream hadn't been a giant ape, though. It had been a ... what? Dragon? No, nothing like that. Not a dragon, not a dinosaur, not a troll. He couldn't get it. Whatever it was, it couldn't quite get in and get Donna and Tad, so it was merely waiting outside their bolthole, like a cat waiting with dreadful patience for a mouse.

He began to run, but no matter how fast he went, he never got any closer to the other side of the clearing. He could hear

Donna screaming for help, but when he called back his words seemed to die two feet out of his mouth. It was Tad who had finally spotted him.

'They don't work!' Tad had screamed in a hopeless, despairing voice that had hollowed out Vic's guts with fear. 'Daddy, the Monster Words don't work! Oh, Daddy, they don't work, they never worked! You lied, Daddy! You lied!'

He ran on, but it was as if he were on a treadmill. And he had looked at the base of that high gray wall and had seen a heaped drift of old bones and grinning skulls, some of them furred with green moss.

That was when he woke up.

What had the monster been, anyway?

He just couldn't remember. Already the dream seemed like a scene observed through the wrong end of a telescope. He dropped the cigarette into the john, flushed it, and ran water into the sink as well to swirl the ashes down the drain.

He urinated, shut off the light, and went back to bed. As he lay down he glanced at the telephone and felt a sudden irrational urge to call home. Irrational? That was putting it mildly. It was ten minutes of two in the morning. He would not only wake her up, he would probably scare the living hell out of her in the bargain. You didn't interpret dreams literally; everyone knew that. When both your marriage and your business seemed in danger of running off the rails at the same time, it wasn't really surprising that your mind pulled a few unsettling head games, was it?

Still, just to bear her voice and know she's okay

He turned away from the telephone, punched up the pillow, and resolutely shut his eyes.

Call her in the morning, if that'll make you feel better. Call her right after breakfast.

That eased his mind, and very shortly he drifted off to sleep again. This time he did not dream - or if he did, these dreams never imprinted themselves on his conscious mind. And when the wakeup call came on Tuesday, he had forgotten A about the dream of the beast in the clearing. He had only the vaguest recollection of having gotten up in the night at all. Vic did not call home that day.

Charity Camber awoke that Tuesday morning on the dot of five and went through her own brief period of disorientation -yellow wallpaper instead of wood walls, colorful green print curtains instead of white chintz, a narrow single bed instead of the double that had begun to sag in the middle.

Then she saw where she was - Stratford, Connecticut - and felt a burst of pleased anticipation. She would have the whole day to talk to her sister, to hash over old times, to find out what she had been doing the last few years. And Holly had talked about going into Bridgeport to do some shopping.

She had awakened an hour and a half before her usual time, probably two hours or more before things began to stir in this household. But a person never slept well in a strange bed until the third night - that had been one of her mother's sayings, and it was a true one.

The silence began to give up its Iittle sounds as she lay awake and listening, looking at the thin five-o'clock light that fell between the half-drawn curtains ... dawn's early fight, always so white and clear and fine. She heard the creak of a single board. A bluejay having its morning tantrum. The day's first commuter train, bound for Westport, Greenwich, and New York City.

The board creaked again.

And again.

It wasn't just the house settling. It was footsteps.

Charity sat up in bed, the blanket and sheet pooling around the waist of her sensible pink nightgown. Now the steps were going slowly downstairs. It was a light tread: bare feet or sock feet. It was Brett. When you lived with people, you got to know the sound of their walk. It was one of those mysterious things that just happen over a course of years, like the shape of a leaf sinking into a rock.

She pushed the covers back, got up, and went to the door. Her room opened on the upstairs hall, and she just saw the top of Brett's head disappearing, his cowlick sticking up for a moment and then gone.

She went after him.

When Charity reached the top of the stairs, Brett was just disappearing down the hallway that ran the width of the house, from the front door to the kitchen. She opened her mouth to call him ... and then shut it again. She was intimidated by the sleeping house that wasn't her house.

Something about the way he had been walking... the set of his body ... but it had been years since

She descended the stairs quickly and quietly in her bare feet. She followed Brett into the kitchen. He was dressed only in light blue pajama bottoms, their white cotton drawstring hanging down to below the neat fork of his crotch. Although it was barely midsummer he was already very brown - he was naturally dark, like his father, and tanned easily.

Standing in the doorway she saw him in profile, that same fine, clear morning light pouring over his body as he hunted along the line of cupboards above the stove and the counter and the sink. Her heart was full of wonder and fear. He's beautiful, she thought. Everything that's beautiful, or ever was, in us, is in him. It was a moment she never forgot - she saw her son dad only in his pajama bottoms and for a moment dimly comprehended the mystery of his boyhood, so soon to be left behind. Her mother's eyes loved the slim curves of his muscles, the line of his buttocks, the clean soles of his feet. He seemed ... utterly perfect.

She saw it clearly because Brett wasn't awake. As a child there had been episodes of sleepwalking; about two dozen of them in all, between the ages of four and eight. She had finally gotten worried enough - scared enough - to consult with Dr. Gresham (without Joe's knowledge). She wasn't afraid that Brett was losing his mind -anyone who was around him could see he was bright and normal - but she was afraid that he might hurt himself while he was in that

strange state. Dr. Gresham had told her that was very unlikely, and that most of the funny ideas people had about somnambulism came from cheap, badly researched movies.

'We only know a Iittle about sleepwalking,' he had told her, 'but we do know that it is more common in children than it is in adults. There's a constantly growing, constantly maturing interaction between the mind and body, Mrs. Camber, and a lot of people who have done research in this field believe that sleepwalking may be a sympton of a temporary and not terribly significant imbalance between the two.'

'Like growing pains?' she had asked doubtfully.

'Very much like that,' Gresham had said with a grin. He drew a bell curve on his office pad, suggesting that Brett's somnambulism would reach a peak, hold for a while, then begin to taper off. Eventually it would disappear.

She had gone away a little reassured by the doctor's conviction that Brett would not go sleepwalking out a window or down the middle of a highway, but without being much enlightened. A week later she had brought Brett in. He had been just a month or two past his sixth birthday then. Gresham had given him a complete physical and had pronounced him normal in every way. And indeed, Gresham had appeared to be right. The last of what Charity thought of as his 'nighwalks' had occurred more than two years ago.

The last, that was, until now.

Brett opened the cupboards one by one, dosing each neatly before going on to the next, disclosing Holly's casserole dishes, the extra elements to her Jenn-Aire range, her dishtowels neatly folded, her coffee-and-tea creamer, her as-yet-incomplete set of Depression glassware. His eyes were wide and blank, and she felt a cool certainty that he was seeing the contents of other cabinets, in another place.

She felt the old, helpless terror that she had almost completely forgotten as parents do the alarms and the excursions of their children's early years: the teething, the vaccination that brought the frighteningly high fever as a little extra added attraction, the croup, the car infection, the hand or leg that suddenly began to spray. irrational blood. What's be thinking? she wondered. Where is be? And why now, after two quiet years? Was it being in a strange place? He hadn't seemed duly upset ... at least, not until now.

He opened the last cupboard and took down a pink gravy boat. He put it on the counter. He picked up empty air and mimed pouring something into the gravy boat. Her arms suddenly broke out in gooseflesh as she realized where he was and what this dumbshow was all about. It was a routine he went through each day at home. He was feeding Cujo.

She took an involuntary step toward him and then stopped. She didn't believe those wives' tales about what might happen if you woke a sleepwalker - that the soul would be forever shut out of the body, that madness might result, or sudden death -and she hadn't needed Dr. Gresham to reassure her on that score. She had gotten a book on special loan from the Portland City Library ... but she hadn't really needed that, either. Her own good common sense told her what happened when you woke up a sleepwalker was that they woke up - no more and no less than just that. There might be tears, even mild hysteria, but that sort of reaction would be provoked by simple disorientation.

Still, she had never wakened Brett during one of his nightwalks, and she didn't dare to do so now. Good common sense was one thing. Her unreasoning fear was another, and she was suddenly very afraid, and unable to think why. What could be so dreadful in Brett's acted-out dream of feeding his dog? It was perfectly natural, as worried as he had been about Cujo.

He was bent over now, holding the gravy boat out, the drawstring of his pajama trousers making a right-angled white line to the horizontal plane of the red and black linoleum floor. His face went though a slow-motion pantomime of sorrow. He spoke then, muttering the words as sleepers so often do, gutturally, rapidly, almost unintelligibly. And with no emotion in the words themselves, that was all inside, held in the cocoon of whatever dream had been vivid enough to make him nightwalk again, after two quiet years. There was nothing inherently melodramatic about the words, spoken all of a rush in a quick sleeping sigh, but Charity's hand went to her throat anyway. The flesh there was cold, cold.

'Cujo's not hungry no more,' Brett said, the words riding out on that sigh. He stood up again, now holding the gravy boat cradled to his chest. 'Not no more, not no more.'

He stood immobile for a short time by the counter, and Charity did likewise by the kitchen door. A single tear had slipped down his face. He put the gravy boat on the counter and headed for the door. His eyes were open but they slipped indifferently and unseeingly over his mother. He stopped, looking back.

'Look in the weeds,' he said to someone who was not there.

Then be began to walk toward her again. She stood aside, her hand still pressed against her throat. He passed her quickly and noiselessly on his bare feet and was gone up the hall toward the stairs.

She turned to follow him and remembered the gravy boat. It stood by itself on the bare, ready-for-the-day counter like the focal point in a weird painting. She picked it up and it slipped through her fingers - she hadn't realized that her fingers were slick with sweat. She juggled it briefly, imagining the crash in the still, sleeping hours. Then she had it cradled safely in both hands. She put it back on the shelf and closed the cupboard door and could only stand there for a moment, listening to the heavy thud of her heart, feeling her strangeness in this kitchen. She was an intruder in this kitchen. Then she followed her son.

She got to the doorway of his room just in time to see him climb into bed. He pulled the sheet up and rolled over on his left side, his usual sleeping position. Although she knew it was over now, Charity stood there yet awhile longer.

Somebody down the hall coughed, reminding her again that this was someone else's house. She felt a strong wave of homesickness; for a few moments it was as if her stomach were full of some numbing gas, the kind of stuff dentists use. In this fine still morning light, her thoughts of divorce seemed as immature and without regard for the realities as the thoughts of a child. It was easy for her to think of such things here. It wasn't her house, not her place.

Why had his pantomime of feeding Cujo, and those rapid, sighing words, frightened her so much? Cujo's not hungry no more, not no more.

She went back to her own room and lay there in bed as the sun came up and brightened the room. At breakfast, Brett seemed no different than ever. He did not mention Cuio, and he had apparently forgotten about calling home, at least for the time being. After some interior debate, Charity decided to let the matter rest there.

It was hot.

Donna uncranked her window a little farther - about a quarter of the way, as far as she dared - and then leaned across Tad's lap to unroll his too. That was when she noticed the creased yellow sheet on paper in his lap.

'What's that, Tad?'

He looked up at her. There were smudged brown circles under his eyes. 'The Monster Words,' he said..

'Can I see?'

He held them tightly for a moment and then let her take the paper. There was a watchful, almost proprietary expression on his face, and she felt an instant's jealousy. It was brief but very strong. So far she had managed to keep him alive and unhurt, but it was Vic's hocus-pocus he cared about. Then the feeling dissipated into bewilderment, sadness, and self-disgust. It was she who had put him in this situation in the first place. If she hadn't given in to him about the baby-sitter ...

'I put them in my pocket yesterday,' he said, 'before we went shopping. Mommy, is the monster going to eat us?'

'It's not a monster, Tad, it's just a dog, and no, it isn't going to eat us!' She spoke more sharply than she had intended. 'I told you, when the mailman comes, we can go home.' And I told him the car would start in just a little while, and I told him someone would come, that the Cambers would be home soon

But what was the use of thinking that?

'May I have my Monster Words back?' he asked.

For a moment she felt a totally insane urge to tear the sweatstained, creased sheet of yellow legal paper to bits and toss them out of her window, so much fluttering confetti. Then she handed the paper back to Tad and ran both hands through her hair, ashamed and scared. What was happening to her, for Christ's sake? A sadistic thought like that. Why would she want to make it worse for him? Was it Vic? Herself? What?

It was so hot - too hot to think. Sweat was streaming down her face and she could see it trickling down Tad's cheeks as well. His hair was plastered against his skull in unlovely chunks, and it looked two shades darker than its usual medium-blond. He needs his hair washed, she thought randomly, and that made her think of the bottle of Johnson's No More Tears again, sitting safely and sanely on the bathroom shelf, waiting for someone to take it down and pour a capful or two into one cupped palm.

(don't lose control of yourself)

No, of course not. She had no reason to lose control of herself. Everything was going to be all right, wasn't it? Of course it was. The dog wasn't even in sight, hadn't been for more than an hour. And the mailman. It was almost ten o'clock now. The mailman would be along soon, and then it wouldn't matter that it was so hot in the car. 'The greenhouse effect', they called it. She had seen that on an SPCA handout somewhere, explaining why you shouldn't shut your dog up in your car for any length of time when it was hot like this. The greenhouse effect. The pamphlet had said that the temperature in a car that was parked in the sun could go as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit if the windows were rolled up, so it was cruel and dangerous to lock up a pet while you did your shopping or went to see a movie. Donna uttered a short, cracked-sounding chuckle. The shoe certainly was on the other foot here, wasn't it? it was the dog that had the people locked up.

Well, the mailman was coming. The mailman was coming and that would end it. It wouldn't matter that they had only a quarter of a Thermos of milk left, or that early this morning she had to go to the bathroom and she had used Tad's smaller Thermos - or had tried to - and it had overflowed and now the Pinto smelled of urine, an unpleasant smell that only seemed to grow stronger with the heat. She had capped the Thermos and thrown it out the window. She had heard it shatter as it hit the gravel. Then she had cried.

But none of it mattered. It was humiliating and demeaning to have to try and pee into a Thermos bottle, sure it was, but it didn't matter because the mailman was coming - even now he would be loading his small blue-and-white truck at the ivy-covered brick post office on Carbine Street ... or maybe he had already begun his route, working his way out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road. Soon it would end. She would take Tad home, and they would go upstairs. They would strip and shower together, but before she got into the tub with him and under the shower, she would take the bottle of shampoo from the shelf and put the cap neatly on the edge of the sink, and she would wash first Tad's hair and then her own.

Tad was reading the yellow paper again, his lips moving soundlessly. Not real reading, not the way he would be reading in a couple of years (if we get out of this, her traitorous mind insisted on adding senselessly but instantly), but the kind that came from rote memorization. The way driving schools prepared functional illiterates for the written part of the driver's exam. She had read that somewhere too, or maybe seen it on a TV news story, and wasn't it amazing, the amount of crud the human mind was capable of storing up? And wasn't it amazing how easily it all came spewing out when there was nothing else to engage it? Like a subconscious garbage disposal running in reverse.

That made her think of something that had happened in her parents' house, back when it had still been her house too. Less than two hours before one of her mother's Famous Cocktail Parties (that was how ' Donna's father always referred to them, with a satirical tone that automatically conferred the capital letters - the same satirical tone that could sometimes drive Samantha into a frenzy), the disposal in the kitchen sink had somehow backed up into the bar sink, and when her mother turned the gadget on again in an effort to get rid of everything, green goo had exploded all over the ceiling. Donna had been about fourteen at the time, and she remembered that her mother's utter, hysterical rage had both frighened and sickened her. She had been sickened because her mother was throwing a tantrum in front of the people who loved and needed her most over the opinion of a group of casual acquaintances who were coming over to drink free booze and munch up a lot of free canapes. She had been frightened because she could see no logic in her mother's tantrum ... and because of the expression she had seen in her father's eyes. It had been a kind of resigned disgust. That had been the first time she had really believed - believed in her gut - that she was going to grow up and become a woman, a woman with at least a fighting chance to be a better woman than her own mother, who could get into such a frightening state over what was really such a little thing....

She dosed her eyes and tried to dismiss the whole train of thought, uneasy at the vivid emotions that memory called up. SPCA, greenhouse effect, garbage disposals, what next? How I Lost My Virginity? Six Well-Loved Vacations? The mailman, that was the thing to think about, the goddam mailman.

'Mommy, maybe the car will start now.'

'Honey, I'm scared to try it because the battery is so low.'

'But we're just sitting here,' he said, sounding petulant and tired and cross. 'What does it matter if the battery's low or not if we're just sitting here? Try it!'

'Don't you go giving me Orders, kiddo, or I'll. whack your ass for you!'

He cringed away from her hoarse, angry voice and she cursed herself again. He was scratchy ... so, who could blame him? Besides, he was right. That was what had really made her angry. But Tad didn't understand, the real reason she didn't want to try the engine again was because she was afraid it would bring the dog. She was afraid it would bring Cujo, and more than anything else she didn't want that.

Grimly, she turned the key in the ignition. The Pinto's engine cranked very slowly now, with a draggy, protesting sound. h coughed twice but did not fire. She turned the key off and tapped the horn. It gave a foggy, low honk that probably didn't carry fifty yards, let alone to that house at the bottom of the hill.

'Mere,' she said briskly and cruelly. 'Are you happy? Good.'

Tad began to cry. He began the way she always remembered it beginning when he was a baby: his mouth drawing into a trembling bow, the tears spilling down his cheeks even before the first sobs came. She pulled him to her then, saying she was sorry, saying she didn't mean to be mean, it was just that she was upset too, telling him that it would be over as soon as the madman got there, that she would take him home and wash his hair. And thought: A fighting chance to be a better woman than your mother. Sure. Sure, kid. You're just like her. That's just the kind of thing she would have said in a situation like this. When you're feeling bad, what you do is spread the misery, share the wealth. Well, like mother like daughter, right? And maybe when Tad grows up, he'll feel the same way about you as you feel about

'Why is it so hot, Mommy?' Tad asked dully.

'The greenhouse effect,' she answered, without even thinking about it. She wasn't up to this, and she knew it now. If this was, in any sense, a final examination on motherhood - or on adulthood itself - then she was flagging the test. How long had they been stuck in this driveway? Fifteen hours at the very most. And she was cracking up, falling apart.

'Can I have a Dr Pepper when we get home, Mommy?' The Monster Words, sweaty and wrinkled, lay limply on his lap.

'All you can drink,' she said, and hugged him tight. But the feel of his body was frighteningly wooden. I shouldn't have shouted at him, she thought distractedly. If only I hadn't shouted.

But she would do better, she promised herself. Because the madman would be along soon.

'I think the muh - I think the doggy's going to eat us,' Tad said.

She started to reply and then didn't. Cujo still wasn't around. The sound of the Pinto's engine turning over hadn't brought him. Maybe he was asleep. Maybe he had had a convulsion and died. That would be wonderful ... especially if it had been a slow convulsion. A painful one. She looked at the back door again. It was so temptingly near. It was locked. She was sure of that now. When people went away, they locked up. It would be foolhardy to try for the door, especially with the mailman due so soon. Play it as though it were real, Vic sometimes said. She would have to. because it was real. Better to assume the dog was still alive, and lying just inside those half-open garage doors. Lying in the shade.

The thought of shade made her mouth water.

It was almost eleven o'clock then. It was about forty-five minutes later when she spotted something in the grass beyond the edge of Tad's side of the car. Another fifteen minutes of examination convinced her that it was an old baseball bat with a friction-taped handle, half obscured by witch grass and timothy.

A few minutes after that, just before noon, Cujo stumbled out of the barn, blinking his red, rheumy eyes stupidly in the hot sun.

When they come to take you down,

When they bring that wagon 'round,

When they come to call on you

And drag your poor body down ...

Jerry Garcia's voice, easy but somehow weary, came floating down the hall, magnified and distorted by someone's transistor radio until it sounded as if the vocal were floating down a long steel tube. Closer by, someone was moaning. That morning, when he went down to the smelly industrial bathroom to shave and shower, there had been a puddle of vomit in one of the urinals and a large quantity of dried blood in one of the washbasins.

'Shake it, shake it, Sugaree,' Jerry Garcia sang, 'just don't tell 'em you know me.'

Steve Kemp stood at the window of his room on the fifth floor of the Portland YMCA, looking down at Spring Street, feeling bad and not knowing why. His head was bad. He kept thinking about Donna Trenton and how he had fucked her over - fucked her over and then hung around. Hung around for what? What the fuck had happened?

He wished he were in Idaho. Idaho had been much on his mind lately. So why didn't he stop honking his donk and just go? He didn't know. He didn't like not knowing. He didn't like all these questions screwing up his head. Questions were counterproductive to a state of serenity, and serenity was necessary to the development of the artist. He had looked at himself this morning m one of the toothpaste-spotted mirrors and had thought he looked old. Really old. When he came back to his room he had seen a cockroach zigzagging busily across the floor. The omens were bad.

She didn't give me the brush because I'm old, he thought. I'm not old. She did it because her itch was scratched, because she's a bitch, and because I gave her a spoonful of her own medicine. How did Handsome Hubby like his little love note, Donna? Did Handsome Hubby dig it?

Did hubby get his little love note?

Steve crushed his cigarette out in the jar top that served the room as an ashtray. That was really the central question, wasn't it? With that one answered, the answers to the other questions would drop into place. The hateful hold she had gotten over him by telling him to get lost before he was ready to end the affair (she had humiliated him, goddammit), for one thing - for one very big thing.

Suddenly he knew what to do, and his heart began to thud heavily with anticipation. He put a hand into his pocket and jingled the change there. He went out. It was just past noon, and in Castle Rock, the mailman for whom Donna hoped had begun that part of his rounds which covered the Maple Sugar Road and Town Road No. 3.

Vic, Roger, and Rob Martin spent Tuesday morning at Image-Eye and then went out for beers and burgers. A few burgers and a great many beers later, Vic suddenly realized that he was drunker than he had ever been at a business luncheon in his life. Usually he had a single cocktail or a glass of white wine; he had seen too many good New York admen drown themselves slowly in those dark places just off Madison Avenue, talking to their friends about campaigns they would never mount ... or, if they became drunk enough, to the barmen in those places about novels which they would assuredly never write.

It was a strange occasion, half victory celebration, half wake. Rob had greeted their idea of a final Sharp Cereal Professor ad with tempered enthusiasm, saying that he could knock it a mile ... always assuming he was given the chance. That was the wake half. Without the approval of old and his fabled kid, the greatest spot in the world would them no good. They would all be out on their asses.

Under the circumstances, Vic supposed it was all right to get loaded.

Now, as the main rush of the restaurant's lunchtime clientele came in, the three of them sat in their shirtsleeves at a comer booth, the remains of their burgers on waxed paper, beer bottles scattered around the table, the ashtray overflowing. Vic was reminded of the day he and Roger had sat in the Yellow Sub back in Portland, discussing this little safari. Back when everything that had been wrong had been wrong with the business. Incredibly, he felt a wave of nostalgia for that day and wondered what Tad and Donna were doing. Got to call them tonight, he thought. If I can stay sober enough to remember, that is.

'So what now?' Rob asked. 'You hangin out in Boston or going on to New York? I can get you guys tickets to the Boston-Kansas City series, if you want them. Might cheer you up to watch George Brett knock a few holes in the Ieft-field wall.'

Vic looked at Roger, who shrugged and said, 'On to New York, I guess. Thanks are in order, Rob, but I don't think either opus are in the mood for baseball.'

'There's nothing more we can do here,' Vic agreed. 'We had a lot of time scheduled on this trip for brainstorming, but I guess we're all agreed to go with the final spot idea.'

'There's still plenty of rough edges,' Rob said. 'Don't get too proud.'

'We can mill off the rough edges,' Roger said. 'One day with the marketing people ought to do it, I think. You agree, Vic?'

'It might take two,' Vic said. 'Still, there's no reason why we can't tie things up a lot earlier than we'd expected.'

'Then what?'

Vic grinned bleakly. 'Then we call old man Sharp and make an appointment to see him. I, imagine we'll end tip going straight on to Cleveland from New York. The Magical Mystery Tour.'

'See Cleveland and die,' Roger said gloomily, and poured the remainder of his beer into his glass. 'I just can't wait to see that old fart.'

'Don't forget the young fart,' Vic said, grinning a little.

'How could I forget that little prick?' Roger replied. 'Gentlemen, I propose another round.'

Rob looked at his watch. 'I really ought to -'

'One last round,' Roger insisted. 'Auld Lang Sync, if you want.'

Rob shrugged. 'Okay. But I still got a business to run, don't forget that. Although without Sharp Cereals, there's going to be space for a lot of long lunches.' He raised his glass in the air and waggled it until a waiter saw him and nodded back.

'Tell me what you really think,' Vic said to Rob. 'No bullshit. You think it's a bust?'

Rob looked at him, seemed about to speak, then shook his head.

Roger said, 'No, go ahead. We all set out to sea in the same peagreen boat. Or Red Razberry Zingers carton, or whatever. You think it's no go, don't you?'

'I don't think there's a chance in hell,' Rob said. 'You'll work up a good presentation - you always do. You'll get your background work done in New York, and I have a feeling that everything the market-research boys can tell you on such short notice is all going to be in your favor. And Yancey Harrington.... I think he'll emote his fucking heart out. His big deathbed scene. He'II he so good he'll make Bette Davis in Dark Victory look like Ali MacGraw in Love

'Oh, but it's not like that at all -' Roger began.

Rob shrugged. 'Yeah, maybe that's a little unfair. Okay. Call it his curtain call, then. Whatever you want to call it, I've been in this business long enough to believe that there wouldn't he a dry eye in the house after that commercial was shown over a three- or fourweek period. It would knock ~body on their asses. But -'

The beers came. The waiter said to Rob, 'Mr. Johnson asked me to tell you that he has several parties of three waiting, Mr. Martin.'

'Well, you run back and tell Mr. Johnson that the boys are on their last round and to keep his undies dry. Okay, Rocky?'

The waiter smiled, emptied the ashtray, and nodded.

He left. Rob turned back to Vic and Roger. 'So what's the bottom line? You're bright boys. You don't need a one-legged cameraman with a snootful of beer to tell you where the bear shat in the buckwheat.'

'Sharp just won't apologize,' Vic said. 'That's what you think, isn't it?' Rob saluted him with his bottle of beer. 'Goto the head of the class.'

'It's not an apology,' Roger said plaintively. 'It's a fucking explanation.'

'You see it that way,' Rob answered, 'but will he) Ask yourself that. I've met that old geezer a couple of times. He'd see it in terms of the captain deserting the sinking ship ahead of the women and children, giving up the Alamo, every stereotype you can think of. No, I'll tell you what I think is going to happen, my friends.' He raised his glass and drank slowly. 'I think a valuable and all too short relationship is going to come to an end very soon now. Old man Sharp is going to listen to your proposal, he's going to shake his head, he's going to usher you out. Permanently. And the next PR firm will be chosen by his son, who will make his Pick based on which one he believes will give him the freest rein to indulge his crackpot ideas.'

'Maybe,' Roger said. 'But maybe he'll

'Maybe doesn't matter shit one way or the other,' Vic said vehemently. 'The only difference between a good advertising man and a good snake-oil salesman is that a good advertising man does the best job he can with the materials at hand ... without stepping outside the bounds of honesty. 'Rat's what this commercial is about. If he turns it down, he's turning down the best we can do. And that's the end. Toot-finny.' He snuffed his cigarette and almost knocked over Roger's half-full bottle of beer. His hands were shaking.

Rob nodded. 'I'll drink to that.' He raised his glass. 'A toast, gentlemen.'

Vic and Roger raised their own glasses.

Rob thought for a moment and then said: 'May things turn out all right, even against the odds.'

'Amen,' Roger said.

They clinked their glasses together and drank. As he downed the rest of his beer, Vic found himself thinking about Donna and Tad again.

George Meara, the mailman, lifted one leg clad in blue-gray Post Office issue and farted. just lately he farted a great deal. He was mildly worried about it. It didn't seem to matter what he had been eating. Last night he and the wife had had creamed cod on toast and he had farted. This morning. Kellog's Product 19 with a banana cut up in it - and he had farted. This noon, down at the Mellow Tiger in town, two cheeseburgers with mayonnaise ... ditto farts.

He had looked up the symptom in The Home Medical Encyclopedia, an invaluable tome in twelve volumes which his wife had gotten a volume at a time by saving her checkout slips from the Shop 'n Save in South Paris. What George Meara had discovered under the EXCESSIVE FLATULENCE heading had not been particularly encouraging. It could he a symptom of gastric upset. It could mean he had a nice Iittle ulcer incubating in there. It could be a bowel problem. It could even mean the big C. If it kept up he supposed he would go and see old Dr. Quentin. Dr. Quentin would tell him he was farting a lot because he was getting older and that was it.

Aunt Evvie Chalmers's death that late spring had hit George hard - harder than he ever would have believed - and just lately he didn't like to think about getting older. He preferred to think about the Golden Years of Retirement, years that he and Cathy would spend together. No more getting up at six thirty. No more heaving around sacks of mad and listening to that asshole Michael Fournier, who was the Castle Rock postmaster. No more freezing his balls off in the winter and going crazy with all the summer people who wanted delivery to their camps and cottages when the warm weather came. Instead, there would be a Winnebago for 'Scenic Trips Through New England.' There would be

'Puttering in the Garden.' There would be 'All Sorts of New Hobbies'. Most of all, there would be 'Rest and Relaxation'. And somehow, the thought of farting his way through his late sixties and early seventies like a defective rocket just didn't jibe with his fond picture of the Golden Years of Retirement.

He turned the small blue-and-white mad truck onto Town Road No. 3, wincing as the glare of sunlight shifted briefly across the windshield. The summer had turned out every bit as hot as Aunt Evvie had prophesied - all of that, and then some. He could hear crickets singing sleepily in the high summer grass and had a brief vision out of the Golden Years of Retirement, a scene entitled 'George Relaxes in the Back Yard Hammock'.

He stopped at the Millikens' and pushed a Zayre's advertising circular and a CMP power bill into the box. Ibis was the day all the power bills went out, but he hoped the CMP folks wouldn't hold their breath until the Millikens' check came in. The Millikens were poor white trash, like that Gary Pervier just up the road. It was nothing but a scandal to see what was happening to Pervier, a man who had once won a DSC. And old Joe Camber wasn't a hell of a lot better. They were going to the dogs, the both of them.

John Milliken was out in the side yard, repairing what looked like a harrow. George gave him a wave, and Milliken flicked one finger curtly in return before going back to his work.

Here's one for you, you welfare chiseler, George Meara thought. He lifted his leg and blew his trombone. It was a hell of a thing, this farting. You had to be pretty damn careful when you were out in company.

He drove on up the road to Gary Pervier's, produced another Zayre's circular, another power bill, and added a VFW newsletter. He tucked them into the box and then turned around in Gary's driveway, because he didn't have to drive all the way up to Camber's place today. Joe had called the post office yesterday morning around ten and had asked them to hold his mail for a few days. Mike Fournier, the big talker who was in charge of things at the Castle Rock P.O., had routinely filled out a HOLD MAIL UNTIL NOTIFIED card and flipped it over to George's station. Fournier told Joe Camber he had called just about fifteen minutes too late to stop the Monday delivery of mail, if that had been his intention.

'Don't matter,' joe had said. 'I guess I'll be around to get today's.'

When George put Gary Pervier's mail into his box, he noticed that Gary's Monday delivery - a Popular Mechanix and a charity begging letter from the Rural Scholarship Fund ~ had not been removed. Now, turning around, he noticed that Gary's big old Chrysler was in the dooryard and Joe Camber's rusting-around-theedges station wagon was parked right behind it.

'Gone off together,' he muttered aloud. 'Two fools off booting somewhere.'

He lifted his leg and farted again.

George's conclusion was that the two of them were probably off drinking and whoring, wheeling around in Joe Camber's pickup truck. It didn't occur to him to wonder why they would have taken Joe's truck when there were two much more comfortable vehicles near at hand, and he didn't notice the blood on the porch steps or the fact that there was a large hole in the lower panel of Gary's screen door.

'Two fools off hooting,' he repeated. 'At least joe Camber remembered to cancel his mail.'

He drove off the way he had come, back towards Castle Rock, lifting his leg every now and then to blow his trombone.

Steve Kemp drove out to the Dairy Queen by the Westbrook Shopping Mall for a couple of cheeseburgers and a Dilly Bar. He sat in his van, eating and looking out at Brighton Avenue, not really seeing the road or tasting the food.

He had called Handsome Hubby's office. He gave his name as Adam Swallow when the secretary asked. Said he was the marketing director for House of Lights, Inc., and would like to talk to Mr. Trenton. He had been drymouthed with excitement. And when Trenton got on the old hooter, they could find more interesting things than marketing to talk about. Like the little woman's birthmark, and what it might look like. Like how she had bitten him once when she came, hard enough to draw blood. Like how things were going for the Bitch Goddess since Handsome Hubby discovered she had a little taste for what she was on the other side of the sheets.

But things hadn't turned out that way. The secretary had said, 'I'm sorry, but both Mr. Trenton and Mr. Breakstone are out of the office this week. They'll probably be out most of the next week, as well. If I could help you -?' Her voice had a rising, hopeful inflection. She really did want to help. It was her big chance to land an account while the bosses were taking care of business in Boston or maybe New York - surely no place as exotic as LA, not a little dipshit agency like Ad Worx. So get out there and tapdance until your shoes smoke, kid.

He thanked her and told her he would ring back toward the end of the month. He hung up before she could ask for his number, since the office of the House of Lights, Inc., was in a Congress Street phone booth across from Joe's Smoke Shop.

Now here he was, eating cheeseburgers and wondering what to do next. As if you didn't know, an interior voice whispered.

He started the van up and headed for Castle Rock. By the time he finished his lunch (the Dilly Bar was practically running down the stick in the heat), he was in North Windham. He threw his trash on the floor of the van, where it joined a drift of like stuff - plastic drink containers, Big Mac boxes, returnable beer and soda bottles, empty cigarette packs. Littering was an antisocial, antienvironmentalist act, and he didn't do it.

Steve got to the Trenton house at just half past three on that hot, glaring afternoon. Acting with almost subliminal caution, he drove past the house without slowing and parked around the comer on a side street about a quarter of a mile away. He walked back.

The driveway was empty, and he felt a pang of frustrated disappointment. He would not admit to himself - especially now that it looked like she was out - that he had intended to give her a taste of what she had been so eager to have during the spring. Nevertheless, he had driven all the way from Westbrook to Castle Rock with a semi-erection that only now collapsed completely.

She was gone.

No; the car was -gone. One thing didn't necessarily prove the other, did it?

Steve looked around himself.

What we have here, ladies and gents, is a peaceful suburban street on a summer's day, most of the kiddies in for naps, most of the little wifies either doing likewise or glued to their TVs, checking out Love of Life or Search for Tomorrow. All the Handsome Hubbies are busy earning their way into higher tax brackets and very possibly a bed in the Intensive Care ward at the Eastern Maine Medical Center. Two little kids were playing hopscotch on a blurred chalk grid; they were wearing bathing suits and sweating heavily. An old balding lady was trundling a wire shopping caddy back from town as if both she and it were made of the finest bone china. She gave the kids playing hopscotch a wide berth.

In short, not much happening. The street was dozing in the heat.

Steve walked up the sloping driveway as if he had every right to be there. First he looked in the tiny one-car garage. He had never known Donna to use it, because the doorway was so narrow. If she put a dent in the car, Handsome Hubby would give her hell - no, excuse me; he would give her beck.

The garage was empty. No Pinto, no elderly jag

Donna's Handsome Hubby was into what was known as sports car menopause. She hadn't liked him saying that, but Steve had never seen a more obvious case.

Steve left the garage and went up the three steps to the back stoop. Tried the door. Found it unlocked. He went inside without knocking after another casual glance around to make sure no one was m sight.

He closed the door on the silence of the house. Once more his heart was knocking heavily in his chest, seeming to shake his whole ribcage. And once again he was not admitting things. He didn't have to admit them. They were there just the same.

'Hi! Anybody home?' His voice was loud, honest, pleasant, inquiring.

'Hi?' He was halfway down the hall now.

Obviously no one home. The house had a silent, hot, waiting feel. An empty house full of furniture was somehow creepy when it wasn't your house. You felt watched.

'Hello? Anybody home?' One last time.

Give her something to remember you by, then. And split.

He went into the living room and stood looking around. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his forearms lightly slicked with sweat. Now things could be admitted. How he had wanted to kill her when she called him a son of a bitch, her spittle spraying on his face. How he had wanted to kill her for making him feel old and scared and not able to keep on top of the situation any more. The letter had been something, but the letter hadn't been enough.

To his right, knickknacks stood on a series of glass shelves. He turned and gave the bottom shelf a sudden hard kick. It disintegrated. The frame tottered and then fell over, spraying glass, spraying little china figurines of cats and shepherds and all that happy bourgeois horseshit. A pulse throbbed in the center of his forehead. He was grimacing, unaware of the fact. He walked carefully over the unbroken figurines, crushing them into powder. He pulled a family portrait from the wall, looked curiously at the smiling face of Vic Trenton for a moment (Tad was sitting on his lap, and his arm was around Donna's waist), and then he dropped the picture to the floor and stamped down hard on the glass.

He looked around, breathing hard, as if he had just run a race. And suddenly he went after the room as if it were something alive, something that had hurt him badly and needed to be punished, as if it were the room that had caused his pain. He pushed over Vic's La-Z-Boy recliner. He upended the couch. It stood on end for a moment, rocking uneasily, and then went down with a crash, breaking the back of the coffee table which had stood in front of it*. He pulled all the books out of the bookcases, cursing the shitty taste of the people who had bought them under his breath as he did it. He picked up the magazine stand and threw it overhand at the mirror over the mantelpiece, shattering it. Big pieces of blackbacked mirror fell onto the floor like chunks of a jigsaw puzzle. He was snorting now, like a bull in heat. His thin cheeks were almost purple with color.

He went into the kitchen by way of the small dining room. As he walked past the dining-room table Donna's parents had bought them as a housewarming present, he extended his arm straight out and swept everything off onto the floor - the lazy Susan with its complement of spices, the cut-glass vase Donna had gotten for a dollar and a quarter at the Emporium Galorium in Bridgton the summer previous, Vic's graduation beer stein. The ceramic salt and pepper shakers shattered like bombs. His erection was back now, raging. Thoughts of caution, of possible discovery, had departed his mind. He was somewhere inside. He was down a dark hole. In the kitchen he yanked the bottom drawer of the stove out to its stop and threw pots and pans everywhere. They made a dreadful clatter, but there was no satisfaction in mere clatter. A rank of cupboards ran around three of the room's four sides. He pulled them open one after the other. He grabbed plates by the double handful and threw them on the floor. Crockery jingled musically. He swept the glasses out and grunted as they broke. Among them was a set of eight delicate long-stemmed wine glasses that Donna had had since she was twelve years old. She had read about 'hope chests' in some magazine or other and had determined to have such a chest of her own. As it turned out, the wine glasses were the only thing she had actually put in hers before losing interest (her original grand intention had been to lay by enough to completely furnish her bridal house or flat), but she had had them for more than half her life, and they were treasured.

The gravy boat went. The big serving platter. The Sears radioltape player went on the floor with a heavy crunch. Steve Kemp danced on it; he boogied on it. His penis, hard as stone, throbbed inside his pants. The vein in the center of his forehead throbbed in counterpoint. He discovered booze under the small chromium sink in the corner. He yanked out half- and three-quarters-full bottles by the armload and then flung them at the closed door of the kitchen closet one by one, throwing them overhand as hard as he could; the next day his right arm would be so stiff and sore he would barely be able to lift it to shoulder level. Soon the blue closet door was running with Gilbey's Pi, jack Daniel's, J & B whisky, sticky green creme de menthe, the amaretto that had been a Christmas present from Roger and Althea Breakstone. Glass twinkled benignly in the hot afternoon sunlight pouring through the windows over the sink.

Steve tore into the laundry room, where he found boxes of bleach, Spic 'n Span, Downy fabric softener in a large blue plastic bottle, Lestoil, Top job, and three kinds of powdered detergent. He ran back and forth pouring these cleaning potions everywhere. He had just emptied the last carton - when he saw the message scrawled on the noteminder in Donna's unmistakable spiky handwriting: Tad & I have gone out to

Camber's garage w/pinto. Back soon.

That brought him back to the realities of the situation with a bang. He had already been here half an hour at least, maybe longer. The time had passed in a red blur, and it was hard to peg it any more closely than that. How Iong had she been gone when he came in? Who had the note been Ieft for?

Anybody who might pop in, or someone specific? He had to get out of here ... but there was one other thing he had to do first.

He erased the message on the noteminder with one swipe of his sleeve and wrote in large block letters:

I LEFT SOMETHING UPSTAIRS FOR YOU, BABY

He took the stairs two by two and came into their bedroom, which was to the left of the second-floor landing. He felt terribly pressed now, almost positive that the doorbell was going to ring or someone - another happy housewife, most likely - would poke her head in the back door and call (as he had), Hi! Anybody home?'

But, perversely, that added the final spice of excitement to this mad happening. He unbuckled his belt, jerked his fly down, and let his jeans drop down around his knees. He wasn't wearing underpants; he rarely did. His cock stood out stiffly from a mass of reddish-gold pubic hair. It didn't take long; he was too excited. Two or three quick jerks through his closed fist and orgasm came, immediate and savage. He spat semen onto the bedspread in a convulsion.

He yanked his jeans back up, raked the zipper closed (almost catching the head of his penis in the zipper's small teeth - that would have been a laugh, all right), and ran or the door, buckling his belt again. He would meet someone as he was going out. Yes. He felt positive of it, as if it were preordained. Some happy housewife who would take one look at his flushed face, his bulging eyes, his tented jeans, and scream her head off.

He tried to prepare himself for it as he opened the back door and went out. In retrospect it seemed that he had made enough noise to wake the dead ... those pans! Why had he thrown those fucking pans around? What had he been thinking of? Everyone in the neighborhood must have heard.

But there was no one in the yard or in the driveway. The peace of the afternoon was undisturbed. Across the street, a lawn sprinkler twirled unconcernedly. A kid went by on roller skates. Straight ahead was a high hedge which separated the Trentons' house lot from the next one over. Looking to the left from the back stoop was a view of the town nestled at the bottom of the hill. Steve could see the intersection of Route 117 and High Street quite dearly, the Town Common nestled in one of the angles made by the crossing of the two roads. He stood there on the stoop, trying to get his shit back together. His breath slowed a little at a time back into a more normal inhale-exhale pattern. He found a pleasant afternoon face and put it on. All this happened in the length of time it took for the traffic light on the corner to cycle from red to amber to green and back to red again.

What if she pulls into the driveway right now?

That got him going again. He'd left his calling card; he didn't need any hassle from her on top of it. There was no way she could do a thing anyway, unless she called the cops, and he didn't think she'd do that. There were too many things he could tell: The Sex Life of the Great American Happy Housewife in Its Natural Habitat. It had been a crazy scene, though. Best to put miles between himself and CastIe Rock. Maybe later he would give her a call. Ask her how she had liked his work. That might be sort of fun.

He walked down the driveway, turned left, and went back to his van. He wasn't stopped. Nobody took any undue notice of him. A kid on roller skates zipped past him and shouted 'HW Steve hi'd him right back.

He got in the van and started it up. He drove up 117 to 302 and followed that road to its intersection with Interstate 95 in Portland. He took an Interstate time-and-toll ticket and rolled south. He had begun having uneasy thoughts about what he had done - the red rage of destruction he had gone into when he saw that no one was home. Had the retribution been too heavy for the offense? So she didn't want to make it with him any more, so what? He had trashed most of the goddamn house. Did that, maybe, say something unpleasant about where his head was at?

He began to work on these questions a Iittle at a time, the way most people do, running an objective set of facts through a bath of various chemicals which, when taken together, make up the complex human perceptual mechanism known as subjectivity. Like a schoolchild who works carefully first with the pencil, then with the eraser, then with the pencil again, he tore down what had happened and then carefully rebuilt it -redrew it in his mind - until both the facts and his perception of the facts jibed in a way he could five with.

When he reached Route 495, he turned west toward New York and the country that sprawled beyond, all the way to the silent reaches of Idaho, the place that Papa Hemingway had gone to when he was old and mortally hurt. He felt the familiar lift in his feelings that came with cutting old ties and moving on - that magical thing that Huck had called 'fighting out for the territory.' At such times he felt almost newborn, felt strongly that he was in possession of the greatest freedom of all, the freedom to recreate himself. He would have been unable to understand the significance if someone had pointed out the fact that, whether in Maine or in Idaho, he would still be apt to throw his racket down in angry frustration if he lost a game of tennis; that he would refuse to shake the hand of his opponent over the net, as he always had when he lost. He only shook over the net when he won.

He stopped for the night in a small town called Twickenham. His sleep was easy. He had convinced himself that trashing the Trentons' house had not been an act of half-mad jealous pique but a piece of revolutionary anarchy - offing a couple of fat middleclass pigs, the sort who made it easy for the fascist overlords to remain in power by blindly paying their taxes and their telephone bills. It had been an act of courage and of clean, justified fury. It was his way of saying 'power to the people', an idea he tried to incorporate in all his poems.

Still, he mused, as he turned toward sleep in the narrow motel bed, he wondered what Donna had thought of it when

she and the kid got home. That sent him to sleep with a slight smile on his lips.

By three thirty that Tuesday afternoon, Donna had given up on the mailman.

She sat with one arm lightly around Tad, who was in a dazed half sleep, his lips cruelly puffed from the heat, his face hectic and flushed. There was a tiny bit of milk left, and soon she would give it to him. During the last three and a half hours -since what would have been lunchtime at home - the sun had been monstrous and unremitting. Even with her window and Tad's window open a quarter of the way, the temperature inside must have reached 100 degrees, maybe more. It was the way your car got when you left it in the sun, that was all. Except, under normal circumstances, what you did when your car got like that was you unrolled all the windows, pulled the knobs that opened the air-ducts, and got rolling. Let's get rolling - what a sweet sound those words had!

She licked her lips.

For short periods she had unrolled the windows A the way, creating a mild draft, but she was afraid to leave them that way. She might doze off. The heat scared her - it scared her for herself and even more for Tad, what it might he taking out of him - but it didn't scare her as badly as the face of that dog, slavering foam and staring at her with its sullen red eyes.

The last time she had unrolled the windows all the way was when Cujo had disappeared into the shadows of the barn-garage. But now Cujo was back.

He sat in the lengthening shadow of the big barn, his head lowered, staring at the blue Pinto. The ground between his front paws was muddy from his slaver. Every now and then he would grow] and snap at empty air, as if he might be hallucinating.

How long? How long before he dies?

She was a rational woman. She did not believe in monsters from closets; she believed in things she could see and touch. There was nothing supernatural about the slobbering wreck of a Saint Bernard sitting in the shade of a barn; he was merely a sick animal that had been bitten by a rabid fox or skunk or something. He wasn't out to get her personally. He wasn't the Reverend Dimmesdale or Moby Dog. He was not four-footed Fate.

But. . . she had just about decided to make a run for the back door of the enclosed Camber porch when Cujo had come rolling and staggering out of the darkness of the barn.

Tad. Tad was the thing. She had to get him out of this. No more fucking around. He wasn't answering very coherently any more. He seemed to he in touch only with the peaks of reality. The glazed way his eyes rolled toward her when she spoke to him, like the eyes of a fighter who has been struck and struck and struck, a fighter who has lost his coherence along with his mouthguard and is waiting only for the final flurry of punches to drop him insensible to the canvas - those things terrified her and roused all her motherhood. Tad was the thing. If she had been alone, she would have gone for that door long ago. It was Tad who had held her back, because her mind kept circling back to the thought of the dog pulling her down, and of Tad in the car alone.

Still, until Cujo had returned fifteen minutes ago, she had been preparing herself to go for the door. She played it over and over in her mind like a home movie, did it until it seemed to one part of her mind as if it had already happened. She would shake Tad fully awake, slap him awake if she had to. Tell him he was not to leave the car and follow her - under no circumstances, no matter what happens. She would run from the car to the porch door. Try the knob. If it was unlocked, well and fine. But she was prepared for the very real possibility that it was locked. She had taken off her shirt and now sat behind the wheel in her white cotton bra, the shirt in her lap. When she went, she would go with the shirt wrapped around her hand. Far from perfect protection, but better than none at all. She would smash in the pane of glass nearest the doorknob, reach through, and let herself onto the little back porch. And if the inner door was locked, she would cope with that too. Somehow.

But Cujo had come back out, and that took away her edge.

Never mind. He'II go back in. He has before.

But will be? her mind chattered. It's all too perfect, isn't it? The Cambers are gone, and they remembered to shut off their mail like good citizens; Vic is gone, and the chances are slim that he'll call before tomorrow night, because we just Can't afford long distance every night. And if be does call, he'll call early. When he doesn't get any answer he'll assume we went out to catch some chow at Mario's or maybe a couple of ice creams at the Tastee Freeze. And he won't call later because he'll think we're asleep. He'll call tomorrow instead. Considerate Vic. Yes, it's all just too perfect Wasn't there a dog in the front of the boat in that story about the boatman on the River Charon? The boatman's dog. just call me Cujo. All out for the Valley of Death.

Go in, she silently willed the dog. Go back in the barn, damn you.

Cujo didn't move.

She licked her lips, which felt almost as puffy as Tad's looked.

She brushed his hair off his forehead and said softly, 'How you going, Tadder?'

'Shhh,' Tad muttered distractedly. 'The ducks . .

She gave him a shake. 'Tad? Honey? You okay? Talk to me!'

His eyes opened a little at a time. He looked around, a small boy who was puzzled and hot and dreadfully tired. 'Mommy? Can't we go home? I'm so hot...'

'We'll go home,' she soothed.

'When, Mom? When?' He began to cry helplessly.

Oh Tad, save your moisture, she thought. You may need it. Crazy thing to have to be thinking. But the entire situation was ridiculous to the point of lunacy, wasn't it? The idea of a small boy dying of dehydration

(stop it be is NOT dying)

less than seven miles from the nearest good-sized town was crazy.

But the situation is what it is, she reminded herself roughly. And don't you think anything else, sister. It's like a war on a miniaturized scale, so everything that looked small before looks big now. The smallest puff of air through the quarter-open windows was a zephyr. The distance to the back porch was half a mile across no-man's-land. And if you want to believe the dog is Fate, or the Ghost of Sins Remembered, or even the reincarnation of Elvis Presley, then believe it. In this curiously scaled-down situation - this life-or-death situation -even having to go to the bathroom became a skirmish.

We're going to get out of it. No dog is going to do this to my son.

'When, Mommy?' He looked up at her, his eyes wet, his face as pale as cheese.

'Soon,' she said grimly. 'Very soon.' She brushed his hair back and held him against her. She looked out Tad's window and again her eyes fixed on that* thing lying in the high grass, that old frictiontaped baseball bat.

I'd like to bash your bead in with it.

Inside the house, the phone began to ring.

She jerked her head around, suddenly wild with hope.

'Is it for us, Mommy? Is the phone for us?'

She didn't answer him. She didn't know who it was for. But, if they were lucky - and their luck was due to change soon, wasn't it? - it would be from someone with cause to be suspicious that no one was answering the phone at the Cambers'. Someone who would come out and check around.

Cujo's head had come up. His head cocked to one side, and for a moment he bore an insane resemblance to Nipper, the RCA dog with his ear to the gramophone horn. He got shakily to his feet and started toward the house and the sound of the ringing telephone.

'Maybe the doggy's going to answer the telephone,' Tad said. 'Maybe -'

With a speed and agility that was terrifying, the big dog changed direction and came at the car. The awkward stagger was gone now. as if it had been nothing but a sly act all along. It was roaring and bellowing rather than barking. Its red eyes burned. It struck the car with a hard, dull crunch and rebounded - with stunned eyes, Donna saw that the side of her door was actually bowed in a bit. It must be dead, she thought hysterically, bashed its sick brains in spinal fusion deep concussion must have - must have MUST HAVE

Cujo got back up. His muzzle was bloody. His eyes seemed wandering, vacuous again. Inside the house the phone rang on and on. The dog made as if to walk away, suddenly snapped viciously at its own flank as if stung, whirled, and sprang at Donna's window. It struck right in front of Donna's face with another tremendous dull thud. Blood sprayed across the Glass, and a long silver crack appeared. Tad shrieked and clapped his hands to his face, pulling his cheeks down, harrowing them with his fingernails.

The dog leaped again. Ropes of foam runnered back from his bleeding muzzle. She could see his teeth, heavy as old yellow ivory. His claws clicked on the glass. A cut between his eyes was streaming blood. His eyes were fixed on hers; dumb, dull eyes, but not without - she would have sworn it not without some knowledge. Some malign knowledge.

'Get out of here!' she screamed at it.

Cujo threw himself against the side of the car below her window again. And again. And again. Now her door was badly dented inward. Each time the dog's two-hundred-pound bulk struck the Pinto, it rocked on its springs. Each time she heard that heavy, toneless thud, she felt sure it must have killed itself, at least knocked itself unconscious. And each time it trotted back toward the house, whirled and charged the car again. Cujo's face was a mask of blood and matted fur from which his eyes, once a kind, mild brown, peered with stupid fury.

She looked at Tad and saw that he had gone into a shock reaction, curling himself up into a tight, fetal ball in his bucket seat, his hands laced together at the nape of his neck, his chest hitching.

Maybe that's best. Maybe

Inside the house the phone stopped ringing. Cujo, in the act of whirling around for another charge, paused. He cocked his head again in that curious, evocative gesture. Donna held her breath. The silence seemed very big. Cujo sat down, raised his horribly mangled nose toward the sky, and howled once such a dark and lonesome sound and she shivered, no longer hot but as cold as a crypt. In that instant she knew - she did not feel or just think - she knew that the dog was something more than just a dog.

The moment passed. Cujo got to his feet, very slowly and wearily, and walked around to the front of the Pinto. She supposed he had lain down there - she could no longer see his tail. Nevertheless she held herself tensed for a few moments longer, mentally ready in case the dog should spring up onto the hood as it had done before. It hadn't. There was nothing but silence.

She gathered Tad into her arms and began to croon to him.

When Brett had at last given up and come out of the telephone booth, Charity took his hand and led him into Caldor's coffee shop. They had come to Caldor's to look at matching tablecloths and curtains.

Holly was waiting for them, sipping the last of an ice-cream soda. 'Nothing wrong, is there?' she asked.

'Nothing too serious,' Charity said, and ruffled his hair. 'He's worried about his dog. Aren't you, Brett?'

Brett shrugged - nodded miserably.

'You go on ahead, if you want,' Charity said to her. 'We'll catch up.'

'All right. I'll be downstairs.'

Holly finished her soda and said, 'I bet your pooch is just fine, Brett.'

Brett smiled at her as best he could but didn't reply. They watched Holly walk away, smart in her dark burgundy dress and cork-soled sandals, smart in a way Charity knew she would never be able to duplicate. Maybe once, but not now. Holly had left her two with a sitter, and they had come into Bridgeport around noon. Holly had bought them a nice lunch paying with a Diners Club card - and since then they had been shopping. But Brett had been quiet and withdrawn, worrying about Cujo. Charity didn't feel much like shopping herself; it was hot, and she was still a little unnerved by Brett's sleepwalking that morning. Finally she had suggested that he try calling home from one of the booths around the corner from the snack bar ... but the results had been precisely those of which she had been afraid.

The waitress came. Charity ordered coffee, milk, and two Danish pastries.

'Brett,' she said 'when I told your father I wanted us to go on this trip, he was against it'

'Yeah, I figured that.'

'- and then he changed his mind. He changed it all at once. I think that maybe ... maybe he saw it as a chance for a little vacation of his own. Sometimes men like, to go off by themselves, you know, and do things

'Like hunting?'

(and whoring and drinking and God alone knows what else or why)

'Yes, like that.'

'And movies,' Brett said. Their snacks came, and he began munching his Danish.

(yes the X-rated kind on Washington Street they call it the Combat Zone)

'Could be. Anyway, your father might have taken a couple of days to go to Boston ~~

'Oh, I don't think so,' Brett said earnestly. 'He had a lot of work. A lot of work. He told me so.'

'There might not have been as much as he thought,' she said, hoping that the cynicism she felt hadn't rubbed through into her voice. 'Anyway, that's what I think he did, and that's why he didn't answer the phone yesterday or today. Drink your milk, Brett. It builds up your bones.'

He drank half his milk and grew an old man's mustache. He set the glass down. 'Maybe he did. He could have got Gary to go with him, maybe. He likes Gary a lot.'

'Yes, maybe he did get Gary to go with him,' Charity said. She spoke as if this idea had never occurred to her, but in fact she had called Gary's house this morning while Brett had been out in the back yard, playing with Jim Junior. There had been no answer. She hadn't a doubt in the world that they were together, wherever they were. 'You haven't eaten much of that Danish.'

He picked it up, took a token bite, and put it down ' again. 'Mom, I think Cujo was sick. He looked sick when I saw him yesterday morning. Honest to God.'

'Brett -'

'He did, Mom. You didn't see him. He looked ... well, gross.'

'If you knew Cujo was all right, would it set your mind at rest?'

Brett nodded.

'Then we'll call Alva Thornton down on the Maple Sugar tonight,' she said. 'Have him go up and check, okay? My guess is your father already called him and asked him to feed Cujo while he's gone.'

'Do you really think so?'

'Yes, I do.' Alva or someone like Alva; not really Joe's friends, because to the best of her knowledge Gary was the only real friend Joe had, but men who would do a favor for a favor in return at some future time.

Brett's expression cleared magically. Once again the grownup had produced the right answer, like a rabbit from a hat. Instead of cheering her, it turned her momentarily glum. What was she going to tell him if she called Alva and he said he hadn't seen Joe since mud season? Well, she would cross that bridge if she came to it, but she continued to believe that Joe wouldn't have just left Cujo to shift for himself. It wasn't like him.

'Want to go and find your aunt now?'

'Sure. just lemme finish this.'

She watched, half amused and half appalled, as he gobbled the rest of the Danish in three great bites and chased it with the rest of the milk. Then he pushed his chair back.

Charity paid the check and they went out to the down escalator.

'Jeez, this sure is a big store,' Brett said wonderingly. 'It's a big city, isn't it, Mom?'

'New York makes this look like Castle Rock,' she said. 'And don't say jeez, Brett, it's the same as swearing.'

'Okay.' He held the moving railing, looking around. To the right of them was a maze of twittering chirruping parakeets. To the left was the housewares department, with chrome glittering everywhere and a dishwasher that had a front made entirely of glass so you could check out its sudsing action. He looked up at his mother as they got off the escalator. 'You two grew up together, huh?'

'Hope to tell you,' Charity said, smiling.

'She's real nice,' Brett said.

'Well, I'm glad you think so. I was always partial to her myself.'

'How did she get so rich?'

Charity stopped. 'Is that what you think Holly and jim are? Rich?'

'That house they live in didn't come cheap,' he said, and again she could see his father peeking around the corners of his unformed face, Joe Camber with his shapeless green hat tipped far back on his head, his eyes, too wise, shifted off to one side. 'And that jukebox. That was dear, too. She's got a whole wallet of those credit cards and all we've got is the Texaco -'

She rounded on him. 'You think it's smart to go peeking into people's wallets when they've just bought you a nice lunch?'

His face looked hurt and surprised, then it closed up and became smooth. That was a Joe Camber trick too. 'I just noticed. Would have been hard not to, the way she was showing them off -'

'She was not showing them off!' Charity said, shocked. She stopped again. They had reached the edge of the drapery department.

'Yeah, she was,' Brett said. 'lf they'd been an accordion, she would have been playing "Lady of Spain.-

She was suddenly furious with him ~ partly because she suspected he might be right.

'She wanted you to see all of them,' Brett said. 'That's what I think.'

'I'm not particularly interested in what you think on the subject, Brett Camber.' Her face felt hot. Her hands itched to strike him. A few moments ago, in the cafeteria, she had been loving him ... just as important, she had felt Iike his friend. Where had those good feelings gone?

'I just wondered how she got so much dough.'

'That's sort of a crude word to use for it, don't you think?'

He shrugged, openly antagonistic now, provoking her purposely, she suspected. It went back to his perception of what had happened at lunch, but it went further back than that. He was contrasting his own way of life and his father's way of fife with another one. Had she thought he would automatically embrace the way that her sister and her husband lived, just because Charity wanted him to embrace it - a life-style that she herself had been denied, either by bad luck, her own stupidity, or both? Had he no right to criticize ... or analyze?

Yes, she acknowledged that he did, but she hadn't expected that his observation would be so unsettlingly (if intuitively) sophisticated, so accurate, or so depressingly negative.

'I suppose it was Jim who made the money,' she said. 'You know what he does -'

'Yeah, he's a pencil-pusher.'

But this time she refused to be drawn.

'If you want to see it that way. Holly married him when he was in college at the University of Maine in Portland, studying pre-law. While he was in law school in Denver, she worked a lot of crummy jobs to see that he got through. It's often done that way. Wives work so their husbands can go to school and learn some special skill. . . .'

She was searching for Holly with her eyes, and finally thought she saw the top of her younger sister's head several aisles to the left.

'Anyway, when Jim finally got out of school, he and Holly came back east and he went to work in Bridgeport with a big firm of lawyers. He didn't make much money then. They lived in a thirdfloor apartment with no air conditioning in the summer and not much heat in the winter. But he's worked his way up. and now he's what's called a junior partner. And I suppose he does make a lot of money, by our standards.'

'Maybe she shows her credit cards around because sometimes she still feels poor inside,' Brett said.

She was struck by the almost eerie perceptiveness of that, as well. She ruffled his hair gently, no longer angry at him. 'You did say you liked her.'

'Yeah, I do. There she is, right over there.'

'I see her.'

They went over and joined Holly, who already had an armload of curtains and was now prospecting for tablecloths.

The sun had finally gone down behind the house.

Little by little, the oven that was inside the Trentons' Pinto began to cool off. A more-or-less steady breeze sprang up, and Tad turned his face into it gratefully. He felt better, at least for the time being, than he had all day. In fact, all the rest of the day before now seemed like a terribly bad dream, one he could only partly remember. At times he had gone away; had simply left the car and gone away. He could remember that. He had gone on a horse. He and the horse had ridden down a long field, and there were rabbits playing there, 'lust like in that cartoon his mommy and daddy had taken him to see at the Magic Lantern Theater in Bridgton. There was a pond at the end of the field, and ducks in the pond. The ducks were friendly. Tad played with them. It was better there than with Mommy, because the monster was where Mommy was, the monster that had gotten out of his closet. The monster was not in the place where the ducks were. Tad liked it there, although he knew in a vague way that if he stayed in that place too long, he might forget how to get back to the car.

'Men the sun had gone behind the house. There were cool shadows, almost thick enough to have a texture, like velvet. The monster had stopped trying to get them. The mailman hadn't come, but at least now he was able to rest comfortably. The worst thing was being so thirsty. Never in his life had he wanted a drink so much. That was what made the place where the ducks were so nice - it was a wet, green place.

'What did you say, honey?' Mommy's face bending down over him.

'Thirsty,' he said in a frog's croak. 'I'm so thirsty, Mommy.' He remembered that he used to say 'firsty' instead of 'thirsty.' But some of the kids at daycamp had laughed at him and called him a baby, the same way they laughed at Randy Hofnager for saying 'brefkust' when he meant 'breakfast'. So he began to say it right, scolding himself fiercely inside whenever he forgot.

'Yes, I know. Mommy's thirsty coo.'

'I bet there's water in that house.'

'Honey, we can't go into the house. Not just yet. The bad dog's in front of the car.'

'Where?' Tad got up on his knees and was surprised at the lightness that ran lazily through his head, like a slowbreaking wave. He put a hand on the dashboard to support himself, and the hand seemed on the end of an arm that was a mile long. 'I don't see him.' Even his voice was distant, echoey.

'Sit back down, Tad. You're...'

She was still talking, and he could feel her sitting him back into the scat, but it was all distant. The words were coming to him over a long gray distance; it was foggy between him and her, as it had been foggy this morning ... or yesterday morning ... or on whatever morning it had been when his daddy left to go on his trip. But there was a bright place up ahead, so he left his mother to go to it. It was the duck place.

Ducks and a pool and lilypads. Mommy's voice became a faraway drone. Her beautiful face, so large, always there, so calm, so like the moon that sometimes looked in his window when he awoke late at night having to go peepee ... that face became gray and lost definition. It melted into the gray mist. Her voice became the lazy sound of bees which were far too nice to sting, and lapping water.

Tad played with the ducks.

Donna dozed off, and when she woke up again all the shadows had blended with one another and the last of the light in the Camber driveway was the color of ashes. It was dusk. Somehow it had gotten around to dusk again and they were - unbelievably - still here. The sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked to her like a basketball that had been dipped in blood. She moved her tongue around in her mouth. Saliva that had dotted into a thick gum broke apart reluctantly and became more or less ordinary spit again. Her throat felt like a flannel. She thought how wonderful it would be to lie under the garden faucet at home, turn the spigot on full, open her mouth, and just let the icy water cascade in. The image was powerful enough to make her shiver and break out in a skitter of gooseflesh, powerful enough to make her head ache.

Was the dog still in front of the car?

She looked, but of course there was no real way of telling. All she could see for sure vas that it wasn't in front of the barn.

She tapped the horn, but it only produced a rusty hoot and nothing changed. He could be anywhere. She ran her finger along the silver crack in her window and wondered what would happen if the dog hit the glass a few more times. Could it break through? She wouldn't have believed so twenty-four hours before, but now she wasn't so sure.

She looked at the door leading to Cambers' porch again. It seemed father away than it had before. That made her think of a concept they had discussed in a college psychology course. Idee fixe, the instructor, a prissy little man with a toothbrush mustache, had called it. If you get on a down escalator that isn't moving, you'll suddenly find it very hard to walk. That had amused her so much that she had eventually found a down escalator in Bloomingdale's that was marked OUT OF ORDER and had walked down it. She had found to her further amusement that the prissy Iittle associate professor was right -your legs just didn't want to move. That had led her to try and imagine what would happen to your head if the stairs in your house suddenly started to move as you were walking down them. The very idea had made her laugh out loud.

But it wasn't so funny now. As a matter of fact, it wasn't funny at all.

That porch door definitely looked farther away.

The dog's psyching me out.

She tried to reject the thought as soon as it occurred to her, and then stopped trying. Things had become too desperate now to indulge in the luxury of lying to herself. Knowingly or unknowingly, Cujo was psyching her out. Using, perhaps, her own idee fixe of how the world was supposed to be. But things had changed. The smooth escalator ride was over. She could not just continue to stand on the still steps with her son and wait for somebody to start the motor again. The fact was, she and Tad were under siege by dog.

Tad was sleeping. If the dog was in the barn, she could make it now.

But if it's still in front of the car? Or under it?

She remembered something her father used to say sometimes when he was watching the pro football games on TV. Her dad almost always got tanked for these occasions, and usually ate a large plate of cold beans left over from Saturday-night supper. As a result, the TV room was uninhabitable for normal earth fife by the fourth quarter; even the dog would slink out, an uneasy deserter's grin on its face.

This saying of her father's was reserved for particularly fine tackles and intercepted passes. 'He laid back in the tall bushes on that one!' her father would cry. It drove her mother crazy ... but by the time Donna was a teenager, almost everything about her father drove her mother crazy.

She now had a vision of Cujo in front of the Pinto, not sleeping at all but crouched on the gravel with his back legs coiled under him, his blood shot eyes fixed intently on the spot where she would first appear if she left the car on the driver's side. He was waiting for her, hoping she would be foolish enough to get out. He was laying back in the tall bushes for her.

She rubbed both hands over her face in a quick and nervous washing gesture. Overhead, Venus now peeked out of the darkening blue. The sun had made its, exit, leaving a still but somehow crazed yellow light over the fields. Somewhere a bird sang, stopped, then sang again.

It came to her that she was nowhere near as anxious to leave the car and run for the door as she had been that afternoon. Part of it was having dozed off and then wakened not knowing exactly where the dog was. Part of it was the simple fact that the heat was drawing back - the tormenting beat and what it was doing to Tad had been the biggest thing goading her to make a move. It was quite comfortable in the car now, and Tad's half-lidded, halfswooning state had become a real sleep. He was resting comfortably, at least for the time being.

But she was afraid those things were secondary to the main reason she was still here - that, little by little, some psychological point of readiness had been reached and passed. She remembered from her childhood diving lessons at Camp Tapawingo that there came an instant, that first time on the high board, when you either had to try it or retreat ignominiously to let the girl behind you have her crack at it. There came a day during the learning-to-drive experience when you finally had to leave the empty country roads behind and try it in the city. There came a time. Always there came a time. A time to dive, a time to drive, a time to try for the back door.

Sooner or later the dog would show itself. The situation was bad, granted, but not yet desperate. The right time came around in cycles - that was not anything she had been taught in a psychology class; it was something she knew instinctively. If you chickened down from the high board on Monday, there was no law that said you couldn't go right back again on Tuesday. You could

Reluctantly, her mind told her that was a deadly-false bit of reasoning.

She was not as strong tonight as she had been last night. She would be even weaker and more dehydrated tomorrow morning. And that was not the worst of it. She had been sitting almost all the time for - how long? - it didn't seem possible, but it was now some twentyeight hours. What if she was too stiff to do it? What if she got halfway to the porch only to be doubled up and then dropped flopping to the ground by charley horses in the big muscles of her thighs?

In matters of life and death, her mind told her implacably, the right time only comes around once - once and then it's gone.

Her breathing and heart rate had speeded up. Her body was aware she was going to make the try before her mind was. Then she was wrapping her shirt more firmly about her right hand, her left hand was settling on the doorhandle, and she knew. There had been no conscious decision she was aware of; suddenly she was simply going. She was going now, while Tad slept deeply and there was no danger he would bolt out after her.

She pulled the doorhandle up, her hand sweat-slick. She was holding her breath, listening for any change in the world.

The bird sang again. That was all.

If he's basked the door too far out of shape it won't even Open, she thought. That would be a kind of bitter relief. She could sit back then, rethink her options, see if there was anything she had left out of her calculations ... and get a little thirstier ... a little weaker ... a little slower....

She brought pressure to bear against the door, slugging her left shoulder against it, gradually settling more and more of her weight upon it. Her right hand was sweating inside the cotton shirt. Her fist was so tightly clenched that the fingers ached. Dimly, she could feel the crescents of her nails biting into her palm. Over and over in her mind's eye she saw herself punching through the glass beside the knob of the porch door, beard the tinkle of the shards striking the boards inside, saw herself reaching for the handle ...

But the car door wasn't opening. She shoved as hard as she could, straining, the cords in her neck standing out. But it wasn't opening. It

Then it did open, all of a sudden. It swung wide with a terrible clunking sound, almost spilling her out on all fours. She grabbed for the doorhandle, missed, and grabbed again. She held the handle, and suddenly a panicky certainty stole into her mind. It was as cold and numbing as a doctor's verdict of inoperable cancer. She had gotten the door open. but it wouldn't close again. The dog was going to leap in and kill them both. Tad would have perhaps one confused moment of waking, one last merciful instant in which to believe it was a dream, before Cujo's teeth ripped his throat open.

Her breath rattled in and out, quick and quick. It felt like hot straw. It seemed that she could see each and every piece of gravel in the driveway, but it was hard to think. Her thoughts tumbled wildly. Scenes out of her past zipped through the foreground of her mind like a film of a parade which had been speeded up until the marching bands and horseback riders and baton twirlers seemed to be fleeing the scene of some weird crime.

The garbage disposal regurgitating a nasty

green mess all over the kitchen ceiling, backing

up through the bar sink.

Failing off the back porch when she was five and breaking her wrist.

Looking down at herself during period 2 - algebra - one day when she was a high school freshman and seeing to her utter shame and horror that there were spots of blood on her light blue linen skirt, she had started her period, how was she elver going to get up from her seat when the bell rang without everybody seeing, without everyone knowing that DonnaRose was having her period?

The first boy she had ever kissed with her mouth open. Dwight Sampson.

Holding Tad in her arms, newborn, then the nurse taking him away; she wanted to tell the nurse not to do that - Give him back, I'm not done with him, those were the words that had come to mind - but she was too weak to talk and then the horrible, squelching, gutty sound of the afterbirth coming out of her; she remembered thinking I'm puking up his life-support systems, and then she had passed out.

Her father, crying at her wedding and then getting drunk at the reception.

Faces. Voices. Rooms. Scenes. Books. The terror of this moment, thinking I AM GOING TO DIE -

With a tremendous effort, she got herself under some kind of control. She got the Pinto's doorhandle in both hands and gave it a tremendous yank. The door flew shut. There was that clunk again as the hinge Cujo had knocked out of true protested. There was a hefty bang when the door slammed dosed that made Tad jump and then mutter a bit in his sleep.

Donna leaned back in the seat, shaking helplessly all over, and cried silently. Hot tears slipped out from under her lids and ran back on a slant toward her cars. She had never in her fife been so afraid of anything, not even in her room at night when she was little and it had seemed to her that there were spiders everywhere. She couldn't go now, she assured herself. It was unthinkable. She was totally done up. Her nerves were shot. Better to wait, wait for a better chance....

But she didn't dare let that idee become fixe.

There wasn't going to be abetter chance than this one. Tad was out of it, and the dog was out of it too. It had to be true; A logic declared it to be true. That first loud clunk, then another one when she pulled the door to, and the slam of the door actually shutting again. It would have brought him on the run if he had been in front of the car. He might be in the barn, but she believed he would have heard the noise in there, as well.

He had almost surely gone wandering off somewhere. There was never going to be a better chance than right now, and if she was too scared to do it for herself, she musn't be too scared to do it for Tad.

All suitably noble. But what finally persuaded her was a vision of letting herself into the Cambers' darkened house, the reassuring feel of the telephone in her hand. She could hear herself talking to one of Sheriff Bannerman's deputies, quite calmly and rationally, and then putting the phone down. Then going into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.

She opened the door again, prepared for the clunking sound this time but still wincing when it came. She cursed the dog in her heart, hoping it was already lying someplace dead of a convulsion, and fly-blown.

She swung her legs out, wincing at the stiffness and the pain. She put her tennis shoes on the gravel. And little by little she stood up under the darkling sky.

The bird sang somewhere nearby: it sang three notes and was still.

Cujo heard the door open again, as instinct had told him it would. The first: time it opened he had almost come around from the front of the car where he had been lying in a semi-stupor. He had almost come around to get THE WOMAN who had caused this dreadful pain in his head and in his body. He had almost come around, but that instinct had commanded him to lie still instead. THE WOMAN was only trying to draw him out, the instinct counseled, and this had proved to be true.

As the sickness had tightened down on him, sinking into his nervous system like a ravenous grassfire, all dove-gray smoke and low rose-colored flame, as it continued to go about its work of destroying his established patterns of thought and behaviour, it had somehow deepened his cunning. He was sure to get THE WOMAN and THE Boy. They had caused his pain -both the agony in his body and the terrible hurt in his head which had come from leaping against the car again and again.

Twice today he had forgotten about THE WOMAN and THE BOY, leaving the barn by the dog bolthole that Joe Camber had cut in the door of the back room where he kept his accounts. He had gone down to the marsh at the back of the Camber property, both times passing quite close to the overgrown entrance to the limestone cave where the bats roosted. There was water in the marsh and he was horribly thirsty, but the actual sight of the water had driven him into a frenzy both times. He wanted to drink the water; kill the water; bathe in the water; piss and shit in the water; cover it over with dirt; savage it; make it bleed. Both times this terrible confusion of feelings had driven him away, whining and trembling. THE WOMAN and THE Boy had made all this happen. And he would leave them no more. No human who had ever lived would have found a dog more faithful or more set in his purpose. He would wait until he could get at them. If necessary he would wait until the world ended. He would wait. He would stand a watch.

It was THE WOMAN most of all. The way she looked at him, as if to say, Yes, yes, I did it, I made you sick, I made you hurt, I devised this agony just for you and it will be with you always now.

Oh kill her, kill her!

A sound came. It was a soft sound, but it did not escape Cujo; his ears were preternaturally attuned to all sounds now. The entire spectrum of the aural world was his. He beard the chimes of heaven and the hoarse screams which uprose from hell. In his madness he heard the real and the unreal.

It was the soft sound of small stones slipping and grinding against each other.

Cujo screwed his hindquarters down against the ground and waited for her. Urine, warm and painful, ran out of him unheeded. He waited for THE WOMAN to show herself. When she did, he would kill her.

In the downstairs wreckage of the Trenton house, the telephone began to ring.

It burred six times, eight times, ten. Then it was silent. Shortly after, the Trentons' copy of the Castle Rock Call thumped against the front door and Billy Freeman pedaled on up the street on his Raleigh with his canvas sack over his shoulder, whistling.

In Tad's room, the closet door stood open, and an unspeakable dry smell, lionlike and savage, hung in the air.

In Boston, an operator asked Vic Trenton if he would like her to keep trying. 'No, that's okay, operator,' he said, and hung up.

Roger had found the Red Sox playing Kansas City on Channel 38 and was sitting on the sofa in his skivvies with a room-service sandwich and a glass of milk, watching the warmups.

'Of all your habits,' Vic said, 'most of which range from the actively offensive to the mildly disgusting, I think that eating in your underpants is probably the worst.'

'Listen to this guy,' Roger said mildly to the empty room at large. 'He's thirty-two years old and he still calls underwear shorts underpants.'

'What's wrong with that?'

'Nothing ... if you're still one of the Owl Tent at summer camp.'

'I'm going to cut your throat tonight, Rog,' Vic said, smiling happily. 'You'll wake up strangling in your own blood. You'll be sorry, but it will be ... too late!' He picked up half of Roger's hot pastrami sandwich and wounded it grieviously.

'That's pretty fucking unsanitary,' Roger said, brushing crumbs from his bare, hairy chest. 'Donna wasn't home, huh?' 'Uh-uh. She and Tad probably went down to the Tastee Freeze to catch a couple of burgers or something. I wish to God I was there instead of Boston.'

'Oh, just think,' Roger said, grinning maliciously, 'we'll be in the Apple tomorrow night. Having cocktails under the clock at the Biltmore . . .`

'Fuck the Biltmore and fuck the clock,' Vic said. 'Anyone who spends a week away from Maine on business in Boston and New York - and during the summertime - has got to he crazy.'

'Yeah, I'll buy that,' Roger said. On the TV screen, Bob Stanley popped a good curve over the outside comer to start the game. 'It is rawtha shitteh.'

'That's a pretty good sandwich, Roger,' Vic said, smiling winningly at his partner.

Roger grabbed up the plate and held it to his chest. 'Call down for your own, you damn mooch.'

'What's the number?'

'Six-eight-one, I think. It's on the dial there.'

'Don't you want some beer with that?' Vic asked, going to the phone again.

Roger shook his head. 'I had too much at lunch. My head's bad, my stomach's bad, and by tomorrow morning I'll probably have the Hershey-squirts. I'm rapidly discovering the truth, goodbuddy. I'm no kid any more.'

Vic called down for a hot pastrami on rye and two bottles of Tuborg. When he hung up and looked back at Roger, Roger was sitting with his eyes fixed on the TV. His sandwich plate was balanced on his considerable belly and he was crying. At first Vic thought he hadn't seen right; it was some sort of optical illusion. But no, those were tears. The color TV reflected off them in prisms of light.

For a moment Vic stood there, unable to decide if he should go over to Roger or go over the other side of the room and pick up the newspaper, pretending he hadn't seen. Then Roger looked over at him, his face working and utterly naked, as defenseless and as vulnerable as Tad's face when he fell off the swing and scraped his knees or took a tumble on the sidewalk.

'What am I going to do, Vic?' he asked hoarsely.

'Rog, what are you talk -

'You know what I'm talking about,' he said. The crowd at

Fenway cheered as Boston turned a double play to end the top of the first.

'Take it easy, Roger. You

'This is going to fall through and we both know it,' Roger said. 'It smells as bad as a carton of eggs that's been sitting all week in the sun. This is some nice little game we're playing. We've got Rob Martin on our side. We've got that refugee from the Home for Old Actors on our side. Undoubtedly we'll have Summers Marketing & Research on our side, since they bill us. How wonderful. We've got everybody on our side but the people who matter.'

'Nothing's decided, Rog. Not yet.'

'Althea doesn't really understand how much is at stake,' Roger said. 'My fault; okay, so I'm a chicken, duck-duck. But she loves it in Bridgton, Vic. She loves it there. And the girls, they've got their school friends ... and the lake in the summer ... they don't know what the fuck's coming down at all.'

'Yeah, it's scary. I'm not trying to talk you out of that, Rog.'

'Does Donna know how bad it is?'

'I think she just thought it was an awfully good joke on us at first But she's getting the drift of it now.'

'But she never took to Maine the way the rest of us did.'

'Not at first, maybe. I think she'd raise her hands in horror at the idea of taking Tad back to New York now.'

'What am I going to do?' Roger asked again. 'I'm no kid any more. You're thirty-two, but Vic, I'm going to be forty-one next month. What am I supposed to do? Start Liking my resume around? Is J. Walter Thompson going to welcome me in with open arms? "Hi, Rog-baby, I've been holding your old spot for you. You start at thirty-five-five." Is that what he's going to say?'

Vic only shook his head, but a part of him was a little irritated with Roger.

'I used to be just mad. Well, I'm still mad, but now I'm more scared than anything else. I lie in bed at night and try to imagine how it's going to be - after. What it's going to be. I can't imagine it. You look at me and you say to yourself, "Roger's dramatizing." You -'

'I never thought any such thing,' Vic said, hoping he didn't sound guilty.

'I won't say you're lying,' Roger said, 'but I've been working with you long enough to have a pretty good idea of how you think. Better than you might know. Anyway I wouldn't blame you for the thought -but there's a big difference between thirty-two and fortyone, Vic. They kick a lot of the guts out of you in between thirtytwo and forty-one.'

'Look, I still think we've got a fighting chance with this proposal -'

'What I'd Iike to do is bring about two dozen boxes of Red Razberry Zingers along with us to Cleveland,' Roger said, 'and then get them to bend over after they tie the can to our tails. I'd have a place for all that cereal, you know it?'

Vic clapped Roger on the shoulder. 'Yeah, I get you.'

'What are you going to do if they pull the account?' Roger asked.

Vic had thought about that. He had been around it from every possible angle. It would have been fair to say that he had gotten to the problem quite a while before Roger had been able to make himself approach it.

'If they pull out, I'm going to work harder than I ever have in my life,' Vic said. 'Thirty hours a day, if I have to. If I have to rope in sixty small New England accounts to make up for what Sharp billed, then I'll do it.'

'We'll kill ourselves for nothing.'

'Maybe,' Vic said. 'But we'll go down with all guns firing. Right?'

'I figure,' Roger said unsteadily, 'that if Althea goes to work, we can hold on to the house for about a year. That ought to be just about enough time to sell it, the way interest rates are.'

Suddenly Vic felt it trembling right behind his lips: the whole shitty black mess that Donna had managed to get herself into because of her need to keep pretending that she

believed it - how still the night must be! How calm!

She felt very alive.

Her heart was a small, powerful machine flexing in her chest. Her blood was up. Her eyes seemed to move effortlessly and perfectly in their bed of moisture. Her kidneys were heavy but not unpleasantly so. This was it; this was for keeps. The thought that it was her life she was putting on the line, her very own real life, had a heavy, silent fascination, like a great weight which has reached the outermost degree of its angle of repose. She swung the car door shut - clunk.

She waited, scenting the air like an animal. There was nothing. The maw of Joe Camber's barn-garage was dark and silent. The chrome of the Pinto's front bumper twinkled dimly. Faintly, the Dixieland music played on, fast and brassy and cheerful. She bent down, expecting her knees to pop, but they didn't. She picked up a handful of the loose gravel. One by one she began to toss the stones over the Pinto's hood at the place she couldn't see.

The first small stone landed in front of Cujo's nose, clicked off more stones, and then lay still. Cujo twitched a little. His tongue hung out. He seemed to be grinning. The second stone struck beyond him. The third struck his shoulder. He didn't move. THE WOMAN was still trying to draw him out.

Donna stood by the car, frowning. She had heard the first stone click off the gravel, also the second. But the third ... it was as if it had never come down. There had been no minor click. What did that mean?

Suddenly she didn't want to run for the porch door until she could see that there was nothing lurking in front of the car. Then, yes. Okay. But ... just to make sure.

She took one step. Two. Three.

Cujo got ready. His eyes glowed in the darkness.

Four steps from the door of the car. Her heart was a drum in her chest.

Now Cujo could see THE WOMAN's hip and thigh. In a moment she would see him. Good. He wanted her to see him.

Five steps from the door.

Donna turned her head. Her neck creaked like the spring on an old screen door. She felt a premonition, a sense of low sureness. She turned her head, looking for Cujo. Cujo was there. He had been there all the time, crouched low, hiding from her, waiting for her, laying back in the tall bushes.

Their eyes locked for a moment - Donna's wide blue ones, Cujo's muddy red ones. For a moment she was looking out of his eyes, seeing herself, seeing THE WOMAN - was he seeing himself through hers?

Then he sprang at her.

There was no paralysis this time. She threw herself backward, fumbling behind her for the doorhandle. He was snarling and grinning, and the drool ran out between his teeth in thick strings. He landed where she had been and skidded stiff-legged in the gravel, giving her a precious extra second.

Her thumb found the door button below the handle and depressed it. She pulled. The door was stuck. The door wouldn't open. Cujo leaped at her.

It was as if someone had slung a medicine ball right into the soft, vulnerable flesh of her breasts. She could feel them push out toward her ribs - it hurt - and then she had the dog by the throat, her fingers sinking into its heavy, rough fur, trying to hold it away from her. She could hear the quickening sob of her respiration. Starlight ran across Cujo's mad eyes in dull semicircles. His teeth were snapping only inches from her face and she could smell a dead world on his breath, terminal sickness, senseless murder. She thought crazily of the drain backing up just before her mother's party, spurting green goo all over the ceiling.

Somehow, using all her strength, she was able to fling him away when his back feet left the ground in another lunge at her throat. She beat helplessly behind her for the door button. She found it, but before she could even push it in. Cujo came again. She kicked out at him, and the sole of her sandal struck his muzzle, already badly lacerated in his earlier kamikaze charges at the door. The dog sprawled back on his haunches, howling out his pain and his fury.

She found the button set in the doorhandle again, knowing perfectly well that it was her last chance, Tad's last chance. She pushed it in and pulled with all her might as the dog came again, some creature from hell that would come and come and come until she was dead or it was. It was the wrong angle for her arm; her muscles were working at cross-purposes, and she felt an agonizing flare of pain in her back above her right shoulderblade as something sprained. But the door opened. She had just time to fall back into the bucket seat, and then the dog was on her again.

Tad woke up. He saw his mother being driven back toward the Pinto's center console; there was something in his mother's lap, some terrible, hairy thing with red eyes and he knew what it was, oh yes, it was the thing from his closet, the thing that had promised to come a little closer and a little closer until it finally arrived right by your bed, Tad, and yes, here it was, all right, here it was. The Monster Words had failed; the monster was here, now, and it was murdering his mommy. He began to scream, his hands clapped over his eyes.

Its snapping jaws were inches from the bare flesh of her midriff. She held it off as best she could, only faintly aware of her son's screams behind her. Cujo's eyes were locked on her. Incredibly, his tail was wagging. His back legs worked at the gravel, trying to get a footing solid enough to allow him to jump right in, but the gravel kept splurting out from under his driving rear paws.

He lunged forward, her hands slipped, and suddenly he was biting her, biting her bare stomach just below the white cotton cups of her bra, digging for her entrails

Donna uttered a low, feral cry of pain and shoved with both hands as hard as she could. Now she was sitting up again, blood trickling down to the waistband of her pants. She held Cujo with her left hand. Her right hand groped for the Pinto's doorhandle and found it. She began to slam the door against the dog. Each time she swept it forward into Cujo's ribs, there was a heavy whopping sound, like a heavy rug beater striking a carpet hung over a clothesline. Each time the door hit him, Cujo would grunt, snorting his warm, foggy breath over her.

He drew back a little to spring. She timed it and brought the door toward her again, using all of her failing strength. This time the door closed on his neck and head, and she heard a crunching sound. Cujo howled his pain and she thought, He must draw back now, he must, he MUST, but Cujo drove forward instead and his jaws closed on her lower thigh, just above her knee, and with one quick ripping motion he pulled a chunk out of her. Donna shrieked.

She slammed the door on Cujo's head again and again, her screams melting into Tad's, melting into a gray shockworld as Cujo worked on her leg, turning it into something else, something that was red and muddy and churned up. The dog's head was plastered with thick, sticky blood, as black as insect blood in the chancey starlight. Little by little he was forcing his way in again; her strength was on the ebb now.

She pulled the door to one final time, her head thrown back, her mouth drawn open in a quivering circle, her face a livid, moving blur in the darkness. It really was the last time; there was just no more left.

But suddenly Cujo had had enough.

He drew back, whining, staggered away, and suddenly fell over on the gravel, trembling, legs scratching weakly at nothing. He began to dig at his wounded head with his right forepaw.

Donna slammed the door shut and lay back, sobbing weakly.

'Mommy - Mommy - Mommy

'Tad ... okay . .

'Mommy!'

' ... Okay.

Hands: his on her, fluttering and birdlike; hers on Tad's face, touching, trying to reassure, then falling back.

'Mommy ... home.. . please ... Daddy and home ... Daddy and home...'

'Sure, Tad we will ... we will, honest to God, I'll get you there ... we will . . .'

No sense in the words. It was all right. She could feel herself fading back, fading into that gray shockworld, those mists in herself which she had never suspected until now. Tad's words took on a deep chaining sound, words in an echo chamber. But it was all right. It was

No. It wasn't all right.

Because the dog had bitten her

- and the dog was rabid.

Holly told her sister not to he foolish, to just dial her call direct, but Charity insisted on calling the operator and having it billed to her home number. Taking handouts, even a little thing like an after-six long-distance call, wasn't her way.

The operator got her directory assistance for Maine and Charity asked for Alva Thornton's number in Castle Rock. A few moments later, Alva's phone was ringing.

'Hello, Thornton's Egg Farms.

'Hi, Bessie?'

'Ayuh, 'tis.'

'This is Charity Camber. I'm calling from Connecticut. Is Alva right around handy?'

Brett sat on the sofa, pretending to read a book.

'Gee, Charity, he ain't. He's got his bowling league t'night. They're all over to the Pondicherry Lanes in Bridgton. Somethin wrong?'

Charity had carefully and consciously decided what she was going to say. The situation was a bit delicate. Like almost every other married woman in Castle Rock (and that was not to necessarily let out the single ones), Bessie loved to talk, and if she found out that Joe Camber had gone shooting off somewhere without his wife's knowledge as soon as Charity and Brett had left to visit her sister in Connecticut... why, that would be something to talk about on the party line, wouldn't it?

'No, except that Brett and I got a little worried about the dog.'

'Your Saint Bernard?'

'Ayuh, Cujo. Brett and I are down here visiting my sister while Joe's in Portsmouth on business. 'This was a barefaced be, but a safe one; Joe did occasionally go to Portsmouth to buy parts (there was no sales tax) and to the car auctions. 'I just wanted to make sure he got someone to feed the dog. You know how men are.'

'Well, Joe was over here yesterday or the day before, I think,' Bessie said doubtfully. Actually, it had been the previous Thursday. Bessie Thornton was not a terribly bright woman (her great-aunt, the late Evvie Chalmers, had been fond of screaming to anyone who would listen that Bessie 'wouldn't never pass none of those IQ tests, but she's goodhearted'), her life on Alva's chicken farm was a hard one, and she lived most fully during her 'stories'- As the World Turns, The Doctors, and All My Children (she had tried The Young and the Restless but considered it 'too racy by half'). She tended to be fuzzy on those parts of the real world that did not bear on feeding and watering the chickens, adjusting their piped-in music, candling and sorting eggs, washing floors and clothes, doing dishes, selling eggs, tending the garden. And in the winter, of course, she could have told a questioner the exact date of the next meeting of the Castle Rock SnoDevils, the snowmobile club she and Alva belonged to.

Joe had come over on that day with a tractor tire he had repaired for Alva. Joe had done the job free of charge since the Cambers got all their eggs from the Thorntons at half price. Alva also harrowed Joe's small patch of garden each April, and so Joe was glad to patch the tire. It was the way country people got along.

Charity knew perfectly well that Joe had gone over to the Thorntons' with the repaired tire the previous Thursday. She also knew that Bessie was apt to get her days mixed up. All of which left her in a pretty dilemma. She could ask Bessie if Joe had had a tractor tire with him when he came up 'yesterday or the day before,' and if Bessie said why yes, now that you mention it, he did, that would mean that Joe hadn't been up to see Alva since last Thursday, which would mean that Joe hadn't asked Alva to feed Cujo, which would also mean that Alva wouldn't have any information about Cujo's health and well-being.

Or she could just leave well enough alone and ease Brett's mind. They could enjoy the rest of their visit without thoughts of home intruding constantly. And ... well, she was a little jealous of Cujo right about now. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Cujo was distracting Brett's attention from what could be the most important trip he ever took. She wanted the boy to see a whole new life, a whole new set of possibilities, so that when the time came, a few years from now, for him to decide which doors he wanted to step through and which ones he would allow to swing closed, he could make those decisions with a bit of perspective. Perhaps she had been wrong to believe she could steer him, but let him at least have enough experience to make up his mind for himself.

Was it fair to let his worries about the damned dog stand in the way of that?

,Charity? You there? I said I thought

'Ayuh, I heard you, Bessie. He probably did ask Alva to feed him, then.'

'Well, I'll ask him when he gets home, Charity. And I'll let you know, too.'

'You do that. Thanks ever so much, Bessie.'

'Don't even mention it.'

'Fine. Good-bye.' And Charity hung up, realizing that Bessie had forgotten to ask for Jim and Holly's phone number. Which was fine. She turned toward Brett, composing her face. She would say nothing that was a lie. She would lie to her son.

'Bessie said your dad was over to see Alva Sunday night,' Charity said. 'Must have asked him to take care of Cujo then.'

'Oh.' Brett was looking at her in a speculative way that made her a little uneasy. 'But you didn't talk to Alva himself.'

'No, he was out bowling. But Bessie said she'd let us know if -'

She doesn't have our number down here.' Was Brett's tone now faintly accusatory? Or was that her own conscience talking?

'Well, I'll call her back in the morning, then,' Charity said, hoping to close the conversation and applying some salve to her conscience at the same time.

'Daddy took a tractor tire over last week,' Brett said thoughtfully. 'Maybe Mrs. Thornton got mixed up on which day Daddy was there.'

'I think Bessie Thornton can keep her days straighter in her head than that,' Charity said, not thinking so at all. 'Besides, she didn't mention anything to me about a tractor tire.'

'Yeah, but you didn't ask her.'

'Go ahead and call her back, then!' Charity flashed at him. A sudden helpless fury swept her, the same ugly feeling that had come when Brett had offered his wickedly exact observation about Holly and her deck of credit cards. When he had done that his father's intonation, even his father's pattern of speech, had crept into his voice, and it had seemed to her, then and now, that the only thing this trip was doing was to show her once and for all who Brett really belonged to -lock, stock, and barrel.

'Mom '

'No, go ahead, call her back, the number's right here on the scratchpad. just tell the operator to charge it to our phone so it won't go on Holly's bill. Ask Bessie all your questions. I only did the best I could.'

There, she thought with sad and bitter amusement. just five minutes ago I wasn't going to lie to him.

That afternoon her anger had sparked anger in him. Tonight he only said quietly, 'Naw, that's okay.'

'If you want, we'll call somebody else and have them go up and check,' Charity said. She was already sorry for her outburst.

'Who would we call?' Brett asked.

'Well, what about one of the Milliken brothers?'

Brett only looked at her.

'Maybe that's not such a good idea,' Charity agreed. Late last winter, Joe Camber and john Milliken had had a bitter argument over the charge on some repair work Joe had done on the Milliken brothers' old Chevy Bel Air. Since then, the Cambers and the Millikens hadn't been talking much. The last time Charity had gone to play Beano down at the Grange, she had tried to pass a friendly word with Kim Milliken, Freddy's daughter, but Kim wouldn't say a word to her; just walked away with her head up as if she hadn't been acting the slut with half the boys in Castle Rock High School.

It occurred to her now how really isolated they were, up at the end of Town Road No.3. It made her feel lonely and a little chilled. She could think of no one she could reasonably ask to go up to their place with a flashlight and hunt up Cujo and make sure he was okay.

Never mind,' Brett said listlessly. 'Probably stupid, anyway. He probably just ate some burdocks or something.'

'Listen,' Charity said, putting an arm around him. 'One thing you aren't is stupid, Brett. I'll call Alva himself in the morning and ask him to go up. I'll do it as soon as we get up. Okay?'

'Would you, Mom?'

'Yes.'

'That'd be great. I'm sorry to bug you about it, but I can't seem to get it off my mind.

Jim popped his head in. 'I got out the Scrabble board. Anyone want to play?'

'I will,' Brett said, getting up, 'if you show me how.'

'What about you, Charity?'

Charity smiled. 'Not just now, I guess. I'll bein for some of the popcorn.'

Brett went out with his uncle. She sat on the sofa and looked at the telephone and thought of Brett night-walking, feeding a phantom dog phantom dogfood in her sister's modern kitchen.

Cujo's not hungry no more, not no more.

Her arms suddenly tightened, and she shivered. We're going to take care of this business tomorrow morning, she promised herself. One way or the other. Either that or go back and take care of it ourselves. That's a promise, Brett.

Vic tried home again at ten o'clock. There was no answer. He tried again at eleven o'clock and there was still no answer, although he let the phone ring two dozen times. At ten he was beginning to get scared. At eleven he was good and scared -of what, he was not precisely sure.