Roger was sleeping. Vic dialed the number in the dark, listened to it ring in the dark, hung up in the dark. He felt alone, childlike, lost. He didn't know what to do or what to think. Over and over his mind played a simple litany: She's gone off with Kemp, gone off with Kemp, gone off with Kemp.


All reason and logic was against it. He played over everything he and Donna had said to each other - he played it over again and again, listening to the words and to the nuances of tone in his mind. She and Kemp had had a falling out. She had told him to go peddle his papers somewhere else. And that had prompted Kemp's vengeful little billet doux. It did not seem the rosy scenery into which two mad lovers might decide to elope.


A failing out doesn't preclude a later rapprochement, his mind retorted with a kind of grave and implacable calm.


But what about Tad? She wouldn't have taken Tad with her, would she? From her description, Kemp sounded like some sort of wildman, and although Donna hadn't said so, Vic had gotten the feeling that something damned violent had almost happened on the day she told him to fuck off.


People in love do strange things.

That strange and jealous part of his mind - he hadn't even been aware of that part in him until that afternoon in Deering Oaks - had an answer for everything, and in the dark it didn't seem to matter that most of the answers were irrational.


He was doing a slow dance back and forth between two sharpened points: Kemp on one (DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?); a vision of the telephone ringing on and on in their empty Castle Rock house on the other. She could have had an accident. She and Tad could be in hospital. Someone could have broken in. They could be lying murdered in their bedrooms. Of course if she'd had an accident, someone official would have been in touch -the office as well as Donna knew in which Boston hotel he and Roger were staying - but in the dark that thought, which should have been a comfort since no one had been in touch, only inclined his thoughts more toward murder.


Robbery and murder, his mind whispered as he lay awake in the dark. Then it danced slowly across to the other sharpened point and took up its original litany: Gone off with Kemp.


In between these points, his mind saw a more reasonable explanation, one that made him feel helplessly angry. Perhaps she and Tad had decided to spend the night with someone and had simply forgotten to call and tell him. Now it was too late to just start calling around and asking people without alarming them. He supposed he could call the sheriff's office and ask them to send someone up and check. But wouldn't that be overreacting?


No, his mind said.


Yes, his mind said, definitely.


She and Tad are both dead with knives stuck in their throats, his mind said. You read about it in the papers all the time. It even happened in Castle Rock just before we came to town. That crazy cop. That Frank Dodd.



Gone off with Kemp, his mind said.

At midnight he tried again, and this time the constant ringing of the phone with no one to pick it up froze him into a deadly certainty of trouble. Kemp, robbers, murderers, something. Trouble. Trouble at home.


He dropped the phone back into its cradle and turned on the bed lamp. 'Roger,' he said. 'Wake up.'


'Huh. Wuh. Hzzzzzz. . . .' Roger had his arm over his eyes, trying to block out the light. He was in his pajamas with the little yellow college pennants.


'Roger. Roger!'


Roger opened his eyes, blinked, looked at the Travel-Ette clock.


'Hey, Vic, it's the middle of the night.'


'Roger...' He swallowed and something clicked in his throat. 'Roger, it's midnight and Tad and Donna still aren't home. I'm scared.'


Roger sat up and brought the clock close to his face to verify what Vic had said. It was now four past the hour.


'Well, they probably got freaked out staying there by themselves, Vic. Sometimes Althea takes the girls and goes over to Sally Petrie's when I'm gone. She gets nervous when the wind blows off the lake at night, she says.'


'She would have called.' With the light on, with Roger sitting up and talking to him, the idea that Donna might have just run off with Steve Kemp seemed absurd -he couldn't believe he had even indulged it. Forget logic. She had told him it was over, and he had believed her. He believed her now.


'Called?' Roger said. He was still having trouble tracking things.

'She knows I call home almost every night when I'm awayShe would have called the hotel and left a message if she was going to be gone overnight. Wouldn't Althea?'


Roger nodded. 'Yeah. She would.'


'She'd call and leave a message so you wouldn't worry. Like I'm worrying now.'


'Yeah. But she might have just forgotten, Vic.' Still, Roger's brown eyes were troubled.


'Sure,' Vic said. 'On the other hand, maybe something's happened.'


'She carries ID, doesn't she) If she and Tad were in an accident, God forbid, the cops would try home first and then the office. The answering service would -'


'I wasn't thinking about an accident,' Vic said. 'I was thinking about . . .' His voice began to tremble. 'I was thinking about her and Tadder being there alone, and ... shit, I don't know ... I just got scared, that's all.'


'Call the sheriff's office,' Roger said promptly.


'Yeah, but -'


'Yeah, but nothing. You aren't going to scare Donna, that's for sure. She's not there. But what the hell, set your mind at rest. It doesn't have to be sirens and flashing lights. Just ask if they can send a cop by to check and make sure that everything looks normal. There must be a thousand places she could be. Hell, maybe she just tied into a really good Tupperware party.'


'Donna hates Tupperware parties.'


'So maybe the girls got playing penny-ante poker and lost track of the time and Tad's asleep in someone's spare room.' Vic remembered her telling him how she had steered clear of any deep involvement with 'the girls' - I don't want to be one of those faces you see at the bake sales, she had said. But he didn't want to tell Roger that; it was too close to the subject of Kemp.

'Yeah, maybe something like that,' Vic said.


'Have you got an extra key to the place tucked away somewhere?'


'There's one on a hook under the eave of the front porch.'


'Tell the cops. Someone can go in and have a good look around ... unless you've got pot or coke or something you'd just as soon they didn't stumble over.'


'Nothing like that.'


'Then do it,' Roger said earnestly. 'She'll probably call here while they're out checking and you'll feel like a fool, but sometimes it's good to feel like a fool. You know what I mean?'


'Yeah,' Vic said, grinning a little. 'Yeah, I do.'


He picked the telephone up again, hesitated, then tried home again first. No answer. Some of the comfort he had gotten from Roger evaporated. He got directory assistance ocr Maine and jotted down the number of the Castle County Sheriff's Department. It was now nearly fifteen minutes past twelve on Wednesday morning.


Donna Trenton was sitting with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel of the Pinto. Tad had finally fallen asleep again, but his sleep was not restful; he twisted, turned, sometimes moaned. She was afraid he was reliving in his dreams what had happened earlier.


She felt his forehead; he muttered something and pulled away from her touch. His eyelids fluttered and then slipped dosed again. He felt feverish - almost surely a result of the constant tension and fear. She felt feverish herself, and she was in severe pain. Her belly hurt, but those wounds were superficial, little more than scratches. She had been lucky there. Cujo had damaged her left leg more. The wounds there (the bites, her mind insisted, as if relishing the horror of it) were deep and ugly. They had bled a lot before dotting, and she hadn't tried to apply a bandage right away, although there was a first-aid kit in the Pinto's glovebox. Vaguely she supposed she had hoped that the flowing blood would wash the wound clean ... did that really happen, or was it just an old wives' tale? She didn't know. There was so much she didn't know, so goddam much.

By the time the lacerated punctures had finally clotted, her thigh and the driver's bucket seat were both tacky with her blood. She needed three gauze pads from the first-aid kit to cover the wound. They were the last three in the kit. Have to replace those, she thought, and that brought on a short, hysterical fit of the giggles.


In the faint light, the flesh just above her knee had looked like dark plowed earth. There was a steady throbbing ache there that had not changed since the dog bit her. She had dry-swallowed a couple of aspirin from the kit, but they didn't make a dent in the pain. Her head ached badly too, as if a bundle of wires were slowly being twisted tighter and tighter inside each temple.


Flexing the leg brought the quality of the pain up from a throbbing ache to a sharp, glassy beat. She had no idea if she could even walk on the leg now, let alone run for the porch door. And did it really matter? The dog was sitting on the gravel between her car door and the door which gave on the porch, its hideously mangled head drooping ... but with its eyes fixed unfailingly on the car. On her.


Somehow she didn't think Cujo was going to move again, at least not tonight. Tomorrow the sun might drive him into the barn, if it was as hot as it had been yesterday.


'It wants me,' she whispered through her blistered lips. It was true. Somehow it was true. For reasons decreed by Fate, or for its own unknowable ones, the dog wanted her.

When it had fallen on the gravel, she had been sure it was dying. No living thing could have taken the pounding she had given it with the door. Even its thick fur hadn't been able to cushion the blows. One of the Saint Bernard's ears appeared to be dangling by no more than a string of flesh.


But it had regained its feet, little by little. She hadn't been able to believe her eyes ... hadn't wanted to believe her eyes.


'No!' she had shrieked, totally out of control. 'No, lie down, you're supposed to be dead, lie down, lie down and die, you shit dog!'


'Mommy, don't,' Tad had murmured, holding his head. 'It hurts . . . it hurts me . . .'


Since then, nothing in the situation had changed. Time had resumed its former slow crawl. She had put her watch to her ear several times to make sure it was still ticking, because the hands never seemed to change position.


Twenty past twelve.


What do we know about rabies, class?


Precious little. Some hazy fragments that had probably come from Sunday-supplement articles. A pamphlet leafed through idly back in New York when she had taken the family cat, Dinah, for her distemper shot at the vet's. Excuse me, distemper and rabies shots.


Rabies, a disease of the central nervous system, the good old CNS. Causes slow destruction of same - but how? She was blank on that, and probably the doctors were, too. Otherwise the disease wouldn't be considered so damned dangerous. Of course, she thought hopefully, I don't even know for sure that the dog is rabid. The only rabid dog I've ever seen was the one Gregory Peck shot with a rifle in To Kill a Mockingbird. Except of course that dog wasn't really rabid, it was just pretend, it was probably some mangy mutt they'd gotten from the local pound and they put Gillette Foamy all over him....

She pulled her mind back to the point. Better to make what Vic called a worst-case analysis, at least for now. Besides, in her heart she was sure the dog was rabid ~ what else would make it behave as it had? The dog was as mad as a hatter.


And it had bitten her. Badly. What did that mean?


People could get rabies, she knew, and it was a horrible way to die. Maybe the worst. There was a vaccine for it, and a series of injections was the prescribed method of treatment. The injections were quite painful, although probably not as painful as going the way the dog out there was going. But ...


She seemed to remember reading that there were only two instances where people had lived through an advanced case of rabies - a case, that is, that had not been diagnosed until the carriers had begun exhibiting symptoms. One of the survivors was a boy who had recovered entirely. The other had been an animal researcher who had suffered permanent brain damage. The good old CNS had just fallen apart.


The longer the disease went untreated, the less chance there was. She rubbed her forehead and her hand skidded across a film of cold sweat.


How long was too long? Hours? Days? Weeks? A month, maybe? She didn't know.


Suddenly the car seemed to be shrinking. It was the size of a Honda, then the size of those strange little three-wheelers they used to give disabled people in England, then the size of an enclosed motorcycle sidecar, finally the size of a coffin. A double coffin for her and Tad. They had to get out, get out, get out Her hand was fumbling for the doorhandle before she got hold of herself again. Her heart was racing, accelerating the thudding in her head. Please, she thought. It's bad enough without claustrophobia, so please ... please ... please.

Her thirst was back again, raging.


She looked out and Cujo stared implacably back at her, his body seemingly split in two by the silver crack running through the window.


Help us, someone, she thought. Please, please, help us.


Roscoe Fisher was parked back in the shadows of Jerry's Citgo when the call came in. He was ostensibly watching for speeders, but in actual fact he was cooping. At twelve thirty on a Wednesday morning, Route 117 was totally dead. He had a little alarm clock inside his skull, and he trusted it to wake him up around one, when the Norway Drive-In let out. Then there might be some action.


'Unit three, come in, unit three. Over.'


Roscoe snapped awake, spilling cold coffee in a Styrofoam cup down into his crotch.


'Oh shitfire,' Roscoe said dolefully. 'Now that's nice, isn't it? Keerist!'


'Unit three, you copy? Over?'


He grabbed the mike and pushed the button on the side. 'I copy, base.' He would have liked to have added that he hoped it was good because he was sitting with his balls in a puddle of cold coffee, but you never knew who was monitoring police calls on his or her trusty Bearcat scanner ... even at twelve thirty in the morning.

'Want you to take a run up to Eighty-three Larch Street,' Billy said. 'Residence of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Trenton. .Check the place out. Over.'


'What am I checking for, base? Over.'


'Trenton's in Boston and no one's answering his calls. He thinks someone should be home. Over.'


Well, that's wonderful, isn't it? Roscoe Fisher thought sourly. For this I got a four-buck cleaning bill, and if I do have to stop a speeder, the guy's going to think I got so excited at the prospect of a collar that I pissed myself.


'Ten-four and time out,' Roscoe said, starting his cruiser. 'Over.'


'I make it twelve thirty-four A.M.,' Billy said. 'There's a key hanging on a nail under the front porch eave, unit three. Mr. Trenton would like you to go right on inside and look around if the premises appear deserted. Over.'


'Roger, base. Over and out.'


'Out.'


Roscoe popped on his headlights and cruised down Castle Rock's deserted Main Street, past the Common and the bandstand with its conical green roof. He went up the hill and turned right on Larch Street near the top. The Trentons' was the second house from the corner, and he saw that in the daytime they would have a nice view of the town below. He pulled the Sheriff's Department Fury III up to the curb and got out, closing the door quietly. The street was dark, fast asleep.


He paused for a moment, pulling the wet cloth of his uniform trousers away from his crotch (grimacing as he did it), and then went up the driveway. The driveway was empty, and so was the small one-car garage at the end of it. He saw a Big Wheels trike parked inside. It was just like the one his own son had. He closed the garage door and went around to the front porch. He saw that this week's copy of the Call was leaning against the porch door. Roscoe picked it up and tried the door. It was unlocked. He went onto the porch, feeling like an intruder. He tossed the paper on the porch glider and pushed the bell beside the inner door. Chimes went off in the house, but no one came. He rang twice more over a space of about three minutes, allowing for the time it would take the lady to wake up, put on a robe, and come downstairs ... if the lady was there.

When there was still no answer, he tried the door. It was locked.


Husband's away and she's probably staying over with friends, he thought - but the fact that she hadn't notified her husband also struck Roscoe Fisher as mildly strange.


He felt under the peaked eave, and his fingers knocked off the key Vic had hung up there not long after the Trentons had moved in. He took it down and unlocked the front door - if he had tried the kitchen door as Steve Kemp had that afternoon, he could have walked right in. Like most people in Castle Rock, Donna was slipshod about buttoning up when she went out.


Roscoe went in. He had his flashlight, but he preferred not to use it. That would have made him feel even more like an unlawful intruder - a burglar with a large coffee stain on his crotch. He felt for a switchplate and eventually found one with two switches. The top one turned on the porch light, and he turned that one off quickly. The bottom one turned on the living-room light.


He looked around for a long moment, doubting what he was seeing - at first he thought it must be some trick of his eyes, that they had not adjusted to the light or something. But nothing changed, and his heart began to pump quickly.


Musn't touch anything, he thought. Can't balls this up.

He had forgotten about the wet coffee splotch on his pants, and he had forgotten about feeling like an intruder. He was scared and excited.


Something had happened here, all right. The living room had been turned topsy-turvy. There was shattered glass from a knickknack shelf all over the floor. The furniture had been overturned, the books had been scattered every whichway. The big mirror over the fireplace was also broken - seven years' bad luck for somebody, Roscoe thought, and found himself thinking suddenly and for no reason about Frank Dodd, with whom he had often shared a cruiser. Frank Dodd, the friendly small-town cop who had just happened to also be a psycho who murdered women and little children. Roscoe's arms broke out in gooseflesh suddenly. This was no place to be thinking about Frank.


He went into the kitchen through the dining room, where everything had been swept off the table - he skirted that mess carefully. The kitchen was worse. He felt a fresh chill creep down his spine. Someone had gone absolutely crazy in here. The doors to the bar cabinet stood open, and someone had used the length of the kitchen like a Pitch-Til-U-Win alley at a county fair. Pots were everywhere, and white stuff that looked like snow but had to be soap powder.


Written on the message board in large and hurried block letters was this:


I LEFT SOMETHING UPSTAIRS FOR YOU, BABY.


Suddenly Roscoe Fisher didn't want to go upstairs. More than anything else, he didn't want to go up there. He had helped clean up three of the messes Frank Dodd had left behind him, including the body of Mary Kate Hendrasen, who had been raped and murdered on the Castle Rock bandstand in the Common. He never wanted to see anything like that again ... and suppose the woman was up there, shot or slashed or strangled? Roscoe had seen plenty of mayhem on the roads and had even got used to it, after a fashion. Two summers ago he and Billy and Sheriff

Bannerman had pulled a man out of a potato-grading machine in pieces, and that had been one to tell your grandchildren about. But he had not seen a homicide since the Hendrasen girl, and he did not want to see one now.


He didn't know whether to be relieved or disgusted by what he found on the Trentons' bedspread.


He went back to his car and called in.


When the telephone rang, Vic and Roger were both up, sitting in front of the TV, not talking much, smoking their heads off. Frankenstein, the original film, was on. It was twenty minutes after one.


Vic grabbed the phone before it had completed its first ring. 'Hello? Donna? Is that -'


'Is this Mr. Trenton?' A man's voice.


'Yes?'


'This is Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Trenton. I'm afraid I have some rather upsetting information for you. I'm sor -'


'Are they dead?' Vic asked. Suddenly he felt totally unreal and two-dimensional, no more real than the face of an extra glimpsed in the background of an old movie such as the one he and Roger had been watching. The question came out in a perfectly conversational tone of voice. From the corner of his eye he saw Roger's shadow move as he stood up quickly. It didn't matter. Nothing else did, either. In the space of the few seconds that had passed since he had answered the phone, he had had a chance to get a good look behind his life and had seen it was all stage scenery and false fronts.

'Mr. Trenton, Officer Fisher was dispatched -'


'Dispense with the official bullshit and answer my question. Are they dead?' He turned to Roger. Roger's face was gray and wondering. Behind him, on the TV, a phony windmill turned against a phony sky. 'Rog, got a cigarette?.' Roger handed him one.


'Mr. Trenton, are you still there?' 'Yes. Are they dead?'


'We have no idea where your wife and son are as of right now,' Bannerman said, and Vic suddenly felt all of his guts drop back into place. The world took on a little of its former color. He began to tremble. The unlit cigarette jittered between his lips.


'What's going on? What do you know? You're Bannerman, you said?'


'Castle County Sheriff, that's right. And I'll try to put you in the picture, if you'll give me a minute.'


'Yes, okay.' Now he was afraid; everything seemed to be going too fast.


'Officer Fisher was dispatched to your home at Eightythree Larch Street as per your request at twelve thirty-four this morning. He ascertained that there was no car in the driveway or in the garage. He rang the front doorbell repeatedly, and when there was no answer, he let himself in using the key over the porch eave. He found that the house had been severely vandalized. Furnishings were overturned, liquor bottles broken, soap powder had been poured over the floor and the built-ins of the kitchen -'


'Jesus, Kemp,' Vic whispered. His whirling mind fixed on the note: DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS? He remembered thinking that note, regardless of anything else, was a disquieting index into the man's psychology. A vicious act of revenge for being dumped. What had Kemp done now? What had he done besides go through their house like a harpy on the warpath?

'Mr. Trenton?'


'I'm here.'


Bannerman cleared his throat as if he were having some difficulty with the next. 'Officer Fisher proceeded upstairs. The upstairs had not been vandalized, but he found traces of - uh, some whitish fluid, most probably semen, on the bedspread of the master bedroom.' And in an unwitting comic ellipsis, he added, 'The bed did not appear to have been slept in.'


'Where's my wife?' Vic shouted into the phone. 'Where's my boy? Don't you have any idea?'


'Take it easy,' Roger said, and put a hand on Vic's shoulder. Roger could afford to say take it easy. His wife was home in bed. So were his twin girls. Vic shook the hand off.


'Mr. Trenton, all I can tell you right now is that a team of State Police detectives are on the scene, and my own men are assisting. Neither the master bedroom nor your son's room appear to have been disturbed.'


'Except for the come on our bed, you mean,' Vic said savagely, and Roger flinched as if struck. His mouth dropped open in a gape.


'Yes, well, that.' Bannerman sounded embarrassed. 'But what I mean is that there are no signs of - uh, violence against person or persons. It looks like straight vandalism.'


'Then where are Donna and Tad?' The harshness was now breaking up into bewilderment, and he felt the sting of helpless little-boy tears at the corners of his eyes.


'At this time we have no idea.'


Kemp... my God, what if Kemp has them?

For just a moment a confusing flash of the dream he had the previous night recurred: Donna and Tad hiding in their cave, menaced by some terrible beast. Then it was gone.


'If you have any idea of who might be behind this, Mr. Trenton -'


'I'm going out to the airport and rent a car,' Vic said. 'I can be there by five o'clock.'


Patiently, Bannerman said: 'Yes, Mr. Trenton. But if your wife and son's disappearance is somehow connected with this vandalism, time could be a very precious commodity. If you have even the slightest idea of who might bear a grudge against you and your wife, either real or imagined ~'


'Kemp,' Vic said in a small, strangled voice. He couldn't hold the tears back now. The tears were going to come. He could feel them running down his face.' Kemp did it, I'm sure it was Kemp. Oh my Christ, what if he's got them?'


'Who is this Kemp?' Bannerman asked. His voice was not embarrassed now; it was sharp and demanding.


He held the phone in his right hand. He put his left hand over his eyes, shutting out Roger, shutting out the hotel room, the sound of the TV, everything. Now he was in blackness, alone with the unsteady sound of his voice and the hot, shifting texture of his tears.


'Steve Kemp,' he said. 'Steven Kemp. He ran a place called the Village Stripper there in town. He's gone now. At least, my wife said he was gone. He and my wife ... Donna ... they ... they had ... well, they had an affair. Banging each other. It didn't last long. She told him it was over. I found out because he wrote me a note. It was ... it was a pretty ugly note. He was getting his own back, I guess. I guess he didn't like to get brushed off much. This ... it sounds like a grander version of that note.'

He rubbed his hand viciously across his eyes, making a galaxy of red shooting stars.


'Maybe he didn't like it that the marriage didn't just blow apart. Or maybe he's just ... just fucked up. Donna said he got fucked up when he lost a tennis match. Wouldn't shake hands over the net. It's a question . . .' Suddenly his voice was gone and he had to dear his throat before it would come back. There was a band around his chest, tightening and loosening, then tightening again. 'I think it's a question of how far he might go. He could have taken them, Bannerman. He's capable of it, from what I know of him.'


There was a silence at the other end; no, not quite silence. The scratching of a pencil on paper. Roger put his hand on Vic's shoulder again, and this time he let it stay, grateful for the warmth. He felt very cold.


'Mr. Trenton, do you have the note Kemp sent you?'


'No. I tore it up. I'm sorry, but under the circumstances


'Was it by any chance printed in block letters?'


'Yes. Yes, it was.'


'Officer Fisher found a note written in block letters on the message board in the kitchen. It said, "I left something upstairs for you, baby."'


Vic grunted a little. The last faint hope that it might have been someone else - a thief, or maybe just kids - blew away. Come on upstairs and see what I left on the bed. It was


Kemp. The line on the noteminder at home would have fit into Kemp's little note.


'The note seems to indicate that your wife wasn't there when he did it,' Bannerman said, but even in his shocked state, Vic heard a false note in the sheriffs voice.

'She could have walked in while he was still there and you know it,' Vic said dully. 'Back from shopping, back from getting the carb adjusted on her car. Anything.'


'What sort of car did Kemp drive? Do you know?'


'I don't think he had a car. He had a van.'


'Color?'


'I don't know.'


'Mr. Trenton, I'm going to suggest you come on up from Boston. I'm going to suggest that if you rent a car, you take it easy. It would he one hell of a note if your people turned up just fine and you got yourself killed on the Interstate coming up here.'


'Yes, all right.' He didn't want to drive anywhere, fast or slow. He wanted to hide. Better still, he wanted to have the last six days over again.


'Another thing, sir.'


'What's that?'


'On your way up here, try to make a mental list of your wife's friends and acquaintances in the area. It's still perfectly possible that she could be spending the night with someone.'


'Sure.'


'The most important thing to remember right now is that there are no signs of violence.'


'The whole downstairs is ripped to hell,' Vic said. That sounds pretty fucking violent to me.'


'Yes,' Banner said uncomfortably. 'Well.'


'I'll be there,' Vic said. He hung up.


'Vic, I'm sorry,' Roger said.

Vic couldn't meet his old friend's eyes. Wearing the horns, he thought. Isn't that what the English call it? Now Roger knows Im wearing the horns.


'It's all right,' Vic said, starting to dress.


'All this on your mind ... and you went ahead with the trip?'


'What good would it have done to stay at home?' Vic asked. 'It happened. I ... I only found out on Thursday. I thought ... some distance. . time to think ... perspective ... I don't know all the stupid goddam things I thought. Now this.'


'Not your fault,' Roger said earnestly.


'Rog, at this point I don't know what's my fault and what isn't. I'm worried about Donna, and I'm out of my mind about Tad. I just want to get back there. And I'd like to get my hands on that fucker Kemp. I'd. . .'His voice had been rising. It abruptly sank. His shoulders sagged. For a moment he looked drawn and old and almost totally used up. Then he went to the suitcase on the floor and began to hunt for fresh clothes. 'Call Avis at the airport, would you, and get me a car? My wallet's there on the nightstand. They'll want the American Express number.'


'I'll call for both of us. I'm going back with you.'


'No.'


'But --?


'But nothing.' Vic slipped into a dark blue shirt. He had it buttoned halfway up before he saw he had it wrong; one tail hung far below the other. He unbuttoned it and started again. He was in motion now, and being in motion was better, but that feeling of unreality persisted. He kept having thoughts about movie sets, where what looks like Italian marble is really just Con-Tact paper, where all the rooms end just above the camera's sight line and where someone is always lurking in the background with a clapper board. Scene #41, Vic convinces Roger to Keep On Plugging, Take One. He was an actor and this was some crazy absurdist film. But it was undeniably better when the body was in motion.

'Hey, man


'Roger, this changes nothing in the situation between Ad Worx and the Sharp Company. I came along after I knew about Donna and this guy Kemp partly because I wanted to keep up a front - I guess no guy wants to advertise when he find out his wife has been getting it on the side - but mostly because I knew that the people who depend on us have to keep eating no matter who my wife decides to go to bed with.'


'Go easy on yourself, Vic. Stop digging yourself with it.'


'I can't seem to do that,' Vic said. 'Even now I can't seem to do that.'


'And I can't just go on to New York as if nothing's happened!'


'As far as we know, nothing has. The cop kept emphasizing that to me. You can go on. You can see it through. Maybe it'll turn out to have been nothing but a charade all along, but ... people have to try, Roger. There's nothing else to do. Besides, there's nothing you can do back in Maine except hang out.'


'Jesus, it feels wrong. It feels all wrong.'


'It's not. I'll call you at the Biltmore as soon as I know something.' Vic zippered his slacks and stepped into his loafers. 'Now go on and call Avis for me. I'll catch a cab out to Logan from downstairs. Here, I'll write my Amex number down for you.'


He did this, and Roger stood silently by as he got his coat and went to the door.


'Vic,' Roger said.

He turned, and Roger embraced him clumsily but with surprising strength. Vic hugged him back, his cheek against Roger's shoulder.


'I'll pray to God everything's okay,' Roger said hoarsely.


'Okay,' Vic said, and went out.


The elevator hummed faintly on the way down - not really moving at all, he thought. It's a sound effect. Two drunks supporting each other got on at lobby level as he got off. Extras, he thought.


He spoke to the doorman - another extra - and after about five minutes a cab rolled up to the blue hotel awning.


The cab driver was black and silent. He had his radio tuned to an FM soul station. The Temptations sang 'Power' endlessly as the cab took him toward Logan Airport through streets that were almost completely deserted. Helluva good movie set, he thought. As the Temptations faded out, a jiveass dj came on with the weather forecast. It had been hot yesterday, he reported, but you didn't see nuthin yesterday, brothers and sisters. Today was going to be the hottest day of the summer so far, maybe a record-breaker. The big G's weather prognosticator, Altitude Lou McNally, was calling for temperatures of over 100 degrees inland and not much cooler on the coast. A mass of warm, stagnant air had moved up from the south and was being held in place over New England by hands of high pressure. 'So if you gas gonna reach, you gotta head for the beach,' the jiveass dj finished. 'It ain't goan be too pretty if you hangin out in the city. And just to prove the point, here's Michael Jackson. He's goin "Off the Wall".'


The forecast meant little or nothing to Vic, but it would have terrified Donna even more than she already was, had she known.


As she had the day before, Charity awoke just before dawn. She awoke listening, and for a few moments she wasn't even sure what she was listening for. Then she remembered. Boards creaking. Footsteps. She was listening to see if her son was going to go walking again.

But the house was silent.


She got out of bed, went to the door, and looked out into the hall. The hall was empty. After a moment's debate she went down to Brett's room and looked in on him. There was nothing showing under his sheet but a lick of his hair. If he had gone walking, he had done it before she woke up. He was deeply asleep now.


Charity went back to her room and sat on her bed, looking out at the faint white line on the horizon. She was aware that her decision had been made. Somehow, secretly, in the night while she slept. Now, in the first cold light of day, she was able to examine what she had decided, and she felt that she could count the cost.


It occurred to her that she had never unburdened herself to her sister Holly as she had expected she would do. She still might have, if not for the credit cards at lunch yesterday. And then last night she had told Charity how much this, that, and the other had cost - the Buick four-door, the Sony color set, the parquet floor in the hallway. As if, in Holly's mind, each of these things still carried invisible price tags and always would.


Charity still liked her sister. Holly was giving and kindhearted, impulsive, affectionate, warm. But her way of living had forced her to close off some of the heartless truths about the way she and Charity had grown up poor in rural Maine, the truths that had more or less force Charity into marriage with Joe Camber while luck - really no different from Charity's winning lottery ticket - had allowed Holly to meet Jim and escape the life back home forever.


She was afraid that if she had told Holly that she had been trying to get Joe's permission to come down here for years, that this trip had only occurred because of brutal generalship on her part, and that even so it had almost come down to Joe's strapping her with his leather belt... she was afraid that if she told Holly those things, her sister's reaction would be horrified anger rather than anything rational and helpful. Why horrified anger? Perhaps because, deep down in a part of the human soul where Buick station wagons, and Sony color TVs with Trinitron picture tubes, and parquet floors can never quite make their final stilling impact, Holly would recognize that she might have escaped a similar marriage, a similar life, by the thinnest of margins.

She hadn't told because Holly had entrenched herself in her uppermiddle-class suburban life like a watchful soldier in a foxhole. She hadn't told because horrified anger could not solve her problems. She hadn't told because no one likes to look like a freak in a sideshow, living through the days and weeks and months and years with an unpleasant, uncommunicative, sometimes frightening man. Charity had discovered there were things you didn't want to tell. Shame wasn't the reason. Sometimes it was just better - kinder - to keep up a front.


Mostly she hadn't told because these things were her problems. What happened to Brett was her problem... and over the last two days she had come more and more to beheve that what he did with his life would depend less on her and Joe in the final reckoning than it would on Brett himself.


There would he no divorce. She would continue to fight her unceasing guerilla war with Joe for the boy's soul... for whatever good that would do. In her worry over Brett's wanting to emulate his father, she had perhaps forgotten - or overlooked -the fact that there comes a time when children stand in judgment and their parents ~ mother as well as father -must stand in the dock. Brett had noticed Holly's ostentatious display of credit cards. Charity could only hope Brett would notice that his father ate with his hat on ... among other things.


The dawn was brightening. She took her robe from the back of the door and put it on. She wanted a shower but would not take one until the others in the house were stirring. The strangers. That was what they were. Even Holly's face was strange to her now, a face that bore only a faint resemblance to the snapshots in the family albums she had brought with them ... even Holly herself had looked at those photographs with a faint air of puzzlement.

They would go back to Castle Rock, back to the house at the end of Town Road No. 3, back to Joe. She would pick up the threads of her life, and things would continue. That would be best.


She reminded herself to call Alva just before seven o'clock, when he would be at breakfast.


It was just past 6 A.M. and the day was coming bright when Tad had his convulsion.


He had awakened from an apparently sound sleep around 5: 15 and had roused Donna from a low doze, complaining of being hungry and thirsty. As if he had pressed a button deep down inside her, Donna had become aware for the first time that she was hungry too. The thirst she had been aware of - it was more or less constant - but she could not remember actually thinking of food since sometime yesterday morning. Now she was suddenly ravenous.


She soothed Tad as best she could, telling him hollow things that no longer meant anything real to her one way or another - that people would show up soon, the bad dog would be taken away, they would be rescued.


The real thing was the thought of food.


Breakfasts, for instance, take breakfasts: two eggs fried in butter, over easy if you don't mind, waiter. French toast. Big glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice so cold that moisture beaded the glass. Canadian bacon. Home fries. Bran flakes in cream with a sprinkle of blueberries on top - bloobies, her father had always called them, another one of those comic irrationalities that had irritated her mother out of all proportion.

Her stomach made a loud rumbling sound, and Tad laughed. The sound of his laughter startled her and pleased her with its unexpectedness. It was like finding a rose growing in a rubbish heap, and she smiled back. The smile hurt her lips.


'Heard that, huh?'


'I think you must be hungry too.'


'Well, I wouldn't turn down an Egg McMuffin if someone threw it my way.'


Tad groaned, and that made them both laugh again. In the yard, Cujo had pricked up his ears. He growled at the sound of their laughter. For a moment he made as if to get to his feet, perhaps to charge the car again; then he settled wearily back on his haunches, head drooping.


Donna felt that irrational lift in her spirits that almost always comes with daybreak. Surely it would be over soon; surely they had passed the worst. All the luck had been against them, but sooner or later even the worst luck changes.


Tad seemed almost his old self. Too pale, badly used, terribly tired in spite of his sleep, but still indubitably the Tadder. She hugged him, and he hugged her back. The pain in her belly had subsided somewhat, although the scrapes and gouges there had a puffy, inflamed look. Her leg was worse, but she found she was able to flex it, although it hurt to do so and the bleeding started again. She would have a scar.


The two of them talked for the next forty minutes or so. Donna, hunting for a way to keep Tad alert and to also pass the time for both of them, suggested Twenty Questions. Tad agreed eagerly. He had never been able to get enough of the game; the only problem had always been getting one or the other of his parents to play it with him. They were on their fourth game when the convulsion struck.

Donna had guessed some five questions ago that the subject of the interrogation was Fred Redding, one of Tad's daycamp chums, but had been spinning things out.'


'Does he have red hair?' she asked.


'No, he's . . . he's ... he's . . .'


Suddenly Tad was struggling to catch his breath. It came and went in gasping, tearing whoops that caused fear to leap up her throat in a sour, coppery-tasting rush.


'Tad? Tad?'


Tad gasped. He clawed at his throat, leaving red lines there. His eyes rolled up, showing only the bottoms of the irises and the silvery whites.


'Tad!'


She grabbed him, shook him. His Adam's apple went up and down rapidly, like a mechanical bear on a stick. His hands began to flop aimlessly about, and then they rose to his throat again and tore at it. He began to make animal choking sounds.


For a moment Donna entirely forgot where she was. She grabbed for the doorhandle, pulled it up, and shoved the door of the Pinto open, as if this had happened while she was in the supermarket parking lot and there was help close by. Cujo was on his feet in an instant. He leaped at the car before the door was more than half open, perhaps saving her from being savaged at that instant. He struck the opening door, fell back, and then came again, snarling thickly. Loose excrement poured onto the crushed gravel of the driveway.


Screaming, she yanked the door closed. Cujo leaped at the side of the car again, bashing the dent in a little deeper. He reeled back, then sprang at the window, thudding off it with a dull cracking sound. The silver crack running through the glass suddenly developed half a dozen tributaries. He leaped at it again and the Saf-T-Glas starred inward, still holding together but sagging now. The outside world was suddenly a milky blur.

If he comes again…


Instead, Cujo withdrew, waiting to see what she would do next.


She turned to her son.


Tad's entire body was jerking, as if with epilepsy. His back was bowed. His buttocks came out of the seat, thumped back, rose again, thumped back. His face was taking on a bluish color. The veins in his temples stood out prominently. She had been a candystriper for three years, her last two in high school and the summer following her freshman year at college, and she knew what was happening here. He had not swallowed his tongue; outside of the more purple mystery novels, that was impossible. But his tongue had slid down his throat and was now blocking his windpipe. He was choking to death in front of her eyes.


She grabbed his chin in her left hand and yanked his mouth open. Panic made her rough, and she heard the tendons in his jaw creak. Her probing fingers found the tip of his tongue incredibly far back, almost to where his wisdom teeth would be if they every grew out. She tried to grip it and couldn't; it was as wet and slippery as a baby eel. She tried to tweeze it between her thumb and forefinger, only faintly aware of the lunatic race of her heart. I think I'm losing him, she thought. Oh my dear God, I think I'm losing my son.


Now his teeth suddenly clashed down, drawing blood from her probing fingers and from his own cracked and blistered lips. Blood ran down his chin. She was hardly aware of the pain. Tad's feet began to rattle a mad tattoo against the floormat of the Pinto. She groped for the tip of his tongue desperately. She had it... and it slipped through her fingers again.



(the dog the goddamned dog it's his fault goddam dog goddam hellhound I'LL KILL YOU I SWEAR TO GOD)

Tad's teeth clamped down on her fingers again, and then she had his tongue again and this time she did not hesitate: she dug her fingernails into its spongy top and underside and pulled it forward like a woman pulling a windowshade down; at the same time she put her other hand under his chin and tipped his head back, creating the maximum airway. Tad began to gasp again - a harsh, rattling sound, like the breathing of an old man with emphysema. Then he began to whoop.


She slapped him. She didn't know what else to do, so she did that.


Tad uttered one final tearing gasp, and then his breathing waled into a rapid pant. She was panting herself. Waves of dizziness rushed over her. She had twisted her bad leg somehow, and there was the warm wetness of fresh bleeding.


'Tad!' She swallowed harshly. 'Tad, can you hear me?'


His head nodded. A little. His eyes remained closed.


'Take it as easy as you can. I want you to relax.'


... want to go home ... Mommy ... the monster. .


'Shhh, Tadder. Don't talk, and don't think about monsters. Here.' The Monster Words had fallen to the floor. She picked the yellow paper up and put it in his hand. Tad gripped it with panicky tightness. 'Now concentrate on breathing slowly and regularly, Tad. That's the way to get home. Slow and regular breaths.'


Her eyes wandered past him and once again she saw the splintery bat, its handle wrapped in friction tape, lying in the high weeds at the right side of the driveway.


'Just take it easy, Tadder, can you try to do that?'


Tad nodded a little without opening his eyes.

'Just a little longer, hon. I promise. I promise.'


Outside, the day continued to brighten. Already it was warm. The temperature inside the small car began to climb.


Vic got home at twenty past five. At the time his wife was pulling his son's tongue out of the back of his mouth, he was walking around the living room, putting things slowly and dreamily to rights, while Bannerman, a State Police detective, and a detective from the state Attorney General's office sat on the long sectional sofa drinking instant coffee.


'I've already told you everything I know,' Vic said. 'If she isn't with the people you've contacted already, she's not with anybody.' He had a broom and a dustpan, and he had brought in the box of Hefty bags from the kitchen closet. Now he let a panful of broken glass slide into one of the bags with an atonal jingle. 'Unless it's Kemp.'


There was an uncomfortable silence. Vic couldn't remember ever being as tired as he was now, but he didn't believe he would be able to sleep unless someone gave him a shot. He wasn't thinking very well. Ten minutes after he arrived the telephone had rung and he had sprung at it like an animal, not heeding the A. G.'s man's mild statement that it was probably for him. It hadn't been; it was Roger, wanting to know if Vic had gotten there, and if there was any news.


There was some news, but all of it was maddeningly inconclusive. There had been fingerprints all over the house, and a fingerprint team, also from Augusta, had taken a number of sets from the living quarters adjacent to the small stripping shop where Steven Kemp had worked until recently. Before long the matching would be done and they would know conclusively if Kemp had been the one who had turned the downstairs floor upside down. To Vic it was so much redundancy; he knew in his guts that it had been Kemp.

The State Police detective had run a make on Kemp's van. It was a 1971 Ford Econoline, Maine license 641-644. The color was light gray, but they knew from Kemp's landlord -they had routed him out of bed at 4 Am. - that the van had desert murals painted on the sides: buttes, mesas, sand dunes. There were two bumper stickers on the rear, one which said SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and one which said RONALD REAGAN SHOT J.R. A very hinny guy, Steve Kemp, the murals and the bumper stickers would make the van easier to identify, and unless he had ditched it, he would almost certainly he spotted before the day was out. The MV alert had gone out to all the New England states and to upstate New York. In addition, the FBI in Portland and Boston had been alerted to a possible kidnapping, and they were now running Steve Kemp's name through their files in Washington. They would find three minor busts dating back to the Vietnam war protests, one each for the years 1968-1970.


'There's only one thing about all of this that bothers me,' the A. G.'s man said. His pad was on his knee, but anything Vic could tell he had already told them. The man from Augusta was only doodling. 'If I may be frank, it bothers the shit out of me.'


'What's that?' Vic asked. He picked up the family portrait, looked down at it, and then tilted it so the shattered glass facing tumbled into the Hefty bag with another evil little jingle.


'The car. Where's your wife's car?'


His name was Masen - Masen with an 'e', he had informed Vic as they shook hands. Now he went to the window, slapping his pad absently against his leg. Vic's battered sports car was in the driveway, parked to one side of Bannerman's cruiser. Vic had picked it up at the Portland jetport and dropped off the Avis car he had driven north from Boston.


'What's that got to do with it?' Vic asked.

Masen shrugged. 'Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Maybe everything. Probably nothing, but I just don't like it. Kemp comes here, right? Grabs your wife and son. Why? He's crazy. That's reason enough. Can't stand to lose. Maybe it's even his twisted idea of a joke.'


These were all things Vic himself had said, repeated back almost verbatim.


'So what does he do? He bundles them into his Ford van with the desert murals on the sides. He's either running with them or he's holed up somewhere. Right?'


'Yes, that's what I'm afraid -'


Masen turned from the window 'to look at him. 'So where's her car?'


'Well -' Vic tried hard to think. It was hard. He was very tired. 'Maybe -'


'Maybe he had a confederate who drove it away,' Masen said. 'That would probably mean a kidnapping for ransom. If he took them on his own, it was probably just a crazy spur-of-the-moment thing. If it was a kidnapping for money, why take the car at all? To switch over to? Ridiculous. That Pinto's every bit as hot as the van, if a little harder to recognize. And I repeat, if there was no confederate, if he was by himself, who drove the car?'


'Maybe he came back for it,' the State Police detective rumbled. 'Stowed the boy and the missus and came back for the car.'


That would present some problems without a confederate,' Masen said, 'but I suppose he could do it. Take them someplace close and walk back for Mrs. Trenton's Pinto, or take them someplace far away and thumb a ride back. But why?'


Bannerman spoke for the first time. 'She could have driven it herself.'

Masen swung to look at him, his eyebrows going up.


'If he took the boy with him -Bannerman looked at Vic and nodded a little. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Trenton, but if Kemp took the boy with him, belted him in, held a gun on him, and told your wife to follow dose, and that something might happen to the boy if she tried anything clever, like turning off or flashing her lights -'


Vic nodded, feeling sick at the picture it made.


Masen seemed irritated with Bannerman, perhaps because he hadn't thought of the possibility himself. 'I repeat: to what purpose?'


Bannerman shook his head. Vic himself couldn't think of a single reason why Kemp would want Donna's car.


Masen lit a Pall Mall, coughed, and looked around for an ashtray.


'I'm sorry,' Vic said, again feeling Iike an actor, someone outside himself, saying lines that had been written for him. 'The two ashtrays in here were broken. I'll get you one from the kitchen.'


Masen walked out with him, took an ashtray, and said, 'Let's go out on the steps, do you mind? It's going to be a bitch of a hot day. I like to enjoy them while they're still civilized during July.'


'Okay,' Vic said listlessly.


He glanced at the thermometer-barometer screwed to the side of the house as they went out ... a gift from Donna last Christmas. The temperature already stood at 73. The needle of the barometer was planted squarely in the quadrant marked FAIR.


'Let's pursue this a little further,' Masen said. 'It fascinates me. Here's a woman with a son, a woman, whose husband is away on a business trip. She needs her car if she's going to get around very well. Even downtown's half a mile away and the walk back is all uphill. So if we assume that Kemp grabbed her here, the car would still be here. Try this, instead. Kemp comes up and trashes the house, but he's still furious. He sees them someplace else in town and grabs them. In that case, the car would still be in that other place. Downtown, maybe. Or in the parking lot at the shopping center.'

'Wouldn't someone have tagged it in the middle of the night?' Vic asked.


'Probably,' Masen said. 'Do you think she herself might have left it somewhere, Mr. Trenton?'


Then Vic remembered. The needle valve.


'You look like something just clicked,' Masen said.


'It didn't click, it clunked. The car isn't here because it's at the Ford dealership in South Paris. She was having carburetor trouble. The needle valve in there kept wanting to jam. We talked about it on the phone Monday afternoon. She was really pissed off and upset about it. I meant to make an appointment for her to get it done by a local guy here in town, but I forgot because . . .'


He trailed off, thinking about the reasons why he had forgotten.


'You forgot to the make the appointment here in town, so she would have taken it to South Paris?'


'Yeah, I guess so.' He couldn't remember exactly what the run of the conversation had been now, except that she had been afraid the car would seize up while she was taking it to be fixed.


Masen glanced at his watch and got up. Vic started to rise with him.


'No, stay put. I just want to make a quick phone call. I'll be back.'


Vic sat where he was. The screen door banged closed behind Masen, a sound that reminded him so much of Tad that he winced and had to grit his teeth against fresh tears. Where were they? The thing about the Pinto not being here had only been momentarily promising after all.

'The sun was fully up now, throwing a bright rose light over the houses and the streets below, and across Castle Hill. It touched the swing set where he had pushed Tad times without number ... all he wanted was to push his son on the swing again with his wife standing beside him. He would push until his hands fell off, if that was what Tad wanted.


Daddy, I wanna loop the loop! I wanna!


The voice in his mind chilled his heart. It was like a ghost voice.


The screen door opened again a moment later. Masen sat down beside him and lit a fresh cigarette. 'Twin City Ford in South Paris,' he said. 'That was the one, wasn't it?'


'Yeah. We bought the Pinto there.'


'I took a shot and called them. Got lucky; the service manager was already in. Your Pinto's not there, and it hasn't been there. Who's the local guy?'


'Joe Camber,' Vic said. 'She must have taken the car out there after all. She didn't want to because he's way out in the back of beyond and she couldn't get any answer on the phone when she called. I told her he was probably there anyway, just working in the garage. It's this converted barn, and I don't think he's got a phone in there. At least he didn't the last time I was out there.'


'We'll check it out,' Masen said, 'but her car's not there either, Mr. Trenton. Depend on it.'


'Why not?'


'Doesn't make a bit of logical sense,' Masen said. 'I was ninety-five percent sure it wasn't in South Paris, either. Look, everything we said before still holds true. A young woman with a child needs a car. Suppose she took the car over to Twin City Ford and they told her it was going to be a couple of days. How does she get back?'

'Well ... a loaner ... or if they wouldn't give her a loaner, I guess they'd rent her one of their lease cars. From the cheap fleet.'


'Right! Beautiful! So where is it?'


Vic looked at the driveway, almost as if expecting it to appear.


'There'd be no more reason for Kemp to abscond with your wife's loaner than there would be for him to abscond with her Pinto,' Masen said. 'That pretty well ruled out the Ford dealership in advance. Now let's say she takes it out to this guy Camber's garage. If he gives her an old junker to run around in while he fixes her Pinto, we're back at square one right away: Where's the junker? So let's say that she takes it up there and Camber says he'll have to keep it awhile but she calls a friend, and the friend comes out to pick her up. With me so far?'


'Yes, sure.'


'So who was the friend? You gave us a list, and we got them all out of bed. Lucky they were all home, it being summer and all. None of them mentioned bringing your people home from anywhere. No one has seen them any later than Monday morning.'


'Well, why don't we stop crapping around?' Vic asked. 'Let's give Camber a call and find out for sure.'


'Let's wait until seven,' Masen said. 'That's only fifteen minutes. Give him a chance to get his face washed and wake up a little. Service managers usually clock in early. This guy's an independent.'


Vic shrugged. This whole thing was a crazy blind alley. Kemp had Donna and Tad. He knew it in his guts, just as he knew it was Kemp who had trashed the house and shot his come on the bed he and Donna shared.

'Of course, it didn't have to he a friend,' Masen said, dreamily watching his cigarette smoke drift off into the morning. 'There are all sorts of possibilities. She gets the car up there, and someone she knows slightly happens to be there, and the guy or gal offers Mrs. Trenton and your son a ride back into town. Or maybe Camber runs them home himself. Or his wife. Is be. married?'


'Yes. Nice woman.'


'Could have been him, her, anyone. People are always willing to help a lady in distress.'


'Yeah,' Vic said, and lit a cigarette of his own.


'But none of that matters either, because the question always remains the same: Where's the fucking car? Because the situation's the same. Woman and kid on their own. She has to get groceries, go to the dry cleaner's, go to the post office, dozens of little errands. If the husband was only going to be gone a few days, a week, even, she might try to get along without a car. But ten days or two weeks? Jesus, that's a long haul in a town that's only got one goddam cab. Rental car people are happy to deliver in a situation like that. She could have gotten Hertz or Avis or National to deliver the car here or out to Camber's. So where's the rental car? I keep coming back to that. There should have been a vehicle in this yard. Dig?'


'I don't think it's important,' Vic said.


'And probably it's not. We'll find some simple explanation and say Oy vay, how could we be so stupid? But it fascinates me strangely ... it was the needle valve? You're sure of that?'


'Postitive.'


Masen shook his head. 'Why would she need all that rigamarole about loaners or rental cars anyway? That's a fifteen-minute fix for somebody with the tools and the know-how. Drive in, drive out. So where's -'

'- her goddam car?' Vic finished wearily. 'Me world was coming and going in waves now.


'Why don't you go upstairs and lie down?' Masen said. 'You looked wiped out.'


'No, I want to be awake if something happens--.'


'And if something does, somebody will he here to wake you up. The FBI's coming with a trace-back system to hook up on your phone. Those people are noisy enough to wake the dead -so don't worry.'


Vic was too tired to feel much more than a dull dread. 'Do you think that trace-back shit is really necessary?'


'Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,' Masen said, and pitched his cigarette. 'Get a little rest and you'll be able to cope better, Vic. Go on.'


'All right.'


He went slowly upstairs. The bed had been stripped to the mattress. He had done it himself. He put two pillows on his side, took off his shoes, and lay down. The morning sun shone fiercely in through the window. I won't sleep, he thought, but I'll rest. I'll try to, anyway. Fifteen minutes ... maybe half an hour ...


But by the time the phone woke him up, that day's burning noon had come.


Charity Camber had her morning coffee and then called Alva Thornton in Castle Rock. This time Alva himself answered.


He knew that she had chatted with Bessie the night before. 'Nope,' Alva said. 'I ain't seed hide nor hair of Joe since last Thursday or so, Charity. He brought over a tractor tire he fixed for me. Never said nothing about feeding Cujo, although I'd've been happy to.'

'Alva, could you run up to the house and check on Cujo) Brett saw him Monday morning before we left for my sister's, and he thought he looked sick. And I just don't know who Joe would have gotten to feed him.' After the way of country people, she added: 'No hurry.'


'I'll take a run up and check,' Alva said. 'Let me get those damn cacklers fed and watered and I'm gone.'


That would be fine, Alva,' Charity said gratefully, and gave him her sister's number. 'Thanks so much.'


They talked a little more, mostly about the weather. The constant heat had Alva worried about his chickens. Then she hung up.


Brett looked up from his cereal when she came into the kitchen. Jim junior was very carefully making rings on the table with his orange juice glass and talking a mile a minute. He had decided sometime during the last forty-eight hours that Brett Camber was a dose relation to Jesus Christ.


'Well?' Brett asked.


'You were right. Dad didn't ask Alva to feed him.' She saw the disappointment and worry on Brett's face and went on: 'But he's going up to check on Cujo this morning, as soon as he's got his chickens tended to. I left the number this time. He said he'd call back one way or the other.'


'Thanks, Mom.'


Jim clattered back from the table as Holly called him to come upstairs and get dressed. 'Wanna come up with me, Brett?'


Brett smiled. 'I'll wait for you, slugger.'

'Okay.' Jim ran out trumpeting, 'Mom! Brett said he'd wait! Brett's gonna wait for me to get dressed!'


A thunder, as of elephants, on the stairs.


'He's a nice kid,' Brett said casually.


'I thought,' Charity said, 'that we might go home a little early. If that's all right with you.'


Brett's face brightened, and in spite of all the decisions she had come to, that brightness made her feel a Iittle sad. 'When?' he asked.


'How does tomorrow sound? She had been intending to suggest Friday.


'Great! But' - he Iooked at her closely -'are you done visiting, Mom? I mean, she's your sister.'


Charity thought of the credit cards, and of the Wurlitzer jukebox Holly's husband had been able to afford but did not know how to fix. Those were the things that had impressed Brett, and she supposed they had impressed her as well in some way. Perhaps she had seen them through Brett's eyes a little ... through Joe's eyes. And enough was enough.


'Yes,' she said. 'I guess I've done my visiting. I'll tell Holly this morning.'


'Okay, Mom.' He looked at her a little shyly. 'I wouldn't mind coming back, you know. I do like them. And he's a neat little kid. Maybe he can come up to Maine sometime.'


'Yes,' she said, surprised and grateful. She didn't think Joe would object to that. 'Yes, maybe that could be arranged.'


'Okay. And tell me what Mr. Thornton said.'


'I will.'

But Alva never called back. As he was feeding his chickens that morning, the motor in his big air conditioner blew, and he was immediately in a life-or-death struggle to save his birds before the day's heat could kill them. Donna Trenton might have called it another stroke of that same Fate she saw reflected in Cujo's muddy, homicidal eyes. By the time the issue of the air conditioner was settled, it was four in the afternoon (Alva Thornton lost sixtytwo chickens that day and counted himself off cheaply), and the confrontation which had begun Monday afternoon in the Cambers' sunstruck dooryard was over.


Andy Masen was the Maine Attorney General's Wunderkind, and there were those who said that someday - and not too distant a day, either - he would lead the A. G.'s criminal division. Andy Masen's sights were set a good deal higher than that. He hoped to be Attorney General himself in 1984, and in a position to run for Governor by 1987. And after eight years as Governor, who knew?


He came from a large, poor family. He and his three brothers and two sisters had grown up in a ramshackle 'poor white trash' house on the outer Sabbatus Road in the town of Lisbon. His brothers and sisters had been exactly up - or down - to town expectations. Only Andy Masen and his youngest brother, Marry, had managed to finish high school. For a while it had looked as if Roberta might make it, but she had gotten herself knocked up higher than a kite following a dance her senior year. She had left school to marry the boy, who still had pimples at twenty-nine, drank Narragansett straight from the can, and knocked both her and the kid around. Marry had been killed in a car crash over on Route 9 in Durham. He and some of his drunk friends had tried to take the tight curve up Sirois Hill at seventy. The Camaro in which they were riding rolled over twice and burned.


Andy had been the star of the family, but his mother had never liked him. She was a little afraid of him. When talking to friends she would say, 'My Andy's a cold fish,' but he was more than that. He was always tightly controlled, always buttoned up. He knew from the fifth grade on that he was going to somehow get through college and become a lawyer. Lawyers made a lot of money. Lawyers worked with logic. Logic was Andy's God.

He saw each event as a point from which a finite number of possibilities radiated. At the end of each possibility line was another event point. And so on. This point-to-point blueprint of life had served him very well. He made straight A's through grammar school and high school, got a Merit Scholarship, and could have gone to college almost anywhere. He decided on the University of Maine, throwing away his chance at Harvard because he had already decided to start his career in Augusta, and he didn't want some piney-woodser in gumrubber boots and a lumberman's jacket throwing Harvard in his face.


On this hot July morning, things were right on schedule.


He put Vic Trenton's phone down. There had been no answer at the Camber telephone number. The State Police detective and Bannerman were still here, waiting for instructions like welltrained dogs. He had worked with Townsend, the State Police guy, before, and he was the sort of fellow Andy Masen felt comfortable with. When you said fetch, Townsend fetched. Bannerman was a new one, and Masen didn't care for him. His eyes were a little too bright, and the way he had suddenly come out with the idea that Kemp might have coerced the woman by using the kid ... well, such ideas, if they were going to come, ought to come from Andy Masen. The three of them sat on the sectional sofa, not talking, just drinking coffee and waiting for the FBI boys to show up with the trace-back equipment.


Andy thought about the case. It might be a tempest in a teapot, but it might well be something *more. The husband was convinced it was a kidnapping and attached no importance to the missing car. He was fixated on the idea that Steven Kemp had taken his people. Andy Masen was not so sure.

Camber wasn't home; no one was home up there. Maybe they had all gone on vacation. That was likely enough; July was the quintessential vacation month, and they had been due to hit someone who was gone. Would he have taken her car in for a repair job if he was going away? Unlikely. Unlikely that the car was there at all. But it had to be checked, and there was one possibility he had neglected to mention to Vic.


Suppose she had taken the car up to Camber's Garage? Suppose someone had offered her a lift back? Not a friend, not an acquaintance, not Camber or his wife, but a total stranger? Andy could hear Trenton saying, 'Oh, no, my wife would never accept a ride from a stranger.' But, in the vernacular, she had accepted several rides from Steven Kemp, who was almost a stranger. If the hypothetical man was friendly, and if she was anxious to get her son home, she might have accepted. And maybe the nice, smiling man was some kind of a freak. They had had just such a freak here in Castle Rock before, Frank Dodd. Maybe the nice, smiling man had left them in the brush with their throats cut and had hied on his merry way. If that was the case, the Pinto would be at Camber's.


Andy did not think this fine of reasoning likely, but it was possible. He would have sent a man up to the Cambers' anyway - it was routine - but he liked to understand why he was doing each thing he was doing. He thought that, for all practical purposes, he could dismiss Camber's Garage from the structure of logic and order he was building. He supposed she could have gone up there, discovered the Cambers were gone, and then had her car conk out on her, but Castle Rock's Town Road No. 3 was hardly Antartica. She and the kid had only to walk to the nearest house and ask to use the phone in that case, but they hadn't done it.


'Mr. Townsend,' he said in his soft voice. 'You and Sheriff Bannerman here ought to take a ride out to this Joe Camber's Garage. Verify three things: no blue Pinto there, license. number

218 -8 64, no Donna and Theodore Trenton there, no Cambers there. Got that?'

'Fine,' Townsend said. 'Do you want


'I want only those three things,' Andy said softly. He didn't like the way Bannerman was looking at him, and with a kind of weary contempt. It upset him. 'If any of those three are there, call me here. And if I'm not here, I'll leave a number. Understood?'


The telephone rang. Bannerman picked it up, listened, and offered it to Andy Masen. 'For you, hotshot.'


Their eyes locked over the telephone. Masen thought that Bannerman would drop his, but he didn't. After a moment Andy took the phone. The call was from the State Police barracks in Scarborough. Steve Kemp had been picked up. His van had been spotted in the courtyard of a small motel in the Massachusetts town of Twickenham. The woman and the boy were not with him. After receiving the Miranda,


Kemp had given his name and had since been standing on his right to remain silent.


Andy Masen found that extremely ominious news.


'Townsend, you come with me,' he said. 'You can handle the Camber place by yourself, can't you, Sheriff Bannerman?'


'It's my town,' Bannerman said.


Andy Masen lit a cigarette and looked at Bannerman through the shifting smoke. 'Have you got a problem with me, Sheriff?'


Bannerman smiled. 'Nothing I can't handle.'


Christ, I hate these hicks, Masen thought, watching Bannerman leave. But he's out of the play now, anyway. Thank God for small favors.

Bannerman got behind the wheel of his cruiser, fired it up, and backed out of the Trenton driveway. It was twenty minutes after seven. He was almost amused at how neatly Masen had shunted him off onto a siding. They were headed toward the heart of the matter; he was headed nowhere. But ole Hank Townsend was going to have to listen to a whole morning's worth of Masen's bullshit, so maybe he had gotten off well at that.


George Bannerman loafed out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road, siren and flashers off. It surely was a pretty day. And he saw no need to hurry.


Donna and Tad Trenton were sleeping.


Their positions were very similar: the awkward sleeping positions of those forced to spend long hours on interstate buses. Their heads lolled against the sockets of their shoulders, Donna's turned to the left, Tad's to the right. Tad's hands lay in his lap like a beached fish. Now and again they would twitch. His breathing was harsh and stertorous. His lips were blistered, his eyelids a purplish color. A line of spittle running from the corner of his mouth to the soft line of his jaw had begun to dry.


Donna was in middle sleep. As exhausted as she was, her cramped position and the pain in her leg and belly and now her fingers (in his seizure Tad had bitten them to the bone) would let her sink no deeper. Her hair clung to her head in sweaty strings. The gauze pads on her left leg had soaked through again, and the flesh around the superficial wounds on her belly had gone an ugly red. Her breathing was also harsh, but not as uneven as Tad's.


Tad Trenton was very close to the end of his endurance. Dehydration was well advanced. He had lost electrolytes, chlorides, and sodium through his perspiration. Nothing had replaced them. His inner defenses were being steadily rolled back, and now he had entered the final critical stage. His life had grown light, not sunken firmly into his flesh and -bones but trembling, ready to depart on any puff of wind.

In his feverish dreams his father pushed him on the swing, higher and higher, and he did not see their back yard but the duckpond, and the breeze was cool on his sunburned forehead, his aching eyes, his blistered lips.


Cujo also slept.


He lay on the verge of grass by the porch, his mangled snout on his forepaws. His dreams were confused, lunatic things. It was dusk, and the sky was dark with wheeling, red-eyed bats. He leaped at them again and again, and each time he leaped he brought one down, teeth clamped on a leathery, twitching wing. But the bats kept biting his tender face with their sharp little rat-teeth. That was where the pain came from. That was where all the hurt came from. But he would kill them A. He would


He woke suddenly, his head lifting from his paws, his head cocking.


A car was coming.


To his hellishly alert cars, the sound of the approaching car was dreadful, insupportable; it was the sound of some great stinging insect coming to fill him with poison.


He lurched to his feet, whining. All his joints seemed filled with crushed glass. He looked at the dead car. Inside, he could see the unmoving outline of THE WOMAN'S head. Before, Cujo had been able to look right through the glass and see her, but THE WOMAN had done something to the glass that made it hard to see. It didn't matter what she did to the windows. She couldn't get out. Nor THE Boy, either.

The drone was closer now. The car was coming up the hill, but ... was it a car? Or a giant bee or wasp come to batten on him, to sting him, to make his pain even worse?


Better wait and see.


Cujo slunk under the porch, where he had often spent hot summer days in the past. It was drifted sleep with the decaying autumn leaves of other years, leaves which released a smell he had thought incredibly sweet and pleasant in those same other years. Now the smell seemed immense and cloying, suffocating and well-nigh unbearable. He growled at the smell and began to slobber foam again. If a dog could kill a scent, Cujo would have killed this one.


The drone was very close now. And then a car was turning into the driveway. A car with blue sides and a white roof and lights on the top.


'Me one thing George Bannerman had been least prepared to me when he turned into Joe Camber's dooryard was the Pinto belonging to the missing woman. He was not a stupid man, and while he would have been impatient with Andy Masen's point-topoint kind of logic (he had dealt with the horror of Frank Dodd and understood that sometimes there was no logic),he arrived at his own mostly solid conclusions in much the same way, if on a more subconscious level. And he agreed with Masen's belief that it was highly unlikely the Trenton woman and her son would be here. But the car was here, anyway.


Bannerman grabbed for the mike hung under his dashboard and then decided to check the car first. From this angle, directly behind the Pinto, it was impossible to see if anyone was in there or not. The backs of the bucket seats were a bit too high, and both Tad and Donna had slumped down in their sleep.


Bannerman got out of the cruiser and slammed the door behind him. Before he had gotten two steps, he saw the entire driver's side window was a buckled mass of shatter-shot cracks. His heart began to beat harder, and his hand went to the butt of his .38 Police Special.

Cujo stared out at THE MAN from the blue car with rising hate. It was this MAN who had caused all his pain; he felt sure of it. THE MAN had caused the pain in his joints and the high, rotten singing in his head; it was THE MAN's fault that the drift of old leaves here beneath the porch now smelled putrescent; it was THE MAN's fault that he could not look at water without whining and shrinking away and wanting to kill it in spite of his great thirst.


A growl began somewhere deep in his heavy chest as his legs coded beneath him. He could smell THE MAN his oil of sweat and excitement, the heavy meat set against his bones. The growl deepened, then rose to a great and shattering cry of fury. He sprang out from beneath the porch and charged at this awful MAN who had caused his pain.


During that first crucial moment, Bannerman didn't even hear Cujo's low, rising growl. He had approached the Pinto closely enough to see a mass of hair lying against the driver's side window. His first thought was that the woman must have been shot to death, but where was the bullet hole? The glass looked as if it had been bludgeoned, not shot.


Then he saw the head move. Not much - only slightly - but it had moved. The woman was alive. He stepped forward . . and that was when Cujo's roar, followed by a volley of snarling barks came. His first thought.


(Rusty?) was of his Irish setter, but he'd had Rusty put down four years ago, not long after the Frank Dodd thing. And Rusty had never sounded like this, and for a second crucial moment, Bannerman was frozen in his tracks with a terribly, atavistic horror He turned then, pulling his gun, and caught just a blurred glimpse of a dog - an incredibly big dog - launching itself into the air at him. It struck him chest-high, driving him against the Pinto's hatchback. He grunted. His right hand was driven up and his wrist struck the chrome guttering of the hatchback hard. His gun went flying. It whirled over the top of the car, butt-for-barrel and buttfor-barrel, to land in the high weeds on the other side of the driveway.

The dog was biting him, and as Bannerman saw the first flowers of blood open on the front of his light blue shirt, he suddenly understood everything. They'd come here, their car had seized up ... and the dog had been here. The dog hadn't been in Masen's neat little point-to-point analysis.


Bannerman grappled with it, trying to get his hands under the dog's muzzle and bring it up and out of his belly. There was a sudden deep and numbing pain down there. His shirt was in tatters down there. Blood was pouring over his pants in a freshet. He lurched forward and the dog drove him back with frightening force, drove him back against the Pinto with a thud that rocked the little car on its springs.


He found himself trying to remember if he and his wife had made love last night.


Crazy thing to be thinking. Crazy


The dog bored in again. Bannerman tried to dodge away but the dog anticipated him, it was grinning at him, and suddenly there was more pain that he had ever felt in his life. It galvanized him. Screaming, he got both hands under the dog's muzzle again and yanked it up. For a moment, staring into those dark, crazed eyes, a swoony kind of horror came over him and he thought: Hello, Frank. It's you, isn't it? Was bell too hot for you?

Then Cujo was snapping at his fingers, tearing them, laying them open. Bannerman forgot about Frank Dodd. He forgot about everything but trying to save his life. He tried to get his knee up, between him and the dog, and found he couldn't. When he tried to raise his knee, the pain in his lower belly flared to a sheeting agony.


What's he done to me down there? Oh my God, what's he done? Vicky, Vicky


Then the driver's side door of the Pinto opened. It was the woman. He had looked at the family portrait Steve Kemp had stepped on and had seen a pretty, neatly coiffed woman, the sort you look at twice on the street, the second look being mildly speculative. You saw a woman like that and you thought that her husband was lucky to have her in the kip.


This woman was a ruin. The dog had been at her as well. Her belly was streaked with dried blood. One leg of her jeans had been chewed away, and there was a sopping bandage just over her knee. But her face was the worst; it was like a hideous baked apple. Her forehead had blistered and peeled. Her lips were cracked and suppurating. Her eyes were sunken in deep purple pouches of flesh.


The dog left Bannerman in a flash and advanced on the woman, stiff-legged and growling. She retreated into the car and slammed the door.


(cruiser now got to call in got to call this in)


He turned and ran back to the cruiser. The dog chased him but he outran it. He slammed the door, grabbed the mike, and called for help, Code 3, officer needs assistance. Help came. The dog was shot. They were all saved.

All of this happened in just three seconds, and only in George Bannerman's mind. As he turned to go back to his police cruiser, his legs gave out and spilled him into the driveway.


(Oh Vicky what's be done to me down there?)


The world was all dazzling sun. It was hard to see. Bannerman scrambled, clawed at the gravel, and finally made it to his knees. He looked down. at himself and saw a thick gray rope of intestine hanging out of his tattered shirt. His pants were soaked with blood to both knees.


Enough. The dog had done enough to him down there.


Hold your guts in, Bannerman. If you're stepping out, you're stepping out. But not until you get to that fucking mike and call this in. Hold your guts in and get on your big Pat feet


(the kid jesus her kid is her kid in there?)


That made him think of his own daughter, Katrina, who would be going into the seventh grade this year. She was getting breasts now. Becoming quite the little lady. Piano lessons. Wanted a horse. There had been a day when, if she had crossed from the school to the library alone, Dodd would have had her instead of Mary Kate Hendrasen. When


(move your ass)


Bannerman got to his feet. Everything was sunshine and brightness and all his insides seemed to want to slip out of the hole the dog had torn in him. The car. The police radio. Behind him, the dog was distracted; he was throwing himself crazily against the Pinto's buckled driver's side door again and again, barking and snarling.


Bannerman staggered toward the cruiser. His face was as white as pie dough. His lips were blue gray. It was the biggest dog he had ever seen, and it had gutted him. Gutted him, for Christ's sake, and why was everything so hot and bright?

His intestines were slipping through his fingers.


He reached the car door. He could hear the radio under the dash, crackling out its message. Should have called in first. That's procedure. You never argue with procedure, but if I'd believed that, I never would have called Smith in the Dodd case. Vicky, Katrina, I'm sorry


The boy. He had to get help for the boy.


He almost fell and grabbed the edge of the door for support.


And then he heard the dog coming for him and he began to scream again. He tried to hurry. If he could only get the door shut ... oh, God, if only he could close the door before the dog got to him again ... oh, God ...


(oh GOD)


Tad was screaming again, screaming and clawing at his face, whipping his head from side to side as Cujo thudded against the door, making it rock.


'Tad, don't! Don't ... honey, please don't!'


'Want Daddy ... want Daddy ... want Daddy...'


Suddenly it stopped.


Holding Tad against her breasts, Donna turned her head in time to see Cujo strike the man as he tried to swing into his car. The force of it knocked his hand loose from the door.


After that she couldn't watch. She wished she could block her ears somehow as well, from the sounds of Cujo finishing with whoever it had been.


He bid, she thought hysterically. He heard the car coming and he hid.

The porch door. Now was the time to go for the porch door while Cujo was ... was occupied.


She put her hand on the doorhandle, yanked it, and shoved. Nothing happened. The door wouldn't open. Cujo had finally buckled the frame enough to seal it shut.


'Tad,' she whispered feverishly. 'Tad, change places with me, quick. Tad? Tad?'

Tad was shivering all over. His eyes had rolled up again.


'Ducks,' he said gutturally. 'Go see the ducks. Monster Words. Daddy. Ah ... ahh... ahhhhhhh-'

He was convulsing again. His arms flopped bonelessly. She began to shake him, crying his name over and over again, trying to keep his mouth open, trying to keep the airway open. There was a monstrous buzzing in her head and she began to be afraid that she was going to faint. This was hell, they were in hell. The morning sun streamed into the car, creating the greenhouse effect, dry and remorseless.


At last Tad quieted. His eyes had closed again. His breathing was very rapid and shallow. When she put her fingers on his wrist she found a runaway pulse, weak, thready, and irregular.


She looked outside. Cujo had hold of the man's arm and was shaking it in the way a puppy will shake a rag toy. Every now and then he would pounce on the limp body. The blood ... there was so much blood.


As if aware he was being observed, Cujo looked up, his muzzle dripping. He looked at her with an expression (could a dog have an expression? she wondered madly) that seemed to convey both sternness and pity ... and again Donna had the feeling that they had come to know each other intimately, and that there could be no stopping or resting for either of them until they had explored this terrible relationship to some ultimate conclusion.

It pounced on the man in the blood-spattered blue shirt and the khaki pants again. The dead man's head lolled on his neck. She looked away, her empty stomach sour with hot acid. Her torn leg ached and throbbed. She had torn the wound there open yet again.


Tad ... how was he now?


He's terrible, her mind answered inexorably. So what are you going to do? You're his mother, what are you going to do?


What could she do? Would it help Tad if she went out there and got herself killed?


The policeman. Someone had sent the policeman up here. And when he didn't come back 'Please,' she croaked. 'Soon, please.'


It was eight o'clock now, and outside it was still relatively cool - 77 degrees. By noon, the recorded temperature at the Portland jetport would be 102, a new record for that date.


Townsend and Andy Masen arrived at the State Police barracks in Scarborough at 8:30 A.M. Masen let Townsend run with the ball. This was his bailiwick, not Masen's, and there was not a thing wrong with Andy's ears.


The duty officer told them that Steven Kemp was on his way back to Maine. There had been no problem about that, but Kemp still wasn't talking. His van had been given a thorough going-over by Massachusetts lab technicians and forensic experts. Nothing had turned up which might indicate a woman and a boy had been held in the back, but they had found a nice little pharmacy in the van's wheel well - marijuana, some cocaine in an Anacin bottle, three amyl nitrate poppers, and two speedy combinations of the type known as Black Beauties. It gave them a handy hook to hang Mr. Kemp on for the time being.

'That Pinto,' Andy said to Townsend, bringing them each a cup of coffee. 'Where's that fucking Pinto of hers?'


Townsend shook his head.


'Has Bannerman called anything in?'


'Nope.'


'Well, give him a shout. Tell him I want him down here when they bring Kemp in. It's his jurisiction, and I guess he's got to be the questioning officer. Technically, at least.'


Townsend came back five minutes later looking puzzled. 'I can't get him, Mr. Masen. Their dispatcher's tried him and says he must not be in his car.'


'Christ, he's probably having coffee down at the Cozy Corner. Well, fuck him. He's out of it.' Andy Masen lit a fresh Pall Mall, coughed, and then grinned at Townsend. 'Think we can handle this Kemp without him?'


Townsend smiled back. 'Oh, I think we can manage.'


Masen nodded. 'This thing is starting to look bad, Mr. Townsend. Very bad.'


'It's not good.'


'I'm beginning to wonder if this Kemp didn't bury them in the ditch beside some farm road between Castle Rock and Twickenham.' Masen smiled again. 'But we'll crack him, Mr. Townsend. I've cracked tough nuts before this.'


'Yessir,' Townsend said respectfully. He believed Masen had.


'We'll crack him if we have to sit him in this office and sweat him for two days.'


Townsend slipped out every fifteen minutes or so, trying to make contact with George Bannerman. He knew Bannerman only slightly, but he held a higher opinion of him than Masen did, and he thought Bannerman deserved to be warned that Andy Masen was on the prod for him. When he still hadn't reached Bannerman by ten o'clock, he began to feel worried. He also began to wonder if he should mention Bannerman's continued silence to Masen, or if he should hold his peace.

Roger Breakstone arrived in New York at 8:49 A.M. on the Eastern shuttle, cabbed into the city, and checked into the Biltmore a little before 9:30.


The reservation was for two?' the desk clerk asked.


'My partner has been called home on an emergency.'


'What a pity,' the desk clerk said indifferently, and gave Roger a card to fill out. While he did so, the desk clerk talked to the cashier about the Yankee tickets he had gotten for the following weekend.


Roger lay down in his room, trying to nap, but in spite of his poor rest the night before, no sleep would come. Donna screwing some other man, Vic holding on to all of that - trying to, anyway - in addition to this stinking mess over a red, sugary kiddies' cereal. Now Donna and Tad had disappeared. Vic had disappeared. Everything had somehow gone up in smoke this last week. Neatest trick you ever saw, presto chango, everything's a big pile of shit. His head ached. The ache came in big, greasy, thumping waves.


At last he got up, not wanting to be alone with his bad head and his bad thoughts any longer. He thought he might as well go on over to Summers Marketing & Research on 47th and Park the spread some gloom around there - after all, what else did Ad Worx pay them for?


He stopped in the lobby for aspirin and walked over. The walk did nothing for his head, but it did give him a chance to renew his hate/hate relationship with New York.



Not back here, he thought. I'll go to work throwing cartons of Pepsi on a truck before I bring Althea and the girls back here.

Summers was on the fourteenth floor of a big, stupidlooking, energy-inefficient skyscraper. The receptionist smiled and nodded when Roger identified himself. 'Mr. Hewitt has just stepped out for a few minutes. Is Mr. Trenton with you?'


'No, he was called home.'


'Well, I have something for you. It just came in this morning.'


She handed Roger a telegram in a yellow envelope. It was addressed to V. TRENTON/R. BREAKSTONE/AD


WORXICARE OF IMAGE-EYE STUDIOS. Rob had forwarded it to Summers Marketing late yesterday.


Roger tore it open and saw at once that it was from old man Sharp, and that it was fairly long.


Walking papers, here we come, he thought, and read the telegram.


The telephone woke Vic up at a few minutes before twelve; otherwise he might have slept most of the afternoon away as well. His sleep had been heavy and, soggy, and he woke with a terrible feeling of disorientation. The dream had come again. Donna and Tad in a rocky niche, barely beyond the reach of some terrible, mythical beast. The room actually seemed to whirl around him as he reached for the telephone.


Donna and Tad, he thought. They're safe.


'Hello?'


'Vic, it's Roger.'


'Roger?' He sat up. His shirt was plastered to his body. Half his mind was still asleep and grappling with that dream. The light was too strong. The beat ... it had been relatively cool when he went to



sleep. Now the bedroom was an oven. How late was it? How late had they let him sleep? The house was so silent.

'Roger, what time is it?'


'Time,?' Roger paused. 'Why, just about twelve o'clock. What 'Twelve? Oh, Christ.... Roger, I've been asleep.'


'What's happened, Vic? Are they back?'


'They weren't when I went to sleep. That bastard Masen promised '


'Who's Masen?'


'He's in charge of the investigation. Roger, I have to go. I have to find out -'


'Hold on, man. I'm calling from Summers. I've got to tell you. There was a telegram from Sharp in Cleveland. We're keeping the account.'


'What? What? It was all going too fast for him. Donna... the account ... Roger, sounding almost absurdly cheerful.


There was a telegram here when I came in. The old man and his kid sent it to Image-Eye and Rob forwarded it here. You want me to read it?'


'Give me the gist.'


'Old man Sharp and the kid apparently came to the same conclusion using different chains of logic. The old man sees the Zingers thing as a replay of the Alamo - we're the good guys standing on the battlements, standing by to repel the boarders. All got to stick together, all for one and one for all.'


'Yeah, I knew he had that in him,' Vic said, rubbing the back of his neck. 'He's a loyal old bastard. That's why he came with us when we left New York.'

'The kid would still like to get rid of us, but he doesn't think this is the right time. He thinks it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness and even possible culpability. Can you believe it?'


'I could believe anything coming from that paranoid little twerp.'


'They want us to fly to Cleveland and sign a new two-year contract. It's not a five-year deal, and when it's up the kid's almost sure to be in charge and we'll undoubtedly be invited to take a long walk off a short dock, but two years ... it's enough time, Vic! In two years we'll be on top of it! We can tell them --'


'Roger, I've got to


'- to take their lousy pound cake and pound it up their asses! They also want to discuss the new campaign, and I think they'll go for the Cereal Professor's swan song, too.'


'That's great, Roger, but I've got to find out what the Christ has been happening with Donna and Tad.'


'Yeah. Yeah. I guess it was a lousy time to call, but I couldn't keep it to myself, man. I would have busted like a balloon.'


'There's no bad time for good news,' Vic said. All the same, he felt a stab of jealousy, as painful as a silver sharpened bone, at the happy relief in Roger's voice, and a bitter disappointment that he couldn't share in Roger's feelings. But maybe it was a good omen.


'Vic, call me when you hear, okay?'


'I will, Rog. Thanks for the call.'


He hung up, slipped into his loafers, and went downstairs. The kitchen was still a mess - it made his stomach do a slow and giddy rollover just to look at it. But there was a note from Masen on the table, pegged down with a salt shaker.


Mr. Trenton,

Steve Kemp has been picked, up in a western Massachusetts town, Twickenham. Your wife and son are not, repeat, are not, with him. I did not wake you with this news because Kemp is standing on his right to remain silent. Barring any complication, he will be brought directly to the Scarborough S.P. barracks for charging on vandalism and possession of illegal drugs. We estimate him here by 11:30 A.M. If anything breaks, I'll call you soonest.


Andy Masen


'Fuck his right to remain silent,' Vic growled. He went into the living room, got the number of the Scarborough State Police barracks, and made the call.


'Mr. Kemp is here,' the duty officer told him. 'He got here about fifteen minutes ago. Mr. Masen is with him now. Kemp's called a lawyer. I don't think Mr. Masen can come to the –'


'You never mind what he can or can't do,' Vic said. 'You tell him it's Donna Trenton's husband and I want him to shag his ass over to the phone and talk to me.'


A few moments later, Masen came on the line.


'Mr. Trenton, I appreciate your concern, but this brief time before Kemp's lawyer gets here can be very valuable.'


'What's he told you?'


Masen hesitated and then said, 'He's admitted to the


vandalism. I think he finally realized this thing was a lot heavier than a little nose candy stashed in the wheel well of his van. He admitted the vandalism to the Massachusetts officers who brought him over here. But he claims that nobody was home when he did it, and that he left it undisturbed.'


'You don't believe that shit, do you?'

Masen said carefully,' He's quite convincing. I couldn't say that I believe anything right now. If I could just ask him a few more questions -'


'Nothing came of Camber's Garage?'


'No. I sent Sheriff Bannerman up there with instructions to call in immediately if Mrs Trenton had been there or if her car was there. And since he didn't call back in -'


'That's hardly definitive, is it?' Vic asked sharply.


'Mr. Trenton, I really must go. If we hear any - '


Vic slammed the telephone down and stood breathing rapidly in the hot silence of the living room. Then he went slowly to the stairs and mounted them. He stood in the upstairs hall for a moment and then went into his son's room. Tad's trucks were lined up neatly against the wall, slant-parking style. Looking at them hurt his heart. Tad's yellow slicker was hung on the brass hook by his bed, and his coloring books were piled neatly on his desk. His closet door was open. Vic shut it absently and, barely thinking about what he was doing, put Tad's chair in front of it.


He sat on Tad's bed, hands dangling between his legs, and looked out into the hot, bright day.


Dead ends. Nothing but dead ends, and where were they?


(dead ends)


Now there was an ominous phrase if ever one had been coined. Dead ends. As a boy Tad's age he had been fascinated with deadend roads, his mother had told him once. He wondered if that sort of thing was inherited, if Tad was interested in dead-end roads. He wondered if Tad was still alive.


And it suddenly occurred to him that Town Road No. 3, where Joe Camber's Garage stood, was a dead-end road.

He suddenly looked around and saw that the wall over the head of Tad's bed was bare. The Monster Words were gone. Now why had he taken those? Or had Kemp taken them for some weird reason of his own? But if Kemp had been in here, why hadn't he trashed Tad's room as he had those downstairs?


(dead ends and Monster Words)


Had she taken the Pinto up to Camber's? He remembered the conversation they'd had about the balky needle valve only vaguely. She was a little scared of Joe Camber, hadn't she said that?


No. Not Camber. Camber only wanted to mentally undress her. No, it was the dog she was a little scared of. What was his name?

They had joked about it. Tad. Tad calling the dog.


And again he heard Tad's phantom, ghostly voice, so hopeless and lost in this too-empty, suddenly creepy room: Cujo ... heere, Cujo ... Coooojo ...


And then something happened which Vic never spoke of to anyone in the rest of his life. Instead of hearing Tad's voice in his mind he was actually hearing it, high and lonely and terrified, a going-away voice that was coming from inside the closet.


A cry escaped Vic's throat and he pushed himself up on Tad's bed, his eyes widening. The closet door was swinging open, pushing the chair in front of it, and his son was crying 'Coooooooooo ..


And then he realized it wasn't Tad's voice; it was his own tired, overwrought mind making Tad's voice from the thin scraping sound of the chair legs on the painted plank floor. That was all it was and and there were eyes in the closet, he saw eyes, red and sunken and terrible A little scream escaped his throat. The chair tipped over for no earthly reason. And he saw Tad's teddybear inside the closet, perched on a stack of sheets and blankets. It was the bear's glass eyes he had seen. No more.

Heart thumping heavily in his throat, Vic got up and went to the closet. He could smell something in there, something heavy and unpleasant. Perhaps it was only mothballs - that smell was certainly part of it - but it smelled ... savage.


Don't be ridiculous. It's just a closet. Not a cave. Not a monster lair.


He looked at Tad's bear. Tad's bear looked back at him, unblinking. Behind the bear, behind the hanging clothes, all was darkness. Anything could be back there. Anything. But, of course, nothing was.


You gave me a scare, bear, he said.


Monsters, stay out of this room, the bear said. Its eyes sparkled. They were dead glass, but they sparkled.


The door's out of true, that's all, Vic said. He was sweating; huge salty drops ran slowly down his face like tears.


You have no business here, the bear replied.


What's the matter with me? Vic asked the bear. Am I going crazy? Is this what going crazy is like?


To which Tad's bear replied: Monsters, leave Tad alone.


He closed the closet door and watched, as wide-eyed as a child, as the latch lifted and popped free of its notch. The door began to swing open again.


I didn't see that. I won't believe I saw that.


He slammed the door and put the chair against it again. Then he took a large stack of Tad's picturebooks and put them on the chair's seat to weight it down. This time the door stayed closed. Vic stood there looking at the closed door, thinking about dead-end roads. Not much traffic on dead-end roads. All monsters should five under bridges or in closets or at the ends of dead-end roads. It should be a national law.

He was very uneasy now.


He left Tad's room, went downstairs, and sat on the back steps. He lit a cigarette with a hand that shook slightly and looked at the gunmetal sky, feeling the sense of unease grow. Something had happened in Tad's room. He wasn't sure what it had been, but it had been something. Yeah. Something.


Monsters and dogs and closets and garages and dead-end roads.


Do we add these up, teacher? Subtract them? Divide? Fractionate?


He threw his cigarette away.


He did believe it was Kemp, didn't he? Kemp had been responsible for everything. Kemp had wrecked the house. Kemp had damn near wrecked his marriage. Kemp had gone upstairs and shot his semen onto the bed Vic and his wife had slept in for the last three years. Kemp had tom a great big hole in the mostly comfortable fabric of Vic Trenton's life.


Kemp. Kemp. All Steve Kemp's fault. Let's blame the Cold War and the hostage situation in Iran and the depletion of the ozone layer on Kemp.


Stupid. Because not everything was Kemp's fault, now, was it? The Zinger's business, for instance; Kemp had had nothing to do with that. And Kemp could hardly be blamed for the bad needle valve on Donna's Pinto.


He looked at his old jag. He was going to go somewhere in it. He couldn't stay here; he would go crazy if he stayed here. He should get in the car and beat it down to Scarborough. Grab hold of Kemp and shake him until it came out, until he told what he had done with Donna and Tad. Except by then his lawyer would have arrived, and, incredible as it seemed, the lawyer might even have sprung him.

Spring. It was a spring that held the needle valve in place. If the spring was bad, the valve could freeze and choke off the flow of gasoline to the carb.


Vic went down to the jag and got in, wincing at the hot leather seat. Get rolling quick. Get some cool in here.


Get rolling where?


Camber's Garage, his mind answered immediately.


But that was stupid, wasn't it? Masen had sent Sheriff Bannerman up there with instructions to report immediately if anything was wrong and the cop hadn't reported back so that meant


(that the monster got him)


Well, it wouldn't hurt to go up there, would it? And it was something to do.


He started the jag up and headed down the hill toward


Route 117, still not entirely sure if he was going to turn left toward I-95 and Scarborough or right toward Town Road No. 3.


He paused at the stop sign until someone in back gave him the horn. Then, abruptly, he turned right. It wouldn't hurt to take a quick run up to Joe Camber's. He could be there in fifteen minutes. He checked his watch and saw that it was twenty past twelve.


The time had come, and Donna knew it.


The time might also have gone, but she would have to live with that - and perhaps die with it. No one was going to come. There was going to be no knight on a silver steed riding up Town Road No. 3 - Travis McGee was apparently otherwise engaged.


Tad was dying.

She made herself repeat it aloud in a husky, choked whisper: 'Tad's dying.'


She had not been able to create any breeze through the car this morning. Her window would no longer go down, and Tad's window let in nothing but more heat. The one time she had tried to unroll it more than a quarter of the way, Cujo had left his place in the shade of the garage and had come around to Tad's side as fast as he could, growling eagerly.


The sweat had now stopped rolling down Tad's face and neck. There was no more sweat left. His skin was dry and hot. His tongue, swelled and dead-looking, protruded over his bottom lip. His breathing had grown so faint that she could barely hear it. Twice she had had to put her head against his chest to make sure that he still breathed at all.


Her condition was bad. The car was a blast furnace. The metalwork was now too hot to touch, and so was the plastic wheel. Her leg was a steady, throbbing ache, and she no longer doubted that the dog's bite had infected her with something. Perhaps it was too early for rabies - she prayed to God it was - but the bites were red and inflamed.


Cujo was not in much better shape. The big dog seemed to have shrunk inside his matted and blood-streaked coat. His eyes were hazy and nearly vacant, the eyes of an old man stricken with cataracts. Like some old engine of destruction, now gradually beating itself to death but still terribly dangerous, he kept his watch. He was no longer foaming; his muzzle was a dried and lacerated horror. It looked like a gouged chunk of igneous rock that had been coughed out of the hotbed of an old volcano.


The old monster, she thought incoherently, keeps his watch still.


Had this terrible vigil been only a matter of hours, or had it been her whole life? Surely everything that had gone before had been a dream, little more than a short wait in the wings? The mother who had seemed to be disgusted and repulsed by all those around her, the well-meaning but ineffectual father, the schools, the friends, the dates and dances - they were all a dream to her now, as youth must seem to the old. Nothing mattered, nothing was but this silent and sunstruck dooryard where death had been dealt and yet more death waited in the cards, as sure as aces and eights. The old monster kept his watch still, and her son was slipping, slipping, slipping away

The baseball bat. That was all that remained to her now.


The baseball bat and maybe, if she could get there, something in the dead man's police car. Something like a shotgun.


She began to lift Tad into the back, grunting and puffing, fighting the waves of dizziness that made her sight gray over. Finally he was in the hatchback, as silent and still as a sack of grain.'


She looked out of his window, saw the baseball bat lying in the high grass, and opened the door.


In the dark mouth of the garage, Cujo stood up and began to advance slowly, head lowered, down the crushed gravel toward her.


It was twelve thirty when Donna Trenton stepped out of her Pinto for the last time.


Vic turned off the Maple Sugar Road and onto Town Road No. 3 just as his wife was going for Brett Camber's old Hillerich & Bradsby in the weeds. He was driving fast, intent on getting up to Camber's so he could turn around and go to Scarborough, some fifty miles away. Perversely, as soon as he had made his decision to come out here first, his mind began dolefully telling him that he was on a wild goosechase. On the whole, he had never felt so impotent in his life.

He was moving the jag along at better than sixty, so intent on the road that he was past Gary Pervier's before he realized that Joe Camber's station wagon had been parked there. He slammed on the jag's brakes, burning twenty feet of rubber. The jag's nose dipped toward the road. The cop might have gone up to Camber's and found nobody home because Camber was down here.


He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw the road was empty, and backed up quickly. He wheeled the jag into Pervier's driveway and got out.


His feelings were remarkably like those of Joe Camber himself when, two days before, Joe had discovered the splatters of blood (only now these were dried and maroon-colored) and the smashed bottom panel of the screen door. A foul, metallic taste flooded Vic's mouth. This was all a part of it. Somehow it was all a part of Tad's and Donna's disappearance.


He let himself in and the smell hit him at once - be bloated, green smell of corruption. It had been a hot two days. There was something halfway down the hall that looked Iike a knocked-over endtable, except that Vic was mortally sure that it wasn't an endtable. Because of the smell. He went down to the thing in the hall and it wasn't an endtable. It was a man. The man appeared to have had his throat cut with an extremely dull blade.


Vic stepped back. A dry gagging sound came from his throat. The telephone. He had to call someone about this.


He started for the kitchen and then stopped. Suddenly everything came together in his mind. Them was an instant of crushing revelation; it was like two half pictures coming together to make a three-dimensional whole.


The dog. The dog had done this.


The Pinto was at Joe Camber's. The Pinto had been there all along. The Pinto and

'Oh my God, Donna -'


Vic turned and ran for the door and his car.


Donna almost went sprawling; that was how bad her legs were. She caught herself and grabbed for the baseball bat, not daring to look around for Cujo until she had it tightly in her hands, afraid she might lose her balance again. If she had had time to look a little further - just a little - she would have seen George Bannerman's service pistol laying in the grass. But she did not.


She turned unsteadily and Cujo was running at her.


She thrust the heavy end of the baseball bat at the Saint Bernard, and her heart sank at the unsteady way the thing wiggled in her hand - the handle was badly splintered, then. The Saint Bernard shied away, growling. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly in the white cotton bra. The cups were blood streaked; she had wiped her hands on them after clearing Tad's mouth.


They stood staring at each other, measuring each other, in the still summer sunlight. The only sounds were her low rapid breathing, the sound of Cujo growling deep in his chest, and the bright squawk of a sparrow somewhere near. Their shadows were short, shapeless things at their feet.


Cujo began to move to his left. Donna moved right. They circled. She held the bat at the point where she believed the split in the wood to be the deepest, her palms tight on the rough texture of the BIack Cat friction tape the handle had been wrapped with.


Cujo tensed down.


'Come on, then!' she screamed at him, and Cujo leaped.


She swung the bat like Micky Mantle going after a high fastball. She missed Cujo's head but the bat struck him in the ribs. There was a heavy, dull thump and a snapping sound from somewhere inside Cujo. The dog uttered a sound like a screarn and went sprawling in the gravel. She felt the bat give sickeningly under the friction tape - but for the moment it still held.

Donna cried out in a high, breaking voice and brought the bat down on Cujo's hindquarters. Something else broke. She heard it. The dog bellowed and tried to scramble away but she was on it again, swinging. pounding, screaming. Her head was high wine and deep iron. The world danced. She was the harpies, the Weird Sisters, she was all vengeance not for herself. but for what had been done to her boy. The splintered handle of the bat bulged and pumped like a racing heart beneath her hands and beneath its binding of friction tape.


The bat was bloody now. Cujo was still trying to get away, but his movements had slowed. He ducked one blow - the head of the bat skittered through the gravel but the next one struck him midway on his back, driving him to his rear legs.


She thought he was done; she even backed off a step or two, her breath screaming in and out of her lungs like some hot liquid. Then he uttered a deep snarl of rage and leaped at her again ... but as Cujo went rolling in the gravel, the old bat finally split in two. The fat part flew away and struck the right front hubcap of the Pinto with a musical bong! She was left with a splintered eighteen-inch wand in her hand.


Cujo was getting to his feet again ... dragging himself to his feet. Blood poured down his sides. His eyes flickered like lights on a defective pinball machine.


And still it seemed to her that he was grinning.


'Come on, then!' she shrieked.


For the last time the dying ruin that had been Brett Camber's good dog Cujo leaped at THE WOMAN that had caused all his misery. Donna lunged forward with the remains of the baseball bat, and a long, sharp hickory splinter plunged deep into Cujo's right eye and then into his brain. There was a small and unimportant popping sound – the sound a grape might make when squeezed suddenly between the fingers. Cujo's forward motion carried him into her and knocked her sprawling. His teeth now snapped and snarled bare inches from her neck. She put her arm up as Cujo crawled farther on top of her. His eye was now oozing down the side of his face. His breath was hideous. She tried to push his muzzle up, and his jaws clamped on her forearm.

'Stop!' she screamed 'Oh stop, won't you ever stop? Please! Please! Please!'


Blood was flowing down onto her face in a sticky drizzle -her blood, the dog's blood. The pain in her arm was a sheeting flare that seemed to fill the whole world ... and little by little he was forcing it down. The splintered handle of the bat wavered and jiggled grotesquely, seeming to grow from his head where his eye had been.


He went for her neck.


Donna felt his teeth there and with a final wavering cry she pistoned her arms out and pushed him aside. Cujo thudded heavily to the ground.


His rear legs scratched at the gravel. They slowed ... slowed ... stopped. His remaining eye glared up at the hot summer sky. His tail lay across her shins, as heavy as a Turkish rug runner. He pulled in a breath and let it out. He took another. He made a thick snorting sound, and suddenly a rill of blood ran from his mouth. Then he died.


Donna Trenton howled her triumph. She got halfway to her feet, fell down, and managed to get up again. She took two shuffling steps and stumbled over the dog's body, scoring her knees with scrapes. She crawled to where the heavy end of the baseball bat lay, its far end streaked with gore. She picked it up and gained her feet again by holding on to the hood of the Pinto. She tottered back to where Cujo lay. She began to pound him with the baseball bat. Each downward swing ended with a heavy meat thud. Black strips of friction tape danced and flew in the hot air. Splinters gouged into the soft pads of her palms, and blood ran down her wrists and forearms. She was still screaming, but her voice had broken with that first howl of triumph and all that came out now was a series of growling croaks; she sounded as Cujo himself had near the end. The bat rose and fell. She bludgeoned the dead dog. Behind her, Vic's jag turned into the Camber's driveway.

He didn't know what he had expected, but it hadn't been this. Fie had been afraid, but the sight of his wife - could that really be Donna? - standing over the twisted and smashed thing in the driveway, striking it again and again with something that looked like a caveman's club ... that turned his fear to a bright, silvery panic that almost precluded thought. For one infinite moment, which he would never admit to himself later, he felt an impulse to throw the jag in reverse and drive away ... to drive forever. What was going on in this still and sunny dooryard was monstrous.


Instead, he turned off the engine and leaped out. 'Donna! Donna!'


She appeared not to hear him or to even realize that he was there. Her cheeks and forehead were savagely welted with sunburn. The left leg of her slacks was shredded and soaked with blood. And her belly looked ... it looked gored.


The baseball bat rose and fell, rose and fell. She made harsh cawing sounds. Blood flew up from the dog's limp carcass.


'Donna!'


He got hold of the baseball bat on the backswing and wrenched it out of her hands. He threw it away and grabbed her naked shoulder. She turned to face him, her eyes blank and hazed, her hair straggling, witchlike, any way. She stared at him . . . shook her head ... and stepped away.

'Donna, honey, my jesus,' he said softly.


It was Vic, but Vic couldn't be here. It was a mirage. It was the dog's sickening disease at work in her, making her hallucinate. She stepped away ... rubbed her eyes . . . and he was still there. She stretched out one trembling hand, and the mirage folded strong brown hands over it. That was good. Her hands hurt dreadfully.


'Vuh?' she croaked in a whisper. 'Vuh -Vuh - Vic?'


'Yes, honey. It's me. Where's Tad?'


The mirage was real. It was really him. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. Her eyes only moved in their sockets like overheated ball bearings.


'Vic? Vic?'


He put an arm around her. 'Where's Tad, Donna?'


'Car. Car. Sick. Hospital.' She could now barely whisper, and even that was failing her. Soon she would be able to do no more than mouth words. But it didn't matter, did It? Vic was here. She and Tad were saved.


He left her and went to the car. She stood where he had left her, looking fixedly down at the dog's battered body. At the end, it hadn't been so bad, had it? When there was nothing left but survival, when you were right down to the strings and nap and ticking of yourself, you survived or you died and that seemed perfectly all right. The blood didn't seem so bad now, nor the brains that were leaking out of Cujo's cloven head. Nothing seemed so bad now. Vic was here and they were saved.


'Oh my God,' Vic said, his voice rising thinly in the stillness.

She looked over and saw him taking something out of the back of her Pinto. A sack of something. Potatoes? Oranges? What? Had she been shopping before all this happened? Yes, but she had taken the groceries into the house. She and Tad had taken them in. They used his wagon. So what


Tad! she tried to say, and ran to him.


Vic carried Tad into the thin shade at the side of the house and laid him down. Tad's face was very white. His hair lay like straw on his fragile skull. His hands lay on the grass, seemingly without enough weight to crush the stems beneath their backs.


Vic put his head on Tad's chest. He looked up at Donna. His face was white but calm enough.


'How long has he been dead, Donna?'


Dead? she tried to scream at him. Her mouth moved like the mouth of a figure on a TV set the volume control of which has been turned all the way down. He's not dead, he wasn't dead when I put him in the hatchback, what are you telling me, he's dead? What are you telling me, you bastard/


She tried to say those things in her voiceless voice. Had Tad's life slid away at the same time the dog's fife had slid away? It was impossible. No God, no fate, could be so monstrously cruel.


She ran at her husband and shoved him. Vic, expecting anything but that, fell over on his butt. She crouched over Tad. She put his hands above his head. She opened his mouth, pinched his nostrils shut, and breathed her voiceless breath into her son's lungs.


In the driveway, the somnolent summer flies had found the corpse of Cujo and that of Sheriff Bannerman, husband to Victoria, father to Katrina. They had no preference between the dog and the man. They were democratic flies. The sun blared triumphantly down. It was ten minutes of one now, and the fields shimmered and danced with silent summer. The sky was faded blue denim. Aunt Evvie's prediction had come true.

She breathed for her son. She breathed. She breathed. Her son was not dead; she had not gone through this hell for her son to be dead, and it simply would not be.


It would not be.


She breathed. She breathed. She breathed for her son.


She was still doing it when the ambulance pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later. She would not Iet Vic near the boy. When he came near, she bared her teeth and growled soundlessly at him.


Stunned with grief nearly to the point of distraction, deeply sure at the final bedrock level of his consciousness that none of this could be happening, he broke into Camber's house by way of the porch door at which Donna had stared so long and hard. The inner door beyond it had not been locked. He used the telephone.


When he came outside again, Donna was still administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their dead son. He started toward her and then swerved away. He went to the Pinto instead and opened the hatchback again. Heat roared out at him like an invisible Iion. Had they existed in there Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday and until noon of today? It was impossible to believe they had.


Underneath the hatchback's floor, where the spare tire was, he found an old blanket. He shook it out and put it over Bannerman's mutilated body. He sat down on the grass then, and stared out at Town Road No. 3 and the dusty pines beyond. His mind floated serenely away.


The ambulance driver and the two orderlies loaded Bannerman's body into the Castle Rock Rescue Unit. They approached Donna. Donna bared her teeth at them. Her parched lips formed the words He's alive! Alive! When one of the orderlies tried to pull her gently to her feet and lead her away, she bit him. Later this orderly would need to go to hospital himself for anti-rabies treatment. The other orderly came to help. She fought them.

They stood away warily. Vic still sat on the lawn, his chin propped in his hands, looking across the road.


The Rescue Unit driver brought a syringe. There was a struggle. The syringe was broken. Tad lay on the grass, still dead. His patch of shade was a little bigger now.


Two more police cars arrived. Roscoe Fisher was in one of them. When the ambulance driver told him that George Bannerman was dead, Roscoe began to cry. Two other policemen advanced on Donna. There was another struggle, short and furious, and Donna Trenton was finally pulled away from her son by four sweating, straining men. She nearly broke free again and Roscoe Fisher, still crying, joined them. She screamed soundlessly, whipping her head from side to side. Another syringe was produced, and she was injected successfully this time.


A stretcher came down from the ambulance, and the orderlies wheeled it over to where Tad lay on the grass. Tad, still dead, was put on it. A sheet was pulled up over his head. At the sight of this, Donna redoubled her struggles. She freed one hand and began to flail about wildly with it. Then, suddenly, she was free.


'Donna,' Vic said. He got to his feet. 'Honey, it's over. Honey, please. Let go, let go.'


She did not go for the stretcher that her son lay on. She went for the baseball bat. She picked it up and began to bludgeon the dog again. The flies rose in a shiny green-black cloud. The sound of the ball bat making contact was heavy and terrible, a butcher-shop sound. Cujo's body jumped a little each time she struck it.


The cops began to move forward.

'No,' one of the orderlies said quietly, and a few moments later Donna simply collapsed. Brett Camber's bat rolled away from her relaxing hand.


The ambulance left five minutes or so later, siren howling. Vic had been offered a shot ~'to calm your nerves, Mr. Trenton' -and although he felt utterly tranquilized already, he had accepted the shot to be polite. He picked up the cellophane the orderly had stripped from the syrette and examined the word UPJOHN printed on it carefully. 'We ran an advertising campaign for these guys once,' he told the orderly.


'That so?' the orderly asked cautiously. He was a fairly young man and he felt that he might throw up sometime soon. He had never seen such a mess in his life.


One of the police cars was standing by to take Vic to Northern Cumberland Hospital in Bridgton.


'Can you wait a minute?' he asked.


The two cops nodded. They were also staring at Vic Trenton in a very cautious way, as if whatever he had might be catching.


He opened both doors of the Pinto. He had to tug long and hard at Donna's; the dog had dented it in a way he wouldn't have believed. Her purse was in there. Her shirt. The shirt had a jagged tear in it, as if maybe the dog had taken a chomp out of it. There was some empty Slim Jim wrappers on the dashboard and Tad's Thermos bottle, smelling of sour milk. Tad's Snoopy lunchbox. His heart gave a heavy, horrid wrench at the sight of that, and he wouldn't allow himself to think of what that meant in terms of the future - if there was any future after this terrible hot day. He found one of Tad's sneakers.


Tadder, he thought. Oh Tadder.

The strength went out of his legs and he sat down heavily on the passenger scat, looking between his legs at the strip of chrome at the bottom of the doorframe. Why? Why had something like this been allowed to happen? How could so many events have conspired together?


His head was suddenly throbbing violently. His nose closed with tears and his sinuses began to pound. He snorted the tears back and passed a hand over his face. It occurred to him that, counting Tad, Cujo had been responsible for the deaths of at least three people, more than that if the Cambers were discovered to be among his victims. Did the cop he had covered with the blanket have a wife and children? Probably.


If I'd gotten here even an hour earlier. If I hadn't gone to sleep


His mind cried: I was so sure it was Kemp! So sure!


If I'd gotten here just fifteen minutes earlier, would that have been enough? If I hadn't talked to Roger so long, would Tad be alive now? When did he die? Did it really happen at all? And how am I supposed to deal with it for the rest of my life without going mad? What's going to happen to Donna?


Another police car pulled up. One of the cops got out of it and conferred with one of the cops waiting for Vic. The latter stepped forward and said quietly. 'I think we ought to go, Mr.. Trenton. Quentin here says there are reporters on the way. You don't want to talk to any reporters just now.'


'No,' Vic agreed, and started to get up. As he did, he saw a bit of yellow at the very bottom of his field of vision. A bit of paper poking out from under Tad's seat. He pulled it out and saw it was the Monster Words he had written to case Tad's mind at bedtime. The sheet was crumpled and ripped in two places and badly stained with sweat; along the deep creases it was nearly transparent.

Monsters, stay out of this room!


You have no business here.


No monsters under Tad's bed!


You can't fit under there.


No monsters hiding in Tad's closet!


It's too small in there.


No monsters outside of Tad's window!


You can't hold on out there.


No vampires, no werewolves, no things that bite.


You have no business here.


Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this ni---





He could read no more. He crumpled the sheet of paper up and threw it at the dead dog's body. The paper was a sentimental lie, it's sentiments as inconstant as the color in that stupid runny-dyed cereal. It was all a lie. The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary.


He let himself be led to the police car. They drove him away, as George Bannerman and Tad Trenton and Donna Trenton had been driven away before him. After a while, a veterinarian came in a panel truck. She looked at the dead dog, then donned long rubber gloves and brought out a circular bone saw. The cops, realizing what she was going to do, turned away.


The vet cut off the Saint Bernard's head and put it in a large white plastic garbage bag. Later that day it was forwarded to the State Commissioner of Animals, where the brain would be tested for rabies.

So Cujo was gone, too.


It was quarter to four that afternoon when Holly called Charity to the telephone. Holly looked mildly worried. 'It sounds like somebody official,' she said. About an hour earlier, Brett had given in to Jim Junior's endless supplications and had accompanied his young cousin down to the playground at the Stratford Community Center.


Since then the house had been silent except for the women's voices as they talked over old times - the good old times, Charity amended slightly. The time Daddy had fallen off the haytruck and gone into a great big cowflop in Back Field (but no mention of the times he had beaten them until they couldn't sit down in payment for some real or imagined transgression); the time they had snuck into the old Met Theater in Lisbon Falls to see Elvis in Love Me Tender (but not the time Momma had had her credit cut off at the Red & White and had backed out of the grocery in tears, leaving a full basket of provisions behind and everybody watching); how Red Timmins from up the road was always trying to kiss Holly on their walk back from school (but not how Red had lost an arm when his tractor turned turtle on him in August of 1962). The two of them had discovered it was all right to open the closets ... as long as you didn't poke too far back in them. Because things might still be lurking there, ready to bite.


Twice, Charity had opened her mouth to tell Holly that she and Brett would be going home tomorrow, and both times she had closed it again, trying to think of a way she could say it without leading Holly to believe they didn't like it here.


Now the problem was momentarily forgotten as she sat at the telephone table, a fresh cup of tea beside her. She felt a little anxious - nobody likes to get a telephone call while they're on vacation from someone who sounds official.


'Hello?' she said.

Holly watched her sister's face go white, listened as her sister said, 'What? What? No ... no! There must be some mistake. I tell you, there must


She fell silent, listening to the telephone. Some dreadful news was being passed down the wire from Maine,- Holly thought. She could see it in the gradually tightening mask of her sister's face, although she could hear nothing from the phone itself except a series of meaningless squawks.


Bad news from Maine. To her it was an old story. It was all right for her and Charity to sit in the sunny morning kitchen, drinking tea and eating orange sections and talking about sneaking into the Met Theater. It was all right, but it didn't change the fact that every day she could remember of her childhood had brought a little piece of bad news with it, each piece a part of her early life's jigsaw, the whole picture so terrible that she would not really have minded if she had never seen her older sister again. Torn cotton underpants that the other girls at school made fun of. Picking potatoes until her back ached and if you stood up suddenly the blood rushed out of your head so fast you felt like you were going to faint. Red Timmins - how carefully she and Charity had avoided mentioning Red's arm, so badly crushed it had to be amputated, but when Holly heard she had been glad, so glad. Because she remembered Red throwing a green apple at her one day, hitting her in the face, making her nose bleed, making her cry. She remembered Red giving her Indian rubs and laughing. She remembered an occasional nourishing dinner of Shedd's Peanut Butter and Cheerios when things were particularly bad. She remembered the way the outhouse stank in high summer, that smell was shit, and in case you should wonder, that wasn't a good smell.


Bad news from Maine. And somehow, for some crazed reason she knew they would never discuss even if they both lived to be a hundred and spent the last twenty old-maid years together, Charity had elected to stick with that life. Her looks were almost entirely gone. There were wrinkles around her eyes. Her breasts sagged; even in her bra they sagged. There were only six years between them, but an observer might well

have thought it was more like sixteen. And worst of all, she seemed totally unconcerned about dooming her lovely, intelligent boy to a similar life ... unless he got smart, unless he wised up. For the tourists, Holly thought with an angry bitterness that all the good years had not changed, it was Vacationland. But if you came from the puckies, it was day after day of bad news. Then one day you looked in the mirror and the face looking back at you was Charity Camber's face. And now there was more dreadful news from Maine, that home of all dreadful news. Charity was hanging up the telephone. She sat staring at it, her hot tea steaming beside her.


'Joe's dead,' she announced suddenly.


Holly sucked in breath. Her teeth felt cold. Why did you come? she felt like shrieking. I knew you'd bring it all with you, and sure enough, you did.


'Oh, honey,' she said, 'are you sure?'


'That was a man from Augusta. Name of Masen. From the Attorney General's office, Law Enforcement Division.'


'Was it ... was it a car accident?


Charity looked directly at her then, and Holly was both shocked and terrified to see that her sister did not look like someone who has just received dreadful news; she looked like someone who has just received good news. The lines in her face had smoothed out. Her eyes were blank ... but was it shock behind that blankness or the dreamy awakening of possibility?


If she had seen Charity Camber's face when she had checked the numbers on her winning lottery ticket, she might have known. 'Charity?'

'It was the dog,' Charity said. 'It was Cujo.'


'The dog?' At first she was bewildered, unable to see any possible connection between the death of Charity's husband and the Camber family dog. Then she realized. The implications came in terms of Red Timmins's horribly mangled left arm, and she said, in a higher, shriller tone, 'The dog?'


Before Charity could reply - if she had meant to - there were cheery voices in the back yard: Jim Junior's high, piping one and then Brett's, lower and amused, answering. And now Charity's face changed. It became stricken. It was a face that Holly remembered and hated well, an expression that made all faces the same - an expression she had felt often enough on her own face in those old days.


'The boy,' Charity said. 'Brett. Holly ... how am I going to tell Brett his father is dead?'


Holly had no answer for her. She could only stare helplessly at her sister and wish neither of them had come.


RABID DOG KILLS 4 IN BIZARRE THREE-DAY REIGN OF TERROR, the headline on that evening's edition of the Portland Evening Express blared. The subhead read: Lone Survivor at Northern Cumberland Hospital in Guarded Condition. The headline on the following day's Press-Herald read: FATHER TELLS OF WIFE'S DOOMED STRUGGLE TO SAVE SON. That evening the story had been relegated to the bottom of page one: MRS. TRENTON RESPONDING TO RABIES TREATMENT, DOCTOR SAYS. And in a sidebar: DOG HAD NO SHOTS: LOCAL VET. Three days after it had ended, the story was inside, on page four: STATE HEALTH AGENCY BLAMES

RABID FOX OR RACCOON FOR DOG'S CASTLE ROCK RAMPAGE.


A final story that week carried the news that Victor Trenton had no intention of suing the surviving members of the Camber family, who were said to be in 'deep shock'. This intelligence was scant, but provided a pretext upon which the entire tale could be rehashed. A week later, the front page of the Sunday paper carried a feature story on what had happened. A week after that, a national tabloid offered a fervid synopsis of what had happened, headed: TRAGIC BATTLE IN MAINE AS MOM BATTLES KILLER SAINT BERNARD.


And that was really the end of the coverage.


There was a rabies scare in central Maine that fall. An expert attributed it to 'rumor and the horrifying but isolated incident in Castle Rock.'


Donna Trenton was in the hospital for nearly four weeks. She finished her cycle of treatments for the rabid dog bites with a good deal of pain but no serious problems, but because of the potential seriousness of the disease - and because of her deep mental depression - she was closely watched.


In late August, Vic drove her home.


They spent a quiet, showery day around the house. That evening as they sat in front of the television, not really watching it, Donna asked him about Ad Worx.


'Everything's fine there,' he said. 'Roger got the last Cereal Professor commercial on the rails single-handed ... with Rob Martin's help, of course. Now we're involved in a major new campaign for the whole Sharp line.' Half a lie; Roger was involved. Vic went in three, sometimes four days a week, and either pushed his pencil around or looked at his typewriter. 'But the Sharp people are being very careful to make sure that none of what we're doing will go beyond the two-year period we signed for. Roger was right. They're going to dump us. But by then it won't matter if they do.'

'Good,' she said. She had bright periods now, periods when she seemed very much like her old self, but she was still listless most of the time. She had lost twenty pounds and looked scrawny. Her complexion was not very good. Her nails were ragged.


She looked at the TV for a while and then turned to him. She was crying.


'Donna,' he said. 'Oh babe.' He put his arms around her and held her. She was soft but unyielding to his arms. Through the softness he could feel the angles of her bones in too many places.


'Can we live here?' she managed in an unsteady voice. 'Vic, can we live here?'


'I don't know,' he said. 'I think we ought to give it a damned good shot.'


'Maybe I should ask if you can go on living with me. If you said no, I'd understand. I'd understand perfectly.'


'I don't want anything else but to live with you. I knew that all along, I think. Maybe there was an hour - right after I got


Kemp's note - when I didn't know. But that was the only time. Donna, I love you. I always have.


Now she put her arms around him and hugged him tight. Soft summer rain struck the windows and made gray and black shadow patterns on the floor.


'I couldn't save him,' she said. 'That's what keeps coming back on me. I can't get rid of it. I go over it again ... and again . . . and again. If I'd run for the porch sooner ... or gotten the baseball bat. . .'She swallowed. 'And when I finally did get up the guts to go out there, it was just ... over. He was dead.'

He could have reminded her that she'd had Tad's welfare in mind above her own all the time. That the reason she hadn't gone for the door was because of what would have happened to Tad if the dog had gotten to her before she could get inside. He could have told her that the siege had probably weakened the dog as much as it had Donna herself, and if she had tried Cujo with the baseball bat earlier on, the outcome might have been terribly different; as it was, the dog had almost killed her in the end. But he understood that these points had been brought to her attention again and again, by himself and by others, and that not all the logic in the world could blunt the pain of coming upon that mute pile of coloring books, or seeing the swing, empty and motionless at the bottom of its arc, in the back yard. Logic could not blunt her terrible sense of personal failure. Only time could do those things, and time would do an imperfect job.


He said, 'I couldn't save him either.'


'You –'


'I was so sure it was Kemp. If I'd gone up there earlier, if I hadn't fallen asleep, even if I hadn't talked to Roger on the phone.'


'No,' she said gently. 'Don't.'


'I have to. I guess you do too. We'll just have to get along. That's what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other.'


'I keep feeling him sensing him ... around every comer.'


'Yeah. Me too.'


He and Roger had taken all of Tad's toys to the Salvation Army two Saturdays ago. When it was done, they had come back here and had a few beers in front of the ballgame, not talking much. And when Roger went home, Vic went upstairs and sat on the bed in Tad's room and wept until it seemed the weeping would pull all his insides apart. He wept and wanted to die but he hadn't died and the next day he had gone back to work.

'Make us some coffee,' he said, and slapped her lightly on the rump. 'I'll light a fire. Chilly in here.'


'All right.' She got up. 'Vic?'


'What?'


Her throat worked. 'I love you too.'


'Thanks,' he said. 'I think I needed that.'


She smiled wanly and went to make the coffee. And they got through the evening, although Tad was still dead. They got through the next day as well. And the next. It was not much better at the end of August, nor in September, but by the time the leaves had turned and began to fall, it was a little better. A little.


She was wired with tension and trying not to show it.


When Brett came back from the barn, knocked the snow from his boots, and let himself in the kitchen door, she was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea. For a moment he only looked at her, He had lost some weight and had grown taller in the last six months. The total effect was to make him look gangling, where he had always before seemed compact and yet lithe. His grades during the first quarter hadn't been so good, and he had been in trouble twice - scuffles in the schoolyard both times, probably over what had happened this last summer. But his second-quarter marks had been a lot better.


'Mom? Momma? Is it –'


'Alva brought him over,' she said. She set the teacup on the saucer carefully, and it did not chatter. 'No law says you have to keep him.'

'Has he had his shots?' Brett asked, and her heart broke a little that this should be his first question.


'As a matter of fact, he has,' she said. 'Alva tried to slip that over on me, but I made him show me the Yet's bill. Nine dollars, it was. Distemper and rabies. Also, there's a tube of cream for ticks and ear mites. If you don't want him, Alva will give me my nine dollars back.'


Money had become important to them. For a little bit she hadn't been sure if they would be able to keep the place, or even if they should try to keep it. She had talked it over with Brett, being level with him. There had been a small life insurance policy. Mr. Shouper at the Casco Bank in Bridgton had explained to her that if the money was put in a special trust account, it plus the lottery money would make nearly all the outstanding mortgage payments over the next five years. She had landed a decent job in the packing and billing department of Castle Rock's one real industry, Trace Optical. The sale of Joe's equipment - including the new chainfall - had brought them in an additional three thousand dollars. It was possible for them to keep the place, she had explained to Brett, but it was apt to be a hard scrabble. The alternative was an apartment in town. Brett had slept on it, and it had turned out that what he wanted was what she wanted - to keep the home place. And so they had stayed.


'What's his name?' Brett asked.


'Doesn't have a name. He's just weaned.'


'Is he a breed?'


'Yes,' she said, and then laughed. 'He's a Heinz. Fifty-seven Varieties.'


He smiled back, and the smile was strained. But Charity reckoned it better than no smile at all.

'Could he come in? It's started to snow again.'


'He can come in if you put down papers. And if he piddles around, you clean it up.'


'All right.' He opened the door to go out.


'What do you want to call him, Brett?'


'I don't know,' Brett said. There was a long, long pause. 'I don't know yet. I'll have to think on it.


She had an impression that he was crying, and restrained an impulse to go to him. Besides, his back was to her and she couldn't really tell. He was getting to be a big boy, and as much as it pained her to know it, she-understood that big boys often don't want their mothers to know they're crying.


He went outside and brought the dog back in, carrying it cradled in his arms. It remained unnamed until the following spring, when for no reason either of them could exactly pinpoint, they began to call it Willie. It was a small, lively, short-haired dog, mostly terrier. Somehow it just looked like a Willie. The name stuck.


Much later, that spring, Charity got a small pay raise. She began to put away ten dollars a week. Toward's Brett's college.


Shortly before those mortal events in the Camber dooryard, Cujo's remains were cremated. The ashes went out with the trash and were disposed of at the Augusta waste-treatment plant. It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN and most of all his Boy, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.

The small cave into which Cujo had chased the rabbit was never discovered. Eventually, for whatever vague reasons small creatures may have, the bats moved on. The rabbit was unable to get out and it starved to death in slow, soundless misery. Its bones, so far as I know, still remain there with the bones of those small animals unlucky enough to have tumbled into that place before it.



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