He went on eating and he went on looking at her. He didn't say anything. His eyes were totally expressionless. He was eating with his hat on, still pushed back on his head. She spoke to him slowly, deliberately, knowing it would be a mistake to rush. 'I want to go away for a week. With Brett. To see Holly and Jim down in Connecticut.'


'No,' he said, and went on eating.


'We could go on the bus. We'd stay with them. It would he cheap. There would be plenty of money left over. That found money. It wouldn't cost a third of what that chainfall cost. I called the bus station and asked them about the round-trip fare.'


'No. I need- Brett here to help me.'


She clutched her hands together in a hard, twisting fury under the table, but made her face remain calm and smooth. 'You get along without him in the school year.'


'I said no, Charity,' he said, and she saw with galling, bitter certainty that he was enjoying this. He saw how much she wanted this. How she had planned for it. He was enjoying her pain. She got up and went to the sink, not because she had anything to do there, but because she needed time to get herself under control. The evening star peeped in at her, high and remote. She ran water. The porcelain was a discolored yellowish color. Like Joe, their water was hard.

Maybe disappointed, feeling that she had given up too easily, Camber elaborated. 'The boy's got to learn some responsibility. Won't hurt him to help me this summer instead of running off to Davy Bergeron's house every day and night.'


She turned off the water. 'I sent him over there.'


'You did? Why?'


'Because I thought it might go like this,' she said, turning back to him. 'But I told him you'd say yes, what with the money and the chainfall.'


'If you knew better, you sinned against the boy,' Joe said. 'Next time I guess you'll think before you throw your tongue in gear.' He smiled at her through a mouthful] of food and reached for the bread.


'You could come with us, if you wanted.'


'Sure. I'll just tell Richie Simms to forget getting in his first cutting this summer. Besides, why do I want to go down and see them two? From what I've seen of them and what you tell of them, I got to think they're a couple of first-class snots. Only reason you like them is because you'd like to be a snot like them.' His voice was gradually rising. He began to spray food. When he got like this he frightened her and she gave in. Most times. She would not do that tonight. 'Mostly you'd like the boy to be a snot like them. That's what I think. You'd like to turn him against me, I guess. Am I wrong?'


'Why don't you ever call him by his name?'

'You want to just shut the craphouse door now, Charity,' he said, looking at her hard. A flush had crept up his cheeks and across his forehead. 'Mind me, now.'


'No,' she said. 'That's not the end.'


He dropped his fork, astounded. 'What? What did you say?'


She walked towards him, allowing herself the luxury of total anger for the first time in her marriage. But it was all inside, burning and sloshing like acid. She could feel it eating. She daren't shout. To shout would be the end for sure. She kept her voice low.


'Yes, you'd think that about my sister and her husband. Sure you would. Look at you, sitting there and eating with your dirty hands and your hat still on. You don't want him down there seeing how other people live. Just the same way I don't want him seeing how you and your friends live when you're off to yourselves. That's why I wouldn't let him go on that hunting trip with you last November.'


She paused and he only sat there, a half-eaten slice of Wonder Bread in one hand, steak juice on his chin. She thought that the only thing keeping him from springing at her was his total amazement that she should be saying these things at all.


'So I'll trade with you,' she said. 'I've got you that chainfall and I'm willing to hand over the rest of the money to you - lots wouldn't - but if you're going to be so ungrateful, I'll go you one more. You let him go down with me to Connecticut, and I'll let him go up to Moosehead with you come deerhunting season.' She felt cold and prickly all over, as if she had just offered to strike a bargain with the devil.


'I ought to strap you,' he said wonderingly. He spoke to her as if she were a child who had misunderstood some very simple case of cause and effect. 'I'll take him hunting with me if I want, when I want. Don't you know that? He's my son. God's sake. If I want, when I want.' He smiled a little, pleased with the sound it made. 'Now - you got that?'

She locked her eyes with his. 'No,' she said. 'You won't.'


He got up in a hurry then. His chair fell over.


'I'll put a stop to it,' she said. She wanted to step back from him, but that would end it too. One false move, one sign of giving, and he would be on her.


He was unbuckling his belt. 'I'm going to strap you, Charity,' he said regretfully.


'I'll put a stop to it any way I can. I'll go up to the school and report him truant. Go to Sheriff Bannerman and report him kidnapped. But most of all ... I'll see to it that Brett doesn't want to go.'


He pulled his belt from the loops of his pants and held it with the buckle end penduluming back and forth by the floor.


'The only way you'll get him up there with the rest of those drunks and animals before he's fifteen is if I let him go,' she said. 'You sling your belt on me if you want, Joe Camber. Nothing is going to change that.'


'Is that so?'


'I'm standing here and telling you it is.'


But suddenly he didn't seem to he in the room with her any more. His eyes had gone far away, musing. She had seen him do this other times. Something had just crossed his mind, a new fact to be laboriously added into the equation. She prayed that whatever it was would be on her side of the equals sign. She had never gone so much against him before, and she was scared.


Camber suddenly smiled. 'Regular little spitfire, ain't you?'


She said nothing.

He began to slip his belt back into the loops of his pants again. He was still smiling, his eyes still far away. 'You suppose you can screw like one of those spitfires? Like one of those little Mexican spitfires?'


She still said nothing, wary.


'If I say you and him can go, what about then? You suppose we could shoot for the moon?'


'What do you mean?'


'It means okay,' he said. 'You and him.'


He crossed the room in his quick, agile way, and it made her cold to think of how quick he could have crossed it a minute before, how quick he could have had his belt on her. And who would there have been to stop him? What a man did with - or to - his wife, that was their own affair. She could have done nothing, said nothing. Because of Brett. Because of her pride.


He put his hand on her shoulder. He dropped it to one of her breasts. He squeezed it. 'Come on,' he said. 'I'm horny.'


'Brett -'


'He won't be in until nine. Come on. Told you, you can go. You can at least say thanks, can't you?'


A kind of cosmic absurdity rose to her lips and had passed through them before she could stop it: 'Take off your hat.'


He sailed it heedlessly across the kitchen. He was smiling. His teeth were quite yellow. The two top ones in front were dentures. 'If we had the money now, we could screw on a bedful of greenbacks,' he said. 'I saw that in a movie once.'


He took her upstairs and she kept expecting him to turn vicious, but he didn't. His lovemaking was as it usually was, quick and hard, but he was not vicious. He did not hurt her intentionally, and tonight, for perhaps the tenth or eleventh time since they had been married, she had a climax. She let herself go to him, eyes closed, feeling the shelf of his chin dig into the top of her head. She stifled the cry that rose to her lips. It would have made him suspicious if she had cried out.

She was not sure he really knew that what always happened at the end for men sometimes happened for women too.


Not long after (and still an hour before Brett came home from the Bergerons) he left her, not telling her where he was going. She surmised it was down to Gary Pervier's, where the drinking would start. She lay in bed and wondered if what she had done and what she had promised could ever be worth it. Tears tried to come and she drove them back. She lay hot-eyed and straight in bed, and just before Brett came in, his arrival announced by Cujo's barks and the slam of the back-door screen, the moon rose in all its silvery, detached glory. Moon doesn't care, Charity thought, but the thought brought her no comfort.


'What is it?' Donna asked.


Her voice was dull, almost defeated. The two of them were sitting in the living room. Vic had not gotten home until nearly Tad's bedtime, and that was now half an hour past. He was sleeping in his room upstairs, the Monster Words tacked by his bed, the closet door firmly shut.


Vic got up and crossed to the window, which now looked out only on darkness. She knows, he thought glumly. Not the fine tuning, maybe, but she's getting a pretty clear picture. All the way home he had tried to decide if he should confront her with it, lance the boil, try living with the laudable pus ... or if he should just deep-six it. After leaving Deering Oaks he had torn the letter up, and on his way home up 302 he had fed the scraps out the window. Litterbug Trenton, he thought. And now the choice had been taken out of his hands. He could see her pale reflection in the dark glass, her face a white circle in yellow lamplight.

He turned toward her, having absolutely no idea what he was going to say.


He knows, Donna was thinking.


It was not a new thought, not by now, because the last three hours had been the longest three of her whole life. She had heard the knowledge in his voice when he called to say he would he home late. At first there had been panic - the raw, fluttering panic of a bird trapped in a garage. The thought had been in italics followed by comic-book exclamation points: He knows! He knows! He KNOWS!! She had gotten Tad his supper in a fog of fear, trying to see what might logically happen next, but she was unable. I'll wash the dishes next, she thought. Then dry them. Then put them away. Then read Tad some stories. Then I'll just sail off the edge of the world.


Panic had been superseded by guilt. Terror had followed the guilt. Then a kind of fatalistic apathy had settled in as certain emotional circuits quietly shut themselves down. The apathy was even tinged by a certain relief. The secret was out. She wondered if Steve had done it, or if Vic had guessed on his own. She rather thought it had been Steve, but it didn't really matter. There was also relief that Tad was in bed, safely asleep. But she wondered what sort of morning he would wake up to. And that thought brought her full circle to her original panicky fear again. She felt sick, lost.


He turned toward her from the window and said, 'I got a letter today. An unsigned letter.'


He couldn't finish. He crossed the room again, restlessly, and she found herself thinking what a handsome man he was, and that it was too bad he was going gray so early. It looked good on some young men, but on Vic it was just going to make him look



prematurely old and - and what was she thinking about his hair for? It wasn't his hair she had to worry about, was it?

Very softly, still hearing the shake in her voice, she said everything that was salient, spitting it out like some horrible medicine too bitter to swallow. 'Steve Kemp. The man who refinished your desk in the den. Five times. Never in our bed, Vic. Never.'


Vic put out his hand for the pack of Winstons on the endtable by the sofa and knocked it onto the floor. He picked it up, got one out, and lit it. His hands were shaking badly. They weren't looking at each other. That's bad, Donna thought. We should be looking at each other. But she couldn't be the one to start. She was scared and ashamed. He was only scared.


'Why?'


'Does it matter?'


'It matters to me. It means a lot. Unless you want to cut loose. If you do, I guess it doesn't matter. I'm mad as hell, Donna. I'm trying not to let that ... that part get on top, because if we never talk straight again, we have to do it now. Do you want to cut loose?'


'Look at me, Vic.'


With a great effort, he did. Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours, at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not... not the way his face said he felt. 'I don't want to cut loose,' she said. 'I love you. These last few weeks I think I've just found that out again.'

He looked relieved for a moment. He went back to the window, then returned to the couch. He dropped down there and looked at her.


'Why, then?'


The epiphany was lost in low-key, exasperated anger. Why, it was a man's question. Its origin lay far down in whatever the concept of masculinity was in an intelligent late-twentieth-century Western man. I have to know why you did it. As if she were a car with a stuck needle valve that had caused the machine to start hitching and sputtering or a robot that had gotten its servotapes scrambled so that it was serving meatloaf in the morning and scrambled eggs for dinner. What drove women crazy, she thought suddenly, wasn't really sexism at all, maybe. It was this mad, masculine quest for efficiency.


'I don't know if I can explain. I'm afraid it will sound stupid and petty and trivial.'


'Try. Was it. . .'He cleared his throat, seemed to mentally spit on his hands (that cursed efficiency thing again) and then fairly wrenched the thing out. 'Haven't I been satisfying you? Was that it?'


'No,' she said.


'Then what?' he said helplessly. 'For Christ's sake, what?'


Okay ... you asked for it.


'Fear,' she said. 'Mostly, I think it was fear.'


'Fear?'


'When Tad went to school, there was nothing to keep me from being afraid. Tad was like. . what do they call it? ... white noise. The sound the TV makes when it isn't tuned to a station that comes in.'

'He wasn't in real school,' Vic said quickly, and she knew he was getting ready to be angry, getting ready to accuse her of trying to lay it off on Tad, and once he was angry things would come out between them that shouldn't be spoken, at least not yet. There were things, being the woman she was, that she would have to rise to. The situation would escalate. Something that was now very fragile was being tossed from his hands to hers and back again. It could easily be dropped.


'That was part of it,' she said. 'He wasn't in real school. I still had him most of the time, and the time when he was gone ... there was a contrast. . .' She looked at him. 'The quiet seemed very loud by comparison. That was when I started to get scared. Kindergarten next year, I'd think. Half a day every day instead of half a day three times a week. The year after that, all day five days a week. And there would still be all those hours to fill up. And I just got scared.'


'So you thought you'd fill up a little of that time by fucking someone?' he asked bitterly.


That stung her, but she continued on grimly, tracing it out as best she could, not raising her voice. He had asked. She would tell him.


'I didn't want to be on the Library Committee and I didn't want to be on the Hospital Committee and run the bake sales or be in charge of getting the starter change or making sure that not everybody is making the same Hamburger Helper casserole for the Saturday-night supper. I didn't want to see those same depressing faces over and over again and listen to the same gossipy stories about who is doing what in this town. I didn't want to sharpen my claws on anyone else's reputation.'


The words were gushing out of her now. She couldn't have stopped them if she wanted to.

'I didn't want to sell Tupperware and I didn't want to sell Amway and I didn't want to give Stanley parties and I don't need to join Weight Watchers. You -'


She paused for the tiniest second, grasping it, feeling the weight of the idea.


'You don't know about emptiness, Vic. Don't think you do. You're a man, and men grapple. Men grapple, and women dust. You dust the empty rooms and you listen to the wind blowing outside sometimes. Only sometimes it seems like the wind's inside, you know? So you put on a record, Bob Seger or J. J. Cale or someone, and you can still hear the wind, and thoughts come to you, ideas, nothing good, but they come. So you clean both toilets and you do the sink and one day you're down in one of the antique shops looking at little pottery knickknacks, and you think about how your mother had a shelf of knickknacks like that, and your aunts all had shelves of them, and your grandmother had them as wen.'


He was looking at her closely, and his expression was so honestly perplexed that she felt a wave of her own despair.


'It's feelings, I'm talking about, not facts!'


'Yes, but why -'


'I'm telling you why! I'm telling you that I got so I was spending enough time in front of the mirror to see how my face was changing, how no one was ever going to mistake me for a teenager again or ask to see my driver's license when I ordered a drink in a bar. I started to be afraid because I grew up after all. Tad's going to preschool and that means he's going to go to school, then high school -'


'Are you saying you took a lover because you felt old?' He was looking at her, surprised, and she loved him for that, because she supposed that was a part of it; Steve Kemp had found her attractive and of course that was flattering, that was what had made the flirtation fun in the first place. But it was in no way the greatest part of it.

She took his hands and spoke earnestly into his face, thinking - knowing that she might never speak so earnestly (or honestly) to any man again. 'It's more. It's knowing you can't wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It's knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman - no, for me - that's a brutal thing to have to face. Wife, that's fine. But you're gone at work, even when you're home you're gone at work so much. Mother, that's fine, too. But there's a little less of it every year, because every year the world gets another little slice of him.


'Men. . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are. They never five up to the ideal, and it breaks them, and maybe that's why so many men die unhappy and before their time, but they know what being a grownup is supposed to mean. They have some kind of handle on thirty, forty, fifty. They don't hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down.


'What a woman does - what I did - was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone. Once, do you know - this is crazy - I was in his room, changing the sheets, and I got thinking about these girlfriends I had in high school. Wondering what happened to them, where they went. I was almost in a daze. And Tad's closet door swung open and ... I screamed and ran out of the room. I don't know why ... except I guess I do. I thought for just a second there that Joan Brady would come out of Tad's closet, and her head would be gone and there would be blood all over her clothes and she would say, "I died in a car crash when I was nineteen coming back from Sammy's Pizza and I don't give a damn."'


'Christ, Donna,' Vic said.

'I got scared, that's all. I got scared when I'd start looking at knickknacks or thinking about taking a pottery course or yoga or something like that. And the only place to run from the future is into the past. So. ... so I started flirting with him.'


She looked down and then suddenly buried her face in her hands. Her words were muffled but still understandable.


'It was fun. It was like being in college again. It was like a dream. A stupid dream. It was like he was white noise. He blotted out that wind sound. The flirting part was fun. The sex ... it was no good. I had orgasms, but it was no good. I can't explain why not, except that I still loved you through all of it, and understood that I was running away. . . .' She looked up at him again, crying now. 'He's running too. He's made a career of it. He's a poet ... at least that's what he calls himself. I couldn't make head or tail of the things he showed me. He's a roadrunner, dreaming he's still in college and protesting the war in Vietnam. That's why it was him, I guess. And now I think you know everything I can tell you. An ugly little tale, but mine own.'


'I'd like to beat him up,' Vic said. 'If I could make his nose bleed, I guess that would make me feel better.'


She smiled wanly. 'He's gone. Tad and I went for a Dairy Queen after we finished supper and you still weren't home. There's a FOR RENT sign in the window of his shop. I told you he was a roadrunner.'


'There was no poetry in that note,' Vic said. He looked at her briefly, then down again. She touched his face and he winced back a little. That hurt more than anything else, hurt more than she would have believed. The guilt and fear came again, in a glassy, crushing wave. But she wasn't crying any more. She thought there would be no more tears for a very long time. The wound and the attendant shock trauma were too great.

'Vic,' she said. 'I'm sorry. You're hurt and I'm sorry.'


'When did you break it off?'


She told him about the day she had come back and found him there, omitting the fear she'd had that Steve might actually rape her.


'Then the note was his way of getting back at you.'


She brushed hair away from her forehead and nodded. Her face was pale and wan. There were purplish patches of skin under her eyes. 'I guess so.'


'Let's go upstairs, he said. 'It's late. We're both tired.'


'Will you make love to me?'


He shook his head slowly. 'Not tonight.'


'All right.'


They went to the stairs together. At the foot of them, Donna asked, 'So what comes next, Vic?'


He shook his head. 'I just don't know.'


'Do I write "I promise never to do it again" five hundred times on the blackboard and miss recess? Do we get a divorce? Do we never mention it again? What?' She didn't feel hysterical, only tired, but her voice was rising in a way she didn't like and hadn't intended. The shame was the worst, the shame of being found out and seeing how it had punched his face in. And she hated him as well as herself for making her feel so badly ashamed, because she didn't believe she was responsible for the factors leading up to the final decision - if there really had been a decision.


'We ought to be able to get it together,' he said, but she did not mistake him; he wasn't talking to her. 'This thing --? He looked at her pleadingly. 'He was the only one, wasn't he?'

It was the one unforgivable question, the one he had no right to ask. She left him, almost ran up the stairs, before everything could spill out, the stupid recriminations and accusations that would not solve anything but only muddy up whatever poor honesty they had been able to manage.


There was little sleep for either of them that night. And the fact that he had forgotten to call Joe Camber and ask him if he could work on his wife's ailing Pinto Runabout was the furthest thing from Vic's mind.


As for Joe Camber himself, he was sitting with Gary Pervier in one of the decaying lawn chairs which dotted Gary's run-to-riot side yard. They were drinking vodka martinis out of McDonald's glasses under the stars. Lightning bugs flickered across the dark, and the masses of honeysuckle clinging to Gary's fence filled the hot night with its cloying, heavy scent.


Cujo would ordinarily have been chasing after the fireflies, sometimes barking, and tickling both men no end. But tonight he only lay between them with his nose on his paws. They thought he was sleeping, but he wasn't. He simply lay there, feeling the aches that filled his bones and buzzed back and forth in his head. It had gotten hard for him to think what came next in his simple dog's life; something had gotten in the way of ordinary instinct. When he slept, he had dreams of uncommon, unpleasant vividity. In one of these he had savaged THE Boy, had ripped his throat open and then pulled his guts out of his body in steaming bundles. He had awakened from this dream twitching and whining.


He was continually thirsty, but he had already begun to shy away from his water dish some of the time, and when he did drink, the water tasted like steel shavings. The water made his teeth ache. The water sent bolts of pain through his eyes. And now he lay on the grass, not caring about the lightning bugs or anything else. The voices Of THE MEN were unimportant rumbles coming from somewhere above him. They meant little to him compared to his own growing misery.

'Boston!' Gary Pervier said, and cackled. 'Boston! What the hell are you going to do in Boston, and what makes you think I could afford to tag along? I don't think I got enough to go down to the Norge until I get my check cashed.'


'Fuck you, you're rolling in it,' joe replied. He was getting pretty drunk. 'You might have to dig into what's in your mattress a little, that's all.'


'Nothing in there but bedbugs,' Gary said, and cackled again. 'Place is crawlin with em, and I don't give a shit. You ready for another blast?'


Joe held out his glass. Gary had the makings right beside his chair. He mixed in the dark with the practiced, steady, and heavy hand of the chronic drinker.


'Boston!' He said again, handing Joe his drink. He said slyly, 'Kickin up your heels a little, Joey, I guess.' Gary was the only man in Castle Rock - perhaps in the world - who could have gotten away with calling him Joey. 'Kicking up some whoopee, I guess. Never known you to go further than Portsmouth before.'


'I been to Boston once or twice,' joe said. 'You better look out, Pervert, or I'll sic my dog on you.'


'You couldn't sic that dog on a yellin nigger with a straight razor in each hand,' Gary said. He reached down and ruffled Cujo's fur briefly. 'What's your wife say about it?'


'She don't know we're goin. She don't have to know.'


'Oh, yeah?'


'She's takin the boy down to Connecticut to see her sister 'n' that freak she's married to. They're gonna be gone a week. She won some money in the lottery. Might as well tell you that right out. They use all the names on the radio, anyway. It's all in the prize form she had to sign.'

'Won some money in the lottery, did she?'


'Five thousand dollars.'


Gary whistled. Cujo flicked his ears uncomfortably at the sound.


Joe told Gary what Charity had told him at supper, leaving out the argument and making it appear a straight trade that had been his idea: The boy could go down to Connecticut for a week with her, and up to Moosehead for a week with him in the fall.


'And you're gonna go down to Boston and spend some of that dividend yourself, you dirty dog,' Gary said. He clapped Joe on the shoulder and laughed. 'Oh, you're a one, all right.'


'Why shouldn't I? You know when the last time was I had a day off? I don't. Can't remember. I ain't got much on this week. I'd planned to take most of a day and a half pulling the motor on Richie's International, doing a valve job and all, but with that chainfall it won't take four hours. I'll get him to bring it in tomorrow and I can do it tomorrow afternoon. I got a transmission job, but that's just a teacher. From the grammar school. I can put that back. A few other things the same way. I'll just call em up and tell em I'm having a little holiday.'


'What you gonna do down in Beantown?'


'Well, maybe see the Dead Sox play a couple at Fenway. Go down there to Washington Street --'


'The combat zone! Hot damn, I knew it!' Gary snorted laughter and slapped his leg. 'See some of those dirty shows and try to catch the clap!'


'Wouldn't be much fun alone.'

'Well, I guess I could tag along with you if you was willin to put some of that money my way until I get my check cashed.'


'I'd do that,' Joe said. Gary was a drunkard, but he took a debt seriously.


'I ain't been with a woman for about four years, I guess,' Gary said reminiscently. 'Lost most of the old sperm factory over there in France. What's left, sometimes it works, sometimes it don't. Might be fun to find out if I still got any ram left in my ramrod.'


'Ayuh,' Joe said. He was slurring now, and his cars were buzzing. 'And don't forget the baseball. You know when the last time was I went to Fenway?'


'No.'


'Nine-teen-sixty-eight,' Joe said, leaning forward and tapping out each syllable on Gary's arm for emphasis. He spilled most of his new drink in the process. 'Before my kid was born. They played the Tigers and lost six to four, those suckers. Norm Cash hit a homer in the top of the eighth.'


'When you thinking of going>'


'Monday afternoon around three , I thought. The wife and the boy will want to go out that morning, I guess. I'll take them in to the Greyhound station in Portland. That gives me the rest of the morning and half the afternoon to catch up whatever I have to catch up.'


'You takin the car or the truck?'


'Car.'


Gary's eyes went soft and dreamy in the dark. 'Booze,. baseball, and broads,' he said. He sat up straighter. 'I don't give a shit if I do.'


'You want to go?'

'Ayuh.'


Joe let out a little whoop and they both got laughing. Neither noticed that Cujo's head had come off his paws at the sound and that he was growling very softly.


Monday morning dawned in shades of pearl and dark gray; the fog was so thick that Brett Camber couldn't see the oak in the side yard from his window, and that oak wasn't but thirty yards away.


The house still slept around him, but there was no more sleep left in him. He was going on a trip, and every part of his being vibrated with the news. just he and his mother. It would be a good trip, he felt that, and deep down inside, beyond any conscious thought, he was glad his father wasn't coming. He would be free to be himself; he would not have to try to live up to some mysterious ideal of masculinity that he knew his father had achieved but which he himself couldn't yet even begin to comprehend. He felt good - incredibly good and incredibly alive. He felt sorry for anyone in the world who was not going on a trip this fine, foggy morning, which would be another scorcher as soon as the fog burned off . He planned to sit in a window seat of the bus and watch every mile of the journey from the Greyhound terminal on Spring Street all the way to Stratford. It had been a long time before he had been able to get to sleep last night and here it was, not yet five o'clock but if he stayed in bed any longer, he would explode, or something.


Moving as quietly as he could, he put on jeans and his Castle Rock Cougars T-shirt, a pair of white athletic socks, and his Keds. He went downstairs and fixed himself a bowl of Cocoa Bears. He tried to eat quietly but was sure that the crunch of the cereal that he heard in his head must be audible all over the house. Upstairs he heard his dad grunt and rum over in the double bed he and his mom shared. The springs rasped. Brett's jaws froze. After a moment's debate he took his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back porch, being careful not to let the screen door slam. The summer smells of everything were greatly clarified in the heavy fog, and the air was already warm. In the east, just above the faint fuzz that marked a belt of pines at the end of the east pasture, he could see the sun. It was as small and silver-bright as the full moon when it has risen well up in the sky. Even now the humidity was a dense thing, heavy and quiet. The fog would be gone by eight or nine, but the humidity would remain.

But for now what Brett saw was a white, secret world, and he was filled with the secret joys of it: the husky smell of hay that would he ready for its first cutting in a week, of manure, of his mother's roses. He could even faintly make out the aroma of Gary Pervier's triumphant honeysuckle which was slowly burying the fence which marked the edge of his property -burying it in a drift of cloying, grasping vines.


He put his cereal bowl aside and walked toward where he knew the barn to be. Halfway across the dooryard he looked over his shoulder and saw that the house had receded to nothing but a misty outline. A few steps farther and it was swallowed. He was alone in the white with only the tiny silver sun looking down on him. He could smell dust, damp, honeysuckle, roses.


And then the growling began.


His heart leaped into his throat and he fell back a step, all his muscles tensing into bundles of wire. His first panicky thought, like a child who has suddenly tumbled into a fairy tale, was wolf, and he looked around wildly. There was nothing to see but white.


Cujo came out of the fog.


Brett began to make a whining noise in his throat. The dog he had grown up with, the dog who had pulled a yelling, gleeful five-yearold Brett patiently around and around the dooryard on his Flexible Flyer, budded into a harness Joe had made in the shop, the dog who had been waiting calmly by the mailbox every afternoon during school for the bus, come shine or shower ... that dog bore only the slightest resemblance to the muddy, matted apparition slowly materializing from the morning mist. The Saint Bernard's big, sad eyes were now reddish and stupid and lowering: more pig's eyes than dog's eyes. His coat was plated with brownishgreen-mud, as if he had been rolling around in the boggy place at the bottom of the meadow. His muzzle was wrinkled back in a terrible mock grin that froze Brett with horror. Brett felt his heart slugging away m his throat.

Thick white foam dripped slowly from between Cujo's teeth.


'Cujo?' Brett whispered. 'Cuje?'


Cujo looked at THE Boy, not recognizing him any more, not his looks, not the shadings of his clothes (he could not precisely see colors, at least as human beings understand them), not his scent. What he saw was a monster on two legs. Cujo was sick, and all things appeared monstrous to him now. His head clanged dully with murder. He wanted to bite and rip and tear. Part of him saw a cloudy image of him springing at THE Boy, bringing him down, parting flesh with bone, drinking blood as it still pulsed, driven by a dying heart.


Then the monstrous figure spoke, and Cujo recognized the voice. It was THE BOY, THE BOY, and THE BOY had never done him any harm. Once he had loved THE Boy and would have died for him, had that been called for. There was enough of that feeling left to hold the image of murder at bay until it grew as murky as the fog around them. It broke up and rejoined the buzzing, clamorous river of his sickness.


'Cujo? What's wrong, boy?'


The last of the dog that had been before the bat scratched its nose turned away, and the sick and dangerous dog, subverted for the last time, was forced to turn with it. Cujo stumbled away and moved deeper into the fog. Foam splattered from his muzzle onto the dirt. He broke into a lumbering run, hoping to outrun the sickness, but it ran with him, buzzing and yammering, making him ache with hatred and murder. He began to roll over and over in the high timothy grass, snapping at it, his eyes rolling.

The world was a crazy sea of smells. He would track each to its source and dismember it.


Cujo began to growl again. He found his feet. He slipped deeper into the fog that was even now beginning to thin, a big dog who weighed just under two hundred pounds.


Brett stood in the dooryard for more than fifteen minutes after Cujo had melted back into the fog, not knowing what to do. Cujo had been sick. He might have eaten a poison bait or something. Brett knew about rabies, and if he had ever seen a woodchuck or a fox or a porcupine exhibiting the same symptons. he would have guessed rabies. But it never crossed his mind that his dog could have that awful disease of the brain and the nervous system. A poison bait, that seemed the most likely.


He should tell his father. His father could call the vet. Or maybe Dad could do something himself, like that time two years ago, when he had pulled the porcupine needles out of Cujo's muzzle with his pliers, working each quill first up, then down, then out, being careful not to break them off because they would fester in there. Yes, he would have to tell Dad. Dad would do something, like that time Cuje got into it with Mr. Porky Pine.


But what about the trip?


He didn't need to be told that his mother had won them the trip through some desperate stratagem, or luck, or a combination of the two. Like most children, he could sense the vibrations between his parents, and he knew the way the emotional currents ran from one day to the next the way a veteran guide knows the twists and turns of an upcountry river. It had been a near thing, and even though his dad had agreed, Brett sensed that this agreement had been grudging and unpleasant. The trip was not on for sure until he had dropped them off and driven away. If he told Dad Cujo was sick, might he not seize on that as an excuse to keep them home?

He stood motionless in the dooryard. He was, for the first time in his life, in a total mental and emotional quandary. After a little while he began to hunt for Cujo behind the barn. He called him in a low voice. His parents were still sleeping, and he knew how sound carried in the morning fog. He didn't find Cujo anywhere ... which was just as well for him.


The alarm burred Vic awake at quarter to five. He got up, shut it off, and blundered down to the bathroom, mentally cursing Roger Breakstone, who could never get to the Portland jetport twenty minutes before check-in like any normal air traveler. Not Roger. Roger was a contingency man. There might always be a flat tire or a roadblock or a wash out or an earthquake. Aliens from outer space might decide to touch down on runway 22.


He showered, shaved, gobbled vitamins, and went back to the bedroom to dress. The big double bed was empty and he sighed a little. The weekend he and Donna had just passed hadn't been very pleasant ... in fact, he could honestly say he never wanted to go through such a weekend again in his life. They had kept their normal, pleasant faces on -for Tad - but Vic had felt like a participant at a masquerade ball. He didn't like to be aware of the muscles in his face at work when he smiled.


They had slept in the same bed together, but for the first time the king-sized double seemed too small to Vic. They slept each on one side, the space between them a crisply sheeted no-man's-land. He had lain awake both Friday and Saturday nights, morbidly aware of each shift in Donna's weight as she moved, the sound of her nightdress against her body. He found himself wondering if she was awake, too, on her side of the emptiness that lay between them.

Last night, Sunday night, they had tried to do something about that empty space in the middle of the bed. The sex part had been moderately successful, if a little tentative (at least neither of them had cried when it was over; for some reason he had been morbidly sure that one of them would do that). But Vic was not sure you could call what they had done making love.


He dressed in his summerweight gray suit - as gray as the early fight outside - and picked up his two suitcases. One of them was much heavier than the other. That one contained most of the Sharp Cereals file. Roger had all the graphic layouts.


Donna was making waffles in the kitchen. The teapot was on, just beginning to huff and puff. She was wearing his old blue flannel robe. Her face was puffy, as if instead of resting her, sleep had punched her unconscious.


'Will the planes fly when it's like that?' she asked.


'It's going to bum off. You can see the sun already.' He pointed at it and then kissed her lightly on the nape of the neck. 'You shouldn't have gotten up.'


'No problem.' She lifted the waffle iron's lid and deftly turned a waffle out on a plate. She handed it to him. 'I wish you weren't going away.' Her voice was low. 'Not now. After last night.'


'It wasn't that bad, was it?'


'Not like before,' Donna said. A bitter, almost secret smile touched her lips and was gone. She beat the waffle mixture with a wire whisk and then poured a ladleful into the waffle iron and dropped its heavy lid. Sssss. She poured boding water over a couple of Red Rose bags and took the cups - one said VIC, the other DONNA - over to the table. 'Eat your waffle. There's strawberry preserves, if you want them.'

He got the preserves and sat down. He spread some oleo across the top of the waffle and watched it melt into the little squares, just as he had when he was a child. The preserves were smucker's. He liked Smucker's preserves. He spread the waffle liberally with them. It looked great. But he wasn't hungry.


'Will you get laid in Boston or New York?' she asked, turning her back on him. 'Even it out) Tit for tat)


He jumped a little -perhaps even flushed. He was glad her back was turned because he felt that at that precise moment there was more of him on his face than he wanted her to see. Not that he was angry; the thought of giving the bellman a ten instead of the usual buck and then asking the fellow a few questions had certainly crossed his mind. He knew that Roger had done it on occasion.


'I'm going to be too busy for anything like that.'


'What does the ad say? There's Always Room for Jell-O.'


'Are you trying to make me mad, Donna? Or what?'


'No. Go on and eat. You got to feed the machine.'


She sat down with a waffle of her own. No oleo for her. A dash of Vermont Maid Syrup, that was all. How well we know each other, he thought.


'What time are you picking Roger up)' she asked him.


'After some hot negotiations, we've settled on six.'


She smiled again, but this time the smile was warm and fond. 'He really took that early-bird business to heart at some point, didn't he?'


'Yeah. I'm surprised he hasn't called yet to make sure I'm up.'

The phone rang.


They looked at each other across the table, and after a silent considering pause they both burst out laughing. It was a rare moment, certainly more rare than the careful lovemaking in the dark the night before. He saw how fine her eyes were, how lucent. They were as gray as the morning mist outside.


'Get it quick before it wakes the Tadder up,' she said.


He did. It was Roger. He assured Roger that he was up, dressed, and in a fighting frame of mind. He would pick Roger up on the dot of six. He hung up wondering if he would end up telling Roger about Donna and Steve Kemp. Probably not. Not because Roger's advice would be bad; it wouldn't be. But, even though Roger would promise not to tell Althea, he most certainly would. And he had a suspicion that Althea would find it difficult to resist sharing out such a juicy bit of bridge-table gossip. Such careful consideration of the question made him feel depressed all over again. It was as if, by trying to work out the problem between them, he and Donna were burying their own body by moonlight.


'Good old Roger,' he said, sitting down again. He tried on a smile but it felt wrong. The moment of spontaneity was gone.


'Will you be able to get all of your stuff and all of Roger's into the jag?'


'Sure,' he said. 'We'll have to. Althea needs their car, and you've got - oh, shit, I completely forgot to call Joe Camber about your Pinto.'


'You had a few other things on your mind,' she said. 'Mere was faint irony in her voice. 'That's all right. I'm not going to send Tad to the playground today. He has the sniffles. I may keep him home the rest of the summer, if that suits you. I get into trouble when he's gone.'

There were tears choking her voice, squeezing it and blurring it, and he didn't know what to say or how to respond. He watched helplessly as she found a Kleenex, blew her nose, wiped her eyes.


'Whatever,' he said, shaken. 'Whatever seems best.' He rushed on: 'Just give Camber a call. He's always there, and I don't think it would take him twenty minutes to fix it. Even if he has to put in another carb -'


'Will you think about it while you're gone?' she asked.


'About what we're going to do? The two of us?'


'Yes,' he said.


'Good. I will too. Another waffle?'


'No, thanks.' The whole conversation was turning surreal. Suddenly he wanted to be out and gone. Suddenly the trip felt very necessary and very attractive. The idea of getting away from the whole mess. Putting miles between him and it. He felt a sudden jab of anticipation. In his mind he could see the Delta jet cutting through the unraveling fog and into the blue.


'Can I have a waffle?'


They both looked around, startled. It was Tad, standing in the hallway in his yellow footy pajamas, his stuffed coyote grasped by one ear, his red blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He looked like a small, sleepy Indian.


'I guess I could rustle one up,' Donna said, surprised. Tad was not a notably early riser.


'Was it the phone, Tad?' Vic asked.


Tad shook his head. 'I made myself wake up early so I could say good-bye to you, Daddy. Do you really have to go?'


'It's just for a while.'

'It's too long,' Tad said blackly. 'I put a circle around the day you're coming home on my calendar. Mom showed me which one. I'm going to mark off every day, and she said she'd tell me the Monster Words every night.'


'Well, that's okay, isn't it?'


'Will you can?'


'Every other night,' Vic said.


'Every night,' Tad insisted. He crawled up into Vic's lap and set his coyote next to Vic's plate. Tad began to crunch up a piece of toast. 'Every night, Daddy.'


'I can't every night,' Vic said, thinking of the backbreaking schedule Roger had laid out on Friday, before the letter had come.


'Why not?'


'Because -'


'Because your Uncle Roger is a hard taskmaster,' Donna said, Puffing Tad's waffle On the table. 'Come on over here and eat. Bring your coyote. Daddy will call us tomorrow night from Boston and tell us everything that happened to him.'


Tad took his place at the end of the table. He had a large plastic placemat that said TAD. 'Will you bring me a toy?'


'Maybe. If you're good. And maybe I'll call tonight so you'll know I got to Boston in one piece.'


'Good deal.' Vic watched, fascinated, as Tad poured a small ocean of syrup over his waffle. 'What kind of toy?'


'We'll see,' Vic said. He watched Tad eat his waffle. It suddenly occurred to him that Tad liked eggs. Scrambled, friend, poached, or hard-boiled, Tad gobbled them up. 'Tad?'


'What, Daddy?'

'If you wanted people to buy eggs, what would you tell them?'


Tad considered. 'I'd tell em eggs taste good,' he said.


Vic met his wife's eyes again, and they had a second moment like the one that had occurred when the phone rang. This time they laughed telepathically.


Their good-byes were light. Only Tad, with his imperfect grasp of how short the future really was, cried.


'You'll think about it?' Donna asked him again as he climbed into the jag.


'Yes.'


But driving into Bridgton to get Roger, what he thought about were those two moments of near-perfect communication. Two in one morning, not bad. All it took was eight or nine years together, roughly a quarter of all the years so far spent on the face of the earth. He got thinking about how ridiculous the whole concept of human communication was - what monstrous, absurd overkill was necessary to achieve even a little. When you'd invested the time and made it good, you had to he careful. Yes, he'd think about it. It had been good between them, and although some of the channels were now closed, filled with God knew how much muck (and some of that muck might still be squirming), plenty of the others seemed open and in reasonably good working order.


There had to be some careful thought - but perhaps not too much at once. Things had a way of magnifying themselves.


He turned the radio up and began to think about the poor old Sharp Cereal Professor.


Joe Camber pulled up in front of the Greyhound terminal in Portland at ten minutes to eight. The fog had burned off and the digital clock atop the Casco Bank and Trust read 73 degrees already.

He drove with his hat planted squarely on his head, ready to be angry at anyone who pulled out or cut in front of him. He hated to drive in the city. When he and Gary got to Boston he intended to park the car and leave it until they were ready to come home. They could take the subways if they could puzzle them out, walk if they couldn't.


Charity was dressed in her best pants suit - it was a quiet green - and a white cotton blouse with a ruffle at the neck. She was wearing earrings, and this had filled Brett with a mild sense of amazement. He couldn't remember his mother wearing earrings at all, except to church.


Brett had caught her alone when she went upstairs to dress after getting Dad his breakfast oatmeal. Joe had been mostly silent, grunting answers to questions in monosyllables, then shutting off conversation entirely by tuning the radio to WCSH for the ball scores. They were both afraid that the silence might presage a ruinous outburst and a sudden change of mind on their trip.


Charity had the slacks of her pants suit on and was slipping into her blouse. Brett noted she was wearing a peach-colored bra, and that had also amazed him. He hadn't known his mother had underclothes in any color other than white.


'Ma,' he said urgently.


She turned to him - it seemed almost that she was turning on him. 'Did he say something to you?'


'No ... no. It's Cujo.'


'Cujo? What about Cujo?,


'He's sick.'


'What do you mean, sick?'

Brett told her about having his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back steps, about walking into the fog, and how Cujo had suddenly appeared, his eyes red and wild, his muzzle dripping foam.


'And he wasn't walking right,' Brett finished. 'He was kind of, you know, staggering. I think I better tell Daddy. '


'No,' his mother said fiercely, and grasped him by the shoulders hard enough to hurt. 'You do no such a thing!'


He looked at her, surprised and frightened. She relaxed her grip a little and spoke more quietly.


'He just scared you, coming out of the fog like that. There's probably nothing wrong with him at all. Right?'


Brett groped for the right words to make her understand how terrible Cujo had looked, and how for a moment he had thought the dog was going to turn on him. He couldn't find the words. Maybe he didn't want to find them.


'If there is something wrong,' Charity continued, 'it's probably just some little thing. He might have gotten a dose of skunk -'


'I didn't smell any sk-'


'or he might have been running a woodchuck or a rabbit. Might even have jumped a moose down there in that bog. Or he might have eaten some nettles.'


'I guess he could have,' Brett said doubtfully.


'Your father would just jump on something like that,' she said. 'I can hear him now. "Sick ' ' is be? Well, he's your dog, Brett. You see to him. I got too much work to do to be messing around with your mutt."'

Brett nodded unhappily. It was his own thought exactly, magnified by the brooding way his father had been eating breakfast while the sports blared around the kitchen.


'If you just leave him, he'll come mooching around your dad, and your dad will take care of him,' Charity said. 'He loves Cujo almost as much as you do, although he'd never say it. If he sees something's wrong, he'll fetch him over to the vet's in South Paris.'


'Yeah, I guess he would.' His mother's words rang true to him, but he was still unhappy about it.


She bent and kissed his cheek. 'I'll tell you! We can call your father tonight, if you want. How would that be? And when you talk to him, you just say, sort of casually, "You feeding my dog, ]Daddy?" And then you'll know.'


'Yeah,' Brett said. He smiled gratefully at his mother, and she smiled back, relieved, the trouble averted. But, perversely, it had given them something else to worry about during the seemingly interminable period before Joe backed the car up to the porch steps and silently began to load their four pieces of luggage into the wagon (into one of them Charity had surreptitiously placed all six of her snapshot albums). This new worry was that Cujo would lurch into the yard before they could drive away and stick Joe Camber with the problem.


But Cujo hadn't shown up.


Now Joe lowered the tailgate of the Country Squire, handed Brett the two small bags, and took the two large ones for himself.


'Woman, you got so much luggage I wonder if you ain't leavin on one of those Reno divorce cruises instead of going down to Connecticut.'


Charity and Brett smiled uneasily. It sounded like an attempt at humor, but with Joe Camber you were never really sure. 'That would be a day,' she said.

'I guess I'd just have to chase you down and drag you back with my new chainfall,' he said, unsmiling. His green hat was cocked squarely on the back of his head. 'Boy, you gonna take care of your mom?'


Brett nodded.


'Yeah, you better. ' He measured the boy. 'You're getting pretty damn big. Probably you ain't got a kiss to give your old man.'


'I guess I do, Daddy,' Brett said. He hugged his father tight and kissed his stubbly cheek, smelling sour sweat and a phantom of last night's vodka. He was surprised and overwhelmed by his love for his father, a feeling that sometimes still came, always when it was least expected (but less and less often over the last two or three years, something his mother did not know and would not have believed if told). It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigar-smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.


His father hugged him back and then turned to Charity. He put a finger under her chin and turned her face up a little. From the loading bays behind the squat brick building they heard a bus warming up. Its engine was a low and guttural diesel rumble. 'Have a good time,' he said.


Her eyes filled with tears and she wiped them away quickly. The gesture was nearly one of anger. 'Okay,' she said.


Abruptly the tight, dosed, noncommittal expression descended over his face. It came down like the clap of a knight's visor. He was the perfect country man again. 'Let's get these cases in, boy! Feels like there's lead in this one ... Jesus-please-us!'

He stayed with them until all four bags had been checked, looking closely at each tag, oblivious of the baggage handler's condescending expression of amusement. He watched the handler trundle the bags out on a dolly and load them into the guts of the bus. Then he turned to Brett again.


'Come on out on the sidewalk with me,' he said.


Charity watched them go. She sat down on one of the hard benches, opened her purse, took out a handkerchief, and began fretting at it. It would just be like him to wish her a good time and then try to talk the boy into going back to the home place with him.


On the sidewalk, Joe said: 'Lemme give you two pieces of advice, boy. You probably won't take neither of them, boys seldom do, but I guess that never stopped a father giving em. First piece of advice is this: That fella you're going to see, that Jim, he's nothing but a piece of shit. One of the reasons I'm letting you go on this jaunt is that you're ten now, and ten's old enough to tell the difference between a turd and a tearose. You watch him and you'll see. He don't do nothing but sit in an office and push papers. People like him is half the trouble with this world, because their brains have got unplugged from their hands.' Thin, hectic color had risen in Joe's cheeks. 'He's a piece of shit. You watch him and see if you don't agree.'


'All right,' Brett said. His voice was low but composed.


Joe Camber smiled a little. 'The second piece of advice is to keep your hand on your pocketbook.'


'I haven't got any mon -'

Camber held out a rumpled five-dollar bill. 'Yeah, you got this. Don't spend it all in one place. The fool and his money soon parted.'


'All right. Thank you'


'So long,' Camber said. He didn't ask for another kiss.


'Good-bye, Daddy.' Brett stood on the sidewalk and watched his father climb into the car and drive away. He never saw his father alive again.


At quarter past eight that morning, Gary Pervier staggered out of his house in his pee-stained underwear shorts and urinated into the honeysuckle. In a perverse sort of way he hoped that someday his piss would become so rancid with booze that it would blight the honeysuckle. That day hadn't come yet.


'Arrrouggh, my head!' he screamed, holding it with his free hand as he watered the honeysuckle which had buried his fence. His eyes were threaded with bright snaps of scarlet. His heart clattered and roared like an old water pump that was drawing more air than water just lately. A terrible stomach cramp seized him as he finished voiding himself -they had been getting more common lately - and as he doubled up a large and foul-smelling flatulence purred out from between his skinny shanks.


He turned to go back in. and that was when he heard the growling begin. It was a low, powerful sound coming from just beyond the point where his overgrown side yard merged with the hayfield beyond it.


He turned toward the sound quickly, his headache forgotten, the clatter and roar of his heart forgotten, the cramp forgotten. It had been a long time since he'd had a flashback to his war in France, but he had one now, Suddenly his mind was screaming, Germans! Germans! Squad down!

But it wasn't the Germans. When the grass parted it was Cujo who appeared.


'Hey, boy, what are you growling f -'Gary said, and then faltered.


It had been twenty years since he had wen a rabid dog, but you didn't forget the look. He had been in an Amoco station east of Machias, headed back from a camping trip down Eastport way. He had been driving the old Indian motorcycle he'd had for a while in the mid-fifties. A panting, slat-sided yellow dog had drifted by outside that Amoco station like a ghost. Its sides had been moving in and out in rapid, shallow springs of respiration. Foam was dripping from its mouth in a steady watery stream. It's eyes were rolling wildly. Its hindquarters were caked with shit. It had been reeling rather than walking, as if some unkind soul had opened its jaws an hour before and filled it full of cheap whiskey.


'Hot damn, there he is,' the pump jockey said. He had dropped the adjustable wrench he was holding and had rushed into the cluttered, dingy little office which adjoined the station's garage bay. He had come out with a .30-30 clutched in his greasy, bigknuckled hands. He went out onto the tarmac, dropped to one knee, and started shooting. His first shot had been low, shearing away one of the dog's back legs in a cloud of blood. That yellow dog never even moved, Gary remembered as he stared at Cujo now. Just looked around blankly as if he didn't have the slightest idea what was happening to it. The pump jockey's second try had cut the dog almost in half. Guts hit the station's one pump in a black and red splash. A moment later three more guys had pulled in, three of Washington County's finest crammed shoulder to shoulder in the cab of a 1940 Dodge pickup. They were all armed. ]bey piled out and pumped another eight or nine rounds into the dead dog. An hour after that, as the pump jockey was finishing tip putting a new headlamp on the front of Gary's Indian cyclic, the County Dog Officer arrived in a Studebaker with no door on the passenger side. She donned long rubber gloves and cut off what was left of the yellow dog's head to send to State Health and Welfare.

Cujo looked a hell of a lot spryer than that long-ago yellow dog, but the other symptoms were exactly the same. Not too far gone, he thought. More dangerous. Holy Jesus, got to get my gun


He started to back away. 'Hi, Cujo ... nice dog, nice boy, nice doggy -' Cujo stood at the edge of the lawn. his great head lowered, his eyes reddish and filmy, growling.


'Nice boy –'


To Cujo, the words coming from THE MAN meant nothing. They were meaningless -sounds, like the wind. What mattered was the smell coming from THE MAN. It was hot, rank, and pungent. It was the smell of fear, and was maddening and unbearable. He suddenly understood THE MAN had made him sick. He lunged forward, the growl in his chest mounting into a heavy roar of rage.


Gary saw the dog coming for him. He turned and ran. One bite, one scratch could mean death. He ran for the porch and the safety of the house beyond the porch. But there had been too many drinks, too many long winter days by the stove, and too many long summer nights in the lawn chair. He could hear Cujo closing in behind him, and then there was the terrible split second when he could hear nothing and understood that Cujo had leaped.


As he reached the first splintery step of his porch, two hundred pounds of Saint Bernard hit him like a locomotive, knocking him flat and driving the wind from him. The dog went for the back of his neck. Gary tried to scramble up. The dog was over him, the thick fur of its underbelly nearly suffocating him, and it knocked him back down easily. Gary screamed.


Cujo bit him high on the shoulder, his powerful jaws dosing and crunching through the bare skin, pulling tendons like wires. He continued to growl. Blood flew. Gary felt it running warmly down his skinny upper arm. He turned over and battered at the dog with his fists. It gave back a little and Gary was able to scramble up three more steps on his feet and hands. Then Cujo came again.

Gary kicked at the dog. Cujo feinted the other way and then came boring in, snapping and growling. Foam flew from his jaws, and Gary could smell his breath. It smelled rotten - rank and yellow. Gary balled his right fist and swung in a roundhouse, connecting with the bony shelf of Cujo's lower jaw. It was mostly luck. The jolt of the impact ran all the way up to his shoulder, which was on fire from the deep bite.


Cujo backed off again.


Gary looked at the dog, his thin, hairless chest moving rapidly up and down. His face was ashy gray. The laceration on his shoulder welled blood that splattered on the peeling porch steps. 'Come for me, you sonofawhore,' he said. 'Come on, come on, I don't give a shit.' He screamed, 'You hear me! I don't give a shit!'


But Cujo backed off another pace.


The words still had no meaning, but the smell of fear had left THE MAN. Cujo was no longer sure if he wanted to attack or not. He hurt, he hurt so miserably, and the world was a crazyquilt of sense and impression.


Gary got shakily to his feet. He backed up the last two steps of the porch. He backed across the porch's width and felt behind him for the handle of the screen door. His shoulder felt as if raw gasoline had been poured under the skin. His mind raved at him, Rabies! I got the rabies!


Never mind. One thing at a time. His shotgun was in the hall closet. Thank Christ Charity and Brett Camber were gone from up on the hill. That was God's mercy at work.

He found the screen door's handle and pulled the door open. He kept his eyes locked on Cujo's until he had backed in and pulled the screen door shut behind him. Then a great relief swept through him. His legs went rubbery. For a moment the world swam away, and he pulled himself back by sticking his tongue out and biting down on it. This was no time to swoon like a girl. He could do that after the dog was dead, if he wanted. Christ, but it had been close out there; he had thought he was going to punch out for sure.


He turned and headed down the darkened hallway to the Closet, and that was when Cujo smashed through the lower half of the screen door, muzzle wrinkled back from his teeth in a kind of sneer, a dry volley of barking sounds coming from his chest.


Gary screamed again and whirled just in time to catch Cujo in both arms as the dog leaped again, driving him back down the hall, bouncing from side to side and trying to keep his feet. For a moment they almost seemed to waltz. Then Gary, who was fifty pounds lighter, went down. He was dimly aware of Cujo's muzzle burrowing in under his chin, was dimly aware that Cujo's nose was almost sickeningly hot and dry. He tried getting his hands up and was thinking that he would have to go for Cujo's eyes with his thumbs when Cujo seized his throat and tore it open. Gary screamed and the dog savaged him again. Gary felt warm blood sheet across his face and thought, Dear God, that's mine! His hands beat weakly and ineffectually at Cujo's upper body, doing no damage. At last they fell away.


Faintly, sick and cloying, he smelled honeysuckle.


'What do you see out there?'


Brett turned a little toward the sound of his mothers voice. Not all the way - he did not want to lose sight of the steadily unrolling view even for a little while. The bus had been on the road for almost an hour. They had crossed the

Million Dollar Bridge into South Portland (Brett had stared with fascinated, wondering eyes at the two scum-caked, rustbucket freighters in the harbor), joined the Turnpike going south, and were now approaching the New Hampshire border.


Everything,' Brett said. 'What do you see, Mom?'


'She thought. Your reflection in the glass - very faint. That's what I see.


Instead she answered, 'Why, the world, I guess. I see the world unrolling in front of us.'


'Mom? I wish we could ride all the way to California on this bus. See everything there is in the geography books at school.'


She laughed and ruffled his hair. 'You'd get damn tired of scenery, Brett.'


'No. No, I wouldn't.'


And he probably wouldn't, she thought. Suddenly she felt both sad and old. When she had called Holly Saturday morning to ask her if they could come, Holly had been delighted, and her delight had made Charity feel young. It was strange that her own son's delight, his almost palpable euphoria, would make her feel old. Nevertheless ...


What exactly is there going to be for him? she asked herself, studying his ghostlike face, which was superimposed over the moving scenery like a camera trick. He was bright, brighter than she was and much brighter than Joe.


He ought to go to college, but she knew that when he got to high school Joe would press him to sign up for the shop and automotive maintenance courses so he could be more help around the place. Ten years ago he wouldn't have been able to get away with it, the guidance counselors wouldn't have allowed a bright boy like Brett to opt for all manual trades course, but in these days of phase electives and do your own thing, she was terribly afraid it might happen.

It made her afraid. Once she had been able to tell herself that school was far away, so very far away - high school, real school. Grammar school was nothing but play to a boy who slipped through his lessons as easily as Brett did. But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heard clearly in the dreams of later years.


She gripped her elbows and shivered, not even kidding herself that it was because the Hound's air conditioning was turned up too high.


For Brett, high school was now just four years away.


She shivered again and suddenly found herself wishing viciously that she had never won the money, or that she had lost the ticket. They had only been away from Joe for an hour, but it was the first time she had really been separated from him since they had married in late 1966. She hadn't realized that perspective would be so sudden, so dizzying and so bitter. Picture this: Woman and boy are let free from the brooding castle keep ... but there's a catch. Stapled to their backs are large books, and slipped over the ends of the hooks are heavy-duty invisible rubber bands. And before you can get too far, presto-whizzo! You're snapped back inside for another fourteen years!


She made a little croaking sound in her throat.


'Did you say something, Mom?'


'No. just clearing my throat.'


She shivered a third time, and this time her arms broke out in gooseflesh. She had recalled a line of poetry from one of her own high school English classes (she had wanted to take the college courses, but her father had been furious at the idea - did she think they were rich? - and her mother had laughed the idea to death gently and pityingly). It was from a poem by Dylan Thomas, and she couldn't remember the whole thing, but it had been something about moving through dooms of love.

That line had seemed funny and perplexing to her then, but she thought she understood it now. What else did you call that heavyduty invisible rubber hand, if not love? Was she going to kid herself and say that she did not, even now, in some way love the man she had married? That she stayed with him only out of duty, or for the sake of the child (that was a bitter laugh; if she ever left him it would be for the sake of the child)? That he had never pleasured her in bed? That he could not, sometimes at the most unexpected moments (like the one back at the bus station), be tender?


And yet ... and yet ...


Brett was looking out the window, enrapt. Without turning from the view, he said, 'You think Cujo's all right, Mom?'


'I'm sure he's fine,' she said absently.


For the first time she found herself thinking about divorce in a concrete way - what she could do to support herself and her son, how they would get along in such an unthinkable (almost unthinkable) situation. If she and Brett didn't come home from this trip, would he come after them, as he had vaguely threatened back in Portland? Would he decide to let Charity go to the bad but try to get Brett back by fair means ... or foul?


She began to tick the various possibilities over in her mind, weighing them, suddenly thinking that maybe a little perspective wasn't such a bad thing after all. Painful, maybe. Maybe useful, too.

The Greyhound slipped across the state line into New Hampshire and rolled on south.


The Delta 727 rose steeply, buttonhooked over Castle Rock -Vic always looked for his house near Castle Lake and 117, always fruitlessly - and then headed back toward the coast. It was a twenty-minute run to Logan Airport.


Donna was down there, some eighteen thousand feet below. And the Tadder. He felt a sudden depression mixed with a black premonition that it wasn't going to work, that they were crazy to even think it might. When your house blew down, you had to build a new house. You couldn't put the old one back together again with Elmer's Glue.


The stewardess came by. He and Roger were riding in first class ('Might as well enjoy it while we can, buddy,' Roger had said last Wednesday when he made the reservations; 'not everyone can go to the poorfarm in such impeccable style'), and there were only four or five other passengers, most of them reading the morning paper - as was Roger.


'Can I get you anything?' she asked Roger with that professional twinkly smile that seemed to say she had been overjoyed to get up this morning at five thirty to make the upsy-downsy run from Bangor to Portland to Boston to New York to Atlanta.


Roger shook his head absently, and she turned that unearthly smile on Vic. 'Anything for you, sir? Sweet roll? Orange juice?'


'Could you rustle up a screwdriver?' Vic asked, and Roger's head came out of his paper with a snap.


The stew's smile didn't falter; a request for a drink before nine in the morning was no news to her. 'I can rustle one up,' she said, 'but you'll have to hustle to get it all down. It's really only a hop to Boston.'

'I'll hustle,' Vic promised solemnly, and she passed on her way back up to the galley, resplendent in her powder-blue slacks uniform and her smile.


'What's with you?' Roger asked.


'What do you mean, what's with me?'


'You know what I mean. I never even saw you drink a beer before noon before. Usually not before five.'


'I'm launching the boat,' Vic said.


'What boat?'


'The R.M.S. Titanic,' Vic said.


Roger frowned. 'That's sort of poor taste, don't you think?'


He did, as a matter of fact. Roger deserved something better, but this morning, with the depression still on him like a foul-smelling blanket, he just couldn't think of anything better. He managed a rather bleak smile instead. But Roger went on frowning at him.


'Look,' Vic said, 'I've got an idea on this Zingers thing. It's going to he a bitch convincing old man Sharp and the kid, but it might work.'


Roger looked relieved. It was the way it had always worked with them; Vic was the raw idea man, Roger the shaper and implementer. They had always worked as a team when it came to translating the ideas into media, and in the matter of presentation.


'What is it?'


'Give me a little while,' Vic said. 'Until tonight, maybe. Then we'll run it up the flagpole -'


'-and see who drops their pants,' Roger finished with a grin. He shook his paper open to the financial page again. 'Okay. As long as I get it by tonight. Sharp stock went up another eighth last week. Were you aware of that?'

'Dandy,' Vic murmured, and looked out the window again. No fog now; the day was as clear as a bell. The beaches at Kennebunk and Ogunquit and York formed a panoramic picture postcard - cobalt blue sea, khaki sand, and then the Maine landscape of low hills, open fields, and thick bands of fir stretching west and out of sight. Beautiful. And it made his depression even worse.


If I have to cry, I'm damn well going into the crapper to do it, he thought grimly. Six sentences on a sheet of cheap paper had done this to him. It was a goddam fragile world, as fragile as one of those Easter eggs that were all pretty colors on the outside but hollow on the inside. Only last week he had been thinking of just taking Tad and moving out. Now he wondered if Tad and Donna would still be there when he and Roger got back. Was it possible that Donna might just take the kid and decamp, maybe to her mother's place in the Poconos?


Sure it was possible. She might decide that ten days apart wasn't enough, not for him, not for her. Maybe a six months' separation would be better. And she had Tad now. Possession was nine points of the law, wasn't it?


And maybe, a crawling, insinuating voice inside spoke up, maybe she knows where Kemp is. Maybe she'll decide to go to him. Try it with him for a while. They can search for their happy pasts together Now there's a nice crazy Monday morning thought, he told himself uneasily.


But the thought wouldn't go away. Almost, but not quite.


He managed to finish every drop of his screwdriver before the plane touched down at Logan. It gave him acid indigestion that he knew would last all morning long - like the thought of Donna and Steve Kemp together, it would come creeping back even if he gobbled a whole roll of Turns - but the depression lifted a little and so maybe it was worth it.

Maybe.


Joe Camber looked at the patch of garage floor below his big vise damp with something like wonder. He pushed his green felt hat back on his forehead, stared at what was there awhile longer, then put his fingers between his teeth and whistled piercingly.


'Cujo! Hey, boy! Come, Cujo!'


He whistled again and then leaned over, hands on his knees. The dog would come, he had no doubt of that. Cujo never went far. But how was he going to handle this?


The dog had shat on the garage floor. He had never known Cujo to do such a thing, not even as a pup. He had piddled around a few times, as puppies will, and he had tom the bejesus out of a chair cushion or two, but there had never been anything like this. He wondered briefly if maybe some other dog had done it, and then dismissed the thought. Cujo was the biggest dog in Castle Rock, so far as he knew. Big dogs ate big, and big dogs crapped big. No poodle or beagle or Heinz Fifty-seven Varieties had done this mess. Joe wondered if the dog could have sensed that Charity and Brett were going away for a sped. If so, maybe this was his way of showing just how that idea set with him. Joe had heard of such things.


He had taken the dog in payment for a job he had done in 1975. The customer had been a one-eyed fellow named Ray Crowell from up Fryeburg way. This Crowell spent most of his time working in the woods, although it was acknowledged that he had a fine touch with dogs - he was good at breeding them and good at training them. He could have made a decent living doing what New England country people sometimes called 'dog farming', but his temper was not good, and he drove many customers away with his sullenness.

'I need a new engine in my truck,' Crowell had told Joe that spring.


'Ayuh,' Joe had said.


'I got the motor, but I can't pay you nothing. I'm tapped out.'


They had been standing just inside Joe's garage, chewing on stems of grass. Brett, then five, had been goofing around the dooryard while Charity hung out clothes.


'Well, that's too bad, Ray,' Joe said, 'but I don't work for free. This ain't no charitable organization.'


'Mrs. Beasley just had herself a litter,' Ray said. Mrs. Beasley was a prime bitch Saint Bernard. 'Purebreds. You do the work and I'll give you the pick of the litter. What do you say? You'd be coming out ahead, but I can't cut no pulp if I don't have a truck to haul it in.'


'Don't need a dog,' joe said. 'Especially a big one like that. Goddam Saint Bernards ain't nothing but eatin machines.'


'You don't need a dog,' Ray said, casting an eye out at Brett, who was now just sitting on the grass and watching his mother, 'but your boy might appreciate one.'


Joe opened his mouth and then closed it again. He and Charity didn't use any protection but there had been no more kids since Brett, and Brett himself had been a long while coming. Sometimes, looking at him, a vague question would form itself in Joe's head: Was the boy lonely? Perhaps he was. And perhaps Ray Crowell was right. Brett's birthday was coming up. He could give him the pup then.


'I'll think about it,' he said.

'Well, don't think too long,' Ray said, bridling. 'I can go see Vin Callahan over in North Conway. He's just as handy as you are, Camber. Handier, maybe.'


'Maybe,' Joe said, unperturbed. Ray Crowell's temper did not scare him in the least.


Later that week, the manager of the Shop'n Save drove his Thunderbird up to Joe's to get the transmission looked at. It was a minor problem, but the manager, whose name was Donovan, fussed around the car like a worried mother while Joe drained the transmission fluid well, refilled it, and tightened the bands. The car was a piece of work, all right, a 1960 T-Bird in cherry condition. And as he finished the job, listening to Donovan talk about how his wife wanted him to sell the car, Joe had, had an idea.


'I'm thinking about getting my boy a dog,' he told this Donovan as he let the T-Bird down off the jacks.


Oh, yes?' Donovan asked politely.


Ayuh. Saint Bernard. It's just a pup now, but it's gonna eat big when it grows. Now I was just thinking that we might make a little deal, you and me. If you was to guarantee me a discount on that dry dog food, Gaines Meal, Ralston-Purina, whatever you sell, I'd guarantee you to work on your Bird here every once in a while. No labor charges.'


Donovan had been delighted and the two of them had shaken on it. Joe had called Ray Crowell and said he'd decided to take the pup if Crowell was still agreeable. Crowell was, and when his son's birthday rolled around that year, Joe had astounded both Brett and Charity by putting the squirming, wriggling puppy into the boy's arms.


'Thank you, Daddy, thank you, thank you!' Brett had cried, hugging his father and covering his cheeks with kisses. 'Sure,' joe said. 'But you take care of him, Brett. He's your dog, not mine. I guess if he does any piddling or cropping around, IT take him out in back of the barn and shoot him for a stranger.'

'I will, Daddy ... I promise!'


He had kept his promise, pretty much, and on the few occasions he forgot, either Charity or Joe himself had cleaned up after the dog with no comment. And Joe had discovered it was impossible to stand aloof from Cujo; as he grew (and he grew damned fast, developing into exactly the sort of eating machine Joe had foreseen), he simply took his place in the Camber family. He was one of your bona fide good dogs.


He had house-trained quickly and completely ... and now this. Joe turned around, hands stuffed in his pockets, frowning. No sign of Cuje anywhere.


He stepped outside and whistled again. Damn dog was maybe down in the creek, cooling off. Joe wouldn't blame him. It felt like eighty-five in the shade already. But the dog would come back soon, and when he did, Joe would rub his nose in that mess. He would be sorry to do it if Cujo had made it because he was missing his people, but you couldn't let a dog get away with


A new thought came. Joe slapped the flat of his hand against his forehead. Who was going to feed Cujo while he and Gary were gone?


He supposed he could fill up that old pig trough behind the barn with Gaines Meal - they had just about a long ton of the stuff stored downstairs in the cellar - but it would get soggy if it rained. And if he left it in the house or the barn, Cujo might just decide to up and crap on the floor again. Also, when it came to food, Cujo was a big cheerful glutton. He would cat half the first day, half the second day, and then walk around hungry until Joe came back.


'Shit,' he muttered.

The dog wasn't coming. Knew Joe would have found his mess and ashamed of it, probably. Cujo was a bright dog, as dogs went, and knowing (or guessing) such a thing was by no means out of his mental reach.


Joe got a shovel and cleaned up the mess. He spilled a capful of the industrial cleaner he kept handy on the spot, mopped it, and rinsed it off with a bucket of water from the faucet at the back of the garage.


That done, he got out the small spiral notebook in which he kept his work schedule and looked it over. Richie's International Harvester was taken care of - that chainfall surely did take the ouch out of pulling a motor. He had pushed the transmission job back with no trouble; the teacher had been every bit as easygoing as Joe had expected. He had another half a dozen jobs lined up, all of them minor.


He went into the house (he had never bothered to have a phone installed in his garage; they charged you dear for that extra line, he had told Charity) and began to call people and tell them he would be out of town for a few days on business. He would get to most of them before they got around to taking their problems somewhere else. And if one or two couldn't wait to get their new fanbelt or radiator hose, piss on em.


The calls made, he went back out to the barn. The last item before he was free was an oil change and a ring job. The owner had promised to come by and pick up his car by noon. Joe got to work, thinking how quiet the home place seemed with Charity and Brett gone ... and with Cujo gone. Usually the big Saint Bernard would lie in the patch of shade by the big sliding garage door, panting, watching Joe as he worked. Sometimes Joe would talk to him, and Cujo always looked as if he was listening carefully.


Been deserted, he thought semi-resentfully. Been deserted by all three. He glanced at the spot where Cujo had messed and shook his head again in a puzzled sort of disgust. The question of what he was going to do about feeding the dog recurred to him and he came up empty again. Well, later on he would give the old Pervert a call. Maybe he would be able to think of someone - some kid - who would be willing to come up and give Cujo his chow for a couplethree days.

He nodded his head and turned the radio on to WOXO in Norway, turning it up loud. He didn't really hear it unless the news or the ball scores were on, but it was company. Especially with everyone gone. He got to work. And when the phone in the house rang a dozen or so times, he never heard it.


Tad Trenton was in his room at midmorning, playing with his trucks. He had accumulated better than thirty of them in his four years on the earth, an extensive collection which ranged from the seventy-nine-cent plastic jobs that his dad sometimes bought him at the Bridgton Pharmacy where he always got Time magazine on Wednesday evenings (you had to play carefully with the seventynine-cent trucks because they were MADE IN TAIWAN and had a tendency to fall apart) to the flagship of his line, a great yellow Tonka bulldozer that came up to his knees when he was standing.


He had various 'men' to stick into the cabs of his trucks. Some of them were round-headed guys scrounged from his PlaySkool toys. Others were soldiers. Not a few were what he called 'Star Wars Guys'. These included Luke, Han Solo, the Imperial Creep (aka Darth Vader), a Bespin Warrior, and Tad's absolute favorite, Greedo. Greedo always got to drive the Tonka dozer.


Sometimes he played Dukes of Hazzard with his trucks, sometimes B. J. and the Bear, sometimes Cops and Moonshiners (his dad and mom had taken him to see White Lightning and White Line Fever on a double bill at. the Norway Drive-In and Tad had been very impressed), sometimes a game he had made up himself. That one was called Ten-Truck Wipe-Out.

But the game he played most often - and the one he was playing now -had no name. It consisted of digging the trucks and the 'men' out of his two playchests and lining the trucks up one by one in diagonal parallels, the men inside, as if they were all slant-parked on a street that only Tad could see. Then he would run them to the other side of the room one by one, very slowly, and line them up on that side bumper-to-bumper. Sometimes he would repeat this cycle ten or fifteen times, for an hour or more, without tiring.


Both Vic and Donna had been struck by this game. It was a little disturbing to watch Tad set up this constantly repeating, almost ritualistic pattern. They had both asked him on occasion what the attraction was, but Tad did not have the vocabulary to explain. Dukes of Hazzard, Cops and Moonshiners, and Ten-Truck WipeOut were simple crash-and-bash games. The no-name game was quiet, peaceful, tranquil, ordered. If his vocabulary bad been big enough, he might have told his parents it was his way of saying Om and thereby opening the doors to contemplation and reflection.


Now as he played it, he was thinking something was wrong.


His eyes went automatically - unconsciously - to the door of his closet, but the problem wasn't there. The door was firmly latched, and since the Monster Words, it never came open. No, the something wrong was something else.


He didn't know exactly what it was, and wasn't sure he even wanted to know. But, Iike Brett Camber, he was already adept at reading the currents of the parental river upon which he floated. just lately he had gotten the feeling that there were black eddies, sandbars, maybe deadfalls hidden just below the surface. There could be rapids. A waterfall. Anything.


Things weren't right between his mother and father.

It was in the way they looked at each other. The way they talked to each other. It was on their faces and behind their faces. In their thoughts.


He finished changing a slant-parked row of trucks on one side of the room to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the other side and got up and went to the window. His knees hurt a little because he had been playing the no-name game for quite a while. Down below in the back yard his mother was hanging out clothes. Half an hour earlier she had tried to call the man who could fix the Pinto, but the man wasn't home. She waited a long time for someone to say hello and then slammed the phone down, mad. And his mom hardly ever got mad at little things like that.


As he watched, she finished hanging the first two sheets.


She looked at them ... and her shoulders kind of sagged. She went to stand by the apple tree beyond the double clothesline, and Tad knew from her posture-her legs spread, her head down, her shoulders in slight motion - that she was crying. He watched her for a little while and then crept back to his trucks. There was a hollow place in the pit of his stomach. He missed his father already, missed him badly, but this was worse.


He ran the trucks slowly back across the room, one by one, returning them to their slant-parked row. He paused once when the screen door slammed. He thought she would call to him, but she didn't. There was the sound of her steps crossing the kitchen, then the creak of her special chair in the living room as she sat down. But the TV didn't go on. He thought of her just sitting down there, just. . . sitting ... and dismissed the thought, quickly from his mind.


He finished the row of trucks. There was Greedo, his best, sitting in the cab of the dozer, looking blankly out of his round black eyes at the door of Tad's closet. His eyes were wide, as if he had seen something there, something so scary it had shocked his eyes wide,



something really gooshy, something horrible, something that was coming

Tad glanced nervously at the closet door. It was firmly latched.


Still he was tired of the game. He put the trucks back in his playchest, clanking them loudly on purpose so she would know he was getting ready to come down and watch Gunsmoke on Channel 8. He started for the door and then paused, looking at the Monster Words, fascinated.


Monsters, stay out of this room! You have no business here.


He knew them by heart. He liked to look at them, read them by rote, look at his daddy's printing.


Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this night.


You have no business here.


On a sudden, powerful impulse, he pulled out the pushpin that held the paper to the wall. He took the Monster Words carefully - almost reverently - down. He folded the sheet of paper up and put it carefully into the back pocket of his jeans. Then, feeling better than he had all day, he ran down the stairs to watch Marshal Dillon and Festus.


That last fellow had come and picked up his car at ten minutes of twelve. He had paid cash, which Joe had tucked away into his old greasy wallet, reminding himself to go down to the Norway Savings and pick up another five hundred before he and Gary took off.


Thinking of taking off made him remember Cujo, and the problem of who was going to feed him. He got into his Ford wagon and drove down to Gary Pervier's at the foot of the hill. He parked in Gary's driveway. He started up the porch steps, and the hail that had been rising in his throat died there. He went back down and bent over the steps.

There was blood there.


Joe touched it with his fingers. It was tacky but not completely dry. He stood up again, a little worried but not yet unduly so. Gary might have been drunk and stumbled with a glass in his hand. He wasn't really worried until he saw the way the rusty bottom panel of the screen door was crashed in.


'Gary?'


There was no answer. He found himself wondering if someone with a grudge had maybe come hunting ole Gary. Or maybe some tourist had come asking directions and Gary had picked the wrong day to tell someone he could take a flying fuck at the moon. .


He climbed the steps. There were more splatters of blood on the boards of the porch.


'Gary?' he called again, and suddenly wished for the weight of his shotgun cradled over his right arm. But if someone had punched Gary out, bloodied his nose, or maybe popped out a few of the old Pervert's remaining teeth, that person was gone now, because the only car in the yard other than Joe's rusty Ford LTD wagon was Gary's white '66 Chrysler hardtop. And You just didn't walk out to Town Road No. 3. Gary Pervier's was seven miles from town, two miles off the Maple Sugar Road that led back to Route 117.


More likely he just cut himself, Joe thought. But Christ, I hope it was just his hand he cut and not his throat.


Joe opened the screen door. It squealed on its hinges. 'Gary?'


Still no answer. There was a sickish-sweet smell in here that he didn't like. but at first he thought it was the honeysuckle. The stairs to the second floor went up on his left. Straight ahead was the hall to the kitchen, the living room doorway opening off the hall about halfway down on the right.

There was something on the hall floor but it was too dark for Joe to make it out. Looked like an endtable that had been knocked over, or something like that ... but so far as Joe knew, there wasn't now and never had been any furniture in Gary's front hall. He leaned his lawn chairs in here when it rained, but there hadn't been any rain for two weeks. Besides, the chairs had been out by Gary's Chrysler in their accustomed places. By the honeysuckle.


Only that smell wasn't honeysuckle. It was blood. A whole lot of blood. And that was no tipped-over endtable.


He hurried down to the shape, his heart hammering in his chest. He knelt by it, and a sound like a squeak escaped his throat Suddenly the air in the hall seemed too hot and dose.


It seemed to be strangling him. He turned away from Gary, one hand cupped over his mouth. Someone had murdered Gay. Someone had


He forced himself to look back. Gary lay in a pool of his own blood. His eyes glared sightlessly up at the hallway ceiling. His throat had been opened. Not just opened, dear God , it looked as if it had been chewed open.


This time there was no struggle with his gorge. This time he simply let everything come up in a series of hopeless choking sounds. Crazily, the back of his mind had turned to Charity with childish resentment. Charity had gotten her trip, but he wasn't going to get his. He wasn't going to get his because some crazy bastard had done a jack the Ripper act on poor old Gary Pervier and


- and he had to call the police. Never mind all the rest of it. Never mind the way the ole Pervert's eyes were glaring up at the ceiling in the shadows, the way the sheared-copper smell of his blood mingled with the sickish-sweet aroma of the honeysuckle. He got to his feet and staggered down toward the kitchen. He was moaning deep in his throat but was hardly aware of it. The phone was on the wall in the kitchen. He had to call the State Police, Sheriff Bannerman, someone

He stopped in the doorway. His eyes widened until they actually seemed to be bulging from his head. There was a pile of dog droppings in the doorway of the kitchen ... and he knew from the size of the pile whose dog had been here.


'Cujo,' he whispered. 'Oh my God, Cujo's gone rabid!'


He thought he heard a sound behind him and he whirled around, hair freezing up from the back of his neck. The hallway was empty except for Gary, Gary who had said the other night that Joe couldn't sic Cujo on a yelling nigger, Gary with his throat laid open all the way to the knob of his backbone.


There was no sense in taking chances. He bolted back down the hallway, skidding momentarily in Gary's blood, leaving an elongated footmark behind him. He moaned again, but when he had shut the heavy inner door he felt a little better.


He went back to the kitchen, shying his way around Gary's body, and looked in, ready to pull the kitchen hallway door shut quickly if Cujo was in there. Again he wished distractedly for the comforting weight of his shotgun over his arm.


The kitchen was empty. Nothing -moved except the curtains, stirring in a sluggish breeze which whispered through the open windows. There was a smell of dead vodka bottles. It was sour, but better than that ... that other smell. Sunlight lay on the faded hilly linoleum in orderly patterns. The phone, its once-white plastic case now dulled with the grease of many bachelor meals and cracked in some long-ago drunken stumble, hung on the wall as always.


Joe went in and closed le door firmly behind him. He crossed to the two open windows and saw nothing in the tangle of the back yard except the rusting corpses of the two cars that had predated Gary's Chrysler. He closed the windows anyway.

He went to the telephone, pouring sweat in the explosively hot kitchen. The book was hanging beside the phone on a hank of hayrope. Gary had made the hole through the book where the hayrope was threaded with Joe's drillpunch about a year ago, drunk as a lord and proclaiming that he didn't give a shit.


Joe picked the book up and then dropped it. The book thudded against the wall. His hands felt too heavy. His mouth was slimy with the taste of vomit. He got hold of the book again and opened it with a jerk that nearly tore off the cover. He could have dialed 0, or 555-1212, but in his shock he never thought of it.


The sound of his rapid, shallow breathing, his racing heart, and the riffle of the thin phonebook pages masked a faint noise from behind him: the low creak of the cellar door as Cujo nosed it open.


He had gone down cellar after killing Gary Pervier. The light in the kitchen had been too bright, too dazzling. It sent white-hot shards of agony into his decomposing brain. The cellar door had been ajar and he had padded jerkily down the stairs into the blessedly cool dark. He had fallen asleep next to Gary's old Army footlocker, and the breze from the open windows had swung the cellar door most of the way closed. The breeze had not been quite strong enough to latch the door.


The moans, the sound of Joe retching, the thumpings and slammings as Joe ran down the hall to close the front door -these things had awakened him to his pain again. His pain and his dull, ceaseless fury. Now he stood behind Joe in the dark doorway. His head was lowered. His eyes were nearly scarlet. His thick, tawny fur was matted with gore and drying mud. Foam drizzled from his mouth in a lather, and his teeth showed constantly because his tongue was beginning to swell.

Joe had found the Castle Rock section of the book. He got the C's and ran a shaking finger down to CASTLE ROCK MUNICIPAL SERVICES in a boxed-off section halfway down one column. There was the number for the sheriffs office. He reached up a finger to begin dialing, and that was when Cujo began to growl deep in his chest.


All the nerves seemed to run out of Joe Camber's body. The telephone book slithered from his fingers and thudded against the wall again. He turned slowly toward that growling sound. He saw Cujo standing in the cellar doorway.


'Nice doggy,' he whispered huskily, and spit ran down his chin.


He made helpless water in his pants, and the sharp, ammoniac reek of it struck Cujo's nose like a keen slap. He sprang. Joe lurched to one side on legs that felt like stilts and the dog struck the wall hard enough to punch through the wallpaper and knock out plaster dust in a white, gritty puff. Now the dog wasn't growling; a series of heavy, grinding sounds escaped him, sounds more savage than any barks.


Joe backed toward the rear door. His feet tangled in one of the kitchen chairs. He pinwheeled his arms madly for balance, and might have gotten it back, but before that could happen Cujo bore down on him, a bloodstreaked killing machine with strings of foam flying backward from his jaws. There was a green, swampy stench about him.


'ob m' God lay off'n me!' Joe Camber shrieked.


He remembered Gary. He covered his throat with one hand and tried to grapple with Cujo with the other. Cujo backed off momentarily, snapping, his muzzle wrinkled back in a great humorless grin that showed teeth like a row of slightly yellowed fence spikes. Then he came again.


And this time he came for Joe Camber's balls.

'Hey kiddo, you want to come grocery shopping with me? And have lunch at Mario's?'


Tad got up. 'Yeah I Good!'


'Come on, then.'


She had her bag over her shoulder and she was wearing jeans and a faded blue shirt. Tad thought she was looking very pretty. He was relieved to see there were no sign of her tears, because when she cried, he cried. He knew it was a baby thing to do, but he couldn't help it.


He was halfway to the car and she was slipping behind the wheel when he remembered that her Pinto was all screwed UP.


'Mommy?'


'What? Get in.'


But he hung back a little, afraid. 'What if the car goes kerflooey?'


'Ker -?'She was looking at him, puzzled, and then he saw by her exasperated expression that she had forgotten all about the car being screwed up. He had reminded her, and now she was unhappy again. Was it the Pinto's fault, or was it his? He didn't know, but the guilty feeling inside said it was his. Then her face smoothed out and she gave him a crooked little smile that he knew well enough to feel it was his special smile, the one she saved just for him. He felt better.


'We're just going into town, Tadder. If Mom's ole blue Pinto packs it in, we'll just have to blow two bucks on Castle Rock's one and only taxi getting back home. Right?'


'Oh, Okay.' He got in and managed to pull the door shut.


She watched him closely, ready to move at an instant, and Tad supposed she was thinking about last Christmas, when he had shut the door on his foot and had to wear an Ace bandage for about a month. But he had been just a baby then, and now he was four years old. Now he was a big boy. He knew that was true because his dad had told him. He smiled at his mother to show her the door had been no problem, and she smiled back.

'Did it latch tight?'


'Tight,' Tad agreed, so she opened it and slammed it again, because moms didn't beheve you unless you told them something bad, like you spilled the bag of sugar reaching for the peanut butter or broke a window while trying to throw a rock all the way over the garage roof.


'Hook your belt,' she said, getting in herself again. 'When that needle valve or whatever it is messes up, the car jerks a lot.'


A little apprehensively, Tad buckled his seat belt and harness. He sure hoped they weren't going to have an accident, like in TenTruck Wipe Out. Even more than that, he hoped Mom wouldn't cry.


'Flaps down?' she asked, adjusting invisible goggles.


'Flaps down,' he agreed, grinning. It was just a game they played.


'Runway clear?'


'Clear.'


'Then here we go.' She keyed the ignition and backed down the driveway. A moment later they were headed for town.


After about a mile they both relaxed. Up to that point Donna had been sitting bolt upright behind the wheel and Tad had been doing the same in the passenger bucket. But the Pinto ran so smoothly that it might have popped off the assembly line only yesterday.


They went to the Agway Market and Donna bought forty dollars' worth of groceries, enough to keep them the ten days that Vic would be gone. Tad insisted on a fresh box of Twinkles, and would have added Cocoa Bears if Donna had let him. They got. shipments of the Sharp cereals regularly, but they were currently out h was a busy trip, but she still had time for bitter reflection as she waited in the checkout lane (Tad sat in the cart's child seat, swinging his legs nonchalantly) on how much three lousy bags of groceries went for these days. It wasn't just depressing; it was scary. That thought led her to the frightening possibility probability, her mind whispered - that Vic and Roger might actually lose the Sharp account and, as a result of that, the agency itself. What price groceries then?

She watched a fat woman with a lumpy behind packed into avocado-colored slacks pull a food-stamp booklet out of her purse, saw the checkout girl roll her eyes at the girl running the next register, and felt sharp rat-teeth of panic gnawing at her belly. It couldn't come to that, could it? Could it? No, of course not. Of course not. They would go back to New York first, they would


She didn't like the way her thoughts were speeding up, and she pushed the whole mess resolutely away before it could grow to avalanche size and bury her in another deep depression. Nex time she wouldn't have to buy coffee, and that would knock three bucks off the bill.


She trundled Tad and the groceries out to the Pinto and put the bags into the hatchback and Tad into the passenger bucket, standing there and listening to make sure the door latched, wanting to close the door herself but understanding it was something he felt he had to do. It was a big-boy thing. She had almost had a heart attack last December when Tad shut his foot in the door. How he had screamed! She had nearly fainted... and then Vic had been there, charging out of the house in his bathrobe, splashing out fans of driveway slush with his bare feet. And she had let him take over and be competent, which she hardly ever was in emergencies; she usually just turned to mush. He had checked to make sure the foot wasn't broken, then had changed quickly and driven them to the emergency room at the Bridgton hospital.

Groceries stowed, likewise Tad, she got behind the wheel and started the Pinto. Now it'll fuck up, she thought, but the Pinto took them docilely up the street to Mario's, which purveyed delicious pizza stuffed with enough calories to put a spare tire on a lumberjack. She did a passable job of parallel parking, ending up only eighteen inches or so from the curb, and took Tad in, feeling better than she had all day. Maybe Vic had been wrong; maybe it had been bad gas or dirt in the fuel line and it had finally worked its way out of the car's system. She hadn't looked forward to going out to Joe Camber's Garage. It was too far out in the boonies (what Vic always referred to with high good humor as East Galoshes Corners -but of course he could afford high good humor, he was a man), and she had been a little scared of Camber the one time she had met him. He was the quintessential back-country Yankee, grunting instead of talking, sullen-faced. And the dog ... what was his name? Something that sounded Spanish. Cujo, that was it. The same name William Wolfe of the SLA had taken, although Donna found it impossible to believe that Joe Camber had named his Saint Bernard after a radical robber of banks and kidnapper of rich young heiresses. She doubted if Joe Camber had ever heard of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The dog had seemed friendly enough, but it had made her nervous to see Tad patting that monster - the way it made her nervous to stand and watch him close the car door himself. Cujo looked big enough to swallow the likes of Tad in two bites.


She ordered Tad a hot pastrami sandwich because he didn't care much for pizza - kid sure didn't get that from my side of the family, she thought - and a pepperoni and onion pizza with double cheese for herself. They ate at one of the tables overlooking the road. My breath will be fit to knock over a horse, she thought. and then realised it didn't matter. She had managed to alienate both her husband and the guy who came to visit in the course of the last six weeks or so.

That brought depression cruising her way again, and once again she forced it back ... but her arms were getting a little tired.


They were almost home and Springsteen was on the radio when the Pinto started doing it again.


At first there was a small jerk. That was followed by a bigger one. She began to pump the accelerator gently; sometimes that helped.


Mommy?' Tad asked, alarmed.


It's all right, Tad,' she said, but it wasn't. The Pinto began to jerk hard, throwing them both against their seatbelts with enough force to lock the harness clasps. The engine chopped and roared. A bag fell over in the hatchback compartment, spilling cans and bottles. She heard something break.


'You goddamned shitting thing!' she cried in an exasperated fury. She could see their house just below the brow of the hill, mockingly close, but she didn't think the Pinto was going to get them there.


Frightened as much by her shout as by the car's spasms, Tad began to cry, adding to her confusion and upset and anger.


'Shut up!' she yelled at him. 'Oh Christ, just shut up, Tad!'


He began to cry harder, and his hand went to the bulge in his back pocket, where the Monster Words, folded up to packet size, were stowed away. Touching them made him feel a little bit better. Not much, but a little.


Donna decided she was going to have to pull over and stop; there was nothing else for it. She began to steer toward the shoulder, using the last of her forward motion to get there. They could use Tad's wagon to pull the groceries up to the house and then decide what to do about the Pinto. Maybe

just as the Pinto's offside wheels crunched over the sandy gravel at the edge of the road, the engine backfired twice and then the jerks smoothed out as they had done on previous occasions. A moment later she was scooting up to the driveway of the house and turning in. She drove uphill, shifted to park, pulled the emergency brake, turned off the motor, leaned over the wheel, and cried.


'Mommy?' Tad said miserably. Don't cry no more, he tried to add, but he had no voice and he could only mouth the words soundlessly, as if struck dumb by laryngitis. He looked at her only, wanting to comfort, not knowing just how it was done. Comforting her was his daddy's job, not his, and suddenly he hated his father for being somewhere else. The depth of his emotion both shocked and frightened him, and for no reason at all he suddenly saw his closet door coming open and spilling out a darkness that stank of something low and bitter.


At last she looked up, her face puffy. She found a handkerchief in her purse and wiped her eyes. 'I'm sorry, honey. I wasn't really shouting at you. I was shouting at this ... this thing.' She struck the steering wheel with her hand, hard. 'Ow!' She put the edge of her hand in her mouth and then laughed a little. It wasn't a happy laugh.


'Guess it's still kerflooey,' Tad said glumly.


'I guess it is,' she agreed, almost unbearably lonesome for Vic. 'Well, let's get the things in. We got the supplies anyway, Cisco.'


'Right, Pancho,' he said. 'I'll get my wagon.'


He brought his Redball Flyer down and Donna loaded the three bags into it, after repacking the bag that had fallen over. It had been a ketchup bottle that had shattered. You'd figure it, wouldn't you? Half a bottle of Heinz had puddled out on the powder-blue pile carpeting of the hatchback. It looked as if someone had committed hara-kiri back there. She supposed she could sop up the worst of it with a sponge, but the stain would still show. Even if she used a rug shampoo she was afraid it would show.

She tugged the wagon up to the kitchen door at the side of the house while Tad pushed. She lugged the groceries in and was debating whether to put them away or clean up the ketchup before it could set when the phone rang. Tad was off for it like a sprinter at the sound of a gun. He had gotten very good at answering the phone.


'Yes, who is it please?'


He listened, grinned, then held out the phone to her.


Figures, she thought. Someone who'll want to talk for two hours about nothing. To Tad she said, 'Do you know who it is, hon?'


'Sure,' he said. 'It's Dad.'


Her heart began to beat more rapidly. She took the phone from Tad and said, 'Hello? Vic?'


'Hi, Donna.' It was his voice all right, but so reserved ... so careful. It gave her a deep sinking feeling that she didn't need on top of everything else.


'Are you all right?' she asked.


'Sure.'


'I just thought you'd call later. If at all.


'Well, we went right over to Image-Eye. They did all the Sharp Cereal Professor spots, and what do you think? They can't find the frigging kinescopes. Roger's ripping his hair out by the roots.'


'Yes,' she said, nodding. 'He hates to be off schedule, doesn't he?'

'That's an understatement.' He sighed deeply. 'So I just thought, while they were looking . . .'


He trailed off vaguely, and her feelings of depression - her feelings of sinking feelings that were so unpleasant and yet so childishly passive, turned to a more active sense of fear. Vic never trailed off like that, not even if he was being distracted by stuff going on at his end of the wire. She thought of the way he had looked on Thursday night, so ragged and close to the edge.


'Vic, are you all right?' She could hear the alarm in her voice and knew he must hear it too; even Tad looked up from the coloring book with which he had sprawled out on the hall floor, his eyes bright, a tight little frown on his small forehead.


'Yeah,' he said. 'I just started to say that I thought I'd call now, while they're rummaging around. Won't have a chance later tonight, I guess. How's Tad?'


'Tad's fine.'


She smiled at Tad and then tipped him a wink. Tad smiled back, the lines on his forehead smoothed out, and he went back to his coloring. He sounds tired and I'm not going to lay all that shit about the car on him, she thought, and then found herself going right ahead and doing it anyway.


She heard the familiar whine of self-pity creeping into her voice and struggled to keep it out. Why was she even telling him all of this, for heaven's sake? He sounded like he was falling apart, and she was prattling on about her Pinto's carburetor and a spilled bottle of ketchup.


'Yeah, it sounds like the needle valve, okay,' Vic said. He actually sounded a little better now. A little less down. Maybe because it was a problem which mattered so little in the greater perspective of things which they had now been forced to deal with. 'Couldn't Joe Camber get you in today?'

'I tried him but he wasn't home.'


'He probably was, though,' Vic said. 'There's no phone in his garage. Usually his wife or his kid runs his messages out to him. Probably they were out someplace.'


'Well, he still might be gone -'


'Sure,' Vic said. 'But I really doubt it, babe. If a human being could actually put down roots, Joe Camber's the guy that would do it.'


'Should I just take a chance and drive out there?' Donna asked doubtfully. She was thinking of the empty miles along 117 and the Maple Sugar Road ... and all that was before you got to Camber's road, which was so far out it didn't even have a name. And if that needle valve chose a stretch of that desolation in which to pack up for good, it would just make another hassle.


'No, I guess you better not,' Vic said. 'He's probably there ... unless you really need him. In which case he'd be gone. Catch-22.' He sounded depressed.


'Then what should I do?'


'Call the Ford dealership and tell them you want a tow.'


'But –'


'No, you have to. If you try to drive twenty-two miles over to South Paris, it'll pack up on you for sure. And if you explain the situation in advance, they might be able to get you a loaner. Barring that, they'll lease you a car.'


'Lease ... Vic, isn't that expensive?'


'Yeah,' he said.


She thought again that it was wrong of her to be dumping all this on him. He was probably thinking that she wasn't capable of anything ... except maybe screwing the local furniture refinisher. She was fine at that. Hot salt tears, partly anger, partly self-pity, stung her eyes again. 'I'll take care of it,' she said, striving desperately to keep her voice normal, light. Her elbow was propped on the wall and one hand was over her eyes. 'Not to worry.'

'Well, I - oh, shit, there's Roger. He's dust up to his neck, but they got the kinescopes. Put Tad on for a second, would you.


Frantic questions backed up in her throat. Was it all right? Did he think it could be all right? Could they get back to go and start again? Too late. No time. She had spent the time gabbing about the car. Dumb broad, stupid quiff.


'Sure,' she said. 'He'll say good-bye for both of us. And ... Vic?'


'What?' He sounded impatient now, pressed for time.


'I love you,' she said, and then before he could reply, she added: 'Here's Tad.' She gave the phone to Tad quickly, almost conking him on the head with it, and went through the house to the front porch, stumbling over a hassock and sending it spinning, seeing everything through a prism of tears.


She stood on the porch looking out at 117, clutching her elbows, struggling to get herself under control - control, dammit, control - and it was amazing, wasn't it, how bad you could hurt when there was nothing physically wrong.


Behind her she could hear the soft murmur of Tad's voice, telling Vic they had eaten at Mario's, that Mommy had her favorite Fat Pizza and the Pinto had been okay until they were almost home. Then he was telling Vic that he loved him. Then there was the soft sound of the phone being hung up. Contact broken.


Control.


At last she felt as if she had some. She went back into the kitchen and began putting away the groceries.

Charity Camber stepped down from the Greyhound bus at quarter past three that afternoon. Brett was right at her heels. She was clutching the strap of her purse spasmodically. She was suddenly, irrationally afraid that she would not recognize Holly. Her sister's face, held in her mind like a photograph all these years (The Younger Sister Who Had Married Well), had gone suddenly and mysteriously out of her mind, leaving only a fogged blank where the picture should have been.


'You see her?' Brett asked as they alighted. He looked around at the Stratford bus depot with bright interest and no more. There was certainly no fear in his face.


'Give me a chance to look around!' Charity said sharply. 'Probably she's in the coffee shop or


'Charity?'


She turned and there was Holly. The picture held in her memory came flooding back, but it was now a transparency overlying the real face of the woman standing by the Space Invaders game. Charity's first thought was that Holly was wearing glasses - how funny! Her second, shocked, was that Holly had wrinkles - not many, but there could be no question about what they were. Her third thought was not precisely a thought at all. It was an image, as dear, true, and heartbreaking as a sepia-toned photograph: Holly leaping into old man Seltzer's cowpond in her underpants, pigtails standing up against the sky, thumb and forefinger of left hand pinching her nostrils closed for comic effect. No glasses then, Charity thought, and pain came to her then, and it squeezed her heart.


Standing at Holly's sides, looking shyly at her and Brett, were a boy of about five and a girl who was perhaps two and a half. The little girl's bulgy pants spoke of diapers beneath. Her stroller stood off to one side.

'Hi, Holly,' Charity said, and her voice was so thin she could hardly hear it.


The wrinkles were small. They turned upward, the way their mother had always said the good ones did. Her dress was dark blue, moderately expensive. The pendant she wore was either a very good piece of costume jewelry or a very small emerald.


There was a moment then. Some space of time. In it, Charity felt her heart fill with a joy so fierce and complete that she knew there could never be any real question about what this trip had or had not cost her. For now she was free, her son was free. Ibis was her sister and those children were her kin, not pictures but real.


Laughing and crying a little, the two women stepped toward each other, hesitantly at first, then quickly. They embraced. Brett stood where he was. The little girl, maybe scared, went to her mother and wrapped a hand firmly around the hem of her dress, perhaps to keep her mother and this strange lady from flying off together.


The little boy stared at Brett, then advanced. He was wearing Tuffskin jeans and a T-shirt with the words HERE COMES TROUBLE printed on it.


'You're my cousin Brett,' the kid said.


'Yeah.'


'My name's Jim. just like my dad.'


'Yeah.'


'You're from Maine,' Jim said. Behind him, Charity and Holly were talking rapidly, interrupting each other and laughing at their hurry to tell everything right here in this grimy bus station south of Milford and north of Bridgeport.


'Yeah, I'm from Maine,' Brett said.


'You're ten.'

'Right.'


'I'm five.'


'Oh yeah?'


'Yeah. But I can beat you up, Ka-whud!' He hit Brett in the belly, doubling-him up.


Brett uttered a large and surprised 'Oof P Both women gasped.


'Jimmy!' Holly cried in a kind of resigned horror.


Brett straightened up slowly and saw his mother watching him, her face in a kind of suspension.


'Yeah, you can beat me up anytime,' Brett said, and smiled.


And it was all right. He saw from his mother's face that it was all right, and he was glad.


By three thirty Donna had decided to leave Tad with a baby-sitter and try taking the Pinto up to Camber's. She had tried the number again and there had still been no response, but she had reasoned that even if Camber wasn't in his garage, he would be back soon, maybe even by the time she arrived there ... always assuming she did arrive there. Vic told her last week that Camber would probably have some old junker to loan her if it looked like her Pinto was going to be an overnight job. That had really been the deciding factor. But she thought that taking Tad would he wrong. If the Pinto seized up on that back road and she had to take a hike, well, okay. But Tad shouldn't have to do it.


Tad, however, had other ideas.


Shortly after talking to his dad, he had gone up to his room and had stretched out on his bed with a stack of Little Golden Books. Fifteen minutes later he had dozed off, and a dream had come to him, a dream which seemed utterly ordinary but which had a strange, nearly terrifying power. In his dream he saw a big boy throwing a friction-taped baseball up and trying to hit it. He missed twice, three times, four. On the fifth swing he hit the ball ... and the bat, which had also been taped, shattered at the handle. The boy held the handle for a moment (black tape flapped from it), then bent and picked up the fat of the bat. He looked at it for a moment, shook his head disgustedly, and tossed it into the high grass at the side of the driveway. Then he turned, and Tad saw with a sudden shock that was half dread, half delight, that the boy was himself at ten or eleven. Yes, it was him. He was sure of it.

Then the boy was gone, and there was a grayness. In it he could bear two sounds: creaking swing chains ... and the faint quacking of ducks. With these sounds and the grayness


came a sudden scary feeling that he could not breathe, he was suffocating. And a man was walking out of the mist... a man who wore a black shiny raincoat and held a stop sign on a stick in one band. He grinned, and his eyes were shiny silver coins. He raised one band to point at Tad, and he saw with horror it wasn't a hand at all, it was bones, and the face inside the shiny vinyl hood of the raincoat wasn't a face at all. It was a skull. It was


He jerked awake, his body bathed in sweat that was only in part due to the room's almost explosive heat. He sat up, propped on his elbows, breathing in harsh gasps.


Snick.


The closet door was swinging open. And as it swung open he saw something inside, only for a second and then he was flying for the door which gave on the hall as fast as he could. He saw it only for a second, long enough to tell it wasn't the man in the shiny black raincoat, Frank Dodd, the man who had killed the ladies. Not him. Something else. Something with red eyes like bloody sunsets.


But he could not speak of these things to his mother. So he concentrated on Debbie, the sitter, instead.

He didn't want to be left with Debbie, Debbie was mean to him, she always played the record player loud, et cetera, et cetera. When none of this had much effect on his mother, Tad suggested ominously that Debbie might shoot him. When Donna made the mistake of giggling helplessly at the thought of fifteen-year-old myopic Debbie Gehringer shooting anyone, Tad burst into miserable tears and ran into the living room. He needed to tell her that Debbie Gehringer might not be strong enough to keep the monster in his closet-that if dark fell and his mother was not back, it might come out. It might be the man in the black raincoat, or it might be the beast.


Donna followed him, sorry for her laughter, wondering how she could have been so insensitive. The boy's father was gone, and that was upsetting enough. He didn't want to lose sight of his mother for even an hour. And


And isn't it possible he senses some of what's gone on between Vic and me? Perhaps even beard. ..?


No, she didn't think that. She couldn't think that. It was just the upset in his routine.


The door to the living room was shut. She reached for the knob, hesitated, then knocked softly instead. There was no answer. She knocked again and when there was still no answer, she went in quietly. Tad was lying face down on the couch with one of the back cushions pulled firmly down over his head. It was behavior reserved only for major upsets.


'Tad?'


No answer.


'I'm sorry I laughed.'


His face looked out at her from beneath one edge of the puffy, dove-gray sofa cushion. There were fresh tears on his face. 'Please can't I come?' he asked. 'Don't make me stay here with Debbie, Mom.' Great histrionics, she thought. Great histrionics and blatant coercion. She recognized it (or felt she did) and at the same time found it impossible to be tough ... partly because her own tears were threatening again. Lately it seemed that there was always a cloudburst just over the horizon.

'Honey, you know the way the Pinto was when we came back from town. It could break down in the middle of East Galoshes Corners and we'd have to walk to a house and use the telephone, maybe a long way


'So? I'm a good walker!'


'I know, but you might get scared.'


Thinking of the thing in the closet, Tad suddenly cried out with all his force, 'I will not get scared!' His hand had gone automatically to the bulge in his hip pocket of his jeans, where the Monster Words were stowed away.


'Don't raise your voice that way, please. It sounds ugly.'


He lowered his voice. 'I won't get scared. I just want to go with you.'


She looked at him helplessly, knowing that she really ought to call Debby Gehringer, feeling that she was being shamelessly manipulated by her four-year-old son. And if


she gave in it would he for all the wrong reasons. She thought helplessly, It's like a chain reaction that doesn't stop anyplace and it's gumming up works I didn't even know existed. 0 God I wish I was in Tahiti.


She opened her mouth to tell him, quite firmly and once and for all, that she was going to call Debbie and they could make popcorn together if he was good and that he would have to go to bed right after supper if he was bad and that was the end of it. Instead, what came out was, 'All right, you can come. But our Pinto might not make it, and if it doesn't we'll have to walk to a house and have the Town Taxi come and pick us up. And if we do have to walk, I don't want to have to listen to you crabbing at me, Tad Trenton.

'No, I won't-'


'Let me finish. I don't want you crabbing at me or asking me to carry you, because I won't do it. Do we have an understanding?'


'Yeah! Yeah, sure!' Tad hopped off the sofa, all grief forgotten. 'Are we going now.


'Yes, I guess so. Or ... I know what. Why don't I make us a snack first? A snack and we'll put some milk in the Thermos bottles, too.'


'In case we have to camp out all night?' Tad looked suddenly doubtful again.


'No, honey.' She smiled and gave him a little hug. 'But I still haven't been able to get Mr. Camber on the telephone. Your daddy says it's probably just because he doesn't have a phone in his garage so he doesn't know I'm calling. And his wife and his little boy might be someplace, so -'


'He should have a phone in his garage,' Tad said. 'That's dumb.'


'Just don't you tell him that,' Donna said quickly, and Tad shook his head that he wouldn't. 'Anyway, if nobody's there, I thought you and I could have a little snack in the car or maybe on his steps and wait for him.'


Ted clapped his hands. 'Great! Great! Can I take my Snoopy lunchbox?'


'Sure,' Donna said, giving in completely.


She found a box of Keebler figbars and a couple of Slim Jims (Donna thought they were hideous things, but they were Tad's alltime favorite snack). She wrapped some green olives and cucumber slices in foil. She filled Tad's Thermos with milk and half-filled Vic's big Thermos, the one he took on camping trips.

For some reason, looking at the food made her uneasy.


She looked at the phone and thought about trying Joe Camber's number again. Then she decided there was no sense in it, since they would be going out there either way. Then she thought of asking Tad again if he wouldn't rather she called Debbie Gehringer, and then wondered what was wrong with her - Tad had made himself perfectly clear on that point.


It was just that suddenly she didn't feel good. Not good at all. It was nothing she could put her finger on. She looked around the kitchen as if expecting the source of her unease to announce itself. It didn't.


'We going, Mom?'


'Yes,' she said absently. There was a noteminder on the wall by the fridge, and on this she scrawled: Tad & I have gone out to J. Camber's garage w/Pinto. Back soon.


'Ready, Tad?'


'Sure.' He grinned. 'Who's the note for, Mom?'


'Oh, Joanie might drop by with those raspberries,' she said vaguely. 'Or maybe Alison MacKenzie. She was going to show me some Amway and Avon stuff.'


'oh'


Donna ruffled his hair and they went out together. The heat hit them like a hammer wrapped in pillows. Buggardly car probably won't even start, she thought.


But it did.


It was 3:45 P.m.

They drove southeast along Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road, which was about five miles out of town. The Pinto behaved in exemplary fashion, and if it hadn't been for the bout of snaps and jerks coming home from the shopping trip, Donna would have wondered what she had bothered making such a fuss about. But there had been that bout of the shakes, and so she drove sitting bolt upright again, going no faster than forty, pulling as far to the right as she could when a car came up behind her. And there was a lot of traffic on the road. The summer influx of tourists and vacationers had begun. The Pinto had no air conditioning, so they rode with both windows open.


A Continental with New York plates towing a gigantic trailer with two mopeds on the back swung around them on blind curve, the driver bleating his horn. The driver's wife, a fat woman wearing mirror sunglasses, looked at Donna and Tad with imperious contempt.


'Get stuffed!' Donna yelled, and popped her middle finger up at the fat lady. The fat lady turned away quickly. Tad was looking at his mother just a little nervously, and Donna smiled at him. 'No hassle, big guy. We're going good. Just out-of-state fools.'


'Oh,' Tad said cautiously.


Listen to me, she thought. The big Yankee. Vic would be proud.


She had to grin to herself, because everyone in Maine understood that if you moved here from another place, you would be an outof-stater until you were sent to your grave. And on your tombstone they would write something like HARRY JONES, CASTLE CORNERS, MAINE (Originally from Omaha, Nebraska).


Most of the tourists were headed toward 302, where they would turn east to Naples or west toward Bridgton, Fryeburg, and North Conway, New Hampshire, with its alpine slides, cut-rate amusement parks, and tax-free restaurants. Donna and Tad were not going up to the 302 junction.

Although their home overlooked downtown Castle Rock and its picturebook Town Common, woods had closed in on both sides of the road before they were five miles from their own front door. These woods drew back occasionally - a little - to show a lot with with a house or a trailer on it, and as they went farther out, the houses were more often of the type that her father had called 'shanty Irish'. The sun still shone brightly down and there was a good four hours of daylight left, but the emptiness made her feel uneasy again. It was not so bad here, on 117, but once they left the main road


Their turnoff was marked with a sign saying MAPLE SUGAR ROAD in faded, almost unreadable letters. It had been splintered considerably by kids banging away with.22s and birdshot. This road was two-lane blacktop, bumpy and frost-heaved. It wound past two or three nice houses, two or three not-so-nice houses, and one old and shabby RoadKing trailer sitting on a crumbling concrete foundation. There was a yardful of weeds in front of the trailer. Donna could see cheap-looking plastic toys in the weeds. A sign nailed askew to a tree at the head of the driveway read FREE KITTEN'S. A potbellied kid of maybe two stood in the driveway, his sopping Pamper hanging below his tiny penis. His mouth hung open and he was picking his nose with one finger and his navel with another. Looking at him, Donna felt a helpless chill of gooseflesh.


Stop it! For Christ's sake, what's wrong with you?


The woods closed in around them again. An old '68 Ford Fairlane with a lot of rusty-red primer paint on the hood and around the headlights passed them going the other way. A young kid with a lot of hair was slouched nonchalantly behind the wheel. He wasn't wearing a shirt. The Fairlane was doing maybe eighty. Donna winced. It was the only traffic they saw.

The Maple Sugar Road climbed steadily, and when they passed the occasional field or large garden they were afforded a stunning view of western Maine toward Bridgton and Freyburg. Long Lake glittered in the farthest distance like the sapphire pendant of a fabulously rich woman.


They were climbing another long slope up one of these eroded bills (as advertised, the sides of the road were now lined with dusty, heat-drooping maples) when the Pinto began to buck and jolt again. Donna's breath dogged in her throat and she thought, Oh come on, oh come on, come on, you cruddy little car, come on!


Tad shifted uneasily in the passenger bucket and held onto his Snoopy lunchbox a little tighter.


She began to tap the accelerator lightly, her mind repeating the same words over and over like an inarticulate prayer: come on, come on, come on.


'Mommy? Is it


'Hush, Tad.'


The jerking grew worse. She pressed the gas pedal harder in frustration - and the Pinto squirted ahead, the engine smoothing out once more.


'Yay!' Tad said, so suddenly and loudly that she lumped


'We're not there yet, Tadder.'


A mile farther along they came to an intersection marked with another wooden sign, this one reading TOWN ROAD NO. 3. Donna turned in, feeling triumphant. As well as she remembered, Camber's place was less than a mile and a half from here. If the Pinto gave up the ghost now, she and Tad could ankle it.


They passed a ramshackle house with a station wagon and a big old rusty white car in the driveway. In her rearview mirror, Donna noticed that the honeysuckle had really gone crazy on the side of the house that would catch most of the sun. A field opened up on their left after they passed the house, and the Pinto began to climb a long, steep hill.

Halfway up, the little car began to labor again. This time it was jerking harder than it ever had before.


'Will it get up, Mommy?'


'Yes,' she said grimly.


The Pinto's speedometer needle dropped from forty to thirty. She dropped the transmission selector lever from drive into the lower range, thinking vaguely that it might help compression or something. Instead, the Pinto began to buck worse than ever. A fusillade of backfires roared through the exhaust pipe, making Tad cry out. Now they were down to fast running speed, but she could see the


Camber house and the red barn that served as his garage. Flooring the accelerator had helped before. She tried again, and for a moment the engine smoothed out. The speedometer needle crept up from fifteen to twenty. Then it began to shake and shudder once more. Donna tried flooring the gas yet again, but this time, instead of smoothing out, the engine began to fail. The AMP idiot light on the dashboard began to flicker dully, signaling the fact that the Pinto was now on the edge of a stall.


But it didn't matter because the Pinto was now laboring past the Camber mailbox. They were here. There was a package hung over the mailbox lid, and she saw the return address clearly as they passed it: J. C. Whitney & Co.


The information went directly to the back of her mind without stopping. Her immediate attention was focused on getting the car into the driveway. Let it stall then, she thought. He'll have to fix it before he can get in or out.

The driveway was a little beyond the house. If it had been an uphill driveway all the way, as the Trentons' own was, the Pinto would not have made it. But after a small initial rise, the Cambers' driveway ran either dead level or slightly downhill toward the big converted barn.


Donna shifted into neutral and let what was left of the Pinto's forward motion carry them toward the big barn doors, which stood half open on their tracks. As soon as her foot left the accelerator pedal to tap the brake and stop them, the motor began to hitch again ... but feebly this time. The AMP light pulsed like a slow heartbeat, then brightened. The Pinto stalled.


Tad looked at Donna.


She grinned at him. 'Tad, ole buddy,' she said, 'we have arrived.'


'Yeah,' he said. 'But is anybody home?'


There was a dark green pickup truck parked beside the barn. That was Camber's truck, all right, not someone else's waiting to be fixed. She remembered it from last time. But the lights were off inside. She craned her neck to the left and saw they were off in the house too. And there had been a package hung over the mailbox lid.


The return address on the package had been J. C. Whitney & Co. She knew what that was; her brother had gotten their catalogue in the mail when he was a teenager. They sold auto parts, accessories, customizing equipment. A package for Joe Camber from J. C. Whitney was the most natural thing in the world. But if he was here, he surely would have gotten his mail by now.


Nobody home, she thought dispiritedly, and felt a weary sort of anger at Vic. He's always home, sure he is, the guy would put down roots in his garage if he could. sure he would, except when I need him.

'Well, let's go see, anyhow,' she said, opening her door.


'I can't get my seatbelt unhooked,' Tad said, scratching futilely at the buckle release.


'Okay, don't have a hemorrhage, Tad. I'll come around and let you out.'


She got out, slammed her door, and took two steps toward the front of the car, intending to cross in front of the hood to the passenger side and let Tad out of his harness. It would give Camber a chance to come out and see who his. company was, if he was here. She somehow didn't relish poking her head in on him unannounced. It was probably foolish, but since that ugly and frightening scene with Steve Kemp in her kitchen, she had become more aware of what it was to be an unprotected woman than she had since she was sixteen and her mother and father had let her begin dating.


The quiet struck her at once. It was hot and so quiet that it was somehow unnerving. There were sounds, of course, but even after several years in Castle Rock, the most she could say about her ears was that they had slowly adapted from 'city ears' to 'town ears'. They were by no means 'country cars' . . . and this was the real country.


She heard birdsong, and the harsher music of a crow somewhere in the long field which stretched down the flank of the hill they had just climbed. There was the sigh of a light breeze, and the oaks that lined the driveway made moving patterns of shadow around her feet. But she could not hear a single car engine, not even the faraway burp of a tractor or a baling machine. City ears and town ears are most closely attuned to man-made sounds; those that nature makes tend to fall outside the tightly drawn net of selective perception. A total lack of such sounds makes for unease.


I'd bear him if be was working in the barn, Donna thought. But the only sounds that registered were her own crunching footfalls on the crushed gravel of the driveway and a low humming sound, barely audible - with no real conscious thought at all, her mind placed it as the hum of a power transformer on one of the poles back by the road.

She reached the front of the hood and started to cross in front of the Pinto, and that was when she heard a new sound. A low, thick growling.


She stopped, her head coming up at once, trying to pinpoint the source of that sound. For a moment she couldn't and she was suddenly terrified, not by the sound itself but by its seeming directionlessness. It was nowhere. It was everywhere. And then some internal radar - survival equipment, perhaps -turned on all the way, and she understood that the growling was coming from inside the garage.


'Mommy?' Tad poked his head out his open window as far as the seatbelt harness would allow. 'I can't get this damn old -~


'Shhhh!'


(growling)


She took a tentative step backward, her right hand resting lightly on the Pinto's low hood, her nerves on tripwires as thin as filaments, not panicked but in a state of heightened alertness, thinking: It didn't growl before.


Cujo came out of Joe Camber's garage. Donna stared at him, feeling her breath come to a painless and yet complete stop in her throat. It was the same dog. It was Cujo. But


But oh my


(oh my God)


The dog's eyes settled on hers. They were red and rheumy. They were leaking some viscous substance. The dog seemed to be weeping gummy tears. His tawny coat was caked and matted with mud and

Blood. is that


(it is it's blood Christ Christ)


She couldn't seem to move. No breath. Dead low tide in her lungs. She had heard about being paralyzed with fear but had never realized it could happen with such totality. There was no contact between her brain and her legs. That twisted gray filament running down the core of her spine had shut off the signals. Her hands were stupid blocks of flesh south of her wrists with no feeling in them. Her urine went. She was unaware of it save for some vague sensation of distant warmth. -


And the dog seemed to know. His terrible, thoughtless eyes never left Donna Trenton's wide blue ones. He paced forward slowly, almost languidly. Now he was standing on the barnboards at the mouth of the garage. Now he was on the crushed gravel twentyfive feet away. He never stopped growling. It was a low, purring sound, soothing in its menace. Foam dropped from Cujo's snout. And she couldn't move, not at all.


Then Tad saw the dog, recognized the blood which streaked its fur, and shrieked - a high piercing sound that made Cujo shift his eyes. And that was what seemed to free her.


She turned in a great shambling drunk's pivot, slamming her lower leg against the Pinto's fender and sending a steely bolt of pain up to her hip. She ran back around the hood of the car. Cujo's growl rose to a shattering roar of rage and he charged at her. Her feet almost skidded out from under her in the loose gravel, and she was only able to recover by slamming her arm down on the Pinto's hood. She hit her crazybone and uttered a thin shriek of pain.


The car door was shut. She had shut it herself, automatically, after getting out. The chromed button below the handle suddenly seemed dazzlingly bright, winking arrows of sun into her eyes. I'll never be able to get that door open and get in and get it shut, she thought, and the choking

realization that she might be about to die rose up in her. Not enough time. No way.


She raked the door open. She could hear her breath sobbing in and out of her throat. Tad screamed again, a shrill, breaking sound.


She sat down, almost falling into the driver's seat. She got a glimpse of Cujo coming at her, hindquarters tensing down for the leap that would bring all two hundred pounds of him right into her lap.


She yanked the Pinto's door shut with both hands, reaching over the steering wheel with her right arm, honking the horn with her shoulder. She was just in time. A split second after the door slammed closed there was a heavy, solid thud, as if someone had swung a chunk of stovewood against the side of the car. The dog's barking roars of rage were cut off cleanly, and there was silence.


Knocked himself out, she thought hysterically. Thank God, thank God for that


And a moment later Cujo's foam-covered, twisted face popped up outside her window, only inches away, like a horror-movie monster that has decided to give the audience the ultimate thrill by coming right out of the screen. She could see his huge, heavy teeth. And again there was that swooning, terrible feeling that the dog was looking at her, not at a woman who just happened to be trapped in her car with her little boy, but at Donna Trenton, as if he had just been hanging around, waiting for her to show up.


Cujo began to bark again, the sound incredibly loud even through the Saf-T-Glas. And suddenly it occurred to her that if she had not automatically rolled her window up as she brought the Pinto to a stop (something her father had insisted on: stop the car, roll up the windows, set the brake, take the keys, lock the car), she would now be minus her throat. Her blood would be on the wheel, the dash, the windshield. That one action, so automatic she could not even really remember performing it.

She screamed.


The dog's terrible face dropped from view.


She remembered Tad and looked around. When she saw him, a new fear invaded her, drilling like a hot needle. He had not fainted, but he was not really conscious, either. He had fallen back against the seat, his eyes dazed and blank. His face was white. His lips had gone bluish at the corners.


'Tad!' She snapped her fingers under his nose, and he blinked sluggishly at the dry sound. 'Tad!'


'Mommy,' he said thickly. 'How did the monster in my closet get out? Is it a dream? Is it my nap?'


'It's going to be all right,' she said, chilled by what he had said about his closet nonetheless. 'It's -'


She saw the dog's tail and the top of its broad back over the hood of the Pinto. It was going around to Tad's side of the car


And Tad's window wasn't shut.


She jackknifed across Tad's lap, moving with such a hard muscular spasm that she cracked her fingers on the window crank. She turned it as fast as she could, panting, feeling Tad squirming beneath her.


It was three quarters of the way up when Cujo leaped at the window. His muzzle shot in through the dosing gap and was forced upward toward the ceiling by the closing window. The sound of his snarling barks filled the small car. Tad shrieked again and wrapped his arms around his head, his forearms crossed over his eyes. He tried to dig his face into Donna's belly, reducing her leverage on the window crank in his blind efforts to get away.

'Momma! Momma! Momma! Make it stop! Make it go away!'


Something warm was running across the backs of her hands. She saw with mouting horror that it was mixed slime and blood running from the dog's mouth. Using everything that she had, she managed to force the window crank through another quarter turn . . and then Cujo pulled back. She caught just a glimpse of the Saint Bernard's features, twisted and crazy, a mad caricature of a friendly Saint Bernard's face. Then it dropped back to all fours and she could only see its back.


Now the crank turned easily. She shut the window, then wiped the backs of her hands on her jeans, uttering small cries of revulsion.


(oh Christ oh Mary Mother of God)


Tad had gone back to that dazed state of semiconsciousness again. This time when she snapped her fingers in front of his face there was no reaction.


He's going to have some complexes out of this, oh God yes. Oh sweet Tad, if only Id left you with Debbie.


She took him by the shoulders and began to shake him gently back and forth.


'Is it my nap?' he asked again.


'No" she said. He moaned -a low,' painful sound that tore at her heart. 'No, but it's all right. Tad? It's okay. That dog can't get in. The windows are shut now. It can't come in. It can't get us.'


That got through and Tad's eyes cleared a little. 'Then let's go home, Mommy. I don't want to be here.'


'Yes. Yes, we'll '

Like a great tawny projectile, Cujo leaped onto the hood of the Pinto and charged at the windshield, barking. Tad uttered another scream, his eyes bulging, his small hands digging at his cheeks, leaving angry red welts there.


'it can't get us!' Donna shouted at him. 'Do you hear me) It can't get in, Tad!'


Cujo struck the windshield with a muffled thud, bounced back, and scrabbled for purchase on the hood. He left a series of new scratches on the paint. Then he came again.


'I want to go home!' Tad screamed.


'Hug me tight, Tadder, and don't worry.'


How insane that sounded ... but what else was there to say?


Tad buried his face against her breasts just as Cujo struck the windshield again. Foam smeared against the glass as he tried to bite his way through. Those muddled, bleary eyes stared into Donna's. I'm going to pull you to pieces, they said. You and the boy both. just as soon as I find a way to get into this tin can, I'll cat you alive; I'll he swallowing pieces of you while you're still screaming.


Rabid, she thought. That dog is rabid.


With steadily mounting fear, she looked past the dog on the hood and at Joe Camber's parked truck. Had the dog bitten him?


She found the horn buttons and pressed them. The Pinto's horn blared and the dog skittered back, again almost losing its balance. 'Don't like that much, do you?' she shrieked triumphantly at it. 'Hurts your ears, doesn't it?' She jammed the horn down again.


Cujo leaped off the hood.


,Mommy, pleeease let's go home.'

She turned the key in the ignition. The motor cranked and cranked and cranked ... but the Pinto did not start. At last she turned the key off again.


'Honey, we can't go just yet. The car


'Yes! Yes! Now! Right now!'


Her head began to thud. Big, whacking pains that were in perfect sync with her heartbeat.


'Tad. Listen to me. The car doesn't want to start. It's that needle valve thing. We've got to wait until the engine cools off. It'll go then, I think. We can leave.'


All we have to do is get back out of the driveway and get pointed down the bill. Then it won't matter even if it does stall, because we can coast. If I don't chicken out and bit the brake. I should be able to make it most of the way back to the Maple Sugar Road even with the engine shut down.


or ...


She thought of the house at the bottom of the hill, the one with the honeysuckle running wild all over the east side. There were people there. She had seen cars.


People!


She began to use the horn again. Three short blasts, three long blasts, three shorts, over and over, the only Morse she remembered from her two years in the Girl Scouts. They would hear. Even if they didn't understand the message, they would come up to see who was raising bell at Joe Camber's - and why.


Where was the dog? She couldn't see him any more. But it didn't matter. The dog couldn't get in and help would be here shortly.


'Everything's going to be fine,' she told Tad. 'Wait and see.'

A dirty brick building in Cambridge housed the offices of ImageEye Studios. The business offices were on the fourth floor, a suite of two studios were on the fifth, and a poorly air-conditioned screening room only big enough to hold sixteen seats in rows of four was on the sixth and top floor.


On that early Monday evening Vic Trenton and Roger Breakstone sat in the third row of the screening room, jackets off, ties pulled down. They had watched the kinescopes of the Sharp Cereal Professor commercials five times each. There were exactly twenty of them. Of the twenty, three were the infamous Red Razberry Zingers spots.


The last reel of six spots had finished half an hour ago, and the projectionist had called good night and gone to his evening job, which was running films at the Orson Welles Cinema. Fifteen minutes later Rob Martin, the president of Image-Eye, had bade them a glum good night, adding that his door would be open to them all day tomorrow and Wednesday, if they needed him. He avoided what was in all three of their minds: The door'll be open if you think of something worth talking about.


Rob had every right to look glum. He was a Vietnam vet who had lost a leg in the Tet offensive. He had opened I-E Studios in late 1970 with his disability money and a lot of help from his in-laws. The studio had gasped and struggled along since then, mostly catching crumbs from that wellstocked media table at which the larger Boston studios banqueted. Vic and Roger had been taken with him because he reminded them of themselves, in a way - struggling to make a 90 of it, to get up to that fabled comer and turn it. And, of course, Boston was good because it was an easier commute than New York.


In the last sixteen months, Image-Eye had taken off. Rob had been able to use the fact that his studio was doing the Sharp spots to land other business, and for the first time things had looked solid. In May, just before the cereal had hit the fan, he sent Vic and Roger a postcard showing a Boston T-bus going away. On the back were four lovely ladies, bent over to show their fannies, which were encased in designer jeans. Written on the back of the card, tabloid style, was this meassage: IMAGE-EYE LANDS CONTRACT TO DO BUTTS FOR BOSTON BUSES; BILLS BIG BUCKS. Funny then. Not such a hoot now. Since the Zingers fiasco, two clients (including Cannes-Look jeans) had canceled their arrangements with I-E, and if Ad Worx lost the Sharp account, Rob would lose other accounts in addition to Sharp. It had left him feeling angry and scared. . . emotions Vic understood perfectly.

They had been sitting and smoking in silence for almost five minutes when Roger said in a low voice, 'It just makes me want to puke, Vic. I see that guy sitting on his desk and looking out at me like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, taking a big bite of that cereal with the runny dye in it and saying, "Nope, nothing wrong here," and I get sick to my stomach. Physically sick to my stomach. I'm glad the projectionist had to go. If I watched them one more time, I'd have to do it with an airsick bag in my lap.'


He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray set into the arm of his chair. He did look ill; his face had a yellowish sheen that Vic didn't like at all. Call it shellshock, combat fatigue, whatever you wanted, but what you meant was scared shitless, backed into a rathole. It was looking into the dark and seeing something that was going to cat you up.


'I kept telling myself,' Roger said, reaching for another cigarette, 'that I'd see something. You know? Something. I couldn't believe it was as bad as it seemed. But the cumulative effect of those spots ... it's like watching Jimmy


Carter saying, "I'll never lie to you".' He took a drag from the new cigarette, grimaced, and stuffed it into the ashtray. 'No wonder George Carlin and Steve Martin and fucking Saturday Night Live had a field day. That guy just looks so sanctimonious to me now . . .' His voice had developed a sudden watery tremble. He shut his mouth with a snap.

'I've got an idea,' Vic said quietly.


'Yeah, you said something on the plane.' Roger looked at him, but without much hope. 'If you got one, let's hear it.'


'I think the Sharp Cereal Professor has to make one more spot,' Vic said. 'I think we have to convince old man Sharp of that. Not the kid. The old man.'


'What's the old prof gonna sell this time?' Roger asked, twisting open another button on his shirt. 'Rat poison or Agent Orange?'


'Come on, Roger. No one got poisoned.'


'Might as well have,' Roger said, and laughed shrilly. 'Sometimes I wonder if you understand what advertising really is. It's holding a wolf by the tail. Well, we lost our grip on this particular wolf and he's just about to come back on us and eat us whole.'


'Roger


'This is the country where it's front-page news when some consumer group weighed the McDonald's Quarter Pounder and found out it weighed a little shy of a quarter pound. Some obscure California magazine publishes a report that a rear-end collision can cause a gas-tank explosion in Pintos, and the Ford Motor Company shakes in its shoes -'


'Don't get on that,' Vic said, laughing a little. 'My wife's got a Pinto. I got problems enough.'


'All I'm saying is that getting the Sharp Cereal Professor to do another spot seems about as shrewd to me as having Richard Nixon do an encore State of the Union address. He's compromised, Vic, he's totally blown!' He paused, looking at Vic. Vic looked back at him gravely. 'What do you want him to say?'

'That he's sorry.'


Roger blinked at him glassily for a moment. Then he threw back his head and cackled. 'That he's sorry. Sorry? Oh, dear, that's wonderful. Was that your great idea?


'Hold on, Rog. You're not even giving me a chance. That's not like you.'


'No,' Roger said. 'I guess it's not. Tell me what you mean. But I can't believe you're -'


'Serious? I'm serious, all right. You took the courses. What's the basis of all successful advertising? Why bother to advertise at all?'


'The basis of all successful advertising is that people want to believe. That people sell themselves.


'Yeah. When the Maytag Repairman says he's the loneliest guy in town, people want to believe that there really is such a guy someplace, not doing anything but listening to the radio and maybe jacking off once in awhile. People want to believe that their Maytags will never need repairs. When Joe DiMaggio comes on and says Mr. Coffee saves coffee, saves money, people want to believe that. If..


'But isn't that why we've got our asses in a crack? They wanted to believe the Sharp Cereal Professor and he let them down. Just like they wanted to believe in Nixon, and he -~



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