Cujo

door swung open slowly and steadily, a dead mouth opening on darkness inch by inch and foot by foot.

The monster was in that darkness. It crouched where it had crouched before. It grinned at him, and its huge shoulders bulked above its cocked head, and its eyes glowed amber, alive with stupid cunning. I told you they'd go away, Tad, it whispered. They always do, in the end. And then I can come back. I like to come back. I like you, Tad. I'll come back every night now, I think, and every night I'll come a little closer to your bed ... and a little closer ... until one night, before you can scream for them, you'll bear something growling, something growling right beside you, Tad, it'll be me, and I'll pounce, and then I'll eat you and you'll be in me.

Tad stared at the creature in his closet with drugged, horrified fascination. There was something that ... was almost familiar. Something he almost knew. And that was the worst, that almost knowing. Because

Because I'm crazy, Tad. I'm here. I've been here all along. My name was Frank Dodd once, and I killed the ladies and maybe I ate them, too. I've been here all along, I stick around, I keep my ear to the ground. I'm the monster, Tad, the old monster, and I'll have you soon, Tad. Feel me getting closer ... and closer....

Perhaps the thing in the closet spoke to him in its own hissing breath, or perhaps its voice was the wind's voice. Either way, neither way, it didn't matter. He listened to its words, drugged with terror, near fainting -(but oh so wide awake); he looked upon its shadowed, snarling face, which he almost knew. He would sleep no more tonight; perhaps he would never sleep again.

But sometime later, sometime between the striking of half past midnight and the hour of one, perhaps because he was small, Tad drifted away again. Thin sleep in which hulking, furred creatures with white teeth chased him deepened into dreamless slumber.

The wind held long conversations with the gutters. A rind of white spring moon rose in the sky. Somewhere far away, in some still meadow of night or along some pine-edged corridor of forest, a dog barked furiously and then fell silent.

And in Tad Trenton's closet, something with amber eyes held watch.

'Did you put the blankets back?' Donna asked her husband the next morning. She was standing at the stove, cooking bacon. Tad was in the other room, watching The New Zoo Revue and eating a bowl of Twinkles. Twinkles was a Sharp cereal, and the Trentons got all their Sharp cereals free.

'Hmmm?' Vic asked. He was buried deep in the sports pages. A transplanted New Yorker, he had. so far successfully resisted Red Sox fever. But he was masochistically pleased to see that the Mets were off to another superlatively cruddy start.

'The blankets. In Tad's closet. They were back in there. The chair was back in there, too, and the door was open again.' She brought the bacon, draining on a paper towel and still sizzling, to the table. 'Did you put them back on his chair?'

'Not me,' Vic said, turning a page. 'It smells like a mothball convention back there.'

'That's funny. He must have put them back.'

He put the paper aside and looked up at her. 'What are you talking about, Donna?'

'You remember the bad dream last night

'Not apt to forget. I thought the kid was dying. Having a convulsion or something.'

She nodded. 'He thought the blankets were some kind of -' She shrugged.

'Bogeyman,' Vic said, grinning.

'I guess so. And you gave him his teddybear and put those blankets in the back of the closet. But they were back on the chair when I went to make his bed.' She laughed. 'I looked in, and for just a second there I thought -'

'Now I know where he gets it,' W said, picking up the newspaper again. He cocked a friendly eye at her. 'Three hot dogs, my ass.' Later, after Vic had shot off to work, Donna asked Tad why he had put the chair back in the closet with the blankets on it if they had scared him in the night.

Tad looked up at her, and his normally animated, lively face seemed pale and watchful -too old. His Star Wars coloring book was open in front of him. He had been doing a picture from the interstellar cantina, using his green Crayola to color Greedo.

'I didn't,' he said.

'But Tad, if you didn't, and Daddy didn't, and I didn't

'The monster did it,' Tad said. 'The monster in my closet.'

He bent to his picture again.

She stood looking at him, troubled, a little frightened. He was a bright boy, and perhaps too imaginative. This was not such good news. She would have to talk to Vic about it tonight. She would have to have a long talk with him about it.

'Tad, remember what your father said,' she told him now. 'There aren't any such things as monsters.'

'Not in the daytime, anyway,' he said, and smiled at her so openly, so beautifully, that she was charmed out of her fears. She ruffled his hair and kissed his cheek.

She meant to talk to Vic, and then Steve Kemp came while Tad was at nursery school, and she forgot, and Tad screamed that night too, screamed that it was in his closet, the monster, the monster!

The closet door hung ajar, blankets on the chair. This time Vic took them up to the third floor and stacked them in the closet up there.

'Locked it up, Tadder,' Vic said, kissing his son. 'You're all set now. Go back to sleep and have a good dream.'

But Tad did not sleep for a long time, and before he did the closet door swung dear of its latch with a sly little snicking sound, the dead mouth opened on the dead dark -' the dead dark where something furry and sharp-toothed and -clawed waited, something that smelled of sour blood and dark doom.

Hello, Tad, it whispered in its rotting voice, and the moon peered in Tad's window like the white and slitted eye of a dead man.

The oldest living person in Castle Rock that late spring was Evelyn Chalmers, known as Aunt Evvie by the town's older residents, known as 'that old loudmouth bitch' by George Meara, who had to deliver her mail -' which mostly consisted of catalogues and offers from the Reader's Digest and prayer folders from the Crusade of the Eternal Christ -' and listen to her endless monologues. 'The only thing that old loudmouth bitch is any good at is telling the weather,' George had been known to allow when in his cups and in the company of his cronies down at the Mellow Tiger. It was one stupid name for a bar, but since it was the only one Castle Rock could boast, it looked like they were pretty much stuck with it.

There was general agreement with George's opinion. As the oldest resident of Castle Rock, Aunt Evvie had held the Boston Post cane for the last two years, ever since Arnold Heebert, who had been one hundred and one and so far gone in senility that talking to him held all the intellectual challenge of talking to an empty catfood can, had doddered off the back patio of the Castle Acres Nursing Home and broken his neck exactly twenty-five minutes after whizzing in his pants for the last time.

Aunt Evvie was nowhere near as senile as Arnie Heebert had been, and nowhere near as old, but at ninety-three she was old enough, and, as she was fond of bawling at a resigned (and often hungover) George Meara when he delivered the mail, she hadn't been stupid enough to lose her home the way Heebert had done. But she was good at the weather. The town consensus among the older people, who cared about such things - was that Aunt Evvie was never wrong about three things: the week when the 'first haycutting would happen in the summertime, how good (or how bad)