if she was too scared to do it for herself, she musn't be too scared to do it for Tad.
All suitably noble. But what finally persuaded her was a vision of letting herself into the Cambers' darkened house, the reassuring feel of the telephone in her hand. She could hear herself talking to one of Sheriff Bannerman's deputies, quite calmly and rationally, and then putting the phone down. Then going into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.
She opened the door again, prepared for the clunking sound this time but still wincing when it came. She cursed the dog in her heart, hoping it was already lying someplace dead of a convulsion, and fly-blown.
She swung her legs out, wincing at the stiffness and the pain. She put her tennis shoes on the gravel. And little by little she stood up under the darkling sky.
The bird sang somewhere nearby: it sang three notes and was still.
Cujo heard the door open again, as instinct had told him it would. The first: time it opened he had almost come around from the front of the car where he had been lying in a semi-stupor. He had almost come around to get THE WOMAN who had caused this dreadful pain in his head and in his body. He had almost come around, but that instinct had commanded him to lie still instead. THE WOMAN was only trying to draw him out, the instinct counseled, and this had proved to be true.
As the sickness had tightened down on him, sinking into his nervous system like a ravenous grassfire, all dove-gray smoke and low rose-colored flame, as it continued to go about its work of destroying his established patterns of thought and behaviour, it had somehow deepened his cunning. He was sure to get THE WOMAN and THE Boy. They had caused his pain -both the agony in his body and the terrible hurt in his head which had come from leaping against the car again and again.
Twice today he had forgotten about THE WOMAN and THE BOY, leaving the barn by the dog bolthole that Joe Camber had cut in the door of the back room where he kept his accounts. He had gone down to the marsh at the back of the Camber property, both times passing quite close to the overgrown entrance to the limestone cave where the bats roosted. There was water in the marsh and he was horribly thirsty, but the actual sight of the water had driven him into a frenzy both times. He wanted to drink the water; kill the water; bathe in the water; piss and shit in the water; cover it over with dirt; savage it; make it bleed. Both times this terrible confusion of feelings had driven him away, whining and trembling. THE WOMAN and THE Boy had made all this happen. And he would leave them no more. No human who had ever lived would have found a dog more faithful or more set in his purpose. He would wait until he could get at them. If necessary he would wait until the world ended. He would wait. He would stand a watch.
It was THE WOMAN most of all. The way she looked at him, as if to say,
Oh kill her, kill her!
A sound came. It was a soft sound, but it did not escape Cujo; his ears were preternaturally attuned to all sounds now. The entire spectrum of the aural world was his. He beard the chimes of heaven and the hoarse screams which uprose from hell. In his madness he heard the real and the unreal.
It was the soft sound of small stones slipping and grinding against each other.
Cujo screwed his hindquarters down against the ground and waited for her. Urine, warm and painful, ran out of him unheeded. He waited for THE WOMAN to show herself. When she did, he would kill her.
In the downstairs wreckage of the Trenton house, the telephone began to ring.
It burred six times, eight times, ten. Then it was silent. Shortly after, the Trentons' copy of the Castle Rock Call thumped against the front door and Billy Freeman pedaled on up the street on his Raleigh with his canvas sack over his shoulder, whistling.
In Tad's room, the closet door stood open, and an unspeakable dry smell, lionlike and savage, hung in the air.
In Boston, an operator asked Vic Trenton if he would like her to keep trying. 'No, that's okay, operator,' he said, and hung up.
Roger had found the Red Sox playing Kansas City on Channel 38 and was sitting on the sofa in his skivvies with a room-service sandwich and a glass of milk, watching the warmups.
'Of all your habits,' Vic said, 'most of which range from the actively offensive to the mildly disgusting, I think that eating in your underpants is probably the worst.'
'Listen to this guy,' Roger said mildly to the empty room at large. 'He's thirty-two years old and he still calls underwear shorts underpants.'
'What's wrong with that?'
'Nothing ... if you're still one of the Owl Tent at summer camp.'
'I'm going to cut your throat tonight, Rog,' Vic said, smiling happily. 'You'll wake up strangling in your own blood. You'll be sorry, but it will be ... too late!' He picked up half of Roger's hot pastrami sandwich and wounded it grieviously.
'That's pretty fucking unsanitary,' Roger said, brushing crumbs from his bare, hairy chest. 'Donna wasn't home, huh?' 'Uh-uh. She and Tad probably went down to the Tastee Freeze to catch a couple of burgers or something. I wish to God I was there instead of Boston.'
'Oh, just think,' Roger said, grinning maliciously, 'we'll be in the Apple tomorrow night. Having cocktails under the clock at the Biltmore . . .`
'Fuck the Biltmore and fuck the clock,' Vic said. 'Anyone who spends a week away from Maine on business in Boston and New York - and during the summertime - has got to he crazy.'
'Yeah, I'll buy that,' Roger said. On the TV screen, Bob Stanley popped a good curve over the outside comer to start the game. 'It is rawtha shitteh.'
'That's a pretty good sandwich, Roger,' Vic said, smiling winningly at his partner.
Roger grabbed up the plate and held it to his chest. 'Call down for your own, you damn mooch.'
'What's the number?'
'Six-eight-one, I think. It's on the dial there.'
'Don't you want some beer with that?' Vic asked, going to the phone again.
Roger shook his head. 'I had too much at lunch. My head's bad, my stomach's bad, and by tomorrow morning I'll probably have the Hershey-squirts. I'm rapidly discovering the truth, goodbuddy. I'm no kid any more.'
Vic called down for a hot pastrami on rye and two bottles of Tuborg. When he hung up and looked back at Roger, Roger was sitting with his eyes fixed on the TV. His sandwich plate was balanced on his considerable belly and he was crying. At first Vic thought he hadn't seen right; it was some sort of optical illusion. But no, those were tears. The color TV reflected off them in prisms of light.
For a moment Vic stood there, unable to decide if he should go over to Roger or go over the other side of the room and pick up the newspaper, pretending he hadn't seen. Then Roger looked over at him, his face working and utterly naked, as defenseless and as vulnerable as Tad's face when he fell off the swing and scraped his knees or took a tumble on the sidewalk.
'What am I going to do, Vic?' he asked hoarsely.
'Rog, what are you talk -
'You know what I'm talking about,' he said. The crowd at
Fenway cheered as Boston turned a double play to end the top of the first.
'Take it easy, Roger. You
'This is going to fall through and we both know it,' Roger said. 'It smells as bad as a carton of eggs that's been
