Cujo Read online

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

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

  Then why had no one come to feed the dog?

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

  And the dog kept going back into the barn.

  Was it eating in there?

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

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

  Is the dog eating in the barn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Cujo was grinning at her.

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

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

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

  The scream had to come

  (but Tad's) or she would go mad.

  (sleeping)

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

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

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

  (what's it eating in there?) and then she slammed a door shut somewhere in her mind.

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

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

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

  (you are in)

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

  (the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston Massachusetts)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He began to run, but no matter how fast he went, he never got any closer to the other side of the clearing. He could bear Donna screaming for help, but when he called back his words seemed to die two feet out of his mouth. It was Tad who had finally spotted him.

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

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

  That was when he woke up.

  What had that monster been, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The board creaked again.

  And again.

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

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

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

  She went after him.

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

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

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

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

  She saw it clearly because Brett wasn't awake. As a child there had been episodes of sleepwalking; about two dozen of them in all, between the ages of four and eight. She had finally gotten worried enough--scared enough--to consult with Dr. Gresham (without Joe's knowledge). She wasn't afraid that Brett was losing his mind--anyone who was around him could see he was bright and normal--but she was afraid that he might hurt himse
lf while he was in that strange state. Dr. Gresham had told her that was very unlikely, and that most of the funny ideas people had about somnambulism came from cheap, badly researched movies.

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

  "Like growing pains?" she had asked doubtfully.

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

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

  The last, that was, until now.

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

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