Cujo Read online

  Vic either saw more deeply or remembered more clearly about the closet door that turned into an unhinged idiot mouth in the dark of night, a place where strange things sometimes rustled, a place where hanging clothes sometimes turned into hanging men. He remembered vaguely about the shadows the streetlight could throw on the wall in the endless four hours that follow the turn of the day, and the creaking sounds that might have been the house settling or that might--just might--be something creeping up.

  His solution had been the Monster Catechism, or just the Monster Words if you were four and not much into semantics. Either way, it was nothing more (nor less) than a primitive incantation to keep evil at bay. Vic had invented it one day on his lunch hour, and to Donna's mixed relief and chagrin, it worked when her own efforts to use psychology, Parent Effectiveness Training, and, finally, blunt discipline had failed. Vic spoke it over Tad's bed every night like a benediction as Tad lay there naked under a single sheet in the sweltering dark.

  "Do you think that's going to do him any good in the long run?" Donna asked. Her voice held both amusement and irritation. This had been in mid-May, when the tensions between them had been running high.

  "Admen don't care about the long run," Vic had answered. "They care about fast, fast, fast relief. And I'm good at my job."

  "Yeah, nobody to say the Monster Words, that's the matter, that's a lot the matter," Tad answered now, wiping the tears off his cheeks in disgust and embarrassment.

  "Well, listen," Vic said. "They're written down. That's how I can say them the same every night. I'll print them on a piece of paper and tack them to your wall. And Mommy can read them to you every night I'm gone."

  "Yeah? Will you?"

  "Sure. Said I would."

  "You won't forget?"

  "No way, man. I'll do it tonight."

  Tad put his arms around his father, and Vic hugged him tight.

  That night, after Tad slept, Vic went quietly into the boy's room and tacked a sheet of paper to the wall with a pushpin. He put it right next to Tad's Mighty Marvel Calendar, where the kid couldn't miss it. Printed in large, clear letters on this sheet of paper was: THE MONSTER WORDS

  For Tad

  Monsters, stay out of this room !

  You have no business here.

  No monsters under Tad's bed!

  You can't fit under there.

  No monsters hiding in Tad's closet!

  It's too small in there.

  No monsters outside of Tad's window!

  You can't hold on out there.

  No vampires, no werewolves, no things that bite.

  You have no business here.

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

  You have no business here.

  Vic looked at this for a long time and reminded himself to tell Donna at least twice more before he left to read it to the kid every night. To impress on her how important the Monster Words were to Tad.

  On his way out, he saw the closet door was open. Just a crack. He closed the door firmly and left his son's room.

  Sometime much later that evening, the door swung open again. Heat lightning flickered sporadically, tattooing crazy shadows in there.

  But Tad did not wake.

  The next day, at quarter past seven in the morning, Steve Kemp's van backed out onto Route 11. Steve made miles, heading for Route 302. There he would turn left and drive southeast, crossing the state to Portland. He intended to flop at the Portland YMCA for a while.

  On the van's dashboard was a neat pile of addressed mail--not printed in block letters this time but typed on his own machine. The typewriter was now in the back of the van, along with the rest of his stuff. It had taken him only an hour and a half to pack in his Castle Rock operation, including Bernie Carbo, who was now snoozing in his box by the rear doors. He and Bernie traveled light.

  The typing job on the envelopes was a professional one. Sixteen years of creative writing had turned him into an excellent typist, if nothing else. He pulled over to the same box from which he had posted the anonymous note to Vic Trenton the night before and dropped the letters in. It would not have bothered him in the least to run out owing rent on the shop and the house if he had intended to leave the state, but since he was only going as far as Portland, it seemed prudent to do everything legally. This time he could afford not to cut corners; there was better than six hundred dollars in cash tucked into the small bolthole behind the van's glove compartment.

  In addition to a check covering the rent he owed, he was returning deposits to several people who had made them on bigger jobs. Accompanying each check was a polite note saying he was very sorry to have caused any inconvenience, but his mother had been taken suddenly and seriously ill (every red-blooded American was a sucker for a mom-story). Those for whom he had contracted to do work could pick up their furniture at the shop--the key was on the ledge. above the door, just to the right, and would they kindly return the key to the same place after they had made their pickup. Thank you, thank you, blahdeblah, bullshit-bullshit. There would be some inconvenience, but no real hassle.

  Steve dropped the letters into the mailbox. There was that satisfied feeling of having his ass well covered. He drove away toward Portland, singing along with the Grateful Dead, who were delivering "Sugaree." He pushed the van up to fifty-five. hoping traffic would stay light so he could get to Portland early enough to grab a court at Tennis of Maine. All in all, it looked like a good day. If Mr. Businessman hadn't received his little letter bomb yet, he surely would today. Nifty, Steve thought, and burst out laughing.

  At half past seven, as Steve Kemp was thinking tennis and Vic Trenton was reminding himself to call Joe Camber about his wife's balky Pinto, Charity Camber was fixing her son's breakfast. Joe had left for Lewiston half an hour ago, hoping to find a '72 Camaro windshield at one of the city's automobile junkyards or used-parts outfits. This jibed well with Charity's plans, which she had made slowly and carefully.

  She put Brett's plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of him and then sat down next to the boy. Brett glanced up from the book he was reading in mild surprise. After fixing his breakfast, his mother usually started on her round of morning chores. If you spoke to her too much before she got herself around a second cup of coffee, she was apt to show you the rough side of her tongue.

  "Can I talk to you a minute, Brett?"

  Mild surprise turned to something like amazement Looking at her, he saw something utterly foreign to his mother's taciturn nature. She was nervous. He closed his book and said, "Sure, Mom."

  "Would you like--" She cleared her throat and began again. "How would you like to go down to Stratford, Connecticut, and see your Aunt Holly and your Uncle Jim? And your cousins?"

  Brett grinned. He had only been out of Maine twice in his life, most recently with his father on a trip to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They had gone to a used-car auction where Joe had picked up a '58 Ford with a hemi engine. "Sure!" he said. "When?"

  "I was thinking of Monday," she said. "After the weekend of the Fourth. We'd be gone a week. Could you do that?"

  "I guess! Jeez, I thought Dad had a lot of work lined up for next week. He must have--"

  "I haven't mentioned this to your father yet."

  Brett's grin fell apart. He picked up a piece of bacon and began to eat it. "Well, I know he promised Richie Simms he'd pull the motor on his International Harvester. And Mr. Miller from the school was gonna bring over his Ford because the tranny's shot. And--"

  "I thought just the two of us would go," Charity said. "On the Greyhound from Portland."

  Brett looked doubtful. Outside the back-porch screen, Cujo padded slowly up the steps and collapsed onto the boards in the shade with a grunt. He looked in at THE BOY and THE WOMAN with weary, red-rimmed eyes. He was feeling very bad now, very bad indeed.

  "Jeez, Mom, I don't know--"

  "Don't say jeez. It's just the same as swearing."

  "Sorry."

  "Would you lik
e to go? If your father said it was all right?"

  "Yeah, really! Do you really think we could?"

  "Maybe." She was looking out through the window over the sink thoughtfully.

  "How far is it to Stratford, Mom?"

  "About three hundred and fifty miles, I guess."

  "Jee--I mean, boy, that's a long way. Is it--"

  "Brett."

  He looked at her attentively. That curious intense quality was back in her voice and on her face. That nervousness.

  "What, Mom?"

  "Can you think of anything your father needs out in the shop? Any one thing he's been looking to get?"

  The light dawned in Brett's eyes a little. "Well, he always needs adjustable wrenches . . . and he's been wanting a new set of ball-and-sockets . . . and he could use a new welder's helmet since the old one got a crack in the faceplate--"

  "No, I mean anything big. Expensive."

  Brett thought awhile, then smiled. "Well, what he'd really like to have is a new Jorgen chainfall, I guess. Rip that old motor out of Richie Simms's International just as slick as sh--well, slick." He blushed and hurried on. "But you couldn't get him nothing like that, Mom. That's really dear."

  Dear. Joe's word for expensive. She hated it.

  "How much?"

  "Well, the one in the catalogue says seventeen hundred dollars, but Dad could probably get it from Mr. Belasco at Portland Machine for wholesale. Dad says Mr. Belasco's scared of him."

  "Do you think there's something smart about that?" she asked sharply.

  Brett sat back in his chair, a little frightened by her fierceness. He couldn't remember his mother ever acting quite like this. Even No, out on the porch, pricked his ears a little.

  "Well? Do you?"

  "No, Mom," he said, but Charity knew in a despairing way that he was lying. If you could scare somebody into giving you wholesale, you were trading a right smart. She had heard the admiration in Brett's voice, even if the boy himself had not Wants to be just like him. Thinks his daddy is just standing tall when he scares someone. Oh my God.

  "There's nothing smart about being able to scare people," Charity said. "All it takes is a big voice and a mean disposition. There's no smart to it." She lowered her voice and flapped a hand at him. "Go on and eat your eggs. I'm not going to shout at you. I guess it's the heat."

  He ate, but quietly and carefully, looking at her now and then. There were hidden mines around this morning.

  "What would wholesale be, I wonder? Thirteen hundred dollars? A thousand?"

  "I don't know, Mamma."

  "Would this Belasco deliver? On a big order like that?"

  "Ayuh, I guess he would. If we had that kind of money."

  Her hand went to the pocket of her housedress. The lottery ticket was there. The green number on her ticket, 76, and the red number, 434, matched the numbers drawn by the State Lottery Commission two weeks before. She had checked it dozens of times, unable to believe it. She had invested fifty cents that week, as she had done every week since the lottery began in 1975, and this time she had won five thousand dollars. She hadn't cashed the ticket in yet, but neither had she let it out of her sight or her reach since she found out.

  "We do have that kind of money," she said. Brett goggled at her.

  At quarter past ten, Vic slipped out of his Ad Worx office and went around to Bentley's for his morning coffee, unable to face the bitch's brew that was available at the office. He had spent the morning writing ads for Decoster Egg Farms. It was hard going. He had hated eggs since his boyhood, when his mother grimly forced one down his throat four days a week. The best he had been able to come up with so far was EGGS SAY LOVE . . . SEAMLESSLY. Not very good. Seamlessly had given him the idea of a trick photo which would show an egg with a zipper running around its middle. It was a good image, but where did it lead? Noplace that he had been able to discover. Ought to ask the Tadder, he thought, as the waitress brought him coffee and a blueberry muffin. Tad liked eggs.

  It wasn't really the egg ad that was bringing him down, of course. It was having to take off for twelve days. Well, it had to be. Roger had convinced him of that. They would have to get in there and pitch like hell.

  Good old garrulous Roger, whom Vic loved almost like a brother. Roger would have been more than glad to cruise down here to Bentley's with him, to have a coffee with him, and to talk his ear off. But this one time, Vic needed to be alone. To think. The two of them would be spending most of two weeks together starting Monday, sweating it out, and that was quite enough, even for soul brothers.

  His mind turned toward the Red Razberry Zingers fiasco again, and he let it, knowing that sometimes a no-pressure, almost idle review of a bad situation could--for him, at least--result in some new insight, a fresh angle.

  What had happened was bad enough, and Zingers had been withdrawn from the market. Bad enough, but not terrible. It wasn't like that canned mushroom thing; no one had gotten sick or died, and even consumers realized that a company could take a pratfall now and then. Look at that McDonald's glass giveaway a couple-three years ago. The paint on the glasses had been found to contain an unacceptably high lead content. The glasses had been withdrawn quickly, consigned to that promotional limbo inhabited by creatures such as Speedy Alka-Seltzer and Vic's own personal favorite, Big Dick Chewing Gum.

  The glasses had been bad for the McDonald's Corporation, but no one had accused Ronald McDonald of trying to poison his pre-teen constituency. And no one had actually accused the Sharp Cereal Professor either, although comedians from Bob Hope to Steve Martin had taken potshots at him and Johnny Carson had run off an entire monologue-- couched in careful double entendre--about the Red Razberry Zingers affair one evening during his opening spot on The Tonight Show. Needless to say, the Sharp Cereal Professor ads had been jerked from the tube. Also needless to say, the character actor who played the Professor was wild at the way events had turned on him.

  I could imagine a worse situation, Roger had said after the first shock waves had subsided a bit and the thrice-daily long-distance calls between Portland and Cleveland were no longer flying.

  What? Vic had asked.

  Well, Roger had answered, straight-faced, we could be working on the Bon Vivant Vichysoisse account.

  "More coffee, sir?"

  Vic glanced up at the waitress. He started to say no, then nodded. "Half a cup, please," he said.

  She poured it and left. Vic stirred it randomly, not drinking it.

  There had been a mercifully brief health scare before a number of doctors spoke up on TV and in the papers, all of them saying the coloration was harmless. There had been something like it once before; the stews on a commercial airline had been struck down with weird orange skin discolorations which finally proved to be nothing more serious than a rub-off of the orange dye on the life jackets they demonstrated for their passengers before takeoff. Years before that, the food dye in a certain brand of frankfurters had produced an internal effect similar to that of Red Razberry Zingers.

  Old man Sharp's lawyers had lodged a multimillion-dollar damage suit against the dye manufacturer, a case that would probably drag on for three years and then be settled out of court. No matter; the suit provided a forum from which to make the public aware that the fault--the totally temporary fault, the completely harmless fault--had not been that of the Sharp Company.

  Nonetheless, Sharp stock had tumbled sharply on the Big Board. It had since made up less than half the original drop. The cereals themselves had shown a sudden dip in sales but had since made up most of the ground that had been lost after Zingers showed its treacherous red face. Sharp's All-Grain Blend, in fact, was doing better than ever before.

  So there was nothing wrong here, right?

  Wrong. So wrong.

  The Sharp Cereal Professor was what was wrong. The poor guy would never be able to make a comeback. After the scare come the laughs, and the Professor, with his sober mien and his schoolroom surroundings, had been literally laughed to dea
th.

  George Carlin, in his nightclub routine: "Yeah, it's a crazy world. Crazy world." Carlin bends his head over his mike for a moment, meditating, and then looks up again. "The Reagan guys are doing their campaign shit on TV, right? Russians are getting ahead of us in the arms race. The Russians are turning out missiles by the thousands, right? So Jimmy gets on TV to do one of his spots, and he says, 'My fellow Americans, the day the Russians get ahead of us in the arms race will be the day the youth of America shits red.' "

  Big laugh from the audience.

  "So Ronnie gets on the phone to Jimmy, and he says, 'Mr.

  President, what did Amy have for breakfast?'"

  A gigantic laugh from the audience. Carlin pauses. The real punchline is then delivered in a low, insinuating tone:

  "Nooope . . . nothing wrong here."

  The audience roars its approval, applauds wildly. Carlin shakes his head sadly. "Red shit, man. Wow. Dig on it awhile."

  That was the problem. George Carlin was the problem. Bob Hope was the problem. Johnny Carson was the problem. Steve Martin was the problem. Every barbershop wit in America was the problem.

  And then, consider this: Sharp stock had gone down nine and had only rebounded four and a quarter. The shareholders were going to be hollering for somebody's head. Let's see . . . whose do we give them? Who had the bright idea of the Sharp Cereal Professor in the first place? How about those guys as the most eligible? Never mind the fact that the Professor had been on for four years before the Zingers debacle. Never mind the fact that when the Sharp Cereal Professor (and his cohorts the Cookie Sharpshooter and George and Gracie) had come on the scene, Sharp stock had been three and a quarter points lower than it was now.