She felt the hot sting of tears and tried to push all those thoughts away. She opened her Thermos with shaky hands and poured herself half a cup of milk. She set it on the dashboard and took one of the figbars. After one bite she realized she was absolutely ravenous. She ate three more figbars, drank some milk, popped four or five of the green olives, then drained her cup. She burped gently . . . and then looked more sharply at the barn.
There was a darker shadow in front of it now. Except it wasn't just a shadow. It was the dog. It was Cujo.
He's standing watch over us.
No, she didn't believe that. Nor did she believe she had seen a vision of Cujo in a pile of blankets stacked in her son's closet. She didn't . . . except . . . except part of her did. But that part wasn't in her mind.
She glanced up into the rearview mirror at where the road was. It was too dark now to see it, but she knew it was there, just as she knew that nobody was going to go by. When they had come out that other time with Vic's Jag, all three of them (the dog was nice then, her brain muttered, the Tadder patted him and laughed, remember?), laughing it up and having a great old time, Vic had told her that until five years ago the Castle Rock Dump had been out at the end of Town Road No. 3. Then the new waste treatment plant had gone into operation on the other side of town, and now, a quarter of a mile beyond the Camber place, the road simply ended at a place where a heavy chain was strung across it. The sign which hung from the chain read NO TRESPASSING DUMP CLOSED. Beyond Cambers', there was just no place to go.
Donna wondered if maybe some people in search of a really private place to go parking might not ride by, but she couldn't imagine that even the horniest of local kids would want to neck at the old town dump. At any rate, no one had passed yet.
The white line on the western horizon had faded to a bare afterglow now . . . and she was afraid that even that was mostly wishful thinking. There was no moon.
Incredibly, she felt drowsy herself. Maybe sleep was her natural weapon, too. And what else was there to do? The dog was still out there (at least she thought it was; the darkness had gotten just deep enough to make it hard to tell if that was a real shape or just a shadow) . The battery had to rest. Then she could try again. So why not sleep?
The package on his mailbox. That package from J. C. Whitney.
She sat up a little straighter, a puzzled frown creasing her brow. She turned her head, but from here the front corner of the house blocked her view of the mailbox. But she had seen the package, hung from the front of the box. Why had she thought of that? Did it have some significance?
She was still holding the Tupperware dish with the olives and slices of cucumbers inside, each wrapped neatly in Saran Wrap. Instead of eating anything else, she carefully put the white plastic cover on the Tupperware dish and stowed it back in Tad's lunchbox. She did not let herself think much about why she was being so careful of the food. She settled back in the bucket seat and found the lever that tipped it back. She meant to think about the package hooked over the mailbox--there was something there, she was almost sure of it--but soon her mind had slipped away to another idea, one that took on the bright tones of reality as she began to doze off.
The Cambers had gone to visit relatives. The relatives were in some town that was two, maybe three hours' drive away. Kennebunk, maybe. Or Hollis. Or Augusta. It was a family reunion.
Her beginning-to-dream mind saw a gathering of fifty people or more on a green lawn of TV-commercial size and beauty. There was a fieldstone barbecue pit with a shimmer of heat over it. At a long trestle table there were at least four dozen people, passing platters of corn on the cob and dishes of home-baked beans--pea beans, soldier beans, red kidney beans. There were plates of barbecued franks (Donna's stomach made a low goinging sound at this vision). On the table was a homely checked tablecloth. All this was being presided over by a lovely woman with pure white hair that had been rolled into a bun at the nape of her neck. Fully inserted into the capsule of her dream now, Donna saw with no surprise at all that this woman was her mother.
The Cambers were there, but they weren't really the Cambers at all. Joe Camber looked like Vic in a clean Sears work coverall, and Mrs. Camber was wearing Donna's green watered-silk dress. Their boy looked the way Tad was going to look when he was in the fifth grade . . .
"Mommy?"
The picture wavered, started to break up. She tried to hold on to it because it was peaceful and lovely: the archetype of a family life she had never had, the type she and Vic would never have with their one planned child and their carefully programmed lives. With sudden rising sadness, she wondered why she had never thought of things in that light before.
"Mommy?"
The picture wavered again and began to darken. That voice from outside, piercing the vision the way a needle may pierce the shell of an egg. Never mind. The Cambers were at their family reunion and they would pull in later, around ten, happy and full of barbecue. Everything would be all right. The Joe Camber with Vic's face would take care of everything. Everything would be all right again. There were some things that God never allowed. It would--
"Mommy!"
She came out of the doze, sitting up, surprised to find herself behind the wheel of the Pinto instead of at home in bed . . . but only for a second. Already the lovely. surreal image of the relatives gathered around the trestle picnic table was beginning to dissolve, and in fifteen minutes she would not even remember that she had dreamed.
"Huh? What?"
Suddenly, shockingly, the phone inside the Cambers' house began to ring. The dog rose to its feet, moving shadows that resolved themselves into its large and ungainly form.
"Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom."
Cujo began to roar at the sound of the telephone. He was not barking; he was roaring. Suddenly he charged at the house. He struck the back door hard enough to shake it in its frame.
No, she thought sickly, oh no, stop, please, stop--
"Mommy, I have to--"
The dog was snarling, biting at the wood of the door. She could hear the sick splintering sounds its teeth made.
"--go weewee."
The phone rang six times. Eight times. Ten. Then it stopped.
She realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out through her teeth in a low, hot sigh.
Cujo stood at the door, his back paws on the ground, his forepaws on the top step. He continued to growl low in his chest--a hateful, nightmarish sound. At last he turned and looked at the Pinto for a time--Donna could see the dried foam caked on his muzzle and chest--then he padded back into the shadows and grew indistinct. It was impossible to tell exactly where he went. In the garage, maybe. Or maybe down the side of the barn.
Tad was tugging desperately at the sleeve of her shirt.
"Mommy, I have to go bad!"
She looked at him helplessly.
Brett Camber put the phone down slowly. "No one answered. He's not home, I guess."
Charity nodded, not terribly surprised. She was glad that Jim had suggested they make the call from his office, which was downstairs and off the "family room." The family room was soundproofed. There were shelves of board games in there, a Panasonic large-screen TV with a video recorder and an Atari video-games setup attached to it. And standing in one corner was a lovely old Wurlitzer jukebox that really worked.
"Down at Gary's, I guess," Brett added disconsolately.
"Yes, I imagine he's with Gary," she agreed, which wasn't exactly the same as saying they were together at Gary's house. She had seen the faraway look that had come into Joe's eyes when she had finally struck the deal with him, the deal that had gotten her and her son down here. She hoped Brett wouldn't think of calling directory assistance for Gary Pervier's number, because she doubted if there would be any answer there either. She suspected that there were two old dogs out somewhere tonight howling at the moon.
"Do you think Cuje is okay, Mom?"
"Why, I don't think your father would go off and leave him
if he wasn't," she said, and that was true--she didn't believe he would. "Why don't we leave it for tonight and you call him in the morning? You ought to be getting to bed anyway. It's past ten. You've had a big day."
"I'm not tired."
"Well, it's not good to go too long on nervous excitement. I put your toothbrush out, and your Aunt Holly put out a washcloth and a towel for you. Do you remember which bedroom--?"
"Yeah, sure. You going to bed, Mom?"
"Soon. I'm going to sit up with Holly for a while. We've got a lot of history to catch up on, she and I."
Shyly, Brett said, "She looks like you. Y'know that?"
Charity looked at him, surprised. "Does she? Yes, I suppose she does. A little."
"And that little kid, Jimmy. He's got a real right hook. Pow!" Brett burst out laughing.
"Did he hurt your stomach?"
"Heck, no." Brett was looking around Jim's study carefully, noting the Underwood typewriter on the desk, the Rolodex, the neat open file of folders with the names on the tabs in alphabetical order. There was a careful, measuring look in his eyes that she couldn't understand or evaluate. He seemed to come back from far away. "Nah, he didn't hurt me. He's just a little kid." He cocked his head at her. "My cousin, right?"
"Right."
"Blood relation." He seemed to muse over it.
"Brett, do you like your Uncle Jim and Aunt Holly?"
"I like her. I can't tell about him yet. That jukebox. That's really neat. But . . . " He shook his head in a kind of impatience.
"What about it, Brett?"
"He takes so much pride in it!" Brett said. "It was the first thing he showed me, like a kid with a toy, isn't this neat, you know--"
"Well, he's only had it for a little while," Charity said. An unformed dread had begun to swirl around inside of her, connected somehow with Joe--what had he told Brett when he took him out on the sidewalk? "Anyone's partial to something new. Holly wrote me when they finally got it, said Jim had wanted one of those things since he was a young man. People . . . honey, different people buy different things to . . . to show themselves that they're successful, I suppose. There's no accounting for it. But usually it's something they couldn't have when they were poor."
"Was Uncle Jim poor?"
"I really don't know," she said. "But they're not poor now."
"All I meant was that he didn't have anything to do with it. You get what I mean?" He looked at her closely. "He bought it with money and hired some people to fix it and hired some more people to bring it here, and he says it's his, but he didn't . . . you know, he didn't . . . aw, I don't know."
"He didn't make it with his own hands?" Although her fear was greater now, more coalesced, her voice was gentle.
"Yeah! That's right! He bought it with money, but he didn't really have nothing to do--"
"Anything--"
"Okay, yeah, anything to do with it, but now he's, like, takin credit for it--"
"He said a jukebox is a delicate, complicated machine--"
"Dad could have gotten it running," Brett said flatly, and Charity thought she heard a door bang shut suddenly, closing with a loud, toneless, frightening bang. It wasn't in the house. It was in her heart. "Dad would have tinkered it up and it would have been his."
"Brett," she said (and her voice sounded weak and justifying to her own ears), "not everybody is good at tinkering and fixing like your father is."
"I know that," he said, still looking around the office. "Yeah. But Uncle Jim shouldn't take credit for it just because he had the money. See? It's him taking the credit that I don't li--that bothers me."
She was suddenly furious with him. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him back and forth; to raise her voice until it was loud enough to shout the truth into his brain. That money did not come by accident; that it almost always resulted from some sustained act of will, and that will was the core of character. She would tell him that while his father was perfecting his skills as a tinkerer and swilling down Black Label with the rest of the boys in the back of Emerson's Sunoco, sitting in piles of dead bald tires and telling frenchman jokes, Jim Brooks had been in law school, knocking his brains out to make grades, because when you made the grades you got the diploma, and the diploma was your ticket, you got to ride the merry-go-round. Getting on didn't mean you'd catch the brass ring, no, but it guaranteed you the chance to at least try.
"You go on up now and get ready for bed," she said quietly. "What you think of your Uncle Jim is between you and you. But . . . give him a chance, Brett. Don't just judge him on that." They had gone through into the family room now, and she jerked a thumb at the jukebox.
"No, I won't," he said.
She followed him up into the kitchen, where Holly was making cocoa for the four of them. Jim Junior and Gretchen had gone to bed long before.
"You get your man?" Holly asked.
"No, he's probably down chewing the fat with that friend of his," Charity said. "Well try tomorrow."
"Want some cocoa, Brett?" Holly asked.
"Yes, please."
Charity watched him sit down at the table. She saw him put his elbow on it and then take it off again quickly, remembering that it was impolite. Her heart was so full of love and hope and fear that it seemed to stagger in her chest.
Time, she thought. Time and perspective. Give him that. If you force him, you'll lose him for sure.
But how much time was there? Only a week, and then he would be back under Joe's influence. And even as she sat down next to her son and thanked Holly for her cup of hot cocoa, her thoughts had turned speculatively to the idea of divorce again.
In her dream, Vic had come.
He simply walked down the driveway to the Pinto and opened her door. He was dressed in his best suit, the three-piece charcoal-gray one (when he put it on she always teased him that he looked like Jerry Ford with hair). Come on, you two, he said, and that quirky little grin on his face. Time to go home before the vampires come out.
She tried to warn him, to tell him the dog was rabid, but no words came. And suddenly Cujo was advancing out of the dark, his head down, a steady low growl rumbling in his chest. Watch out! she tried to cry. His bite is death! But no sound came out.
But just before Cujo launched himself at Vic, he turned and pointed his finger at the dog. Cujo's fur went dead white instantly. His red, rheumy eyes dropped back into his head like marbles into a cup. His muzzle fell off and shattered against the crushed gravel of the driveway like black glass. A moment later all that was left in front of the garage was a blowing fur coat.
Don't you worry, Vic said in the dream. Don't you worry about that old dog, it's nothing but a fur coat. Did you get the mail yet? Never mind the dog, the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing. Right? The mail--
His voice was disappearing down a long tunnel, growing echoey and faint. And suddenly it was not a dream of Vic's voice but a memory of a dream--she was awake and her cheeks were wet with tears. She had cried in her sleep. She looked at her watch and could just make out the time: quarter past one. She looked over at Tad and saw he was sleeping soundly, his thumb hooked into his mouth.
Never mind the dog, the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing.
And suddenly the significance of the package hung over the mailbox door came to her, hit her like an arrow fired up from her subconscious mind, an idea she had not quite been able to get hold of before. Perhaps because it was so big, so simple, so elementary-my-dear-Watson. Yesterday was Monday and the mail had come. The J. C. Whitney package for Joe Camber was ample proof of that.
Today was Tuesday and the mail would come again.
Tears of relief began to roll down her not-yet-dry cheeks. She actually had to restrain herself from shaking Tad awake and telling him it was going to be all right, that by two o'clock this afternoon at the latest--and more probably by ten or eleven in the morning, if the mail delivery out here was as prompt as it was most other places in town--this nightmare would e
nd.
The mailman would come even if he had no mail for the Cambers, that was the beauty of it. It would be his job to see if the flag was up, signifying outgoing mail. He would have to come up here, to his last stop on Town Road No. 3, to check that out, and today he was going to be greeted by a woman who was semi-hysterical with relief.
She eyed Tad's lunchbox and thought of the food inside. She thought of herself carefully saving some of it aside, in case . . . well, in case. Now it didn't matter so much, although Tad was likely to be hungry in the morning. She ate the rest of the cucumber slices. Tad didn't care for cucumbers much anyway. It would be an odd breakfast for him, she thought, smiling. Figbars, olives, and a Slim Jim or two.
Munching the last two or three cucumber slices, she realized it was the coincidences that had scared her the most. That series of coincidences, utterly random but mimicking a kind of sentient fate, had been what seemed to make the dog so horribly purposeful, so . . . so out to get her personally. Vic being gone for ten days, that was coincidence number one. Vic calling early today, that was coincidence number two. If he hadn't got them then, he would have tried later, kept trying, and begun to wonder where they were. The fact that all three of the Cambers were gone, at least for overnight, the way it looked now. That was number three. Mother, son, and father. All gone. But they had left their dog. Oh yes. They had--
A sudden horrible thought occurred to her, freezing her jaws on the last bite of cucumber. She tried to thrust it away, but it came back. It wouldn't go away because it had its own gargoyle-like logic.
What if they were all dead in the barn?
The image rose behind her eyes in an instant. It had the unhealthy vividness of those waking visions which sometimes come in the morning's small hours. The three bodies tumbled about like badly made toys on the floor in there, the sawdust around them stained red, their dusty eyes staring up into the blackness where barnswallows cooed and fluttered, their clothing ripped and chewed, parts of them--
Oh that's crazy, that's--
Maybe he had gotten the boy first. The other two are in the kitchen, or maybe upstairs having a quickie, they hear screams, they rush out--
(stop it won't you stop it)