Cujo

by Stephen King

  Reluctantly, her mind told her that was a deadly-false bit of reasoning.

  She was not as strong tonight as she had been last night. She would be even weaker and more dehydrated tomorrow morning. And that was not the worst of it. She had been sitting almost all the time for--how long?--it didn't seem possible, but it was now some twenty-eight hours. What if she was too stiff to do it? What if she got halfway to the porch only to be doubled up and then dropped flopping to the ground by charley horses in the big muscles of her thighs?

  In matters of life and death, her mind told her implacably, the right time only comes around once--once and then it's gone.

  Her breathing and heart rate had speeded up. Her body was aware she was going to make the try before her mind was. Then she was wrapping her shirt more firmly about her right hand, her left hand was settling on the doorhandle, and she knew. There had been no conscious decision she was aware of; suddenly she was simply going. She was going now, while Tad slept deeply and there was no danger he would bolt out after her.

  She pulled the doorhandle up, her hand sweat-slick. She was holding her breath, listening for any change in the world.

  The bird sang again. That was all.

  If he's bashed the door too far out of shape it won't even open, she thought. That would be a kind of bitter relief. She could sit back then, rethink her options, see if there was anything she had left out of her calculations . . . and get a little thirstier . . . a little weaker . . . a little slower . . . .

  She brought pressure to bear against the door, slugging her left shoulder against it, gradually settling more and more of her weight upon it. Her right hand was sweating inside the cotton shirt. Her fist was so tightly clenched that the fingers ached. Dimly, she could feel the crescents of her nails biting into her palm. Over and over in her mind's eye she saw herself punching through the glass beside the knob of the porch door, heard the tinkle of the shards striking the boards inside, saw herself reaching for the handle . . .

  But the car door wasn't opening. She shoved as hard as she could, straining, the cords in her neck standing out. But it wasn't opening. It--

  Then it did open, all of a sudden. It swung wide with a terrible clunking sound, almost spilling her out on all fours. She grabbed for the doorhandle, missed, and grabbed again. She held the handle, and suddenly a panicky certainty stole into her mind. It was as cold and numbing as a doctor's verdict of inoperable cancer. She had gotten the door open, but it wouldn't close again. The dog was going to leap in and kill them both. Tad would have perhaps one confused moment of waking, one last merciful instant in which to believe it was a dream, before Cujo's teeth ripped his throat open.

  Her breath rattled in and out, quick and quick. It felt like hot straw. It seemed that she could see each and every piece of gravel in the driveway, but it was hard to think. Her thoughts tumbled wildly. Scenes out of her past zipped through the foreground of her mind like a film of a parade which had been speeded up until the marching bands and horseback riders and baton twirlers seem to be fleeing the scene of some weird crime.

  The garbage disposal regurgitating a nasty green mess all over the kitchen ceiling, backing up through the bar sink.

  Falling off the back porch when she was five and breaking her wrist.

  Looking down at herself during period 2--algebra--one day when she was a high school freshman and seeing to her utter shame and horror that there were spots of blood on her light blue linen skirt, she had started her period, how was she ever going to get up from her seat when the bell rang without everybody seeing, without everyone knowing that Donna-Rose was having her period?

  The first boy she had ever kissed with her mouth open. Dwight Sampson.

  Holding Tad in her arms, newborn, then the nurse taking him away; she wanted to tell the nurse not to do that--Give him back, I'm not done with him, those were the words that had come to mind--but she was too weak to talk and then the horrible, squelching, gutty sound of the afterbirth coming out of her; she remembered thinking I'm puking up his life-support systems, and then she had passed out.

  Her father, crying at her wedding and then getting drunk at the reception.

  Faces. Voices. Rooms. Scenes. Books. The terror of this moment, thinking I AM GOING TO DIE--

  With a tremendous effort, she got herself under some kind of control. She got the Pinto's doorhandle in both hands and gave it a tremendous yank. The door flew shut. There was that clunk again as the hinge Cujo had knocked out of true protested. There was a hefty bang when the door slammed closed that made Tad jump and then mutter a bit in his sleep.

  Donna leaned back in her seat, shaking helplessly all over, and cried silently. Hot tears slipped out from under her lids and ran back on a slant toward her ears. She had never in her life been so afraid of anything, not even in her room at night when she was little and it had seemed to her that there were spiders everywhere. She couldn't go now, she assured herself. It was unthinkable. She was totally done up. Her nerves were shot. Better to wait, wait for a better chance. . . .

  But she didn't dare let that idee become fixe.

  There wasn't going to be a better chance than this one. Tad was out of it, and the dog was out of it too. It had to be true; all logic declared it to be true. That first loud clunk, then another one when she pulled the door to, and the slam of the door actually shutting again. It would have brought him on the run if he had been in front of the car. He might be in the barn, but she believed he would have heard the noise in there, as well. He had almost surely gone wandering off somewhere. There was never going to be a better chance than right now, and if she was too scared to do it for herself, she mustn'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 behavior, 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, Yes, yes, I did it, I made you sick, I made you hurt, I devised this agony just for you and it will be with you always now.

  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 heard 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 warm-ups.

  "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 grievously.

  "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 be crazy."

  "Yeah, I'll buy that," Roger said. On the TV screen, Bob Stanley popped a good curve over the outside corner 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 to 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 sitting all week in the sun. This is some nice little game we're playing. We've got Rob Martin on our side. We've got that refugee from the Home for Old Actors on our side. Undoubtedly we'll have Summers Marketing & Research on our side, since they bill us. How wonderful. We've got everybody on our side but the people who matter."

  "Nothing's decided, Rog. Not yet."

  "Althea doesn't really understand how much is at stake," Roger said. "My fault; okay, so I'm a chicken, cluck-cluck. But she loves it in Bridgton, Vic. She loves it there. And the girls, they've got their school friends . . . the lake in the summer . . . and they don't know what the fuck's coming down at all."

  "Yeah, it's scary. I'm not trying to talk you out of that, Rog."

  "Does Donna know how bad it is?"

  "I think she just thought it was an awfully good joke on us at first. But she's getting the drift of it now."

  "But she never took to Maine the way the rest of us did."

  "Not at first, maybe. I think she'd raise her hands in horror at the idea of taking Tad back to New York now."

  "What am I going to do?" Roger asked again. "I'm no kid any more. You're thirty-two, but Vic, I'm going to be forty-one next month. What am I supposed to do? Start taking my resume around? Is J. Walter Thompson going to welcome me in with open arms? 'Hi, Rog-baby, I've been holding your old spot for you. You start at thirty-five-five.' Is that what he's going to say?"

  Vic only shook his head, but a part of him was a little irritated with Roger.

  "I used to be just mad. Well, I'm still mad, but now I'm more scared than anything else. I lie in bed at night and try to imagine how it's going to be--after. What it's going to be. I can't imagine it. You look at me and you say to yourself, 'Roger's dramatizing.' You--"

  "I never thought any such thing," Vic said, hoping he didn't sound guilty.

  "I won't say you're lying," Roger said, "but I've been working with you long enough to have a pretty good idea of how you think. Better than you might know. Anyway, I wouldn't blame you for the thought--but there's a big difference between thirty-two and forty-one, Vic. They kick a lot of the guts out of you in between thirty-two and forty-one."

  "Look, I still think we've got a fighting chance with this proposal--"

  "What I'd like to do is bring about two dozen boxes of Red Razberry Zingers along with us to Cleveland," Roger said, "and then get them to bend over after they tie the can to our tails. I'd have a place for all that cereal, you know it?"

  Vic clapped Roger on the shoulder. "Yeah, I get you."

  "What are you going to do if they pull the account?" Roger asked.

  Vie had thought about that. He had been around it from every possible angle. It would have been fair to say that he had gotten to the problem quite a while before Roger had been able to make himself approach it.

  "If they pull out, I'm going to work harder than I ever have in my life," Vic said. "Thirty hours a day, if I have to. If I have to rope in sixty small New England accounts to make up for what Sharp billed, then I'll do it."

  "Well kill ourselves for nothing."


  "Maybe," Vic said. "But we'll go down with all guns firing. Right?"

  "I figure," Roger said unsteadily, "that if Althea goes to work, we can hold on to the house for about a year. That ought to be just about enough time to sell it, the way interest rates are."

  Suddenly Vic felt it trembling right behind his lips: the whole shitty black mess that Donna had managed to get herself into because of her need to keep pretending that she was still nineteen-going-on-twenty. He felt a certain dull anger at Roger, Roger who had been happily and unquestioningly married for fifteen years. Roger who had pretty, unassuming Althea to warm his bed (if Althea Breakstone had so much as contemplated infidelity, Vic would have been surprised), Roger who had absolutely no idea of how many things could go wrong at once.

  "Listen," he said. "Thursday I got a note in the late mail--"

  There was a sharp rap at the door.

  "That'll be room service," Roger said. He picked up his shirt and wiped his face with it . . . and with the tears gone, it was suddenly unthinkable to Vic that he should tell Roger. Maybe because Roger was right after all, and the big difference was the nine years lying between thirty-two and forty-one.

  Vic went to the door and got his beers and his sandwich. He didn't finish what he had been about to say when the room-service waiter knocked, and Roger didn't ask him. He was back in the ballgame and his own problems.

  Vic sat down to eat his sandwich, not entirely surprised to and that most of his appetite was gone. His eyes fell on the telephone, and, still munching, he tried home again. He let it ring a dozen times before hanging up. He was frowning slightly. It was five past eight, five minutes past Tad's usual bedtime. Perhaps Donna had met someone, or maybe they had gotten feeling dragged down by the empty house and gone visiting. After all, there was no law that said the Tadder had to be in bed on the stroke of eight, especially when it stayed light so late and it was so damned hot. Sure, that was likely. They had maybe gone down to the Common to goof around until it got cool enough to make sleep possible. Right.