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 idée 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.