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