the double bed he and his mom shared. The springs rasped. Brett’s jaws froze. After a moment’s debate he took his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back porch, being careful not to let the screen door slam.
The summer smells of everything were greatly clarified in the heavy fog, and the air was already warm. In the east, just above the faint fuzz that marked a belt of pines at the end of the east pasture, he could see the sun. It was as small and silver-bright as the full moon when it has risen well up in the sky. Even now the humidity was a dense thing, heavy and quiet. The fog would be gone by eight or nine, but the humidity would remain.
But for now what Brett saw was a white, secret world, and he was filled with the secret joys of it: the husky smell of hay that would be ready for its first cutting in a week, of manure, of his mother’s roses. He could even faintly make out the aroma of Gary Pervier’s triumphant honeysuckle which was slowly burying the fence which marked the edge of his property—burying it in a drift of cloying, grasping vines.
He put his cereal bowl aside and walked toward where he knew the barn to be. Halfway across the dooryard he looked over his shoulder and saw that the house had receded to nothing but a misty outline. A few steps farther and it was swallowed. He was alone in the white with only the tiny silver sun looking down on him. He could smell dust, damp, honeysuckle, roses.
And then the growling began.
His heart leaped into his throat and he fell back a step, all his muscles tensing into bundles of wire. His first panicky thought, like a child who has suddenly tumbled into a fairy tale. was wolf. and he looked around wildly. There was nothing to see but white.
Cujo came out of the fog.
Brett began to make a whining noise in his throat. The dog he had grown up with, the dog who had pulled a yelling, gleeful, five-year-old Brett patiently around and around the dooryard on his Flexible Flyer, buckled into a harness Joe had made in the shop, the dog who had been waiting calmly by the mailbox every afternoon during school for the bus, come shine or shower . . . that dog bore only the slightest resemblance to the muddy, matted apparition slowly materializing from the morning mist. The Saint Bernard’s big, sad eyes were now reddish and stupid and lowering: more pig’s eyes than dog’s eyes. His coat was plated with brownish-green mud, as if he had been rolling around in the boggy place at the bottom of the meadow. His muzzle was wrinkled back in a terrible mock grin that froze Brett with horror. Brett felt his heart slugging away in his throat.
Thick white foam dripped slowly from between Cujo’s teeth.
“Cujo?” Brett whispered. “Cuje?”
Cujo looked at THE BOY, not recognizing him any more, not his looks, not the shadings of his clothes (he could not precisely see colors, at least as human beings understand them), not his scent What he saw was a monster on two legs. Cujo was sick, and all things appeared monstrous to him now. His head clanged dully with murder. He wanted to bite and rip and tear. Part of him saw a cloudy image of him springing at THE BOY, bringing him down, parting flesh with bone, drinking blood as it still pulsed, driven by a dying heart.
Then the monstrous figure spoke, and Cujo recognized his voice. It was THE BOY, THE BOY, and THE BOY had never done him any harm. Once he had loved THE BOY and would have died for him had that been called for. There was enough of that feeling left to hold the image of murder at bay until it grew as murky as the fog around them. It broke up and rejoined the buzzing, clamorous river of his sickness.
“Cujo? What’s wrong. boy?”
The last of the dog that had been before the bat scratched its nose turned away, and the sick and dangerous dog, subverted for the last time, was forced to turn with it. Cujo stumbled away and moved deeper into the fog. Foam splattered from his muzzle onto the dirt. He broke into a lumbering run, hoping to outrun the sickness, but it ran with him. buzzing and yammering, making him ache with hatred and murder. He