trucks back in his playchest, clanking them loudly on purpose so she would know he was getting ready to come down and watch Gun-smoke on Channel 8. He started for the door and then paused, looking at the Monster Words, fascinated.
Monsters, stay out of this room!
You have no business here.
He knew them by heart. He liked to look at them, read them by rote, look at his daddy’s printing.
Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this night.
You have no business here.
On a sudden, powerful impulse, he pulled out the pushpin that held the paper to the wall. He took the Monster Words carefully—almost reverently—down. He folded the sheet of paper up and put it carefully in the back pocket of his jeans. Then, feeling better than he had all day, he ran down the stairs to watch Marshal Dillon and Festus.
That last fellow had come and picked up his car at ten minutes of twelve. He had paid cash, which Joe had tucked away into his old greasy wallet, reminding himself to go down to the Norway Savings and pick up another five hundred before he and Gary took off.
Thinking of taking off made him remember Cujo, and the problem of who was going to feed him. He got into his Ford wagon and drove to Gary Pervier’s at the foot of the hill. He parked in Gary’s driveway. He started up the porch steps, and the hail that had been rising in his throat died there. He went back and bent over the steps.
There was blood there.
Joe touched it with his fingers. It was tacky but not completely dry. He stood up again, a little worried but not yet unduly so. Gary might have been drunk and stumbled with a glass in his hand. He wasn’t really worried until he saw the way the rusty bottom panel of the screen door was crashed in.
“Gary?”
There was no answer. He found himself wondering if someone with a grudge had maybe come hunting ole Gary. Or maybe some tourist had come asking directions and Gary had picked the wrong day to tell someone he could take a flying fuck at the moon.
He climbed the steps. There were more splatters of blood on the boards of the porch.
“Gary?” he called again, and suddenly wished for the weight of his shotgun cradled over his right arm. But if someone had punched Gary out, bloodied his nose or maybe popped out a few of the old Pervert’s remaining teeth, that person was gone now, because the only car in the yard other than Joe’s rusty Ford LTD wagon was Gary’s white ’66 Chrysler hardtop. And you just didn’t walk out to Town Road No. 3. Gary Pervier’s was seven miles from town, two miles off the Maple Sugar Road that led back to Route 117.
More likely he just cut himself, Joe thought. But Christ, I hope it was just his hand he cut and not his throat.
Joe opened the screen door. It squealed on its hinges. “Gary?”
Still no answer. There was a sickish-sweet smell in here that he didn’t like, but at first he thought it was the honeysuckle. The stairs to the second floor went up on his left. Straight ahead was the hall to the kitchen, the living room doorway opening off the hall about halfway down on the right.
There was something on the hall floor, but it was too dark for Joe to make it out. Looked like an endtable that had been knocked over, or something like that . . . but so far as Joe knew, there wasn’t now and never had been any furniture in Gary’s front hall. He leaned his lawn chairs in here when it rained, but there hadn’t been any rain for two weeks. Besides, the chairs had been out by Gary’s Chrysler in their accustomed places. By the honeysuckle.
Only that smell wasn’t honeysuckle. It was blood. A whole lot of blood. And that was no tipped-over endtable.
Joe hurried down to the shape, his heart hammering in his ears. He knelt by it, and a sound like a squeak escaped his throat. Suddenly the air in the hall seemed too hot and close. It seemed to be strangling him. He turned away from Gary, one hand cupped over his mouth. Someone had murdered Gary. Someone had—
He forced himself to look back. Gary lay in a pool of his own blood. His eyes glared sightlessly up at the hallway ceiling. His throat had been opened. Not