just opened, dear God, it looked as if it had been chewed open.
This time there was no struggle with his gorge. This time he simply let everything come up in a series of hopeless choking sounds. Crazily, the back of his mind had turned to Charity with childish resentment. Charity had gotten her trip, but he wasn’t going to get his. He wasn’t going to get his because some crazy bastard had done a Jack the Ripper act on poor old Gary Pervier and—
—and he had to call the police. Never mind all the rest of it. Never mind the way the ole Pervert’s eyes were glaring up at the ceiling in the shadows, the way the sheared-copper smell of his blood mingled with the sickish-sweet aroma of the honeysuckle.
He got to his feet and staggered down toward the kitchen. He was moaning deep in his throat but was hardly aware of it The phone was on the wall in the kitchen. He had to call the State Police, Sheriff Bannerman, someone—
He stopped in the doorway. His eyes widened until they actually seemed to be bulging from his head. There was a pile of dog droppings in the doorway to the kitchen . . . and he knew from the size of the pile whose dog had been here.
“Cujo,” he whispered. “Oh my God, Cujo’s gone rabid!”
He thought he heard a sound behind him and he whirled around, hair freezing up from the back of his neck. The hallway was empty except for Gary, Gary who had said the other night that Joe couldn’t sic Cujo on a yelling nigger, Gary with his throat laid open all the way to the knob of his backbone.
There was no sense taking chances. He bolted back down the hallway, skidding momentarily in Gary’s blood, leaving an elongated footmark behind him. He moaned again, but when he had shut the heavy inner door he felt a little better.
He went back to the kitchen, shying his way around Gary’s body, and looked in, ready to pull the kitchen hallway door shut quickly if Cujo was in. there. Again he wished distractedly for the comforting weight of his shotgun over his arm.
The kitchen was empty. Nothing moved except the curtains, stirring in a sluggish breeze which whispered through the open windows. There was a smell of dead vodka bottles. It was sour, but better than that . . . that other smell. Sunlight lay on the faded, hilly linoleum in orderly patterns. The phone, its once-white plastic case now dulled with the grease of many bachelor meals and cracked in some long-ago drunken stumble, hung on the wall as always.
Joe went in and closed the door firmly behind him. He crossed to the two open windows and saw nothing in the tangle of the back yard except the rusting corpses of the two cars that had predated Gary’s Chrysler. He closed the windows anyway.
He went to the telephone, pouring sweat in the explosively hot kitchen. The book was hanging beside the phone on a hank of hayrope. Gary had made the hole through the book where the hayrope was threaded with Joe’s drillpunch about a year ago, drunk as a lord and proclaiming that he didn’t give a shit.
Joe picked the book up and then dropped it. The book thudded against the wall. His hands felt too heavy. His mouth was slimy with the taste of vomit He got hold of the book again and opened it with a jerk that nearly tore off the cover. He could have dialed 0, or 555-1212, but in his shock he never thought of it.
The sound of his rapid, shallow breathing, his racing heart, and the riffle of the thin phonebook pages masked a faint noise from behind him: the low creak of the cellar door as Cujo nosed it open.
He had gone down to the cellar after killing Gary Pervier. The light in the kitchen had been too bright, too dazzling. It sent white-hot shards of agony into his decomposing brain. The cellar door had been ajar and he had padded jerkily down the stairs into the blessedly cool dark. He had fallen asleep next to Gary’s old Army footlocker, and the breeze from the open windows had swung the cellar door most of the way dosed. The breeze had not been quite strong enough to latch the door.
The moans, the sound of Joe retching, the thumpings and slammings as Joe ran down the hall to close the