A moment later all that was left in front of the garage was a blowing fur coat.
Don’t you worry, Vic said in the dream. Don’t you worry about that old dog, it’s nothing but a fur coat. Did you get the mail yet? Never mind the dog, the mail’s coming. The mail’s the important thing. Right? The mail—
His voice was disappearing down a long tunnel, growing echoey and faint. And suddenly it was not a dream of Vic’s voice but a memory of a dream—she was awake and her cheeks were wet with tears. She had cried in her sleep. She looked at her watch and could just make out the time: quarter past one. She looked over at Tad and saw he was sleeping soundly, his thumb hooked into his mouth.
Never mind the dog, the mail’s coming. The mail’s the important thing.
And suddenly the significance of the package hung over the mailbox door came to her, hit her like an arrow fired up from her subconscious mind, an idea she had not quite been able to get hold of before. Perhaps because it was so big, so simple, so elementary-my-dear-Watson. Yesterday was Monday and the mail had come. The J. C. Whitney package for Joe Camber was ample proof of that.
Today was Tuesday and the mail would come again.
Tears of relief began to roll down her not-yet-dry cheeks. She actually had to restrain herself from shaking Tad awake and telling him it was going to be all right, that by two o’clock this afternoon at the latest—and more probably by ten or eleven in the morning, if the mail delivery out here was as prompt as it was most other places in town—this nightmare would end.
The mailman would come even if he had no mail for the Cambers, that was the beauty of it. It would be his job to see if the flag was up, signifying outgoing mail. He would have to come up here, to his last stop on Town Road No. 3, to check that out, and today he was going to be greeted by a woman who was semi-hysterical with relief.
She eyed Tad’s lunchbox and thought of the food inside. She thought of herself carefully saving some of it aside, in case . . . well, in case. Now it didn’t matter so much, although Tad was likely to be hungry in the morning. She ate the rest of the cucumber slices. Tad didn’t care for cucumbers much anyway. It would be an odd breakfast for him, she thought, smiling. Figbars, olives, and a Slim Jim or two.
Munching the last two or three cucumber slices, she realized it was the coincidences that had scared her the most. That series of coincidences, utterly random but mimicking a kind of sentient fate, had been what seemed to make the dog so horribly purposeful, so . . . so out to get her personally. Vic being gone for ten days, that was coincidence number one. Vic calling early today, that was coincidence number two. If he hadn’t got them then, he would have tried later, kept trying, and begun to wonder where they were. The fact that all three of the Cambers were gone, at least for overnight, the way it looked now. That was number three. Mother, son, and father. All gone. But they had left their dog. Oh yes. They had—
A sudden horrible thought occurred to her, freezing her jaws on the last bite of cucumber. She tried to thrust it away, but it came back. It wouldn’t go away because it had its own gargoyle-like logic.
What if they were all dead in the barn?
The image rose behind her eyes in an instant. It had the unhealthy vividness of those waking visions which sometimes come in the morning’s small hours. The three bodies tumbled about like badly made toys on the floor in there, the sawdust around them stained red, their dusty eyes staring up into the blackness where barnswallows cooed and fluttered, their clothing ripped and chewed, parts of them—
Oh that’s crazy, that’s—
Maybe he had gotten the boy first. The other two are in the kitchen, or maybe upstairs having a quickie, they hear screams, they rush out—
(stop it won’t you stop it)
—they rush out but the boy is already dead, the dog has torn his throat out, and while they’re still stunned by the death of their son, the Saint Bernard comes lurching out of the shadows, old and terrible engine of destruction, yes,