afraid that Brett was losing his mind—anyone who was around him could see he was bright and normal—but she was afraid that he might hurt himself while he was in that strange state. Dr. Gresham had told her that was very unlikely, and that most of the funny ideas people had about somnambulism came from cheap, badly researched movies.
“We only know a little about sleepwalking,” he had told her, “but we do know that it is more common in children than it is in adults. There’s a constantly growing, constantly maturing interaction between the mind and body, Mrs. Camber, and a lot of people who have done research in this field believe that sleepwalking may be a symptom of a temporary and not terribly significant imbalance between the two.”
“Like growing pains?” she had asked doubtfully.
“Very much like that,” Gresham had said with a grin. He drew a bell curve on his office pad, suggesting that Brett’s somnambulism would reach a peak, hold for a while, then begin to taper off. Eventually it would disappear.
She had gone away a little reassured by the doctor’s conviction that Brett would not go sleepwalking out a window or down the middle of a highway, but without being much enlightened. A week later she had brought Brett in. He had been just a month or two past his sixth birthday then. Gresham had given him a complete physical and had pronounced him normal in every way. And indeed, Gresham had appeared to be right. The last of what Charity thought of as his “nightwalks” had occurred more than two years ago.
The last, that was, until now.
Brett opened the cupboards one by one, closing each neatly before going on to the next, disclosing Holly’s casserole dishes, the extra elements to her Jenn-Aire range, her dish-towels neatly folded, her coffee-and-tea creamer, her as-yet-incomplete set of Depression glassware. His eyes were wide and blank, and she felt a cool certainty that he was seeing the contents of other cabinets, in another place.
She felt the old, helpless terror that she had almost completely forgotten as parents do the alarms and the excursions of their children’s early years: the teething, the vaccination that brought the frighteningly high fever as a little extra added attraction, the croup, the ear infection, the hand or leg that suddenly began to spray irrational blood. What’s he thinking? she wondered. Where is he? And why now, after two quiet years? Was it being in a strange place? He hadn’t seemed unduly upset . . . at least, not until now.
He opened the last cupboard and took down a pink gravy boat. He put it on the counter. He picked up empty air and mimed pouring something into the gravy boat. Her arms suddenly broke out in gooseflesh as she realized where he was and what this dumbshow was all about. It was a routine he went through each day at home. He was feeding Cujo.
She took an involuntary step toward him and then stopped. She didn’t believe those wives’ tales about what might happen if you woke a sleepwalker—that the soul would be forever shut out of the body, that madness might result, or sudden death—and she hadn’t needed Dr. Gresham to reassure her on that score. She had gotten a book on special loan from the Portland City Library . . . but she hadn’t really needed that, either. Her own good common sense told her that what happened when you woke up a sleepwalker was that they woke up—no more and no less than just that. There might be tears, even mild hysteria, but that sort of reaction would be provoked by simple disorientation.
Still, she had never wakened Brett during one of his nightwalks, and she didn’t dare to do so now. Good common sense was one thing. Her unreasoning fear was another, and she was suddenly very afraid, and unable to think why. What could be so dreadful in Brett’s acted-out dream of feeding his dog? It was perfectly natural, as worried as he had been about Cujo.
He was bent over now, holding the gravy boat out, the drawstring of his pajama trousers making a right-angled white line to the horizontal plane of the red and black linoleum floor. His face went through a slow-motion pantomime of sorrow. He spoke then, muttering the words as sleepers so often do, gutturally, rapidly, almost unintelligibly. And with no emotion in the words themselves, that was all inside, held in the cocoon of whatever dream