'Call the sheriff's office,' Roger said promptly.

'Yeah, but -'

'Yeah, but nothing. You aren't going to scare Donna, that's for sure.

She's not there. But what the hell, set your mind at rest. It doesn't have to be sirens and flashing lights. Just ask if they can send a cop by to check and make sure that everything looks normal. There must be a thousand places she could be. Hell, maybe she just tied into a really good Tupperware party.'

'Donna hates Tupperware parties.'

'So maybe the girls got playing penny-ante poker and lost track of the time and Tad's asleep in someone's spare room.'

Vic remembered her telling him how she had steered clear of any deep involvement with 'the girls' - I don't want to be one of those faces you see at the bake sales, she had said. But he didn't want to tell Roger that; it was too close to the subject of Kemp.

'Yeah, maybe something like that,' Vic said.

'Have you got an extra key to the place tucked away somewhere?'

'There's one on a hook under the eave of the front porch.'

'Tell the cops. Someone can go in and have a good look around ...

unless you've got pot or coke or something you'd just as soon they didn't stumble over.'

'Nothing like that.'

'Then do it,' Roger said earnestly. 'She'll probably call here while they're out checking and you'll feel like a fool, but sometimes it's good to feel like a fool. You know what I mean?'

'Yeah,' Vic said, grinning a little. 'Yeah, I do.'

He picked the telephone up again, hesitated, then tried home again first. No answer. Some of the comfort he had gotten from Roger evaporated. He got directory assistance ocr Maine and jotted down the number of the Castle County Sheriff's Department. It was now nearly fifteen minutes past twelve on Wednesday morning.

Donna Trenton was sitting with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel of the Pinto. Tad had finally fallen asleep again, but his sleep was not restful; he twisted, turned, sometimes moaned.

She was afraid he was reliving in his dreams what had happened earlier.

She felt his forehead; he muttered something and pulled away from her touch. His eyelids fluttered and then slipped dosed again. He felt feverish - almost surely a result of the constant tension and fear. She felt feverish herself, and she was in severe pain. Her belly

hurt, but those wounds were superficial, little more than scratches.

She had been lucky there. Cujo had damaged her left leg more. The wounds there (the bites, her mind insisted, as if relishing the horror of it) were deep and ugly. They had bled a lot before dotting, and she hadn't tried to apply a bandage right away, although there was a first-aid kit in the Pinto's glovebox. Vaguely she supposed she had hoped that the flowing blood would wash the wound clean ...

did that really happen, or was it just an old wives' tale? She didn't know. There was so much she didn't know, so goddam much.

By the time the lacerated punctures had finally clotted, her thigh and the driver's bucket seat were both tacky with her blood. She needed three gauze pads from the first-aid kit to cover the wound.

They were the last three in the kit. Have to replace those, she thought, and that brought on a short, hysterical fit of the giggles.

In the faint light, the flesh just above her knee had looked like dark plowed earth. There was a steady throbbing ache there that had not changed since the dog bit her. She had dry-swallowed a couple of aspirin from the kit, but they didn't make a dent in the pain. Her head ached badly too, as if a bundle of wires were slowly being twisted tighter and tighter inside each temple.

Flexing the leg brought the quality of the pain up from a throbbing ache to a sharp, glassy beat. She had no idea if she could even walk on the leg now, let alone run for the porch door. And did it really matter? The dog was sitting on the gravel between her car door and the door which gave on the porch, its hideously mangled head drooping ... but with its eyes fixed unfailingly on the car. On her.

Somehow she didn't think Cujo was going to move again, at least not tonight. Tomorrow the sun might drive him into the barn, if it was as hot as it had been yesterday.

'It wants me,' she whispered through her blistered lips. It was true.

Somehow it was true. For reasons decreed by Fate, or for its own unknowable ones, the dog wanted her.

When it had fallen on the gravel, she had been sure it was dying.

No living thing could have taken the pounding she had given it with the door. Even its thick fur hadn't been able to cushion the blows. One of the Saint Bernard's ears appeared to be dangling by no more than a string of flesh.

But it had regained its feet, little by little. She hadn't been able to believe her eyes ... hadn't wanted to believe her eyes.

'No!' she had shrieked, totally out of control. 'No, lie down, you're supposed to be dead, lie down, lie down and die, you shit dog!'

'Mommy, don't,' Tad had murmured, holding his head. 'It hurts . . .

it hurts me . . .'

Since then, nothing in the situation had changed. Time had resumed its former slow crawl. She had put her watch to her ear several times to make sure it was still ticking, because the hands never seemed to change position.

Twenty past twelve.

What do we know about rabies, class?

Precious little. Some hazy fragments that had probably come from Sunday-supplement articles. A pamphlet leafed through idly back in New York when she had taken the family cat, Dinah, for her distemper shot at the vet's. Excuse me, distemper and rabies shots.

Rabies, a disease of the central nervous system, the good old CNS.

Causes slow destruction of same - but how? She was blank on that, and probably the doctors were, too. Otherwise the disease wouldn't be considered so damned dangerous. Of course, she thought hopefully, I don't even know for sure that the dog is rabid. The only rabid dog I've ever seen was the one Gregory Peck shot with a rifle in To Kill a Mockingbird. Except of course that dog wasn't really rabid, it was just pretend, it was probably some mangy mutt

they'd gotten from the local pound and they put Gillette Foamy all over him....

She pulled her mind back to the point. Better to make what Vic called a worst-case analysis, at least for now. Besides, in her heart she was sure the dog was rabid ~ what else would make it behave as it had? The dog was as mad as a hatter.

And it had bitten her. Badly. What did that mean?

People could get rabies, she knew, and it was a horrible way to die.

Maybe the worst. There was a vaccine for it, and a series of injections was the prescribed method of treatment. The injections were quite painful, although probably not as painful as going the way the dog out there was going. But ...

She seemed to remember reading that there were only two instances where people had lived through an advanced case of rabies - a case, that is, that had not been diagnosed until the carriers had begun exhibiting symptoms. One of the survivors was a boy who had recovered entirely. The other had been an animal researcher who had suffered permanent brain damage. The good old CNS had just fallen apart.

The longer the disease went untreated, the less chance there was.

She rubbed her forehead and her hand skidded across a film of cold sweat.

How long was too long? Hours? Days? Weeks? A month, maybe?