conscious decision she was aware of; suddenly she was simply going. She was going now, while Tad slept deeply and there was no danger he would bolt out after her.
She pulled the doorhandle up, her hand sweat-slick. She was holding her breath, listening for any change in the world.
The bird sang again. That was all.
If he's basked the door too far out of shape it won't even Open, she thought. That would be a kind of bitter relief. She could sit back then, rethink her options, see if there was anything she had left out of her calculations ... and get a little thirstier ... a little weaker ... a little slower....
She brought pressure to bear against the door, slugging her left shoulder against it, gradually settling more and more of her weight upon it. Her right hand was sweating inside the cotton shirt. Her fist was so tightly clenched that the fingers ached. Dimly, she could feel the crescents of her nails biting into her palm. Over and over in her mind's eye she saw herself punching through the glass beside the knob of the porch door, beard the tinkle of the shards striking the boards inside, saw herself reaching for the handle ...
But the car door wasn't opening. She shoved as hard as she could, straining, the cords in her neck standing out. But it wasn't opening.
It
Then it did open, all of a sudden. It swung wide with a terrible clunking sound, almost spilling her out on all fours. She grabbed for the doorhandle, missed, and grabbed again. She held the handle, and suddenly a panicky certainty stole into her mind. It was as cold and numbing as a doctor's verdict of inoperable cancer.
She had gotten the door open. but it wouldn't close again. The dog was going to leap in and kill them both. Tad would have perhaps one confused moment of waking, one last merciful instant in which
to believe it was a dream, before Cujo's teeth ripped his throat open.
Her breath rattled in and out, quick and quick. It felt like hot straw.
It seemed that she could see each and every piece of gravel in the driveway, but it was hard to think. Her thoughts tumbled wildly.
Scenes out of her past zipped through the foreground of her mind like a film of a parade which had been speeded up until the marching bands and horseback riders and baton twirlers seemed to be fleeing the scene of some weird crime.
The garbage disposal regurgitating a nasty
green mess all over the kitchen ceiling, backing up through the bar sink.
Failing off the back porch when she was five and breaking her wrist.
Looking down at herself during period 2 - algebra - one day when she was a high school freshman and seeing to her utter shame and horror that there were spots of blood on her light blue linen skirt, she had started her period, how was she elver going to get up from her seat when the bell rang without everybody seeing, without everyone knowing that DonnaRose was having her period?
The first boy she had ever kissed with her mouth open. Dwight Sampson.
Holding Tad in her arms, newborn, then the nurse taking him away; she wanted to tell the nurse not to do that - Give him back, I'm not done with him, those were the words that had come to mind
- but she was too weak to talk and then the horrible, squelching, gutty sound of the afterbirth coming out of her; she remembered thinking I'm puking up his life-support systems, and then she had passed out.
Her father, crying at her wedding and then getting drunk at the reception.
Faces. Voices. Rooms. Scenes. Books. The terror of this moment, thinking I AM GOING TO DIE -
With a tremendous effort, she got herself under some kind of control. She got the Pinto's doorhandle in both hands and gave it a tremendous yank. The door flew shut. There was that clunk again as the hinge Cujo had knocked out of true protested. There was a hefty bang when the door slammed dosed that made Tad jump and then mutter a bit in his sleep.
Donna leaned back in the seat, shaking helplessly all over, and cried silently. Hot tears slipped out from under her lids and ran back on a slant toward her cars. She had never in her fife been so afraid of anything, not even in her room at night when she was little and it had seemed to her that there were spiders everywhere.
She couldn't go now, she assured herself. It was unthinkable. She was totally done up. Her nerves were shot. Better to wait, wait for a better chance....
But she didn't dare let that idee become fixe.
There wasn't going to be abetter chance than this one. Tad was out of it, and the dog was out of it too. It had to be true; A logic declared it to be true. That first loud clunk, then another one when she pulled the door to, and the slam of the door actually shutting again. It would have brought him on the run if he had been in front of the car. He might be in the barn, but she believed he would have heard the noise in there, as well.
He had almost surely gone wandering off somewhere. There was never going to be a better chance than right now, and if she was too scared to do it for herself, she musn't be too scared to do it for Tad.
All suitably noble. But what finally persuaded her was a vision of letting herself into the Cambers' darkened house, the reassuring feel of the telephone in her hand. She could hear herself talking to one of Sheriff Bannerman's deputies, quite calmly and rationally, and then putting the phone down. Then going into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.
She opened the door again, prepared for the clunking sound this time but still wincing when it came. She cursed the dog in her heart, hoping it was already lying someplace dead of a convulsion, and fly-blown.
She swung her legs out, wincing at the stiffness and the pain. She put her tennis shoes on the gravel. And little by little she stood up under the darkling sky.
The bird sang somewhere nearby: it sang three notes and was still.
Cujo heard the door open again, as instinct had told him it would.
The first: time it opened he had almost come around from the front of the car where he had been lying in a semi-stupor. He had almost come around to get THE WOMAN who had caused this dreadful pain in his head and in his body. He had almost come around, but that instinct had commanded him to lie still instead. THE
WOMAN was only trying to draw him out, the instinct counseled, and this had proved to be true.
As the sickness had tightened down on him, sinking into his nervous system like a ravenous grassfire, all dove-gray smoke and low rose-colored flame, as it continued to go about its work of destroying his established patterns of thought and behaviour, it had somehow deepened his cunning. He was sure to get THE
WOMAN and THE Boy. They had caused his pain -both the agony in his body and the terrible hurt in his head which had come from leaping against the car again and again.
Twice today he had forgotten about THE WOMAN and THE
BOY, leaving the barn by the dog bolthole that Joe Camber had cut in the door of the back room where he kept his accounts. He had gone down to the marsh at the back of the Camber property, both times passing quite close to the overgrown entrance to the limestone cave where the bats roosted. There was water in the marsh and he was horribly thirsty, but the actual sight of the water had driven him into a frenzy both times. He wanted to drink the water; kill the water; bathe in the water; piss and shit in the water; cover it over with dirt; savage it; make it bleed. Both times this terrible confusion of feelings had driven him away, whining and trembling. THE WOMAN and THE Boy had made all this happen.
And he would leave them no more. No human who had ever lived would have found a dog more faithful or more set in his purpose.
