His eyes went automatically - unconsciously - to the door of his closet, but the problem wasn't there. The door was firmly latched, and since the Monster Words, it never came open. No, the something wrong was something else.
He didn't know exactly what it was, and wasn't sure he even wanted to know. But, Iike Brett Camber, he was already adept at reading the currents of the parental river upon which he floated. just lately he had gotten the feeling that there were black eddies, sandbars, maybe deadfalls hidden just below the surface. There could be rapids. A waterfall. Anything.
Things weren't right between his mother and father.
It was in the way they looked at each other. The way they talked to each other. It was on their faces and behind their faces. In their thoughts.
He finished changing a slant-parked row of trucks on one side of the room to bumper-to-bumper traffic on the other side and got up and went to the window. His knees hurt a little because he had been playing the no-name game for quite a while. Down below in the back yard his mother was hanging out clothes. Half an hour earlier she had tried to call the man who could fix the Pinto, but the man wasn't home. She waited a long time for someone to say hello and then slammed the phone down, mad. And his mom hardly ever got mad at little things like that.
As he watched, she finished hanging the first two sheets.
She looked at them ... and her shoulders kind of sagged. She went to stand by the apple tree beyond the double clothesline, and Tad knew from her posture-her legs spread, her head down, her shoulders in slight motion - that she was crying. He watched her for a little while and then crept back to his trucks. There was a hollow place in the pit of his stomach. He missed his father already, missed him badly, but this was worse.
He ran the trucks slowly back across the room, one by one, returning them to their slant-parked row. He paused once when the screen door slammed. He thought she would call to him, but she didn't. There was the sound of her steps crossing the kitchen, then the creak of her special chair in the living room as she sat down. But the TV didn't go on. He thought of her just sitting down there, just. . . sitting ... and dismissed the thought, quickly from his mind.
He finished the row of trucks. There was Greedo, his best, sitting in the cab of the dozer, looking blankly out of his round black eyes at the door of Tad's closet. His eyes were wide, as if he had seen something there, something so scary it had shocked his eyes wide,
something really gooshy, something horrible, something that was coming
Tad glanced nervously at the closet door. It was firmly latched.
Still he was tired of the game. He put the trucks back in his playchest, clanking them loudly on purpose so she would know he was getting ready to come down and watch Gunsmoke on Channel 8. He started for the door and then paused, looking at the Monster Words, fascinated.
Monsters, stay out of this room! You have no business here.
He knew them by heart. He liked to look at them, read them by rote, look at his daddy's printing.
Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this night.
You have no business here.
On a sudden, powerful impulse, he pulled out the pushpin that held the paper to the wall. He took the Monster Words carefully - almost reverently - down. He folded the sheet of paper up and put it carefully into the back pocket of his jeans. Then, feeling better than he had all day, he ran down the stairs to watch Marshal Dillon and Festus.
That last fellow had come and picked up his car at ten minutes of twelve. He had paid cash, which Joe had tucked away into his old greasy wallet, reminding himself to go down to the Norway Savings and pick up another five hundred before he and Gary took off.
Thinking of taking off made him remember Cujo, and the problem of who was going to feed him. He got into his Ford wagon and drove down to Gary Pervier's at the foot of the hill. He parked in Gary's driveway. He started up the porch steps, and the hail that had been rising in his throat died there. He went back down and bent over the steps.
There was blood there.
Joe touched it with his fingers. It was tacky but not completely dry. He stood up again, a little worried but not yet unduly so. Gary might have been drunk and stumbled with a glass in his hand. He wasn't really worried until he saw the way the rusty bottom panel of the screen door was crashed in.
'Gary?'
There was no answer. He found himself wondering if someone with a grudge had maybe come hunting ole Gary. Or maybe some tourist had come asking directions and Gary had picked the wrong day to tell someone he could take a flying fuck at the moon. .
He climbed the steps. There were more splatters of blood on the boards of the porch.
'Gary?' he called again, and suddenly wished for the weight of his shotgun cradled over his right arm. But if someone had punched Gary out, bloodied his nose, or maybe popped out a few of the old Pervert's remaining teeth, that person was gone now, because the only car in the yard other than Joe's rusty Ford LTD wagon was Gary's white '66 Chrysler hardtop. And You just didn't walk out to Town Road No. 3. Gary Pervier's was seven miles from town, two miles off the Maple Sugar Road that led back to Route 117.
More likely he just cut himself, Joe thought. But Christ, I hope it was just his hand he cut and not his throat.
Joe opened the screen door. It squealed on its hinges. 'Gary?'
Still no answer. There was a sickish-sweet smell in here that he didn't like. but at first he thought it was the honeysuckle. The stairs to the second floor went up on his left. Straight ahead was the hall to the kitchen, the living room doorway opening off the hall about halfway down on the right.
There was something on the hall floor but it was too dark for Joe to make it out. Looked like an endtable that had been knocked over, or something like that ... but so far as Joe knew, there wasn't now and never had been any furniture in Gary's front hall. He leaned his lawn chairs in here when it rained, but there hadn't been any rain for two weeks. Besides, the chairs had been out by Gary's Chrysler in their accustomed places. By the honeysuckle.
Only that smell wasn't honeysuckle. It was blood. A whole lot of blood. And that was no tipped-over endtable.
He hurried down to the shape, his heart hammering in his chest. He knelt by it, and a sound like a squeak escaped his throat Suddenly the air in the hall seemed too hot and dose.
It seemed to be strangling him. He turned away from Gary, one hand cupped over his mouth. Someone had murdered Gay. Someone had
He forced himself to look back. Gary lay in a pool of his own blood. His eyes glared sightlessly up at the hallway ceiling. His throat had been opened. Not 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