Donna fumbled for the ignition switch and turned it from ON to START. The motor began to rum over again, but this time it didn't catch. She could hear a harsh panting sound in her own ears and didn't realize for several seconds that she was making the sound herself - in some vauge way she had the idea that it must be the dog. She ground the starter, grimacing horribly, ;wearing at it, oblivious of Tad, using words she had hardly known she knew. And A the time Cujo stood there, trailing his shadow from his heels like some surreal funeral drape, watching.
At last he lay down in the driveway, as if deciding there was no chance for them to escape. She hated it more than she had when it had tried to force its way in through Tad's window.
'Mommy ... Mommy ... Mommy!'
From far away. Unimportant. What was important now was this goddamned sonofabitching little car. It was going to start. She was going to make it start by pure ... force... of will!
She had no idea how long, in real time, she sat hunched over the wheel with her hair hanging in her eyes, futilely grinding the starter. What at last broke through to her was not Tad's cries - they had trailed off to whimpers - but the sound of the engine. It would crank briskly for five seconds, then lag off, then crank briskly for another five, then lag off again. A longer lag each time, it seemed.
She was killing the battery.
She stopped.
She came out of it a little at a time, like a woman coming out of a faint. She remembered a bout of gastroenteritis she'd had in college - everything inside her had either come up by the elevator or dropped down the chute - and near the end of it she had grayed out in one of the dorm toilet stalls. Coming back had been like this, as if you were the same but some invisible painter was adding color to the world, bringing it first up to full and then to overfull. Colors shrieked at you. Everything looked plastic and phony, like a display in a department store window -SWING INTO SPRING, perhaps, or READY FOR THE FIRST KICKOFF.
Tad was cringing away from her, his eyes squeezed shut, the thumb of one hand in his mouth. The other hand was pressed against his hip pocket, where the Monster Words were. His respiration was shallow and rapid.
'Tad,' she said. 'Honey, don't worry.'
'Mommy, are you all right?' His voice was little more than a husky whisper.
'Yeah. So are you. At least we're safe. This old car will go. just wait and see.'
'I thought you were mad at me.'
She took him in her arms and hugged him tight. She could smell sweat in his hair and the lingering undertone of Johnson's No More Tears shampoo. She thought of that bottle sitting safely and sanely on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. If only she could touch it! But all that was here was that faint, dying perfume.
'No, honey, not at you,' she said. 'Never at you.'
Tad hugged her back. 'He can't get us in here, can he?'
'No.'
'He can't ... he can't eat his way in, can he?'
'No.'
'I hate him,' Tad said reflectively. 'I wish he'd die.'
'Yes. Me too.'
She looked out the window and saw that the sun was getting ready to go down. A superstitious dread settled into her at the thought. She remembered the childhood games of hide-and-seek that had always ended when the shadows joined each other and grew into purple lagoons, that mystic call drifting through the suburban streets of her childhood, talismanic and distant, the high voice of a child announcing suppers that were ready, doors ready to be shut against the night:
'Alleee-alleee-infree! Alleee-alleee-infree!'
The dog was watching her. It was crazy, but she could no longer doubt it. Its mad, senseless eyes were fixed unhesitatingly on hers.
No, you're imagining it. It's only a dog, and a sick dog at that. Things are bad enough without you seeing something in that dog's eyes that can't be there.
She told herself that. A few minutes later she told herself that Cujo's eyes were like the eyes of some portraits which seem to follow you wherever you move in the room where they are hung.
But the dog was looking at her. And ... and there was something familiar about it.
No, she told herself, and tried to dismiss the thought, but it was too late
You've seen him before, haven't you? The morning after Tad bad the first of his bad dreams, the morning that the blankets and sheets were back on the chair, his Teddy on top of them, and for a moment when you opened the closet door YOU only saw a slumped shape with red eyes, something in Tad's closet ready to spring, it was him, it was Cujo, Tad was right all along, only the monster wasn't in his closet... it was out here. It was
(stop it)
out here just waiting to
(! YOU STOP IT DONNA!)
She stared at the dog and imagined she could bear its thoughts. Simple thoughts. The same simple pattern, repeated over and over in spite of the whirling boil of its sickness and delirium.
Kill THE WOMAN Kill THE BOYWOMAN. Kill THE WOMAN Kill -Stop it, she commanded herself roughly. It doesn't think and it's not some goddamned bogeyman out of a child's closet. It's a
sick dog and that's all it is. Next you'll believe the dog is God's punishment for committing
Cujo suddenly got up -almost as if she had called him - and disappeared into the barn again.
(almost as if I called it)
She uttered a shaky, semi-hysterical laugh.
Tad looked up. 'Mommy?'
'Nothing, hon.'
She looked at the dark maw of the garage-barn, then at the back door of the house. Locked? Unlocked? Locked? Unlocked? She thought of a coin rising in the air, flipping over and over. She thought of whirling the chamber drum of a pistol, five holes empty, one full. Locked? Unlocked
The sun went down, and what was left of the day was a white line painted on the western horizon. It looked no thicker than the white stripe painted down the center of the highway. That would be gone soon enough. Crickets sang in the high grass to the right of the driveway, making a mindlessly cheerful rickety-rickety sound.
Cujo was still in the barn. Sleeping? she wondered. Eating?
That made her remember that she had packed them some food. She crawled between the two front buckets and got the Snoopy lunchbox and her own brown bag. Her Thermos had rolled all the way to the back, probably when the car had started to buck and jerk coming up the road. She had to stretch, her blouse coming untucked, before she could hook it with her fingers. Tad, who had been in a half doze, stirred awake. His voice was immediately filled with a sharp fright that made her hate the damned dog even more.