will,' Brett said, getting up, 'if you show me how.'

'What about you, Charity?'

Charity smiled. 'Not just now, I guess. I'll bein for some of the popcorn.'

Brett went out with his uncle. She sat on the sofa and looked at the telephone and thought of Brett night-walking, feeding a phantom dog phantom dogfood in her sister's modern kitchen.

Cujo's not hungry no more, not no more.

Her arms suddenly tightened, and she shivered. We're going to take care of this business tomorrow morning, she promised herself. One way or the other. Either that or go back and take care of it ourselves. That's a promise, Brett.

Vic tried home again at ten o'clock. There was no answer. He tried again at eleven o'clock and there was still no answer, although he let the phone ring two dozen times. At ten he was beginning to get scared. At eleven he was good and scared -of what, he was not precisely sure.

Roger was sleeping. Vic dialed the number in the dark, listened to it ring in the dark, hung up in the dark. He felt alone, childlike, lost. He didn't know what to do or what to think. Over and over his mind played a simple litany: She's gone off with Kemp, gone off with Kemp, gone off with Kemp.

All reason and logic was against it. He played over everything he and Donna had said to each other - he played it over again and again, listening to the words and to the nuances of tone in his mind. She and Kemp had had a falling out. She had told him to go peddle his papers somewhere else. And that had prompted Kemp's vengeful little billet doux. It did not seem the rosy scenery into which two mad lovers might decide to elope.

A failing out doesn't preclude a later rapprochement, his mind retorted with a kind of grave and implacable calm.

But what about Tad? She wouldn't have taken Tad with her, would she? From her description, Kemp sounded like some sort of wildman, and although Donna hadn't said so, Vic had gotten the feeling that something damned violent had almost happened on the day she told him to fuck off.

People in love do strange things.

That strange and jealous part of his mind - he hadn't even been aware of that part in him until that afternoon in Deering Oaks - had an answer for everything, and in the dark it didn't seem to matter that most of the answers were irrational.

He was doing a slow dance back and forth between two sharpened points: Kemp on one (DO YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS?); a vision of the telephone ringing on and on in their empty Castle Rock house on the other. She could have had an accident. She and Tad could be in hospital. Someone could have broken in. They could be lying murdered in their bedrooms. Of course if she'd had an accident, someone official would have been in touch -the office as well as Donna knew in which Boston hotel he and Roger were staying - but in the dark that thought, which should have been a comfort since no one had been in touch, only inclined his thoughts more toward murder.

Robbery and murder, his mind whispered as he lay awake in the dark. Then it danced slowly across to the other sharpened point and took up its original litany: Gone off with Kemp.

In between these points, his mind saw a more reasonable explanation, one that made him feel helplessly angry. Perhaps she and Tad had decided to spend the night with someone and had simply forgotten to call and tell him. Now it was too late to just start calling around and asking people without alarming them. He supposed he could call the sheriff's office and ask them to send someone up and check. But wouldn't that be overreacting?

No, his mind said.

Yes, his mind said, definitely.

She and Tad are both dead with knives stuck in their throats, his mind said. You read about it in the papers all the time. It even happened in Castle Rock just before we came to town. That crazy cop. That Frank Dodd.

Gone off with Kemp, his mind said.

At midnight he tried again, and this time the constant ringing of the phone with no one to pick it up froze him into a deadly certainty of trouble. Kemp, robbers, murderers, something. Trouble. Trouble at home.

He dropped the phone back into its cradle and turned on the bed lamp. 'Roger,' he said. 'Wake up.'

'Huh. Wuh. Hzzzzzz. . . .' Roger had his arm over his eyes, trying to block out the light. He was in his pajamas with the little yellow college pennants.

'Roger. Roger!'

Roger opened his eyes, blinked, looked at the Travel-Ette clock.

'Hey, Vic, it's the middle of the night.'

'Roger...' He swallowed and something clicked in his throat. 'Roger, it's midnight and Tad and Donna still aren't home. I'm scared.'

Roger sat up and brought the clock close to his face to verify what Vic had said. It was now four past the hour.

'Well, they probably got freaked out staying there by themselves, Vic. Sometimes Althea takes the girls and goes over to Sally Petrie's when I'm gone. She gets nervous when the wind blows off the lake at night, she says.'

'She would have called.' With the light on, with Roger sitting up and talking to him, the idea that Donna might have just run off with Steve Kemp seemed absurd -he couldn't believe he had even indulged it. Forget logic. She had told him it was over, and he had believed her. He believed her now.

'Called?' Roger said. He was still having trouble tracking things.

'She knows I call home almost every night when I'm awayShe would have called the hotel and left a message if she was going to be gone overnight. Wouldn't Althea?'

Roger nodded. 'Yeah. She would.'

'She'd call and leave a message so you wouldn't worry. Like I'm worrying now.'

'Yeah. But she might have just forgotten, Vic.' Still, Roger's brown eyes were troubled.

'Sure,' Vic said. 'On the other hand, maybe something's happened.'

'She carries ID, doesn't she) If she and Tad were in an accident, God forbid, the cops would try home first and then the office. The answering service would -'

'I wasn't thinking about an accident,' Vic said. 'I was thinking about . . .' His voice began to tremble. 'I was thinking about her and Tadder being there alone, and ... shit, I don't know ... I just got scared, that's all.'

'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? She didn't know.

Suddenly the car seemed to be shrinking. It was the size of a Honda, then the size of those strange little three-wheelers they used to give disabled people in England, then the size of an enclosed motorcycle sidecar, finally the size of a coffin. A double coffin for her and Tad. They had to get out, get out, get out

Her hand was fumbling for the doorhandle before she got hold of herself again. Her heart was racing, accelerating the thudding in her head. Please, she thought. It's bad enough without claustrophobia, so please ... please ... please.

Her thirst was back again, raging.

She looked out and Cujo stared implacably back at her, his body seemingly split in two by the silver crack running through the window.

Help us, someone, she thought. Please, please, help us.

Roscoe Fisher was parked back in the shadows of Jerry's Citgo when the call came in. He was ostensibly watching for speeders, but in actual fact he was cooping. At twelve thirty on a Wednesday morning, Route 117 was totally dead. He had a little alarm clock inside his skull, and he trusted it to wake him up around one, when the Norway Drive-In let out. Then there might be some action.

'Unit three, come in, unit three. Over.'

Roscoe snapped awake, spilling cold coffee in a Styrofoam cup down into his crotch.

'Oh shitfire,' Roscoe said dolefully. 'Now that's nice, isn't it? Kee-rist!'

'Unit three, you copy? Over?'

He grabbed the mike and pushed the button on the side. 'I copy, base.' He would have liked to have added that he hoped it was good because he was sitting with his balls in a puddle of cold coffee, but you never knew who was monitoring police calls on his or her trusty Bearcat scanner ... even at twelve thirty in the morning.

'Want you to take a run up to Eighty-three Larch Street,' Billy said. 'Residence of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Trenton. .Check the place out. Over.'

'What am I checking for, base? Over.'

'Trenton's in Boston and no one's answering his calls. He thinks someone should be home. Over.'

Well, that's wonderful, isn't it? Roscoe Fisher thought sourly. For this I got a four-buck cleaning bill, and if I do have to stop a speeder, the guy's going to think I got so excited at the prospect of a collar that I pissed myself.

'Ten-four and time out,' Roscoe said, starting his cruiser. 'Over.'

'I make it twelve thirty-four A.M.,' Billy said. 'There's a key hanging on a nail under the front porch eave, unit three. Mr. Trenton would like you to go right on inside and look around if the premises appear deserted. Over.'

'Roger, base. Over and out.'

'Out.'

Roscoe popped on his headlights and cruised down Castle Rock's deserted Main Street, past the Common and the bandstand with its conical green roof. He went up the hill and turned right on Larch Street near the top. The Trentons' was the second house from the corner, and he saw that in the daytime they would have a nice view of the town below. He pulled the Sheriff's Department Fury III up to the curb and got out, closing the door quietly. The street was dark, fast asleep.

He paused for a moment, pulling the wet cloth of his uniform trousers away from his crotch (grimacing as he did it), and then went up the driveway. The driveway was empty, and so was the small one-car garage at the end of it. He saw a Big Wheels trike parked inside. It was just like the one his own son had.

He closed the garage door and went around to the front porch. He saw that this week's copy of the Call was leaning against the porch door. Roscoe picked it up and tried the door. It was unlocked. He went onto the porch, feeling like an intruder. He tossed the paper on the porch glider and pushed the bell beside the inner door. Chimes went off in the house, but no one came. He rang twice more over a space of about three minutes, allowing for the time it would take the lady to wake up, put on a robe, and come downstairs ... if the lady was there.

When there was still no answer, he tried the door. It was locked.

Husband's away and she's probably staying over with friends, he thought - but the fact that she hadn't notified her husband also struck Roscoe Fisher as mildly strange.

He felt under the peaked eave, and his fingers knocked off the key Vic had hung up there not long after the Trentons had moved in. He took it down and unlocked the front door - if he had tried the kitchen door as Steve Kemp had that afternoon, he could have walked right in. Like most people in Castle Rock, Donna was slipshod about buttoning up when she went out.

Roscoe went in. He had his flashlight, but he preferred not to use it. That would have made him feel even more like an unlawful intruder - a burglar with a large coffee stain on his crotch. He felt for a switchplate and eventually found one with two switches. The top one turned on the porch light, and he turned that one off quickly. The bottom one turned on the living-room light.