Gerald's Game(19)
At first it turned to the right, in the direction of the kitchen. It was from this direction that the puffs of scent dispersed by the flapping door had come. The smells were dry but pleasant: peanut butter, Ry-Krisp crackers, raisins, cereal (this latter smell was drifting from a box of Special K in one of the cupboards-a hungry fieldmouse had gnawed a hole in the bottom of the box).
The dog took a step in that direction, then swung its head back the other way to make sure no master was creeping up on it masters most frequently shouted, but they could be sly, too. There was no one in the halfway leading down to the left, but the dog caught a much stronger scent coming from that direction, one that caused its stomach to cramp with terrible longing.
The dog stared down the hall, its eyes sparkling with a mad mixture of fear and desire, its snout wrinkled backward like a rumpled throw-rug, its long upper lip rising and falling in a nervous, spasmodic sneer that revealed its teeth in small white winks. A stream of anxious urine squirted from it and patterned on the floor, marking the front hall-and thus the whole house-as the dog's territory. This sound was too small and too brief for even Jessie's straining ears to catch.
What it smelled was blood. The scent was both strong and wrong. In the end, the dog's extreme hunger tipped the scales; it must eat soon or die. The former Prince began to walk slowly down the hall toward the bedroom. The smell grew stronger as it went. It was blood, all right, but it was the wrong blood. It was the blood of a master. Nevertheless, that smell, one far too rich and compelling to deny, had gotten into its small, desperate brain. The dog kept walking, and as it neared the bedroom door, it began to growl.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jessie heard the click of the dog's nails and understood it was indeed still in the house, and coming this way. She began to scream. She knew this was probably the worst thing a person could do-it went against all the advice she'd ever heard about never showing a potentially dangerous animal that you were afraid-but she couldn't help it. She had too good an idea of what was drawing the stray toward the bedroom.
She pulled her legs up, using the handcuffs to yank herself back against the headboard at the same time. Her eyes never left the door to the hallway as she did this. Now she could hear the dog growling. The sound made her bowels feel loose and hot and liquid.
It halted in the doorway. Here the shadows had already begun to gather, and to Jessie the dog was only a vague shape low to the floor-not a big one, but no toy poodle or Chihuahua, either. Two orange-yellow crescents of reflected sunlight marked its eyes.
"Go away!" Jessie screamed at it. "Go away! Get out! You're...you're not welcome here!" That was a ridiculous thing to say... but under the circumstances, what wasn't? I'll be asking it to fetch methe keys from the top of the bureau before you know it, she thought.
There was movement from the hindquarters of the shadowy shape in the doorway: it had begun to wag its tail. In some sentimental girl's novel, this probably would have meant the stray had confused the voice of the woman on the bed with the voice of some beloved but long-lost master. Jessie knew better. Dogs didn't just wag their tails when they were happy; they-like cats-also wagged them when they were indecisive, still trying to evaluate a situation. The dog had barely flinched at the sound of her voice, but it didn't quite trust the dim room, either. Not yet, at least.
The former Prince had yet to learn about guns, but it had learned a good many other hard lessons in the six weeks or so since the last day of August. That was when Mr Charles Sutlin, a lawyer from Braintree, Massachusetts, had turned it out in the woods to die rather than take it back home and pay a combined state and town dog-tax of seventy dollars. Seventy dollars for a pooch which was nothing but a Heinz Fifty-seven was a pretty tall set of tickets, in Charles Sutlin's opinion. A little too tall. He had bought a motor-sailer for himself only that June, granted, a purchase that was well up in the five-figure range, and you could claim there was some f**ked-up thinking going on if you compared the price of the boat and the price of the dog-tax-of course you could, anybody could, but that wasn't really the point. The point was that the motor-sailer had been a planned purchase. That particular acquisition had been on the old Sutlin drawing-board for two years or more. The dog, on the other band, was just a spur-of-the-moment buy at a roadside vegetable stand in Harlow. He never would have bought it if his daughter hadn't been with him and fallen in love with the pup. "That one, Daddy!" she'd said, pointing. "The one with the white spot on his nose-the one that's standing all by himself like a little prince." So he'd bought her the pup-no one ever said he didn't know how to make his little girl happy-but seventy bucks (maybe as much as a hundred if Prince was classified as a Class B, Larger Dog) was serious dough when you were talking about a mutt that had come without a single piece of paperwork. Too much dough, Mr Charles Sutlin had decided as the time to close up the cottage on the lake for another year began to approach. Taking it back to Braintree in the back seat of the Saab would also be a pain in the ass-it would shed everywhere, might even puke or take a shit on the carpeting. He could buy it a Vari Kennel, he supposed, but those little beauts started at $29.95 and worked up from there. A dog like Prince wouldn't be happy in a kennel, anyway. He would be happier running wild, with the whole north woods for his kingdom. Yes, Sutlin had told himself on that last day of August as he parked on a deserted stretch of Bay Lane and then coaxed the dog out of the back seat. Old Prince had the heart of a happy wanderer-you only had to take a good close look at him to see that. Sutlin wasn't a stupid man and part of him knew this was self-serving bullshit, but part of him was also exalted by the idea of it, and as he got back into his car and drove off, leaving Prince standing at the side of the road and looking after him, he was whistling the theme from Born Free, occasionally bursting into a snatch of the lyrics: "Booorn freeee... to follow your heaaaart!" He had slept well that night, not sparing a thought for Prince (soon to be the former Prince), who spent the same night curled up beneath a fallen tree, shivering and wakeful and hungry, whining with fear each time an owl hooted or an animal moved in the woods.