Stephen King - Under the Dome

“I have an idea about that.”

“Should I ask?”

He smiled. “Probably not. It’s pretty crazy.”

She twined her fingers through his. “Be careful.”

He kissed her lightly. “You too.”

They looked at Jackie pushing the girls on the swings. They had a lot to be careful for. All the same, Rusty thought that risk was coming into his life as a major factor. If, that was, he wanted to be able to continue looking at his reflection when he took his morning shave.

Horace the Corgi liked peoplefood.

In fact, Horace the Corgi loved peoplefood. Being a little over-weight (not to mention a little gray about the muzzle in these latter years), he wasn’t supposed to have it, and Julia had been good about stopping the table feeding after the vet had told her bluntly that her generosity was shortening her housemate’s life. That conversation had taken place sixteen months ago; since then Horace had been restricted to Bil-Jac and the occasional dietetic dog treat. The treats resembled Styrofoam packing-poppers, and judging from the reproachful way Horace looked at her before eating them, she guessed they probably tasted like packing-poppers, too. But she stuck to her guns: no more fried chicken skin, no more Cheez Doodles, no more bites of her morning doughnut.

This limited Horace’s intake of verboten comestibles, but did not entirely end it; the imposed diet simply reduced him to foraging, which Horace rather enjoyed, returning him as it did to the hunting nature of his foxy forebears. His morning and evening walks were especially rich in culinary delights. It was amazing what people left in the gutters along Main Street and West Street, which formed his usual walkie-walk route. There were french fries, potato chips, discarded peanut butter crackers, the occasional ice cream bar wrapper with some chocolate still adhering to it. Once he came upon an entire Table Talk pie. It was out of its dish and in his stomach before you could say cholesterol.

He didn’t succeed in snarking all the goodies he came upon; sometimes Julia saw what he was after and jerked him along on his leash before he could ingest it. But he got a lot, because Julia often walked him with a book or a folded copy of the New York Times in one hand. Being ignored in favor of the Times wasn’t always good—when he wanted a thorough belly-scratch, for instance—but during walkies, ignorance was bliss. For small yellow Corgis, ignorance meant snacks.

He was being ignored this morning. Julia and the other woman—the one who owned this house, because her smell was all over it, especially in the vicinity of the room where humans went to drop their scat and mark their territory—were talking. Once the other woman cried, and Julia hugged her.

“I’m better, but not all better,” Andrea said. They were in the kitchen. Horace could smell the coffee they were drinking. Cold coffee, not hot. He could also smell pastries. The kind with icing. “I still want it.” If she was talking about pastries with icing, so did Horace.

“The craving may go on for a long time,” Julia said, “and that’s not even the important part. I salute your courage, Andi, but Rusty was right—cold turkey is foolish and dangerous. You’re damn lucky you haven’t had a convulsion.”

“For all I know, I have.” Andrea drank some of her coffee. Horace heard the slurp. “I’ve been having some damned vivid dreams. One was about a fire. A big one. On Halloween.”

“But you’re better.”

“A little. I’m starting to think I can make it. Julia, you’re welcome to stay here with me, but I think you could find a better place. The smell —”

“We can do something about the smell. We’ll get a battery-powered fan from Burpee’s. If room and board is a firm offer—one that includes Horace—I’ll take you up on it. No one trying to kick an addiction should have to do it on her own.”

“I don’t think there’s any other way, hon.”

“You know what I mean. Why did you do it?”

“Because for the first time since I got elected, this town might need me. And because Jim Rennie threatened to withhold my pills if I objected to his plans.”

Horace tuned the rest of this out. He was more interested in a smell wafting to his sensitive nose from the space between the wall and one end of the couch. It was on this couch that Andrea liked to sit in better (if considerably more medicated) days, sometimes watching shows like The Hunted Ones (a clever sequel to Lost ) and Dancing with the Stars, sometimes a movie on HBO. On movie nights she often had microwave popcorn. She’d put the bowl on the endtable. Because stoners are rarely neat, there was a scattering of popcorn down there below the table. This was what Horace had smelled.

Leaving the women to their blah, he worked his way under the little table and into the gap. It was a narrow space, but the endtable formed a natural bridge and he was a fairly narrow dog, especially since going on the Corgi version of WeightWatchers. The first kernels were just beyond the VADER file, lying there in its manila envelope. Horace was actually standing on his mistress’s name (printed in the late Brenda Perkins’s neat hand) and hoovering up the first bits of a surprisingly rich treasure trove, when Andrea and Julia walked back into the living room.

A woman said, Take that to her.

Horace looked up, his ears pricking. That was not Julia or the other woman; it was a deadvoice. Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded them every minute of every day.

Take that to Julia, she needs it, it’s hers.

That was ridiculous. Julia would never eat anything that had been in his mouth, Horace knew this from long experience. Even if he pushed it out with his snout she wouldn’t eat it. It was peoplefood, yes, but now it was also floorfood.

Not the popcorn. The —

“Horace?” Julia asked in that sharp voice that said he was being bad—as in Oh you bad dog, you know better, blah-blah-blah. “What are you doing back there? Come out.”

Horace threw it in reverse. He gave her his most charming grin—gosh, Julia, how I love you—hoping that no popcorn was stuck to the end of his nose. He’d gotten a few pieces, but he sensed the real motherlode had escaped him.

“Have you been foraging?”

Horace sat, looking up at her with the proper expression of adoration. Which he did feel; he loved Julia very much.

“A better question would be what have you been foraging?” She bent to look into the gap between the couch and the wall.

Before she could, the other woman began to make a gagging noise. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to stop a shivering fit, but was unsuccessful. Her smell changed, and Horace knew she was going to yark. He watched closely. Sometimes peopleyark had good things in it.

“Andi?” Julia asked. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question, Horace thought. Can’t you smell her? But that was a stupid question, too. Julia could hardly smell herself when she was sweaty.

“Yes. No. I shouldn’t have eaten that raisin bun. I’m going to—” She hurried out of the room. To add to the smells coming from the piss-and-scat place, Horace assumed. Julia followed. For a moment Horace debated squeezing back under the table, but he smelled worry on Julia and hurried at her heels instead.

He had forgotten all about the deadvoice.

Rusty called Claire McClatchey from the car. It was early, but she answered on the first ring, and he wasn’t surprised. No one in Chester’s Mill was getting much sleep these days, at least not without pharmacological assistance.