Stephen King - The Tommyknockers

See, Anne, ole Bobbi didn't move up to Sticksville and go crazy; ole Bobbi moved up here and went sane. Insanity is limiting possibilities, Anne, can you dig it? Insanity is refusing to go down certain paths of speculation even though the logic is there… like a token for the turnstile. See what I mean? No? Of course you don't. You don't and you never did. Then go away, Anne. Stay in Utica and grind your teeth in your sleep until there's nothing left of them, make whoever is mad enough to stay within range of your voice crazy, be my guest, but stay out of my head.

The thing in the earth was a ship from space.

There. It was out. No more bullshit. Never mind Anne, never mind the Lubbock Lights or how the Air Force had closed its file on flying saucers. Never mind the chariots of the gods, or the Bermuda Triangle, or how Elijah was drawn up to heaven in a wheel of fire. Never mind any of it-her heart knew what her heart knew. It was a ship, and it had either landed or crash-landed a long time ago maybe millions of years ago.

God!

She lay in bed, hands behind her head. She was calm enough, but her heart was beating fast, fast, fast.

Then another voice, and this was the voice of her dead grandfather, repeating something Anne's voice had said earlier.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

That momentary vibration. Her earlier premonition, suffocating and positive, that she had found the edge of some weird steel coffin. Peter's reaction. Starting her period early, only spotting here at the farm but bleeding like a stuck pig when she was close to it. Losing track of time, sleeping the clock all the way around. And don't forget ole Chuck the Woodchuck. Chuck had smelled gassy and decomposed, but there were no flies. No flies on Chuck, you might say.

None of that shit adds up to Shinola. I'll buy the possibility of a ship in the earth because no matter how crazy it sounds at first, the logic's still there. But there's no logic to the rest of this stuff. they're loose beads rolling around on

the table. Thread them onto a string and maybe I'll buy it-I'll think about it, anyway. Okay?

Her grandfather's voice again, that slow, authoritative voice, the only one in the house that had always been able to strike Anne silent as a kid.

Those things all happened after you found it, Bobbi. That's your string.

No. Not enough.

Easy enough to talk back to her grandfather now; the man was sixteen years in his grave. But it was her grandfather's voice that followed her down to sleep, nevertheless.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

–and you know that, too.

She thought she had seen something different about Peter, but hadn't been able to tell exactly what it was. When Anderson woke up the next morning (at a perfectly normal nine o'clock) she saw it almost at once.

She stood at the counter, pouring Gravy Train into Peter's old red dish. As always, Peter came strolling in at the sound. The Gravy Train was fairly new; up until this year the deal had always been Gaines Meal in the morning, half a can of Rival canned dogfood at night, and everything Pete could catch in the woods in between. Then Peter had stopped eating the Gaines Meal and it had taken Anderson almost a month to catch on-Peter wasn't bored; what remained of his teeth simply couldn't manage to crunch up the nuggets anymore. So now he got Gravy Train… the equivalent, she supposed, of an old man's poached egg for breakfast.

She ran warm water over the Gravy Train nuggets, then stirred them with the old battered spoon she kept for the purpose. Soon the softening nuggets floated in a muddy liquid that actually did look like gravy… either that, Anderson thought, or something out of a backed-up septic tank.

“Here you go,” she said, turning away from the sink. Peter was now in his accustomed spot on the linoleum-a polite distance away so Anderson wouldn't trip over him when she turned around-and thumping his tail. “Hope you enjoy it. Myself, I think I'd ralph my g-”

That was where she stopped, bent over with Peter's red dish in her right hand, her hair falling over one eye. She brushed it away.

“Pete?” she heard herself say.

Peter looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then padded forward to get his morning kip. A moment later he was slurping it up enthusiastically.

Anderson straightened, looking at her dog, rather glad she could no longer see Peter's face. In her head her grandfather's voice told her again to leave it alone, it was dangerous, and did she need any more string for her beads?

There are about a million people in this country alone who would come running if they got wind of this kind of dangerous, Anderson thought. God knows how many in the rest of the world. And is that all it does? How is it on cancer, do you suppose?

All the strength suddenly ran out of her legs. She felt her way backward until she touched one of the kitchen chairs. She sat down and watched Peter eat.

The milky cataract which had covered his left eye was now half gone.

“I don't have the slightest idea,” the vet said that afternoon.

Anderson sat in the examining room's only chair while Peter sat obediently on the examining table. Anderson found herself remembering how she had dreaded the possibility of having to bring Peter to the vet's this summer… only now it didn't look as if Peter would have to be put down after all.

“But it isn't just my imagination?” Anderson asked, and she supposed that what she really wanted was for Dr Etheridge to either confirm or confute the Anne in her head: It's what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog…

“Nope,” Etheridge said, “although I can understand why you feel flummoxed. I feel a little flummoxed myself. His cataract is in active remission. You can get down, Peter.” Peter climbed down from the table, going first to Etheridge's stool and then to the floor and then to Anderson.

Anderson put her hand on Peter's head and looked closely at Etheridge, thinking: Did you see that? Not quite wanting to say it out loud. For a moment Etheridge met her eyes, and then he looked away. I saw it, yes, but I'm not going to admit that I saw it. Peter had gotten down carefully, in a descent that was miles from the devil-take-the-hindmost bounds of the puppy he had once been, but neither was it the trembling, tentative, wobbly descent Peter would have made even a week ago, cocking his head unnaturally to the right so he could see where he was going, his balance so vague that your heart stopped until he was down with no bones broken. Peter came down with the conservative yet solid confidence of the elder statesman he had been two or three years ago. Some of it, Anderson supposed, was the fact that the vision in his left eye was returning-Etheridge had confirmed that with a few simple perception tests. But the eye wasn't all of it. The rest was overall improved body coordination. Simple as that. Crazy, but simple.

And the shrinking cataract hadn't caused Pete's muzzle to return to saltand-pepper from an almost solid white, had it? Anderson had noticed that in the pickup truck as they headed down to Augusta. She had almost driven off the road.

How much of this was Etheridge seeing and not being prepared to admit he was seeing? Quite a bit, Anderson guessed, but part of it was just that Etheridge wasn't Doc Daggett.

Daggett had seen Peter at least twice a year during the first ten years of Peter's life… and then there were the things that came up, like the time Pete had mixed in with a porcupine, for instance, and Daggett had removed the quills, one by one, whistling the theme music from The Bridge on the

River Kwai as he did so, soothing the trembling year-old dog with one big, kindly hand. On another occasion Peter had come limping home with a backside full of birdshot-a cruel present from a hunter either too stupid to look before he shot or perhaps sadistic enough to inflict misery on a dog because he couldn't find a partridge or pheasant to inflict it on. Dr Daggett would have seen all the changes in Peter, and would not have been able to deny them even if he had wished to. Dr Daggett would have taken off his pink-rimmed glasses, polished them on his white coat, and said something like: We have to find out where he's been and what he's gotten into, Roberta. This is serious. Dogs don't just get younger, and that is what Peter appears to be doing. That would have forced Anderson to reply: I know where he's been, and I've got a pretty good idea of what did it. And that would have taken a lot of the pressure off, wouldn't it? But old Doc Daggett had sold the practice to Etheridge, who seemed nice enough, but who was still something of a stranger, and retired to Florida. Etheridge had seen Peter more often than Daggett had done-four times in the last year, as it happened-because as Peter grew older he had grown steadily more infirm. But he still hadn't seen him as often as his predecessor… and, she suspected, he didn't have his predecessor's clear-eyed perceptions, either. Or his guts.