The Tommyknockers (6 page)

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 first 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 even 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 salt-and-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. Or his guts.

From the ward behind them, a German shepherd suddenly exploded a string of heavy barks that sounded like a string of canine curses. Other dogs picked it up. Peter's ears cocked forward and he began to tremble under Anderson's hand. The Benjamin Button routine apparently hadn't done a thing for the beagle's equanimity, Anderson thought; once through his puppyhood storms, Peter had been so laid-back he was damn near paralytic. This high-strung trembling was brand-new.

Etheridge was listening to the dogs with a slight frown—now almost all of them were barking.

“Thanks for seeing us on such short notice,” Anderson said. She had to raise her voice to be heard. A dog in the waiting room also started to bark—the quick, nervous yappings of a very small animal . . . a Pom or a poodle, most likely. “It was very—” Her voice broke momentarily. She felt a vibration under her fingertips and her first thought

(the ship)

was of the thing in the woods. But she knew what this vibration was. Although she had felt it very, very seldom, there was no mystery about it.

This
vibration was coming from Peter. Peter was growling, very low and deep in his throat.

“—kind of you, but I think we ought to split. It sounds
like you've got a mutiny on your hands.” She meant it as a joke, but it no longer sounded like a joke. Suddenly the entire small complex—the cinderblock square that was Etheridge's waiting room and treatment room, plus the attached cinderblock rectangle that was his ward and operating theater—was in an uproar. All the dogs out back were barking, and in the waiting room the Pom had been joined by a couple of other dogs . . . and a feminine, wavering wail that was unmistakably feline.

Mrs. Alden popped in, looking distressed. “Dr. Etheridge—”

“All right,” he said, sounding cross. “Excuse me, Ms. Anderson.”

He left in a hurry, heading for the ward first. When he opened the door, the noise of the dogs seemed to double—
they're going bugshit,
Anderson thought, and that was all she had time to think, because Peter almost lunged out from under her hand. That idling growl deep in his throat suddenly roughened into a snarl. Etheridge, already hurrying down the ward's central corridor, dogs barking all around him and the door swinging slowly shut on its pneumatic elbow behind him, didn't hear, but Anderson did, and if she hadn't been lucky in her grab for Peter's collar, the beagle would have been across the room like a shot and into the ward after the doctor. The trembling and the deep growl . . . those hadn't been fear, she realized. They had been rage—it was inexplicable, completely unlike Peter, but that's what it had been.

Peter's snarl turned to a strangled sound—
yark
!—as Anderson pulled him back by the collar. He turned his head, and in Peter's rolling red-rimmed right eye Anderson saw what she would later characterize only as fury at being turned from the course he wanted to follow. She could acknowledge the possibility that there was a flying saucer three hundred yards around its outer rim buried on her property; the possibility that some emanation or vibration from this ship had killed a woodchuck that had the bad luck to get a little too close, killed it so completely and unpleasantly that even the flies seemingly wanted no part of it; she could deal with an anomalous menstrual period, a canine cataract in remission, even with the seeming certainty that her dog was somehow growing younger.

All this, yes.

But the idea that she had seen an insane hate for her, for Bobbi Anderson, in her good old dog Peter's eyes . . . no.

That
moment was thankfully brief. The door to the ward shut, muffling the cacophony. Some of the tenseness seemed to go out of Peter. He was still trembling, but at least he sat down again.

“Come on, Pete, we're getting out of here,” Anderson said. She was badly shaken—much more so than she would later admit to Jim Gardener. For to admit that would have perhaps led back to that furious leer of rage she had seen in Peter's good eye.

She fumbled for the unfamiliar leash which she had taken off Peter as soon as they got into the examination room (that dogs should be leashed when owners brought them in for examination was a requirement Anderson had always found annoying—until now), almost dropping it. At last she managed to attach it to Peter's collar.

She led Peter to the door of the waiting room and pushed it open with her foot. The noise was worse than ever. The yapper was indeed a Pomeranian, the property of a fat woman wearing bright yellow slacks and a yellow top. Fatso was trying to hold the Pom, telling it to “be a good boy, Eric, be a good boy for Mommy.” Very little save the dog's bright and somehow ratty eyes were visible between Mommy's large and flabby arms.

“Ms. Anderson—” Mrs. Alden began. She looked bewildered and a little frightened, a woman trying to conduct business as usual in a place that had suddenly become a madhouse. Anderson understood how she felt.

The Pom spotted Peter—Anderson would later swear that was what set it off—and seemed to go crazy. It certainly had no problem choosing a target. It sank its sharp teeth into one of Mommy's arms.

“Cocksucker!”
Mommy screamed, and dropped the Pom on the floor. Blood began to run down her arm.

At the same time, Peter lunged forward, barking and snarling, fetching up at the end of the short leash hard enough to jerk Anderson forward. Her right arm flagged
out straight. With the clear eye of her writer's mind Anderson saw exactly what was going to happen next. Peter the beagle and Eric the Pom were going to meet in the middle of the room like David and Goliath. But the Pom had no brains, let alone a sling. Peter would tear its head off with one large chomp.