The Tommyknockers (8 page)

“Do you mind, Peter?”

Peter gave a little ground . . . and then crowded up to Anderson's ankles again, when thunder cannonaded hard enough to rattle the windows. As Anderson got back to her chair, lightning sheeted blue-white and the phone tinged. The wind began to rise, making the trees rustle and sigh.

Peter sat hard by the rocker, looking up at Anderson pleadingly.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Come on up, jerk.”

Peter didn't have to be asked twice. He sprang into Anderson's lap, getting her crotch a pretty good one with one forepaw. He always seemed to whang her there or on one boob; he didn't aim—it was just one of those mysterious things, like the way elevators invariably stopped at every floor when you were in a hurry. If there was a defense, Bobbi Anderson had yet to find it.

Thunder tore across the sky. Peter crowded against her. His smell
—Eau de Beagle
—filled Anderson's nose.

“Why don't you just jump down my throat and have done with it, Pete?”

Peter grinned his shamefaced grin, as if to say
I know it, I know it, don't rub it in.

The wind rose. The lights began to flicker, a sure sign that Roberta Anderson and Central Maine Power were about to bid each other a fond adieu . . . at least until three or four in the morning. Anderson laid the thesis aside and put her arm around her dog. She didn't really mind the occasional summer storm, or the winter blizzards, for that matter. She liked their big power. She liked the sight and sound of that power working on the land in its crude and blindly positive way. She sensed insensate compassion in the workings of such storms. She could feel this one working inside her—the hair on her arms and the nape of her neck stirred, and a particularly close shot of lightning left her feeling almost galvanized with energy.

She remembered an odd conversation she'd once had with Jim Gardener. Gard had a steel plate in his skull, a souvenir of a skiing accident that had almost killed him at the age of seventeen. Gardener had told her that once, while changing a light bulb, he had gotten a hell of a shock by inadvertently sticking his forefinger into the socket. This was hardly uncommon; the peculiar part was that, for the next week, he had heard music and announcers and newscasts in his head. He told Anderson he had really believed for a while he was going crazy. On the fourth day of this, Gard had even identified the call letters of the station he was receiving: WZON, one of Bangor's three AM radio stations. He had written down the names of three songs in a row and then called the station to see if they had indeed played those songs—plus
ads for Sing's Polynesian Restaurant, Village Subaru, and the Bird Museum in Bar Harbor. They had.

On the fifth day, he said, the signal started to fade, and two days later it was gone entirely.

“It was that damned skull plate,” he had told her, rapping his fist gently on the scar by his left temple. “No doubt about it. I'm sure thousands would laugh, but in my own mind I'm completely sure.”

If someone else had told her the story, Anderson would have believed she was having her leg pulled, but Jim hadn't been kidding—you looked in his eyes and you knew he wasn't.

Big storms had big power.

Lightning flared in a blue sheet, giving Anderson a shutter-click of what she had come to think of—as her neighbors did—as her dooryard. She saw the truck, with the first drops of rain on its windshield; the short dirt driveway; the mailbox with its flag down and tucked securely against its aluminum side; the writhing trees. Thunder exploded a bare moment later, and Peter jumped against her, whining. The lights went out. They didn't bother dimming or flickering or messing around; they went out all at once, completely. They went out with
authority.

Anderson reached for the lantern—and then her hand stopped.

There was a green spot on the far wall, just to the right of Uncle Frank's Welsh dresser. It bobbed up two inches, moved left, then right. It disappeared for a moment and then came back. Anderson's dream recurred with all the eerie power of
déjà vu.
She thought again of the lantern in Poe's story, but mixed in this time was another memory:
The War of the Worlds.
The Martian heat-ray, raining green death on Hammersmith.

She turned toward Peter, hearing the tendons in her neck creak like dirty door hinges, knowing what she was going to see. The light was coming from Peter's eye. His left eye. It glared with the witchy green light of St. Elmo's fire drifting over a swamp after a still, muggy day.

No . . . not the
eye.
It was the
cataract
that was glowing . . . at least, what remained of the cataract. It had gone back noticeably even from that morning at the vet's office. That side of Peter's face was lit with a lurid green light, making him look like a comic-book monstrosity.

Her first impulse was to get away from Peter, dive out of the chair and simply run . . .

. . . but this
was
Peter, after all. And Peter was scared to death already. If she deserted him, Peter would be terrified.

Thunder cracked in the black. This time both of them jumped. Then the rain came in a great sighing sheetlike rush. Anderson looked back at the wall across the room again, at the green splotch bobbing and weaving there. She was reminded of times she had lain in bed as a child, using the watchband of her Timex to play a similar spot off the wall by moving her wrist.

And by the way, what's it doing to
you,
Bobbi?

Green sunken fire in Peter's eye, taking away the cataract. Eating it. She looked again, and had to restrain herself from jerking back when Peter licked her hand.

That night Bobbi Anderson slept hardly at all.

When Anderson finally woke up, it was almost ten
A.M.
and most of the lights in the place were on—Central Maine Power had gotten its shit together again, it seemed. She walked around the place in her socks, turning off lights, and then looked out the front window. Peter was on the porch. Anderson let him in and looked closely at his eye. She could remember her terror of the night before, but in this morning's bright summer daylight, terror had been supplanted by fascination.
Anyone
would have been scared, she thought, seeing something like that in the dark, with the power out, and a thunderstorm stomping the earth and the sky outside.

Why in hell didn't Etheridge see this?

But that was easy. The dials of radium watches glow in the day as well as in the dark; you just can't see the glow in bright light. She was a little surprised she had missed the green glow in Peter's eye on the previous nights, but hardly flabbergasted . . . after all, it had taken her a couple of days to even realize the cataract was shrinking. And yet . . . Etheridge had been
close,
hadn't he? Etheridge had been right in there with the old ophthalmoscope, looking into Peter's eye.

He had agreed with Anderson that the cataract was shrinking . . . but hadn't mentioned any glow, green or otherwise.

Maybe he saw it and decided to unsee it. The way he
saw Peter was looking younger and decided he didn't see that. Because he didn't
want
to see that.

There was a part of her that didn't like the new vet a whole hell of a lot; she supposed it was because she had liked old Doc Daggett so much and had made that foolish (but apparently unavoidable) assumption that Daggett would be around as long as she and Peter were. But it was a silly reason to feel hostility toward the old man's replacement, and even if Etheridge had failed (or refused) to see Peter's apparent age regression, that didn't change the fact that he seemed a perfectly competent vet.

A cataract that glowed green . . . she didn't think he would have ignored something like that.

Which led her to the conclusion that the green glow hadn't been there for Etheridge to see.

At least, not right away.

There hadn't been any big hooraw right away, either, had there? Not when they came in. Not during the exam. Only when they were getting ready to go out.

Had Peter's eye started to glow then?

Anderson poured Gravy Train into Peter's dish and stood with her left hand under the tap, waiting for the water to come in warm so she could wet it down. The wait kept getting longer and longer. Her water heater was slow, balky, sadly out of date. Anderson had been meaning to have it replaced—would certainly have to do so before cold weather—but the only plumber in either Haven or the rural towns to Haven's immediate north and south was a rather unpleasant fellow named Delbert Chiles, who always looked at her as if he knew
exactly
what she would look like with her clothes off
(not much,
his eyes said,
but I guess it'd do in a pinch)
and always wanted to know if Anderson was “writing any new books lately.” Chiles liked to tell her that he could have been a damned good writer himself, but he had too much energy and “not enough glue on the seat of my pants, get me?” The last time she'd been forced to call him had been when the pipes burst in the minus-twenties cold snap winter before last. After he set things to rights, he had asked her if she would like “to go steppin” sometime. Anderson declined politely, and Chiles tipped her a wink that aspired to worldly wisdom and made it almost to informed vacuity. “You don't know what you're missin, sweetie,” he said.
I'm pretty sure I do, which is why I said no
had come to her lips, but she said nothing—as little as she liked him, she had known she might need Chiles again sometime. Why was it the really good zingers only came immediately to mind in real life when you didn't dare use them?

You could do something about that hot-water heater, Bobbi,
a voice in her mind spoke up, one that she couldn't identify. A
stranger's
voice in her head? Oh golly, should she call the cops?
But you could,
the voice insisted.
All you'd need to do would be
—

But then the water started to come in warm—tepid, anyway—and she forgot about the water heater. She stirred the Gravy Train, then set it down and watched Peter eat. He was showing a much better appetite these days.

Ought to check his teeth,
she thought.
Maybe you can go back to Gaines Meal. A penny saved is a penny earned, and the American reading public is not exactly beating a path to your door, babe. And—

And exactly when
had
the uproar in the clinic started?

Anderson thought about this carefully. She couldn't be completely sure, but the more she thought about it the more it seemed that it might have been—not for sure, but
might
have been—right after Dr. Etheridge finished examining Peter's cataract and put down the ophthalmoscope.

Attend, Watson,
the voice of Sherlock Holmes suddenly spoke up in the quick, almost urgent speech rhythms of Basil Rathbone.
The eye glows. No . . . not the
eye;
the
cataract
glows. But Anderson does not observe it, although she should. Etheridge does not observe it, and he
definitely
should. May we say that the animals at the veterinary clinic do not become upset until Peter's cataract begins to glow . . . until, we might further theorize, the healing process has resumed? Possibly. That the glow is seen only when being seen is safe? Ah, Watson, that is an assumption as frightening as it is unwarranted. Because that would indicate some sort of—

—some sort of intelligence.

Anderson didn't like where this was leading and tried to choke it off with the old reliable advice: Let it go.

This time it worked.

For a while.

Anderson wanted to go out and dig some more.

Her forebrain didn't like that idea at all.

Her forebrain thought that idea sucked.

Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.

Right.

And by the way, what's it doing to
you?

Nothing she could
see.
But you couldn't see what cigarette smoke did to your lungs, either; that's why people went on smoking. It could be that her liver was rotting, that the chambers of her heart were silting up with cholesterol or that she had rendered herself barren. For all she knew her bone marrow might be producing outlaw white cells like mad right this minute. Why settle for an early period when you could have something
really
interesting like leukemia, Bobbi?

But she wanted to dig it up just the same.

This urge, simple and elemental, had nothing to do with her forebrain. It came baking up from someplace deeper inside. It had all the earmarks of some physical craving—for salt, for some coke or heroin or cigarettes or coffee. Her forebrain supplied logic; this other part supplied an almost incoherent imperative:
Dig on it, Bobbi, it's okay, dig on it, dig on it, shit, why not dig on it awhile more, you know you want to know what it is, so dig on it till you
see
what it is, dig dig dig
—

She was able to turn the voice off by conscious effort and would then realize fifteen minutes later she had been listening to it again, as if to a Delphic oracle.

You've got to tell somebody what you've found.

Who? The police? Huh-uh. No way. Or
—

Or who?

She was in her garden, madly weeding . . . a junkie in withdrawal.

—or anyone in authority,
her mind finished.

Her right-brain supplied Anne's sarcastic laughter, as she had known it would . . . but the laughter didn't have as much force as she had feared. Like a good many of her generation, Anderson didn't put a great deal of stock in “let the authorities handle it.” Her distrust in the way the authorities handled things had begun at the age of thirteen, in Utica. She had been sitting on the sofa in
their living room with Anne on one side and her mother on the other. She had been eating a hamburger and watching the Dallas police escort Lee Harvey Oswald across an underground parking garage. There were lots of Dallas police. So many, in fact, that the TV announcer was telling the country that someone had shot Oswald before all those police—all those people in authority—seemed to have the slightest inkling something had gone wrong, let alone what it was.