Free The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

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—plusads 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.
    â€œIt 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.

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4.
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THE DIG, CONTINUED
1
    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