Free The Tommyknockers by Stephen King Page A

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 hesaw 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 Her water heater was slow, balky, sadly out of date.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