The Tommyknockers Read Online Free PDF

time Anderson said, “No, Peter,” and pointed back at the house. Peter stopped, looking wounded. He whined and took a tentative step toward Anderson.
    â€œ No , Peter.”
    Peter gave in and headed back, head down, tail drooping dispiritedly. Anderson was sorry to see him go that way, but Peter’s previous reaction to the plate in the ground had been bad. She stood a moment longer on the path which would lead her to the woods road, spade in one hand, shovel and crowbar in the other, watching as Peter mounted the back steps, nosed open the back door, and went into the house.
    She thought: Something was different about him  . . . is different about him. What is it? She didn’t know. But for a moment, almost subliminally, her dream flickered back to her—that arrow of poisonous green light . . . and her teeth all falling painlessly out of her gums.
    Then it was gone and she set off toward the place where it was, that odd thing in the ground, listening to the crickets make their steady ree-ree-ree sound in thissmall back field which would soon be ready for its first cutting.
3
    At three that afternoon it was Peter who raised her from the semidaze in which she had been working, making her aware she was two damn-nears: damn-near starving and damn-near exhausted.
    Peter was howling.
    The sound raised gooseflesh on Anderson’s back and arms. She dropped the shovel she had been using and backed away from the thing in the earth—the thing that was no plate, no box, not anything she could understand. All she knew for sure was that she had fallen into a strange, thoughtless state she didn’t like at all. This time she had done more than lose track of time; she felt as if she had lost track of herself. It was as if someone else had stepped into her head the way a man would step into a bulldozer or a payloader, simply firing her up and starting to yank the right levers.
    Peter howled, nose pointing toward the sky—long, chilling, mournful sounds.
    â€œStop it, Peter!” Anderson yelled, and thankfully, Peter did. Any more of that and she might simply have turned and run.
    Instead, she fought for control and got it. She backed up another step and cried out when something flapped loosely against her back. At her cry, Peter uttered one more short, yipping sound and fell silent again.
    Anderson grabbed for whatever had touched her, thinking it might be . . . well, she didn’t know what she thought it might be, but even before her hand closed on it, she remembered what it was. She had a hazy memory of stopping just long enough to hang her blouse on a bush; here it was.
    She took it and put it on, getting the buttons wrong on the first try so that one tail hung down below the other. She rebuttoned it, looking at the dig she had begun—and now that archaeological word seemed to fit what she was doing exactly. Her memories of the four and a half hours she’d spent digging were like her memory of hanging herblouse on the bush—hazy and broken. They were not memories; they were fragments.
    But now, looking at what she had done, she felt awe as well as fear . . . and a mounting sense of excitement.
    Whatever it was, it was huge. Not just big, but huge.
    The spade, shovel, and crowbar lay at intervals along a fifteen-foot trench in the forest floor. She had made neat piles of black earth and chunks of rock at regular intervals. Sticking up from this trench, which was about four feet deep at the point where Anderson had originally stumbled over three inches of protruding gray metal, was the leading edge of some titanic object. Gray metal . . . some object . . .
    You’d ordinarily have a right to expect something better, more specific, from a writer, she thought, arming sweat from her forehead, but she was no longer sure the metal was steel. She thought now it might be a more exotic alloy, beryllium, magnesium, perhaps—and