The Tommyknockers by Stephen King

partridge or pheasant to inflict it on. Dr. Daggettwould 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.
    â€œThanks 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.
    â€œâ€”kind of you, but I think we ought to split. It soundslike 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—”
    â€œAll 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