The Wells of Hell (8 page)

‘Smell?’ asked Carter.

‘
That smell
of bad fish. Hasn’t it hit you?’

I
was living, temporarily, in a
stone-and-weatherboard weekend house just outside of New Milford, on the back
road to New Preston. The house belonged to my lawyer, the same lawyer who had
handled my divorce for me, but he rarely came up from the city these days, not
since he’d broken up with his mistress. I used to live over a macrame and
pottery store just across from the foodliner store in the centre of New
Milford, but the lease had expired and the landlord had wanted the place for his
aged sister. Shelley and I, rather than argue, had packed our bags and our
ballcocks and our lengths of piping, and moved out.

Still, Shelley liked it out at New
Preston. There was a small farm right opposite, where black-and-white cows
grazed in the foggy fall mists and that meant there were plenty of mice to be
played with. And the place was quiet, too. So quiet that you could step out of
the back door at night and take a deep breath of that chilly Connecticut air,
and hear nothing at all but scurrying leaves.

I didn’t get back to the house until
it was almost dawn. I parked the Country Squire on the sloping driveway, and
climbed tiredly out. Shelley stretched himself out like a watch-spring, and
climbed after me. I’d named him Shelley after the poet Shelley, who had
written: ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep!’ It never took a
genius to figure out why.

It was cold in the hallway when I
opened the front door. The log fire had long since died away, and there was
nothing in the hearth but a pile of grey ashes. I kept on my red baseball cap
and my sheepskin coat while I shovelled the ashes away, and stacked fresh logs
on the firedogs. I crumpled up a copy of the New Milford paper and put a match
to it. Shelley watched me from the sofa with an expression of haughty
impatience.

Next, I went into the kitchen, which
looked out over the sloping back yard, and put on the kettle. I needed a cup of
coffee and a dose of Jack Daniel’s. I stood by the window staring out at the
grey and unwelcoming dawn, and thought about poor young Oliver Bodine and his
missing parents.

Carter Wilkes had put out an alert
for Jimmy and Alison, and he had distributed their description to the
volunteers who were already searching for Paul Denton. He had also sent his
deputies around, knocking on doors and instructing people around the New
Milford and Washington Depot area not to drink their own well water. There was
going to.be radio and television
bulletins,
too,
although all that Carter had told the news services so far was that the danger
came from a possible sewerage leak. As for Oliver’s death and Jimmy and
Alison’s disappearance, he had played those completely straight. Oliver had
died ‘in a-domestic accident’, and Jimmy and Alison were being sought ‘in order
to aid police inquiries’.

Carter had made no public mention of
the crustaceous growth on Oliver’s back and thighs, neither had he given the
Press any leads on Dan’s investigations of the mouse and the Bodine well water.
‘The last thing I want around here is a goddamned flying-saucer panic,’ he had
remarked.

The coroner’s
office,
who were
going to perform a full-scale autopsy on young Oliver’s body,
were also keeping tight-lipped. The medical investigator there was a quiet,
grey-haired man called Jack Newsom, and he had always expressed
a distaste
for publicity and pyrotechnics.

Lawrence Dunn felt the same way, and
that meant Oliver’s death would remain confidential until Sheriff Wilkes wanted
to make a full-scale announcement.

It was just as well. It was going to
shake New Milford rigid, knowing that their drinking water might turn them
scaley as lobsters. It was as much as I could do to believe it myself, and I’d
stood right there and seen young Oliver’s body.

The kettle boiled and I made myself
a jug of coffee. When it had brewed I took down a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from
the kitchen cupboard and poured a couple of fingers into the bottom of a mug.
Then I topped it up with coffee, gave it a stir, and went through into the
living-room to sit down beside Shelley and watch the log fire burn up. I felt
chilled and exhausted and just about ready to join Shelley in a long sleep.

I was almost dozing off when the
telephone rang. I yawned, stretched my face, and got up to answer it. I said:
‘Who is it?’ and took a Hetty mouthful of coffee and whisky.

‘It’s Dan,’ said Dan. ‘I’m back at
the laboratory. I’ve been running some more tests on that water.’

‘Have you had any sleep yet?’

‘Who needs sleep? This is
important.’

I yawned again. ‘Okay, it’s
important. What have you found out?’

Dan said: ‘I ran some dating tests
on the water and the organisms in it. I got Rheta in to help me, and we must
have gone through twenty or thirty tests, just to make absolutely sure.’

‘So? What does that do?’

‘A dating test tells me the age of
the organic material in the water, and that gives me a pretty clear idea about
the depth from which it’s risen out of the ground. If, for instance, the
organic material is seven to eight thousand years old, then it probably
originates from the deciduous forest layer which you can find about twenty feet
under the surface. See what I mean?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The older it
is,
the deeper down it originates. So how old is the stuff
in the Bodines’ water?’

Dan paused. ‘Would you believe two
million years?
Or thereabouts, anyway.’

‘Two million years? You mean the
organic stuff in that water is prehistoric?’

‘That’s right. We’ve checked, and
there’s no mistake. That water must have come up from subterranean sources more
than a mile and a half under the surface.’

I finished my coffee and whisky, and
coughed. ‘That’s ridiculous. Their well isn’t more than a hundred feet deep, if
that.’

‘The tests are conclusive.’

‘Okay, they’re conclusive. But what
do they prove? So the Bodines drank some very old water.

Where does that leave us?’

Dan said patiently: ‘I don’t think
you’re following me. The organisms in that water are also two million years
old.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The little
squiggly creatures.
I’ve tested the fluid that comes out of them, and I’ve tested their own
organic fabric. The results are always the same. I’m sending a small sample
over to the radio-carbon laboratory at White Plains, just to make doubly sure,
but I don’t think there’s any room for doubt. They’re two million years old.’

I closed my eyes. It was all getting
too much for me. ‘Listen, Dan,’ I said tiredly, ‘how can anything
be
two million years old and still be living? Those
organisms don’t even have beards.’

‘All the same, it’s true. They’re
living fossils. Rheta’s checking up now, to see if we can relate them to any
known prehistoric species.’

I was silent for a long time.
Standing there listening to Dan on the telephone, I suddenly felt tired and
lonesome and mystified by everything that had happened in the past twelve
hours. I was frightened, too, to tell you the God’s-honest truth. I kept
thinking about Oliver’s scales, and the bony carapace in the bathtub, and the
shuffling hulking figure I had seen disappearing over by the Bodines’ fence.

Dan said: ‘I think we’re going to
have to make some more tests, Mason, and maybe dig down into the well itself.
That water’s coming up from some-place, and for the public’s protection I need
to know where. Maybe you’d like to come out with us later this afternoon and
give us some help. I’ve already advised Carter, and he’s going to give us all
the co-operation we need.’

‘What time would you like me to be
there?’ I asked him.

‘Get some sleep first. I’m going to,
just as soon as I’ve finished up here. Make it two-thirty, up at the house.’

‘All right,’ I said, and put the
phone down. I looked across at Shelley and he squeezed his eyes closed, as if
he was bored with the whole business.

‘It’s no good looking like that,’ I
said, walking through to the bedroom. ‘There’s a whole gang of
two-million-year-old fossils in this town’s drinking water, and so far it looks
like they’re giving people fish-scales. Do you want to wind up with
fish-scales?
You, a cat?’

I undressed, straightened the bed
out of the rumpled condition in which I had left it the morning before, and
climbed between the sheets. I was so exhausted that it couldn’t have been
longer than four or five minutes before I was asleep.

While I slept, I had the weirdest
dream, or dreams. I felt I was standing by the seashore, at night, and the moon
was shining its shattered light across the surface of the ocean. Then, I was
swimming, carried up and down on the waves, and I could feel the chill of the
briney water. The moon appeared and disappeared like a remote and alien signal
lamp.

Before long, I was plunging beneath
the surface of the ocean itself. I wasn’t afraid, and for some reason I felt no
need to breathe. The water itself seemed to be breathable, and I could feel the
cold, refreshing flow of brine through my lungs. It was almost impossible to
see anything, though. The water was very dark, and I could only feel my way
through the currents and undertows, and through the icy glittering schools of
herring and bass. But what made this dream swim especially strange was that /
knew where I was going, with great sureness and certainty. I knew that if I
continued to swim in a wide leftward curve, that’I would soon reach a jutting
headland of submarine rocks, and that once I reached those rocks I would only
be a mile’s hard swimming away from my destination.

Already ahead of me I could see dim
shafts of moonlight playing down through the waters. Then the dark shape of the
rocks began to appear out of the murk, and I swam faster and more urgently. It
was dangerous to swim in the sea at night, and I knew it. The ocean was alive
with slithery predators.

I had almost made the peak of the
rocks when I sensed a vibration through the water. I took a deep gulp, and
began to push myself forwards as hard and as fast as I could. Something had
sensed that I was there, and was already coming after me. Something vicious and
evil that was out to destroy me. I tried to dive deeper, twisting around in the
water to evade capture, but I felt something seize my ankle, something as
crushing and painful as a steel mantrap.

I woke up. For a while I couldn’t
work out where I was. I couldn’t understand that I was on dry land, and that I
was breathing air instead of water. I sat up, and I was chilled with sweat.
Outside, it was a cold, pale morning, and the cows were munching peaceably on
the rocky slopes of the farm. I left the bedroom and went back through to the
living-room, where the fire was crackling and spluttering and burning up well.
I stood naked in the middle of the room and swallowed down another Jack
Daniel’s.

Coughing, I returned to the bedroom.
But the bed didn’t look so appetizing any more. I was still tired, but the
twisted sheets looked too much like the surface of an unpleasant and
nightmarish ocean.

I called Rheta at the laboratory.
Dan had left to get some sleep, but she was still there working on the water
samples. She seemed surprised that I wasn’t sleeping, too.

‘I sleep very badly when I’m by
myself,’ I told her. ‘You wouldn’t consider coming out here and assisting me to
rest, would you?
Purely in the interests of public safety, of
course.’
She laughed softly. She might have been cool and independent
and three times
more brainy
than Shelley and me put
together, but she wasn’t above responding to an improper suggestion or two. I
like that in a girl.
Especially when a girl takes me up on
it.

But Rheta, of course, didn’t. She
was too busy saving the world from the prehistoric lobster people. She said:
‘Dan’s really worried about what’s happening here. He thinks it could be some
kind of disease that’s been lying dormant for centuries. Like when they dug up
an old mass burial pit from the Black Death in London, three hundred years
later, and two of the construction workers went down with plague.’

‘He really believes that?’ I asked
her.

‘He doesn’t know for sure. We still
have more tests to run on the mouse but there’s no question that it’s a pretty
sick little animal.’

I rubbed my eyes. ‘Is it a disease
that anyone’s heard of before?’

Rheta said: ‘I’ve been doing some
checking, but it’s real hard to come up with anything conclusive. I found out a
couple of things.’

‘Such as?’

She riffled through her notepad.
‘Well, for instance, I called a paleontologist I know this morning. He said
that the Currie expedition of 1954 to the Central Rift Valley of Africa found
seven or eight fossilized creatures, and that two of them, even though they
were early mammals, a species of deer, had skulls and front limbs like
crustaceans.