The Wells of Hell (16 page)

I shook my head. ‘They’re still out
there. Least, that’s where we left
them
. They’re not
exactly what you’d call compos mentis?

‘What the hell does that mean? Come
in here, will you, and tell me what’s been going on.’

Two officers made way so that I
could squeeze further into the hot, smoky room. I looked around at all the
earnest young faces and all the uniforms, and I felt like I was in some kind of
low-budget crime movie. I
said,
embarrassed: ‘I hope
you don’t mind me coming along here uninvited like this.’

Carter planted a big black-booted
foot on the seat of his chair and jammed a toothpick between his front
incisors. He didn’t like to floss in company. He said bluntly: ‘Just tell us
what’s on your mind, Mason, that’s all.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Paul Denton
found them first. I don’t know how he got lost in the first place, or why, but
he came across Jimmy and Alison, and they sent him back to go get me. That’s
why Paul was around at my house.’

‘You didn’t tell me any of this
before,’ growled Carter.

‘Well, I know, and I wish I had. But
Paul said Jimmy and Alison had insisted on no police. So I guess I played
along. I didn’t want to frighten them off.’

Carter rolled his eyes up into his
head. ‘He didn’t want to frighten them off. Isn’t that terrific? He goes to see
two wanted homicide suspects under suspicion for drowning their own son, and he
doesn’t tell the cops because he doesn’t want to frighten them off.’

‘Sheriff, listen,’ I interrupted.
‘It’s worse than that. You know what happened to young Oliver – well, it’s
happened to them. Only they’ve gone the whole way.’

Nobody else in the office except
Carter and me knew what that meant. They turned to each other and pulled a
variety of baffled faces, and then turned back to us to see if they could work
out what was happening.

Carter squinted at me narrowly.
‘The whole way?
You mean -all over?
The
whole damn thing?’

‘We both saw them.
Dan Kirk and me.
We met them in the woods at the back of old
man Pascoe’s barn, and they went for us.’

‘Went for you? What does that mean?’

I tugged open my necktie and
unbuttoned my shirt. The deputies and the officers watched me in fascinated
silence. When I pulled my collar wide apart, they could see what the creature
that had once been Alison Bodine had done to me. There were two irregular rows
of inflamed crimson-and-blue bruises running diagonally across the upper part
of my chest, across my neck, and taking in the front of my right shoulder. When
I peered down and examined my own body, I almost felt as faint as Dan had
looked. I resembled nothing less than the victim of a motorcycle-chain beating.

‘The Bodines did that?’’ asked
Carter, in awe.

‘Not the Bodines plural.
Just one of the Bodines, singular.
Alison Bodine, if I’m not
mistaken.’

One of the officers, a short, sandy
man with hair cropped as close as a toilet brush, stuck a cigarette in his
mouth, lit it, and said: ‘What kind of weapon did they use on you?
Bullwhip?

Chain?’

‘Neither,’ I told him. ‘These marks
were made by Alison Bodine’s own hand, if that’s what anybody could sanely call
it.’

Another officer said: ‘Those marks look
pretty close to the marks we found on Susan Steadman.

Except that hers were a damn sight
worse.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to suggest,’
I said. ‘I think the Bodines might have been responsible for Susan’s death.’

Carter suddenly lifted his eyes
again. ‘Jerry, Martino, get about twenty deputies together with guns. Do it
quick.’

‘You think I’m right?’ I asked him.
He reached for his hat, which had been resting on the top of his filing
cabinet, and banged it firmly on to his head. ‘I don’t know whether you’re
right or wrong. You may be as damn crazy as always. But if you’ve seen Jimmy
and Alison Bodine, and you’ve got a good idea they killed Susan Steadman as
well as their own son, then I think I have a duty to hightail it out to the
Pascoe place and hunt them down, don’t you? It’s a damn sight better than
sitting on my butt looking at maps.’

He tightened his gunbelt. ‘Trenton,’
he ordered, ‘I want you to take over the search operations around Washington
while I’m gone. Ken – I want you to stay by the radio and link communications.
We’ll go straight out to where Mason last saw the Bodines first, and then we’ll
fan out and start tracking. Call Huntley and tell him I want all the dogs he
can get.’

I rubbed my eyes, smarting from too
much cigarette smoke. ‘You’d be better off with cats if you ask me,’ I
remarked. ‘Shelley goes nuts whenever he picks up that smell of fish.’

The sandy-looking deputy, just as
everybody was packing up their papers and their belongings and swallowing their
last
styrofoam
cupfuls of coffee abruptly piped up:
‘Excuse me, Sheriff, but I think we may be missing out on something here.’

‘Missing out?’ grunted Carter. ‘What
are you talking about?’

‘Well,’ said the deputy, unabashed.
‘I picked up the impression from the way that you and Mr Perkins here were
talking that Jimmy and Alison look kind of different from the way they used to.
And didn’t Mr Perkins say that the marks on his neck were made by Alison
Bodine’s hand’?’

Carter glanced across at me, and I
shrugged. This was a danger that was affecting the whole community of New
Milford and everywhere around, and we knew that we couldn’t keep it
confidential for very much longer. Carter paused, and then let out a long
patient breath, and set his papers back down on his desk. The room was silent,
except for the shuffling of feet and the occasional cough.

‘This had to come out sooner or
later,’ he growled. ‘The reason I kept it under wraps for so long is because I
didn’t want a ridiculous panic. I didn’t want people running around like
blue-assed baboons creating all sorts of chaos, saying’ that the Martians had
landed, or anything
like
that.

But now I guess that circumstances
have proved me wrong, and everyone around here has a right to know.’

He looked up in my direction again,
and I gave him an encouraging nod. He licked his lips, and said: ‘Just for
tonight, I don’t want anybody outside of the police to know what I’m going to
tell you now. Tomorrow, we’ll tell the newspapers and the television people.
But I’m hoping we can catch our murderers before dawn, and if we can do that we
can avert a full-scale crisis.’

He paused again, and then said
softly: ‘The truth is that Jimmy and Alison Bodine have undergone a pretty
bizarre kind of change in their appearance. Don’t ask me why, or how, but I
promise you it’s true. They’ve grown scaley, hard shells instead of skins, and
from what. Mason Perkins here says
,
they have pincers
as well, like crabs or lobsters.’

There was a moment of silent
disbelief. Then one of the policemen tittered. Somebody said:

‘Lobsters?’

Carter was angry. ‘You heard,’ he
said, with a rough edge on his voice. ‘They’ve got scales and pincers, and if
they’re attacking people the way they’ve attacked Mason here, then they’re
obviously dangerous.’

._ ‘This is kind of a hard story to
swallow,’ remarked the sandy deputy. ‘I mean – are you absolutely sure of this,
Sheriff, or is it just supposition?’

Carter glared at him. ‘Williams,’ he
growled, ‘do you know me to be a gullible man? Do you think, from your
experience of working with me, that I’m a sap?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No, sir,’
mimicked Carter.
‘And that means that if I tell you Jimmy and Alison Bodine have started to look
like lobsters, you can bet your ass they have. You just believe what I say, and
do what you’re
told,
and you’ll get through this with
your butt in one piece. I want you to find them first, and bring them in, and
when you’ve done that we can argue about the way they look.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Williams.

‘Sheriff,’ I put in. ‘I think
there’s one more thing we ought to consider.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Carter, picking
up his papers again.

‘Well, it’s a few miles from Sherman
to Washington Depot, and I was wondering how Jimmy and Alison could have made
their way right across country without being seen during the afternoon.’

‘Meaning what?’ demanded Carter,
impatient to get out into the night with his guns and his dogs and his
deputies.

I looked around the room. The
officers and the deputies had obviously had quite enough of hearing from me for
one evening, and I hesitated for a second or two before I spoke. Their faces
were hard and expectant.

‘I mean it could have been this man
Karlen who killed the girl,’ I said quietly. ‘He was nearer the Washington
Depot area, right? And he was a visitor who might not have heard about the ban
on drinking well water.’

‘I asked his aunt if he’d drunk the
water,’ said Carter, in an expressionless voice. ‘She said he hadn’t, as far as
she knew.’

‘As far as she
knew?
And how
far was that?’

‘I don’t know, Mason. And right now
I’d much rather be out there looking for Jimmy and Alison Bodine than wondering
if somebody’s errant nephew drank the well water.’

‘But it could have been him,’ I
insisted. ‘It could have been Karlen, just as easily as it could have been
Jimmy or Alison.
In fact, more easily because he was nearer
the area.
Karlen could have changed into one of these crab people, too.’

Carter wiped the sweat from his
forehead with the back of his hand. ‘All right, Mason, I believe you. Karlen
could have changed, too. If he has, and if he’s still in the vicinity, our
people will find him. But right now, I think it’s more important to get after
Jimmy and Alison, before their trail’s gone totally cold.’

‘All right, fine,’ I told him. ‘But
go easy. Whatever Jimmy and Alison are like right now, I wouldn’t want to see
them killed. I think that Alison is probably hurt already. Dan Kirk got me out
of that situation with the help of my twelve hundred millimetre pipe wrench,
and he said that he heard her shell crunch when he hit her.’

Carter nodded. One of his deputies
said, under his breath: ‘
This
is nuts. I mean, this is
completely nuts.’ But Carter said: ‘Forget the comments. Let’s go find them.’

With Carter bustling out in front of
them, the policemen left the office and went out to look for Jimmy and Alison
Bodine I stayed where I was, listening to the phones ringing and the doors
opening and shutting and the shouted questions of the newspapers when Carter
appeared through the swing doors at the end of the corridor with his troop of
deputies. Then there was no sound at all but the
telephones,
and most of those were silent as reporters made outgoing calls to their wire
services and their papers. Carter’s littered, deserted office smelled of stale
cigarette smoke and sweat.

I heard the swing doors creak, and
footsteps along the corridor, and Dan Kirk appeared. He stood by the door for
the moment, holding his makeshift bandage to his face, and then he said:

‘What happened? Carter came out like
a bat out of hell.’

‘They’ve gone looking for Jimmy and
Alison.’

‘You told them?’

‘Sure I told them. I had to tell
them. They’re a danger to their own selves, as well as to everyone else. At
least if Carter gets them, they stand a chance.’

Dan looked at me carefully. ‘Do you
want them to stand a chance? Don’t you think they’re better off dead?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. They were
friends once, weren’t they? Maybe there’s an outside chance they could be
brought back to what they once were.
Changed back again to
human beings.
And if that’s possible, then I don’t want to think that I
was responsible for killing them.’

‘You’re not responsible,’ said Dan.
‘You’re here.’

I looked at him wryly. ‘Damn it,
Dan,’ I told him. ‘We’re all responsible. Didn’t you hear about loving thy
neighbour as thyself?’

‘I never heard about loving thy
lobster,’ Dan said kindly.

I stepped out of Carter’s office and
closed the door. We walked along the corridor together in silence, and when we
pushed our way through the swing doors and into the lobby, we found it almost
deserted, except for a TV technician taking down his lights, and chilly from
the night air.

‘They’re not lobsters, Dan,’ I said
quietly, ‘and that’s the whole mistake that Carter Wilkes and his deputies will
probably make. They’re people. They’re scaley and they’re violent and they’re
dangerous, but they’re still people. They can talk like people and think like
people. Different people, sure, but still people. What we have to find out is
what kind of people they are.’ Dan said unhappily: ‘Do you seriously think
there’s any chance of that?’