The Wells of Hell (18 page)

It wasn’t much of a shock. There was
a crackle and a blue spark, and a bubble of oxygen fled to the surface of the
water. But it was enough to make the huge claw release its hold for a fraction
of a second, and a fraction of a second was all I needed to give myself a
powerful push against the floor and propel myself free.

The monster came after me
immediately, and the noise it made under the water was like the terrible
cacophony of damned souls. It lunged and lunged again, but I had found the window,
and it only took a brief struggle with the catch before I dived in a huge
torrent of water out of the dining-room and straight into the back yard.

I rolled over and over, almost
screaming for breath. The water splashed out of the window I had left open and
flooded the flagstoned barbecue pit and the sunken garden. But 1 was out of the
house, and I was breathing air again, and that was all that mattered. I picked
myself up, coughing and panting and spluttering, and I leaned for a few moments
against my picnic table, trying to get myself back in one piece again.

It was only when I lifted my head
and looked back towards the house that I realised the water had stopped pouring
out of the dining-room window. It was still dark inside the house, but I could
see that all of the water, or most of it, appeared to have vanished. There was
no sound but the dripping of soaked drapes and furnishings, and in the woods
nearby, the hoot of a long-eared owl.

I waited a while longer, and then I
cautiously walked back across the yard to the window from which I had escaped.
I was shivering with cold, and my clothes were sticking to me like wet cement.
I peered into the room, and all I could see was sodden rugs, overturned tables,
and scattered bottles. There was no sign of the creature that had seized my
leg, and no sign of what must have amounted to more than six or seven thousand
gallons of water.

The first thing I did then was walk
around the house to the garage. I had left my flashlight hanging outside on a
hook, and I took it down and switched it on. The lights in the house would no
probably all be out, and I wanted to see where I was going, and where my
predatory adversary was hiding himself.
Or itself.
I
didn’t really know what to call it.

I climbed the steps to the front door.
From here, I could see the shattered living-room window.

But there was no sign of any way in
which the house could have been filled with such a maelstrom of water. There
wasn’t even a hosepipe. If I hadn’t been so damned wet, I would have thought
that everything that had happened in the past few minutes had been just one
more of those undersea nightmares.

I switched on the flashlight, and
then quietly opened the front door. I flicked the beam around the passage, but
it was deserted. I paused for a moment, listening, and then I stepped inside on
squelching feet, throwing the light this way and that in case the creature
tried to come up behind me and surprise me.

The living-room was sodden and
stinking. I knew what the smell was, and it almost turned my stomach.
Dead, decaying fish.
It was going to take weeks of hard work
and fifty buckets of Lysol to get the smell out of the house. I shone the
flashlight over towards the dining-room, where I had nearly drowned, but there
was nothing there except for broken furniture and smashed ornaments. The
table-lamp, my last desperate hope, lay where I had left it.

It didn’t take long to check the
whole house. There was terrible water damage to the rugs and the furnishings,
and every room stank like a fishing-port, but there was no sign of the
creature. It must have gotten away pretty quickly as soon as I let all the
water out.

I picked up the telephone and poured
water out of its insides. It was still working, and I called Dan. He had just
arrived home, and he sounded tired.

‘Mason? What is it?’

I coughed. I was suddenly feeling
shocked, and I could hardly make my lips work. Dan couldn’t see it, which was
probably just as well, but my eyes .were filled with tears.

‘Dan,’ I said unsteadily, ‘one of
the crab creatures was here.’

‘What happened? Are you okay?’

I coughed again. If the creatures
didn’t get me, then double pneumonia probably would. ‘I’m okay,’ I told him. ‘I
got
a
in soaking, though. They pulled the same trick
here they pulled at the Bodines’ house. They flooded the whole place with
water, and almost drowned me.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Dan, would I kid? They filled up
the living-room, the dining room, the kitchen. It happened so quick the water
didn’t even have time to run away. They must have used thousands and thousands
of gallons. It was like a damn great tidal bore.’

Dan asked: ‘Did you see how they did
it?’

‘Dan,’ I told him, ‘I was under it.
I was hardly in any kind of position to see what was going on.’

‘Do you want me to get out there?’

‘I’d appreciate it. My car’s smashed
and my bed’s soaked, and to tell you the truth I don’t particularly relish a
night out here in the country with those creatures on the loose.’

Dan paused for a moment, and then he
said: ‘Okay. It’s nine o’clock now. I’ll get there by ten at the latest. You
haven’t heard from Carter, I suppose?’

‘Not a word. I don’t think he’ll
have much luck tracking Jimmy and Alison down until morning, though.’

‘I guess he won’t. Okay, Mason. Give
me an hour and I’ll be there.’

‘Dan,’ I said quietly.

‘What is it?’

‘Thanks, Dan.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t even mention it.
One day the same thing may happen to me.’

I put the phone down, and then
picked it up again and tried calling the sheriff’s office. The phone rang and
rang for two or three minutes without anybody answering it, so I gave up. The
best thing I could do now was sort out some dry clothes and an overnight bag.

I was walking across the hallway to
my bedroom when I heard a scratching noise. I stopped, and didn’t breathe.
There was silence for a while, and then I heard the scratching noise again. It
was coming from the linen cupboard.

Well, there was only one kind of
creature who would automatically take refuge there, and it wasn’t one of the
crustaceous
variety
. I went to open the cupboard door
and there was Shelley, ruffled and perplexed, and not at all sure if he was
pleased to see me. He jumped down from his shelf, and stalked around the wet
rug, and I guess he felt as wary and frightened as I did.

A
round seven-thirty in the morning,
Rheta called at Dan’s lodgings with the news that Carter Wilkes and his
deputies had been searching for Jimmy and Alison ••’!
night
and found nothing.

There were no footprints in the
soft, rain-soaked earth – no human footprints, anyway – and no scent that a
police dog could be reasonably expected to follow. At dawn, Carter had called
everyone off, and announced to the newspapers that he intended to play a
waiting game instead.

He warned the people of New Milford
and its surrounding hamlets that two or possibly three homicidal lunatics were
on the loose and that they should keep their children under supervision and
their doors locked after dark.

When Rheta came in, I was sitting
with my knees wedged under Dan’s dinky-sized kitchen table, eating my way
uncomfortably but gratefully through a plate of bacon and sausages and
over-easy eggs that his landlady had cooked up for me. Whatever Dan had said
about his landlady up until now, none of it was true. She was a handsome and
bustling widow in her early forties with a son who looked like Fonzie, an Irish
wolfhound who looked like Norman Mailer after a heavy night, and a neat small
weatherboard rooming house just opposite the New Milford Hospital. She was so
handsome,
in fact, that I wondered whether Dan harboured a
secret or even not-so-secret affection for her, and that was why he’d
constantly told us she was a keyhole-peeping harridan with steel curlers and an
insatiable taste for Tanqueray.

Dan was across on the other side of
the room, which meant about two feet away, making coffee.

It looked like the weather had
cleared up overnight, and there was a haze of sunshine coming through his
gingham drapes. He said: ‘Hi, Rheta. Come on in. You want some Granola?’

‘I don’t eat in the mornings,’ said
Rheta, taking off her fringed shoulder-bag and hanging it on the back of the
chair. ‘Just give me some coffee, black.’ I looked up at her, forking a
well-yolked piece of sausage into my mouth. ‘That’s how you keep so trim, huh?
Not eating in the mornings?’

‘Nor the
afternoons.’

I stirred four spoonfuls of sugar
into my coffee, and sipped it to make sure it was sweet enough.

Us plumbers need our energy, you
know. Rheta watched me in disgusted fascination, as if I had just kissed a live
toad. She was dressed in one of those flowing Indian-type dresses this morning,
and boots, which made her look like one of those ladies who eat sunflower seeds
and brown rice and weave their own comforter covers, but I didn’t mind too
much. She still had that sexy educated charisma that appealed to me, and there
was still time for Pigskin Packer to fall in front of a school bus.

Drinking her coffee, Rheta told us
about Sheriff Wilkes and his unsuccessful search for Jimmy and Alison. In a
way, I was strangely relieved that they hadn’t been found, because once they
were cornered, there was only one way they were going to end up, and that was
shot to pieces.

Our New Milford vigilantes were too
well-conditioned by the science-fiction movies of the

‘
fifties
to
try taking an alien-looking monster alive. It was
shoot
first and try the John Williams music afterwards.

Dan leaned against the kitchen sink
and swallowed his coffee in scalding mouthfuls. ‘Did they look around old man
Pascoe’s place?’ he asked Rheta.

‘I guess so. They didn’t say
anything specific.’

‘I was wondering if there was any
sign of broken shell, where I hit Alison with the pipe-wrench.’

Rheta shook her head. ‘If they found
it, they didn’t mention it. Mind you, I didn’t speak to Carter himself. Pete
Abrams was the only deputy there, and you know what he’s like when it comes to
police co-operation. You have to co-operate with us, but we don’t have to
co-operate with you.’

I finished my bacon and put down my
fork. ‘Maybe they didn’t find anything. Those shells looked pretty tough.’

Dan pulled a face. ‘Maybe they are.
But I’m sure I heard a crunching noise, and I could have sworn I saw pieces
flying.’

‘You’re making me feel sick,’ said
Rheta.

‘It’s a sick business. Did Abrams
say anything else?’

‘Just one thing.
They’re considering opening the
Bodines’ well, and drilling down to find out where the polluted water’s coming
from.’

‘That’s the most sensible idea
they’ve had in two days.’

Rheta nodded. ‘They’re going to call
us when they get permission to start work. They’d like you to go out there and
take samples as they drill down.’

‘What about me?’ I asked her.

‘They didn’t say anything about
you.’

‘I was nearly crushed by one
creature and half-drowned by another, and they haven’t asked me along? I’ve got
to be the expert.’

‘You can come along,’ said Dan.
‘I’ll make you an honorary member of my research department.’

‘It’s nice to know that someone
cares. Anyway, listen, I have to go sort out my car. Are you going to be round
at the laboratory all morning?’

‘Sure,’ said Dan. ‘I have to finish
my tests on that sample we took out of the Bodine well yesterday afternoon.’

I reached into my pocket and took
out Greg McAllister’s letter of authorisation to the Candlewood Furnishers.
‘Okay. While you’re testing, I’ll go pick up this book on the Legends of
Litchjield. You never know, it might have some kind of clues in it. Shall we
meet for lunch?’

‘You ate a breakfast that size and
you’re talking about lunch?’ asked Rheta.

‘I have to keep my strength up,’ I
told her. ‘You never know-when someone may call on my manly reserves.’

‘I wish this town had plain,
ordinary plumbers who mended pipes and then went away again,’ said Rheta,
picking up her shoulder-bag.

‘You don’t mean that.’

She paused. The sunlight touched her
face, and made her eyes sparkle. ‘No,’ she said gently, ‘I don’t.’

Dan looked first at me and then at
Rheta, and then went back to his coffee.

Candlewood Furnishers was a big,
cluttered barn of a building out on Route 202 past the giant-sized figure of a
handyman advertising paint and the New Milford MacDonald’s. I borrowed Rheta’s
Volkswagen to drive out there and it was so small and shaky that I felt like
some French comedian. But Shelley seemed to enjoy the vibration, and he fell
asleep almost straight away. It was a bright, dry day, although the sky was
still reflected in puddles and pools, and wet leaves left dark patterns on the
sidewalks.