The Wells of Hell (19 page)

I pulled across the highway and
parked outside the leaning wooden sign which read

‘Candlewood Furnishers: Elegant
Homes On A Budget, Colonial Furniture Our Specialty, Removals & Storage,
Prop: F. Martin.’ I climbed out of the Volkswagen and gave the door a good
solid bang. Then I walked across the gravelled front lot to the wide display
window, behind which the prop: F. Martin had arranged what he obviously
considered to be a tasteful display of colonial furniture. I particularly liked
the colonial television and the colonial telephone seat. I went along to the
door and pushed my way inside. The whole showroom was stacked with furniture in
varying degrees of suburban ugliness, and behind the stacks, in a small
booth-like office, with his radio playing easy-listening music, sat a
grey-haired man with heavy spectacles and a jersey-knit suit in brown plaid.

‘Mr Martin?’ I said, as he looked up
and spotted me.

He came out into the showroom and
extended his hand. ‘That’s me. Frederick Martin. How can I help you?’

‘It’s nothing too much, I’m afraid.
I’ve brought a letter from Mr Greg McAllister, out near Washington Depot. He
has a book in store and he’d like me to take a look at it.’

Fred Martin scrutinised the letter
carefully. Then he said: ‘Have you any idea how long it would take to find that
book?’

‘Well, no, but I guess it shouldn’t
be too difficult, should it?’

‘Difficult? Mr Perkins, you don’t
know the meaning of the word difficult if you think it shouldn’t be too
difficult.’

‘I’m sorry. I just assumed...’

He clutched his grey hair
melodramatically. ‘Do you know-how many square feet of storage space I have in
back? Do you know how many families have all their possessions wrapped and
parcelled and sealed away here? How many bureaux and how many tables? How many
cupboards and chairs and complete sets of china?
How many
barometers?’

‘Barometers?’
I asked him, perplexed.

‘
Barometers,
or books.
Thousands of books.
More books than the
whole of New Milford library.
Millions of books.
And
you want one book out of all those millions, and you say it shouldn’t be too
difficult to find it?’

I didn’t know what to say. I felt
embarrassed for coming. But Fred Martin read McAllister’s letter again, and
then said quite calmly: ‘However, in this particular instance, you’re
fortunate.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The book you want is Legends oj
Litchfield, right?’

‘That’s correct.’

Fred Martin took off his spectacles,
and examined me with watery blue eyes. ‘It so happens that I’m something of an
amateur student of local legends and mythology. It’s my hobby. You can see from
the furniture I sell that I’ve always tried to keep up the colonial traditions
in the area. I believe in tradition. Tradition means respect for your roots.’

I looked around the showroom. ‘A
colonial telephone table is traditional?’ I asked him.

He squinted at me warily. ‘I know
what you’re getting at. I know what you’re trying to say. But to my way of
thinking, even a colonial cocktail bar is better than a black vinyl version of
the same thing. Gilt and black vinyl are the curses of American design. Apart
from white vinyl,
which is one hundred times worse.
And mock-onyx.
Don’t ever talk to me about mock-onyx.’

‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll keep my
mouth shut about mock-onyx.
But how about the book?
Do
you know where it is?’

‘Sure. It’s on my shelf right here.
I noticed it on the McAllister inventory, and I dug it out a couple of years
ago. It’s a real interesting book, too.
Real old.
And
there’s
some stories in it you don’t usually find in local
histories. Come on back. Do you want some coffee?’

‘No thanks. But I could sure use the
John.’

‘That’s right over there, just past
the stained-oak hutch. While you’re away, I’ll get the book out.’ When I
returned from the head, which had been traditional enough to have neatly-torn
squares of the Nea> Milford Journal for paper, instead of that invidious
modern soft stuff, I found Fred Martin sitting at his desk in his booth of an
office, leafing through the pages of a yellowed, spotted, leather-bound book.
His office was a snowdrift of inventories, bills, invoices, accounts, magazines
and newspapers, and on the wall was a Playmate calendar for three years ago. He
was drinking instant coffee out of a mug that proclaimed he was a Sagittarius.

‘Take a seat,’ he said, indicating a
brand-new armchair that was still wrapped up in corrugated cardboard. I checked
my watch, and did so. I was just hoping he wouldn’t take all morning. I was
looking forward to my lunch appointment with Rheta.

‘I’m interested in any legends about
the wells around New Milford and Washington,’ I told him.

‘You know there’s been this
water-pollution scare in the past week or two. I’d like to find out if there’s
any trace of a similar problem in New Milford’s distant history. Mr McAllister
says his family never drank their own well water, because of a curse. Apparently
they thought it would turn their skin into shell. You know, like a lobster. He
even told me a rhyme about it.’

Fred Martin propped his spectacles
on the end of his nose and peered at the old book as if he were some species of
intelligent animal. With his white shaggy eyebrows and his long nose and his
curled-up mouth, he could in fact have been a literate llama. He sniffed with
considerable style, and turned a few more pages.

‘This is what you want,’ he said,
handing the book over to me. He pointed to a heading at the top of the page,
and then ran his finger with its long chalky fingernail down to the bottom.
‘Page two hundred twenty-nine.’

I held the book carefully. It was
cracked and musty and the pages were foxed with brown.

Keeping my finger on the page that
Fred Martin had shown me, I turned forward to the title page, which announced
in chiselled-looking lettering: ‘A Discours
On Ye Legendes
& Mythes Of Lichfielde In
Connecticut, Includ’g Ye Onlie Detailled
Account of Ye Witche Trialles At Kente.

By Adam Prescott.
Printed & Bound at
Ye
Signe Of Ye Unicorn, Danburye, 1784.’ Opposite the title
page was a murky woodcut of a young man whose mouth had the same lumpy look as
George Washington on the dollar bill, and probably for the same reason: bad
teeth.

‘I never saw one of these books
before this one,’ said Fred Martin, ‘and I don’t suppose I’ll ever see one
again. This is what you could call a rare edition. Worth a few hundred, I
shouldn’t wonder.’

I turned back to the page he had
first pointed out. It was printed in very tiny, close-together type, and it was
so smudgy that it was almost impossible to read it. But when I’d got used to
s’s that were printed as f’s, and some of the most extraordinary spelling
outside of New Milford’s grade schools, I began to interpret Mr Adam Prescott’s
‘discours’ on the particular problems we were facing with Washington’s polluted
wells.

The heading of the chapter read:
‘Certaine Ancient Stories Concerninge Ye Springes & Ye Welles
Of
Washington & Kente.’ There was a long introductory
paragraph about the beauties of the area, and the gentility of the people who
lived there, and how many houses there were, and where they were situated, but
eventually I came to this passage, and I read it with increasing fascination.

‘Ye older denizens of Lichfielde
woulde not drink of ye water from their own welles, sayinge many of them that
it was unfitte for drinking by reason of its tainiinge by beasts which dwelt
beneath ye surface of ye hilles whose appearance they wot not of. Alle any one
of them would say was that ye stones had been passed to them by ye Indianes
which had lived in those parties in centuries gone by, and that ye Indiane
elders had warned them of ye beasts even at a time when ye settlres had been
fighting against ye tribes. By severalle accounts I obtained from ye older
people of Lichfield, ‘twould seem that ye beasts had once lived beneath ye
Oceane many million years before, in that submarine continent knowne by popular
account as Atlantis, although ye Indianes call’d it by ye olde Mic-Mac word
meaninge Land of Ye Beast-Gods. When terrible earthquakes beneath ye Ocean had
destroyed ye caves and hunting-places of ye beast-gods, they had penetrated New
England and other Eastern partes with their laste Seed, that in centuries to
come their descendantes shoulde grow beneath ye earth in ye welles and in ye
cold-water springes & again live in ye bodies of those who dranke ye water.
It was said that Atlantis was never a continent above ye waves, but alwayes ye
dwellinge-place of ye fearsome beast-gods who swam & hunted over ye
underwater mountains & who made their grisly domain in underwater cavernes.
When asked to describe
ye
beast-gods, few of ye
Lichfielde denizens would speak out clear, yet some plainlie knew. Josiah
Walters, of Boardmans Bridge would onlie say that ye beast-gods had been said
by ye Indianes to come from ye Skies, ye muskun, & have tentacles like unto
squiddes & claws like unto lobsters, & above all to exude ye odor like
unto ye rottinge fishes. Ye Indianes call’d ye places where ye beast-gods lay
sleepinge Pontanipo, ye cold-mater, & those who had lived below the Oceane
in ye
dayes
of Atlantis ye Neipfolk, people of ye deep
waters. Ye beast-gods too were possess’d of great Magick & to have made it
to floode seven times seven in New England in ancient times gone by, in order
that they may drown men and devour ye drowned cadavers. And of those few men
& mariners who had surviv’d such floodes, and seen ye beast-gods, they
could scarcely speak of their Ordeals, nor did manie outlive their rescue long,
for almost all who had drunk of Ye waters surrounding ye beast gods became sick
with ye leprosie unto ye death. & their cadavers were afterward burn’d.’

There was one more paragraph, which
told in a very circumlocutory way about strange rumbling noises which had been
heard under the ground during rainstorms, and about three unaccountable
drownings in the 17705, but that was about all. The rest of the legends
concerned fairies and ghosts and visions of various saints. And the trouble was
that no matter how descriptive and relevant any of this evidence seemed to be,
there was no way that I could check it out. I would have given a month’s
plumbing contracts to talk to Josiah Walters of Boardman’s Bridge, because his
account of what the so-called ‘beast-gods’ looked like was the closest
corroboration I had found of my own impressions of Jimmy and Alison’s
condition.

Unfortunately, Josiah Walters had
probably been dead for one hundred and eighty years, and I doubted if any of
his descendants still survived. ‘What do you think of these legends?’ I asked
Fred Martin, who had been sitting quietly watching me read. ‘Do you think
there’s any truth in them?’

Fred Martin scratched his grey wiry
hair. ‘You mean the Atlantis stories? I don’t think so. From what I’ve read in
my books, all my books here, it seems like almost every country around the
Atlantic Ocean has got itself some kind of legend or tradition about Atlantis,
or some place like it, and about monsters and beasts that lived in the sea.
But as for truth?
I don’t think so. They’re good stories,
sure. Good old scarey legends. But that’s about the length and the breadth of
it.’

‘Supposing I told you I believed
them.’

He shrugged. ‘You can believe them
if you want. It’s a free country. And believers never did any of the old
legends any harm; they helped to keep them alive.
So good
luck to you.’

He stirred his coffee solemnly, and
then he said: ‘All kinds of people used to believe Atlantis was real. I’ve got
a book up there about the May-ans. They believed it.
And the
Druids, too.
And the Ancient Greeks.
They all
had stories about giants and monsters
who
came out of
the sea and ate folks for breakfast. You know something – there are still
people in Cornwall, in England who think the magic island of Lyonesse really
existed, and that giants lived there. And sailors in Scotland still talk about
Shony, who was a sort of a sea-creature who called out that he was drowning,
and needed help, and whenever a fisherman went to help him, he dragged him
under the sea and ate him up alive. Shony had another name, too, and that was
Shellycoat.’

‘Shellycoat?
Why?’

Fred Martin reached up to his
bookshelf, hesitated, and then .took down a cheap orange-bound book that had
obviously been liberated from a public library. He thumbed a few pages, and
then he said: ‘Here we are. This is Sir Walter Scott, right? This is what he
says about Shony. “He seemed to be decked with marine productions, and in
particular with shells whose clattering announced his approach.”‘

I shivered. It wasn’t too warm in
Fred Martin’s office. I said hoarsely. ‘What about the wells? Do you think
there’s any truth in that?’

‘Any truth in
what?’
I