The Wells of Hell (23 page)

‘Jimmy? It’s me, Mason Perkins! I’m
right here!’

The creature turned its head towards
me. I could have jumped up right then and there and high-tailed it out of the
woods in six seconds flat, holly or no holly, but I didn’t know how fast that
creature could move, and in any case that wasn’t what I’d struggled all my way
through the undergrowth for. I’d come here to see if Jimmy or Alison could
possibly be saved. I’d come here because they used to be human, and maybe they
still could be. Don’t ask my why. The only motivation I had was that I was human,
too.

I stood up slowly. The monster
wasn’t more than ten feet away, and I almost choked on the hot stench of a
torn-open body and the odour of rotten fish. Its jaws slowly masticated a
remnant of Huntley’s viscera, but its black eyes remained totally motionless,
fixed in my direction. Its grey eyelids peeled and unpeeled.

‘Jimmy, if that’s you, we have to
talk,’ I said, in a shaking voice. I felt as if I was crazy, addressing myself
to something that looked like a movie horror poster. A small brown thrasher
settled on a nearby branch and inspected us both with obvious interest. The
wind rustled through the leaves.

I thought for a few long seconds
that the creature wasn’t going to answer me. After all, it had grown far more
bestial than when I had seen it in back of old man Pascoe’s place, and maybe
the power of human speech had been overwhelmed altogether. But then I heard a
sibilant sound in its throat, a slurred and painful hissing, and I knew that
however hideous it looked, however cold-blooded and vicious it was, it still
harboured the mind of a human being.

‘Mason...’ it hissed. It moved a
little towards me, its spidery legs shifting and its tentacles waving, and I
moved a little back.

‘Is that you, Jimmy?’ I said,
loudly. ‘Is that really you?’

‘Not – now -’ the creature
whispered. ‘Not – any – more –’

‘Jimmy, can you understand me? Can
you understand what I’m saying? I came here to help you.’

‘Help – I – need – no – help...’

‘It’s the sheriff, Jimmy. He’s going
to bring in anti-tank guns. He’s going to kill you. No matter how tough you
are. No matter what you’ve turned yourself into. He’s going to come through
these woods and he’s going to smash you to pieces.’

The creature came closer. I stepped
back an equal distance. I kept the gun raised, and I could feel the sweat on
the palm of my hand against its rubber handgrip.

‘Nothing – can – stop – me – I –
have – my – duty -to-do -my – tasks – to fulfil...’

‘Your tasks?
Your dutyj
What
about your duty to Alison? What about your duty to Oliver, and to all the rest
of us?’

The creature paused. Then it hissed:
‘You - are - all - nothing - this land - will - be - ours - now...’

‘Jimmy,’ I said loudly, ‘if you can
still talk, then you’ve still got something human in you. You have to make an
effort. You have to resist. If you go on believing you’re human, then maybe
you’ll stand a chance. But if you don’t, then sure as eggs are scrambled
they’ll kill you.’

‘You - understand - nothing...’

I stood my ground, even though the
creature was moving closer. ‘Don’t I?’ I challenged it. ‘Don’t I? Don’t I know
about Atlantis, and the way your masters impregnated the water table, hoping
they could survive? Don’t I know about Quetzalcoatl, and Quithe, and don’t I
know about Ottauquechee?’

The creature stayed silent for a
moment. It was growing darker in the woods. For some odd reason, I was reminded
of Alice
Through The
Looking Glass, when the sky grows
black with the shadow of a monstrous crow. It felt as weird and unreal as
looking-glass land in that damp Connecticut scrub, and yet the stink of death
and primeval greed was too strong to make me think it was fantasy. The danger
was too near.

Slowly, with a creaking of jointed
plates and thick membranes, the crab creature that had once been Jimmy Bodine
began to rise on its hind legs. I thought at first that it was going to strike
out at me, like a cobra, but it stayed erect, its tentacles wriggling, and its
black eyes wide. It stood as tall as the lower branches of the trees, maybe
seventeen or eighteen feet, like an automobile turned on to its end.

‘Who - spoke - to - you - of-
Ottauquechee -’ it whispered.

‘Nobody spoke to me. I read it for
myself. I read all about the beasts below the ground, and the gods who came
from the stars and ruled Atlantis. I know what you are now, Jimmy, and what
you’re trying to do, and I’m not going to let it happen. Not to you, because
you used to be my friend, and not to Alison. And above all, not to all those
innocent people you’ve been killing.’

In front of my eyes, the crab
creature seemed to become cloudy. I blinked, and stared at it harder, but it
was actually changing. The tentacles became as insubstantial as smoke, and the
domed head appeared to roll in on
itself
. The air all
around us
vibrated,
and I felt as if someone had
touched a humming tuning-fork against my skull.

The smoke coiled and writhed, and
took on dozens of different, shifting shapes. I thought I saw men-of impossible
stature, hooded and silent, and I thought I saw creatures that were clothed in
hooks and spines. I thought I saw people I knew, but whose faces I couldn’t
quite remember, fleeting impressions of faces from sad and lonesome dreams. I
thought I saw Jimmy Bodine, with a faint smile on his lips. I thought I saw
myself.

The voice whispered: ‘I am
everything and everyone. I am the servant of the god of times gone by and times
yet to be. My name is everything and my face is everyone. I am preparing for
the resurrection of the greatest of those who lived beyond the stars, in those
ancient places of exile from which none could return unsummoned. You are right
that the watery places were ours when we first returned to this earthly domain.
We were forced to flee them when the deeps collapsed, and to seek refuge in the
inlets and the rivers, and to leave our seed between the layers of the earth
itself.’

This was Jimmy’s voice, but it was
gentle, sinister, much more cultured than Jimmy’s voice had ever really been. I
stared through the smoke and I saw Jimmy, standing in the wood in his simple farm
working clothes, his face smiling and content. Yet how could it possibly be so?
He was a monster, wasn’t he?
A giant and ferocious crab
creature?
Or was it all a dream, like the dreams of swimming beneath the
sea and taking cold briny water straight into my lungs? Was it all some kind of
absurd illusion?

‘I am the servant of the god of
times gone by and times yet to be,’ repeated the whispery voice. ‘I was created
to fulfil his needs, to revive him according to the rites that were law in the
days when the stars were different than they are today, and when men were the
slaves of beasts such as you have never known. And the greatest of these beasts
was Quithe, the demon god whom your Indians called Ottauquechee, he who dwells
in the waters of the pit. And his name beyond the stars is the god of times
gone by and times yet to be, and he is my master and yours, and he shall rise
from his grave to rule the men of this land ‘‘once again, even as he did in the
mighty days of Atlantis.’

Jimmy had stepped closer now, and
was standing only a few paces away. I could still hear that irritating humming
noise, and sometimes it was difficult to distinguish Jimmy’s outline in the
gloom. He seemed to waver and fluctuate like a poor television picture, and at
times he looked like nothing more than a distant image of his real self.

But his smile was still fixed on his
face, and he held out his left hand to me in greeting, as if everything that
had happened before was just a faded nightmare, as if the crab creatures had
never been. His smile said,
it’s
okay, I’m Jimmy
again, you don’t have to worry. It was all a fantasy, all a dream. We can be
friends again.

‘Jimmy?’ I asked nervously, raising
my .38.1 knew it was him, but I was still frightened.

‘There is nothing to fear,’
whispered the voice. ‘The day will soon be here when the great god will rise
out of the wells which have been his sleeping-place for so long, and when all
men will bow down before him and offer themselves happily as sacrifices. The
day will come when the god will once again sit inside the minds of all men, and
fires will burn across this continent from shore to shore. The day of the great
reckoning with the beast-gods is close.
The day that was
spoken of by men of learning in ancient times, by the disciples of Sa-to-ga and
Ya-go-sath.
It was those men who first recalled Quithe, my master, and
founded the underwater continent of Atlantis, and there were centuries when the
water people dominated the ocean, which is the greatest domain of this earth.
They were days of glory and sacrifice, and they shall return.’

Jimmy was only two or three feet
away now. He was gliding towards me in a shimmery, watery kind of a way, and
his eyes seemed as dead as fumigated blackbeetles. It was then, at that instant,
that I knew that everything was wrong, that I had made a terrible mistake, and
that this wasn’t Jimmy at all, and whatever remained of Jimmy had been totally
overwhelmed by the creature that called itself the servant of Quithe. The Jimmy
who stood in front of me now was nothing more than a Wavering illusion, a
projection based on the memories in Jimmy’s mind of what he looked like in the
mirror.
He
teas back-to-front. His hair was parted on
the wrong side. His tweed coat was buttoned on the wrong side. His face had
that strange lopsidedness that other people’s mirror-images always seem to
have. He was himself as he remembered himself, but not as I knew him.

He must have sensed my sudden
anxiety, because his right hand instantly whipped towards me. I stepped back,
and tripped on the brambles, and fell, and as I fell the hand became a gigantic
pincer, and struck me a heavy, glancing blow on the side of the head. Dazed, I
rolled over in the leaves, and then I scrambled on to my feet and I was
running. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to look back, but as I
charged through the holly and the creepers with my arms
raised
in front of my eyes, I could hear the creature following me. I could hear those
scuttling feet across the floor of the woods, and the snapping of that giant
claw was like a hundred knives scraping on a hundred dinner-plates.

I didn’t make it. I couldn’t. I flew
into a network of brambles and I was caught. My clothes were snagged, my face
was lashed by thorns, and my gun fell down between a twisting
tangle
of creepers. I couldn’t even break free quickly
enough to turn around and face the beast that was coming after me with the
single intention of crushing my head and ripping my guts out. I remember
yelling: ‘Carter! For Christ’s sake!’ but that was all.

For one hideous, stomach-lurching
moment, I heard the creature’s beak squeaking, and the grating sound of its
joints and its claws. I closed my eyes tight and waited for that first
scrunching squeeze.

It didn’t happen. I heard, instead, a
brisk fusillade of pistol shots, and when I opened my eyes I saw Carter and his
two deputies running towards me through the bushes.

‘Mason!’ yelled Carter. ‘Mason, you
stupid fuck! Your five minutes is up!’

I wrestled myself free from the
thorns, ripping the sleeve of my coat and taking the seat out of my pants in a
wide triangular rip. But I was away, and running, and all around me there was
the flat, crackly sound of pistol fire.

Once I was clear, Carter and his
deputies retreated along with me, and we ran back to the hollow, puffing and
coughing like a geriatric jogging marathon. I didn’t turn around once. I’d seen
enough of the creature that was once Jimmy to last me for now. Maybe I’d seen
enough to last me for ever. As soon as we were safe, I sat down on the ground
with my head between my knees, and I thanked God that I still had lungs that
ached and legs that were scratched and eyes that could burst out in tears for a
young man who could never come back to a human existence.

Dan reached into the back pocket of
his pants and produced a small silver flask.

‘Whisky?’ he asked me. ‘It’s only
Old Grandad.’

I looked up at him. He was almost
crying.

‘You have hidden depths, Dan,’ I
told him, swigging the bourbon with that particular relish that only a narrow
escape can give you.

We waited for twenty minutes in the
hollow, with Martino keeping a watch for the crab creature.

We smoked, drank, talked, but there
was no sign of the beast, and it began to look as if it had made its escape,
and vanished into the woods. If you’ve ever seen the Connecticut woods in fall,
you’ll know how dense they are, and how goddamned difficult it is to find
anyone or anything that doesn’t want to be found.

Just after one o’clock, a red Jeep
came crashing and crackling through the trees, and three deputies jumped out
and announced the arrival of reinforcements, grenades, and the anti-tank
launcher. Sheriff Wilkes stalked up to the Jeep and was met by the
proprietorial stare of the anti-tank gun’s custodian, a fat National Guard sergeant
in an equally well-laundered uniform.