The Wells of Hell (26 page)

Carter didn’t look at me. ‘I’m paying
my respects to Deputy Huntley, and all those innocent people that monster
killed. I said I’d get the bastard, and I did.’

‘There are still others.
At least two, maybe more, if more people have been drinking the
water.’

Carter jammed his hat back on his head.
‘It’s the big one I’m going after now. It seems to me the only way to get this
thing stopped is to root out this beast-god, or whatever it calls itself.’

‘Quithe, the god
of the pit.’

‘Right.’

Dan and one of the deputies were
helping Rheta to hobble back down the ridge. They steered her away from
Sergeant Rosner’s body, and of course we didn’t have to carry him now. I took a
last look back at the overturned creature that lay on the north side of the
ridge, at its whitish jointed abdomen, like a dead boiled crab in a
supermarket, and as I looked it seemed to collapse and crumple up. There was a
breathy, slopping sound, and its abdomen parted and disgorged, in a black
slithery heap, the remains of all those people it had killed and devoured.

The rain washed the rocks and the
turf a brown, bloody colour, and under the lowering, electrified clouds, the
crab dwindled away, as if it had been made of nothing but rice paper and
celluloid. It didn’t take too long before I recognised Jimmy’s body lying
there, hunched up in a cleft between two boulders, but I didn’t want to go down
to look. Maybe he’d helped me, right in those last seconds when I was yelling
at him not to kill us, and maybe he hadn’t. I wasn’t in the mood for thinking
about it.

Carter said: ‘Let’s go. We’ve got
ourselves some work to do.’ I said, absent-mindedly: ‘Yes,’ and followed him
back to the woods.

Mrs Thompson’s house was one of
those dark, rambling old Connecticut houses that stand away from the road,
overhung by pin oaks and poison sumac bushes, its grounds black and muddy but
overgrown with unnaturally green grass. It must have been all of two hundred
and fifty years old, and it looked to me like an old coaching stage, the way
the road curved in front of it. The plumbing was probably all lead, with copper
ballcocks and zinc tanks.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we
drew up outside in Rheta’s Volkswagen. We were both suffering from that odd,
abstracted exhaustion that usually follows shock, and there was no question at
all that we would have been better off in bed. But Carter was going to start
drilling at five o’clock, whether we could persuade Mrs Thompson to help us or
not, and with at least two crab-creatures still at loose in the countryside,
and the beast-god flexing its psychic muscles already, we couldn’t afford the
luxury of rest.

The thundery rain had settled down
into a damp, persistent drizzle that hung across the trees like a drowned
bride’s veil. We climbed out of the car, slammed the doors shut, and walked
through the dew-beaded grass to Mrs Thompson’s dank verandah, where a sodden
rug hung over the toothless front rail, and a rotting rocker with creepers
entwined in its carved back rest stood where someone had left it to stand,
dozens of years ago. I W.O.H.-G went up to the bottle-green front door, and
knocked at the corroded lion’s-head knocker. It was like striking an empty
barrel with a coal-hammer.

She surprised us by opening one of
the sash-windows that looked out on to the verandah. She was surprisingly
young, maybe mid-forties, with black hair that was heavily streaked with grey,
and a face that would have looked good on a veteran sergeant from the Marine
Corps.
All bushy eyebrows, and big nose, and heavy chin.
She said: ‘Did you bring the mattress?’

‘Mattress?’
I asked her. ‘What mattress?’

‘The mattress you were supposed to
bring. The mattress I was having recovered.’

‘We aren’t mattress men, ma’am,’ I
told her.

‘You’re not?’

‘No. I’m a plumber and my friend
here’s an analytical chemist.’

She blinked at us. Then she repeated:
‘A plumber and an analytical chemist?’

I nodded.

She thought for a moment, and then
she said: ‘I don’t remember calling for a plumber and an analytical chemist.
What’s to plumb? What’s to analyse?’

I said hesitantly: ‘You are Mrs
Hilda Thompson, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Mrs Hilda Thompson the
clairvoyante?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, that’s what we’ve come for,’
I told her. ‘We have a psychic problem, and we need some help.’

There was a minute’s silence.
A whole minute.
The rain fell softly on the tangled gardens,
and Mrs Hilda Thompson looked us up and down as if she were trying to penetrate
our psyches and see what we really wanted. Eventually, she said: ‘All right,’
and withdrew her head from the open window. A moment later, the front door
opened.

‘You’ll have to excuse the mess,’
she said, leading us through a dark and musty hallway, past a wrought-iron
umbrella stand crowded with everything from fishing-poles to golf clubs, but no
umbrellas; and past dingy daguerreotypes of stern and whiskery men, with such
captions as Holmwood Bujfen, Master Medium, 1880. At length we arrived in a
leaky conservatory where ferns languished for lack of attention, and a black
Labrador with a dull coat and crusty eyes lay listlessly under a table of
unhealthy geraniums. The whole place stank of decay and week-old Gravy Train.
Mrs Thompson showed us a battered garden table, and we drew up three rusty
wrought iron garden chairs, their feet squeaking nastily on the tiled floor.

‘When it’s raining, I like to feel
as if I’m out in it, as if I’m part of nature’s climate,’ smiled Mrs Thompson,
sitting down opposite us. She wore a floor-length dress of dusty black, and a
necklace of moonstones. There was dried tomato soup on her left sleeve.

I looked up at the glass roof,
cracked and green with lichen. The rain ran down it in sorrowful ribs, and on
top of it was a weather-vane which groaned and shuddered in the wind. I said:
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ and Mrs Thompson shook her head no. I offered her a
cigarillo as a matter of politeness and she took one. Dan waited for us in
silence while we lit up.

Soon, wreathed in smoke, Mrs
Thompson smiled and said: ‘What can I do for you? I’m afraid it’s a long time
since anybody called on my clairvoyante talents.’

‘Do you know any of the old legends
of Litchfield and New Milford?’ I asked her.

‘Some. Why?’

‘Well, we’re wondering if you’ve
ever heard of a legend that the gods who used to rule Atlantis came ashore when
Atlantis sank, and secreted themselves in the natural springs under New
England, waiting for the time when they could release themselves again.’

There was a pause, and then Mrs
Thompson nodded, very slowly.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard that
story.’

Dan coughed. ‘The thing is, Mrs
Thompson, and I know this sounds nuts, but the thing is that we believe it’s
about to happen. We believe the gods from Atlantis are really down there, under
the ground, and we believe they’ve been making themselves ready to – well,
making themselves ready to do whatever it is they do when they come out of the
ground.’

Mrs Thompson nodded. ‘Yes,’ she
said.

‘Just “yes,”?’
I asked her.

She turned and stared at me. ‘That’s
all I can say. I know the legend, and I’m quite sure that much of it is true.
So when you come and tell me that it’s happening, that the beast-gods are about
to emerge as they promised they would in the days when their kingdom collapsed,
what else can I say but “yes”?’

‘How come you know this legend?’ I
asked her. ‘I haven’t met anyone else around here
who’s
heard of it.’

She smiled. ‘I should know it. My
family has been psycho-sensitive for generations. My mother used to tell me
that my great-great-great grandfather actually spoke to one of the gods who
lived under the ground. He found a way into the tunnels and the caves under the
hills, and discovered where the beast-god was concealed.’

I blew out smoke. ‘His name wasn’t
Josiah Walters, by any chance?’

She smiled. ‘You must have found a
copy of the Legends of Lttchjield:

‘I did. That’s how I learned about
the story in the first place. But it doesn’t say too much about the beast-gods
themselves, or what they wanted out of life.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Thompson. ‘The truth
was that everybody thought Josiah Walters was quite mad.

He went underground one day and was
missing for almost a week. When he came out, he said he’d walked for five miles
through caves and tunnels beneath Washington, and swum in subterranean lakes,
and that he’d survived by catching strange blind fish that thrived under the
ground.’

‘Did anyone try to check out his
story?’ asked Dan., ‘I don’t think so. According to his diaries, he wouldn’t
reveal where the entrances and the exits to the caves were concealed. He said
it was too dangerous for anyone else to go down there, and that if scientists
and pot holers disturbed the beast-god, then he would awaken and take his
revenge on everybody.’

‘No wonder they thought he was
crazy.’

‘Oh, they did,’ said Mrs Thompson.
‘He was locked up in an insane asylum in Hartford for three months, but in the
end they released him. Unfortunately, most of his diaries were discovered by
the local church people and destroyed as works of the devil. I suppose, in a
way, they were.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked
her.

She gazed out at the green, unkempt
garden. ‘From what little remains of his notes, it seems that Josiah Walters
was quite sure that he had found the totally evil being that led ancient people
to conjure up the idea of Satan. There was one great beast-god, whose name was
Chulthe or Quithe, and he was summoned from the stars centuries ago, and set up
his kingdom where men could not reach him, in the drowned mountain ranges of
Atlantis.’

‘Who summoned him?’ I wanted to
know. ‘Does Josiah say?’

She said: ‘You can read it for
yourself. If you can wait a few moments I’ll go find his diary for you.’

I checked my watch. It was ten after
four. I said: ‘Sure. We’d appreciate that.’

‘And you’d care for a cup of mint
tea?’

Dan hesitated, and then said: ‘Sure.
Mint tea would be delightful.’

Minutes passed while Mrs Thompson
went in search of the old diary, and made tea. Neither Dan nor I said a word.
We were too tense and too tired, and even though it was only twenty after four
by the time Mrs Thompson came back with a tray, we felt as if ten years had passed,
instead often minutes. On the tray were three green-and-white porcelain cups,
very thin with delicate handles, and a teapot in the unlikely shape of a
cabbage. Beside the teapot were a few yellowed pages of old paper, loosely tied
together with pink legal ribbon. Mrs Thompson handed them over.

Together, Dan and I pored over
Josiah Walters’ slanting, crabbed writing. If I’d had access to a time-machine,
I would have gone back two hundred years and given him a Papermate. It took us
all of ten more minutes to decipher the first two pages alone, but Mrs Thompson
gave us all the time we needed, sitting back and sipping her tea with the
equanimity of a society lady at a genteel local gathering.

The pages were numbered from 54
onwards. Obviously the rest had been destroyed by Walters’ superstitious
friends. They began:

’... out of ye
welles
at last and most happie to breathe ye air. I hidde ye
exite out of which I had come, lest others should finde it and attempt a
similar expedition, which would be perilusse in ye utmost extreme, having
regard to ye nature of ye beasts which lie within. And having further thought
on ye beasts, and in particular ye great beast-god Chulthe, which lieth so deep
beneath ye crust of ye hilles near Washington, it is now evident that I have
met face unto face ye very being itself which i unlearned peoples of ancient
times came to know as Satan, ye Deville. For even though Chulthe was banished
beyond ye stars in ancient times, he was summoned back to this Pianette by [
Aaron whose summons was focussed not by ye Golden Calf, as told in ye Olde
Testament, but by ye Golden Beast of a visage so terrible that none could
describe.it, save as a Calf. And upon this Pianette from that day forth Chulthe
dwell’d, making his kingdom in the mountains beneath ye Atlantic Ocean, and
summoning in his turn lesser beast-gods from ye stars as his miniones. So
thatte in ye greatest days of Atlantis, Chulthe reign’d over both beast-gods
& humans, manie of whom were strangely transmogrified to serve his purpose.
And when Atlantis was swallow’d uppe by ye fires beneath ye Ocean, ye
beast-gods retreated and hidde themselves in ye wateringe-places of ye Globe,
some in England and some in certain rivers in continents of Africa and India,
even beneath ye rock itself, in ye cavernes below New England. Here it is that
ye supreme e’ville being Chulthe dwelles, awaiting a time when he is readie to
rise up again and rule ye lesser beast-gods again, & ye humans who dwell by
ye seas. And it is ye eville wrought by Chulthe and by his miniones in other
partes of ye Globe as they lie beneath ye earth thatte has in all certaintie
led men to believe in Satan, for Chulthe’s ghostlie image, and ye images
likewise of his miniones have walk’d abroad, even when their bodies rested beneath
the earth. And ye certaintie of this is the words and signs which Chulthe
himself gave me in ye subterranean caverns beneath New Milford and Washington,
ye most certaine of which is ye sign appended here.’