The Wells of Hell (28 page)

It hovered as if it was floating on
the surface of our subconscious minds, a swimmer in the black ocean of our
inherited fear. It had an eye that was the concentration of malice and
ferocious intent, and long horns that seemed to wave in the thundery air, as if
I was seeing the beast through the rippling heat of a night-watchman’s brazier.

It wasn’t real. It wasn’t actually
there, in the beastly flesh. It was nothing more than a powerful and
frightening psychic image that
its
actual, buried self
created to terrify us. But it was just what Josiah Walters had said it was. It
was Satan. It was all the fears and sins of every religion embodied in one
totally grotesque and horrible creature. It was the leering temptation that
haunts you when you’re cruel or self-serving. It was the goat-like incarnation
of lust and greed. It was the mastet of everything that crawled and crept and slithered.

When God drowned the world that had
disobeyed Him, saving none but Noah, this devil had also survived. It was the
devil of the oceans, of the strange pressurised deeps where hideous creatures
lurk. It was the devil of drowned hopes and dreams, of the only natural medium
on earth in which man cannot survive. When I had slept and had nightmares of
swimming, it was the evil vibrations of this creature that my dreaming mind had
picked up.

Dan said: ‘Oh, Christ,’ and he said
it sincerely, but even an invocation like that couldn’t help us.

In a split-second, the conservatory
roof burst open, and a thundering torrent of water swept us off our feet. It
was icy cold, foaming and turbulent, and I took a huge lungful before I could
even understand what was happening. I choked and spluttered, and then a current
dragged me down into a dark submarine world of floating plant pots, drifting
dog food, and tables that danced by themselves with a curious buoyancy.

I thought I felt someone clutch at
my sleeve. It could have been Dan or Mrs Thompson, or maybe something more
frightening. I pushed myself backwards, and my head struck the French windows.
For a strange moment I was swimming with my face pressed to the glass, staring
out at the rain in the garden. Then the weight of the water must have burst the
conservatory apart, because there was a smashing and rending of glass, and I
found myself tumbling across the wet grass in a foaming rapid of broken windows
and water.

I lay there in the dark garden for
what seemed like an hour. I was coughing and choking and I couldn’t catch my
breath. The rain fell all around, and every now and then I heard a far-away
crack of lightning, and a responding roll of thunder. At last, soaking and
chilled and shaking all over, I managed to get up on to my feet and look
around.

Dan was sitting a few feet away. He
was coughing, but he seemed all right. It was Mrs Thompson I was worried about.
I walked back to the splintered and twisted ruins of her old conservatory, with
glass splitting and snapping beneath my feet, and I called out: ‘Mrs Thompson?’

There was no answer. I stepped over
the jagged glass teeth that marked the edge of the conservatory, and called
again: ‘Mrs Thompson?’

The rain fell in my face, and the
wind shook the bushes, but there was still no reply. I trod slowly and
cautiously forward, through the wreckage of glass and metal.

I found her, on her back, in the
centre of the tiled floor. She was lying on a glittering bier of broken glass,
and her eyes stared up to heaven as if her soul had already left her, and her
eyes were following its distant progress. The bronze weather-vane which had
topped the apex of the conservatory roof had dropped straight down and was now
imbedded in her chest. She must have died even before the conservatory was
flooded. Her blood mingled with the rain-water, and she smelled of death
already.

Dan came up and stood beside me. He
looked down at Mrs Thompson and wiped the rain from his forehead. ‘It looks
like we brought this on her,’ he said, quietly. ‘We might just as well have
killed her with our own bare hands.’

I turned away. ‘I think she knew the
beast-god was going to get her, sooner or later.
If that’s
any consolation.’

‘Not to her it isn’t.’

I looked across at him sharply.
‘Well, what do you want me to do about it? She said it was her destiny.’

‘You feel as guilty as I do,’ said
Dan.

I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t feel
guilty. She was playing with fire a long time before we came along and burned
her. She seemed like she knew.’

Dan checked his watch. ‘We’d better
get across to the ‘Bodines’ house, whatever,’ he said wearily. ‘They must have
started drilling by now, and if what Mrs Thompson said was true, they’re in for
some problems.’

I looked down at Mrs Thompson’s body
again. She seemed, in an eerie kind of way, to be smiling at me. I found myself
smiling back before I reminded myself that she was dead, and that any smiles
she gave now were tricks of the light, or the distortion of relaxing muscles.

‘Did you see that thing, that
creature?’ I asked Dan, as we walked through the sumac bushes to the car.

He nodded.
‘A
psychic illusion.
It couldn’t have harmed us with its own physical
strength.’

‘Did it remind you of anything?’

‘What do you mean?’

We reached the car and I opened the
door. We looked at each other across the curved, rain-slicked roof.

‘I mean, did it remind you of
anything?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess it did. I’m
not quite sure what.’

We climbed into the car and closed
the doors. The engine whinnied, whined, and finally burst into life. I ground
the gears into first, and away we went.

I said: ‘Why not try to remember? I
know what / thought of, when I saw it. You tell me what you thought of

Dan looked out at the rainy woods.
‘The funniest thing is
,
I think it reminded me of when
I was a boy. I was out in the fields near my home with my sister, and we came
across some older boys torturing a dog. They were hanging it upside-down from a
tree, things like that, and then they doused it in kerosene and set it alight.
I saw that poor dumb animal running around and I could smell its hair and its
flesh burning, and in the end it rolled over and died. Well, I don’t know why,
but that creature we saw tonight reminded me of that.’

‘You know why, don’t you?’ I asked
him. ‘You remember what Josiah Walters said? “It is the evil wrought by Chulthe
and his minions that has led men in all certainty to believe in Satan.”‘

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Dan.
‘Why should Chulthe remind me of that day when the boys burned the
dog?’

‘Because it was an evil deed, and
because it was the work of the devil, and because Chulthe is the devil. What we
saw tonight, that image, that was Satan himself.’

Dan found a pack of paper tissues in
the glove box, and started to dab at his face and his hair to get himself dry.

‘That’s a little too superstitious
for my liking,’ he said, after a while. ‘I prefer to think that it was a
psycho-electric illusion.’

‘You can think what you like. It was
still Satan. Not in person, not in the flesh, but an image of himself which he
projected straight out of his own mind.’

Dan shrugged. ‘You could be right.
But I’d prefer to use his real names, Quithe or Chulthe.

They’re so much less emotive, don’t
you think?’

I glanced across at him. ‘We’re
fighting against the devil, and you’re worried about being emotive?’

‘I just don’t want to panic people.
Especially the drilling crew.’

‘They’re going to dig up Satan and
they shouldn’t panic?’

Dan frowned at me. ‘Listen, Mason,
whose side are you on?’

I steered the car left at the New
Milford rotary, and we crossed the grey steel bridge over the Housatonic.

‘I think I’m on the side of the
angels,’ I told him.

He grunted. ‘That’s good. Let’s hope
the angels are on your side, too.’

The rain had temporarily eased off
by the time we reached the Bodine house. The roads were wet, reflecting the
headlights of passing cars, but the air was dry and windy and fresh, and up
above us the clouds were breaking up so that the stars shone through. From as
far away as the hill that overlooked the Bodines’ property from a mile
west,
we could see the shifting shafts of the arc-lights
that the county engineers had set up around their well-head. The lights were
intense and blue, and they cast shadows as long as dark giraffes. As we pulled
up in the driveway, and climbed out of the Volkswagen we saw the tall
scaffolding of the drilling-rig, and from the regular chugging and whining of a
diesel engine, we guessed that work had already started. I lit a cigarillo, and
then followed Dan around the side of the house.

Sheriff Wilkes was standing a few
feet away from the centre of operations, talking to Dutton Thrush, the
engineering supervisor for Litchfield County, who had driven down from
Torrington specially. Thrush was a lean, laconic man, like a root vegetable
that had been left to shrivel in the back of a cellar. He wore rimless
spectacles, a yellow hard-hat. A Camel hung suspended from his lip at all
times, and was never seen to be lit.

Dan and I screwed up our eyes as we
inspected the brightly-lit drilling rig. The shaft was rotating slowly as the
bit cut through topsoil, and down into the rock. A crew of five engineers,
dressed in jeans and overalls and windbreakers, were standing around the rig
with their collars turned up, clapping their hands together to keep warm.

‘Hallo there, Carter,’ I said
quietly. ‘How are you, Dutton?’

‘Surviving,’ said Dutton, his Camel
waggling precariously.

Carter said: ‘You talk to the
Thompson woman?’

I nodded. ‘For as long as we could.
But Quithe got in there and made sure we didn’t use her against him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s dead, Carter. We were round
at her house and we got hit by another flood.’

Carter Wilkes looked at me carefully
out of deep-set, almost piggy eyes.
‘Dead?
Drowned?’

‘Crushed.
The conservatory was flooded. The
walls collapsed, and the weather-vane came right down and on to her chest.
There wasn’t anything we could do to save her.’

‘How long ago?’ asked Carter.

‘We just came from there.’

Carter took out his personal radio
transmitter and called the deputy who was waiting in his car. ‘Chaffe, get an
ambulance out to Mrs Thompson’s place at Boardman’s Bridge. They’ll know. Yes.
She’s dead. Make sure you tell Yealland to get out there and check everything.
I want pictures, the whole lot. Yes. I’ll call you back in a while.’

Dan said: ‘It was definitely Quithe.
We both saw him, or some kind of psychic image of him.’

‘You mean this monster we’re
drilling after now?’

Dan nodded. ‘According to some old
papers that Mrs Thompson showed us, this whole area is riddled with caves and
underground lakes, and that’s where Quithe has been hiding himself.’

Dutton Thrush said: ‘Quithe? What’s
this Quithe?’

I blew smoke. ‘It’s kind of a pet-name.
It means something like “terrible beast-god from the chasm”.’

‘Are you putting me on?’

I shook my head. ‘There’s something
down there, Dutton. Something that looks like hell on earth and can drown you
in your own bed just by wishing you would. Now, do you think I’d put you on
about something like that?’

W
ith a frenzied screech, the drill
suddenly speeded up, spun madly for a few seconds, and then stopped. Dutton
called out: ‘What goes on?’

One of his crew said: ‘We’ve broken
through into some kind of cavity here, Mr Thrush.
Maybe a
cave or a tunnel.
You want to come see for yourself?’

Dutton Thrush gave me an extremely
old-fashioned look, and stalked across the wet grass to the well-head. The
drilling crew were raising the muddy drill-shaft out of the ground, and it
finally came up in a surging rush of discoloured water. Dutton scraped his
forefinger down the length of the shaft, and examined the dirt on his hand
under the nearest arc-light. Then he said: ‘Jones, Wockik, get that drill
opened up and let’s take a look at the core-sample.’

I went across and stood beside him.
I didn’t know whether I was welcome there or not, but I guessed what had
happened to Jimmy and Alison Bodine was as much my business as anybody’s, and
so I stayed. He knelt down beside the bubbling fountain of yellowy water that
was still gushing out of the drillhole, and he seemed at a loss to know what to
do next.

‘Dutton?’
I asked him.

‘What is it?’

‘Do you think .there’s a cave down
there?
Or maybe a tunnel?’

‘There could be. I won’t be sure
until I’ve checked.’