The Wells of Hell (29 page)

‘How about
underground lakes, that kind of thing?’

He wiped his nose with the back of
his hand. ‘It’s possible. The Litchfield hills were created by tectonic
pressures on Precambrian stable shield and occasionally that gives you folded
hills with caverns beneath. Or sometimes water erodes the lower stratae, and
you get your caves that way.’

‘Tectonic
pressures?’
I
asked him.

‘Sure.
Volcanic
activity.
Rumpling up the flat shields of rock like an unmade bed.
Mostly Palaeozoic in this area.’

‘I didn’t know you were such a
geology buff.’

‘I’m not. But when you spend your
whole damned life drilling holes in the ground, you get to know the ground
you’re drilling holes in.’

The crew’s foreman came up with a
lump of wet clay in his hand. ‘Mr Thrush? It definitely looks like we’ve
drilled ourselves into some kind of underground cavern here. It could be
anything up to seventy, eighty feet in height.’

‘How far down is it?’ asked Thrush.

‘A little less
than seventy-six feet.
That’s at the point where we’ve pierced the roof of it, anyway. It
could be deeper in other areas.’

Carter Wilkes said: ‘Can you drill a
wider hole?’

The foreman looked at him.
‘Sir?’

‘You heard,’ Carter responded, in
his usual harsh voice. ‘Can you drill a wider hole – a hole that a man could
get down?’

‘Well, sure,’ said the foreman,
uncertainly. ‘But it depends on what you want. Mr Thrush here told me this was
nothing more than a water-sampling project.’

Carter sighed. ‘It doesn’t make any
difference to you what it is, does it, so long as you get paid at the end of
the month?’

The foreman tilted his hard-hat back
on his forehead. He was young, with a thick neck like a bull, and a
neatly-clipped moustache. ‘I don’t want any of my crew going down that hole,
sir, and that’s all there is to it. We haven’t had adequate surveys, and we
haven’t had comprehensive sampling bores, and quite frankly it’s too damned
dangerous. Nobody goes down unless the safety angle is all checked out.’

‘I’m not asking you or your men to
go down there,’ said Carter.

The foreman blinked. ‘I can’t take
responsibility for anybody who does though, sheriff.’

‘I’m not asking you to do that,
either. I’m just asking you to drill a hole down to that cavern, and to make
sure that it’s wide enough for a man to climb through.’

The foreman looked at Dutton Thrush,
expecting him to tell Sheriff Wilkes that what he was asking was out of the
question. But Dutton nodded and said: ‘Go ahead,’ and so the foreman shrugged
his shoulders and went back to the rig where his crew were standing waiting.
After a brief discussion, the diesel engine was started up again, and the drill
was shifted a couple of feet nearer the house so that they could sink a
parallel shaft. I checked my watch as the drill bit tore into the grass and
then deep into the soil. It was well past six, and my eyes were so tired that I
felt as if I’d been rubbing them with salt and sand. I would have sold my shoes
for a Jack Daniel’s, a log fire, and a soft bed.

It took another hour to go through
seventy-six feet of soft soil and assorted densities of rock. A few minutes
after seven, as a deputy arrived with a large flask of coffee from the police
commissary in New Milford, the diesel engine was shut off again, and the
foreman of the drilling crew announced that we were almost through.

‘The ground’s real soft here,
because of the water leakage that’s been going on,’ he said, wiping the mud
from his hands with an even muddier handkerchief. ‘It’s already collapsed into
the cavern in parts, and with a little more drilling we should be able to open
up a hole that’s wide enough. Three or four feet wide, at least.’ x

‘Will the sides hold?’ asked Carter.

‘I guess,’ said the foreman. ‘But
whoever goes down there had better be prepared for a few slides of mud on top
of the head.’

Carter smiled across at me like an
unctuous big brother. ‘How do you feel about it, Mason?’

‘
yWf
? You
want me to go down there?’

‘Well, you and Dan together, maybe,
and a deputy to help you out. Come on, Mason, you know more about these
creatures than anybody. Didn’t that crab-creature stop and turn away when you
called it by name?’

I couldn’t believe what I was
hearing. The last goddamned thing in the world that I wanted to do was crawl
down some muddy hole in the ground and come face-to-face with the monster that
had come through centuries of fear and superstition to be known as the Devil.
What I’d seen outside of Mrs Thompson’s conservatory, that flickering and
hideous vision of serpentine tentacles and ferocious
horns,
that
had been.quite enough for one lifetime. But to face Satan in the
flesh – well, that was my cue for discreetly backing out.

181’

‘Carter,’ I said, ‘I’d love to help
you.’

‘Sure you’d love to help me. Dutton,
do you have a hard-hat to spare?’

Dutton nodded. ‘There’s a couple in
the back of my Silverado.’

‘Dutton,’ I put in, ‘hold it,
Dutton. I’m not going.’

Carter pretended to look surprised.
‘What do you mean, you’re not going? This whole goddamned situation has been
your baby, right from the very beginning.’

‘Carter, I’m a plumber.’

‘I know you’re a plumber. Don’t tell
me that you’re a plumber. But you’re an intellectual too, right? You know about
stuff like this.
The occult, stuff like this.
You know
what the hell’s going on here, which is more than I do. Of course you’ve got to
go.’

‘If I go down there, I’m going to
get myself killed!’ I shouted. ‘If the goddamned shaft doesn’t collapse on top
of my head, then that beast-god is going to drown me! And if it doesn’t drown
me, it’s going to eat me! So what do you think I’m going to say to you, but «o
?’

Carter looked at Dutton as if I was
a spoiled child who was going to have to be persuaded to do what was best for
him. But Dan said: ‘Mason’s right. You can’t expect us to go down there without
any kind of protection. It’s certain death.’

‘I’d send a deputy, too.’

‘How about coming down
yourself
?’

‘Me?’ said Carter. ‘I have to stay
up here and control everything.’

I turned and gave him one of my
steadiest, coldest stares. ‘Carter,’ I told him, ‘there’s only one way you’re
going to persuade me to go down that shaft, and that’s if you come along, too.’

Carter looked uncomfortable. He
lifted his head to the sky, and smoothed his double chins with his hand, and
breathed in and out like a man who was summoning, not gods, but the greatest of
patience. The clouds were clotting again now, like black blood, and we could
hear the thunder booming in the distance. A sudden draught of wind blew the
fallen leaves into a clattering turmoil.

‘Mason,’ said Carter, ‘I can’t force
you to go.’ There was another rumble of thunder. I could smell electricity in
the air, and something else. The faint but unmistakeable odour of fish, as if
someone had just opened a can of sardines.

‘I’m not going, Carter,’ I told the
sheriff, flatly. ‘I’m not even a deputy, so you can’t force me.’

Carter sighed some more, and rubbed
his chin some more, and huffed and wuffed. ‘You’re right,’ he said, in a forced
voice. ‘You’re absolutely right. I can’t force you to go nowhere.’

‘As long as you
realise it.’

He turned his back on me, and when
he spoke again, it was in a controlled, though muffled, tone.

‘If I said that I would come,
though, what would you say then?’

I looked across at Dan. ‘Are you
willing to go if Carter goes?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘I guess so. I don’t
have very much to lose. No family, anything like that. And I’d be fascinated to
see what this Chulthe looks like.’

I felt as if I’d been pushed into
checkmate in chess. If Dan was going to go down after this beast-god, and if
Carter was prepared to go, too, then it didn’t look as if I had much in the way
of alternatives. I could have refused, sure. I could have stayed behind and
thanked the Lord for my life and my career in plumbing, but I knew as well as
Carter knew that if Chulthe managed to rise again from under the ground, then
there wasn’t going to be much in the way of life or careers for anyone.
Chulthe, or Quithe, was a powerful and hideous beast who would slaughter or
mutate any human being for the sake of his own self-preservation, and he was
probably stronger now, after centuries of concealment, than he had ever been
before.

Abruptly, a curtain of heavy rain
washed across the grass of the Bodines’ yard. The brilliant arc-lights sparkled
in rainbows of watery colour, and the engineers started up their diesel engine
again in case they had to pump water out of their excavation.

‘All right,’ I said reluctantly.
‘Get me a hard-hat, and tell me I’m the bravest American since Audie Murphy,
and I’ll come.’

Carter nodded to Dutton Thrush, who
went off to his wagon to find us some lids. Dan and Carter and I stood in the
rain looking at each other warily, each one of us wondering if the other two
were only going down in the cavern because they didn’t want to be called chicken,
or because they really weren’t afraid of what might be down there.

Carter said: ‘Martino, did you bring
that anti-tank gun?’

‘1 surely did, sheriff.’

‘Well, bring it around here, and
make sure it’s loaded.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Dan said: ‘It’s a pity we lost Mrs
Thompson. As far as the psychic side of this goes, we’re fumbling around in the
dark. Quithe could kill us without any warning, at any time, and we wouldn’t
even know he was there.’

Carter checked his watch. ‘There’s
no time to find anybody else. We’ll just have to trust our own noses.’

‘I know one nose that I do trust,’ I
put in. ‘
Whose
nose is that?’

‘Shelley’s.’

‘Your cat
Shelley’s?’

I dabbed rainwater out of my eyes
with my handkerchief. ‘Is there any other Shelley?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Carter. ‘Shelley
Winters?’ I was so nervous about what we were going to have to do that I
couldn’t even take a joke. I said, sharply: ‘You think we should take Shelley
Winters down that goddamned seventy-foot hole? Of course I mean my cat Shelley.
This devil and all his mutated servants smell of fish, and that smell gets
Shelley going like a bored New York matron with seven cherry brandies under her
belt.’

‘Do you want to go get him?’ asked
Carter. ‘He won’t like the rain,’ I warned him. Carter beckoned over one of his
deputies. ‘Chaffe,’ he said, with enormously exaggerated patience, ‘I want you
to go to my car and open the trunk. Inside, there’s a spare rain-cape. Would
you bring it back here as soon as you conceivably can?’

‘Okay, sheriff,’ said. Chaffe, and
went off around the house. We waited for a while. The engineering crew dug the
drillhole wider with trenching shovels, but the soil above the cavern was so
soft that they didn’t have very much trouble. Every now and then, a huge lump
of turf would crumble and subside, causing a minor landslide, and by the time
Chaffe came back with the cape, the collapses had widened the hole to four or
five feet in diameter. We cautiously approached the edge, and an engineer
obligingly trained his flashlight downwards into the darkness for us. You
couldn’t see much except sodden earth, twisted roots, rocks and shadows.

Way down at the bottom of the pit,
seventy-six feet below us, there was nothing but blackness.

‘Must be a pretty sizeable cave down
there,’ said the foreman. ‘We can’t even penetrate it with the arc-lights.
Wide, and deep, and smells pretty damned fishy, too,’

‘That’s right,’ said Carter,
brusquely. ‘Now, how are you going to get us down there?’

‘That’s simple enough,’ the foreman
told him. ‘We put one of these canvas belts around you, and then we lower you
down from the drilling rig.’

‘And supposing we want to come up
again, in a real hurry?’

The foreman shrugged. ‘I’m afraid
you can’t do that, at least not in a hurry. You just have to whistle for the
line to come down, and hitch yourself on to it again, and wait while we haul
you up, one at a time.’

Dan said: ‘Let’s hope we don’t have
the hounds of hell on our heels when we need to have ourselves brought back to
the surface.’

Carter wiped rain from the end of
his nose. ‘I’m beginning to wonder how the damn hell you talked me into going
along with you to start with.’

‘Sheriff,’ I smiled, ‘this is the
kind of valiant deed they give sheriffs citations for.’

‘Citations my ass.
Look, here’s your rain-cape.’