The Wells of Hell (31 page)

He looked around the cavern. ‘This
is obviously some upper chamber of a water system,’ he said, using Carter’s
flashlight to inspect the grey shields of rock. ‘I doubt if it’s been flooded
in centuries. But it was at one time – look.’

He shone the beam of the flashlight
along a thick banded encrustation of mineral salts that ran around the cave
only a few feet beneath the ceiling. The salts sparkled and twinkled in the
light, in white and orange and green.

‘Magnesium, copper
sulphate, some potassium.
They were deposited there when the water rose.

We’ll probably find that the next
chamber below this one is flooded.’

‘Is it possible that Quithe’s
hiding-place is right underwater?’ I asked him.

‘That’s what I’ve been wondering,’
said Dan. ‘I was trying to work out why he was coming back to life now, at this
particular time, and maybe it’s because the underground water-level has risen
so high this year.’

‘I don’t get you,’ said Carter. ‘Why
should the water-level make any difference?’

Dan lowered the flashlight. ‘The way
I see it, this Chulthe or Quithe is a water-beast. He can only regain his full
strength if he’s surrounded by water. Now, when Atlantis collapsed, the water
level was probably very high, because of the volcanic activity and the
disturbances under the ocean, and so when Quithe penetrated the inland water
system in order to perpetuate himself, he probably came to rest at a higher
level under the ground than water normally reached.

‘The old legends aren’t very clear
about how he actually penetrated the wells. The Litchfield book says that the
beast-gods infiltrated the subterranean water-table with their seed, which
presumably were microscopic like human seed. Yet Josiah Walters says he
actually came across Quithe in his hiding place, and so by the eighteenth
century Quithe must have been fully grown, or at least half-grown.

‘What I think could have happened is
that Quithe began to grow in these underground caves soon after his earlier
manifestation had deposited his fertilised seed here. The caves were probably
still flooded, and so Quithe rapidly gained in strength and size. But then, as
the disturbances of Atlantis settled, the water level sank, and left Quithe
stranded in a cave from which he was too physically large to escape downwards,
into lower levels that might still have been filled with water. He lost
strength, and he was left in what amounts to suspended animation. He was dried
up, as it were, like dried shellfish, and he stayed that way for centuries.’

Carter blinked. ‘You mean he only
came to life again after this year’s heavy rainfall, when the water rose up
into his cave again, and gave him a good soaking?’

‘If you want to
put it that way, yes.
At least, it’s a theory. And when the water rose, and he started to
grow again, and live again, he ejaculated more seed into the water so that any
human or animal
who
drank it would mutate into one of
his servants. They would turn into crabs, which could find food for him on dry
land, but which could also bring it back here, and feed it to him under the
water.’

I stroked Shelley’s head. ‘There’s
only one thing, Dan. If Quithe is underwater, how do we winkle him out? We
don’t have aqua-lungs, or harpoon-guns, or whatever you need to go chasing
underwater beast-gods with.’

The cavern shook with that deep,
threatening vibration again. Some pieces of rock fell from the ceiling and
clattered, echoing, on to the debris-strewn floor.

‘I don’t know what we can do,’ said
Dan. ‘First of all, we have to find him, and then we can make up our minds what
we need to do to get rid of him.’

I looked down at Shelley. ‘I see.
This is where my faithful bloodpuss comes in.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Carter.

I didn’t want to let Shelley go, but
I guessed neither of us had much choice. I lifted him out from his rain-cape,
and set him down among the bats’ bones and the broken rocks, and he stood there
in the lamplight with his tail stiff and his nose scenting the air, and I really
didn’t want to lose him, not for anything.

‘Go find him, Shelley,’ whispered
Carter. ‘He’s there someplace. You go find him.’

Slowly, selectively, Shelley made
his way across the gloom of the cave, heading towards the narrower end, where
the shadowy crevice was. Carter’s flashlight followed him all the way. He
turned once, his eyes shining green, and then he disappeared into the darkness
without a sound.

We crunched as gently as we could
over the bats’ bones until we reached the crevice, and we looked down it with
growing uncertainty. It was only just over four feet high, and it led steeply
downwards into the ground, with an uneven curve to the left. I glimpsed
Shelley’s tail as he jumped carefully over the craggy, jumbled rocks, and then
he was gone.

‘Like they say in the Lassie movies,
it looks like he wants us to follow him,’ said Carter.

V.f.P.-H 193

‘Do you think we can actually get
down there?’ I asked him. ‘It looks about as tight as a llama’s ass.’

‘How do you know how tight a llama’s
ass is?’ demanded Carter. ‘Help me get this gun off my back. There’s no way I’m
going to crawl through there with this goddamned drainpipe tied around me.’

While Dan helped Carter unbuckle the
anti-tank gun, I checked around the entrance to the crevice with my torch. The
rock was sparkling with minerals, and rough. But as I played the beam over the
left side of the entrance, I thought I glimpsed a mark that wasn’t natural. I
crouched down closer to it, and rubbed away the salts that had encrusted it
over the years, and there was the reassurance we needed that Shelley was
leading us the right way.

Scratched into the rock, unevenly
and hurriedly, were the initials ‘J.W., ‘
87’,
and an
arrow pointing the way that Shelley had gone. I turned around and said to
Carter: ‘This is the devil’s den, all right. Josiah Walters left his initials
here.’

Carter, flexing his shoulder muscles
now that he was free of the anti-tank gun, came across and peered at the
scratchings.

‘That’s incredible,’ he said. ‘Just
to think that guy made that mark all of two hundred years ago, and it’s as
fresh as if he did it this morning.’

There was another shudder of seismic
disturbance, briefer than before, but more intense, and for a moment I couldn’t
keep my balance. We heard rocks clattering and earth sliding, and Carter shone
his lamp quickly up to the roof of the cavern. The loosely-drilled hole through
which we had entered this subterranean world was slowly falling in. We saw the
flicker of a beam from one of the arc-lights on the surface, but then there was
a heavier slide of soil, and even that was gone.

Carter looked at me. His face, in
the upward-shining light of his lamp, was like a grotesque mask of theatrical
tragedy.

‘Let’s hope we don’t need to get out
of this place in a hurry,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s going to take them all of an
hour to clear that shaft again, and that’s being optimistic.’

‘Your brand of optimism I can do
without,’ I told him. ‘Now, let’s get after Shelley before we lose him
altogether.’ ^ ‘You go first,’ said Carter. ‘After all, he’s your cat.’ I bent
my head and crouched my way into the crevice. Once I was through the entrance,
the roof of the tunnel became a few inches higher, but it was still awkward and
narrow and stunningly claustrophobic. Stumbling, grunting, and cursing,’we made
our way downwards over loose and jagged rocks, sometimes tearing our hands on
the rough surface, sometimes squeezing between harsh gaps that seemed to have
been deliberately designed to allow a human being through, but only just. We
were sweating and exhausted after only a few minutes, and still the tunnel
descended into the earth, as narrow and oppressive as before.

‘There are times in my life,’ puffed
Carter, ‘when I really regret all those beers.’

He pushed his way past a massive and
overbearing slab of rock. In the glaring, unsteady light of our torches, I
could just see Dan’s pale face as he brought up the rear.

‘And those hot dogs,’ added Carter.

Dan said: ‘And those giant portions
of pecan pie with mountains of whipped cream.’

We struggled onwards and downwards,
deeper and deeper into the dark earth under Connecticut. Sweat was dropping off
of our faces, and we were all panting for lack of air. I felt like I had as a
small boy, when I had tunnelled under the bedclothes and lost any sense of
which way was up and which way was down, and my world had suddenly turned into
nothing but darkness and oppressive weight and panic.

Carter asked me: ‘How long have we
been down here?’

‘Fifteen minutes,’ I said, over my
shoulder.

‘How far do you think we’ve come?
Two hundred, three hundred feet?’

‘Something
like
that.
Maybe not as far.
It’s difficult to tell when
you don’t have any landmarks.’

Dan called: ‘Any sign of it widening
out yet?’

I shone my flashlight up ahead, but
all I could see was slabby, enclosing rocks.

‘Not for the next fifty feet,’ I
told him. ‘You want to take a rest?’

‘Let’s just get on with it,’ growled
Carter. ‘I’m beginning to feel like the red pimiento in a stuffed olive.’ We
climbed down and down, painfully and silently, for the next ten minutes. At
times, the roof of the tunnel was so low that we had to crawl on our hands and
knees, at a sharp downward angle, and what that cost in cut hands and bruised
foreheads was enough to make us all feel like turning around and getting the
hell out of there. The only trouble was
,
the tunnel
was so constricting that we couldn’t even turn around.

Unexpectedly, though, after we’d
shouldered our way between two gritty and uncompromising boulders, the tunnel
began to widen. In a minute” or two, we were stepping over the rocky floor
quite freely, and then our flashlights picked up the iridescent glitter of
white stalactites. We came out on to what appeared to be a kind of natural
balcony, overlooking a vast, vaulted cavern. All around, the cavern was
pillared with crystallised salts, so that it had taken on the appearance of a
strange cloistered cathedral, a totally silent place of worship into which the
sun had never shone.

Cautiously, we approached the edge
of our balcony, and looked downward. There seemed to be nothing but inky,
fathomless blackness; but then Carter shone his flashlight downwards and we saw
why. Only ten or twelve feet below us, so still that we could see our lights
and our faces suspended in it like Hallowe’en lanterns on a dark night, was the
surface of an underground lake.

This was how far the water had risen
from the depths of the earth, and it was out of here that the Bodines had
drunk, and been cursed by the evil organisms in Chulthe’s seed.

I heard a mewling sound, and I shone
my flashlight to one side. Standing on a broken stalagmite that rose from the
water at the edge of the lake was Shelley, and he was pawing and sniffing as if
what he was hunting was close, but unreachable.

‘You see that?’ I said to Dan. ‘That
could mean that Chulthe is right down there, right in this lake.’

‘That goddamned tuna smell sure is
strong enough,’ said Carter, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of
his hairy arm. ‘It’s like a goddamned fish dock down here.’

Dan stared down at the water. ‘It’s
completely clear,’ he said quietly. ‘If we had a powerful enough lamp, we might
be able to see right down to the bottom.’

‘Any volunteers to go back and get
one?’ asked Carter. Shelley, on his precarious perch, miaowed and bristled.

Dan said: ‘Does your cat know
something that we don’t?’

I shrugged. ‘It could be just the
smell of the fish. I don’t know. I wasn’t trained in cat psychology.’

We spent a few minutes examining the
dark and nightmarish vault. Its resemblance to some kind of holy church was
uncanny, and there was even that cold dead atmosphere you can feel in neglected
French cathedrals, so cold that you can imagine the knights and saints buried
under the flagstones to be numb to the bone. As we shone our flashlights along
the white stalactite pillars all around the cavern’s flooded nave, they were
mirrored in the water to form almost perfect Norman arches.

‘It’s like the devil’s own chapel,’
said Carter. ‘Did you ever see a cave like this before? It’s unreal.’

‘I think supernatural is probably
the right word,’ put in Dan.

I coughed. ‘Supernatural or not,
we’re going to have to do something positive, aren’t we? There’s no point in
going back unless we know that Chulthe’s here for sure.’

‘What do you suggest?’ asked Dan.

‘I don’t know. Maybe we ought to try
disturbing him.’

Carter frowned. ‘You want to disturb
a beast-god, one hundred fifty feet underground, with only a jack-rabbit’s
burrow for an escape route?’

‘I don’t want to. But it looks as if
we’re going to have to.’