The Wells of Hell (32 page)

Carter let out a testy breath. ‘I
wish I’d been able to bring that anti-tank gun down here. I’d like to have the
weight of that thing in my hands right now.’

I stepped right up to the edge of
the balcony and looked at the lake’s limpid surface. Then I turned to Dan and
asked him: ‘
This
is one hundred fifty feet below the
surface, right, or thereabouts?’

‘I guess so.’

I rubbed my cheek thoughtfully.
‘When you tested the water, didn’t you say that the organisms and the soil
material in it came from deeper down?
Maybe a mile and a
half?’

‘That’s right. That was where
Chulthe was probably lying when he first started to revive. These vaults and
chambers must go down miles into the rock. All flooded, too. That was where
Jimmy Bodine must have gotten his dream of swimming under tons of rock. But now
the flooding’s risen up as far as here, and Chulthe must have the freedom of
the whole water system.’

‘You mean he could start to pollute
water in other places?’ asked Carter, bluntly.

‘I’m only theorising, but yes.’

Carter unbuttoned his holster.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know about you two guys, but I’ve seen enough of
ordinary innocent folks being mutated into horrible creatures that go around
murdering more ordinary innocent folks. If Mason here says we ought to disturb
this Chulthe to get him out,
then
let’s disturb him.’

Dan raised his hand and said:
‘Carter, I shouldn’t...’

But Carter was annoyed, and
determined. He took out his police revolver and aimed it down at the surface of
the lake. He fired twice, and the whole cavern was filled with ear-splitting
echoes.

Shelley jumped off his stalagmite on
to the balcony, and came to stand nervously close to my legs. The echoes gave
one last shout and then there was silence again.

The water had hardly been ruffled.
But circles of lightly-drawn ripples ran across the surface, and lapped softly
at the stalactite pillars, and then ran back again. We all stood watching them,
until the last one had faded away.

‘Seems like guns don’t worry him
none,’ said Carter. ‘Maybe we ought to try a few rocks.’

I said: ‘Wait a minute. We’ve all
said how much this place looks like a cathedral. Maybe it’s intentional. Maybe
this place has been specially formed as the devil’s place of worship.’

‘How can you specially form a place
like this?’ asked Dan, with undisguised scepticism. ‘Those stalactites take
twenty thousand years to reach that size. Twenty thousand years.’

‘Maybe they do,’ I told him, ‘but
we’re dealing with a beast
who
can flood a whole
second-floor room, and empty it out again, and think nothing of it. We’re
dealing with a beast who’s supposed to be more than two million years old,
something from out of the past beyond the past.

Something
unbelievably ancient and powerful.
This is Satan, Dan. Think about it. Couldn’t
Satan have made himself a place like this?’

‘It’s remotely possible, I suppose.’

‘Well, let’s say it’s remotely
possible, then, If it’s remotely possible it’s also remotely possible that if
we desecrate this place, if we do something to invoke God, or the forces of
good, then the devil’s going to come out of that water to try stopping us.’

Carter and Dan looked at each other
without much enthusiasm.

‘I’m not too sure about that,’ said
Carter. ‘What do you want us to do – sing Bringing in the Sheaves? My
hymn-singing voice would desecrate any place you care to mention, but I’m not
convinced it would work.’

‘Let’s just say the blessing. Let’s
just profess a little Christianity here.’

Dan sighed.
‘All
right.
I guess we could do dumber things.’

We bowed our heads and stood in
silence for a while. Shelley fretfully clawed at the ground, and kept rubbing
up against my leg, but for a few moments I deliberately ignored him. I wanted
to keep my mind firmly concentrated on God, and His son Jesus Christ, and the Holy
Spirit, and the sign of the crucifix. I wanted to see some kind of brightness
in my mind, something that would show up this subterranean cavern for what it
was – the dark cathedral of Hell.

I raised my eyes. I said, clearly
but not loudly: ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost, we three profess our belief in goodness and Christian ministry. We
renounce the devil and his works. We bless this place in the name of our God
and everything we believe to be right. We cast out evil.’

There was a deep, subdued rumbling
in the ground. It felt like the beginnings of another earthquake. The surface
of the lake began to shudder and ripple, and behind us, loose rocks began to
fall.

Carter said: ‘Mason, hold on there.’

But it was too late for holding on.
If we were going to rouse Quithe out of his flooded caverns, then we were going
to have to use any means possible.

‘We bless this place,’ I repeated.
‘We ask God to sanctify it, and cast out all evil from it. We ask God to make
it untenable for Quithe, who is also Chulthe or Satan.’

The vibration in the ground was
shaking us so much that we could scarcely keep upright. A huge stalactite
cracked and dropped from the ceiling of the balcony on which we were
standing,
and shattered only a few feet away from us. Our
ears were deafened by an endless, painful rumbling noise.

Dan shouted: ‘The
lake
!
Mason!
The lake!’

I raised my flashlight and shone it
into the vaulted darkness, across the trembling meniscus of the water. There,
humped and glossy with wet, mottled and crustaceous, rose a crab-creature so
huge and hideous that I nearly dropped everything and ran. Its claw lifted out
of the water with a noise like a car being dragged out of a river, and its beak
grated and squeaked. What was worse, there were wet and tattered remnants of
clothing trailing from its jaws and its pincers, and an indescribable shred of
human meat caught in its antennae.

With his teeth clenched tight,
Carter said: ‘Dan, I want you to do something, and it’s an order.

Go back up that tunnel and bring
down that anti-tank gun. Go quick as you can. Mason and
me
will try to hold this thing off until you get back.’

Dan hesitated, but Carter snapped:
‘Go! It’s the only chance we’ve got!’ and he went. That left Carter and me and
Shelley standing on the balcony above the lake, while the crab-creature rose
higher and higher out of the water, an infested beast of horny plates and
writhing squid-like tentacles; a soulless monster whose only motivation was to
rip out our insides and digest them for its terrible master.

C
arter opened his revolver and fed it
with two more shells. Then he snapped it shut, cocked it, and stood ready like
Gary Cooper facing the outlaws off of the noon train. All I could find myself
was a sharp spear of broken stalactite, but I hefted it in my hand, and swung
it around my head, and even if it didn’t frighten the crab-creature, at least
it gave me some sort of confidence.

The creature all this time was
wallowing closer and closer, its grey eyelids peeling on and off its glittering
black eyes, and its pincers were snapping with greedy anticipation. We couldn’t
see all of its body, but it seemed to have grown half as large again as the
Jimmy-creature that Carter had killed on the ridge. It was far
more ugly
, too, and the crevices of its shell were alive
with black parasitic leeches. The stench of fish was nauseating.

Carter said: ‘I’m going to try for
the eyes. I’d like you to crouch down on your hands and knees here, Mason,
because I want to use your back to steady my aim.’

‘Okay, Carter,’ I said,
mechanically. I turned my hardhat around so that the peak was at the back, and
knelt down on the rough, rocky ground. Carter hunkered down beside me, and
lifted his .38.

‘Maybe if we can blind it, we’ll
stand more of a chance,’ he said, in a tight, choked-up kind of a voice, His
podgy elbows dug into my back as he took careful aim.

‘Don’t be too long,’ I told him,
‘I’m getting the cramp down here.’

‘You want to have cramp or you want
to be a crab’s breakfast?’ asked Carter. I felt his arm tendons tense, and he
fired one shot. I felt as if the shot had gone off inside my head. I waited,
without moving, and then Carter said: ‘Missed, dammit.’

He fired another shot. He muttered:
‘Missed.’ I could hear the crab-creature’s claws scraping against the side of
the rock balcony, and as it shook its hideous head, water sprayed across the
ground to-where I was crouching. It wasn’t more than fifteen feet away now, and
once it had humped itself up over the balcony’s edge, there was only one thing
left for us to do, and that was to try to make it back to the tunnel.

‘Carter,’ I said, trying to sound
respectful, ‘don’t you think it’s time we retired with dignity? That thing’s
getting awful close.’

Carter grunted. He was concentrating
on hitting one of the black eyes that wavered on a stalk from the creature’s
head. He let out a breath, steadied himself again, and fired. My ears were
singing from all the shots, and I hardly heard the crab-creature’s grating
scream. But I heard Carter shout: ‘Hit it! Hit the bastard!’ and I looked up to
see the crab standing uncertainly on the brink of the balcony, one of its black
globular eyes shot into bloody rags.

‘Down!’ snapped Carter. ‘It’s no use
unless I hit ‘em both!’

He steadied himself on my back once
more, and quickly fired off another shot. This time his confidence, and the
crab-creature’s confusion, paid him instant dividends. I turned my head in time
to see the other eye blasted off the end of its stalk. Carter whooped, and
said: ‘Who said I couldn’t hit a mountain at three feet? See that shooting?
That’s what I call shootingl’

The crab-creature became hesitant,
and its huge claw flailed noisily at the rocks and the stalactites as it tried
to find its bearings. We had to step back as it half-mounted the balcony, and
swung blindly around trying to find us. But without its eyes it was far too
slow and cumbersome, and all we had to do was press ourselves back against the
wall of the cavern and its pincer groped uselessly past us.

After a few minutes of searching,
the crab-creature shifted itself back to the lake, and it settled in the water
just a few feet away, almost submerged. The ribbon-like leeches which had been
feeding in the soft sores between the shields of its body now attached themselves
to the bleeding stalks of its eyes, and in a few moments it appeared to have
replacement eyes of wriggling black.

‘It’s a hard life in the devil’s
auxiliary, ain’t it?’ said Carter, his mouth pursed in disgust.

‘It’s pretty hard on our side, too,’
I replied.

We waited for almost twenty minutes.
I smoked a cigarillo and Carter took a couple of nips from a small silver
hip-flask. The crab-creature stayed where it was, floating with only the hump
of its shell and its mutilated head above the surface of the water. Now and
then, the ground shook with sinister vibrations, but there was no sign of
Chulthe, the devil himself, and I wasn’t going to try raising him again until
Dan had come back with the anti-tank gun.

At last we heard a clattering sound
from the narrow entrance to the tunnel, and Dan’s puffing and panting as he
struggled back down. He came squeezing out from between the two rocks which
rested at the tunnel’s opening, and half-slid, half-stumbled down towwards us.
He was bushed, and sweating like a penful of pigs.

‘What kept you?
said
Carter, taking the anti-tank gun and checking it over.

Dan sat on the ground, gasping for
breath. ‘You’re kidding, Carter. I went up that tunnel and came back down again
so quick you would have thought I was buttered.’

Carter handed him his hip-flask, and
Dan took a full mouthful. He winced, and swallowed, and said: ‘What the hell do
you call this?’

‘Good old confiscated white
lightning, that’s what,’ said Carter.

Dan shuddered.

While Carter loaded the anti-tank
gun, I walked as near as I dared to the edge of the rock balcony and inspected
the wounded crab-creature. It was floating in the water so idly that I wondered
for a moment if it was dying. But when I took one more step closer, its huge
claw began to rise out of the water towards me, and I knew that it was still
keeping watch. I went back to Carter’s side, just as he was finished preparing
the gun, and I said: ‘That thing’s guarding us for some reason.’

Carter nodded. ‘That’s what I’ve
been thinking. And I’ve been wondering why.’

‘Maybe it’s trying to deter us from
reciting any more Christian prayers.’

‘I doubt it. More likely it’s
keeping us here until it can rustle up some reinforcements.’

Dan pointed out: ‘We don’t actually
know if there are any reinforcements. Only Jimmy and Alison Bodine were mutated
for sure. We never had any specific reports on the Karlen guy. That thing there
could be Alison, and it could be the only crab-creature left.’