The Wells of Hell (33 page)

‘That’s possible,’ nodded Carter.
‘In .that case, maybe’it’s stopping us from exploring this lake, and finding
out what’s really down here.’

I nodded towards the anti-tank gun.
‘Are you going to use that thing on it?’

‘I guess. A shot to the head should
finish it.’

I looked around for Shelley. With
his usual disdain, he had retreated to a small niche and was sitting there with
his eyes closed, ignoring us. ‘If you’re going to start blasting, then I think
we’d better back off,’ I suggested
.-
‘You never know
how strong the roofs of these caves might be.’

‘Okay,’ said Dan, and while Carter
prepared himself for a final attack on the crab-creature, he and I retreated as
far back as we could, and shielded our ears with our hands.

With his flashlight wedged between
the cavern wall and a stalactite, so that its beam lit up the head of the
floating crab, Carter took aim at a distance of only twenty feet. The water
glittered with reflected light, and Carter’s heavy, portly figure was
silhouetted against it. I heard him click the safety-catch off, and his
shoulders hunched a little as he applied his eye to the sights.

I suppose we should have guessed the
crab-creature was far quicker and far more powerful than it seemed to be.
Carter may have shot out its eyes, but we forgot that it was a
creature
whose natural habitat was pitch darkness, down in
the flooded caves and chambers beneath Connecticut, and so it could feel its
way around, when it wanted to, with the same speed and strength as it could in
the daylight.

Carter didn’t even get the chance to
fire before the crab-creature rose* horrendously out of the water in an
explosion of spray, and its massive green-and-black claw swung at his head. He
yelled once, hoarsely, but then the pincer closed and his skull was crushed
with a noise like a breaking walnut. The crab-creature flung him to the ground,
and its secondary pincer dragged his bloody body downwards, beneath its
abdomen, where the writhing tentacles entwined themselves around it. I didn’t
even think what I was doing. I must have been claustrophobia-crazy from all
that time under the ground. But I picked myself up and leaped across the loose
rocks that separated our hiding-place from the crab-creature, and I made a
frenzied dive for Carter’s discarded anti-tank gun. Dan yelled: ‘Mason! It’s no
use!’ but it was too late by then, even though my own mind was clattering out a
message like a teleprinter: IT’S NO USE. I tripped, fell, picked
myself
up again, and there was the gun right under’my feet.
I reached its webbing strap, lifted it off the ground, tried to couch it over
my shoulder and aim it. But then my vision was filled with nothing but black
overwhelming shell, and my senses were blotted with a crushing weight that I
couldn’t understand or resist.

There was a screeching, scraping
noise as the crab-creature slid back off the rock-balcony into the water,
dragging me with it. It had gripped my left thigh in its claw, too far up
inside the gap between its pincers to crush the bone, but fierce enough to make
it impossible for me to twist myself free. I shouted: ‘Dan!’ but that was all I
had time for. In the next instant, I was pulled down into the freezing depths
of the underground lake, and I let out almost all of my breath with shock.

The crab-creature dived straight
downwards. I felt the cold water penetrating my eardrums, and I knew that I
only had enough breath for a few more seconds. I tried to wriggle my leg, but
the beast’s strength was unyielding, and I couldn’t break loose. My face was
battered against the rough shell of its head, and its prickly spines, and once
I brushed with terror and disgust against one of its leech-enclustered eyes. We
sank down and down, and the water grew colder and darker until the last glimmer
of Carter’s flashlight was swallowed up. In a second or two, I would have to
breathe in water, and when I did that, I was dead.

Swimming at a steep angle, the
crab-creature pulled me right down to what must have been the bottom of the
lake. But once its claws had touched rock, it scuttled sideways until it
reached a wide crevice in the lake’s floor. In my splitting, oxygen-starved
brain, I could only think of Dan’s words: ‘These vaults and chambers must go
down miles into the rock. All flooded, too.’

The crab-creature dived downwards
again, down through the crevice, down through a rough angled tunnel that
scratched and lacerated my hands and my legs.

I knew I couldn’t hold my breath any
longer, and that meant it was all over. My lifeless I body would be dragged
down through chambers and vaults and tunnels, and then devoured in utter
darkness, in the most unhallowed place on earth. This was hell, in the most
terrible and medieval meaning of the word.

But like a touch on the shoulder
from a saint, the anti-tank gun bumped against my hand. I thought I’d let it
go, but its webbing strap had gotten caught up in the crab’s pincers, and it
had come down with us. I seized it ferociously, grappled with it, tried to feel
in the cold and the darkness where its trigger was, where its muzzle was. My lungs
were bursting, too near the end of their air supply, and my mind was dizzy with
carbon dioxide. But I found the strength to thrust the gun up against the
crab’s body, deep into the mass of wriggling tentacles that still clung on to
Carter’s body. And I found the will to pull the trigger.

There was an abrupt rush of bubbles
as the gun’s rocket was discharged. Then there was nothing but tumbling,
walloping, wrenching, heaving chaos. The crab-creature rolled heavily over
sideways as the rocket penetrated its belly, and my head was slammed against
the rocks. In a second, the rocket blew up, and the water surged and expanded,
and I was suddenly released.

An underwater blizzard of shell
fragments and torn-apart claws and shrapnel followed me and surrounded me as I
swam desperately upwards, my arms working as hard as a water-boatman, my body
long since out of air. I prayed to God that there was a surface above me, and
air,
and that the crab-creature hadn’t pulled me right
through into a lower vault that was flooded right up to the roof. I thought of
Jimmy Bodine’s dream. I thought of drowning. I thought of Atlantis.

‘The thing that always gets me is
the feeling that the water is underneath tons and tons of solid rock, so even
ij I did reach the surface, I couldn’t breathe.’

I saw an odd glimmer of light.
A wavering green glimmer.
And then my head broke the surface
of the water, and I was breathing air. I trod water, coughing and gasping,
doggy-paddling my way around until I could relax enough to float. The air was
so cold that it hurt my lungs, and I was chilled all over, but right at that
moment I didn’t mind. The crab-creature was dead, and I was free of it.

At last, I stopped panting and
started shivering instead. I looked around me, and saw that I was swimming in
another underground lake. The cavern in which this lake lay was quite different
from the devil’s cathedral cavern. It was curved, like a boomerang, so that
from where I was swimming it was only possible to make out one end of it; and
its ceiling was high, slanting and formed out of a huge formation of flaking
slate-like rock. The strangest thing of all, though, was that there was light,
and that I could see at all. It wasn’t lamplight. It was too faint and greenish
for that. It was a dim uneven fluorescence, like one of those pictures that
glows in the dark. It was emanating from the farther end of the cavern, the end
which I couldn’t see. Taking a deep breath and kicking my legs, I started to
swim around the cave towards it, weighted down by my icy, soggy clothes.

I was exhausted by the time the end
of the cavern came into sight, but I wasn’t so tired that I couldn’t pause, and
tread water for a while, and stare at the chilling and terrifying scene which
met my eyes with shock and disbelief.

At the end of the cavern, there was
tier upon tier of stalactites and stalagmites, in magnificent formations, and
they were all glowing and pulsating with dim green light. They reached the roof
of the cave like an extraordinary pipe organ, and they formed a fluted wall
around a wide rock beach. It was what lay on the beach that horrified me most
of all. It looked like a vast black maggot, with dry and wrinkled skin, except
where its body was partly submerged in the subterranean lake. It had glossy
dark brown mandibles, and with these it was rooting amidst a slough of human
offals. It must have been ninety or a hundred feet long, and twenty feet high,
and its body had the colour and the sickening softness of the worst kind of
worm you can find under a stone. It was Quithe, the beast-god of the chasms. It
was Chulthe, the obscene master spirit of Atlantis. It was Satan, in his true
larval form.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t
tread water any longer, mainly because my feet and legs were so cold. I had to
get out of the lake somewhere. And yet the only possible place was on that gory
beach where Chulthe was feeding. There was an alternative - diving back down
into the water and trying to find the tunnel through which the crab-creature
had brought me – but I was pretty certain that if I did that I would kill
myself. I just didn’t have the strength.

I was about to swim across to the
other side of the cave to see if there was a ledge on which I could rest, when
a familiar voice called: ‘Mason! Is that you? Mason!’

I looked back at the grisly beach
where Chulthe had been wallowing in blood. Somehow, the maggot-beast seemed to
have disappeared, and there was nothing there but plain rock. The voice called:
‘Mason!’ again and I realised it was Rheta. But what the hell was Rheta doing
down here, in this Godforsaken subterranean cave? The last time I’d seen her,
she’d been on her way to New Milford hospital with a sprained ankle.

Yet – she was there. She was
standing by the edge of the water in her white laboratory coat. She was waving.
There was no question at all that it was Rheta. I called breathlessly: ‘Rheta!’
and started to swim towards the beach.

Rheta tossed back her blonde hair,
and started to unbutton her laboratory coat. I was only fifty or sixty feet
away now, and I could see that she was smiling at me. I called, in between
swimming strokes: ‘How did you make it down here? Is there another way in?’

She didn’t answer. Instead, she
pulled off her laboratory coat, and underneath she was wearing flame-red
underwear.
A red quarter-cup bra that exposed her wide pink
nipples.
A red garter-belt, holding up sheer red
stockings.
And a red G-string that barely covered her.

I floundered the last few feet
towards the beach. My feet at last touched bottom, and I waded in to Rheta like
Captain Webb after his first successful swim across the English Channel. I
coughed water out of my lungs, and held out my arms towards her.

She let the bra catch loose, so that
her breasts swayed free. She undipped her garters, and peeled off her
stockings. Then she turned and walked coquettishly away from me, across the
uneven rock, the thin red elastic of her -G-string tight between her bare white
bottom
. ‘Do you want me?’ she asked, over her
shoulder.

I stopped. Did I want her? Of course
I wanted her. But what the hell was she doing here? She couldn’t be here. This
couldn’t be Rheta. But if it wasn’t Rheta, what was it? Or who was it?

‘Are you coming?’ called Rheta.
‘Come on, lover, we can lie down here, and do everything you ever dreamed of.’

I stayed where I was. I was
frightened now. Chilled, shaking, and frightened. Where had that black maggot
creature gone? Where
was
all the blood and the offals?

I said, firmly: ‘You’re not Rheta.
You can’t be.’

She hesitated. She was staring at
me, and for the first time I saw that her eyes weren’t Rheta’s eyes at all.
They were dark, snake-like,
malevolent
. They were
watching me through Rheta’s face like the eyes of someone looking through a
mask.

She opened her mouth, but instead of
speaking, a thick black torrent of puffy, wrinkled flesh poured out of her. At
first I thought she was vomiting, but then the black flesh grew to the size of
a man, and larger, until it piled up as huge as the maggot-beast that had been
feeding on the shore. Rheta’s image was swallowed up altogether, until I was
faced by Chulthe, in his basic grotesque form, with scissor-like mandibles, and
eyes as dull and emotionless as an insect. I stepped back, away from those
terrifying jaws, and as I did so I slipped on a stringy, slithery piece of human
flesh.

A voice whispered: ‘I have come
across your kind before.
Men who have tried to thwart me.

Men who have
fondly and foolishly believed that they can prevent me from taking my rightful
place in the world.
Your weakness is below contempt. Your sins are so petty that you can
hardly even be tempted to die like a man should.’

I kept on retreating. Maybe it
wouldn’t do me any good, but I wasn’t planning on staying around there to
decorate Chulthe’s personal beach.

I said: ‘You’ve been defeated
before. You’ll be defeated again.’

‘Not as long as there is foolishness
and jealousy and primitive lust. I am the greatest of the gods from bjleyond
the Hyades, remember, and while men still worship evil, I shall continue to
survive, and rule, even while I dream in the wells and the caves, and wait for
the days of Atlantis yet again.’