The Wells of Hell (34 page)

‘Atlantis can never rise again.’

The maggot-beast moved towards me.
It might have been my imagination, but I kept glimpsing different faces that I
knew on its insect countenance. I kept seeing Dan, and Carter, and Jimmy
Bodine. I saw Alison, but it was an Alison I scarcely recognized, with her
mouth drawn back in a feral grimace, and her eyes as red as if they were filled
with blood. I saw Rheta again, smiling with blatant lewdness. I saw my mother
and my father, and faces of people who were long-forgotten or dead. I saw
myself, in moments of weakness, or pain, or regret.

‘Atlantis may never rise,’ whispered
the voice. ‘But the Kingdom of Quithe will rise again. I sense the world around
me, after all these centuries of imprisonment. I sense it well. It has
nourished the legacies I left it. It has nourished lust and deceit and cruelty.
These are the instruments by which I always ruled, and they are well-maintained
for when I take up my rule again. Only this time, the world you will see will
be by comparison the blackest night, in which pain and pleasure will be the
only beacons on a hellish horizon.’

I was wading backwards in the
underground lake now, up to my knees. The water was freezing, and I knew damned
well that I couldn’t survive for long if I tried to swim. And there was no
chance at all that I could escape Quithe, dive down to the bottom, and make any
kind of escape through the tunnel.

There was a thunderous vibration
throughout the cavern, and before my eyes the maggot-beast seemed to roll in on
itself, like a black parachute being folded, until a tall horned man stood in
front of me, dressed in a long shimmery black cloak. He had high cheekbones,
and slanting eyes, and
skin
the colour of dead
parchment.

‘I am a creature of the seas,’ he
whispered, ‘but this is the manifestation I always used to walk in the world,
in ancient times when darkness was the rule, and light could not penetrate the
deserts nor the swamps, nor the strange cities where men and half-men lived.
This face and this body have become engraven in your culture, as objects both
of loathing and of worship, and it shall walk again, leaving its cloven hoofprint
on the path of the night. This is the manifestation they called Satan, although
they could never have known that this was one of my bodies in eons gone by,
when I was the proud and evil Agnarga on a world so distant that your people
have never perceived it. In the name of Agnarga, your people have committed
indescribable sins, and offered backwards prayers, and held up inverted and
perverted symbols of your greatest religions. Those things shall be as nothing,
compared to what Satan shall do now.’

The man pulled apart his cloak, to
reveal an erect penis the size of a horse’s tool, and the colour of aged wood.
Its foreskin peeled back, and black ectoplasm billowed out of it, until the
maggot-beast had once again taken on its huge and repulsive form.

‘The people who creep on the surface
of this earth are so ignorant,’ whispered the beast. ‘They have suspected my
presence for so long. They have so many stories of the days when I was great.

But they have never truly believed
that I was still waiting for the Day of Iniquity, when the graves shall be
opened not for judgement, but for the dead to rise again and shamble upon the
earth to prey upon the living. The living have always fed upon the dead; now it
is the turn of the corpses and their miserable spirits. They have never
suspected that each of their legends has been one more piece in a jigsaw which
could have proved my existence. Yes – gods came from out of the stars in the
days when your people were little more than animals. We taught them powers and
strengths and practices so arcane that your people can only whisper about them
now. We mutated men into sea-people, so that they could serve us both on the
land and under the waters, where our greatest citadels were. Yet you have
forgotten the water-mutants, who terrorized you, or if you have not forgotten
them, you think of them as fanciful fiction. Mermaids and mermen, you call
them, and weave them into children’s stories. We did many other things. We
moved stones so vast that your people today believe their ancestors were
magical. We laid down networks of psychic lines upon the earth through which we
could communicate, and which men still believe have mystic powers. The whole
human species was controlled from the underwater mountains of Atlantis, in a forgotten
dynasty of indulgence and viciousness and corruption. They were great and
terrifying days. They shall return.’ Again, the maggot-beast appeared to shift
and alter its form, until it stood before me as a huge Cyclopean creature of
gaseous milky-white. It was this manifestation that gave off such an intense
odour of rotting fish, and I recognized it straight away. The single eye was
the evil-eye symbol of which Mrs Thompson had spoken before her death. The
creature was the actual beast from which some ancient artist had drawn the
being now thought by popular scientists to be one of the ‘gods from outer
space’.

I dropped to my knees in the cold
water. I don’t know why. I was exhausted and bruised and defeated, and I
couldn’t see what I could possibly do to escape, how I could ever stop Chulthe
from breaking loose from these subterranean lakes and recreating hell on earth.

I lifted my eyes towards the beast,
and it made illusions for me. Out of the air, it drew pictures that lived and
murmured and spoke and breathed. I saw men raking their own skin with barbed
hooks, and mumbling at the agony of it. I saw men slicing open their own
stomachs, and taking out their stomachs and their intestines in their hands. I
saw children guzzling blood and wine mixed, and I heard their high, echoing
laughter. Women poured blazing oil over their own heads, and stood with fiery
hair, masturbating in frenzy at the pain. Naked girls crouched on all fours
before whispering crowds, and were penetrated by apes and dogs. Their cries and
whimpers of pleasure seemed to be hideously
close,
and
yet thousands and millions of miles distant.

The illusions faded. The black beast
was close to me now, not more than five or six feet away. It gave off an aura
of deadness which was frightening and sickening, and even its insect eyes
looked devoid of any kind of feeling or any kind of life.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked
it, and my voice echoed and re-echoed over and over and over again. ‘Are you
going to kill me?’

The creature said nothing at first.
Its sharp mandibles dripped with a kind of acrid fluid. Then it whispered: ‘I
need your strength. I need your flesh. I have lain in these caves for so long,
dry and powerless. When I have your flesh, I shall swim into the last cavern of
all, which is the cavern you and your ridiculous friends first entered. That is
the cavern which shall be my throne-room, and my unhallowed church, and from
that cavern I shall begin to build my new empire.’

More tremors rippled the surface of
the subterranean lake, and the green fluorescence of the stalactites and
stalagmites dimmed. They must have contained crystalline salts which were
excited by the maggot-beast’s psycho-kinetic energy, and that was why they
glowed. I was glad they did, if glad is the right word. At least it was better
than being devoured in complete darkness, by a beast I had never seen.

Kneeling in the cold water, I bowed
my head and said a prayer to God. God, whatever I’ve done wrong, however
impetuous and stupid and overbearing I’ve been, no matter how often I’ve
refused to take other people’s problems and other people’s fears seriously, no
matter what I’ve done, please deliver me from this Satanic creature, please
deliver all of us. Amen. Oh, God.

Amen.

There was a slight splashing sound
on the surface of the lake. I raised my head, and turned around. The
maggot-beast lifted its head, too, and I could see its eyes searching the
water.

It took a few seconds before I saw
what had made the splash. It was a human body, a woman’s body, and it was drifting
slowly towards us, still impelled by the earth-tremor which must have dislodged
it from where it was trapped in the tunnel on the lake’s bed. It was Alison
Bodine, my dear friend and terrible enemy, whose death had at last released her
from the claws and scales and tentacles of the crab-creature mutation. Even if
God hadn’t rescued me from Satan, He had taken Alison’s soul, and left her body
as it had been before.

Chulthe’s attention was fixed on the
corpse. Its mandibles juddered and squeaked, and its black wrinkled body
contracted in peristalsis. It was dead human meat, just what the devil wanted.
It was torn, maimed flesh, from which it could feed.

Chulthe slithered and rippled into
the water with hardly a splash. It swam quickly and unerringly, a hundred feet
of wet black flesh, like a shark or a moray eel. In a second, its mandibles had
risen from the water and snatched at Alison’s body, and then it was curving
around the surface of the lake and making its way back to the shore.

This was going to be the only chance
I was ever going to get. I 212 gulped an enormous breath, and I kicked away
from the rocky beach with all my remaining strength, which God help me wasn’t
much. Chulthe, dragging Alison’s body on to the shore, didn’t even notice that
I had gone, and that I was swimming out towards the place where I hadlfirst
risen from the lake’s bottom with desperate, panicky strokes. I swam and I swam
and it seemed to take me for ever to cover nothing more than a few feet.

I glanced back over my shoulder. Alison’s
body was sprawled out on the rocks, and the maggot-beast was dipping its head
towards her torn-open entrails. I took another breath and swam harder, telling
myself that my feet weren’t really chilled, that my hands weren’t really numb,
and that I was really going to make it. For the first time in my life, I didn’t
believe myself.

At last, Chulthe and his dead victim
disappeared around the curve in the cavern, and I was treading water over the
spot where I guessed I had first emerged. I lifted my head from the surface,
and I took one, two, three hefty breaths. Then I sucked in a fourth breath, as
agonizingly deep as I could, and I dived beneath the lake, and struck out for
the bottom.

Cold water leaked up my nose and
into my ears. But I kept on swimming downwards, my eyes wide open, searching
and searching for the tunnel that led through to the next cavern. The faint
green glimmer of light faded away and then I was swimming in total darkness,
forcing myself down and down to the bed of the lake.

I reached it sooner than I had
expected. But there was solid rock there, rough and uncompromising. No tunnel.
I swam slowly around, kicking my legs and flapping my arms to keep myself
submerged, and I felt like nothing less than a fully dressed plumber under twenty
feet of iced water looking for a hole that I probably wouldn’t have the breath
to swim through, even if I found it. I began to feel light-headed and silly,
and it occurred to me that if I breathed in water, like I had in my dream, I
could probably swim just as well.

I found the tunnel without even
realising it. I was struggling so hard to keep myself down on the lake bottom
that I swam right down into the cavity before I understood what had happened.

Suddenly I felt rock all around me,
and nothing but water beneath me, and I struck out desperately pulling myself
along by seizing the jagged sides of the tunnel and heaving my body forward.

It took forever. My head was
bursting again from lack of air. But I knew that I had a chance, and a chance
was all I wanted. I struggled on, and on, and then I felt myself rising, felt
myself floating buoyantly upwards until the refracted criss-cross beams of
flashlights penetrated the water and I rose from the surface with my lungs
screaming for air, but safe.

‘Mason!’ called Dan, and I wiped the
water out of my eyes and saw him standing on that natural balcony, with Shelley
beside him. Deputy Martino was there, too, and two more police
officers,
and a short man in white coveralls whom I
recognised as Pete Lansky from Litchfield Quarries. I swam the last few strokes
towards the balcony, and Dan knelt down and helped me clamber, shivering and
dripping, from the lake.

Dan was close to tears. He pressed
his hand against his bald head, and said: ‘I thought I’d lost you there. I
really thought I’d lost you. What happened?’

I gave a shivery smile.
‘Nothing much.
I’ll tell you later. I just want to get out
of here.’

Dan said: ‘
We’re
going to dynamite the cavern. That’s what Pete Lansky is doing down here. I
went back and sent up a message to have them bring him along.’

‘You’re going to dynamite it?’ I
asked him. ‘What the hell good is that going to do? Dan, that thing is right in
the next chamber of this water-system, and whatever you do it’s going to come
swimming through someplace and fix us for good.’

Dan shook his head. ‘I know that. Or
at least 1 guessed it. That’s why I called for Pete. You see, this cavern
system isn’t all flooded. As soon as you disappeared, I went looking for help,
but I missed the tunnel entrance on my way back, and I went down another tunnel
that leads to a deep cave just alongside this one. The only difference is, this
cave was dry, and when I flashed my light down and took a look at it, it
was.pretty clear that it led down to a whole new system of caves that are all
dry, too.’