The Wells of Hell (5 page)

I paused for a moment, listening and
looking. Dan came in through the kitchen door, banging the screen behind him,
and I said: ‘Ssshh.’

‘What is it?’ he whispered,
hoarsely.

‘I’m not sure. Do you hear
anything?’

3°

‘I don’t think so. Why don’t you
turn on the light? Do you enjoy being scared?’

I turned and frowned at him. ‘Who’s
scared?’

We waited in silence for almost a
whole minute, and if you’ve ever waited in silence for a whole minute, then
you’ll know how long that is. I was sure, somewhere in the house, I could still
hear dripping.

I said to Dan: ‘Do you hear water?’

‘Water?’ he queried. ‘What do you
mean, water?’

‘Listen.’

We strained our ears again, and this
time we both heard it clearly. It was the steady, distinctive sound of water,
pattering on to a carpeted floor. It had a splashy quality to it that told me
the carpet was already soaked through.

‘What do you make of that?’ I asked
Dan.

‘I don’t know. You’re the plumbing
expert. Burst pipe, maybe?’

I crossed the kitchen again and
found the light-switch. I flicked it down, but all that happened was that the
lights shone dimly for a moment, and then fizzled out. A small shower of blue
sparks danced from the switch and there was a smell of burned plastic. The
water must have short-circuited the wires.

‘I have a flashlight in the glove
box of my car,’ I whispered to Dan. ‘Why don’t you go get it, while I see if I
can find where this water’s coming from?’

‘Sure. But take care. It sounds like
the whole place is leaking.’

Dan went out of the back door, and
the screen banged again. Myself, I waited in the darkness of the kitchen for a
moment, and then I ventured out into the hallway.

The hall was almost totally dark.
Only a thin blue reflected light from the frosty ground outside filtered in
through the crescent-shaped window over the front door. An antique warming-pan
gleamed copper-and-blue in the
shadows,
and on the
opposite wall there was a dim painting of Lake Candlewood. I touched a potful
of feathery pampas grass as I crept along towards the stairs, and I practically
suffered a heart attack where I stood. But at last I reached the foot of the
stained-oak staircase, and looked up to the landing above.

Less bravely, I called: ‘Jimmy? Are
you up there?’ knowing damned well that he wasn’t. I think I just wanted to
hear the sound of my own voice. Out of the darkness, however, there were no
answers, no whispers,
no
reassuring hellos.
Only the dripping and trickling of water, and the spongey noise of
rugs soaking it up.

I placed my foot on the first stair,
and it made a squelching noise. I reached down and the stair-carpet was sodden.
It seemed as if the water was trickling down the stairs in a slow cataract, and
that meant the whole of the landing must bex flooded.

Right then, Dan came through from
the kitchen with the flashlight.

‘Will you look at this place?’ I
told him. ‘It’s almost afloat.’ He shone the flashlight on to the red-patterned
stair carpet. It was glistening and dark with wet, and the stain was already
spreading across the hall.

‘This isn’t a burst pipe,’ he said.
‘This is more like Niagara Falls.’

I looked around. It wouldn’t be long
before the water poured out of the hallway and into the living-room, and that
would mean that the Bodines’ furniture and carpets and drapes would be ruined.
‘What I want to know is where
are Jimmy and Alison
?’ I
said. ‘If this is a burst pipe, it’s been leaking like this for hours. You
can’t tell me they went out for the evening and left their house full of water.
It just doesn’t make any sense.’ Dan glanced apprehensively up the stairs. ‘I
guess we’d better go see what’s happening up there.’

We hesitated for a moment, not sure who
was going to go first. ‘You’re the plumber,’ said Dan, handing over the
flashlight, and that’s how I volunteered. I led the way cautiously up the
soaking stair carpet, my feet squeezing out water with every step, and by the
time I reached the darkened landing at the top of the stairs, my shoes were
letting in the wet.

‘Is there anybody there?’ asked Dan,
in a heavy whisper. ‘Maybe a killer whale or two,’ I told him.

‘There’s enough water for them.’

I flicked the flashlight beam
around, at the panelled walls, at the oil paintings of Connecticut scenery, at
the small semicircular table at the far end of the hall with its copper vase of
dried flowers. There were five doors leading off the landing -three to the left
and two to the right, and the two on the right were both ajar. Everything
looked quite normal. It was only when I shone the light downwards at the dark
reflecting lake of water that covered the whole floor that I saw how strange
this whole situation was. My flashlight was mirrored in the slowly-moving
surface, and I could see myself, hanging upside-down from the soles of my
shoes, drowned like a mariner in the blackness of an indoor pool.

‘Where’s the water coming from?’
asked Dan. ‘It looks like the walls are quite dry.’

I shone the flashlight at each of
the doors. As far as I could make out the water was swirling out of the end
door on the right, which was slightly open. There was a noticeable pattern of
ripples, and I could hear a dripping, splattering noise from inside.

‘Maybe the tank cracked,’ I said,
splashing across the landing. The water was at least an inch deep, but my shoes
were so wet by now that I didn’t bother. That was the last time I was going to
spend thirty-one bucks on a pair of fashion shoes with a fancy gold chain
across the front. I’d rather be unfashionable in leather than fashionable in
cardboard.

I reached the end door. It had a
small ceramic plaque on it with a painting of an antique car, and it said
‘Oliver’s Room’. I shone the flashlight on the plaque for Dan’s benefit, and he
read it and pulled a face.

Carefully, shining the flashlight
ahead of me, I pushed open the bedroom door. Again, my own light was reflected
back at me out of the glittering darkness. The dripping noise was louder, and
there was another sound as well, a sound that made me stay still, right where I
was, and gave me a freezing, tightening feeling all around my scalp.

It was the sound of somebody, or
something, gurgling.

‘Dan,’ I hissed. ‘Dan, there’s
someone in there.’

‘You’re kidding,’ he said. His face
was rigid with tension.

‘I can hear something. Listen, for
Christ’s sake. Can’t you hear that?’

He listened. There was nothing,
except for the incessant dripping and splashing of water.

<.O.P.-B ‘You must have imagined
it,’ he said, with a nervous smile that showed he didn’t believe for one moment
that I had.

I took a breath, and pushed the door
wider. The room was alive with reflections and shadows. I shone the flashlight
across
[ to
the far wall, where the bed was, but there
was nobody lying ; there. I shone it along the skirting board, across to the
closet,
and ;
back to the bed again.

‘What did I tell you?’ said Dan. ‘It
was just the water.’

I waded farther into the room. It
was still impossible to say where the water was actually coming from. The only
difference between this room and the landing outside was that, in this room,
the walls were wet almost up to the ceiling. The criss-cross patterned
wallpaper was damp and wrinkled, and there was a clear tide-mark right up by
the picture rail. Impossible as it; might have been, it looked as if the entire
room had been filled with water.

Dan said: ‘Mason.’

I turned. His face looked distinctly
odd. He pointed at the; floor behind me, and said again:

‘Mason. Look down there.’ [

I shone the flashlight downwards.
The bed itself may have’ been empty, but I hadn’t looked under the bed. And in
the pale; oval beam of the flashlight, I could see something stirring there,
something white and strange. I bent down closer, my hand; shaking with nerves,
and tried to make out what it was. [

‘Jesus wept,’ said Dan. ‘It’s a
foot.’ j

Together, splashing in the water, we
took hold of the foot and the leg that went with it and dragged it out from
under the bed. I dropped the flashlight once, but it still worked when I picked
it up, and I directed it downwards on to the face of a young boy
,:
his cheeks pale and his lips blue, and his eyes staring
sightlessly’^ upwards. Dan pressed down on his chest, in a hopeless attempt to
see if there was any life left in him, but the boy’s mouth and; nose gushed
water, and it was plain that he was dead. I recognized him, of course, even
though I hadn’t seen him in a while. He was Oliver Bodine, Jimmy and Alison’s
son, and he* was drowned. |

‘We’d better call for Carter,’ said
Dan. ‘This is police business now. I stood up. The feel of Oliver’s cool, soft
flesh still haunted my fingertips. The water seemed to stir, and Oliver’s body
stirred too, still dressed in his Six-Million-Dollar Man pyjamas.

‘Oh, Christ,’ I said. ‘This is too
much for one day. This is all too goddamned much. Look at this poor kid.’

Dan stood up too, and nodded. ‘I
don’t know what happened here. It sure looks like he drowned. Although how in
hell anybody managed to fill up the whole bedroom with water, I don’t have any
idea. It couldn’t have been done slowly, either. The window isn’t sealed, and
neither is the door.’

‘We’d better check the other rooms,’
I said, unenthusiastically. ‘Supposing Jimmy and Alison are

- well, supposing something’s
happened to them, too?’

‘Okay,’ said Dan. He looked about as
keen to go searching for more bodies as I was. ‘I guess you’d better bring the
flashlight.’

We left poor young Oliver Bodine’s
body where it was, and splashed back on to the landing. We tried the master
bedroom first, but apart from water stains on the rug where the wet had crept
in from outside, it
was
quite dry, and empty. The
brass colonial bed with the pink bedspread was neatly made, and nobody had
slept in it. On the dark pine dressing-table, Alison’s hairbrush and
hand-mirror and bottles of perfume remained undisturbed, and on the wall by the
carved pine closet was a colour photograph of Jimmy and Oliver on the beach at
Cape Cod. I shone the flashlight on it, and then looked at Dan, and shrugged.

We tried the next two bedrooms. They
were both empty, both reasonably dry, both untouched.

We gave them a nervous onceover,
opening the cupboard doors as if we expected to find monsters lurking in them,
and then retreated to the sodden landing. The water was slowly beginning to
subside, and it was clear that it hadn’t come from a burst pipe at all.

‘It seems to me that Oliver’s room
was filled up with water somehow, but that was all the flooding there was,’ I
said. ‘Now his room’s emptied out, that’s it. There’s no leak, no fractured
tank, no damaged faucet, nothing.’

Dan turned towards me with an
expression on his face that made him look like an anxious Humpty Dumpty. ‘Who
did it, though?’ he asked me. ‘And what’s even more pertinent, how did they
manage it? I just don’t see how anybody could physically fill up a room with
water. It’s impossible.’

‘We haven’t looked at the bathroom
yet,’ I reminded him. ‘Maybe there was some kind of freak back-up in the
pipes.’

‘You don’t believe that any more
than I do.’

I took out my cigarillos and offered
one to Dan. He shook his head. ‘I have to start rationalizing sometime,’ I told
him, taking out a book of matches from The Cattle Yard. ‘I might as well start
now.’

We opened the bathroom door. It was
noticeably cold in there, not just ordinary winter-evening cold, but damply and
clammily cold. I sniffed, and even though I was smoking a cigarillo, I was sure
that I could detect that odd, unpleasant odour of metallic fish, the same smell
as the sample of water that I had brought out from the house only this
afternoon.

‘Do you smell that?’ I asked Dan.

He nodded.

‘What does it remind you of?’ I
said.

He had a long think. Then he said:
‘Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, on my last vacation.

Shellfish and diesel
fuel,
all mixed up.’

‘Me too,’ I told him.

The shower curtain was drawn across
the tub. It was misty plastic, with pictures of turquoise fish swimming across
it. I shone the flashlight that way, but there didn’t appear to be anybody in
there. I stepped across the cork floor and pulled the shower curtain back.

Lying in the bath was something that
looked like a thin, bony helmet. It was larger than a helmet

-
in
fact,
you would have needed a head that was twice the normal size to wear it. But it
had that kind of dull, tough shine and that kind of curved, nut-like shape that
put you in mind of a helmet.