The Wells of Hell (6 page)

‘Dan,’ I said cautiously. ‘What do
you think it is?’

He leaned forward and peered into
the tub. He stared at the ‘helmet’ for a while, and then he reached in and
lifted it out.

‘It’s light,’ he said. ‘It’s some
kind of shell, or bone. But look.’

He held it up in front of the
flashlight beam and showed me. It was formed out of two halves, like the halves
of a clam or a mussel shell, and it was hinged down the centre by some scaley
but flexible material like celluloid. All down the hinge were black hairy
spines, short and bristly and sharp.

‘Is it real?’ I asked him.

‘Real? You mean
,
does it come from a real creature?’

‘I guess so, if you have to put it that
way.’

Dan tapped it, and looked it over as
best he could in the dim light. Then he said: ‘It looks real. It looks like the
discarded carapace of some pretty big kind of armoured insect.’

I didn’t know whether I wanted to
burst out laughing or run out of that house as fast as inhumanly impossible. I
looked at that scaley, bony piece of creature and I felt as if I was right in
the middle of one of those nightmares that
doesn’t
frighten you until you wake up and see how gloomy it is in your bedroom, and
hear those noises and whispers that shouldn’t be there, and see shapes that
can’t exist.

‘That’s an – an insect’?’ I asked
Dan. ‘That was actually part of something that walked around?’

‘It could be. It could be a clever
hoax. But I don’t think the kind of creature who could drown a boy in his
bedroom would have much of a sense of humour, do you?’

I stared at the carapace in dread.
‘You mean that could be a lobster shell, a crab shell, something like that? Do
you know what you’re saying?’

Dan laid the scales back in the tub.
They rolled over with an unpleasant clattering sound, backwards and forwards,
until they settled.

‘I don’t know what to say, to tell
you the truth,’ he said, unhappily. ‘It looks like the shell of a lobster, or
an insect, but the size is insane. I don’t think I understand any of this at
all.’

I heard more dripping noises from
outside the bathroom. I felt nervous enough without standing around in that
house debating whether Oliver could have been attacked by some horrific insect.
I said: ‘Maybe let’s go call Carter. At least the police have a procedure for
dealing with weird things. I can’t solve a problem unless I can solder it, or
lag it, or tighten it up with a wrench.’

Dan smoothed his hand over his bald
head. His eyes were uneasy. He said: ‘None of this makes any sense. Look at
that thing. It’s a
carapace,
or a clever copy of a
carapace, but the nightmarish size of it, Mason...’

‘Let’s go call Carter, huh?’ I
repeated. ‘You know what happens when people have to fight giant lobsters in
the movies. They send for the police, and the police send for the National
Guard, and the National Guard drop atomic bombs on them. Well, let’s go do
that.’

Tor God’s sake
don’t
joke about it,’ Dan snapped. ‘There’s a boy dead in there.”

‘I’m not joking,’ I insisted. ‘I’m
just tense. I’d just rather be out of this place. Now, shall we go?’

He took another long look at the
carapace, and then nodded.
‘All right.
But I want to
ask Carter to
,let
me have some photographs of that
thing.’

We left the bathroom and squelched
back out on to the landing. We paused there for a moment, and listened, but all
we could hear was the constant drip-dripping of water. Stepping carefully on
the wet carpet, we went back downstairs again, and into the living-room. There
was a telephone there, and I was hoping that the water hadn’t fused that out,
too. I picked it up and listened. It was crackling a little, but I had a tone.

Carter Wilkes took a long time to
answer. When he did, he said tiredly, ‘Sheriff’s office, Carter Wilkes, hold
on, will you?’

‘Carter,’ I said quickly, ‘it’s me,
Mason Perkins.’

‘Oh, how are you doing, Mason? Can
you hold? I’m right in the middle of a briefing on the Demon boy.’

‘Carter, this is worse than the
Denton boy.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m up at the Bodines’ place on
Route 109,’ I said. ‘There’s been an accident or something.

Young Oliver Bodine’s been drowned.’

‘Drowned?
Where?’

‘In the house.
In his bedroom,
as a matter of fact.’

‘In his bedroom?’ asked Carter, with
hoarse incredulity. ‘Are you sure you didn’t stop by the Northville Liquor
Store on your way home? Are you quite sure” you’re sober there, Mason?’

‘Carter, it’s true. And there’s
something else, too. But you’ll have to come up and take a look for yourself.’

Carter out his hand over the
receiver, and I could hear him talking in a muffled voice to some of his
deputies. Then he came back on the line again, and said:

‘Do you have Jimmy and Alison up
there with you, Mason? Are they okay?’

‘They’re missing. We’ve been here
for a good half-hour, and we haven’t seen any sign of them.’

‘Okay,’ said Carter. ‘I’m coming out
straight away. You just stay there and wait for me, and you make damn sure you
don’t touch anything.’

He banged the phone down. I held my
own receiver in my hand for a moment, and Dan turned towards me and said:
‘Well?’

‘Carter’s coming right out. It
shouldn’t take him more than ten minutes. Not the way he drives.’

‘What did he say?
’
.

I shrugged. ‘He thought I was drunk
at first. I’m beginning to wish I was.’

‘Did he say wait?’

I nodded. ‘Let’s go do it outside,
shall we? This place is giving me the oojabs. I don’t fancy meeting up with one
of those giant-sized crustaceans, for starters. And I always did believe in
ghosts.’

‘You believe in ghosts?’ asked Dan,
interested, as we made our way cautiously across the wet hallway and out
through the kitchen.

‘Sure. Don’t you?’

‘I guess not. I never saw one. My
mother used to swear by ouija boards, but I never actually saw a ghost walking
about. Did you?’

‘I used to have an apartment on
Tenth Street, in the village,’ I said. ‘I was sure I could hear people
whispering in my bedroom in the night.’

Dan opened the screen door, and we
stepped out into the frosty night air. ‘What did they say?’ he asked me.

‘I don’t know. I was always taught
it was impolite to listen to other people’s conversations. But seriously, it
went on for months. Later on, the janitor told me that two girls had been
murdered in that room by some schizo rapist.’

We walked around the house to where
my station wagon was parked, with its sidelights on. I climbed into the
driver’s seat and Dan considerately got into the back, so that he wouldn’t
disturb Shelley. 1 started up the engine so that we could have some heat. ‘At
least a schizo rapist is a schizo rapist,’ remarked Dan. ‘But don’t ask me what
that shell-thing in the bath is, or where it came from.’

‘Something just occurred to me,’ I
said. ‘When I was out here this afternoon, talking to Jimmy, he mentioned that
he’d been having dreams about drowning.’

‘He did? Was that all he said?’

I thought for a moment. Hadn’t Jimmy
said something about being underground, in a subterranean pool? ‘The thing that
always gets me is the feeling that the water is underneath tons and tons of
solid rock, so even if I did reach the surface, I couldn’t breathe.’

I said: ‘He seemed to think he was
drowning under the ground.
Maybe in a flooded mineshaft or
something like that.’

‘Under the ground?
That doesn’t make too much sense.’
I nodded towards the Bodine house, dark and silent in the freezing night. ‘What
happened to young Oliver doesn’t majke too much sense, either. But it still
happened.’

‘It could have been some kind of
premonition, Jimmy’s dream,’ suggested Dan. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but
there are several recorded cases of genuine clairvoyance.’

‘And what about the insect shell, or
lobster shell, or whatever it is?’ I asked him.

‘There’s something about that which
worries me more than anything,’ said Dan. His face was illuminated pale green
by the lights from the station wagon’s instruments. ‘It reminded me too much of
our scaley little mouse. It’s hard to say without
having ;
the mouse right here to make comparisons, but there seemed to me to be some
similarity between the shell on that mouse’s lower body and that big shell
upstairs.’

I switched off the Country Squire’s
engine so that we wouldn’t all die of carbon monoxide poisoning. It was warm
enough now to last us until Sheriff Wilkes arrived. Shelley yawned and
stretched and curled himself up into a hairy, tabby ball. It really needed
talent to be as lazy as that.

I took out a cigarillo. It was my
last. I stuck it between my teeth and said: ‘You think some bigger animal could
have drunk the well water, just like the mouse, and had the same thing happen
to it?’

‘If the water a>as to blame, then
the odds are in favour of it, I’d say,’ said Dan. ‘It could have been a dog,
maybe. The Bodines do have a dog, don’t they, and we haven’t seen any sign of
that.’

‘We haven’t seen any sign of the
Bodines, either,’ I reminded him.

He looked away. ‘That’s been on my
mind, too. But until we know if it is the water for sure, and until we know if
those organisms affect humans, then that’s the kind of conjecture I don’t think
I want to make.’

I took out my matches. ‘At least it
didn’t affect Oliver. I mean, he drowned, but he must have drunk the well water
just as much as Jimmy and Alison, and there weren’t any signs of scales on
him.’

Dan rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t
seriously think that Jimmy and Alison are walking around looking like some kind
of advertisement for Schwom’s Sea-food Shanty, do you?’

-I struck a match, and at that
moment I thought I saw somebody crossing the front lawn of the house. The
flaring orange reflection of the match on the inside of the windshield made it
difficult to make sure, and so I quickly blew out the match and stared into the
darkness again.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Dan.

‘I don’t know. It loods like there’s
someone out there. Hold on a minute.’

I opened the station wagon door and
got out. For a brief split-second, I thought I saw a man walking away from me,
over by the far fence. It was too dark to see very clearly, but he appeared to
be hunched and bulky, and moving with an odd kind of swaying step. I called: ‘Jimmy?
Is that Jimmy?’ and the man appeared to turn towards me, but so quickly that I
couldn’t see who it was before he vanished into the grainy shadows. I called
out: ‘Jimmy!’ once more, and then I started to run across the grass towards the
fence. Behind me, I heard Dan open his door and come loping in hot pursuit. My
breath froze in the cold air, and the sound of my heartbeat and my rustling
clothes seemed to be the loudest noises in the whole world.

I reached the rail. Beyond it, there
was a thick hedge of thorn bushes, impossible for a man to penetrate without
scratching himself to hamburger meat. I stopped, panting, and Dan came gasping
and wheezing after me, and we both stood there and looked at the hedge in
bewilderment.

‘Did you see who it was?’ asked Dan.

‘I don’t know. It could have been
anybody. Maybe it was just the shadows. I don’t see how anyone could have
gotten through those bushes.’

We walked a little way along the
rail in each direction, but there didn’t appear to be any gaps in the hedge at all.
If there had been somebody there, he must have cleared the hedge with one
tremendous bionic leap, or else he’d simply run the length of it under the
cover of the shadows. I didn’t think he could have done that, though, without
my seeing him. When I started running, he couldn’t have been much farther than
one hundred and fifty feet away. Only an Olympic-class athlete could have run
right down to the road and out of sight before I got there; and from what I’d
seen of this fellow, he was heavy and gimpy and slow.

We listened. The wind blew soft and
cold through the hedge, and the dead leaves curled among the thorns crackled
with a sound that was too much like cracking lobster claws for comfort.

‘I don’t know what we’re being so
damned nervous about,’ said Dan, cross with
himself
,
and equally irritated with me. ‘We don’t have any evidence of anything, and yet
we’re jumping around like a couple of college students in a haunted house.’

I started to walk back towards the
station wagon, and Dan followed me. I didn’t know whether I was over-reacting
or not. I knew that a certain amount of the adrenalin that was rushing around
my bloodstream had been evoked by imagination. Under the circumstances, it was
pretty difficult not to have horrible images of Jimmy and Alison Bodine being
slowly overtaken by some kind of scaley growth. But I knew I had seen
something, or somebody, and considering young Oliver had been drowned only a
few hours earlier, I think I could be forgiven for feeling edgy. I’m not a
coward. I’ll bend a pipe-wrench over anybody’s head without a qualm, if it’s
necessary. But I’m not so sure about things that whisper in the dark, or creep
about gardens at midnight, and I’m certainly not sure about bedrooms that can
be unnaturally flooded in deserted houses.