The Wells of Hell (7 page)

We had almost reached the station
wagon when there was a single whoop of a siren, and Sheriff Wilkes’ car came
around the curve in the road with its red light flashing. It pulled up right
behind my Country Squire and Sheriff Wilkes got out, accompanied by three of
his deputies.

‘The coroner’s on his way, too,’
called Carter. ‘Can you tell me where the body is?’

‘Upstairs, second
bedroom on the right.’

Carter Wilkes was a big man, almost
six-four, with a belly to match. His face was coarse and broad, with intent,
crow’s-footed eyes, and shaggy eyebrows. His uniforms were always immaculately
laundered, and his shoes always sparkled, and he was a lifelong devotee of
dental floss. He had a pretty Chinese wife and a son who played basketball for
Hartford.

‘You guys want to come up with me,
show me what you found?’ asked Carter.

‘If you think it’s absolutely
necessary,’ I said. ‘It isn’t very pleasant in there.’

‘Sudden death doesn’t often improve
a home too much,’ countered Carter.

‘I guess not,’ I told him.

We showed Carter and his deputies
the way through the kitchen to the sodden-carpeted hallway.

He wanted to know when we’d arrived,
and what we were doing there, and what had first made us suspicious. Had we
seen any footprints on the wet staircarpet? Had we heard any suspicious noises?
Where did I think the water had come from? Why hadn’t I turned it off at the
main stopcock straight away?

All six of us squelched upstairs,
and I pointed to young Oliver’s bedroom. Two of the deputies carried heavy-duty
flashlights, and they lit the place up in all its damp, clammy sadness. Oliver
was still lying where we had left him, his face blue and his eyes wide open.
Sheriff Wilkes squatted down beside him and stared at him for a long time. He
didn’t touch him. Then he looked up and all around the room, taking in the
peeling wallpaper, the dripping furniture, the tidemark around the
picture-rail. ‘You’re the plumber,’ he said, turning to me. ‘What do you think
could have caused all this?’

‘I don’t know,” I admitted. ‘The room
wasn’t even sealed up, so it must have been some kind of freak flash flood. But
I don’t know where the water came from, or how it could have filled up the
place so fast. A room this size would take anything up to five thousand
gallons.’

‘As much as that, huh?’ asked
Carter.
‘Easily.
Maybe more.’

Carter stood up, and hitched his
gunbelt over his hips. ‘It doesn’t look like there’s five thousand gallons out
in that hallway, though, does it? Five thousand gallons would have washed the
whole place out, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes. I guess it would. I didn’t
think of that.’

‘So the water came in, filled the
place up, and then disappeared, mostly?’ asked Carter. ‘I suppose so. I don’t
know how.’

‘I’m not asking you how. What I’m
asking is, do you think that’s what happened?’

I nodded. ‘That’s what happened, all
right.’

‘Okay, we agree with each other,’
said Carter. He stepped across Oliver’s body to the other side of the room.
‘The room was filled up with five thousand gallons of water. Then the water was
emptied out again, almost as quick. Now, what kind of equipment could do
something like that? Something like a pump, maybe, or a special kind of hose?’

I thought about it. There were some
firehoses that could deliver water at a rate of several thousand gallons a
minute, but they were equipped with tremendously powerful and noisy pumps, and
the idea of a would-be murderer driving something like that up to the side of
the Bodines’ house in the early evening, rigging it all up and switching it on,
was totally out of the question. Apart from that, how had all these thousands
of gallons been removed, almost straight afterwards? I didn’t know of any
portable pump that could suck up five thousand gallons in a matter of seconds.

Oliver’s drowning seemed to be
pointless, purposeless, and to have been achieved by means that were quite
impossible. I said to Sheriff Wilkes: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t even begin to guess
how this was done. I would have said it couldn’t have been done at all, if I
hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.’

Carter rubbed his chin. Outside, we
heard the warble of the coroner’s
siren,
and the sound
of his car tyres as they squealed to a halt on the driveway. Doors slammed, and
there were footsteps and voices.

‘There’s one more thing,’ Dan told
Carter. ‘We found something strange in the bathroom.’

‘You don’t think this is strange?’
asked Carter.

‘Yes. But what we found was
stranger.’

Carter glanced at one of his
deputies, and then said: ‘All right. You’d better lead the way.’

We trooped along the landing to the
bathroom. Dan pulled back the shower curtain, and said:

‘There. What do you make of that?’

Carter frowned, and peered into the
bath. His deputy leaned over too. Then he stood straight, and looked from Dan
to me and back again. ‘It’s a bathtub,’ he said, suspiciously.

‘Not the tub,’ I said, pushing my
way forward. ‘The...’

The bathtub was empty. There was no
sign of the scaley carapace at all. I pulled the shower curtain aside even
further, but it wasn’t hidden anywhere there. I looked behind the toilet, but
it wasn’t there either.

‘Do you want to tell me what you’re
looking for?’ demanded Carter. ‘Or was it so strange you don’t even know what
it is?’

‘It was a carapace,’ explained Dan,
trying to describe it by drawing shapes in the air with his hands.

‘A what?’

‘An insect’s
breastplate, in simple language.
Horny and tough, and hinged
along the spine.’

Sheriff Wilkes watched Dan’s
attempts to outline the carapace, and then raised his finger and thumb and held
them just a few millimetres apart.

‘When you say an insect’s
breastplate, you mean it was round about this size, don’t you? You don’t really
mean it was that big.’

Dan looked down at his hands, almost
two feet apart. Then he looked back at the sheriff. There was a moment when I
wondered what he was going to say but then he lowered his arms and gave a
resigned, surrendering grimace. T

‘Yes,’ he said, in a tired voice. ‘I
don’t suppose I really meant that big.’

‘So what was strange about it?’
Carter asked him. ‘You said it was stranger than five thousand gallons of water
in an upstairs bedroom, didn’t you?’

‘Did I?’

I laid my hand on Carter’s broad,
flesh-padded shoulder. ‘I think that Dan’s suffering from shock, Carter. Maybe
it was just an illusion.’

‘Maybe what was just an illusion?’

‘This thing he thought he saw. This
carapace.’.
‘I thought you said you saw it, too.’

I smiled weakly. ‘We all make
mistakes, Carter. We’ve both had a difficult day.’

Carter rested his hands on his bulky
hips and stared at us silently for almost half a minute. Then he said: ‘Okay.
I’ll let it go this time. But if there’s any suggestion that anybody’s concealing
any material evidence, then it’s going to be trouble time. You get me?’

‘Nobody’s concealing anything,
Carter,’ I assured him. ‘We’re just as anxious to find out what happened here
as you are.’

‘Okay. But remember what the penalty
for concealing material evidence is. It’s jail. Okay?’

We all left the bathroom and crossed
the landing again. The deputy coroner, Lawrence Dunn, a thin, bespectacled,
grey faced man in a shiny tan suit, was coming up the stairs with his old brown
leather bag.

‘How are you doing, Larry?’ asked
Carter. ‘Are you ready for a second-floor drowning?’

Lawrence Dunn sniffed, and blinked.
‘Whatever it is, Carter, I’m ready for it. Hi there, Dan. Hi there, Mason. I
gather you were the two unlucky finders.
Poor young Oliver
Bodine, huh?’

‘That’s right,’ said Carter. ‘I’ve
just had Erroll put out an APB for Jimmy and Alison.’

‘They’re missing?’

Carter led Lawrence to the drowned
boy’s bedroom. ‘They weren’t here when Mason and Dan arrived, and that was a
good hour ago by all accounts.’

- 46

Lawrence knelt down on the wet
carpet beside Oliver’s body, and opened up his bag. First of all he flashed a
penlight into the boy’s eyes, and then he checked for other vital signs –
pulse, respiration, reflexes. It was all a formality. There was no question
that Oliver was dead.

‘I’m going to have to take his body
temperature now,’ said Lawrence. ‘Would one of you people give me a hand just
to turn him over?’

Sheriff Wilkes bent down, and
between them, Lawrence and he carefully turned Oliver on to his face. As the
boy rolled over, water ran out of the side of his mouth and out of his
nostrils. The sheriff stood up quickly and gave the coroner an unhappy kind of
a frown.

‘If there’s one thing that scares
people more than finding out that someone who was once alive is now dead, it’s
finding out that someone who was once dead is now alive,’ said Lawrence. He cut
open Oliver’s Six-Million-Dollar Man pyjamas at the back and rummaged in his
bag for his rectal thermometer. Sheriff Wilkes said: ‘Larry?’

‘Umh-humh?
That damn thermometer’s here
someplace.’

‘Larry,’
..repeated
Sheriff Wilkes.

‘What’s the matter with the kid’s
back? Is that bruising, or what?’

Lawrence Dunn adjusted his
spectacles and looked down at Oliver’s exposed back and buttocks.

He squinted closer, and then he
touched the boy’s skin, very gently, with his fingertips. ‘Hand me a
flashlight,’ he said.

Dan and I both stepped nearer as one
of the deputies gave Lawrence his light. Sheriff Wilkes said: ‘Don’t crowd him,
huh?’ but he pushed forward
himself
and bent down so
that he could see what Lawrence was doing.

The deputy coroner pulled Oliver’s
pyjamas open even further, and what he revealed in the bright, theatrical light
of the torch made my stomach rise and tighten. One of the deputies whispered:
‘Jesus – what in hell’s name is that?’

Around the small of Oliver’s back,
and around his buttocks and upper thighs, his skin had taken on a hard,
shell-like appearance. Each buttock, instead of being round and soft, was now a
plate of greeny-grey horn, and dark lumps were forming along the spine. Where
his thighs met his buttocks there was a gristly, lobster-like joint. Lawrence,
his hands shaking, turned the boy’s body back over again, and we could see that
where his sexual organs had once been, there was instead a spiny array of blue
and green crustaceous filaments.

We were all silent. We stood around
Oliver’s body in the light of those police torches, gathered together in that
dark, sodden house, and none of us knew what to do or what to say. Lawrence at
last stood up, tugging the wet cloth of his pants away from his knees, and taking
off his spectacles.

Outside, the wind blew sadly; and
inside, the rugs and the carpets sponged up the water with a slow ticking
sound. Sheriff Wilkes cleared his throat.

‘I think we have an idea what may
have happened here,’ said Dan, in a low, almost inaudible voice.

Lawrence Dunn looked at him, but
Carter couldn’t take his eyes off the dull sheen of the scales on Oliver’s
body.

‘If you think you have an idea,
you’d better spit it out,’ said Carter.

‘It’s the whole reason we came up
here,’ Dan explained. ‘The Bodines were complaining about discoloration in
their water-supply, and Mason here brought me a sample to test. I found some
kind of organism in it, a microscopic creature that kept giving off a
yellowy-greeny fluid.’

‘Did you identify it?’ asked
Lawrence.

Dan shook his head. ‘I didn’t have
time. One of the mice in my laboratory drank some of it by accident while Mason
and I were out, and when we came back – well, the same thing had happened to
the mouse that’s happened to poor young Oliver here.’

‘So you think he’s been drinking the
water and it’s made him turn all shell-backed like this?’ asked Carter.

‘There’s no definitive proof, not
yet.’

‘Do you think it might affect
anybody else’s water supply?’ Lawrence wanted to know.

‘I haven’t any idea,’ said Dan. ‘But
just to be safe, I’d try to put out a warning if I were you, telling the local
folks to stick to bottled water for the time being. Until I find out what these
organisms are, and why they affect people this way, then I think we have to
assume that the whole community’s in danger.’ Carter looked down at Oliver’s
jointed thighs, and slowly shook his head. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen
anything like that before.’

One of the deputies, Erroll, a young
sandy man with a ginger moustache, came up from downstairs with a radio message
from the volunteers out looking for the Denton boy. As soon as he walked into
the room, he said: ‘My God, what’s that smell?’