The Wells of Hell (12 page)

‘Not myself. But my grandpa kept a
book in the house in which he said were old stories of New Milford and
Washington and all around. Legends oj
Litchjield, that
was the name of it.’

I checked my watch. It was still
raining, and it was already a few minutes after three. I began to think about
Jimmy and Alison Bodinc, hiding out in this downpour, waiting for dark, and the
thoughts that I had were less than reassuring. They were frightening, even.
Something was terribly wrong with Jimmy and Alison. The scales had overtaken
their skin, and for some reason they wanted me to help them. I guess I was the
only person they felt they could trust. I guess I was the only person who
wouldn’t shoot first and worry about what to do with lead-and-lobster Newburg
afterwards.

Dan asked Greg McAllister: ‘Do you
still have that old book? I’d really like to take a look at it.’

‘It’s in store now. Everything went
into store when pa died, and we rented the house out. It’s all down at the
Candlewood Furnishers. If you want to see it real bad, I could always give you
a letter for old man Martin. He’d let you lend
a borrow
of it for a while.’

‘That would be real neighbourly,’
said Dan. ‘Whatever happened to Jimmy and Alison, this water and all the old stories
about it could help us to get them out of a real fix.’

Greg tossed his cigarette butt out
into the rain. There was a bright wash of sunshine appearing from the west now,
and the rain began to glitter as it drifted across the grass. Greg said, in a
low voice: ‘I heard they killed young Oliver.
Drowned him in
the bathtub, something like that.
Is that the truth?’

I said: ‘No. We don’t know what
happened yet. We haven’t even found Jimmy and Alison. Carter Wilkes says the
case is still wide open.’

‘I’m only repeating what I heard
tell,’ said Greg McAllister. ‘I didn’t mean to cause any mischief.’

‘I know that,’ I told him. ‘But you
can tell whoever told you that it’s not true, and you can make sure they spread
the right story just as fast as they managed to spread the wrong one.’

‘Well, I sure will. Do you want that
letter now, for old man Martin? If you want to give me a ride back to my
property, I could set it down for you straight away.’

‘Thanks. That would help.’

Greg McAllister gave another of his
crumpled, wrinkly smiles. ‘I’m real glad of that. I’m a neighbour, see, and I
can tell you straight that I’d do anything in the world to be of help.

Anything at all,
bar
nothing.’

Dan sighed. ‘Thank you, Mr
McAllister. Now, let’s go, shall we, while the rain’s still easy?’

By the time we returned to Dan’s
laboratory in New Milford, the sky was almost black, and there was a smell of
more rain in the air. Mrs Wardell had gone home with a migraine, but Rheta was
still there, working at the binocular microscope on sections of skin taken from
the body of the crustaceous mouse. She sat alone in a bright ellipse of
lamplight.

The mouse itself was lying on a pad
of cotton at the bottom of its cage, panting. It was still as scaley as ever,
although its encrustations didn’t seem to have spread any further along its
body. I took a quick look at it and then turned away. It reminded me too much
of poor young Oliver Bodine, and of what I might have to face when I went out
to meet his parents.
Scales, and gristly joints, and bony
carapaces.

Dan hung up his wet raincoat, and
said: ‘How’s it going? Any luck with the Hersman tests?’

Rheta sat up straight on her lab
stool and rubbed her eyes. Dan leaned forward and peered into the microscope
himself. ‘That looks like a regular crustaceous structure,’ he said.

Rheta nodded. ‘There really isn’t
anything vimasual about the cell formations at all. The scaley parts of the
mouse have the same type of” cell structure as a crab
shell,
and the mousey parts of the mouse are absolutely normal and unremarkable.’

‘Have you tried giving the mouse
more of the Bodines’ water?’

‘No. I haven’t gotten around to that
yet. And I’m not sure that we have the equipment or the expertise to handle an
experiment of that magnitude. At the very least, we’d need a Morton refractor.’

Dan smoothed the top of his bald
head thoughtfully. ‘You think we ought to pass this on to Hartford?’

She climbed off the stool and walked
across to the mouse’s cage. She stared at the tiny monster through the bars for
a moment, and then she said: ‘The change is so sophisticated. Ordinary soft
mouse flesh has metamorphosed into scaley crab shell, and the whole process has
happened without killing the mouse or even interfering with its bodily
functions. I made twenty or thirty X-rays, and they all show that, internally,
the mouse is still functioning properly. Let me show you.’

We gathered around the fluorescent
light table at the end of the room, and Rheta opened an envelope of X-ray
photographs. She clipped them on to the light table, and we examined them with
care.

‘This is one of the clearest,’ said
Rheta, pointing. ‘You can see that the mouse’s internal bone structure seems to
have dissolved, and that all its bodily calcium has gravitated somehow to its
outer skin layer. What we’re actually seeing is a creature that has turned
itself inside out, and developed bones on the surface instead of inside.’

I peered at the X-rays cautiously.
‘Is there any indication that the water was responsible for it?’ I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing
conclusive. I can’t say one hundred per cent. But from all the studies I’ve
made today, I’d say that those squiggly bugs in the water are giving off some
kind of enzyme which catalyses this whole process.’

‘I see. So you think it’s definitely
the water?’

‘Eighty-eight per
cent certain.’

Dan flicked through the rest of the
X-ray photographs, and then switched off the light table. He was silent for a
moment, but then he said: ‘The thing that still irks me is why.’1 ‘Why what?’ I
asked him.

He looked up. ‘Why these
two-million-year-old microscopic creatures are still living, and why they
affect people and animals in such an extraordinary way. I thought at first they
were some kind of disease virus, but they don’t behave like viruses, and what
that mouse is suffering from isn’t a disease in my understanding of the word.
It has a condition, that mouse, and I know what that condition is, but I can’t
see why. I can’t see where it fits into the life cycle of the bugs, or into the
life cycle of anything?

Rheta said: ‘You must admit that we
haven’t yet seen a complete cycle. This mouse is only half ossified, just like
young Oliver Bodine was. We don’t know what happens when the shell overtakes
the whole body.’

I coughed. ‘Maybe we’ll find out
tonight, when we go see Jimmy and Alison.’

Rheta gave me an uneasy smile. ‘I
hope you won’t, quite honestly.
For their sakes.’

I saic^: ‘Suppose these squiggly
bugs are like mosquitoes.
Supposing they’re just carrying
this enzyme from one host to another.’

‘That’s a theoretical possibility,’
said Dan. ‘But what host could there possibly be below the Litchfield Hills, a
mile and a half down? Where could they have picked up the condition in the
first place?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe there’s a
prehistoric carcass down there.
A dead caveman, something
like that.’

Dan raised an eyebrow.

‘I know
it’s
wild,’ I toldjiim, ‘but the whole situation’s pretty wild, and maybe we need to
go looking for wild answers.’

Dan looked across at Rheta, who gave
us both a sympathetic, encouraging smile. I wished I’d been able to spend just
a few more minutes with her back at the house, but I guess that was destiny. We
might meet again in another existence, or even next Friday if I could persuade
her to stand up Pigskin Packer.

Dan said: ‘Okay. Let’s think of some
wild answers. Got any more?’ I sat down on the edge of the laboratory bench.
‘I’m not sure. But I get the feeling there’s some kind of purpose behind all
this. Look at the way Oliver Bodine drowned. Whatever did that, whatever
actually engineered a drowning in a second-floor bedroom, well, that being
wasn’t weak and it wasn’t stupid. It could have been a man. If you gave me a
week or two, and a handbook on hydro-engineering, I could probably fathom out
how to do it. But the thinking behind it doesn’t seem to be human. I mean, a
human uses the easiest and most effective means available to dispose of his
victims. Why drown the boy by filling the whole room up with water when he
could have been drowned just as effectively in a china basin? Why drown the boy
at all when you could have more easily stabbed him? Why stab him when you could
have shot him? It just doesn’t make any kind of sense for a human being to kill
a small boy by flooding his entire upstairs bedroom.’

Rheta ran her hand through her hair.
‘So what are you saying? That whatever did it wasn’t human?’

I held out my hands. ‘If you apply
the psychological law that all creatures use the simplest means available to
them for doing anything, then you have to deduce that flooding that bedroom was
the simplest means of killing Oliver that his murderer could draw on.’

Dan sighed. ‘What the hell kind of a
creature finds flooding a bedroom simple?
A whale?’

‘I don’t know. I’m only
speculating.’

‘I see. So you think that Oliver was
killed by a whale.
And what about the bugs in the water?

Where do they fit in?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I told him.

‘I’m glad there’s something you’re
not sure of,’ he answered, sarcastically. ‘I’d hate to think I’d be left
without any scientific research to do.’

I took out a cigarillo and lit it. I
puffed out a whole cloud of smoke and then I said: ‘All right, it sounds weird.
But what other explanation is there?
An explanation that fits
the facts, and the circumstances, and the psychology.’

‘I don’t know. But you’re presupposing
there’s some kind of creature that’s capable of transporting five thousand
gallons of water up to the Bodine place, and back again. You’re presupposing
there’s some kind of creature that would actually want to.’

‘Well, somebody or something wanted
to,’ I retorted, ‘because somebody or something did it.’

Dan didn’t answer for a while. But
then he said: ‘Okay, let’s leave that question for the moment.

Maybe Carter will come up with some
more details. What about the bugs? What’s your theory on those?’

Rheta said: ‘Maybe they were put
into the water supply deliberately. Maybe they’re some kind of germ warfare.’

‘I hardly think so,’ said Dan,
shaking his head.

‘Why not?’ asked Rheta. ‘The Soviets
have nerve gas, and dirty hydrogen bombs, and viruses.

Why shouldn’t they have squiggly
bugs that turn people into shellbacked monsters?’

‘Because it doesn’t make sense,’
snapped Dan. ‘The Soviets would want to kill people, not turn them into
monsters. And apart from that, New Milford is hardly the most strategically sensitive
spot in the United States.’

‘I think the drowning and the bugs
in the water are both manifestations of the same problem,’ I put in. ‘We have
to think of them as clues that are going to lead us to the same source.’

‘I know,’ said Dan. ‘I know.
A giant whale with homicidal tendencies.’

I looked outside at the thundery
sky. It was almost dark now, and that meant a rendezvous with Jimmy and Alison
in back of old man Pascoe’s place. I had an odd jingly, jittery feeling in the
palms of my hands, and I suddenly realized I had almost chewed my way through
my plastic cigar-holder.

Rheta said: ‘One thing’s plain,
anyway. We don’t have enough evidence yet to draw any sensible conclusions.
We’re going to have to wait until Jack Newsom comes up with his medical report
on Oliver, and all the tests are completed on this mouse.’

I asked Dan: ‘Are you going to come
with me down to the Pascoe place? I may need some help.’

‘Sure, if you don’t think I’ll scare
them off.’

I gave him a wry smile. ‘I think
they’re more likely to scare us off. Do you have a flashlight here? I think I
left mine at home.
And how about a camera?
Even if we
don’t get to see them too well, we might be able to catch a couple of
pictures.’

‘I have an infra-red camera
downstairs. Rheta – is there any film in the icebox?’

Rheta went to the icebox to check.
Because infra-red film is sensitive to heat, and not to light, it has to be
kept cool. While she sorted through the trays of cultures and glass slides on
the icebox shelves, Dan and I looked soberly down at the panting mouse and
wondered what the hell we were letting ourselves in for.

Outside, there was an ear-splitting
crack of thunder, and the rain began to pound on the roof of the laboratory as
if it was determined to break through and drown us all.