The Wells of Hell (24 page)

He wore a forage cap, rimless
glasses, and a neat little Rudolf Valentino moustache.

‘I suppose you know how to work that
thing,’ said Carter, sarcastically.

The sergeant gave a slow,
unperturbed blink. ‘I’ve done full training in anti-tank weaponry, sir, as well
as Nike missiles and unarmed combat.’

‘Very good, sergeant,’ said Carter.
‘Do you know what you’re up against now?’

‘Just an exercise,
sir.
That was
what Colonel Phelps told me.
Something to do with co-operating
with civilian forces in the event of hostile invasion.’

The sheriff nodded. ‘You’re almost
right. The only difference is
,
this isn’t an exercise.
We have a real problem right here, and we’re looking to you to sort it out for
us.’

The sergeant blinked.
‘Problem, sir?’

I leaned on the side of the Jeep,
and said carefully: ‘Did you ever see one of those science-fiction movies,
sergeant? One of those
invasion
from outer space
epics? Where the crab monsters try to take over the world?’

He looked at me, obviously wondering
who I was. ‘I guess so,’ he said, uncertainly.

‘Well, sergeant, that’s the problem
we have now. We have a hostile alien, a kind of shell-backed monster, lurking
around in these woods someplace, and we’d like you to knock it out for us.’

The sergeant asked Carter: ‘Is this
gentleman a police officer, sir?’

Carter looked across at me with
obvious amusement. ‘No, sergeant, this gentleman isn’t. This gentleman is New
Milford’s most expensive and least efficient plumbing contractor.’

The sergeant didn’t appear to have
any sense of humour whatever. He said: ‘I’ll need proper authorisation, sir, if
I have to discharge this weapon.’

‘I’m taking full responsibility,’
said Carter. ‘Now let’s get that gun off of that Jeep and get going.

Every minute we stand here talking
that son-of-a-bitch monster gets farther and farther away.’

The sergeant looked from Carter to
me,
and from me to Dan, and from Dan to deputy Martino.

It was only when he was quite sure
that none of us were smiling that he slowly eased his bulky body out of the
Jeep and reached inside for his anti-tank launcher. The gun was all packed up
in khaki canvas and it took him three or four minutes of unfastening studs and
assembling sights and barrel sections before he announced he was ready.

‘I want to tell you, though,’ he
said to us all, with great solemnity, ‘this weapon packs one hell of a punch.
If it’s just some small animal you’re after, you’re going to wipe it off of the
face of the earth with this.’

Carter slapped him on the back.
‘It’s not small, I promise you. It’s about the size of a small truck, and it’s
twice as bad-tempered.’

‘All right, then, you’d better lead
on,’ said the sergeant. ‘And by the way, my name’s Hubert Rosner, in case
you’re interested.’

‘Okay, Hubert,’ said Carter. ‘My
name’s Carter Wilkes. You can call me “sir-.”‘

We fanned out into a small
semi-circle, with Sergeant Rosner in the middle, and we made our way slowly and
carefully through the bushes and the holly towards the place where I had last
seen the crab creature. Carter found his .38 where I had dropped it, and he
handed it back to me with an expression of long-suffering tolerance. I gave him
a quick, uneasy smile in return.

The day was very dark now, and our
progress through the woods was slow. It took us more than five minutes to reach
the spot where Deputy Huntley’s bloodied remains lay sprawled out on the
leaves; but when we did, I think that Sergeant Rosner was at last convinced
that we weren’t playing Boy Scouts, and that we were really searching for something
dangerous.

‘Hot shit,’ he said, respectfully,
taking off his forage cap.

Carter stood silent, his head cocked
on one side, listening. At last, he said: ‘I can hear something.

That way.
Maybe half a mile
through the trees.’

Sergeant Rosner couldn’t take his
eyes off the mangled remains of Deputy Huntley. ‘You think it’s the creature
that did this, sir?’ he asked, with a noticeable lack of relish.

‘I don’t know,’ said Carter,
brusquely. ‘But we won’t find out unless we go look, will we?’

‘No, sir.
I guess we won’t.’

From here, the terrain climbed up to
a woody ridge, and then sloped eastwards and downwards, rocky and irregular,
until it reached a small trickling tributary of the Housatonic. We scaled the
ridge in silence, broken only by the twittering of birds and the puffs and
pants of those among us who hadn’t kept our walking exercises up. Carter,
despite his weight, stayed well ahead of us, and he was the first to reach the
brow of the ridge and stand there looking down towards the river. The sky behind
him was dark and troubled, and northwards, in the direction of Ellsworth Hill,
lightning flashed and flickered in the clouds. I could have sworn for a moment
that I felt a shifting vibration in the ground itself, as if something vast and
subterranean was turning over in its sleep. 149

‘There’s something down there,’
called Carter. ‘Martino -bring me the glasses. We could have him if we’re
lucky.’

‘Lucky,’ I panted, under my breath.
‘If that’s luck, I’d rather stay home and pray for disaster.’

We finally made it up to the rocky
edge of the ridge, and there below us was the shadowy valley which carried the
small foaming river to the west, through zig-zag clefts and rapids, to the
broad breast of the Housatonic. Carter was pointing diagonally downwards to a
russet clump of ash trees, although I couldn’t see anything down there at all,
except for bushes and grey slabby rocks and tangled creepers. I knew that this
countryside up towards Kent was magical, in its own way, and had a long and
mysterious heritage of witchery and strange communions with demons and devils
in no human shape, and so I guess in some respects I was prepared to see almost
anything.

But I was damned if I could make out
the crab creature.

‘There – there it is!’ snapped
Carter, ‘I can see its shell moving!’

I peered down the hillside again,
and I thought I saw a flicker of movement, but no more than that, and I
wouldn’t have liked to swear in a court of law that it was anything at all,
except a few over-excited thrashers, let alone a target for Sergeant Rosner’s
anti-tank gun.

Carter looked at the ash trees again
through his field glasses, and beckoned Sergeant Rosner towards him with an
impatient wave of his hand. Sergeant Rosner obediently came forward, toting his
gun. Carter said: ‘You see that, Hubert? You see that damned monster down
there?’

Sergeant Rosner borrowed the field
glasses and squinted into them for what seemed like half an hour. Then he
nodded, and said: ‘I see what you mean there, sir. I’m not sure what it is. But
if you want it hit, and if you’ll take the responsibility, then I’ll hit it.’

‘Okay, sergeant, you do that,’ said
Carter. ‘You just blow the ass off that murderous thing, and you do it now.’

We waited around awkwardly while
Sergeant Rosner unhurriedly unslung his anti-tank rifle and his knapsack loaded
with rockets. He inserted a rocket into the gun’s wide-open barrel, and then
positioned himself flat on the ground, resting his elbow on a fallen branch,
and adjusting his telescopic sights with such calm and deliberation that Carter
had to look jhe other way in suppressed fury.

Eventually, he hunched himself over
the weapon, screwed up one eye, and took aim. Carter stood beside him, biting
his fingernails and staring down towards the clump of ash trees as if he could
shoot streams of daggers at it out of his eyes, like they do in the cartoons.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ said
Carter, and there was more than a touch of caustic in his voice.

‘Okay, sir,’ answered Sergeant
Rosner, and fired. There was a flash, and a low-pitched whistle, and then we
heard a soft thumping noise, like someone punching a pillow. A small puff of
greyish smoke drifted out of the ash grove as if someone had tossed a dirty
cauliflower out of it in slow-motion.

Carter looked disappointed. ‘Did you
hit it?’ he asked.

‘I guess so,’ said Sergeant Rosner.
‘You want another one in there?’

‘Just to make sure, yes,’ said
Carter.

We stood by while Sergeant Rosner
reloaded his gun. He resighted his telescopic lens, fiddled around with his
wristwatch, and after what seemed like five minutes of twitching and wriggling
and getting himself together he was ready for a second shot. If the Russians
ever did decide to invade us, they could march in fifteen divisions while
Sergeant Rosner was tidying himself up in preparation to drive them back into
the sea.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Carter. In
the distance, the thunder rumbled again, and lightning flickered like snakes’
tongues on the rim of the South Kent hills.

‘I’m ready, sir,’ said Hubert
Rosner, and applied himself to his weapon again, squinting down the sights.
‘Whenever you say fire, sir, I’ll fire.’

Carter Wilkes raised his hand as if
he was about to say ‘fire’, but then something strange happened. I heard that
humming again, that same tuning-fork sound that I had heard in the woods when
the crab creature had created the illusion of being Jimmy Bodine. It was
high-pitched, almost intolerable, and it seemed to make my actual skull vibrate
and sing in a monotonous, unlistenable key.

Right in front of our eyes, I swear
it, on that windy storm-blown ridge in West Connecticut, Sergeant Rosner began
to shimmer and waver,
just
the way that Jimmy’s image
had before, when the crab creature had tried to deceive me into believing that
Jimmy was really there. And Sergeant Rosner turned towards us, with a look of
mystification on his face, but it was too late for any of us to understand what
was happening or do anything at all to help him.

His face went blue, and then a
hideous aubergine purple. He rolled over on the ground, gargling in his throat
and clutching at his clothes as if he was suffocating. Then, with a hideous
gushing sound, water belched out of his nose and his mouth in gallons, an
unstoppable tide that was literally drowning him in front of our eyes – but
drowning him from the inside out.

We tried to hold him down as he
kicked and struggled for breath, and Carter even attempted artificial
respiration. But all that happened was that gallons more water were vomited out
of his stomach and his lungs, and his asphyxiation came all the quicker. In a
few seconds, he slumped back on the turf, his cheeks blue, and it was plain
that he was dead. Water still poured from his nostrils and his half-open mouth
and soaked the ground, but the crab-servant of Quithe had done enough.

Carter said gruffly: ‘He drowned.
Right out here.
Right on.top of a
goddamned hill.’

I nodded. ‘This thing we’re up
against, these creatures, they can do stunts with water you wouldn’t even
believe.’

Carter said: ‘It’s impossible. I saw
it, but I don’t believe it.’

Dan knelt down beside Hubert
Rosner’s bloated corpse. It looked like something that had been dragged out of
the Housatonic. He lifted one of Hubert’s eyelids, and then remarked: ‘It’s not
really impossible, Carter. It looks to me like a very high-powered version of
the old rainmaking spells the Indians used out in Arizona. Any medicine man
with sufficiently powerful alpha-waves could set up a small field of
electro-psychic energy which altered the relative humidity in the atmosphere
around him. There was one medicine man who could make it rain on the palm of
his hand, and nowhere else, just by concentrating his brain-waves. But this is
thousands of times more powerful. Wherever or from whatever this psychic energy
is coming, we’re in trouble.’

‘It’s coming from that crab, ain’t
it?’ said Carter, nervously.

‘I don’t know,’ answered Dan.
‘Probably not.
The way the legends of Atlantis tell
it,
and the way that Jimmy-creature tells it, these crab-people
are just servants to the real gods. Back in the old days, when Atlantis was
still thriving, the gods must have mutated men to serve them and look after
them, which is just what they’ve done here. That psychic energy was channelled
through the crab, but it didn’t originate in the crab’s brain. It was probably
transmitted from under the ground, in the wells, where the beast-god is lying.’

Carter didn’t know what to say. He’d
never heard Dan talking this way before. He was a good sheriff, a blunt and practical
man, and all this airy-fairy nonsense about beast-gods and psychic energy made
him angry and frustrated. But he was shrewd enough to know when his friends and
his deputies believed something for real; and he knew that good old bald
serious Dan wasn’t going to come out with a story like this unless he’d
considered it deeply, and tested it empirically. Dan’s mind was as chemical as
litmus paper, and Carter respected him for it.