The Wells of Hell (4 page)

I looked away. ‘Maybe it’s the way a
fully-trained human being justifies a peaceful and happy life.’

‘Are you really peaceful and happy?’
he wanted to know.

‘Are you really sure you want to
have your name up in lights at the Smithsonian?’ I retaliated.

‘I think you need to fall in love,’
he declared, and took a long drink of beer.

We had one more beer each, and
watched a few minutes of the basketball on the television over the bar. Then I
put a dollar on the counter for Henry and we went back out into the night
again.

I walked back as far as the mall
with Dan, and we stood for a while on the corner, talking about the water
problem. Finally, Dan said: ‘Listen – I have to go check those samples. I’ll
probably call you tomorrow when I’ve been up to Jimmy’s place.’

I reached into my pocket for a
cigarillo. To my annoyance, the goddamn pack wasn’t there. I must have left it
in Stanley’s, or maybe up at the laboratory. I said to Dan: ‘Do you remember if
I left my cigarillos on your desk?’

‘You can come up and take a look if
you want to.’

He unlocked the office doors with a
pass key. Inside the building, it was gloomy and echoing now, and there was
nobody efse around. We climbed the stairs and walked along the landing towards
the health department door.

‘Doesn’t this.place give “you the
creeps when you work late?’ I asked Dan.

‘Not as much as my apartment,’ he
replied. ‘I have a landlady who looks through my keyhole to see if I have
ladies in my rooms.’

‘And do you?’

‘That’s a trade secret, Mason.’

‘Oh. I thought, being a smart
scientist, you would have brewed yourself up some potion to make yourself
irresistible to women.’

Dan unlocked the door of the outer
office, and we crossed past Mrs Wardell’s empty desk to the inner laboratory
door. He unlocked that, too, and we went in. The fluorescent lights flickered
two or three times, and then went on.

‘I think you left your cigarillos
over there someplace by the microscope,’ said Dan. ‘I’m just going to the
icebox next door to get out my swine fever slides if you want me.’

I looked along the varnished
laboratory benches, and there, under a sheaf of loose data paper, were my
cigarillos. I took one out, and lit it, and waited for Dan to come back so that
I could tell him good night. The laboratory^ was silent, except for the faint
buzzing of the neon tubes. I coughed, and watched myself smoking in the dark
window. I wondered if I was going to be too late to pick up a steak before I
went home. I needed some roughage to soak up two beers and two Jack Daniel’s.

It was then that I heard the
rustling noise. I didn’t take any notice at first. I thought it was just the
sheets of data paper, shifting from where I had moved them aside. But then I
heard it again, more distinctly, and even though it teas coming from the paper,
it certainly wasn’t the settling of the paper itself. It was too quick, too
scrabbly. There was something under there, and it sounded like a mouse.

‘Dan!’ I called out. ‘I’m coming!’
he told me.

‘I think I’ve caught the lunch break
bandit!’ I said.

I saw the paper stirring, and I
tippy-toed nearer and cupped my hands over the place where the rustling was
coming from. There was a pause, but then the creature squeaked, and I flung
aside that data paper like a blizzard and caught its wriggling body right
between my palms. It squeaked again like crazy, and even tried to nip me with
its teeth, but I had it trapped in there good and tight.

Dan came in with a tray of samples
and laid them on the bench.

‘Here he is,’ I announced.
The sandwich nibbler himself.’

‘You caught him? That’s a neat
trick. Now what are you going to do with him?’

I looked down at my cupped hands. ‘I
don’t know. Squash him to death, I guess.’

Dan blinked at me. ‘Could you really
do that?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘I guess not.’

‘Well, why don’t you just let him
go? The traps are going to catch him sooner or later.’

‘Maybe 1 ought to drive him up to
Canada and release him at the border.’

Dan laughed. ‘Go on, just let him
go.’

I hunkered down, and gradually
opened up my cupped hands. I saw a tiny pink nose, brown whiskers, pink ears,
and a furry back. And then I saw something else that made me whip my hands away
from that mouse so fast that I lost my balance, and fell with my shoulder
against the cupboards under the bench.

I said: ‘Dan!
For
Christ’s sake!’

Dan turned and looked down at the
floor where I had dropped the mouse. He didn’t realize that anything was wrong
at first, but then he stared in horror and fascination at the creature that
stood shaking and trembling on the polished parquet, unwilling or unable to
move.

‘What in hell happened to him?
he
asked, under his breath. He knelt down beside the mouse
and peered at it even closer. The mouse squeaked a little but didn’t try to run
away.

It couldn’t, of course. From the
middle of its back towards its hindquarters, it was covered in some kind of
dark, scaley excrescence that gave it the appearance of a huge black beetle.
Even its rear legs and its feet had been affected, and they were claw-like and
scabrous. Every one of the rough scales on its back and sides had
a dull
greeny-black sheen, although their edges were ragged.

I got to my feet, my knees weak with
disgust and fright, and I went and washed my hands in the laboratory sink. I
had felt all those scales when I had caught the mouse, but I had imagined they
were nothing but sharp claws. My last beer rose in the back of my throat, and
it was only by taking a deep breath that I persuaded it to go down again.

Dan was on all fours now, with a
transparent plastic foot-rule, and he was gently prodding the mouse with it.

‘Did you ever see anything like this
before?’ he asked me.

I shook my head. ‘I hope I never see
anything like it again.’

He turned the mouse over on to its
back, and it lay there squeaking with its feet waving in the air.

Its abdomen was even worse than its
back. Below its ribcage, its body went into insect-like folds, like a pale
caterpillar or a wood-louse. Its hind claws had saw-tooth edges, and moved with
a repulsive jerking motion.

‘Well,’ said Dan, ‘what the hell do
we make of you, little fellow?’

The mouse squeaked again, and
twisted its head from side to side.

‘Would you go get me that wire cage
over by the window-ledge?’ asked Dan. ‘I’ll keep an eye on our friend here and
make sure he doesn’t make a run for it.’

‘He’s no friend of mine,’ I said,
crossing the laboratory.

It was only when I was on my way
back with the cage that 1 glanced at the culture dish in which Dan had left a
sizeable sample of the Bodines’ water. There were a couple of mouse droppings
beside it, and it was almost empty.

I handed Dan the cage. I didn’t know
what to say. But when he’d carefully lifted the mouse in through the wire door,
balanced almost lifeless on the end of the plastic ruler, I cleared my throat
and said: ‘Dan?’

I
dialled the Bodines’ house four
times, but the phone rang and rang and there was no reply. I checked the clock
on the wall. It was way after nine now, and there should have been somebody
there. After all, it was Oliver’s bedtime, and even if Jimmy and Alison weren’t
at home, they would have had to bring in a babysitter. I waited and waited, but
at last I had to put down the phone and shake my head.

‘They’re not in, or they’re not
answering.’

Dan was still inspecting the scaley
mouse in the wire cage, watching it intently as it tried to pull itself from
one side of its prison to the other. It was so grotesque that I had to look
away, but I could still hear its scales and its insect-like claws scraping on
the wire.

‘In that case,’ said Dan, ‘I guess
we’d better get out there and warn them in person. I can’t tell for certain if
the water’s done this, not until I’ve made some tests. Maybe it has nothing to
do with it at all. But we don’t want to take the slightest risk. Not where
people’s lives are concerned.

‘I’ll drive you,’ I told him.

We took a last queasy look at the
mouse and then we locked the laboratory and went downstairs.

We crossed the mall at a fast walk,
breaking into a trot as we neared the station wagon. It was so cold now that
the windshield was iced over with white stars and fingers of frost, and the
hood shone a dull misted green in the light from the streetlamps. I unlocked
the doors and we climbed in. Shelley, looking very haughty and put out, climbed
over on to the back seat.

‘It smells like cats and putty in
here,’ said Dan, as I started up the engine. ‘I don’t know how you can stand
it.’

‘At least they’re honest smells,’ I
told him, backing up and then pulling out into the main street.

‘What’s a dishonest smell?’ asked
Dan.

I drove up to the top of the mall,
turned right, and then joined Route 202 at the sloping corner by the cemetery.
The gravestones looked whiter and colder than ever as I took a left and headed
north. Dan took a notepad out of his coat pocket and started to jot down
incomprehensible hieroglyphs with a blunt chewed pencil.

‘Supposing it mas the water?’ I
asked him.

He looked at me, his face patterned
with shadows.
‘Supposing it was?’

‘Well – if it does that to a mouse –
what’s it going to do to a human being?’

‘I don’t have any idea. Sometimes
small creatures like mice and rats are affected by chemicals or organisms when
humans aren’t. Look at the whole saccharin affair. Saccharin was found to cause
cancer when given to laboratory rats in fairly heavy doses, but that’s not
indisputable proof that it has the same effect on humans. The same goes for
many micro-organisms, which can maim or kill rodents, but don’t harm people at
all.’

I turned off right on to Route 109.
The road was dark and strewn with dead leaves, and already coated with a white
frosting of sugary-looking ice.

‘I just wish they’d answered the
phone,’ I said. ‘Then I would have been sure they were still okay. I mean, they
should have answered the phone.’

It took five or ten minutes of
driving through the dark and the cold to reach the Bodine house. I blew my horn
a couple of times as we turned up the driveway, but the old, square house
seemed to be deserted. There were no lights at any of the windows, only an
outside light on the verandah, and none of the living-room drapes had been
drawn. I pulled the station wagon to a halt, and we climbed out. Shelley
gratefully returned to his front seat, revelling in the warmth left by Dan’s
backside.

‘Jimmy!’ I called. ‘Alison!’

There was no reply. The house and
its grounds were silent, except for the occasional scuttling of dry leaves. I
walked around the side to the back yard, but that, too, was deserted. Jimmy’s
rake rested where he had left it that afternoon, against the brown-painted
weatherboarding. The screen door creaked and banged, creaked and banged.

‘They could have gone out for the
evening,’ suggested Dan. ‘Maybe they’re staying overnight some place.’

‘They didn’t mention it to me.’

‘People don’t have to ask your
permission to go out for the evening, you know. You’re only the plumber.’

I wasn’t in the mood for humour.
There was something unnaturally creepy about finding the Bodine house empty.
The windows were as dark as old men’s eyes, and the wind hummed in the
telephone wires. Behind me, Dan coughed and shuffled his feet in the leaves.

I went up the back steps to the
kitchen door. I held back the screen and tried the main door handle, and to my
surprise I found that was unlocked, too. I opened up a little way, and called:

‘Jimmy?
Alison?’
into the chilly gloom of the kitchen.

Dan said: ‘You’re wasting your time,
Mason. They’re just not here. Maybe they went over to the darks’ place at
Washington.’

I strained my eyes to see through
the shadows. I could see the edge of the kitchen table, and the corner of the
pine hutch, but it didn’t look like there was anybody there. I called: ‘Jimmy?’
louder, but still there was no reply.

‘It’s unlike Jimmy to leave the
place unlocked,’ I remarked.

Dan shrugged. ‘Maybe he forgot.
Maybe he thought he’d locked up and he hadn’t.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘That
doesn’t seem like Jimmy at all.’

I opened the kitchen door wider and
stepped inside. The kitchen was very dark, and odd shadows clung in every
corner. I heard something squeak and I froze for a moment, wondering if it was
one of those hideous scaley mice, but then it squeaked again and I realized it
was only a floorboard. One of the faucets in the kitchen sink was dripping
steadily, making a flat plip-plapping noise. I went on tippy-toes across the
room, bumping into the corner of the table as I passed, and turned the faucet
off. There’s one sound a plumber can’t stand to hear, and that’s the sound of
dripping.