The Wells of Hell (10 page)

I looked at her, and said softly:
‘This is one of those moments that I’ve been waiting for.’

She looked back at me. The fire
crackled brightly in the hearth, and the whole room was filled with the warmth
of our suddenly-flowering affection. I twisted the top button of her blouse
free, and glimpsed a bare-look nylon bra. Then a voice said: ‘Mr Perkins?’

I jerked up my head in shock. Rheta
pulled away from me, and buttoned up that one vital button again. Standing in
the open kitchen doorway, in a torn plaid shirt and jeans, his face scratched
and bruised and his hair tousled, was young Paul Denton, the nine-year-old boy
Carter had been looking for with a whole posse of deputies since late yesterday.
He was pale and shaking, and it looked as if he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything
since he went missing. He blinked at us, and swayed, and then he fell against
my drinks trolley and sent glasses and bottles and cocktail sticks cascading on
to the rug.

I knelt down beside him and lifted
his head. He was still conscious, although his breathing was laboured, and his
eyes flickered as if he was concussed. I said: ‘Paul? What’s the matter, Paul?

Where have you been?’

‘Mr Perkins,’ he whispered.

‘Rheta,’ I said, ‘go call Carter.
Tell him he’s going to need an ambulance, too. This kid looks terrible.’

‘Mr Perkins,’ repeated Paul. ‘Mr
Perkins.’

‘Just stay quiet,’ I told him.
‘Rheta’s gone to call the police.’ Paul shook his head desperately. ‘No
police,
please. No police, Mr Perkins, not yet. Please.’

Rheta was already dialling. I said:
‘Everybody’s been worried sick about you, Paul. We have to tell the police.’

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘/ promised I
wouldn’t!’ I raised my hand to Rheta. ‘Hold it a moment, Rheta. Don’t call them
yet. Paul – what do you mean you promised you wouldn’t? Who did you promise?’

Paul was trembling now. Every muscle
in his body was tense and quivering and he had to speak between clenched lips.
He reminded me of a woman I had taken to hospital after a bad road accident on
the Danbury road. Shocked, almost incapable of speech, and yet determined to
tell me what had happened.

I said: ‘Who did you promise, Paul?
Who said you mustn’t call the police?’

He stared at me with a wild
expression. ‘No police, Mr Perkins,
please,
no police.
I promised.’

‘I’m not going to call the police,
Paul. But you have to tell me what’s happened. Where have you been? Have you
been with someone?’

He nodded. ‘I saw them – both of
them.’

‘Who?
Who did you see?’

‘They were hiding in the woods. It
was dark. I didn’t know what I was doing there.’

Rheta brought over a cushion and I
lifted Paul’s head so that she could tuck it under him. As I laid him back, I
asked him gently: ‘Tell me who it was, Paul. I need to know. Who was hiding in the
woods?’

‘They asked for you, Mr Perkins,’ he
said, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘I heard them calling, and I went to see what
they wanted. I couldn’t believe it when I saw them. I didn’t understand at all.

But they talked to me, and they said
they had to see you. They said it was life or death. That was what they said.
Life or death.’

‘Paul,’ I insisted, ‘who was it? Who
said it was life or death? I can’t help if I don’t know who it was.’

Paul’s eyes rolled up into his head
so that only the whites were exposed. In a shaking whisper, he said: ‘It was
Jimmy and Alison Bodine. They said they were Jimmy and Alison Bodine.’

‘They said they were?’ asked Rheta.
‘Surely you know them well enough to know for sure?’

‘It was dark,’ Paul said huskily.
His eyes flickered again, and the pupils re-appeared. ‘I don’t know what I was
doing there, but it was so dark.’

I sat up straight, biting at my
thumbnail. Paul lay there among the broken glasses and scattered cocktail
sticks, still shaking, and I said to Rheta: ‘I think you’d better call Carter.
Whatever he promised, he needs medical help.’

Rheta nodded, and went to the phone.
I heard her talking to Phil More, one of Carter’s deputies, and then she came
back and told me that a police car and an ambulance were on their way. Paul was
shuddering more feebly now, his eyes opening and closing and turning around as
if they were completely uncontrolled, and it seemed to me that he was in a
heavy state of shock. ‘Don’t try to talk,’ I said quietly. ‘You’ll be okay in a
little while.’

* 63

Paul muttered for a while, and then
he said, in quite a clear voice, but with a curiously detached kind of
intonation: ‘I was lost, you see. I was on my bicycle and I knew that I had to
go into the woods. But once I was there I didn’t know where I was.’

‘It’s all right, Paul,’ I comforted
him. ‘You don’t have to talk. Just rest easy and we’ll have some people around
to help you in a while.’

But Paul was unstoppable. He spoke
as if he was under hypnosis, as if every word had been taught to him while he
was in a trance. In his high, childish voice, he said: ‘I felt I was close to
the place. I didn’t know for sure. But I had a feeling I was. It was the great
place that you read about in books. I was frightened, but not too much. I could
hear things I never heard before.
Loud noises, loud shouts
.’

‘Did you hear what was being
shouted?’ I asked him. But again he ignored me, and whispered: ‘I knew what was
going to happen. I would have to wait. It was almost dark then. I waited and
waited, and then I knew that I had to walk as far as the Coleman house. It was
very dark, and I fell over four or five times. I scratched my face on the
trees.’

‘Was that when you saw Jimmy and
Alison?’

Paul nodded. ‘They called to me,
from the bushes. They said I mustn’t come close. They said I had to go find
you, and bring you out to the woods. They made me promise no police. If you go
with police, or anybody else, you won’t ever find them.’

‘Did you see them?’ asked Rheta.

Paul shook his head. ‘It was too dark.
They looked like they were wearing blankets over their heads. I didn’t
understand why.’

I bent forward again. ‘Their
voices,’ I asked Paul. ‘Did you hear their voices clearly?’

‘They weren’t clear,’ he said. ‘They
must have been talking with their blankets over their mouths.

They weren’t clear. They were kind
of growling. I didn’t like it.’

‘Do you know where they were – where
I can go to find them?’ I asked.

Paul said feebly: ‘No police. They
won’t come out if you bring the police.’

‘I promise no police.’

‘All right.
They’ll be waiting for you when
it’s dark. They’re in back of the old barn on the Pascoe place, maybe three
minutes’ walk straight into the woods. They told me to say that. In back of the
old barn on the Pascoe place. But only when it’s dark.’

Rheta felt Paul’s pulse. She said:
‘He’s very weak. I hope that ambulance doesn’t take too long.

He could use some oxygen.’ I stood
up and went to the window. Very faintly in the distance, I could hear the
whoop-whoop scribble-scribble sound of the ambulance siren and I knew that they
wouldn’t take longer than a couple of minutes. There was only one more question
I wanted to ask Paul.

‘Paul,’ I said softly, kneeling down
beside him again. Rheta frowned at me, but it was something I had to know.
‘Paul did you smell anything in the woods? Was there a smell you remember?’

Paul trembled and twitched, and
didn’t answer. I hesitated for a moment, and then I went into the kitchen,
opened the food cupboard, and rummaged quickly through for a can of tuna. I had
one small size Chicken-of-the-Sea left, and I took it across to the can opener
and lifted off the lid.

Rheta said: ‘What are you doing?’ as
I came back through the dining-room with the can opened right up.

‘You’ll see,’ I told her. ‘I don’t
like to do it, but it could make all the difference.
Both for
Jimmy and Alison, and for me, too.’
I raised the can of tuna and wafted
it under Paul’s nose. Then I withdrew it, and waited. He stopped shaking for a
moment, his hands drawn up to his chest in a weak but self-protective gesture.
Then suddenly his eyes opened wide and they were nothing but naked white
eyeball,
and he screamed a long, throat-scratching scream of
terror and agony. He twisted and writhed on the rug, and I had to throw the
tuna aside and hold him down. It was all I could do to keep him still, even
though he was only a nine-year-old boy, and it wasn’t until Rheta shushed him
and calmed him that he began to stop jerking and shaking and settle down again.

There was the falling drone of a
siren outside. I sat up, feeling shaken, and I looked at Rheta as if the moment
that had brought us back here in the first place had passed more than a hundred
years ago.

She said: ‘It’s true, then. What’s
happened to that mouse, what happened to those people in
India.
It’s happened again.’

I stood up. There were hurried
footsteps outside, and a ring at the doorbell. All I could say was:

‘I don’t know. I guess we’re going
to have to wait until we see Jimmy and Alison for ourselves.

Meanwhile – for Paul’s sake – I
don’t think we ought to tell Carter where they are.’

Rheta thought for a moment, and then
nodded. I went to the door and opened it up for the medics, who came briskly
into the living-room with a stretcher and an oxygen bottle. One of them said:
‘Is this your son?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I guess he’s
just a lost boy.’

Dan had been waiting for me for
fifteen minutes when I arrived at the Bodine house. He was sitting on the rail
of the front verandah reading a copy of Scientific American. He wore a
fawn-and-blue plaid coat and a matching cap to cover his bald head, and if I’d
been a plain twenty-five-year-old girl from just outside of Brainerd,
Minnesota, I think I might even have taken a fancy to him.

I said: ‘Hi. I’m sorry I’m late.
Something interesting’came up.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Dan, a little
tartly. He was a dedicated man, and he didn’t like his time to be wasted.

‘We found the Denton boy. He was in
my house, looking for me. He just showed up, looking like he’d been dragged
through a Venetian blind backwards. He’s in the hospital now, having treatment
for shock and exhaustion.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Dan,
folding up his magazine and tucking it into his coat pocket.

He was just the kind of guy who
would carry around a magazine in his coat pocket.

‘He, er, well he’s all right. He got
lost, that was all.’

We walked around to the back of the
house, where the wellhead was. Dan said: ‘He got lost?

‘Maybe he fell off his bicycle,
something like that.
Knocked his head.
You
know,
amnesia.’

Dan held my arm. ‘Now, wait a
minute, Mason. I know when you’re telling the truth and I also know when you’re
spinning me a story. I’ve known you long enough for that.’

‘Dan,’ I told him, ‘I’m just a
simple plumber, plying my trade the best way I know how.’

‘You’re a goddamned smartass
plumber. Now what’s up with Paul?’

I sighed. I looked away across the
distant hills. Towards the west, the sky was a threatening metallic grey, and
it looked as if it might rain in an hour or two. The rust-coloured trees swayed
and champed in the wind.

‘Paul’s found Jimmy and Alison
Bodine,’ I said. Dan blinked. ‘He’s found them? What do you mean? Where are
they?’

‘He says they’re hiding in the woods
in back of old man Pascoe’s place. He says he came across them by accident.
There’s something badly wrong with them, Dan. They’re keeping themselves
covered with blankets, and they won’t let anyone come close.’

Dan looked at me, wide-eyed.

‘There’s something else,’ I told
him. ‘It may be nothing more than a wrong guess, but I tried waving an open can
of tuna under Paul’s nose. He went crazy. He screamed like all the devils in
hell were after him. So my guess is that whatever’s happened to Jimmy and
Alison, it has a lot to do with the smell of fish.’

Dan coughed. He said, in a thick
voice: ‘I think I believe you. If you can tell me something like that without
making a joke of it, then I think I believe you.’

‘You sound like Rheta,’ I told him.
But he didn’t understand that at all and he continued to frown in concentrated
thought. ‘Rheta told you about Austin?’ he asked.
‘The 1925
outbreak?’

‘Sure.
And the
Currie expedition.’

Dan nodded. ‘She was able to track
those down in a single morning. If you ask me, a good search through the
medical history files would turf up a whole lot more. It would take time,
though. And I’m not too sure how much time we’ve got.’