The Wells of Hell (11 page)

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I
asked him. ‘Just think about it,’ he replied. ‘Jimmy and Alison complained
about their water Tuesday morning. By the same evening, they were infected by
whatever their water contained. So was Oliver. I don’t know what time of the
evening young Oliver was drowned, not until the police pathology people give us
some kind of report, and so I don’t know how quickly those scales started to
overtake his body. But I do know this. It
happened
damned fast. Now, if this thing is spreading, if all the wells around here are
infected, then we don’t have any time at all. We’re going to find that the
whole damn town of New Milford is turning crustaceous, and once that
happens...’

There was a grumbling of far-away
thunder. Lightning stalked behind the hills.

‘More rain,’ said Dan. ‘We’ve had
more rain this year than we have for a half-century. The water-table is so
damned high we’re practically paddling in it.’

I said: ‘Don’t you think we’d better
take a look at the well, now we’re here? Take a couple more samples, just to
make sure?’

Dan paused for a moment, and then
nodded. We stepped down from the verandah and walked around the side of the
house. The thunder rumbled again, and, for an odd moment, I felt as if the
earth itself was stirring under my feet. I looked at Dan and said: ‘Did you
feel that?’

‘A kind of a
tremor?
Like an
earthquake?’

‘That’s right.’

He stood still, and lifted his head
to the breeze. At the far end of the Bodines’ yard, their barn was illuminated
with unnatural brightness by a wash of sunlight from behind the clouds. I felt
as if I had stepped into an Andrew Wyeth painting, where the colours were all
pale and sharp and life was threatened by its very ordinariness.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess it
was thunder, that’s all.’

We waited a little longer, but there
were no more tremors, and so we continued around to the back yard. The screen
door trembled and rattled in the threatening wind, and there was an air of
desolation around that made me feel unaccountably depressed.

We paused again. I was sure I could
hear something.
A crackling, or a bubbling sound.
I
wasn’t quite certain which. Dan was about to mount the steps to the kitchen
door, but I held his arm and said: ‘Sssh. Listen to that.’

He listened. Then he said: ‘It
sounds like water. Now, where the hell could that
be
coming from?’

We skirted the back of the house. It
was even darker here, because of the overhanging trees, and crisp fall leaves
whirled all around us. The first heavy rain-drops began to plop against the
roof of the rear porch and rattle through the trees. But the bubbling sound was
louder now, and distinctly
water,
and we followed it
across the sloping lawn to the old garden hand-pump, a rusted Victorian relic
painted with red lead.

‘Look at that,’ said Dan. ‘That
water’s bursting out all over.’ From the foot of the pump, out of an inch-wide
fissure in the dirt, a torrent of well-water was jumping and bubbling. Already
it had washed itself a water-course across towards the ditch which bordered the
Bodines’ property to the east, and its pressure was so high that it was
detaching chunks of soil and stones and widening its outlet all the time.

Dan knelt down on the wet grass and
took out a sample bottle. He filled it with water directly from the fissure,
and then he stood up and corked it, ‘What causes an outbreak like that?’ he
asked me. ‘These wells aren’t usually under that much pressure, are they?’

‘No, sir,’ I told him. I hunkered
down, too, and felt the force of the water against the palm of my hand. It was
icy cold, and seemed to be growing in strength with every moment. ‘Do you have
any ideas about it?’ Dan asked me. I shrugged. ‘This sort of pressure could be
caused by any one of a whole lot of different factors, or even two or three
different factors combined. One underground water system could have filled up
so much that it’s poured through into another.

Or there could even have been some
kind of mild volcanic activity.’

‘That tremor we felt?’

‘Maybe.
I don’t know.’

I was still thinking about it when I
saw a man come around the side of the house and walk slowly towards us. He
looked like a neighbour, a red-faced man in faded dungarees and a soiled fawn
hat. He was stocky, and he walked with his hands in his pockets. When he came
within a few feet of us, he stood still and looked at us like a farmer who
finds a courting couple in his wheatfield.

‘I saw your cars outside, reckoned
I’d drop by and see what was up,’ the man remarked. ‘Glad to see the Bodines
have a neighbour who takes an interest,’ I said, standing up and wiping my wet
hand with my handkerchief. ‘I’m Mason Perkins, the plumber, and this is Dan
Kirk, from the county medical department.’

‘I’ve seen you around New Milford,’
nodded the neighbour. ‘My name’s Greg McAllister.
I jusrmoved
into the house next door a few weeks back.’

‘Greg McAllister?’ asked Dan.
‘Aren’t you William McAllister’s son? Used to live in the same house?’

‘That’s right. The house has always been
in the family, only I left it when pa died, and went to farm in Iowa. Now I’ve
sold out my farm and come home to Connecticut. Getting too old for the outdoor
life, you understand.’

Dan said: ‘Have you heard the
warnings about the well water around here? You haven’t been drinking it, have
you?’

‘No, sir,’ said Greg McAllister.
‘I’ve never drunk the well water in my whole life, not me
nor
my father in front of me, nor
his father.’

‘You haven’t? But why ever not?’
asked Dan.

Greg, with his hands still firmly in
his pockets, gave us a noncommittal shrug. ‘Maybe it was stupid,’ he told us,
‘but the belief in my family always was that the wells around here were cursed.

My grandpa used to call them the
wells of Hell.’

F
rom the hills over by Kent, there was
a long bumble of thunder like a dinosaur with chronic gas. Greg McAllister
looked up and said: ‘That rain’s going to come down like all Moses in a
moment.’

I said: ‘We’d better take shelter on
the porch. Do you have all the samples you need, Dan?’

Dan nodded, and so we left the
garden pump and walked quickly back to the house. Just as we reached the porch,
the rain came down in torrential sheets, drumming on the tarpaper roof over our
heads, gurgling in the gutters, and drifting across the lawns in ghosts of
spray.

‘Sure been a wet one this year,’
said Greg McAllister, taking out a pack of Camels and lighting up. ‘The back
end of my four-acre field is just about awash.’

‘You still farm?’ asked Dan.

‘I keep a couple of cows, but that’s
about it. And they’re just for scenery.’

I leaned against the wooden planking
of the house and took off my baseball cap. ‘I never heard any stories about any
curse,’ I told him.

‘On the wells you mean?’ asked
McAllister, blowing out twin streams of smoke from his hairy nostrils. ‘Well,
it was a pretty old story, one of those real old folk stories that died out,
you know? Some of the people round here have heard about it, the geriatrics,
but most of them haven’t. New Milford ain’t the same place it was when I was a
boy.’

‘What kind of a curse was it?’ asked
Dan.

Greg McAllister sniffed, ‘Well, it
was a kind of a
rhyme, that
was all I ever knew. My pa
used to tell it to me when I was going to sleep, when I was real small boy. He
said nobody round these parts ever drank the local well water, they always went
across to the Nepaug Reservoir with a tanker, and brought back their own, and
way before that they maybe went across to Squantz Pond. But they never drank
from their own wells, only used it for washing or irrigation or watering the
beasts.’

I took out a cigarillo and lit it. I
was feeling slightly nauseous, and I wondered if maybe I’d eaten my steak
brochette too quickly. I had been in a nervy sort of condition, after all. I
could have done with a pint and a half of Pepto-Bismol, and a couple of packs
of Rol-Aids.

‘You smoke those things with the
plastic tips?’ asked Greg McAllister. ‘I heard those plastic tips could give
you cancer of the teeth.’

‘Cancer of the teeth}’ asked Dan.

‘That’s right. Plastic’s supposed to
be the biggest cause of cancer, bar cheese.’

I glanced at Dan. It seemed like
Greg McAllister was slightly less than a reliable witness on the subject of
health. But Dan pulled a face as if to say, well, he’s the only witness we’ve
got. Out loud, he said to Greg: ‘Tell us about this rhyme, then, Greg. Can you
remember how it ran?’

Greg
smiled,
a crinkly smile that folded his mouth like a used tissue. ‘I sure can. My pa
told me that rhyme over and over, every night of my boyhood, and I guess I
won’t forget how it ran until I’m stiff as a board and ready to meet my Lord.’

He took a deep drag at his
cigarette, blew out smoke, and then said: ‘
The
way it
went was this:

“Don’t drink thee water, Drink thee
wine,
Lest
old Pontanpo’s curse Be thine.

“We sup us not From Preston’s well,
And
so we keep Our skin from shell.” ‘

Dan raised his eyebrows. He said to
Greg McAllister: ‘Your father told you that rhyme? How long- ago was that?’

Greg rubbed his chin and thought.
‘I’m sixty-one come February, so I guess that was all of fifty years ago.’

‘Did he ever say what the words
meant?’ I asked him.

Greg looked puzzled.
‘What they meant?’’

‘That’s right. Did he say what old
Pontanpo’s curse was, for instance? Or what keeping your skin from shell
meant?’

The rain spattered on to the boards
of the porch. Greg shook his head slowly from side to side, and said: ‘I don’t
reckon he did. He may have done, when I was real young. But I sure don’t
remember any meaning. It never did occur to me to look for a meaning. The words
mean what the words mean, and that’s all.’

‘Can you guess what they mean?’ I
persisted.

‘Well, sure,’ he told me. ‘When it
says “drink thee wine”, it means you have to stay off the well water, and I
guess old Pontanpo was some kind of a Red Indian. It sounds like a Red Indian
name,
don’t
it? Maybe the Red Indians put some curse
on the well water, one of them old-time Algonquians, you know? Or maybe he
didn’t, who’s to know? But anyway the second verse says that we don’t drink
well water from around New Preston on account of it keeps our skin from shell.’

‘Do you know what that means? Can
you guess? Did anyone ever tell you?’

Greg drew hard at his cigarette, and
the tip of it
glowed
bright orange. When he’d
considered a while, and scratched the back of his leathery neck, criss-crossed
with wrinkles and deep red from years of farming, he shook his head in
resignation.

‘I think I asked my pa once,’ he
said. ‘And my pa said it was something to do with the knee people.’

‘The knee people.
You mean, knee like in halfway down
your leg?’

‘I guess so. He didn’t know any
more. He just said the rhyme was to warn folks about the knee people, and that
was it. He didn’t know no more. Some of the older residents did, but not him,
and he wasn’t particularly minded to ask. He said it was one of those things it
was best not to know of anyway.’

Dan took out his sample of water and
held it up to the grey light of the rainy afternoon. Even from where I was
standing, I could see that it had the same yellowish tint as before, although
that might have been partly due to the dirt which the bubbling well water had
stirred up as it came gushing out of the ground. Only a full analysis would
tell us.

He said to Greg McAllister: ‘Did you
ever see the well water? Did you ever see it yellowy-green, like this?’ Greg
squinted at the sample, and then shook his head again. ‘I don’t remember the
well water ever being anything at all but clear. That’s full of mud, ain’t it,
that water?’

Dan said: ‘No. If it were, the lower
part of the water would be tinted more darkly by now, as the suspension
settled. But it’s still the same tint of yellow all the way up.’

‘Is that poison?’ asked Greg.

‘It’s possible,’ said Dan. ‘That’s
what I’m trying to rind out.’

I puffed at my cancerous cigarillo
and put in: ‘That’s why we wanted to know about the rhyme.

There might be some kind of clue in
one of the old stories.’

Greg looked from Dan to me, and then
back again. ‘You’re really interested in all
them
old
tales?

All
them
old rhymes?’

‘Sure. Do you know any more?’