The Wells of Hell (17 page)

I stood on the steps looking across
at my battered and broken Country Squire. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but we’ll have a
damned good try.’

I drove back to New Preston at a
steady ten miles an hour, with the freezing fall wind blowing in through my
shattered windshield and my eyes watering almost as much as when I watched
Miracle on 341(1 Street. Shelley hated the unexpected cold, and he secreted
himself on the floor in front of the passenger seat, crossly letting the hot
air from the heater ruffle up his fur. It was better to be untidy than cold. It
was better to be almost anything than cold. I wondered if he’d ever forgive me.
Oh well, who gave a shit. He was only a cat, and it was my fault if I forgot
that once in a while and treated him like he was human.

It took almost twenty minutes to get
back to my rented house at that pace, but finally I turned up the steep road
that led to my rocky driveway and my own front door. I dragged a worn-out
canvas tent from the garage and slung it over the front of the Country Squire
in case it rained during the night, and then I wearily climbed the narrow steps
to the porch. Shelley followed me, fluffed up with cold and disdain.

Inside the house, the temperature was
almost down to ten degrees. The log fire had burned out again, and the log rack
was empty apart from a few beetle-ridden twigs, and that meant a cold journey
out to the back yard for more. Disconsolate and somewhat lonesome, I raked the
ashes out of the fire and ripped up a few old copies of the TV Guide for
kindling. Then I unlocked the side door and went out across the dark and chilly
yard in search of logs.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been up
in Connecticut in the late fall, but it has a real mournful coldness about it,
a chilly dampness that makes you want to stay by the fire and keep your Jack
Daniel’s bottle close, and do nothing more than watch television, even if it’s
nothing more uplifting than The Gong Show. It isn’t as ball-breaking as New Hampshire
or Vermont, but it’s frigid enough for someone who would rather live in Florida
in any case; and when I traipsed across the sloping grass of my back yard for
those logs that evening, my breath was vapourising and I was shivering like Bob
Cratchit the night before Christmas, and I was completely unprepared for the
heavy crackling sound in the trees that told me someone or something was
walking there.

I stopped, and listened, holding my
armful of logs. The crackling came again, quieter, but still unmistakeable. It
wasn’t leaves, blowing through the branches. It wasn’t a squirrel, or a stray
dog.

It was something as big and heavy as
a human being, and it was skirting around the trees and bushes that surrounded
the house.

My pulse-rate quickened, and I guess
my blood-pressure soared up too, if I’d had the time or the inclination to
measure it. Keeping my eyes wide open, I started to walk slowly and warily back
towards the house, hoping that whatever or whoever was skulking in the
undergrowth wouldn’t decide to leap out and block my path to the half-open side
door. It was still a good
fifty-feet
away, that door,
and the light that streamed out of it was as appetising and welcoming as a
wedge of good Wisconsin cheese.

It seemed to take hours to reach the
safety of the house. But I made it, and closed the door behind me, and there
was Shelley sitting in front of the unlit hearth, impatient as always. I dumped
the logs on to the fire dogs and told him: ‘One night I’m going to make you go
get the wood. It’s too damned spooky out there for me.’ “

Shelley twitched his ears and didn’t
answer. I stacked up the logs, and set a light to the torn-up TV Guides, and it
wasn’t long before the fire was crackling up nicely, and I could go into the
dining-room and pour myself
a hefty
bourbon. I have to
admit that I drank the first one standing right where I was, by the liquor
trolley, and that I poured myself another three fingers to take back to the
hearthside. But then I don’t think anyone would go blaming me. After my
encounter with Jimmy and Alison Bodine, and after hearing sinister noises
outside in the night, I think that anyone would have been tempted to seek
courage in the square bottle with the black label.

I sat by the fire for a while,
warming myself, and then I tried to call Rheta. There was no answer from the
laboratory, and no answer from her home number, so I guessed she must have gone
out with Pigskin Packer again. I felt like busting Pigskin Packer in the mouth,
to tell you the truth. There wasn’t anything I would have liked better right at
that moment than to have Rheta snuggled up beside me by the hearth, preferably
dressed in something casual, and to have the warming and reassuring prospect of
a night in a shared and well-made bed instead of the lonesome tangle that
awaited me. I finally took off my red baseball cap, and took out a cigarillo,
but I scrutinized the white plastic holder pretty close before I lit it. Maybe
Greg McAllister was right about cancer. Maybe he was right about a lot of
things. I made a note on my mental blotter to go down to Candlewood Furnishers
in the morning and dig out that book on Legends of Litchfield.

The front door rattled on its
hinges, and I heard a shifting of leaves outside. Maybe I should have switched
on the television, so I wouldn’t hear noises like that. But somehow I preferred
to be frightened by something I could actually hear than by something I
couldn’t. In any case, television is supposed to be bad for the soul. The only
creatures who can watch it with complete mental immunity are cats.

There was another rustling outside.
I tried to ignore it for a minute or two, but then I heard it again. With
over-exaggerated casualness, I got up from the sofa and stepped across to the
window. I hadn’t yet drawn the drapes, but it was dark out there, solid dark,
and all I could see was my own tired reflection staring back at me. I raised my
glass to myself, and then went back and sat down.

About ten minutes passed. I began to
nod off. I was feeling so tired that I could happily have gone to bed. But it
was only seven o’clock, and if I went to bed now I would probably spend the
rest of the night tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling, and if there
was one thing I couldn’t stand it was lying in bed, totally awake, with nothing
better to do than wait for the dawn to rise through the Venetian blinds. In any
case, the fire was blazing brightly and cheerily now, and the sitting-room was
just the place to be.

I nodded, dozed, nodded. I dreamed
for a moment that I was swimming in some dark ocean, and that I was trying to
find a way through a slimy and complicated reef. I opened my eyes and I was
still sitting on my sofa with my feet up, and Shelley was still there, with the
firelight flickering across his»iface.

I dozed again, and dreamed again,
and I was swimming through darkness, with deep, powerful strokes. I knew that I
was searching for
something, that
I urgently needed to
get out of the ocean and into the crevices and grottoes of the rocks. The sea
was dangerous tonight.
Cold and alien and dangerous.
I
looked over my shoulder, straining my eyes through the dim water to see if I
was being pursued. All I could see was dark shadowy shapes, and things that
could have been trailing weed or eels, or both.

A sharp tap woke me up. My eyes were
open before I was fully aware of what was going on. I turned towards the fire,
and everything was just as before, but then there was another tap, louder, and
I looked at the window. My heart must have dropped right down through the
upholstery.

Only half-visible through the
reflections on the glass, there was a waving, mottled claw. And behind that
claw, scarcely distinguishable in the darkness, were thin tendrils and things
that looked like black staring eyes. It was the claw that was tapping on the
glass of the window. It was the claw that wanted my flesh.

There was an ear-splitting crack,
and Shelley jumped up and away as if he’d been stepped on.

The window shattered from side to
side in an explosion of glass, and the huge pincer lunged into the room. I rolled
off the sofa towards the dining-room, following my fleeing cat, but I wasn’t
fast enough for what happened next.

Through the open window, with a
torrential, sliding roar, poured a foaming cataract of water. It was so
powerful that it drowned the fire in a single spurt of steam, and lifted the
television bodily across the floor. I didn’t have time to reach the kitchen
door before the water gushed into the dining-room, hurling the chairs and the
table against the wall, and splashing up against the window. It hit me in the
back like an icy-cold locomotive, and sent me colliding against the door-jamb.
I lost my footing, and went right under the foam, and the next thing I knew I
was swallowing freezing water by the gallon. Panicking, I tried to stand up
again, but I couldn’t keep my feet, and the room was so full of water that at
first I couldn’t reach the surface. I kicked myself up from the floor, swimming
hard, and I managed to break out into fresh air about a foot below the ceiling.
I gulped and trod water, clinging on to the ceiling light for support, but the
gurgling waves were rising fast, and I knew that in a second or two the room
would be flooded to the top. I looked frantically around for Shelley, but I
couldn’t see him anywhere at all. I just hoped he’d managed to dive through the
kitchen and out through the cat-flap before the tidal wave had hit us.

With a last strong swirl, the water
rose to the ceiling, and I just managed to take one deep breath before I was
completely immersed. I plunged downwards, trying to swim towards the window,
but I was disoriented now, and it was so dark that I couldn’t make out which
way the kitchen was and which way the window lay. I had a chilling and vivid
memory of my dreams about swimming in the ocean, and I forced myself to dive
even deeper towards the floor. There was a powerful, cold current running
through the water. Fragments of wood from the fire, table mats, bottles and
papers were pouring past me as I swam. I felt the drinks trolley roll over and
float away, sending half-empty bottles bobbing and clinking all around me.

My breath was nearly exhausted. My
head was thumping as hard as a Thanksgiving hangover, and my ears were filled
with water and the terrible echoing bubbling noises of my drowned house. I
groped against the wall, but I didn’t know which wall it was, and even when I
kicked my legs and swam a little way along it, I couldn’t find a window or a
door.

It was then that I recalled
something else about my dreams.
The sensation of being
hunted.
The sensation of being followed by some
vicious predator.
I turned around in the water, pedalling hard to keep
myself upright in the current, and even though I couldn’t make out very much in
the churning darkness, I thought I could see something swimming towards me. A
black, threatening bulk which seemed to move far more swiftly and far more
certainly under the water than it had on land. With my vision blurring from
lack of oxygen, and my lungs about to burst out of my throat, I dog-paddled
desperately to one side, thrashing around for a way to escape.

The dark bulk came steadily closer.
I could make out a heavy, scaley
Jiead,
and pincers
that were raised above me ready to strike. I gulped, swallowed more water, and
kicked out at it as hard as I could with my feet.

It may have been cumbersome on land,
but under the water its ungainly strugglings became a fast and buoyant ballet.
Its smaller pincer snapped out and caught the cuff of my pants, holding me long
enough for the large claw to seize me just below the knee. It was a fierce,
relentless grip, as painful as having a car run over your shin and stay there.
At that moment I was certain I was going to drown, and be devoured.

The creature began to drag me
further downwards, towards the floor. I was almost on the point of filling my
lungs with water, and I knew that I didn’t stand a chance. Now that it had me
tight in its pincers, it was determined to take its time, and it floated
downwards with slow and silent deliberation. I couldn’t think about anything.
They say your whole life flashes in front of your eyes when you’re drowning,
but I guess that last picture show is the privilege of those who go up and down
three times. I was just going under, and that was it.

My back bumped against the floor. I
tried to reach out to steady myself hoping to find a door or wall which would
give me enough leverage to kick back at my predatory captor. All I found was an
overturned table lamp and that was made of such light pottery and straw that it
wouldn’t even serve as a club.

The smaller pincer released its hold
on my pants and began to feel its way up the side of my leg.

It was hard and spiney and I had
already heard what it had done to poor young Susan Steadman.

Still, by the time it started to do
any damage, I would probably be drowned and past caring.

Unless I took the lamp and-

My mind leapt. It might not work. It
probably wouldn’t. But it was better to try it than drown in my own dining-room
without a struggle, and have this crustaceous monster make a grisly meal out of
my innards.

I reached over and wrenched the
brass fixture from the top of the lamp, bulb and all, leaving me with two bare
wires. Then I switched the lamp
on,
and blindly
reached out with the wires towards the creature’s head.