The Wells of Hell (3 page)

‘Who’s lecherous? Just because I
have this mental picture of you in one of those tight satin outfits, with
a cotton
puff on your backside, that doesn’t mean anything.
Anyway, how about dinner tonight
?1

‘How about dinner tonight?’ she
asked, unbuttoning her lab coat.

‘I shrugged. ‘We could do anything
you like. We could go up to Gaylordsville and have bluefish and white wine at
the Fritz & Fox. Or we could go to Conn’s Dairy Bar and have milk shakes
and hamburgers.’

‘You really know how to live, don’t
you?’ she asked me, with good-humoured sarcasm. ‘Well, thanks, but no thanks. I
have a date with Kenny Packer at nine.’

‘Kenny Packer the football player?
Pigskin Packer?’

‘That’s him.’

‘He’s like the Incredible Hulk, only
pink.’ - Dan said: ‘Hold on a minute, you two,’ and without taking his eyes
away from his microscope, he beckoned us over. ‘Come and take a look at this.’

We came over, and Dan shifted his stool
back so that we could take a look into the binocular lenses. I took a squint
first, and all I could see
was blurry shapes
swimming
around in a sea of dazzling light. But then Rheta took her turn, and she spent
two or three minutes frowning at the slide in silence, occasionally adjusting
the focus or moving the slide from side to side.

Eventually, she stood straight, and
looked at Dan with a questioning, concerned expression. Dan looked back at her,
and shook his head like he didn’t know what to say, or what to do.

I said, impatiently: ‘Do you mind
letting me in on this? All I saw were curly little squiggles.’

Dan nodded. ‘There are always curly
little squiggles, even in the clearest water.
Micro-organisms
which filtration and purification never remove.
They’re quite harmless,
on the whole. You drink millions of them every day.’

‘What are you trying to do?’ I asked
him. ‘Put me off dinner?’

‘Not at all.
But those things you can see in
this particular sample of water ought to put the Bodines off their dinner.’

‘What are they?
Anything
serious?’

Dan smoothed the palm of his hand
over his bald head. ‘It’s hard to say. From a cursory look at them, they appear
to be nothing more than unusually-developed microscopic organisms. But when you
look at them more closely you can see that they’re much more sophisticated than
the usual run-of-the-mill organisms and microbes you find in water Supplies.
They seem to have a rudimentary respiratory system, and they also seem to be
exuding some kind of substance which is mingling with the water.’

I sat astride one of the stools. ‘Is
that what’s making the water discoloured?’

‘I would guess so. Yes, it almost
certainly is.’

‘So what are these things? You
ever seen
them before?’ I asked him.

Dan glanced at Rheta. ‘Have you?’ he
asked her. She shook her head, and said nothing.

Dan said: ‘They’re not in any way
familiar to me, either.

They’re not the kind of bug you’d
normally expect to find in water, and from what little I’ve seen of them so
far, without having had the chance to study their full life cycle, I’d say that
they lead a most unusual existence. This yellow or green stuff they keep
producing is coming out of them in enormous quantities, comparatively speaking.
You take a look at them again. If you or I excreted any kind of substance at
that rate, we’d be pushing out twenty gallons an hour.’

I pulled a disgusted face, but Dan
said: ‘Go ahead. Take another look,’ and so I bent over the microscope and peered
intently at the sample of water.

Now I knew what I was looking for, I
could identify the organisms that Dan was talking about.

They were transparent and shadowy,
but they had a distinctive shape, like sea-horses, and I could even see where
their respiratory systems were. They seemed to take in water through gills
around their necks and let it flow through their transparent bodies. When it
was excreted at the other end, it came out tinted yellow. Perhaps when I’d
compared the water with piss, up at the Bodines’ place, I hadn’t be<*n too
far wrong.

It was the shape of these organisms
that disturbed me, though. If you forgot they were so goddamned small that you
couldn’t see them with the naked eye, they were monstrous. They had projections
like twisted horns on the part of them which I took to be their heads, and
scaley-looking bodies. And all the time I was watching them, they were jerking
and swimming and writhing about. I suddenly remembered that I’d tasted some of
the water on the end of my finger, and I began to feel distinctly nauseous. I
stood straight again and looked from Dan to Rheta and back again.

‘Can you find out what they are?’ I
asked them, ‘I mean – is there a way you can identify these things?’

‘We’re not sure until we try,’ said
Rheta. ‘There are thousands and thousands of different types of
micro-organisms, and it’s going to take quite a while to check through all the
identifying data.

But this is my speciality, you know,
and I follow most of the latest discoveries, and I don’t ever recall anyone
reporting anything like this before.’

I took a cigarillo out of my coat
pocket and clenched the plastic tip between my teeth. ‘Don’t you have any ideas
at all?’

Dan bent over the microscope again
for a fresh look. He focused and refocused, but then he sat up and shook his
head. ‘I don’t have any useful suggestions right now. If it wasn’t patently
ridiculous, I’d say they most closely resemble some kind of marine life.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ I put in. ‘
They
look like some kind of sea-horse.’

‘You mustn’t be misled by
superficial appearances,’ said Rheta. ‘They may look like sea-horses, but they
came out of
a dug well miles
away from the ocean.
They’re probably nothing like sea-horses at all, biologically.’

‘Are they safe to drink?’ I asked
Dan. ‘I mean, what shall I tell the Bodines?’

Dan let out a long breath. ‘To be on
the safe side, I’d say they shouldn’t drink the well water until we’ve
investigated these organisms further. I’ve managed to isolate a certain amount
of nitric acid, and there’s some sulphurous substance in there, too, but it’s
very hard to say whether they’re connected with these organisms or not.
Whatever’s floating in that water, it’s very complex and most unusual.’

I stood up. ‘Okay. I’ll give the
Bodines a call and tell them to
lay
off. How long do
you think it’s going to take to track these things down? They’ll want to know.’

‘It’s impossible to say. Sometimes
these analyses take months.
Occasionally, years.’

I took out a book of matches and lit
my cigarillo. ‘What if I tell them a week or two? I don’t want to scare them.’

Dan nodded. ‘That’s probably the
best idea. I’m going to have to go up there and take some more samples for
myself, though. Perhaps you could warn Jimmy to expect me sometime tomorrow.’

‘Okay. Now – are you going to join
me for a beer?’

Dan glanced up at the clock.
‘All right.
Maybe I’ll have a sandwich, too. I don’t think
I’ve eaten since breakfast. But I’m going to have to come back here later and
finish off my swine fever samples.’

I buttoned up my coat. ‘You can do
what you like later. Right now, I need to feel a cold Schaefer on the back of
my throat.’ 21

We all left the laboratory together,
and Dan locked the door behind us. Mrs Wardell was going home too, putting the
grey plastic cover over her typewriter and tidying her desk. The lights were
being switched off all through the building. Outside, we could hear cars
starting up and people calling good night.

‘Good night, Gina,’ said Dan to Mrs
Wardell.

‘Good night, Dr Kirk. Did you
remember to set the mousetraps?’

‘I’ll do it later. I’m coming back
up to check on my swine fever samples on the way home.’ He turned to me, and
said: ‘Never work in an old colonial building.-They’re always alive with mice.

Rheta caught a mouse eating her
lunch last week. The damn thing had eaten its way right through the plastic
bag.’

We left the building and walked
across the darkened grassy mall, our breath smoking in the cold evening air.
The stars were bright and sharp, and that meant a hard frost in the morning.
Still, frosts were always good for business. I knew that I’d be spending most
of the morning thawing out faucets and repairing bursts.

Dan said: ‘What’s hard to understand
is what the organism is doing in that water. There doesn’t seem to be any
purpose behind its life style. It takes in water, it pours out yellow fluid.
What’s the point of it all?’

‘What’s the point of anything?’ I
asked him. ‘Human beings take in water and pour out yellow fluid, and nobody
goes around saying that they’re lacking in purpose.’

Dan shook his head. ‘You
misunderstand me. If this fluid was simply excreted water, then that would
account for a lot of things. But from what I’ve seen so far, it seems as if the
discoloration is a substance that’s being added to the water as it flows
through the organism’s body, perhaps by some internal gland, if that’s not too
grand a word for one of the parts of a microscopic creature’s physiology. And
the creature is quite obviously expending an enormous amount of time and energy
exuding this substance – in fact, so much time and energy that it seems to be
the main purpose of its whole existence.’

We were walking along by the old
railroad yard now. Rheta said good night, and went off to collect her Volkswagen
from the parking lot across the street, and I blew her a cold and breathy kiss
as she went off. Then Dan and I walked a little further along to Stanley’s
Hotel & Dining Rooms, a green-and-red painted flat-fronted building where
you could usually get a decent steak and a passable whisky sour. We pushed our
way in through the front door, and walked along a musty carpeted corridor to
the dimly-lit back room. It was a small bar, smoky but almost empty, and a
television flickered silently above the shelves.

‘Good evening, Henry,’ I said to the
dapper little man behind the black vinyl counter. ‘The Professor and I want two
big ones, quick as you can pour them.’

‘Pretty damned frosty out there
tonight, huh?’ said Henry, pumping up two draft Schaefers. ‘Do you want a shot
to go along with these?’

‘I’m working,’ said Dan. ‘I want to
keep a clear head, thanks all the same.’

‘I’m relaxing,’ I said. ‘Give me a
Jack Daniel’s.’

‘Did you hear about the Denton kid?’
asked Henry, pouring out bourbon.

I shook my head. ‘What’s he done
now?’

‘It’s not what he’s
done,
it’s where he’s gone. He’s been missing since this
morning. The police are looking all over.’

‘That’s too bad,’ I said. I knew the
Demons. They were a quiet, poor family who lived not far away from the Bodines.
Their son Sam was always walking around with patches in the knees of his jeans,
but he was one of the nicest and politest kids you could meet. He was only
nine, and I hoped that nothing had happened to him. It was too goddamned cold
to go missing at this time of year.

‘He went out on his bicycle, and
that was the last they saw of him,’ said Henry. ‘They found his bike about a
mile up the road, in the trees, but there was no sign of Sam. I guess his folks
must be pretty distracted by now.’

I drank my beer, subdued. Dan said
quietly: ‘Let’s drink to them finding him, shall we?’

We talked a while more with Henry,
and then we got back to the subject of the Bodines’ water and its organisms.
Dan was clearly irritated by the mystery of the creatures’ greeny-yellow excretion,
and he struck off on his fingers a whole list of purposes it couldn’t possibly
have, and a whole list of purposes that it could have, but still didn’t make
any sense. I said: ‘I don’t know why you’re so worried about it. You know
damned well that you’ll get to find out in the end. A few months of patient
research,
and you’ll probably discover that it’s making
itself mid-morning coffee.
The first microscopic organism to
provide its own refreshments.’

‘Are you ever serious?’ Dan asked
me. ‘This organism could be one of the most fascinating discoveries for years.
I could make my name with this.’

‘I didn’t think you were that kind
of a scientist,’ I told him. ‘The next thing, you’ll be telling me you have
dreams of winning the Nobel Prize for analysing fertilizer.’

Dan went slightly pink. ‘Everybody
has ambitions,’ he said, evidently embarrassed.

7 don’t,’ I said, bluntly. ‘I used
to, when I was younger. But I’ll tell you something for nothing.

Ambitions don’t get you anywhere.
When you have ambitions, you spend your whole life trying to reach some place
only to find out that you didn’t particularly want to be there anyway.’ •

‘Is that how a half-trained
psychiatrist justifies being a plumber?’ he asked me.