The Wells of Hell (30 page)

I took the cape from a soaking and
shivering Chaffe, and then I went around the house to the front drive, where
I’d parked the Volkswagen. I looked through the rainy window, and I could just
see Shelley lying on the front seat, all curled up and cosy and dreaming he was
a Kliban mouser. I tapped on the glass, and he stirred, and then I opened the
door and let in a draught of cold air and rain, and he stretched and yawned and
shook his head so that his face was all ruffled and cross.

‘Shelley,’ I told him, ‘this is
where you pay me back for three years of free food, warm chairs, and toll-free
worming. Here’s your rain-cape. Let’s go get that devil before he comes out to
get us.’

I reached in to wrap him up in the
cape, and as I did so, I felt the first tremor. It was a dark, shuddering
sensation, more like a giant express train passing deep beneath the ground than
a regular earthquake. I’d visited Los Angeles often enough to know what a minor
shake on the Richter scale felt like; but this was alien, and
odd,
and it went on for almost half-a-minute.
Even the ‘quake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 only lasted
for 28 seconds.
I raised my head in alarm, and as I did so, I hit my
forehead sharply on the car door-frame. I swore, and Shelley looked up at me
disdainfully, as if it was
all my
fault for lowering
the temperature and playing around with rain-capes.

‘Right, that settles it,’ I told
him. ‘Let’s get going.’

He mewled as I plucked him out of
the car, bundled him up in the cape and marched around the house with him
dangling under my arm. But I wasn’t feeling in a sympathetic mood. I was too
scared, too excited, and too concerned about my own survival.

I took Shelley across to the dark,
forbidding hole in the ground that the engineers had drilled, and I held him
over it, so that he could smell the rank fishy odour that was rising from the
cavern beneath. His pink nostrils flared, and he wriggled violently, but I
wouldn’t let him go. The drilling-rig workers stood around me and stared as if
I was totally bananas. One of them said, with sardonic solicitude: ‘You want a
hat for the cat?’

I ignored him. ‘The cat can sense
what’s down there,’ I told him. ‘Which is more than you can.’

‘Oh yeah?
Well, what’s down there? What does
he say it is?’

Shelley shook his ears. I said,
sarcastically: ‘He says it sounds like a county drilling engineer having an
intelligent conversation, but he reckons he must be mistaken.’

‘Ah, sit on it,’ said the engineer.

Dutton Thrush came up with our
hard-hats. I took off my baseball cap for the first time in days, and replaced
it with a bright red bonedome that made me look like Action Man on his day off.

Dan came up in a yellow helmet, and
Carter wore a violent shade of green. Carter nodded towards the pit and said:
‘How does Shelley like it?’ The odour of fish was offensively strong now, and
we all felt another vibration beneath the ground, a vibration that set the
chains and the hooks on the drilling-rig jangling, and made the diesel-engine
falter in its stroke. Above our heads, there was a sizzling crack of lightning
that branched out of the clouds and went to earth only a couple of miles
northward. We were still dazzled as thunder exploded around our ears, and
Shelley ducked deeper into his rairr-cape in fear.

‘It seems like this beast-god’s
moving, or getting ready to move,’ said Carter. He was buckling the strap of
the anti-tank gun across his chest, while Chaffe hung two rockets from his
belt.

‘Maybe the crab-creatures brought
Quithe enough sustenance to come to life,’ said Dan. ‘We killed the
Jimmy-creature, but there was still Alison, and maybe the Karlen guy.’

‘How would they get down there?’
asked Dutton. His cigarette was so wet that it was transparent, but he still
let it hang from his lip. ‘Don’t tell me they drilled a seventy-six foot
shaft.’

‘They didn’t have to,’ I told him.
‘There are ways in and out of these caves and tunnels on the surface. There was
some old guy over at Boardman’s Bridge in the eighteenth century who found out
about them.’

‘I never heard of them,’ said
Dutton, suspiciously.

‘Well, let’s not argue about it,’ I
countered. ‘Let’s just get down this goddamned shaft, if we’re going, and see
what’s there.’

The rain was noisy and torrential
now, and rivulets of muddy water were pouring into the shaft, bringing down
more mudslides and more rocks. The foreman came up to Dutton Thrush and said:
‘If you want to get this stunt on the road, Mr Thrush, you’d better do it soon.
What with all this rain and all these tremors, we can’t hold the shaft open for
too long.’

As if to emphasise his warning, the
ground shook again, and Oliver Bodine’s bicycle, which had been propped against
the side of the house in the shelter of the verandah, fell to the boards with a
crash. We looked around at it nervously, and then at each other.

‘You’d better go first, Mason,’ said
Carter. ‘You’re the one with the detecting device.’

‘Carter -’ I started to warn him,
but two burly engineers came across with a harness of damp canvas, and
proceeded to buckle it around me without ceremony or
pause
whatsoever. The next thing I knew, I was being led forward to the brink of the
hole, and a hook was being attached to my waist with a heavy-duty clip. Someone
handed me a heavy flashlight.

This close to the hole, there was a
scaly coldness about the air that was even more unpleasant than the rain and
the wind. Lightning flickered in the clouds again, and there were more
theatrical collisions of thunder. They didn’t worry me half as much as the
stirrings beneath the ground. God may have been moving his furniture around,
but it was the devil, turning over in his sleep,
who
really scared me.

The foreman stuck two fingers in his
mouth and gave a loud whistle. The diesel engine whined, and I was raised
bodily off the ground by the drilling winch, so that Shelley and I were
spinning gently around and around in the rain, watched by everyone else, as if
we’d just been hung on a gallows and they’d all come along to see us swing.

‘Are you okay?’ yelled Carter. ‘Are
you ready to go?’

I cupped my left hand over my ear,
and shouted back: ‘What did you say?’ as I slowly spun past him.

‘Are you ready to go down?’ he
yelled again.

I looked down at my feet, suspended
over complete fathomless blackness. My stomach was tightened up as tiny as a
nervous sea-anemone, and my heart beat seemed to have slowed down to a
relentless clop, clop, clop that deafened me to everything that was going on
around me. The earth trembled again, and my harness jingled and swayed. I
reached out to steady myself, but of course there was nothing there to hold on
to. All I could do was spin and sway and feel nauseous.

‘Lower me down!’ I shouted. Anything
was better than hanging around here in the rain. Carter gave the signal, and
the diesel engine stuttered, and the winch went sqweek-sqweeek-sqweek and began
to drop me, by unsteady inches, into the hole.

One moment I was above the surface
of the ground. The next I was looking at everybody’s shoes, and the wet grass;
and the moment after that I was buried in chilly, foetid darkness, on my way
down to the devil’s caverns. Shelley tried to wriggle himself free as the fishy
chill completely enveloped us, but I clutched him tight and flicked him on the
nose with my finger to keep him quiet. Being flicked on the nose with my finger
was about the only discipline he ever understood.

As we were lowered down the shaft,
the noise of the diesel and the sound of the thunder became gradually more
muffled. Soon I could hardly hear anything, except my heartbeat, and the
distant squeaking of the winch. A few drops of rain still showered down on me,
and when I looked up to check how far I’d been lowered, one of them hit me
straight in the eye. But most of the dampness down here came from the soil, and
from the putrefying miasma of Quithe.

It seemed to take forever to reach
the bottom of the shaft. There were at least three heavy earth tremors on the
way down, and stones and mud kept tumbling and sliding down on top of me,
bouncing off my hard-hat and my shoulders, and once, off Shelley’s back.

I unhooked my flashlight and shone
it on the sides of the shaft. We were down into layers of rock now, fragmented
at first and gradually more solid. Then, quite abruptly, it looked as if my
flashlight had gone out. We had reached the main cavern, and the flashlight
beam, instead of falling on to the sides of the shaft, was now glimmering
almost uselessly in a wide and gloomy space as big as a medieval cathedral.
There was air circulating from somewhere, because I could feel the flow of it
against my face, but it smelled appalling. It was like being shut up in a cold
larder with a dish of week-old tuna. Shelley bristled and mewled, and if I
hadn’t held on to him so tight, I think he would have jumped down and gone after
that fishy-smelling devil like furred lightning.

The winch took us down and down
through the subterranean darkness, until at last my feet touched bottom. From
the length of time it had taken us to drop from the end of the shaft to the
floor of the cavern, I would have guessed the cavern to measure about thirty or
forty feet high. I jerked on the rope to let the drilling crew know I was down,
and then I looked up at the faint light that fell down the muddy shaft through
which I had just descended. It was more than faint. It was blueish, and
distant, and it was the only way I knew of getting out of this place.

I unhooked my harness, tugged the
rope again, and gradually the canvas belts and hooks were winched up and out of
sight. As they finally disappeared from view, a massive grumbling sound shook
the ground, and more fragments of rock clattered into the cave.

Shining my flashlight all around me,
I investigated my new surroundings as they say in castaway stories. I felt like
a castaway. In fact, I felt worse than a castaway. I was more isolated and
afraid than any castaway could have been. At least Robinson Crusoe had sunshine
and sand and a parrot on his shoulder. All I had was darkness and fear and a
cat who wouldn’t keep still.

I stepped forward a little way,
peering into the gloom, and something crunched beneath my feet.

I stepped back in distaste, and
shone my flashlight downwards. I had trodden on a white skeleton, about the
size of a pigeon. I shone my torch around some more, and I saw that the floor
of the cave was littered with them, hundreds of them, several layers deep. I
looked upwards, following the flashlight beam with my eyes, and there they
were.
Suspended from the ceiling of the cave in such dense
and silent clusters that they could have been stalactites were thousands and
thousands of albino bats.
They must have made this cave their home for
centuries, interbreeding themselves colourless and blind, because of the total
lack of light, and feeding on whatever insects or animals strayed into the subterranean
tunnel system. As they died, they fell, and their skeletons had turned the
floor of the cave into a crisp, crunchy boneyard. It wasn’t very pleasant to
walk on, particularly in sneakers.

I waited where I was, distastefully
inspecting the white bats, until I heard the jingle of the winch harness again.
I shone the flashlight up towards the dim smudge of light where the drill-shaft
had broken through the ceiling of the cave, and down came Carter Wilkes like a
heavy spider on a thin web. He gave me a wave as he was lowered down through
the cave, and it was only a few moments before his feet had touched the ground
and he was unbuckling his harness.

‘Watch the floor,’ I told him, as I
stepped over to help him untangle the canvas straps. ‘This whole damned cave is
full of bats. There are bats on the ceiling and bats on the floor, and it
wouldn’t surprise me if there were bats standing in line outside for any
hanging space that comes free.’

Carter switched on his powerful
heavy-duty lamp, and took a quick look around. The cave looked as if it was
about a hundred and fifty feet in length and forty feet at its highest point,
which was where the drilling crew had broken through. It tapered at one end,
and where it was smallest, there seemed to be a small dark cavity which
probably led through into another cave or tunnel. The whole cave was formed out
of a fold in the massive grey rocks, and it looked like it was natural, rather
than man- or monster-made, but all the same it had a clinging cold stench about
it that made us both feel pukish and uneasy.

‘Do you think Shelley will give us
some idea where this Quithe might be hiding?’ asked Carter.

I looked down at the pointed furry
face under my arm. ‘I don’t know. He’s acting like he’s spooked right at the
moment.’

‘Maybe the best thing you can do is
let him go, and then we can follow him.’

‘Oh, yes? And supposing he gets
lost? From what Josiah Walters said, these caves go on for ever.’

Carter unfastened the holster of his
revolver. ‘If he gets lost, I’ll buy you another pet out of police funds.
A terrapin, maybe.’

It was only a few minutes more
before Dan appeared, dangling on the end of the rope. He fell heavily on to one
knee when he reached the ground, but he protested that he was quite all right,
and so we quickly helped him out of his harness and dusted him down.