The Wells of Hell (9 page)

They looked as if they were
gradually turning from endomorphs into ectomorphs.
Or, of
course, the other way around.’

‘Was anything proved?’ I asked.

‘Not a thing. There was a minor
ruckus about them at the Wendell Institute, but in the end they were shelved as
hoaxes, or completely atypical oddities. The truth was they didn’t fit into any
of the established theories of mammal development, and it was easier to
discredit them and forget them.’

I sipped some more whisky. ‘Is that
all?’ I wanted to know. ‘There’s only one thing more,’ said Rheta. ‘There was
an outbreak of what was thought to be leprosy in Cuttack, in India, 1925, but
the British doctor who treated most of the patients, a man called Austin, wrote
a long report saying that it certainly wasn’t leprosy. He said it was a form of
scaley ossification – you
know,
a sort of bony growth.
He tried to pinpoint what caused it, and in the end he decided the disease had
stemmed from the local drinking water. There was a very heavy monsoon that
year, and the rivers had overflowed into the irrigation ditches and the dug
wells.’

‘Did he describe this ossification?’
I asked her. ‘Did he say what form it took?’

Rheta said: ‘He did better than
that. He put together a beautiful descriptive addendum to his report, all in
copperplate handwriting, with drawings.’

‘He did drawings
?1

‘He sure did,’ she said. ‘And the
terrible thing is that his report was lost, about twenty years ago.

It was borrowed from the Harvard
University Library and never returned.’

I reached for a cigarillo and lit it.
‘That’s a goddamned shame. I’d like to have seen those drawings, even if they
proved that what young Oliver Bodine went down with was something else
altogether.’

‘Well, me too,’ said Rheta. ‘But I
managed second best. I called my old professor of specialist medicine. He lives
in Miami now, in retirement. But he remembers looking through -the Austin
repert when he was a student. He thought Austin must have been off his head,
and so he didn’t take much serious notice of it. But he does recall one phrase in
particular.’

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘He said it came at the point where
Austin was describing a patient he had visited in a village on the River
Mahdnadi, in September of 1925. Apparently Austin had to drive fifty miles
through heavy rain and thick mud before he found this village, and he was
exhausted when he got there, and so he says himself that his impressions might
have been distorted by tiredness. But he was taken to an isolated hut on the
outskirts of the village, and led inside by an old woman. The hut was almost
totally dark inside, with drapes over the windows and a blanket screening the
door.

There was somebody lying on a bed in
there, but Austin could scarcely make him out, and the old woman insisted that
he stood at least five or six feet away, and shouldn’t make any attempt to
examine the patient. But Austin wrote that he’d made out a heavy and bone-laden
head, and an arm that was strangely oval in section, with the shine of dull
leather. He also said that the patient’s voice was hoarse and difficult to
understand.’

‘Go on,’ I told her. Austin’s
evocation of his crustaceous patient was making me feel distinctly uneasy. I
only had to half-close my eyes and I could imagine young Oliver Bodine’s
shell-plated thighs and buttocks, and that hideous spiney bone in the bath.

‘There wasn’t much more to tell,’
said Rheta. ‘Except that Austin was nauseated by what he called

“
a
stench
of decaying fish so strong that I thought I must stifle”.’

‘That’s it,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s
exactly what Alison Bodine said about the water I took from their well, and
that’s exactly what Carter’s deputy noticed in the Bodines’ house. And I’ve
smelled it myself now.
A strong, overpowering stench offish.’
Rheta said: ‘I know. And I think there could be a connection. But we mustn’t
leap to instant conclusions. Just because Austin smelled fish in 1925; and
Alison Bodine smelled fish yesterday, that doesn’t mean we’ve established a
scientific connection beyond reasonable doubt. There are plenty of things that
smell like fish apart from fish. Have you ever smelled an overheating electric
plug?’

‘I know there weren’t any
overheating plugs at the Bodines’ house,’ I said. ‘And I don’t suppose Austin’s
patient on the banks of the River Mahdnadi had an overheating plug, either. Not
unless a fuse was going in his hair rollers.’

Rheta didn’t laugh. Instead, she
said: ‘I know it’s tempting to come to snap conclusions, but we mustn’t do it.
This is too serious a situation to make mistakes. We’re going to have to go
through dozens more tests before we have any clear idea of whit’s happening.’

I said: ‘How about Austin’s drawing?
Did your old professor remember what any of those looked like?’

‘Not really. They were just sketches
of hands and joints.
Very detailed and accurate, but not very
memorable.’

‘It’s a goddamned shame that
report’s lost,’ I repeated. ‘I know,’ said Rheta. ‘I even called the library
and had
them
look back over their records to see who
had taken it out. Their records don’t go back to 1925. They’ve just had to
write it off as pilfered.’

I finished my drink. ‘I guess that’s
as far as we can go, then, until we get the coroner’s post-mortem report, and
until we see what’s down that well. Do you fancy some lunch?’

‘Aren’t you going to sleep?’

‘Unh-hunh.
I keep having bad dreams. And, like
I told you, I hate to sleep by myself. How about the Iron Kettle at one o’
clock? I could use one of their steak brochettes.’

‘All right,’ agreed Rheta.
‘As long as you don’t let me drink too much wine.’

‘Of course I won’t,’ I told her. ‘I
don’t need to make a lady drunk to impress her.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’
Rheta retorted. ‘It’s just that I find it difficult to perform accurate
scientific tests when I’m under the influence of alcohol.’

‘Trust me to go for a bluestocking,’
I said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

The Iron Kettle is a colonial-style
restaurant in an elegant white-painted house a few miles north of New Milford.
It’s the kind of place where you can sit at lunch for hours, surrounded by
elderly Connecticut matrons with elastic support stockings and fraying white
hair, while plates of tidily-arranged salads and neatly-prepared avocadoes are
carried to and fro in an atmosphere of quiet gentility. Rheta and I sat at a
table by the window drinking a plain white wine and looking out over the russet
slopes of a fall garden.

Rheta was looking more attractive
than ever. In the grey light from the window, her hazel eyes took on a
translucent look, and her off-blonde hair shone with an appealing softness. I
said: ‘I can’t imagine you dating Pigskin Packer.’

‘Are you jealous?’

‘Why not?’

‘Well,’ she said, with a gentle
smile, ‘jealousy is the most destructive of all feelings. Jealousy destroys the
people who feel it, as well as those for whom it’s felt.’

‘I’m not consumingly jealous,’ I
told her, looking at her over the rim of my glass as I drank. ‘I’m just
ordinary jealous.
And surprised, too.
I don’t know
what a big lunk like that could possibly give you that I couldn’t.
Apart from fifty pounds of extraneous muscle, of course.’

She smiled again, and looked away.
‘Maybe I’m just responsive to extraneous muscle,’ she said.

‘After all, there are plenty of men
who are responsive to extraneous breast tissue.’

‘What’s extraneous about breast
tissue?’ I demanded, a little too loudly. An old woman in a purple hat turned
in her wheelback chair to stare at me through her half-glasses. I grinned at
her reassuringly, and then hissed at Rheta: ‘Packer is such a dumb-bell. He has
no class at all. His conversation comes right out of Raggedy Ann.
An exclamation point after every sentence.’

Rheta shrugged. ‘At least he’s
safe.’

‘Safe? What does that mean?’

The waitress arrived with my
brochette of steak tips and with Rheta’s grilled fish. I couldn’t have eaten fish
right then, but I guess scientists are less squeamish than the rest of us. I
ground some black pepper over my rice, and then took a mouthful of steak and
tomato. But I was still waiting for Rheta to answer me. ‘Well,’ said Rheta,
reaching for another breadstick, ‘I guess he’s safe as opposed to unsafe.’

‘And I’m unsafe?’

She nodded. ‘I think you would be
for me.’

‘What’s unsafe about me? I’m the
safest guy in the universe.’

She squeezed lemon on her fish, and
then started to eat. ‘I think you’re attractive,’ she said, without looking up.
‘But also think that you’re too wound up in your own life. You’re too wound up
in yourself. You could hurt someone like me, hurt them bad, and never even
realize you’d done it.’

I didn’t answer for a while, as I
finished my mouthful of steak. But then I drank some more wine, and said
quietly: ‘I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.’

‘You may not want to hurt me, Mason,
but you would. I know the kind of man you are. It’s like the way you can never
take anything seriously. That’s okay, for a while. Every girl likes to laugh.

But then the time comes when she
needs to know that, even if you don’t take the world seriously, you take her
seriously. You see what I’m getting at?’

I reached across the table and laid
my hand on hers. ‘I can take you seriously,’ I said, simply.

‘What sort of proof do you need?’

‘I don’t know. What sort of proof
are you prepared to give me?’

The old woman in the purple hat was
eavesdropping on our conversation with increasing interest. I sat up and stared
at her coldly, and she bent herself over her plate with exaggerated absorption,
and applied herself to her breadcrumbed veal.
i
‘Finish your lunch,’ I told Rheta.

‘Then come back to the house. I’ve
built up the fire, and there’s a bottle of Chablis in the icebox.

The only thing I haven’t done is
tidy the bed.’

“She stared at me for a long time.
The light brightened a little, as the grey clouds broke, and the sun shone down
through the flaking leaves of the birch trees. She was wearing Gucci perfume,
and she was so warm and delicious that I could have leaned across the table and
kissed her right then.

She said: ‘You’re supposed to be
meeting Dan at two-thirty.’

‘So? I can still make it. It’s only
up the road a ways.’ She licked her lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘I have to
be back at the laboratory to finish those tests. Dan will skin me if I don’t.’

‘Why don’t you let me square it with
Dan?’ I asked her. ‘This thing is bigger than testing water.’

She laid down her fork. ‘Aren’t you
too tired?’ she enquired.

‘Are you trying to talk yourself out
of it?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I
am.’

‘Well, then,’ I told her. ‘Finish
your lunch, and then we’ll go.’

We didn’t say very much more as we
ate our fish and our steak, and drank our wine. We looked into each other’s
eyes a lot, weighing-up, calculating, checking,
prying
.
Then, when the meal was over, and I had paid at the desk and collected a book
of matches and a mouthful of peppermints, we left the restaurant and walked
across to our cars like two lovers in a European art movie, testing the wind
and the weather and each other’s feelings with every step.

Rheta had brought her Volkswagen. It
was beige, and very battered. I said: ‘Why don’t you come with me? I’ll bring
you back here later, and you can drive straight back into town.’

‘Okay,’ she nodded. I don’t think
she wanted to break the spell any more than I did. We both knew that she was
going to have to .go back to the laboratory this afternoon, and that when she
left the laboratory in the evening she was going to meet up with Pigskin
Packer; but right now we were living in our own magic time loop, where anything
at all was possible, and where there were no rules.

Shelley grudgingly moved over for
Rheta, and I started the Mercury’s engine and drove out of the Iron Kettle
parking lot. I turned on the radio to fill in the silent moments. We glanced at
each other from time to time, and smiled, but I think we were both aware how
fragile this interlude was, and how little it would take to finish it before it
had even really begun. On the radio, Nils Lofgren was singing Slow Dancing.

The minutes to New Preston passed
like a projector slide show.
A view of Northville fire
station.
Trees, rocks, and white weatherboard houses.
A steep-sloping side-road through the showering leaves.
My
front driveway.
My front door.
My living-room.

By the fire, I unbuttoned her russet
wool coat for her. I kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her lips. She
hesitated momentarily, and then kissed me back. Her coat fell to the floor.