The Wells of Hell Read Free

could have been the deepening
dusk, but the. water looked more darkly tinted than it
had before. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed at it.
    It was then that Shelley stiffened,
and bristled, and let out a spitting hiss that made my hair stand on end, too.
He was arched up so much that he was almost bent double, and his tail was
bushed out. His eyes were wide with something that was either fear or hatred.
    ‘Shelley, for Christ’s sake -’ I
told him.
    He stayed where he was, his claws
scraping at the vinyl seat, snarling like I’d never heard him snarl before, I
made a move towards him, -but he only spat harder, and let out one of those
tortured yowls that have people throwing their left boot out of the window in
the middle of the night.
    I screwed the lid back on the jar.
Almost at once, Shelley’s fur subsided, and he began to relax.
    He still looked at me suspiciously,
but then cats are experts at making humans feel guilty for upsetting or
discomfiting them. I looked back at him with a frown, and then I looked at the
jar again. It was only water, why .should it make him
go so crazy?
    Maybe Alison had been right, and the
water did smell of fish, or something like fish. After all, both Jimmy and I
liked to smoke an occasional cigar, and perhaps our sense of smell wasn’t as
keen as hers. But then, Shelley didn’t go berserk, even for fish. As a matter
of fact, he preferred left-over pizza to almost any food you could name. He
could possibly go berserk for a pepperoni, but I doubted it.
    I climbed out of the car, locked it,
and then I took the lid off the jar of water again and sniffed it.
    There was some faint trace of odour,
I had to admit. Some chilly, lingering smell that was more metallic than fishy.
It gave me an odd sensation for some reason, like I’d smelled something that
was very strange and hostile, and I stood there in the dusk of New Milford
feeling unusually lonesome. Beyond the bandstand, three or four children were
playing ball in the gloom. Their laughing was like the cries of birds.
    Crossing the green, I mounted the
steps of the New Milford Health Department. There were still lights in the
upstairs window, and I guessed that Dan Kirk and his associates were working
late. I walked inside through the tall black-painted doors, and went up the
broad colonial staircase until I reached the first landing. The building was
brightly lit with fluorescent tubes, and painted a dull Adam green. I went up
to the door marked Health Department, Private, and walked in.
    Mrs Wardell was sitting at her desk
in the front office, all upswept glasses and red lipstick, and she said: ‘Hi,
Mason. What brings you down here?’
    I raised the jelly jar of water.
‘They’re poisoning the wells,’ I said, melodramatically. ‘Is Dan there, or did
he duck out early?’
    ‘Did Dan duck out early? Is that a
joke? Dan thinks going home at dawn is ducking out early.
    They have a swine disease crisis
over at Sherman.’
    ‘Can I go straight in?’ I asked her.
    I knocked, and went through into Dan
Kirk’s laboratory. Dan was there, sitting at the end of a long varnished
workbench, peering into a microscope. He was young, but very bald, and in his
white laboratory coat he looked like a mad professor, or at the very worst a
boiled egg. I noticed Rheta Warren there, too, and that was always good news.
She was Dan’s assistant researcher, on her first job since she graduated from
Princeton Biological college , and compared with most
of the quail around New Milford she was most provocative. She had long
muddy-blonde hair, wide hazel eyes, and a figure that obviously wasn’t meant to
be hidden by a starched white overall. I gave her a more-than-friendly wave as
I crossed the laboratory to have a word with Dan.
    ‘The plumber cometh,’ I said, and
set down the jelly jar. Dan looked up from his microscope and blinked at it
balefully. Then he blinked at me.
    ‘My stars said this was going to be
a silly week,’ he told