Grahem Masterton
The Wells Of Hell
    
    
    
    
    
    One
    
    It was one of those crisp, cold afternoons in Connecticut when the leaves are rusting 
off the trees and the sky is as clear and blue as a child's eyes. I came bouncing up the 
driveway of the Bodines' place in my dusty Country Squire, my eyes screwed up against the 
fall sunlight that sparkled through the trees, my red baseball cap firmly tugged down and 
my sheepskin collar firmly pulled up. In the back of the station wagon, all my wrenches 
and spanners and lengths of pipe banged and jangled, and my faithful cat Shelley sat 
beside me in the passenger seat, his paws neatly together and his ears shining bright 
pink.
    I pulled up in front of the house and climbed out. I said to Shelley: 'You coming?' 
But he closed his eyes as if he was feigning a headache, and that meant he considered it 
was too damned cold out there, and he'd rather stay where he was and listen to the radio, 
the lazy s.o.b. I said: 'Please yourself,' and left him.
    I walked through drifts of curled, crunchy leaves to the front verandah. The Bodine 
house was a big old Victorian place, set on a low hill on a curve of Route 109, between 
New Milford and Washington Depot. This was quiet, rural country, all trees and tiny 
hamlets, and now the tourists and weekenders had all gone back to New York City, it was 
populated as sparsely as it had been back in colonial days, and everybody was snuggling 
themselves down for the winter.
    Jimmy Bodine was in back, raking leaves. He was a young guy, not more than 
twenty-five, which made him a whole decade younger than me. He had curly blond hair and 
buck teeth, and in his plaid lumberjack coat he looked like somebody out of an old Norman 
Rockwell painting. He said: 'Hi, Mason,' and leaned on the handle of his rake.
    'How are you doing?' I asked him.
    'Okay. Pretty raw this morning, ain't it?'
    I sniffed the sharp, smoky air. 'You betcha. Do you want to go inside?'
    'Sure. Alison s got some coffee on.'
    He set his rake against the back verandah rail, and we went in through the screen 
door to the kitchen. It was warm and fragrant in there, with copper moulds hanging on an 
old pine hutch and a cake cooling on every window-ledge. Alison Bodine was just taking 
out a tray of cinnamon and apple cookies, and I thought to myself that when I died there 
could be worse ways to go than choking on Alison Bodine's cookies while making love to 
Raquel Welch on a well-sprung mattress.
    Alison Bodine looked older than Jimmy, somehow, but then she'd always been the 
motherly type. She had dark hair, drawn back in a bun, and a thin friendly face with wide 
brown eyes. She was real small, one of those tiny women you could never hold around the 
waist, only round the neck, not without kneeling anyway. She said: 'How are you doing, 
Mason?' and brought down three pottery mugs and poured coffee.
    We sat down at the heavy old kitchen table and ate cookies while the pale afternoon 
light came straining through the windows.
    'You're having trouble with the well,'then?' I asked them.
    Jimmy just managed to catch a piece of cookie that crumbled as he bit it. 'That's 
right,' he nodded, collecting fragments. 'It's pretty recent. Only about the past two or 
three days. But I'm worried in case we're going to have trouble with it during the 
winter, when the ground's hard.'
    'Well, you're right to call me,' I told him. 'What's going wrong, exactly?'
    'It's not all the time, but every now and then the water's been coming out 
discoloured. Kind of yellowy-greenish. Not a strong colour. Just a tint. And it don't 
taste of nothing, neither. But it don't look right.'
    Alison nodded. 'I'm kind of hesitant to use it, you know? I've heard all that stuff 
about seepage and chemical fertilisers getting into the water supply.'
    'Does it run clear if you leave the faucets open?' I asked them.
    Jimmy nodded. 'If we leave it running for ten, fifteen minutes.'
    'And how about residue? Does it leave a ring around your basin? Is there any sediment 
in it?'
    'No, nothing. The water is just tinted.'
    I sipped at my coffee. It didn't sound like anything very important to me. There were 
all kinds of factors that could affect the quality of well water-soil, minerals, 
seepage-and the only thing that the Bodines really had to worry about was somebody's 
sewage leaking into the water table. We'd had a pretty wet year, on the whole, and that 
meant the ground was saturated. When the underground water levels were as high as they 
were now, they could occasionally flow into a septic system, but the chances of that 
happening were pretty rare. From what the Bodines were saying, it sounded to me like 
their water was filtering through some underground minerals or vegetable matter, and that 
was what was colouring it up.
    'The best I can do is take a sample,' I told them. 'I could have it over to New 
Milford this evening, and if Dan Kirk does a rush job on it for me, I could let you know 
by this time tomorrow. It doesn't sound none too serious, though. I remember a couple of 
years ago, up at Kent, an old fellow turned on his faucet and the water came out the 
colour of blood. It was only some kind of potassium in the soil, and all we had to do was 
dig the well a few feet deeper.'
    Alison gave a vague smile. 'Well, that sounds more reassuring. I was worried the 
water was poisoned.'
    'You haven't been sick, have you?' I asked her.
    'Not at all. None of us have.'
    'Young Oliver's okay?'
    'He's fine. Tough as a truckload of logs.'
    I finished my coffee, and stood up. 'Do you want to lend me a glass jelly jar, 
something of that kind, so that I can take a sample?'
    'Sure thing,' said Alison, and brought me one from her cupboard. I stole another 
cinnamon and apple cookie from the plate and stuffed it into my mouth as I followed her 
through into the scullery. No wonder I was having trouble with my waistline. A fellow 
could jog three miles before he'd burn off one of those cookies.
    'At first I thought it was rust from the pipes,' said Jimmy, as we gathered around 
the sink.
    'Oh, did you?' I answered, showering out cookie crumbs.
    'It seemed the natural answer,' he nodded. 'But when it came out the same colour from 
every faucet, I guessed it was probably something else. And like I said, there's no 
deposit, no flakes of rust?
    I turned on the kitchen faucet and let it run. At first, it came out clear, but after 
a little while I began to notice a distinct coloration. Nothing startling, not like the 
blood-coloured water up at Kent, but a pale, unpleasant kind of yellow. Crudely speaking,