Free The Wells of Hell by Graham Masterton

and bass. But what made this dream swim especially strange was that /
knew where I was going, with great sureness and certainty. I knew that if I
continued to swim in a wide leftward curve, that’I would soon reach a jutting
headland of submarine rocks, and that once I reached those rocks I would only
be a mile’s hard swimming away from my destination.
    Already ahead of me I could see dim
shafts of moonlight playing down through the waters. Then the dark shape of the
rocks began to appear out of the murk, and I swam faster and more urgently. It
was dangerous to swim in the sea at night, and I knew it. The ocean was alive
with slithery predators.
    I had almost made the peak of the
rocks when I sensed a vibration through the water. I took a deep gulp, and
began to push myself forwards as hard and as fast as I could. Something had
sensed that I was there, and was already coming after me. Something vicious and
evil that was out to destroy me. I tried to dive deeper, twisting around in the
water to evade capture, but I felt something seize my ankle, something as
crushing and painful as a steel mantrap.
    I woke up. For a while I couldn’t
work out where I was. I couldn’t understand that I was on dry land, and that I
was breathing air instead of water. I sat up, and I was chilled with sweat.
Outside, it was a cold, pale morning, and the cows were munching peaceably on
the rocky slopes of the farm. I left the bedroom and went back through to the
living-room, where the fire was crackling and spluttering and burning up well.
I stood naked in the middle of the room and swallowed down another Jack
Daniel’s.
    Coughing, I returned to the bedroom.
But the bed didn’t look so appetizing any more. I was still tired, but the
twisted sheets looked too much like the surface of an unpleasant and
nightmarish ocean.
    I called Rheta at the laboratory.
Dan had left to get some sleep, but she was still there working on the water
samples. She seemed surprised that I wasn’t sleeping, too.
    ‘I sleep very badly when I’m by
myself,’ I told her. ‘You wouldn’t consider coming out here and assisting me to
rest, would you? Purely in the interests of public safety, of
course.’ She laughed softly. She might have been cool and independent
and three times more brainy than Shelley and me put
together, but she wasn’t above responding to an improper suggestion or two. I
like that in a girl. Especially when a girl takes me up on
it.
    But Rheta, of course, didn’t. She
was too busy saving the world from the prehistoric lobster people. She said:
‘Dan’s really worried about what’s happening here. He thinks it could be some
kind of disease that’s been lying dormant for centuries. Like when they dug up
an old mass burial pit from the Black Death in London, three hundred years
later, and two of the construction workers went down with plague.’
    ‘He really believes that?’ I asked
her.
    ‘He doesn’t know for sure. We still
have more tests to run on the mouse but there’s no question that it’s a pretty
sick little animal.’
    I rubbed my eyes. ‘Is it a disease
that anyone’s heard of before?’
    Rheta said: ‘I’ve been doing some
checking, but it’s real hard to come up with anything conclusive. I found out a
couple of things.’
    ‘Such as?’
    She riffled through her notepad.
‘Well, for instance, I called a paleontologist I know this morning. He said
that the Currie expedition of 1954 to the Central Rift Valley of Africa found
seven or eight fossilized creatures, and that two of them, even though they
were early mammals, a species of deer, had skulls and front limbs like
crustaceans.
    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