Free The Wells of Hell by Graham Masterton Page A

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