The Wells of Hell by Graham Masterton Page A

asked
Carter. ‘Easily. Maybe more.’
    Carter stood up, and hitched his
gunbelt over his hips. ‘It doesn’t look like there’s five thousand gallons out
in that hallway, though, does it? Five thousand gallons would have washed the
whole place out, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘Yes. I guess it would. I didn’t
think of that.’
    ‘So the water came in, filled the
place up, and then disappeared, mostly?’ asked Carter. ‘I suppose so. I don’t
know how.’
    ‘I’m not asking you how. What I’m
asking is, do you think that’s what happened?’
    I nodded. ‘That’s what happened, all
right.’
    ‘Okay, we agree with each other,’
said Carter. He stepped across Oliver’s body to the other side of the room.
‘The room was filled up with five thousand gallons of water. Then the water was
emptied out again, almost as quick. Now, what kind of equipment could do
something like that? Something like a pump, maybe, or a special kind of hose?’
    I thought about it. There were some
firehoses that could deliver water at a rate of several thousand gallons a
minute, but they were equipped with tremendously powerful and noisy pumps, and
the idea of a would-be murderer driving something like that up to the side of
the Bodines’ house in the early evening, rigging it all up and switching it on,
was totally out of the question. Apart from that, how had all these thousands
of gallons been removed, almost straight afterwards? I didn’t know of any
portable pump that could suck up five thousand gallons in a matter of seconds.
    Oliver’s drowning seemed to be
pointless, purposeless, and to have been achieved by means that were quite
impossible. I said to Sheriff Wilkes: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t even begin to guess
how this was done. I would have said it couldn’t have been done at all, if I
hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.’
    Carter rubbed his chin. Outside, we
heard the warble of the coroner’s siren, and the sound
of his car tyres as they squealed to a halt on the driveway. Doors slammed, and
there were footsteps and voices.
    ‘There’s one more thing,’ Dan told
Carter. ‘We found something strange in the bathroom.’
    ‘You don’t think this is strange?’
asked Carter.
    ‘Yes. But what we found was
stranger.’
    Carter glanced at one of his
deputies, and then said: ‘All right. You’d better lead the way.’
    We trooped along the landing to the
bathroom. Dan pulled back the shower curtain, and said:
    ‘There. What do you make of that?’
    Carter frowned, and peered into the
bath. His deputy leaned over too. Then he stood straight, and looked from Dan
to me and back again. ‘It’s a bathtub,’ he said, suspiciously.
    ‘Not the tub,’ I said, pushing my
way forward. ‘The...’
    The bathtub was empty. There was no
sign of the scaley carapace at all. I pulled the shower curtain aside even
further, but it wasn’t hidden anywhere there. I looked behind the toilet, but
it wasn’t there either.
    ‘Do you want to tell me what you’re
looking for?’ demanded Carter. ‘Or was it so strange you don’t even know what
it is?’
    ‘It was a carapace,’ explained Dan,
trying to describe it by drawing shapes in the air with his hands.
    ‘A what?’
    ‘An insect’s
breastplate, in simple language. Horny and tough, and hinged
along the spine.’
    Sheriff Wilkes watched Dan’s
attempts to outline the carapace, and then raised his finger and thumb and held
them just a few millimetres apart.
    ‘When you say an insect’s
breastplate, you mean it was round about this size, don’t you? You don’t really
mean it was that big.’
    Dan looked down at his hands, almost
two feet apart. Then he looked back at the sheriff. There was a moment when I
wondered what he was going to say but then he lowered his arms and gave a
resigned, surrendering grimace. T
    ‘Yes,’ he said, in a tired voice. ‘I
don’t suppose I really meant that big.’
    ‘So what was strange about it?’
Carter asked him. ‘You said it was