The Well

by Jack Cady

  The cellar seemed endless, appropriate for the fantastic structure that rose so high above them. Lights were small naked bulbs that were activated by the pressure of John’s feet as he led the way, then went off when John and Amy passed into the arc of the next light. It was impossible to gain any perspective, or comprehend the vastness of the cellar.

  At each light they checked blueprints, read descriptions and thereby avoided the traps. So the main route was safe, though without the blueprints to help his memory he was certain they would soon be dead. Water was sluggish at their feet, making the going slick underfoot. This was the ooze of sour water through limestone, the lime and sulphur like a fundament of the house.

  It was warmer in the cellar. The dark crawled after them. The cellar was a soundless, deep night. The silence was only interrupted by their footsteps and the drip of water. He smelled another odor that was a long time past the state of vital decay. Thick air cloaked them and lay on their tongues, and John felt like he was chewing on soggy paper.

  “I don’t believe all this.” Amy was trying to scoff, and not being very successful at it.

  Tracker’s flashlight beam was swallowed up as he swept it back and forth across the vastness to reveal gigantic supporting timbers, nothing more. It was with the flashlight out, in the dark, that he sensed a not so far off presence. No choice but to go on, confront it in the darkness. He could not find it with the light.

  “Do you feel it?” he asked.

  “Yes. Not as bad as in the kitchens when it tried to burn us.”

  Tracker stopped underneath a small light and again unfolded the blueprint. He knew the right way, but if there was going to be trouble he wanted to know what traps might lie in the stifling darkness.

  The light on the blueprint faded, like a streetlight suddenly surrounded by blowing fog. He looked up. The light shone lower, like a black cloth had been thrown over it. The feeling of a presence grew, distinct now, becoming isolated. It no longer seemed diffused through the darkness, it was off to the right, not far from the route they had to travel.

  The light blanked out. He flipped on the flashlight, pointed it. The beam was swallowed at a distance of ten feet, and the darkness continued to encroach, gnawing at the foreshortened length of the flashlight beam.

  He took the pistol from his belt, turned the flashlight off. And listened. And waited.

  Quiet. Blackness. The sense of presence grew. The slow drip of ground water pervaded, then seemed hushed by the blackness. His senses fingered the darkness as though it possessed texture, like a blind person skilled at reading the invisible. He hunted for the exact spot. He found it. He snapped on the light and fired between the outstretched arms and into the open, silently screaming mouth of his dead grandmother Vera Tracker.

  Amy grabbed him, but not before he fired again. The report of the pistol echoed and died. Running footsteps sounded. He traced the sound and pointed the gun. He listened and the footsteps slowed, faltered, and stopped.

  He searched with the light, followed the last of the sound, thought he saw movement hanging off in the distance at the edge of light. He fired. In the darkness the bullet zinged, richocheted, and the sound of a falling blade thumped in the dark. He searched back and forth with the light. Nothing. The light above was bright again. The sense of presence was gone.

  “It apparently can’t be killed,” he said. “I can’t figure why it runs.”

  “Vera?”

  “It isn’t Vera.”

  “I know…but it is, too.”

  “Vera was taken over, call it possessed,” he said. “She won’t be back. What possessed her will use something else because Vera is no longer useful.” He was reacting to shock, which was when memory seemed to get a good hold on the mind. Possession of a corpse? His father never taught such things, and yet he knew something about them. Forbidden reading when he was a boy? Some odd or additional reading in college? A name…Jean Bodin. A baby killer. 1580 or thereabouts. Bodin wrote about possession. “In possession of the dead,” he told Amy, “the possession has to occur before the soul leaves the body. Anyway, you’re right. It isn’t Vera, but it is Vera.”

  “Was.”

  “Yes. It was Vera.”

  “You sound very sure, like you really know it — ”

  “I’m afraid I know a good deal more than that, if I can only remember. I spent a lot of years trying to forget things I didn’t like.”

  They had arrived at a damp passage that went through the foundation, took a long loop and then reversed. Here the lime and sulphur hung like a wet curtain in front of their faces. The lime-encrusted walls seemed to glow. The walls were rought-cut, rough-laid stone, but soft-edged now by the coating of lime, beneath which mortar crumbled to lie loose pebbly beneath their feet as they descended the spiral further and further into the subcellar.

  Around the last curve a dim blue light appeared above a door. John stopped, checked the blueprints. They were coming from the south side. In the northeast corner was the generator room. In the center of the subcellar was the well.

  Suddenly his legs felt tired, his shoulders drooped, and in his mind a gentle voice echoed. No evil force had slowed him. He was a frightened child listening to a gentle-voiced psychiatrist trying to explain about reality to a child who mistrusted that there was such a thing. This was time passed out of repressed memory. This was the child, John Tracker, reluctant to move forward.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “You remember I told you about the well? I’m having a hard time going in there.” He did not want his voice to sound apologetic, but he knew it did.

  Her sympathy was evident, but so was her practical side. Amy might not be able to deal with all of the events of the house, but she was practical about problems she thought she understood. “There is nothing in that well, and especially you are not in that well. You were a little boy, now you’re grown up — ”

  “A part of me doesn’t seem to know it.”

  “You were ready to fight some crazy dog. Fight this.”

  That made sense.

  “If you can do it,” she said, “I know you’ll beat it.”

  “I’ll try.” He looked at the blueprint, which revealed a room that would have been appropriate for the Inquisition. Yes, in its way the house made terrible sense…There was a trap just inside the door. Taking a deep breath, he opened the door — and stepped back to watch a halberd slice down from the wall. He stepped over the blade and into the subcellar, to be assaulted by the dry heat.

  It was not the heat of the kitchens. This blast was the essence of heat, like midday in a desert. He could feel it sucking the moisture from his face. And as his eyes adjusted to the near-darkness, it seemed to him that the heat came from the center of the room. From the well.

  He resisted, and tried rationally to test the feel of the heat. Feeling it there in near-darkness, it could be heat blown from regular oil furnaces. He instructed himself that this made sense.

  In this place even the possibility of the rational, the easily explainable, was of value. All around him were shadowy forms in dim blue light. Shapes of ancient machines were crowded together. A walkway ran between the machines like a black path through a mechanical forest. He heard the hum of machinery in the distance. The subcellar could be no more than a hundred and fifty feet by a hundred, but the machinery seemed more distant than that. Fans circulated the dry air. The blue light flickered so rapidly that you would miss the flicker if you did not look carefully.

  He directed the beam of the flashlight into the subcellar, and it was promptly swallowed, diffused, made impotent. It was like a bright light in dense fog. He turned it off.

  “Why are we here?” Amy whispered.

  “Because we’re at the very center of the house.”

  “Vera?”

  “Whatever animate
d her is surely here.”

  “There’s nothing in the well,” she said. “At least remember that. You were a child when — ”

  “If there’s nothing in the well, it’s only because it’s walking around out here.” It sounded entirely reasonable to him. His eyes were adjusting. He could see the black furrows in Amy’s wrinkled face. “I want to take a look at something.”

  The dark pathway between machines branched, and he chose to follow the branch running along the wall, circling the subcellar. He did not even look at the branch that ran to the center, and the well. The heat was intense. Even in the diminished light he could see that the wood of the machines was dry and worthless. A touch would turn some of them to powder.

  Still, they stood there. Straps of iron designed to fit around skulls hung pebbled and beaten, with tightening screws that when applied to the skull would make it bulge before the brain popped through the thin temples. A seat of spikes. Iron tongs. Stakes to be thrust upward through living bodies. Racks to pull and fracture and draw muscles to the cracking limit. Choking pears to expand throats. His mind felt centuries of torment, and he recalled from old reading that around 1650 an executioner in Germany had used clay ovens like these to roast over a thousand people, including children, alive. He wished he did not understand what he was seeing.

  The path turned now in the direction he wanted, and they followed it to a heavy concrete door set in the rock. He turned the knob, pushed the door open and was nearly blinded by normal electric light. It was cooler in this generator room. As Amy stepped in beside him, he remembered the fate of his father. Carefully he left the door open, searched and found a heavy wrench to jam between door and frame.

  The generator room, which was slightly above the subcellar, was concrete and treated against seepage. The floor was dry. Fuel storage sat behind the generators in two two-hundred- gallon tanks. Both were full, and Tracker figured they were connected to feeder tanks outside the house.

  One generator was round-headed and old-fashioned, the other fairly modern. Both ran off of two diesel engines, one a base unit and the other a back-up. Theophilus certainly wanted to be sure the current did not go off. Tracker took tools from a board on the wall, searched for the oil drains on the engines. He opened them, stuck the plugs in his pocket, and watched oil spill over the painted concrete floor. He considered the risk of fire, shrugged, and opened the drain petcocks on the fuel tanks. Then he beat on them with a wrench until they broke, and watched diesel fuel run in a thin stream across the concrete and make light waves on the spreading puddle of dark engine oil.

  First objective accomplished.

  “We’ll have light for a while,” he told Amy. “If the lube is good, it will still take those things a half hour to burn out.”

  “This was what you couldn’t tell me.”

  “Sabotage.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “We have to take the offensive.”

  Even with the spreading puddle of oil and fuel the generator room seemed a relatively safe place. Still, the stench of diesel rose in the air, and he knew they had to get out.

  Amy left the room and stood in the blue light. Through the frame of electric light her face seemed to fade and take on the aspect of a skull. The sight got him moving. Illusion. The well, he told himself, was also illusion, the haunt that plagued a child. He told himself that but did not believe it. His lie got him through the doorway and into the blue light. He shut the generator room door behind him. The puddle spread gradually. It would back up against that door, he figured, and then at least a little of it would seep through. He wondered about the source of the blue light. He wondered about the force, its strength, what was left of his truck. He was sure that the destruction of the truck had caused the sounds of steel crumpling. He’d fired a pistol in the kitchen, and it seemed to have increased the force against them. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in disabling the generators. He stood waiting for his eyes to adjust to the blue light. “I have to get oriented,” he told Amy, who was moving a slight distance from him.

  “It’s safe here?”

  “As long as you stay on the paths,” he told her.

  “I’m not afraid of any well. I never fell down any well. This way,” Amy said.

  Her voice seemed abrupt and alien. Tracker’s knees were rigid as welded joints. He willed them to bend, to raise his feet, to propel him beyond the fear that blanketed his mind. He began to move, heavy-footed, back in the direction they had come.

  “This way, this way…oh, this way, this…” The sing-song voice of Amy was moving from him, further off. Amy was walking in the opposite direction—to the north wall, to the next branch that led to the well.

  “I like coffee, I like tea, I like the boys and the boys like me.” The spirit voice of a mindless child who skipped through a quiet park.

  Tracker stood frozen, not able to move toward her, not able to move toward the well. Both seemed almost in the same direction.

  “I’m waiting, waiting, waiting…”

  Darkness flooded, the voices of Justice and Vera and Theophilus, warning, threatening. He thought he heard splashing, saw the dark mouth of a well opening, beckoning. In a moment he would be into the well, falling, twisting, grasping, the hands clawing —

  Tracker staggered backward, turned, and stumbled after the voice of Amy that was not the voice of Amy. “Please,” he said. His legs would not work. He staggered against a press designed to crush bodies. Time shifted. The empty machines were once more vibrant with death screams, and a Gregorian chant underlay them. An infant died. A man stood staked. John stumbled to escape, and fell on the path.

  “It’s interesting,” Amy said. “It’s kind of dirty, if you know what I mean, but it’s interesting.” She was bending over him, and her voice was far away.

  He could not even get to his knees, his face lay in oil.

  “I never knew there were so many positions,” Amy was saying in her new voice. “I always heard there were. Why don’t we ever try anything new?”

  “Help me to stand…”

  “Fifteen minutes, ten minutes, spring is here, school’s out, school’s out,” she was sing-songing, her voice moving further and further away.

  “Help me, Amy.”

  “Teacher let the fools out.” She appeared beside him, reached down, and helped him stand. “Teacher let the mules out.”

  “Help me out of here.” He staggered.

  “There’s this,” she said, holding an object that was dull in the bluish light. He grasped with uncoordinated hands at her, at the object, and missed. He looked closely. It was a twenty dollar gold piece.

  “There’s a lot of them scattered around the well,” she said. “Come see.”

  “Throw it away.”

  “What?”

  “Please, throw it now.” His arms shook, he was afraid he would fall again.

  “Welcome to hard times,” she said. “I’m sure it’s perfectly good.”

  “Oh God, throw it.”

  Impish like a little girl, she stood on her toes and threw the gold piece, laughing like an excited, teasing six-year-old. The gold piece pinged against the metal of one of the machines.

  “It’s fun, it’s fun, I’ll do some more.” Her voice was distant again, disappearing, moving toward the center of the house, toward the well.

  “Come, and see, and play with me—hey, nonny, nonny…” The elfin voice was diminishing.

  He had to get out, had to follow along the wall, stay on the path. He couldn’t help her now. Maybe not himself either. He staggered forward, stumbling from the path into mouths of contraptions that vibrated, cracked with his weight. Blades were stopped in their arc. Knives did not spring forward. He did not know why, but his sensibilities warned him, forced him to walk the path. Step at a time, half-step at a time
. His legs were rubbery, his feet heavy as concrete blocks.

  He tried to warn her to get out, to save herself. Turning to call back to her he heard her muffled scream, and then she was running down the path from the direction he’d struggled, and she fell against him.

  “Ahead, up there…oh, Mother, Mother Mary, oh, our Father…” Her eyes were wide, shocked. It was a human reaction to something near-inhuman. It was Amy’s face, not a cunning surrogate. Amy was restored.

  Still, she was stronger than he, and younger. She clutched him now so tightly he was surprised at her strength. “What is it?”

  She shook her head, not yet able to speak.

  “What is it?”

  She shook her head back and forth, as if she tried to cast madness.

  “Stay here.” He moved forward, and as he did the blue light intensified, became nearly electric, and he became conscious that a few feet away a figure stood by the path. At first it was blurred, vague. He moved closer. It was tall, shadowed, as though brooding between those infernal machines; a figure like a man, but this man had incredible arms stretching high, arms that were too long by a third.

  Tracker stopped and waited for movement. There was none. Was it some sort of mock-up? The figure remained motionless. No doubt it was frightening, but after all the other frights in this place it shouldn’t have affected Amy so terribly. Tracker breathed deeply as his constricted lungs would allow, and stepped forward.

  Now the light diffused around him in a pale glow, and as it shifted it concentrated on the brooding figure, pushing away shadows, glinting on sharp blades, coating long decayed wood with a soft velvety glow. It touched the brooding features, uncovered the face slowly, until Tracker stood looking into the dead face of Theophilus Tracker.