"The Wells Of Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

It was real sharp outside, and I pulled on my baseball cap. The sun had already sunk beyond the rim of the woods, and the tops of the trees were irradiated with orange light. Our breath smoked in the cold, and we rubbed our hands briskly to keep warm. A dog was barking over at the next house.
Til call you tomorrow as soon as I know,' I told Jimmy. 'But from what I can see here, you don't have anything to worry about. You've all drunk the water and you're still walking about and eating cookies, so whatever it is, it can't be that serious.'
'Do you want a bag to take home?' asked Alison.
'No, really. I don't want to put on any more weight. I had to crawl along a warm-air duct a couple of weeks ago, and I can tell you that I only just made it. What a way to die, huh? Ducted to death.'
Jimmy and Alison walked around the side of the house with me. 'At least that's better than drowning,' Alison remarked.
'Drowning?' I asked her. 'Who said anything about drowning?'
'Ask Jimmy,' said Alison. 'He's been dreaming about drowning for the past week.'
'Maybe you shouldn't fill your bathtub so full,' I told him.
Jimmy looked embarrassed. 'It's nothing. It's just one of those dreams.'
'One of what dreams?'
Jimmy turned on Alison. 'Why'd you have to go tell him that?' he asked her. 'It's a stupid dream, that's all.'
'I'm an expert on water dreams,' I told him. 'Come on, I'm a
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plumber and I've got myself half a degree in psychology. Who else could interpret a dream about drowning better than me? I'll tell you what your problem is: you have a repressed urge to go down with the Titanic, thwarted by the fact that it sank over sixty-five years ago. Or maybe your mother put too much water in your Kool-Aid when you were a kid, and you're suffering from dilution phobia.'
Jimmy stuck his hands in the pockets of his lumberjack coat and shrugged. 'It's just one of those stupid dreams, that's all. I dream I'm underwater, under some kind of dark water, and I want to get out but I can't.'
'Is it a long dream?'
'I don't know. Maybe just a few seconds. But I wake up and I'm cold and sweating. I mean, really cold. And I always have this feeling that I've swallowed gallons and gallons of freezing water.'
I walked around the front of my Country Squire and opened the door. Shelley was still sitting there, listening to Dolly Parton, and he gave me a haughty wink. I could have kicked that cat's ass sometimes, the arrogant way he behaved. Sometimes I wondered who was running Mason Perkins, Plumbers & Heating Contractors, me or that goddamned Shelley. I could have kicked his ass.
Jimmy wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and said: 'The thing that always gets me is the feeling that the water has no surface. I mean, it isn't the water that scares me so much, it's the fact that it's under the ground, underneath tons and tons of solid rock. So even if I did reach the surface, I couldn't breathe.'
I gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. 'It looks like you and water ain't been getting along lately. Maybe you've been worried about the well.'
'That's what I told him,' said Alison.
I climbed into my car and put the window down. 'If that's what's worrying you,' I told Jimmy, 'then I'll make sure I get you these test results just as soon as humanly possible.'
'He needs to stop working so hard, that's my opinion,' put in Alison. 'It could be one of those struggling-to-succeed dreams, couldn't it?'
'Listen,' I told him, 'I did almost all of an advanced course in psycho-analysis, and we had dreams from ordinary people that would have made your hair go white. What you've been dreaming about is nothing. It's just an anxiety dream. Take a couple of sleeping tablets before you go to bed and you won't ever dream it again.'
Jimmy smiled. 'Do you charge for medical advice, as well as for plumbing?'
'I charge for everything. How do you think I got so rich?'
I left the Bodine place and gave them a last toot on the horn and a wave when I reached the letter-box. Then I turned west on 109 towards New Milford, switching on the lights to see my way through the clinging dusk. I drove up and down the winding hills and valleys, my Country Squire whirling up leaves behind me as I went.
I was interested in Jimmy Bodine's dream, but I was always suspicious of analysis. That was one of the reasons (apart from a pregnant sophomore) that my college course in Freud and Jung and Est had come to a premature conclusion. Maybe I didn't take life seriously enough. Maybe I wasn't cut out for the couch and the collective unconscious and the role-playing routine. Maybe I was too selfish and didn't particularly want to rescue the world from its phobias and its complexes. Whatever it was, I had quit college halfway through an encounter session, numbed by the self-indulgent dumbness of it, and I had taken a bus home and shaved off my beard, in that order. My mother, a short and kind lady with a strong line in flower-print housecoats, had cried; my father, a taller person but no less kind, had shaken my hand and told me it was about time I got on with something useful. That's when I took up plumbing, and that's what I've been ever since, Mason Perkins, plumber.
I think, to tell you the truth, that I look more like a plumber than a psychiatrist. I'm six-one, with dark wavy hair, and a long thin face, and one of those expressions of constant bafflement, like plumbers always have. If I'd taken up psychiatry, I think my patients would have spent most of their time wondering when I was going to bring out my wrench and screw their heads on straight by force. My manner has always been more bathside than bedside, if you get my drift.
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I have been married. It didn't last very long, although she was pretty nice in her way. Her name was Jane and she wanted a neat, neat house in the suburbs, and a television set, and a polished Pinto, and I guess whatever it was that I wanted and still want, it wasn't quite that. We sat in silence for three years staring at the wallpaper and then she went home to Duluth. I guess one shouldn't really try to marry people from Duluth.
But, anyway, here I was, with my plumbing business in Connecticut, and Shelley, and I was trying very hard with the waitress from The Cattle Yard restaurant down on the Danbury road, although I hadn't gotten much further than unbuttoning her chaps. Life was okay, and not too hostile, and I felt that I could cope, even if I was ultimately copping out.
I drove into the outskirts of New Milford. It's a sleepy, pretty little town on the Housatonic, with dozens of picturesque colonial houses, and a main street with a wide grass mall and a bandstand. I parked outside of the New Milford Savings Bank and switched off the engine. Shelley, who had been sleeping soundly, stretched himself and yawned.
I took the jar of water out of my pocket and checked that it wasn't leaking. It could have been the deepening dusk, but the. water looked more darkly tinted than it had before. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed at it.
It was then that Shelley stiffened, and bristled, and let out a spitting hiss that made my hair stand on end, too. He was arched up so much that he was almost bent double, and his tail was bushed out. His eyes were wide with something that was either fear or hatred.
'Shelley, for Christ's sake -' I told him.
He stayed where he was, his claws scraping at the vinyl seat, snarling like I'd never heard him snarl before, I made a move towards him, -but he only spat harder, and let out one of those tortured yowls that have people throwing their left boot out of the window in the middle of the night.
I screwed the lid back on the jar. Almost at once, Shelley's fur subsided, and he began to relax. He still looked at me suspiciously, but then cats are experts at making humans feel guilty for upsetting or discomfiting them. I looked back at him with a
frown, and then I looked at the jar again. It was only water, why .should it make him go so crazy?
Maybe Alison had been right, and the water did smell of fish, or something like fish. After all, both Jimmy and I liked to smoke an occasional cigar, and perhaps our sense of smell wasn't as keen as hers. But then, Shelley didn't go berserk, even for fish. As a matter of fact, he preferred left-over pizza to almost any food you could name. He could possibly go berserk for a pepperoni, but I doubted it.
I climbed out of the car, locked it, and then I took the lid off the jar of water again and sniffed it. There was some faint trace of odour, I had to admit. Some chilly, lingering smell that was more metallic than fishy. It gave me an odd sensation for some reason, like I'd smelled something that was very strange and hostile, and I stood there in the dusk of New Milford feeling unusually lonesome. Beyond the bandstand, three or four children were playing ball in the gloom. Their laughing was like the cries of birds.
Crossing the green, I mounted the steps of the New Milford Health Department. There were still lights in the upstairs window, and I guessed that Dan Kirk and his associates were working late. I walked inside through the tall black-painted doors, and went up the broad colonial staircase until I reached the first landing. The building was brightly lit with fluorescent tubes, and painted a dull Adam green. I went up to the door marked Health Department, Private, and walked in. Mrs Wardell was sitting at her desk in the front office, all upswept glasses and red lipstick, and she said: 'Hi, Mason. What brings you down here?'
I raised the jelly jar of water. 'They're poisoning the wells,' I said, melodramatically. 'Is Dan there, or did he duck out early?'
'Did Dan duck out early? Is that a joke? Dan thinks going home at dawn is ducking out early. They have a swine disease crisis over at Sherman.'
'Can I go straight in?' I asked her.
I knocked, and went through into Dan Kirk's laboratory. Dan was there, sitting at the end of a long varnished workbench, peering into a microscope. He was young, but very bald, and in
his white laboratory coat he looked like a mad professor, or at the very worst a boiled egg. I noticed Rheta Warren there, too, and that was always good news. She was Dan's assistant researcher, on her first job since she graduated from Princeton Biological college, and compared with most of the quail around New Milford she was most provocative. She had long muddy-blonde hair, wide hazel eyes, and a figure that obviously wasn't meant to be hidden by a starched white overall. I gave her a more-than-friendly wave as I crossed the laboratory to have a word with Dan.
'The plumber cometh,' I said, and set down the jelly jar. Dan looked up from his microscope and blinked at it balefully. Then he blinked at me.
'My stars said this was going to be a silly week,' he told me.