I was sure of it.
9
I backed out slowly, turned off the battery-powered lights, and shone my flash one last time on the horrid thing lying against the wall. More steam was rising from it now, and there was a smell, like sour peppermint. The fresh air was really doing a number on it.
I closed the door, snapped the lock, and went back to the house. I returned the flashlight to the cupboard and put the gun back in the safe. I looked at the bucket of gold pellets but felt no urge to put my hands in it, not today. What if I reached all the way to the bottom and felt a segment of hairy insect leg?
I got as far as the stairs before my legs gave out, and I had to grab the newel post to keep from taking a nasty tumble. I sat down at the top, shaking all over. After a minute or two I was able to get a grip on myself and go down, holding the bannister in a way that reminded me of Mr. Bowditch. I sat down heavily at the kitchen table and looked at the tape player. Part of me wanted to eject the tape, yank it out in long brown ribbons, and dump it in the trash. But I didn’t. Couldn’t.
Trust me, Charlie. I’m depending on you.
I pushed play, and for a moment it was as if Mr. Bowditch was in the room with me, seeing how terrified I was—how astounded—and wanting to soothe me. To bring me back from thinking about how that huge insect’s eye had fallen in, leaving the empty socket to glare at me. And it worked, at least a little.
10
They’re just cockroaches, and not dangerous. A bright light puts them to flight. Unless you ran screaming at the sight of the one I shot—and that’s not like the boy I’ve come to know—then you looked through the boards and saw the well, and the steps going down. Sometimes a few of the roaches come up, but only when the weather starts to warm. I don’t know why, because our air is lethal to them. They begin to decompose even when they’re trapped below the boards, but they batter at them anyway. Some kind of instinctive death-wish? Who can say? In the last couple of years I’ve gotten careless about maintaining the barrier over the well, in the last few years I’ve gotten careless about a lot of things… and so a couple got up. It’s been long years since that happened. The one you heard in the spring died on its own, nothing left now but a leg and one of its feelers. The other… well, you know. But they’re not dangerous. They don’t bite.
I call it the well of the worlds, a name I got from an old pulp horror story by a man named Henry Kuttner, and I didn’t really find it at all. I fell into it.
I’ll tell you as much as I can, Charlie.
As Adrian Bowditch, I was born in Rhode Island, and although I was good at math and loved to read… as you know… I didn’t care for school, or for my stepfather, who beat me when things went wrong in his life. Which they often did, as he was a heavy drinker who couldn’t hold a job for more than a few months at a go. I ran away when I was seventeen and went north to Maine. I was a strapping lad and caught on with a logging crew way to hell and gone up in Aroostook County. That would have been 1911, the year Amundsen made it to the South Pole. Do you remember me telling you I was a simple woodcutter? It was the truth.
Six years I did that job. Then, in 1917, there came a soldier to our camp, informing us that able-bodied men had to register for the draft at the Island Falls Post Office. Some of the younger lads piled into a truck, I among them, but I had no intention of feeding myself into the war machine somewhere in France. I reckoned that machine had enough blood to drink without adding mine, so I said so long to the boys as they lined up to register and hopped a freight headed west. I ended up in Janesville, not far from where we are now, and signed on with a cutting crew. When that played out I followed the cutting down to Sentry County, which is now Arcadia County. Our county.
There wasn’t much cutting and I thought of moving on, maybe out to Wyoming or Montana. My life would have been very different if I’d done that, Charlie. I would have lived a normal span and we never would have met. But in Buffington—where the Forest Preserve is now—I saw a sign saying LAND SURVEYOR WANTED. And below that, something that looked made for me: MUST BE WISE IN THE WAYS OF MAPS AND THE WOODS.
I went into the county office, and after reading some maps—latitude, longitude, contours and such—I got the job. Son, I felt like the man who fell into a pile of shit and came up with a rose in his teeth. I got to spend every fucking day tramping the woods, blazing trees and making maps and charting old woods roads, of which there were many. Some nights I stayed with a family willing to take me in and some nights I camped under the stars. It was grand. There were times when I didn’t see another living soul for days. That’s not for everyone, but it was for me.