The Hell Season

by Ray Wallace

  Anything at all.

  *

  Thomas awoke the next morning feeling remarkably refreshed. A bit sore, yes, but that was to be expected after what he’d been through yesterday and spending the night in the less than comfortable confines of a bathtub, wasn’t it? When he pulled the chair away from the door and made his way into the bedroom, he was surprised to discover the bright sunlight streaming in through the shattered window marking the time of day as late morning or possibly even noon. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so long or so soundly. No doubt the stress of the past few days had something to do with that.

  He hadn’t had a shower since all the recent insanity had begun and felt in desperate need of one. Now that the water had stopped working, he decided to go down to the kitchen, grab a gallon of bottled water and wash up a bit. Then he’d find something to eat and figure out what he was going to do with the rest of the day. That is, if nothing completely out of the ordinary occurred to take the decision making away from him.

  First things first, though. He needed a change of clothes. There was a mirror over the wide dresser he and his wife had shared which he stared into for a few moments before rummaging through the drawers for something clean to wear. He needed a shave. The hair on his face was well past the five o’clock shadow stage, was somewhere closer to seven-thirty. The skin there itched a bit and so he scratched at the whiskers covering his chin. As he did so he saw movement behind him. Heart suddenly pounding, he turned around, ready to confront whoever—or whatever—was there. No one. The room was empty. Reluctantly, he turned back to the mirror, told himself he was seeing things, a possible aftereffect of whatever hallucinogen the dead bugs had dosed him with.

  As he stood there thinking, it happened again. Something moved behind his reflection in the mirror. And once again he turned around to find nothing out of the ordinary. What the hell was going on?

  The next time it happened he didn’t turn away. He stared into the mirror, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

  There was a disturbance in one of the beams of sunlight streaming into the room, a swirling mass of dark particles that had a vaguely human shape to it. As he watched, the shape became more solid, particles filling in its outline until it was a nearly solid mass. Differing colors became discernible and the mass was fleshed out with details that sent a shudder down Thomas’s spine. A face was emerging from the dark oval at the top of the form. He could now see eyes and the beginnings of a nose and lips. Below the head was the neck and a pair of thin shoulders. The body appeared to be covered in a garment of some kind, the arms hanging free of the short, frilly sleeves. A woman, Thomas realized. And even before all the details were fully fleshed out Thomas knew who that woman was.

  “Julia?” he asked.

  With the uttering of her name she came into focus, standing there behind him and to the right, her dark hair flowing down over her shoulders, wearing the white dress with the tiny purple flowers she liked—and he liked to see her in—back when they had first started dating.

  “Julia…”

  He started to turn around, to take her in his arms, to hold her close and bury his face in her hair, just breathe in the scent of her. But before he could the image of his wife in the mirror said, “No!” The command stopped him cold. Something in that word, that single, tiny syllable held him fast as if chains had wrapped themselves around his body, immobilizing him where he stood. Her voice seemed to come from a great distance, barely audible, reverberating as if projected down a long tunnel or from the depths of a cave.

  “Julia…” It’s all he could think to say. “Oh, Julia…”

  “Thomas…” The word nearly broke his heart. “Do not turn around. There isn’t much time.” He had to strain to make out most of what she said. Already he could see the details of her face, her beautiful face, starting to blur. The particles were reappearing. She was losing definition.

  “Julia…”

  “The children are here,” she said. “You mustn’t worry about us. We have crossed over. We’ve come to one of the good places, it seems. Not everyone was so lucky. So many worlds…”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Tell me where you are. Tell me how to get to you.”

  When again she spoke her voice seemed even further away:

  “We’re waiting for you, Thomas. We’ll always be waiting for you…”

  Now she was nothing more than a mass of tiny black dots once again, static on a malfunctioning TV screen. No more colors. Just a vague, swirling outline. And all too soon, even that was gone.

  “Julia!” Thomas cried. The invisible bonds that had held him for those few brief moments fell away and he whirled about, desperate for one last glimpse of his wife, to hear one last word.

  But there was nothing except for sunlight and furniture and the feeling of a room recently inhabited.

  *

  An hour later found Thomas sitting on the couch in the living room eating a couple slices of wheat bread with a cold can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. He washed the meal down with some warm grape Kool-Aid even though what he really wanted right then was a beer in the worst way. The appearance of his wife’s apparition had shaken him badly. God, he missed her. Even more so now that he’d been able to see her again. If the forces responsible for what was happening wished to torture him emotionally, they’d hit upon the perfect way to do so.

  He glanced out through the ruined living room window at the daylit world outside. Just past noon—he’d checked the clock in his car a little while ago for the time as his cell phone was dead along with every other digital timepiece in the house—and still no sign of any storm or swarm or whatever other cataclysmic event might be visited upon the town this day. He still wasn’t completely sure if recent events had actually happened or if he’d somehow lost his mind and imagined all of them. Not that there was much of a difference, he reasoned. Perception was reality. He had found himself in some sort of living hell and the bottom line was that he had to find a way out. The rational part of his mind had accepted the very real possibility that all of this was actually happening. It was a copout to think otherwise, an obvious and predictable defense mechanism, one that might, in the long run, cause him more harm than good. If these terrible events were really occurring—and he was willing to accept, for the time being, that they were—then he would be better served discovering a way to thwart further incidents or, at the very least, escaping further exposure to them.

  There were only two courses of action that he could think of at the present time. The first involved leaving town. Yes, he’d tried it once and had been turned back. But maybe the force field or whatever the hell it was that had prevented his departure did not surround the entirety of the town’s perimeter. Maybe there was a way out. The second course would be to visit the hole at the center of town that Ron and Tanya had told him about. They were of the opinion that it was from there that the terrors of recent days had originated. If what they said was true, then maybe there was a way to fill in or collapse the hole to prevent any further incidences. A long shot, sure, but a long shot was better than no shot at all. He needed to take action. This sitting around was getting him nowhere quickly, might get him killed sooner than later. He wasn’t ready to die, not just yet. Eventually, if all other options were exhausted, if he discovered no other way to be reunited with his family, if the only way he might be able to reach them and leave this place behind once and for all was through dying… Well, maybe then. But as long as he had options, no matter how farfetched they might be, he felt compelled to explore them. He was already taking one course of action, right that minute, he realized. He had chosen sanity over insanity, reality over unreality. He had decided that what was happening was real and that he must choose a course of action to alter that reality. And now that he thought about it, the idea that all of this was a figment of his imagination seemed somewhat ridiculous. As a teenager he’d wanted desperately to be a writer of the types of “weird tales” that he’d
enjoyed reading at that point in his life. It had come as no small disappointment to discover that he just didn’t have a creative enough of an imagination to get the job done. The surreal concepts and scenarios wouldn’t come to him. His mind, it seemed, just didn’t work that way. Even the stories that he told his children on occasion were mostly plagiarized things, conjured from the memories of the tales he had read in his youth. If he hadn’t been able to invent such fantasies at any other point in his life then what made him think he could do so now? It didn’t make sense.

  Finishing his lunch—or, more accurately, breakfast, as it was the first meal he’d eaten that day—he stood and, out of habit, brought the remains of his meal into the kitchen. It was warm inside the house, nearly uncomfortably so. The garbage was starting to smell a bit ripe. If he was going to continue living here he should dispose of it soon. He should also do something about the broken windows, about reinforcing the house in other ways to help protect him against whatever else might decide to attack his home. Or should he find someplace else to live? It wasn’t safe here, obviously. But what if Julia and the kids came back? How would they find him? Shouldn’t he stay in case they did? He figured he could always leave a note explaining where he could be found. The reality of the situation was that there were much more defensible places to hole up for a while. And he needed to find other people. Undoubtedly, his chances of survival were higher if he was part of a group rather than as a lone wolf. The idea grabbed hold of him. Other people… Surely there were those who had their own ideas about what was going on. Maybe a few had even figured out a way to escape this nightmare already. Where would he find those people though? He thought about Dana and Ron and Tanya. Where were they now? If he’d survived his transformation into a serpent then he assumed Ron and Tanya had also. They had military training. Surely he was better off with them than without them.

  This sudden desire to be around others filled him with a sense of excitement he hadn’t known since before his family had disappeared. It filled him with a sense of purpose. And that’s what he needed right then, needed it desperately—a sense of purpose. All this sitting around, wondering and worrying… Where was it getting him? Nowhere. Probably dead if he kept at it for too long.

  He grabbed the portable radio from where it was sitting on the kitchen counter and turned it on, began scanning the stations as he headed into the living room. First things first: see if anyone had started broadcasting out there. He was up around the one-thousands on the AM band when he heard a voice cut through the static. His heart beat faster at the sound of it. He turned up the volume and stared intensely at the radio, willing the voice to come through.

  “So scared…” he heard through the static. “Help… Please… Mommy, where are you…”

  Thomas’s excitement quickly soured. It was the voice of a little boy, a very scared and confused little boy by the sound of it. A voice that he knew all too well. How could that voice be broadcasting over the radio? And where was it broadcasting from?

  “Somebody help me…”

  Thomas felt sick, like that cold ravioli wasn’t going to stay in his stomach long.

  “Daddy, help me…”

  The radio slipped from Thomas’s hands, bounced off the coffee table, the battery cover dislodging, the batteries spilling out onto the floor. The radio went dead.

  “Oh, God,” said Thomas and he brought his hands up to cover his face. The next word to come out of his mouth would have been barely intelligible if there’d been anyone present to hear it. “Robert…”

  *

  When my son Robert was born it was a very real possibility that he might never leave the hospital. Nearly two months premature, he was so small, I couldn’t help but wonder every time I laid eyes on him how something so fragile could possibly survive. But survive he did. Eventually he was allowed out of that transparent box of purified air in which the doctors had kept him and for the first time we could hold him, and kiss him, and take him home.

  He grew into a painfully shy child, didn’t speak much around people he didn’t know. He scared easily too, always thought there was a bogeyman in the closet or some other equally hideous fiend underneath his bed. We let him sleep with us during some of his darker episodes. So different from Jenny who loved to spend time alone with her dolls and her coloring books or chasing Rex—a much smaller and more easily intimidated animal then—playfully around the back yard.

  That voice on the radio… I hadn’t heard it sound like that in years. Not since Robert was barely more than an infant. Not since the times when he would cry out in the middle of the night and I’d go to his room and he’d beg me, please, Daddy, don’t let them hurt me. Don’t let the monsters take me away…

  *

  After that, they were everywhere. His wife. His son. His daughter. In every reflection he would see them: mirrors, windows, the polished surfaces of kitchen appliance and vases, even doorknobs if he looked close enough. And look he did. They waved back at him or shook their heads in negation, at what he could only guess. They smiled and laughed, or wept, covered their faces with their hands, turned away when he called out to them. He should have been afraid, he knew. What was happening wasn’t possible, was it? But he’d become quite used to the impossible in a rather short period of time. He wasn’t afraid. No, not at all. Saddened, yes. Distraught. These images, these ghosts… He couldn’t touch them, although he wanted to, so desperately that the residual physical ache of what he had endured the previous day was replaced by something altogether different, less tangible, but so much more pervasive.

  He placed the batteries back into the radio and with a sigh of relief found that it still worked. And they were there, too, the voices of those he loved and had so recently lost, on nearly every station, calling out to him, sometimes fearfully, sometimes happily. On 620 his wife was screaming for him, begging him to save her. In the background he could hear something like deep laughter. On 630 she was whispering to him, telling him how much she loved him, how she couldn’t wait to be with him again. He listened to this channel for a long time, turned it reluctantly when her voice eventually faded into silence. Further up the dial he heard the voices of both his children arguing over something—a toy one of them wouldn’t share with the other? Then he found the voice of Jenny, alone, singing a nursery rhyme accompanied by what sounded like water dripping. And then there was Robert, barely audible even at full volume, whispering over and over: “I want to go home… I want to go home…” The sound of it nearly broke Thomas’s heart.

  It didn’t make any sense, all these different voices, these different emotions and sentiments. Joy and sorrow. Excitement and terror. So many contradictions. Which of them were real? None of them? Was this simply a game someone was playing with him? To what end, though? The eventual splintering of his sanity once and for all? Or were all of them real, alternate realities into which his family had been taken, all the possibilities of where they might be and what they might be experiencing at any given moment? Thomas didn’t know. How could he? Each far-fetched explanation that he came up with seemed as plausible as the next. He really could drive himself crazy thinking about it. He should turn off the radio and leave the house behind, he knew, write a note for his family, let them know where he had gone, that he would come by on occasion and check in, see if they were there. But he couldn’t do it. The sounds of his loved ones captivated him, transfixed him, even when their voices were filled with anguish or fear. The very thought of turning off the radio, of silencing those voices, seemed to him a traitorous act. How could he sever this connection, the only one he had to them? And so the minutes and the hours went by as he went up and down the dial, laughing and weeping and shouting his rage along with those voices emanating from the radio’s speaker.

  He wandered the house until night began to fall, reaching out to the ghosts in the reflections, changing the stations, always changing the stations. Then darkness came and robbed him of most of the visual images he’d been pursuing from room to
room. He could have gotten his flashlight but felt—quite irrationally, he knew—that its bright, sterile beam would somehow destroy the mood of the moment and the voices of his family would be lost to him. At some point he ended up back in the living room, sweating in the warm evening air. Outside, there was thunder. Another storm. What kind would it be this time? Thomas didn’t care. When the rains came he wandered out onto the porch to discover that it was only water falling from the sky. Back inside, the darkness thickened and still he listened to the voices of those he lost.

  I should stop this, he told himself. This can’t be healthy. I need to turn off the radio and leave.

  But he couldn’t. The radio was going to have to stop working. Or someone was going to have to come and take it away. Shouldn’t the batteries have died by now? He thought that they should have. He’d been listening for a long time. But maybe they didn’t work the same way that they used to, back before the terrible morning when his world was changed. Maybe they would just go on working forever...

  As he was changing the station for what seemed the thousandth time a hand that was not his own reached out and pulled the radio from his grasp. There was the sound of breaking plastic as it was thrown against the wall. And just like that, the voices of his family were silenced.

  Consumed with a sudden rage, Thomas whirled on the person who’d come into his home and destroyed the one tenuous link he had to his family. His hand was closed in a fist and he was drawing it back to throw a punch at the indistinct figure standing there in the darkness. Before he went through with it, however, a light popped on and he saw that it was Dana before him carrying a flashlight of her own, and the surprise and the guilt he felt at seeing her instantaneously overwhelmed his rage, were more than sufficient to make him lower his hand and ask in a strained voice, “What the hell did you do that for?”