The Hell Season
Page 23
Richard’s body did not disintegrate, did not turn to dust and blow away. So the following afternoon Jeff and I dug a grave in the hard, frozen earth behind one of the houses across the street. It was long, hard work and when we were done, when the snow had started to settle on the mound beneath which we had buried Richard’s body, Patricia opened her Bible and spoke for a few minutes.
“Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return,” she began.
Stella bowed her head and wept.
*
Toward the end of February the angel visited me. I was on my side, lying in bed, Dana behind me, an arm draped across my shoulder. One moment, the open doorway that led out to the hallway beyond was dark and empty, the next the angel stood there. The otherworldly being was plainly visible in the darkness of the room as its white skin and golden hair, the white robes that it wore cast a warm glow that pushed back the surrounding gloom. Its black eyes stared at me, into me, through me in a way that made me feel like a child again, afraid that I’d done something wrong and would soon be punished for it. But when the angel spoke the tone of its voice was kind and free of judgment.
“You must go back.” Its mouth did not move but the words were clearly audible. “Back to the town from which you fled. Back to the abyss. Embrace the darkness. Salvation lies within. June the twenty-first. The day on which so much was taken from you. Only then will it be returned.”
The angel’s light was fading away.
“Embrace the darkness…”
The room was dark once more.
A smothering fatigue washed over me and I knew no more until morning came.
*
“Last night, I had the strangest dream,” I told Dana over breakfast. Orange juice made from concentrate, French toast from one of the loaves of bread that Patricia liked to bake, and a multi-vitamin.
“The angel?” asked Dana.
The fork stopped halfway to my mouth. “You saw it too?”
She nodded her head “yes” and sipped at her orange juice.
“So it wasn’t a dream?”
“I don’t think so.”
I stuck a piece of French toast in my mouth, chewed slowly for a while, swallowed.
“No, I don’t think so either.”
*
The angel visited Patricia and Jeff. Stella too.
“What if it’s a trick?” asked Stella.
For a few weeks after Richard’s suicide she’d been very quiet. It was good to see her coming around, at least a little, to have her participating in the conversation.
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” said Jeff.
The rest of us agreed.
*
The weeks went by and the snow melted away. April first arrived. April Fool’s Day. And we couldn’t find Stella. If it was her idea of a joke no one was laughing. As it turned out, it wasn’t a joke. She was really gone. Dana went through her closet and realized that most of the clothes she liked to wear had been taken. We spent the day driving around, looking for her. To no avail. She must have found a working automobile, was long gone by the time we’d even started our search. Where could she have gone? we wondered. Unlike Richard, she hadn’t left a note, nothing explaining why she had decided to leave or where she might be heading. Had the house where she lived gotten to her, the memories of Richard there? Had the stress of the pregnancy? The thought of raising the child on her own? But wouldn’t it have been better for her to be around her friends, the few that were left to her, to have their help and support with all of it? And there was the angel’s appearance, the message it had delivered to us, the feeling of hope it had inspired, the idea that the day we would leave this empty world behind was fast approaching. We had to believe it. The very thought of returning to our families and loved ones... My heart ached at the thought of seeing Robert and Jenny and Julia once again. It wasn’t something that I discussed with Dana and she, in turn, said nothing about how badly she wished to be reunited with her husband and daughter again. But I knew. Sometimes, in the night, I would awaken with Dana lying beside me and I could hear her mumbling in her sleep, “Bill… Oh, Nina…”
It was Patricia who suggested that the angel may have appeared to Stella again, or that she had been given a different message than the rest of us, one that she had been told not to share. That her leaving the way she had may have been upon direct order from the angel, that she may have already been led out of this world, her and the baby she carried, that she had returned to the life she once knew. It made us all feel better to think that it really happened that way. But who could say for sure? Odds were, we’d never know the truth. And maybe that was for the best.
*
One night, a couple of weeks after Stella left, I found myself standing next to the side of the road where the yard in front of my parents’ house ended. Dana was asleep inside. I was feeling restless. My mind refused to shut down. I could hear the slight, steady rumbling of the generator over by the house and the whispering of the wind. Nothing else. It was something I still couldn’t get used to. All that silence. It weighed on me at times.
The sky was clear. There were so many stars, enough to dazzle the eyes.
I heard footsteps, growing louder as they approached, and then Patricia was standing next to me. I half expected to see her clutching a Bible in her hand. Instead, she held a mug filled with a dark, steaming liquid.
“Couldn’t sleep, so I made some tea. You want some?”
“No. Thank you.”
We stood there quietly for a while. Patricia lifted the mug to her lips, took a sip.
“Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?” she asked.
“Of all possible explanations, the simplest one is always the best.”
“Yes, in a nutshell.”
“You’re saying there’s a simple explanation behind everything that’s happened?”
Another sip. Then:
“It’s all part of God’s plan.”
“He brought us here?”
“No. He took everyone else away.”
“The Rapture, you mean?”
“Yes, the Rapture.”
“But why us? Why were we the ones chosen to stay behind?”
Another sip.
“Before the angel came, I would have said that some questions are simply unanswerable, that God works in mysterious ways. But now… I suspect we will find the answer to that question soon enough.”
*
In late April, I sat down and started to write. Conflicting emotions warred within me, most of them centered around a certain day that was fast approaching. June the twenty-first, the day of which the angel had spoken. The very idea of leaving this place, of going home… It was always there, pervading all of my thoughts. Mixed with the anticipation was a mounting sense of dread. What if it was all a lie? A trick. Just another one of the torments we thought we’d left behind when we’d come north to try and start new lives for ourselves, whatever sort of lives they might be. The temptation to start drinking again resurfaced, to numb both the hope and the fear growing inside of me, to cope with the feelings tearing at my insides, leaving me more and more restless all the time, awake too often late into the night, the darkness and the sound of Dana’s breathing my only companions.
I thought of my psychiatrist, the man who had tried to help me with the anxieties of fatherhood and all the pressures of life in the twenty-first century, and I thought about the little exercise he had recommended. The one where I was supposed to write about the things that bothered me, where I let all the bad things building up inside my head flow out of me and onto the page or the computer screen. And so I started to write. About all of it. As much as I could remember. I’ve always had a pretty good memory and in this endeavor it served me well. I started with the day I woke up to find Julia and the children gone. The blood falling from the sky. Meeting Dana. Then the swarm. The snakes. The time spent at the Wal-Mart... Hours a day I would tap away at the notebook computer I had taken from a local electronic
s store. At night I would set the computer aside, mentally spent and exhausted. I started to sleep much more soundly. I didn’t dream. Not that I could remember. No nightmares about what had happened. No lost families. No angels. I didn’t drink either. The more I wrote the less I wanted to. And the more I wished for June the twenty-first to arrive.
Now here we are. A week before the fated day. Outside, the sun has just gone down. Over the past few weeks I’ve reread much of what I’ve written here, done some editing. Not really sure why. It’s a good possibility that no one else is ever going to read any of this. Something to do, I guess. Dana told me she would read it someday. But not now. It’s all too painful for her, too recent, too fresh in her mind. She needs to forget for a while. I completely understand.
Tomorrow we are going to leave this place. Head south. I’m not sure what to expect when we reach our destination. Maybe Stella will be waiting for us. Or Tanya, by some miracle. There could be any number of other survivors there we may not have seen when we left town. What about Gerald? Or Ron? I hope not if it’s the Ron I knew after his resurrection.
There is one thing I’m quite confident we will find when we get there. The hole. The pit. The abyss. According to the angel, we are to enter that abyss. And what will we discover when we do? Some sort of portal that will bring us back to the world we once knew, the world from which we were taken? A gateway to another world entirely where our friends and loved ones have been waiting for us to arrive? Or will it act as a psychological trigger that will awaken me from the dream I’ve been experiencing this whole time? Will I blink my eyes and turn my head to find Julia lying in bed next to me? Will Robert and Jenny come running into the room, ready for breakfast and the first of many long summer days? Wishful thinking, I know, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking it anyway.
Once we are there at the Wal-Mart again, once the fated time is upon us, just how, exactly, will we “embrace the darkness”? By slowly and carefully climbing down into the pit? Or by jumping from its edge, diving outward and into the waiting blackness, an actual, physical leap of faith?
So many questions... Soon enough, it seems, I’ll have my answers. For now, though, the time has come to put the computer away, to go to bed and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is a big day as are the ones to follow. And, with any luck, if what the angel said was true, June the twenty-first will prove to be the biggest day of them all.
THE END