The Hell Season (29 page)

“You know,” he said to me at one point, eyes still on the screen, “I have a theory.”

The others were seated around the table in the dining room talking. I was the only one who could hear him. His words caught me off guard.

“A theory?”

“Yeah, about what happened. About what’s
still
happening. I’ve been thinking about what you told us a few months back. Toward the end of our journey here. About what Ron had told you. Why we’d been brought here. How we brought all this—“ He motioned to the room around us. “—with us. It doesn’t make sense. Not to me, at least. I’m not buying it. I got my own idea of what’s going on.”

“Oh, yeah?” For some reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

“It’s all a game.” He grimaced as his character on screen was attacked by an enemy airship. “Virtual reality. They’ve been talking about it forever. Hyping it for years now. Shit, since the eighties. And now it’s finally here. Totally immersive. Totally realistic. And we’re in it. A horror RPG. The entire goal of it is to survive. That’s it. Just survive. And we did. The six of us. We survived. We won.” He took down the airship with a well placed shot. “A game so fucking realistic that eventually you forget it’s just a game. Something totally new. Revolutionary. Could still be beta testing it.” Just then an armored, troll-like creature grabbed his character and ripped it in half. Richard looked at me and smiled. “Sounds like something I would have definitely signed up for. But they haven’t written an ending. The game’s still running. Only one way out, it seems.”

“What way is that?”

He motioned toward the screen. The words GAME OVER were printed there, his character lying on the ground in pieces, blood everywhere.

He hit the reset and started playing again. With a sinking feeling in my gut, I got up and went over to where the others were gathered, grabbed a seat and listened to their conversation. Eventually, the night grew long and people got tired and Dana and I went home. I didn’t mention what Richard had said. Should I have? Would it have made a difference? Would it have changed anything? I don’t know. I like to tell myself that it wouldn’t have.

*

A week after Christmas there came a frantic pounding on the front door of the house. It was early. I was in the kitchen. I heard Dana at the door, answering it, then Stella’s voice, loud and high-pitched. Moments later, the three of us rushed over to the house she shared with Richard. And there he was, hanging by the neck from a length of orange extension cord he’d looped over one of the crossbeams that supported the roof over the back porch. A white, plastic lawn chair lay kicked over beneath his feet which were dangling only about six inches or so off the ground, toes pointed downward. I rushed to him, wrapped my arms around his midsection, lifted him up and yelled for Dana to find something that could be used to cut him down. She went into the house, came back out with a serrated knife from the kitchen. After righting the fallen chair, she stood on it and sawed at the extension cord with the knife. It seemed to take a long time for us to get him down but in reality it was probably only a minute or so. And then Richard was lying on the floor of the porch, Dana and I kneeling to either side of him, Stella standing a short distance away, hands covering her mouth, tears streaming down her face. Dana had taken a CPR course some years earlier and so she did what she could but it didn’t take long to realize that her efforts were futile. Who knew exactly how long he had been hanging there? Minutes? Tens of minutes? An hour? More? Later, I learned from Stella that Richard had been gone from bed when she had awoken. Exactly when he had taken his life was hard to say. She had gotten up once to use the bathroom around four o’clock in the morning so it could have been any time after that. Later, it was discovered that he had left a note. It was written on a folded piece of notebook paper left lying on the kitchen counter.

Stella,

I’ve had enough of this game. Time to for it to be over. I’ll understand if you’re too afraid to follow me. I’ll do what I can to end it, to get you out too. See you soon. Out there. In the real world.

Love, Richard

“What does it mean?” asked Stella in a raw voice barely above a whisper after Dana had finished reading the note aloud. “What could it possibly mean?”

“He thought it was a game,” I said. “All of it. He thought that by dying he’d be able to get out. And bring you out too, apparently.”

Stella could only stand there, her face filled with anguish and disbelief. Her hand went to her stomach. Dana went to her, stood there holding her for a while.

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.”

*

“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 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.

“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 electronics 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.