The Hell Season (24 page)

CHAPTER 10

Tuesday, August 24 to Monday, September 20

“It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”

Thomas was with Ron on the roof of the repair shop once again. It seemed to be Ron’s favorite place from which to watch the operations taking place at the hole. The sun was raw and red, an infected wound upon the sky, as it had been for some time now. Thomas hated looking at it. Hated seeing his fellow survivors forced to work like slaves, driven by the unforgiving hands of their demon masters. He hated everything about this place including the man standing next to him. Everything, that is, except for the few people he had come to regard as friends. How long would this nightmare continue? And what would there be when it finally ended? Would he open his eyes, find himself in bed next to his beloved Julia, the sights and sounds of his children bounding into the room calling him from the terrible and hideous memories of the world he now inhabited? Or was there no end? Had he died and gone to Hell without even realizing it? Would the completion of work at the hole only lead to greater and more debasing forms of punishment for him and his friends, ultimately leading to the fiery and eternal torments shown to him in the hallucination experienced when he’d inhaled the bug powder? Two months had passed since that day and the memories of his time in Hell still haunted him. Two months spent in a sober haze of fear and despair and a fierce determination to see his family again. It seemed longer, of course. Unimaginably so.

“It is… impressive,” he said in response to Ron’s query.

And it was. What the survivors were building was a dome. Once the wide opening at the top was filled in the structure would be finished. Archways around its base gave access to the building’s interior. Ron handed Thomas the binoculars and he watched as another black, rune-carved piece was brought out the nearest archway by a group of workers, was handed off to a different group who used a pulley system to lift it into place. He knew the pieces were heavy from experience, learned this while helping to lift some of them himself earlier in the day despite Ron’s admonishments. He held his breath as he watched the workers slowly, oh so slowly fit the piece into place, convinced as always that one of them would lose his balance and topple into the hole, never to be seen again. The piece was safely fitted into place, though, and the three laborers came scrambling back down only to be corralled by the demons and put to work again.

Besides the actual construction of the dome there was other business that needed attending to. The building’s black surface had to be polished with a dark, oily substance that was delivered via the winch in crude buckets. Sections that gleamed with a black, almost mirror-like perfection were polished again. And again. And again. A seemingly pointless and repetitive exercise invented for the sole purpose of finding work for those, mostly the women, who were not as physically capable of lifting and maneuvering the weighty black pieces of which the dome was made. Also, a section of the roadway was being torn up and a new one laid down which led away from the largest of the dome’s seven archways. More buckets were brought up in the cage, some of them filled with a nearly transparent, tar-like substance and others filled with various, uncut, gem-like rocks in every color imaginable: ruby red, emerald green, sapphire blue, amber yellow, and all the hues in between. An untold fortune in what appeared to be precious and semi-precious stones reduced to nothing more than adornment for a fifty foot section of road leading nowhere.

“Soon, my friend, soon,” said Ron and he gave Thomas a pat on the shoulder, “the waiting will be over. All of the hard work will be behind us. The dome’s purpose will be revealed!” He smiled, the expression slowly fading as Thomas watched. “I have to tell you, being trusted with such a great secret can be a bit...
trying
at times. The need to tell someone...
anyone
... can eat at you. How I wish that I could lean in, cup my hand to your ear and impart to you what I know. But I can’t. It would be like having an invitation to a surprise party, the biggest, most lavish surprise party ever imagined and letting the guest of honor in on it beforehand which, of course, would ruin everything. And I wouldn’t want to do that. Definitely not. Just getting to see the expressions on everybody’s faces... That alone will make it all worthwhile.”

Ron started to laugh and Thomas went back to staring through the binoculars, tried to ignore the sounds of merriment escaping the man beside him and the feelings of deep unease they stirred within him. Because it didn’t take a genius to realize that whatever big surprise was on its way would put to shame everything else that had already happened. And the fact that Ron found any humor whatsoever in the idea said all that needed to be said as to the depths of the man’s insanity. And why Thomas now hated him so.

*

Just past noon on Wednesday, September the eighth, the last piece of the building was fitted into place. The light from the red sun above could no longer shine down directly into the black maw of the pit. The dome was complete.

“It’s an affront against nature,” Thomas heard someone say.

“It’s an affront against God.” He knew who that would be, recognized the voice from directly behind him. Patricia. She with the omnipresent Bible in hand. Not surprising to hear those words leave her mouth. And he found himself having to agree with her. If the God that she worshipped did in fact exist, Thomas saw no way that He could be happy with what had been assembled here over the past several weeks. All those long, terrible days put into the construction of the thing, as bad in their own way as those marked by the various attacks which had come from the great hole in the earth over which the building now rested.

There stood the dome. Black. Rune covered. Seven archways around the base, tall enough for even the demons to walk through without bowing their heads, six of them placed equidistantly around the building, the seventh just a bit larger and facing due west.
Ready for something even taller than the demons to pass through?
Thomas did not want to imagine what sort of creature that might be. The building seemed to actually emanate darkness, if such a thing was possible. Thomas found himself constantly looking away from it, the very sight of it causing a churning sensation deep down in his guts. Despite this, however, his eyes were drawn back to it time and time again.

“A temple,” Patricia went on. “A place for concentrating power. An evil place designed for evil purposes.”

She was interrupted by the sound of Ron’s voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, gather round, gather round.” He stood before the larger, seventh archway that led into the dome, the demons standing in lines as if at attention to either side of him. The survivors approached the area a bit tentatively. No one got within a dozen or so paces of the building. This was the first time anyone had seen it complete and in full daylight. This was the first time they got to see it in all of its dark majesty.

“Now don’t be frightened,” said Ron. He was smiling, as usual. Thomas had a sudden and very powerful urge to try and knock his teeth down his throat. “Today is a most wonderful day. Our work has been completed. On time, no less. For that you are to be commended.” He clapped his hands a few times. “Come on, you deserve a round of applause.” There was a smattering of clapping in response to this. None of it sounded very enthusiastic. Ron scanned the crowd. “Thomas! Ah, there you are. Come here, my friend. Assume your rightful place beside me.”

Thomas felt a hand in his. He looked to his side to see Dana standing there. She offered a tiny smile, gave his hand a squeeze. He squeezed back.

“I just wanted everyone to know,” Ron continued, “that for the next three days there will be nothing required of you. We have finished the project early. For now, you may relax. Enjoy the companionship of your friends. Throw a party if you want. You’ve earned it. In three days time we will gather here once more. Then you will see why it was so important to finish this job on time. A very special day is approaching. I don’t want to spoil the surprise but I will say that I know all of you will be quite impressed. And proud. Yes, proud that you have been such an integral part of it all. So, in three days time I expect to see all of you here, present and accounted for. Until then…”

With that he strode toward the crowd which parted before him, let him pass through. Everyone watched as he made his way over to the repair shop where he had set up residence. Then the crowd broke and started to flow over toward the Wal-Mart parking lot. People were murmuring, speculating on what could possibly be in store for them on the day that Ron had mentioned. And, understandably, no one sounded even remotely anxious for that day to arrive.

*

Thomas decided to go home. He figured it might very well be the last time he ever had a chance to see the place. Dana came with him. They didn’t tell anyone besides Tanya where they were going. She decided to stay behind to keep an eye on things. To keep an eye on Ron, Thomas figured. To see if he was up to anything unexpected. After the sun went down and most of the others were congregated within the Wal-Mart, Thomas and Dana walked outside to Dana’s car and drove away.

But it hadn’t. There was that queasy, gut churning feeling of disorientation and then they found themselves turned around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, driving back along the section of road they’d just traveled. After a few of these experiences, Thomas called it quits. No sense making himself sick beyond recovery for the remainder of the evening.

At a little past nine o’clock they pulled up in front of the house. The place was a wreck. The wind and the rain of the storms that had rolled through in all the weeks that he’d been gone had found their way in through the broken windows and taken their toll. As he led the way inside through the open front door he saw papers, stained and wrinkled from water damage, scattered across the living room floor in the beam of the flashlight he carried. Lamps and vases had been toppled. A couple of shelves previously mounted to the walls, one of them loaded with CD’s and DVD’s, another with Julia’s figurines, had collapsed, scattering their contents across the carpeting. Throwing the flashlight’s beam around the room, Thomas saw streaks of mold and mildew marring the previously pristine white surfaces of the walls.

“At least there’s one lifeform that can survive in this world,” he said.

Upstairs, things weren’t much better. The blankets on the beds were thick with the odor of mildew. The surface of the mirror in which he’d once seen Julia’s ghost was streaked with grime. Upon first approaching the master bedroom, Thomas had been nearly overwhelmed by a cascade of memories, most of them involving the many wonderful moments he’d shared there with Julia. But there were the horrors too: the bug storm, the ghosts, Gerald’s death.

It had taken Dana’s touch upon his shoulder to give him the strength to cross the threshold. After a few minutes spent looking around the place, he set about the task of pulling the blankets off the bed, finding some clean, relatively fresh replacements in the closet down the hall. When he had finished with this small task, he declared, “I want to cover the window.”

Downstairs, he went through the garage and out the door that led into to the back yard. Past the swing set and the sturdily built doghouse with the word “Rex” over its entrance, there was an aluminum shed standing just a few feet from the wooden privacy fence that separated his and the neighbor’s property. Inside were sheets of plywood, stored there in the event of a hurricane and the windows needed protecting. With Dana’s help, he carried in one of those unwieldy planks, brought it upstairs to the master bedroom along with a toolbox he kept in the garage, then nailed the plywood into place over the broken window.

“There, that’s better,” he said when the work was done.

That night the two of them slept in that room, Thomas on one side of the bed, Dana on the other. He dreamed pleasant dreams of his wife and children and the dog. The next morning he woke up early, spent some time in the children’s rooms going through the toys and various other possessions each had collected in their short lives. As he did so his heart was heavy but he took comfort in the act, feeling a connection with his lost children during the process. At one point he sat down on the edge of Jenny’s bed, her favorite stuffed animal—a panda bear with a big, dopey smile on its face—in his hands. He stared at it for a long time until he became aware of Dana standing in the doorway watching him.

“You alright?” she asked.

He nodded, gave the toy a kiss on the head and said under his breath, “See you soon.” Then he stood and set the animal back down on the bed where he’d found it and left the room. For the last time, he figured.

“Let’s go,” he told Dana a few minutes later as they stood in the living room. She wanted to go home too so they drove the short distance to her house and pulled into the driveway. The front windows were still intact.
No one inside for the bugs to go after
, Thomas figured. The front door was locked which Dana opened with a key.

In the kitchen Thomas got to see pictures of Bill and Nina for the first time, stuck to the refrigerator with magnets along with a couple of drawings done in a child’s hand. Bill was a handsome guy with short, dark hair and a moustache, Nina a beautiful little girl with a head full of unruly brown hair.