The Hell Season by Ray Wallace Page A

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