Free The Hell Season by Ray Wallace Page B

tired. And afraid. No booze in him. No drugs, mood enhancing or otherwise. He wanted companionship and wished that Dana was there. Or Gerald, the old man he had only known so briefly. The old man that he had killed. Quite inadvertently, of course, but killed nonetheless. Just another burden upon his psyche, one he wasn’t sure he could carry.
    A general fatigue consumed him, physically and mentally. Spiritually? Was such a thing possible? He didn’t know, but if so then he was exhausted in that way too, as tired as a person could be. And he hurt, pretty much everywhere he could hurt. Something for the pain, he would take that and nothing else. He made his way through the dark house, flashlight in hand, went upstairs to the bedroom he and Julia had so recently shared, stood in the doorway, afraid to even look inside. But he had to. He needed blankets and pillows, not to mention somewhere safe to pass the remainder of the dark hours. A change of clothes would be nice. He shined the light into the room, over toward the open closet door, was relieved to see that Gerald’s body was no longer there. Gone, just like the bugs and the snakes, he supposed. There were the old man’s clothes, lying in a dark and crumpled heap on the floor. Exactly where the man himself had been lying the last time Thomas had seen him. And there was the broken bedroom window with the wind swirling in through it. Easy enough to picture Gerald’s remains carried away on that wind once they had dried up and crumbled to dust.
    With a sigh Thomas entered the room. He changed into fresh socks and underwear, a gray t-shirt and matching sweatpants as quickly as his aching body would let him. In the closet he found the box with the ammunition in it and reloaded the gun. Then he pulled the blankets and pillows from the bed and made his way into the bathroom. There he tossed the objects pilfered from the bed into the bathtub, went out and grabbed a chair which he used to prop underneath the bathroom’s door handle. After swallowing a couple of Ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet, he climbed into the tub, set his handgun on the closed toilet lid and turned off the flashlight. As he lay there Thomas thought about his parents, wondered how they were doing up there in Pittsburgh. Had they been taken too? Was the house where they had lived for all these years sitting there empty, now nothing more than a museum filled with all the artifacts of the life they had shared together? With no way of contacting them, he couldn’t know for sure. He tried to picture them sitting in the living room, watching some evening television show, making the occasional good natured comment to one another. But the image wouldn’t hold, faded into a vision of a dark and lifeless room within a dark and lifeless home. So thinking, he fell asleep. He did not dream.
     
     
    CHAPTER 4
     
    Thursday, June 24
     
    I remember as a child going through a brief phase when I was quite fascinated with “the unexplained.” I found myself perusing books covering such topics as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, El Chupacabra, UFO’s, shadow creatures and the like. Horror comics and movies—many of which I was too young to be viewing so my friends and I would sneak into the local theater to see them—introduced me to such creatures as vampires, werewolves, and mummies. The Creature Feature shown on Saturday afternoons, starring such actors as Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, only fueled the fires of my adolescent imagination. I couldn’t get enough. I remember begging my mother to please get me the Time Life series on the Unexplained and when she finally relented and the first issue arrived in the mail, I spent the evening reading it from cover to cover and then endured another all-too-common night where I slept very little if at all.
    I was particularly drawn to tales of hauntings and disembodied spirits. For here, surely, was proof that there was a soul and that it lived beyond the death of the