The Fever

When the fever came it did not tip toe. Nor did it stalk slow circles around me like a cat playing with a mouse. It struck swiftly seizing me too quickly to decide whether I wished to fight or flee from it. Though, I suppose there is no escape from illness, only the option to try to endure it, to outlive it. If one wishes to survive such illness at all that is. However, this fever I had undoubtedly been the cause of and at the time I hadn’t been sure I had wanted to bear it at all.

It had been fast approaching the darkest day of the year when the ice had broken. I knew better. Most of my life had been spent in these woods. I knew when it was wise to cross the river and when it was not. Yet I had chosen to cross the river on an unseasonably warm day. Perhaps this will be my end, had been my only thought as I heard the ice crack away from beneath my feet. I had not lunged for the shore, instead I’d merely stood there for those few precious seconds thinking only that. It had left a scared feeling in my chest, cozying up next to the hollowness that had been inhabiting it. For in those few moments I had felt no grief over my possible demise. Instead I had felt the acceptance of an inevitability long awaited.

Then the cold water had flooded over me robbing me of breath as my instincts kicked in. Had I done this on purpose? I would wonder later. It wasn’t as though I had planned it. I hadn’t gone out that day with the plan to die. No, I had gone to hunt. Yet how many prayers had I sent up to die? To join her? I hadn’t been alive for many months now, not since her death. No, what I had been experiencing wasn’t life at all it was a waking death, a nightmare I couldn’t awaken from. Which left me with the sinking suspicion that perhaps somewhere deep down I had wanted to fall through the ice that day. Perhaps without my body’s instinctual drive to live my mind would have let me succumb to those waters.

Alas I hadn’t died. I had pulled myself to shore frozen and shaking with cold, gasping desperately to pull more oxygen into my lungs. I had sat there for a time staring at the icy waters moving where there had once only been ice. A horrible emptiness gnawing at my insides. A part of me wanted to feel something, anything, clawed and begged for it. But the other part, the part that I had been becoming more and more accustomed to, the part that scared me, welcomed the emptiness. Its better than pain, my mind would murmur. I waited to feel anything at all. I waited and waited until the cold became too much. Then I trudged shivering back to my cabin deep in the woods.

Multiple times throughout the journey I had thought the cold might claim me before I reached my cabin. It was not my home. I had no home, not anymore. She had taken all such sentiments with her when she had died.

At last I made it back to the cabin. I had immediately stripped from my clothes that were no longer wet, but entirely frozen. My skin screamed as I pried it from my body. Then I swiftly stoked the embers back into a roiling flame before I curled up in a pile of blankets in front of the fire.

My body moved about these tasks in a mechanical way. Past knowledge guiding me through the steps while my mind seemed to lack any real interest in warming me. As I sat there with nothing but my shivers, the flames, and my toxic thoughts I wondered at the way my outer cold seemed to intermingle with the one that had taken residence in my chest. The cold that had sank its claws into my soul when I had looked upon the lifeless eyes of my beloved Adeline.

I hadn’t felt any warmth until the fever came. Even that warmth was temporary. Soon I felt only cold even though my body began to sweat. The shivers became so violent my teeth clacked against one another. There was nothing I could do to make it stop. My skin became soaked with sweat and soon the blankets surrounding me were soaked as well. The fire banked as I shook too violently to even move. Yet all of these symptoms paled in comparison to when the hallucinations began.

I could see her, my love, as if she was alive once more. She was lovely gilded in light and perched on one of the faded, overstuffed chairs. Her blond hair falling out from a loose braid to frame her heart-shaped face. Green eyes, the color of pine needles stared back at me. They held so much light and happiness with just a touch of wickedness as if she knew some great secret that she would happily torture me by withholding. She had loved to play games like that.

I called out to her, begged her to come to me, but she only shook her head. Those devilish eyes of hers becoming somber. Her voice morose as she whispered, “Come to me, Danny.” Yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach her. My bones shook with the effort to go to her. I called her name even as my voice became hoarse, and then mouthed it after I lost my voice altogether. “Adeline,” I called both a desperate plea and a prayer, “Adeline!”

Somewhere deep inside I wondered if perhaps now my prayers would be answered. If death might be here at my doorstep to steal me away. Alas I did not feel death come for me. Just as no one came to give me aid. I had secluded myself here far from anyone and everything. With the grief eating me alive I hadn’t been able to stand the living.

It could have been hours or days, but at last my eyes opened and no shivers wracked my body, just as no Adeline sat upon a chair watching me. The cabin was empty and the fire long since gone cold. I moved carefully testing my weakened muscles. My skin was covered in the residue of my sweat and the blankets beneath me were still damp to the touch. My legs wobbled slightly as I rose to my feet. A question crossed mind. What had happened? I thought dazedly. Fever, I reminded myself, I had a fever.

On weak legs I made my way to the lone window. I was unsure what drew me there, but my feet brought me there, nonetheless. It was night. The moon hung, a lonely crescent, in the darkest night I’d ever beheld. The air seemed to hum with an energy I didn’t understand. I was still standing there, entranced by the velvet darkness of this strange night, when I heard the scream. It seemed to echo through the night, joining and intermingling with that strange hum in the air. It was a woman’s scream. I was sure of it, full of pain and fright. My fever addled brain could only call to mind one source of that scream. Adeline. I sprinted from the cabin without another thought, my formerly weak legs carrying me without complaint as I dashed unprepared into the woods.

There were no thoughts in those moments of logical things like weapons, shoes, or even light. My only thought was of Adeline. Why would she be in the woods on a night as dark as this? Why would she leave me when I was in such desperate need of her? Something had to be terribly wrong.

Despite the lack of another scream my feet seemed to know right where to go. They carried me deep into the woods unmindful of the cold or any logical sense that told me it couldn’t be Adeline and I should turn back. My feet dashed along carrying me into a clearing where they suddenly stopped. I was breathing heavily from the run, but my breath caught at what my eyes beheld.

A fox sat in the clearing. Instantly I knew this fox had been the source of that scream. Its white coat glittered just like the snow in the vague moonlight struggling to breakthrough the trees. But there was something terribly wrong with this fox.

I took a careful step closer squinting in the darkness to see him better. There was darkness in his pelt. Darkness saturating the ground around him. Blood. So much blood. His bone peaked through his pelt on his front shoulder. The fox’s chest moved up and down at a frantic rate his body trembling with both pain and fright. Yet he made no sound. Made no attempt to flee. He just sat there with the blackest eyes I’d ever beheld, watching me.

I cursed myself for not even bringing a knife to end this poor creature’s pain. The need to do something overcame me. My eyes began scouring my surroundings surely there had to be something here I could use. Even as I did this my mind began to wonder after the creature to inflict such a wound. What could have left a wound like that? And what manner of creature would have simply let the fox live in pain instead of devouring it? Chills began racing up my spine and not from the cold. All the while the fox continued to watch me with strangely knowing eyes.

That was when I saw the eyes. They watched me from across the clearing yellow and glowing and far too high up to be any natural woodland animal. The creature had to be taller than myself. Its shadow loomed in the trees. It was too dark to see clearly. My heart began to pound as terror clutched me. I froze, a deer in the headlights. The eyes blinked at me, once, twice, three times and then it lunged.

As if someone had cut the cords that had been holding me in place, that had been tethering me to this very world, I flew. My feet moved faster than I had ever thought possible, my heart hammering somewhere near my throat. Prey. I was prey and the hunter was on my heels.

It was in these frantic moments that I realized perhaps I did not want to die. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for my end. So, I pushed myself harder, I ran faster. My feet little more than a blur against the woodland floor. Not yet, I begged the world, the gods, anyone that would hear my plea. Please not yet.

All prayers of joining Adeline were gone. Life. I wanted life. A life I no longer had. Nevertheless, I wanted it, needed it, craved it. I’m not done yet, I cried with my mind unsure if it was too late for such sentiments.

Light, that was light ahead. My cabin loomed just ahead its warmth flickering through the trees. Please, please, please, I continued to plead as I dashed through the door that I had left open, slamming it behind me. Shutting the creature out, I hoped.

“Alive,” I panted to myself, wonder in my voice. “I am alive,” the gnawing emptiness was gone. In its stead raced the silent thrills of terror that hummed through my body. Forcing me to feel here, to feel present, to feel truly alive.

I will bear the years, I promised myself and any of the gods that might spare me as I leaned against the door. My chest still moved up and down rapidly, my breath coming in sharp pants. My eyes moved to the fire, where the blankets I had formerly been entwined in lay. Almost as if pulled there by some unseen force.

What I saw there made my breaths halt. A sinking fear settling over me, so different from the lively terror I had felt moments ago. Confusion and denial struggled for purchase in my mind. But both were outweighed by the words that echoed in my head. Perhaps I had realized these desires too late.