Fever Dream

I looked at the ad, unsure if my fever-addled brain was reading it right.

"Wanted: Someone to infect me with the Covid 19 virus. Must be verified as sick, have paperwork verifying illness no older than two days from today's date, and be willing to allow me to spend time near you. Will pay five hundred dollars for eight hours in your company, contraction of virus notwithstanding. Please email me at," and their email address followed.

I had only been infected by the virus for three days, but I had been affected by the virus for the last two months. I had been laid off from work after a drop in profits had caused the store to go into bankruptcy. My boss had been very apologetic, but he still hadn't been able to keep the doors open. We had all hit the unemployment line after that, but unemployment wasn't as good as the overtime I had been making before the closure. I had been living a little outside my means, and the bills were starting to pile up. Getting sick had ended my job search, and five hundred dollars for doing nothing more than letting a stranger into my house for eight hours sounded like a dream come true.

I contacted him, and he offered to come over that very night, cash in hand.

We discussed hours, I'm a dedicated night owl, and he agreed to come over about six pm.

His knock dragged me up out of my stupor at around five fifty-eight, and I staggered up to get the door. I didn't expect to be greeted by a well-dressed man in his mid-thirties. I had expected a weirdo, maybe some disease fetishist who got off on being sick, but this guy was surprisingly well put together. He wore black slacks, a button-down shirt, no mask, and his brown hair was close-cropped with square little gold glasses that made him look like a banker. He shook my hand, something no one had done in a while, and took an envelope of money out of his pocket. He showed me the five crips, one hundred dollars bills, and I led him to the living room.

He sat in my armchair, leaning in close as I sagged back onto the couch and stared at me intently.

"So," I asked, "now what do we do?"

He shrugged, "Just do whatever you usually do. Watch tv, play video games, whatever. Hopefully, my proximity will be all it takes for me to get the disease, and I'll achieve my goal."

"I had wondered about that," I said, sneezing into a kleenex and wincing as he leaned in closer, "this disease is supposed to be pretty bad. Why exactly do you want it?"

He chuckled, "I'd tell you, but honestly, it would sound crazy."

I shrugged, "It's not like I have anything else to do but watch Netflix for the next eight hours. Tell me. It'll make the time pass."

He glanced over at my bookshelf, eyes roaming as though he were looking for something, before getting up and taking a paperback from the middle. It was a newer book, Fields of Forgone, and he nodded as he inspected the spine. He must have liked what he'd seen because he smiled and held the book out to me.

"I see you're a fan of my work. I'll sign it for you if you want me to, but my books are part of the reason I'm here."

I squinted at him, "Are you...are you, Timothy Corvin? The guy who writes the Ghost Grass series?"

He nodded, "Yup, three-time New York Times bestseller."

I gaped at him for a few seconds before asking my next question.

"Why the hell are you at my apartment trying to get sick?"

He smiled, but the smile was sad, "You could say that writing is why I'm here."

Then he sat down and made himself comfortable before telling me the strangest story I'd ever heard.

"I got sick about a month ago. It came on quickly, a cough and a fever, typical flu-like symptoms, but I assured my agent that it wouldn't be an issue. I'd finish my latest novel and have it on her desk by the end of the month. The first couple of days weren't so bad. I was still lucid, and I managed to get some work done. I was trucking right along, making good progress when the real sickness hit."

"Suddenly, I was feverish, scatterbrained, and I could hardly focus long enough to get off the couch. I spent my days in a stupor, high on cold medicine and barely coherent. My nights consisted of rolling around in a fever-fueled daze that made me question whether I was dreaming or awake. I had these dreams, you see. I say dreams because I can't remember them, but I couldn't do anything but remember them then. I would sit on my couch and mumble about them all day, reeling through their world as I tried to wrap my head around them."

I raised an eyebrow at him, "That sounds pretty bad. It sounds like you didn't get a lot done."

"Quite the contrary. The longer I raved about the story, the more I started writing about it. Not so much writing, I guess. I read through my notes the other day, and it was more like drunken ramblings. At some point, I moved on to chronicling them. I would just come to at my computer, banging away at a story, not sure what I was doing or how long I had been doing it. The stories were great, but they were so far outside of what I normally did that my incoherent brain couldn't wrap around them. As the fever started getting worse, I would slip into these fugue states and just write for hours on end. One day I came out of one and found I had an email from my agent. I had sent her a draft for one of my stories. I was so worried, these stories were weird, completely batty, and I was worried that she would drop me as a client if she read what my fever swallowed brain had been cooking up."

He took a sip from his coffee then, wetting his pipes, and my own fever-addled brain became a little impatient.

"So what did she think?"

"Oh, she loved it! She said it was the most unique thing she had read in ages and wanted to know when I would be done with it? Reading through what I sent her and the stuff I was working on before I got better, I can see what she was talking about. It is both similar to so many things and completely different. It's a timeless story that sits completely outside of the normal processes. It seems to contain two antagonists and no hero, a war with nothing but loss and stakes that didn't seem to make any sense. It was almost Lovecraftian, and I found myself as interested in hearing how it turned out as she was. That's where the problems arose."

He looked at my glass of water longingly, and I slid it across the coffee table to him. If he wanted to get sick, then more power to him. He was paying, after all, so he might as well get his money's worth. He reached out and brought it to his lips, throat working as he swallowed. I tried not to gag. There was probably backwash in that.

"My meds were quashing the fever, and the fever was what was keeping me in my altered state of mind. I was always careful never to ride it for too long, but the high was more than a little intoxicating. I would time travel in those moments, starting on my couch and coming to at my computer as I finished more pages than I'd ever done. I throttled back on my meds a little, wanting to stretch this out as long as I could, but eventually, my body started to get better. My fever abated, and my fugue states became fewer and fewer. I couldn't tap into that hidden world, and the story wasn't something I could just make up as I went along. It was unknown, unheard of, and my mind couldn't begin to tap into that place. My agent was wild to have more, wanting an ending and wanting a sequel, and that's when I started thinking about contracting it again."

I lifted an eyebrow at that, "I know that's what brought you here, that's what you told me on the phone, but I still have a hard time believing that you want this crap. It's miserable! Between the headaches and the near-constant fever, I seem to mostly exist in a state of misery. Some people are experiencing it worse than that, too. What if you get the really bad kind and are hospitalized? It seems like that could put a damper on your writing."

He shrugged, "That's the thing. Even when I'm experiencing the same symptoms as you, I still get the urge to write. I don't know if it's subconscious or what, but my brain takes over and forces my body to write. Maybe it's not even my conscious mind. Maybe it's this place that I have tapped into in my fugue state. I've had this thing three times now, ya know?"

If I'd had water at hand, I'd have done a spit take, "Three times? My God! You rarely hear of anyone getting it more than twice."

"After I got better the first time, I was struggling to keep up." he said, suddenly looking far away, "I tried faking it, but it wasn't the same. My agent started to notice. She started to send my stuff back with notes like, "I need more of the voice you had in your first drafts". I started getting desperate. She told me she had shared my notes with some of her colleagues, and they were very excited about how it would come together. So, I started putting the pieces together and decided that I needed to recreate the situation."

"You needed to get sick again," I said

He nodded, "I needed to get sick again. I started slowly, waiting in hospitals and walking around looking for sick people, but I became desperate after a while. I got lucky the first time, a chance encounter at a sick friend's house. One trip to their apartment later, and I was back where I started, feverish and coughing on my couch as I waited for the time skips to start."

"Did they?"

"Would I still be running the ad if they hadn't? Something was different this time, though. This time I was treated to some of the most vivid dreams I'd ever had. I wasn't just hearing about my two antagonists' exploits. I saw it. I watched them play their shadow games, maneuver their pieces, snatch territory and lose it again. All the while, I was chronicling them. It became a mania for me. I refused to take anything to dull the fever this time, but it didn't seem to matter. After a week, my fevers were abating, and I was back to trying to fake it. But I couldn't fake it, wouldn't even try. I needed the dreams, I needed the visions, I needed the writing fits that I never remembered. That's when I started running the ads. The lady at the paper didn't want to run them, said it was sick, but once I offered to pay her triple her going rate, she caved."

As I watched him talk about it, I reflected that he looked a little sick. Not physically, but mentally I mean. He looked like an addict describing his favorite drug. As he talked, he scratched at his arm, his face taking on a smiling rictus as he described the "visions". I began to wonder just how this disease, or maybe it was the story, had affected him. I wanted to tell him to leave for his own good, but I really did need the money.

"I've sunk nearly five thousand dollars into getting this disease, did I tell you that? Every time I post the ad, someone responds. After so many times, though, my body has built up antibodies to it, and every time I get it, it's a little bit less effective. The last time I contracted it, I barely had it a week. I was so anxious to get some work out of it that I don't think I got more than thirty pages out of the whole week."

"Thirty pages?" I gaped.

I was no writer, but that seemed like a prolific amount of work from a sick person.

"I know, so disgraceful. The first time I was nearly averaging thirty pages a day, but after the first time, I never managed it again."

"You were getting that much a day?"

His eyes glazed a little, and he didn't seem pleased with what he saw as he looked at my popcorn ceiling.

"I see them constantly. I simply can't make sense of it on my own. I can't convey something like storms battling for supremacy, tectonic plates crashing against each other as they try to change the land differently. The fugues allowed me to tap into something primal that could understand these ideas. My puny lizard brain just can't make anything out of it. You know, reading these things that I've written, understanding only enough of what I've written, scares me a little."

"How much of your book have you written?" I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.

He scratched again, seeming uncomfortable but still wanting to discuss his drug of choice.

"I have written five books. I have cataloged the lives of these two from the moment of their births to the very last encounter the two had directly."

I gaped at him. He was talking about five books in what must have been a matter of months. I couldn't even consider something like that, and I began to wonder how large they were. The page volume he talked about per day surely meant these were no small books. He didn't seem to understand where these stories were coming from either, which made them even more mysterious and unknown.

"Can you...can you tell me about them?"

He gave me a dead-eyed look, and I almost regretted asking.

"It's not something people really want to know in the end. This little experiment started as a way to write the next great fantasy series, but my agent stopped returning my emails about three weeks ago. The last two endeavors have been solely so I could learn how it ends, how we end."

"We?"

"Humanity. We are ultimately the prize that these two creatures fight over. More specifically, they fight over the right to subjugate and entertain themselves with us. We see their battles as normal, we see their battles as nothing but the changing of the seasons, but they see them as nothing short of war. I can tell you, but you won't want to know once I'm done."

I didn't really want to know anymore, but now I felt like I had to know.

In the end, my curiosity was stronger than my fear.

He spent the next ten hours telling me about the battle between the Green Man and the Pale Lady. He told me of their beginnings in Strange, their emergence and exile, and how they came to be on this plane of existence. He told me about the Brandylou, the servants of the Pale Lady, and the numerous agents of the Green Men. He told me how this green warrior was worshiped as a pagan deity, how he took his sacrifices, and how he sought out those who ran.

It's funny how ten hours can seem like a half-hour when someone is telling you about eldritch deities.

When the alarm on my phone went off, reminding me to take my meds, I realized that it was six am, and the sun was coming up.

Timothy got up, checking his phone, and seemed to realize that he'd been talking all night.

" I seemed to have gone over my time a little. Here, as promised," he said, taking out an envelope and handing it to me as he made to leave.

"Wait," I said, dropping the envelope and coming shakily up off the couch, "how does it end?"

He looked back and shrugged, "Hopefully, I’ll find out. If I do, I'll let you know."

Then he left, and I wouldn't hear from him for another three months.

Well, I'd never see him again, but he would make good on his promise.

I felt better by the end of the week, my fever breaking and my headaches getting better and better. I finally acquired a negative test and started looking for work again. I got lucky, the bar up the road was hiring, and they needed someone to start right away. They had only recently been allowed to re-open, and the bartender was working double duty with no barbacks to help out. Before I knew it, I was bussing tables and hauling kegs an old pro. I enjoyed the work, though it wasn't something I had ever done before, and it felt nice to get back to work after such a long absence.

Then, one afternoon, I got a bit of a shock. I was helping my new boss open, flipping on the TVs and preparing to tune them to one of the several sports channels we often had on, when I saw a little squib on the news that made me stop. I had caught it towards the end of the broadcast, and the name on the article made me stop in the midst of flipping channels.

"And the city is mourning the death of local writer Timothy Corvin, who died of Covid related symptoms in St Grahams this morning. Mr. Corvin, the writer of the Ghost Grass series, is survived by his father and his older sister. Services will be held Tuesday for friends and family."

I couldn't believe it. The guy had been in my house not even a month ago. Had I...had I killed him? Had he contracted his fatal disease from me? I had to sit down. I didn't know what to make of it. My boss must have noticed that something was off because he tried to send me home, wondering if I still had some latent fatigue from being sick. I told him I was fine, though, and went back to work.

As I worked, I wondered if he'd discovered the end he was looking for?

I got my answer in the mail two months later.

A package was waiting on the stoop. I hadn't ordered anything, and the return address was from Samantha Drummon. The delivery address was mine, though, so I brought it inside and opened it. Inside was a manuscript bound with twine with no title across the surface. On top of the journal was a typed note from Mrs. Drummon, informing me of her package's purpose.

"Hello. My brother requested that I send this to you if he should pass. He was very adamant that it be placed into your care. All the best."

I lifted out the journal, opening the front page baring a message written in a shaky hand.

I found the end. Let's hope it helps you after I'm gone.

I've been sitting here looking at the book for close to an hour, not sure whether I should read it or burn it. If the beings Timothy talked about have been using his infected body as a mouthpiece, I'm not sure I want to open my mind to them. This book contains their history, contains their past, present, and future, and this knowledge was gained at the cost of a life. Will they come to infect me if I subject myself to this arcane wisdom?

That knowledge scares me more than a little as I put the journal back in the box and carried it to my room.

I've decided to put it in the closet for now.

Some things are better left unknown.