Absolute Zero

## **Absolute Zero** *by BloodySpaghetti*

Now this one's going to sound a little weird, but I am kind of Influenza-phobic, specifically. I am not a germaphobe or anything, but I am absolutely mortified of the Flu. Ever since I came down with the virus two years ago. There wasn't anything unusual to that particular infection, I went through a myriad of headaches, nauseas, coughing and sneezing fits and harsh bouts with high fever. The fever would not leave me be when I was down with the Flu. It was pretty bad, I was pretty much incapacitated, shackled to my bed by my own immune system that was trying to bake the viral invaders inside my body alive. After a couple of days of laying hopelessly in bed, after my over-the-counter meds had failed me, I decided it was a good idea to cool off in a nice cold shower.

Boy, oh boy, when you have a fever that high, even taking a walk to the stool might seem as taxing as running a Marathon. Luckily, mine is a 3/4 Bath. By God, making that walk from the bedroom to the bathroom was the hardest thing I had had to do back then. Once I got out of bed, I was instantly attacked by a vertigo like dizziness that make everything, including my body below the neck feel as if it's spinning. My head was pounding, every muscle in my body was throbbing with pain. This short walk down the hallway felt like an eternity. Eventually though, I managed to get myself into the bathroom. I undressed, shoved a plastic chair into the shower booth and dropped onto it myself. I idly yanked the booth door shut and turned on the coldest water I could. The sweet release brought upon by the freezing water crushing down all over my exposed burning dermis came quickly.

It was so refreshing that I closed my eyes and sighed a long sigh of relief.

I just set there, enjoying the feeling of heat finally escaping my body with my eyes closed, and the barrage of water started slowing down for some reason. At first, I did not even notice it but soon enough it became quite obvious that something was wrong with the flow of water coming out of my showerhead. I opened up my eyes to see what was wrong only to find a complete and utter darkness surround me. Somehow forgetting about the horrendous pain my body was in, I jolted upwards to a standing position and began to feel myself all over, every organ was intact. I made sure to rub my eyes in case my brain was just fucking with my vision, but everything remained completely dark. I even touched my own eyeball for the sake of escaping this darkness. The contact between my visual organ and my finger produced a burning sensation but it did not make the perpetual blackness go away. Panic set in, and I could feel my breaths grow shallower and quicker as chills ran down my body. My first reaction was to scream for help, thinking that perhaps my wife or children would hear me out and shake me out of this state. Scream I did and my voice only faded away into what seemed to be endless space of nothing. I tried moving around, hoping to feel the walls of my bathing room.

No matter which way I went, or how much I moved I could not reach anything solid for a while, not to mention that the feeling of me walking inside some sort of goo did not make it any better, not to mention I wasn't feeling a solid ground beneath me either. I moved about kicking and screaming until I felt myself bump into something solid yet mushy. I had began feeling my way around the object until I could feel something like wiggling endings at one end of the object as I was trying to figure out what the object was. A deafening wail filled the space, coming from behind me. Startled, I quickly turned around with my arms in front of my face, but there was nothing there, just more of that endless void. Panic started turning into outright fear and I began cursing and screaming once more. Then a bright light came, it was some sort of luminescent object that flew over my head.

It illuminated the area enough for me to make out the details of my surroundings. I was stuck in some seemingly endless space, kind of submerged inside some liquid substance and that object that I was trying to figure what it was.

Well that was a severed arm.

Imagine my reaction, I screamed at the top of my lungs and started trying to run away, but the thick liquid wouldn't let me make me much progress. I began wondering whether I was dying or if my brain was playing some tricks on me. This couldn't be fever delirium, could it? The sight of something moving in the thick liquid made me stop thinking. I saw something. Something huge move in that thing. I could make out three or four humps rising and falling in and out of that endless sea of blackness. This thing was on it's way to me.

I've decided pushing forward as far as possible from that thing, wishing myself to be just asleep in the shower, suffering from some sort of fever induced nightmare, I kept on moving on and on and I encountered nothing for the most part, by this point the light was gone. I was showered with fear by this point, and even forgot about the fact that I was ill, all of my mental focus was mustered on escaping this black hole of a space. After what seemed like long minutes of moving, I bumped into something mushy yet solid once more, this time it was larger. I brushed it aside and kept on moving, only to bump into more of these things. Hoping not to find another dismantled body part I just kept on pushing forward, not knowing even where I'm trying to go.

The wail came again, louder than the previous time, it froze me in my tracks. I was startled once again, I was trying to recollect myself but then I felt something move beneath me. Something stirred the liquid I was in.

A bright flash of light exploded like a Supernova above my head exposing a legion of dismembered, bloodied, brutalized body parts. Bisected halves of a human body, torsos, limbs, clusters of guts. Every kind of bodily part and organ was scattered around me, just floating there. Some of the bodies were still twitching as though they were alive, that's when I saw a head float by me, I could make out the messy brown hair and the spine was still attached to it. The head slowly shifted inside the liquid as the waters of this Styx moved it towards me, revealing my face, my bloodied face frozen with an expression of pure terror upon it, forever.

I did not feel anything about it though, there were no emotions running through my mind at that moment like there should've been, I mean, if anyone is to see a severed head they should be disgusted, revolted, upset, scared, something... I, I did not feel any sort of new emotion though, nothing new but the already existing almost-existential fear that was running rampant through my system came to fill my mind at the sight of my own severed head spine floating by me.

Completely nothing.

I didn't have the time to do anything as the light was fading, but I did notice something. A huge, empty, black, unmoving eye was staring at me from below.

I didn't have the time to react, the light was gone, sharp pain engulfed the perimeter of my midsection and everything went completely black, but before everything faded out again, I could see something moving in the liquid once again.

At this moment, I was certain this dream or hallucination of mine was about to end and I felt myself relaxing as everything turned into real nothingness and all feeling had slipped from my grasp.

It was far from over, I remember opening my eyes, I guess, into a new world of pitch darkness, I could feel it, I could feel the rage building up in me so quickly that I thought I was going to explode and so I've begun screaming and thrashing around, but nothing came.

Nothing as in really nothing.

No sound, no sight, no touch, no smell, no taste.

Absolute zero, absolute zero data input was being made, there was no informational interaction between my being and its surroundings. I couldn't feel anything externally, nothing at all, but internally. Oh boy, that, this moment is when I truly came to understand what it is like to be terrorized. This so-called feeling, I call it feeling because there is no human word to describe this, this feeling of nothingness. That is the true feeling of terror. Monks and what have you tend to describe the state of nothingness as transcending the material world, well, they must've never experienced actual nothingness because it's like having a sort of very vague sensation of your brain being saw apart, one neuron at a time. It is absolute hell. I recall even the feeling of utter terror going away and being replaced by endless empties. This came about with a sort of spiritual stimulus that can be summed up as a scratch you cannot itch away for a lack of a better term. When this feeling started crawling out of my brain and to the rest of my body, I tried scratching at my arm, just to provoke some feeling, any kind of feeling.

Nothing came of it.

This so called spiritual sense of a need for actual stimuli was slowly being replaced by an unbearable pain. I felt as if my body was being torn apart; My limbs were torn out of their sockets, my muscles torn into pieces, ligaments torn like broken seams, I could feel as if my skin was being torn off as if was a cloth. I could swear I was seeing my whole life flash in front of my eyes as I was drowning in this indiscernible pain and even that, even that was torn away from me. I experienced my memories, my knowledge, my conscious being erased from my brain, as if it was being shredded into tiny specs of dust until nothing remained, my internal sensations were gone as well, there was nothing but the primordial darkness.

I opened my eyes to find myself sitting under my shower head with cold water still blasting all over my burning skin. I felt the heat, I felt again, I felt everything. I felt my arm burn like a son of a bitch. Turns out I did claw at it, there were five cuts on my arm, they were kind of deep. I washed myself clean as quickly as I could and I stumbled out of the bathroom. Upon leaving the bathroom, I noticed the clock hanging on the wall, it said 17:35.

I could feel the cold sweat running down my back, I entered at bathroom at five and a half, and I couldn’t have fallen asleep as even when at my worst, I take at least ten minutes to fall asleep. I don't know what it was, I've never met anyone with an experience similar to mine, and trust me, I've looked all over. It wasn't a dream, and it was way too real to be a fever hallucination, this was something from the depths of the mazes of the monolith that is my mind. This was something dark that lives inside of me, some so unholy that it is never allowed to come out, it probably managed to pound its way through the gates that kept it away from my aware self, my subconscious that is.

One thing is certain, I will never be able to forget about the existence of this Leviathan that dwells inside the darkest corners of the Labyrinth that is my brain, for the scars on my arm will never allow me. I am writing this because my kid came down with something last night, and my wife should be back with her from the doctor's any moment, I hope my sweet little angel doesn't bring the Flu back home.