The Ghastly Cold

We were supposed to be on vacation with Maya’s parents. Then I caught the flu. I knew it was the flu because it absolutely floored me the day after that pesky sensation of sandpaper crawled into the back of my throat. Not wanting to ruin my wife’s long-awaited vacation, I told her to go on her own. We both knew that on the rare occasion I get a mild respiratory infection I go through the trenches and I really didn’t feel like messing it up with being a mop of a man. So, as my wife left me to be with her parents, I prepared myself for a week in the deepest pits of hell.

The usual symptoms of influenza hit me like a truck, headaches, the bone breaking - muscle torching lethargy coursed in waves throughout my body. Smashing into my being repeatedly like a sea of jagged rocks. Snot stuffed my nose to the point of me being unable to exert myself at all without feeling like my lungs sinking into the waters of an arctic ocean. With each coughing fit, glass shards traveled up and down my throat and bronchioles.

These were my days; the nights were worse. Remarkably so. Starting at sunset, I’d get freezing, even if I had really warm clothes on and the temperature wasn’t anywhere near freezing. I’d shiver and shake as if I had fallen into a room-sized fridge. Having no fever. I’d just get cold, eerily so.

Sleep became a battle because of my congested nose and occasional coughing. I had a hard time falling asleep, but staying asleep was even harder. Especially after I heard whispering all around me the first night after Maya left. It was faint and almost nonexistent. Even so, I could hear it. Every now and again, dragging me out of the realm of dreams and into reality. At some point, I have had enough and opened my eyes, or well, tried to.

The thing is, I couldn’t see anything, and I couldn’t move. I started panicking once I realized I got stuck inside an invisible prison of darkness, within my body, within my head. Wrestling harder and harder with my own bodily functions to shake the force keeping me imprisoned. Nothing but a searing pain traveling through my upper body and anxiety came through. By the time I actually opened my eyes, it already became morning.

My head was spinning, my heart was racing, and my ears were ringing. I felt myself crushing from above and it took me a few moments to actually dare to get out of bed. Fearful I might fall, I didn’t move until I stopped feeling lightheaded.

That day I felt even worse than the previous. My entire body ached, and I was dying to sleep, but every time I dozed off. Something jolted me awake from my stupor.

This was only the beginning of my fever dream interwoven into a fever dream.

When evening came, the eerie cold returned with it. This time, even before I headed to bed, I could hear the whispering all around me. It was still faint and sporadic, but I could still differentiate it from the evening’s silence. There were many distinct voices coming from all around me. Some were sympathetic, others laughing, while others were deadpan. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I had heard them clearly enough.

Failing to find anyone around me, inside the house and outside, I started feeling bad about myself. The flu had gotten me to the brink of sanity. How pathetic is that? It’s just the flu. In about five or six days, I should be fine. I tried reassuring myself. With that, my anxiety and the whispering seemed to die out as the evening hours turned to night.

Once again, as I was trying to sleep, the whispering returned. This time, it was slightly louder, and I found the strength to open my eyes. Seeing the strange shadows circle around my bed wasn’t comforting once I realized I couldn’t move. Cold waves of sheer fear crashed into my body as I alternated between watching the strange shadows dance and sway around my room and pure impenetrable darkness.

Waking up was worse that day. I felt as if I had been drowning all night and my legs and arms burned while I tried making sense of my room as it appeared double and swinging from side to side.

The following day, my symptoms seemed to get better, even though my throat still burned and my nose was so stuffed I had trouble breathing every now and again, and my coughing was terribly painful. Not to mention the fact, I got stuck in the dusk between wakefulness and sleep for most of the day.

The evening wasn’t any better. The whispering returned with a vengeance coming into my life on gusts of eerie icy wind. Knowing it was just my tired mind messing with me, I tried my hardest to ignore the noise, and mostly; I did. It only became irritating when I went to bed finally.

Eventually, the noise faded, and I finally fell asleep, for a bit.

I ended up waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of whispering and muffled laughter all around me. Refusing to bother with the strange mental tricks my mind was playing on me. I just laid there, waiting for the sleep paralysis to wear off so I could return to my sleep. That, of course, didn’t happen - instead, the feeling of hot iron nails digging into the side of my neck forced me to jolt. I know I’ve opened my eyes, but there was nothing there. Nothing at all. I couldn’t move, but I felt something pressed against me, clawing into my skin. The burning pain traveled down my neck and spread to my arm and chest.

This time around, the pain felt too real to be a phantom sensation. It was so real it even eclipsed the panic bubbling inside of me. No matter how much I strained or struggled, I couldn’t shake the burning sensation off. Whatever pinned me down, I couldn’t shake it off. The fire spread slowly but methodically all over my body, igniting everything it touched in abysmal flames. Eventually, the pain became so unbearable, my tormented scream filled the room as I woke up feeling dazed and lost with every damn muscle burning with lactic acid and a radiating pain bouncing between my back and chest, my throat full of knives as my voice cracked from the strain.

I remember a little of that day. I can sum up that day as a terrifyingly terrible mixture of a pounding headache and the sensation of my lungs collapsing under the air pressure of any deep breath I was trying to take.

One moment I am laying on the couch and the next I lay on the floor of some ashen dead forest. A massive eye-shaped moon overlooked me above the claw-like branches of the decaying, leafless trees.

I was too cold to feel afraid or surprised or to feel any kind of emotion, really. Even attempting to reason my predicament as I stared at the empty firmament above me seemed impossible while I drifted between the flickering moments of unconsciousness. For the first time in days, I was alone, truly alone, without the shadows and without the whispering, and with no distractions.

I was alone with the ghastly cold that made each breath of mine feel as if I was being stabbed with a rusted spear.

I stayed there motionless, looking above at the alternating environment around me; shifting ever so drastically between the familiar monotony of my living room and the soothing murkiness of the pale trees of the silent forest. The only thing that persisted with me is the sensation of ghastly cold that followed me everywhere my mind took me. Growing more invasive and more oppressive by the moment. Slowly but methodically working its way into my body before attempting to break my bones and blanketing me in an ocean of frigid isolation.

It almost succeeded because for a moment everything seemed to disappear and become a black sea of a pure void in which I floated aimlessly until a bright light came from somewhere, from everywhere enveloping me and pulling me out of the ghastly cold and into the warm embrace of my sister, Vicky, who was clutching at me with joyful tears at a place I didn’t recognize at first.

My head was spinning as my eyes slowly adjusted to the bright lights all around me. Struggling for air and with every cell of my body screaming in pain, I hugged Vicky as she began expressing her relief that I was alive and that I actually found the strength and had the wit to call her. I remember nothing about that, but apparently, I somehow called Vicky before collapsing. She said she found me unresponsive and burning with a fever.

Turns out, my lungs were overflowing with liquid, and I was dead for a couple of minutes. That’s what the doctors say, anyway. Something tells me I’ve died more than once in this past week and that this last death was the closest I had gotten to drowning in the ghastly cold sea that awaits us all.

A part of me thinks the ghastly shadows that flocked around me were just trying to welcome me to my new home.