Haemoglobin

For many years I had a problem. Every now and again I would wake up feeling like a truck ran over my body, crushing every last bone in my body and tearing my insides out. I’d wake up dizzy and weak, barely to swing my feet out of the bed. During these days, my neck would hurt like I had strained it, regardless of what I did in the previous day or how I slept. I’d wake up feeling like I’m made of paper, my neck was sore and I’d feel depressed and lacking in energy. These bouts of strange weakness would occur over and over, ranging anywhere from three days of weakness to a couple of weeks. These episodes were incredibly random, and between each episode, I was feeling pretty normal.

Few years into my dealing with this so strange illness, I was diagnosed as anemic. My red blood cell count was low, that is. I still remember the doctor’s face when he was told my symptoms usually occurred in severe form during the episodes of illness. He seemed confused and unsure of what was going on with me. The tests, however, showed that my red blood cell count was low, and that’s why they went with me. I was treated with iron, which, of course, did not really help. The episodes of weakness and low blood count kept recurring. Instead, I just learned to live with my mysterious variant of anemia. One day I was a normal guy doing everyday things, the next I’d be bedridden feeling like I had the life sucked out of me.

This went on for years, and I was almost comfortable with this sort of life, not like I had any choice in the matter. At some point, I took a turn for the worst and the episodes started turning more frequent and far worse than they had been before. It had gotten so bad there’s about a five or six-year period in my life which I remember nothing about. A piece of memory that was torn out of the motherboard. A chunk of my life turned completely blank. I remember lying in bed a lot with my body feeling like it’s about to turn into dust while I still watched. The illness had gotten so bad I became depressed to the point of pretty much self-isolating because I couldn’t handle anything that required any emotion or effort.

Even when I wasn’t having an episode, everything seemed too bright and too loud. The world moved too fast; people were too close, too touchy. My skin was always cold. I couldn’t handle light at all. I hated it. It burned my eyes and made my skin feel like I’m about to catch fire. I couldn’t smell or taste things very well, it seemed to me like everything had been stripped off of flavor. At this point my depression turned into self-loathing and hated myself for supposedly being “too weak”, I’ve hated myself so much I refused to look into mirrors. I went for god knows how long without looking into a mirror, or thinking about how I look or anything, really. I had even neglected my dental health, something I’m paying for now that a few teeth fell out after decaying away.

My body felt like it wasn’t even my own, I felt like I had been a passenger inside this foreign vessel. Destined to cruise in it as a prison until the day it crumbles and turns into sand. Even when I wasn’t having an episode, I wanted to not live anymore. Fortunately, the persistent pessimistic feeling of monotonous and pointless existence that gnawed at the back of my mind didn’t dictate I should kill myself. It merely made everything feel as if the world was going to crash into me and grind me into dust, ending my miserable existence.

All of that came to a screeching halt one morning when I woke up feeling like a building had fallen on top of me. Crushing me beneath its colossal weight and breaking every last organ and fiber within my already decaying cells. As soon as I opened my eyes, the room spun like a whirlwind. The moment I raised my head a sharp pain shot through my neck and shoulder, and my stomach turned violently causing me to throw up all over the floor. That morning and I still remember it clearly. I didn’t get out of bed, I crawled out of bed. In the literal sense of the word crawl, I couldn’t feel my legs or anything below my aching stomach. For the first time in God knows how long, I felt emotion. A wave of cold something coursed through my entire body, jolting it awake. As I slid crudely out of my bed and fell onto the floor, my heartbeat increasingly got louder in my ears. In a matter of moments, I was hyperventilating, and my body was on fire, almost. Everything in my line of sight swayed left and right. I thought I was dying, something squeezed where my heart should be. Squeezed painfully hard. I remember coughing this painful dry cough as I scrambled to my feet.

Fear is a hell of an emotion.

I wobbled my way into the bathroom, groaning and heaving as the ever-increasing waves of adrenaline bashed against my nervous system. The adrenal flood strained my body to the point of miniature muscle spasms. In the bathroom, I stared into the mirror.

I felt my heart skip a bit, my lungs contracted and my muscles froze. A cold sweat made its way down the back of my neck, raising every last hair in its path. Everything suddenly started making sense.

In the mirror, staring back at me was a corpse.

The creature in the mirror vaguely looked like I remembered myself to look, but it was far thinner. Its lips twisted into a mixture of a confused impression and a snarl – exposing two rows of oddly long yellowed human teeth. I caught a glimpse of the gums in the upper jaw, they were swollen, bright pink, and clearly receding. The creature’s skin tone was deathly pale, and its hair was long, haggard, and graying at the edges. The skin of this thing in the reflection was stretched awfully over its bony frame and its face painfully skeletal. The eyes were sunken and almost lightless. Cold, unmoving, staring. Patches of dirt covered its torso and when a piece of dry soil fell out of its hair and right in front of my eyes something clicked.

Thinking back, I can’t believe I didn’t find it odd that I had soil all over my body, then again hindsight is always 20/20.

The cobwebs in my brain were partially cleared, and some gears started turning again. However, years of neglect left their mark and some neurons definitely were short circuiting. It took me a while but I figured out that the figure in the reflection was indeed me. However, instead of realizing that my awful condition was a result of an illness and years of mental and physical decline, I thought it was something else.

Fear turned into excitement to the point of me tearing up for the first time in ages. The universe blessed me with a eureka moment and surmised I must be a corpse. At that moment, in my mind, I thought I was in fact dead – that had explained the strange bouts of illness and the dullness of everything in my life. I wasn’t feeling alive because obviously, I wasn’t actually alive.

I’ve spent the rest of that day trying to figure out how I became an undead abomination. Obviously with little success, but somehow, I came to the conclusion that I am not really dead – instead just trapped in a nightmare. One I must escape somehow. That led to the idea that I had to get hurt to wake up. After all, people wake up after they get hurt in a dream or in real life while sleeping. That led me to walk over to the kitchen, still feeling like a rag doll on a roller coaster, place my hand on the stove, and light it up.

Of course, my hand burned, and of course, it hurt but the pain wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. Even though I moved it right away, just as the fire licked it, I still wasn’t convinced of being alive. That being said, I thought I was still thinking I was trapped in some hellish nightmare. Seeing this, I figured my best way to “wake up” was to kill myself “in the dream”. After some deliberation, I figured I should do that on the 28th of December 2012. Simply, because everyone was acting like the world is going to end but we all knew it wasn’t. It was just a matter of sarcasm and convenience, plus that specific date had a full moon.

I’ve spent the next three months refusing to do anything other than sitting and staring at walls. I hardly ate, in fact. I’ve starved myself for days at a time before my natural instincts took over and I was forced to eat. I could never stop drinking water, and even then, I didn’t notice it was wrong for a corpse to get thirsty.

The illness came and went as always during these three months, my health deteriorated even further because I refused to shower or eat as much as I should’ve. I kept staring at the mirror from time to time and each time I looked like I was closer to start decaying alive. I’d cut myself occasionally and watch as very little blood trickled out. In my head, that made sense since my blood was basically frozen in my veins. Very little blood could get out. I couldn’t even notice the fact that these cuts were very superficial because of a lack of strength on my part. Bruises would pop up in random places from time to time, and my skin got stretched even further. I was starting to turn ghastly pale. The one time I got out of my house during that period was to buy my cat, Attila, some cat food.

Friday, 21st December 2012 came, the world didn’t end. I was sure mine was going to end in a week. The one I thought was fictional.

A week later, I drafted my will, it was pathetic. I hardly remember what I wrote, other than the fact that for some reason, I mentioned Attila in there. After doing that, I passed out, clutching the knife I intended to slice my veins with before hanging myself. I’d even prepared my own little homemade gallows before then. Speaking of passing out, all that abuse led me to develop awful insomnia, one from which I still suffer, years later. My sleeping schedule was erratic, random, and very limited. Every slightest noise wakes me up, and my sleeping habits are still over the place.

During my sleep, I felt something climb on top of me and straddle me. Something eerily cold. I tried opening my eyes, but I seemingly could not. Everything was pitch black. Something was shifting its weight back and forth on top of my pelvic region. Something ice-cold. Even through my pants, I could feel the frigid touch. Absolutely exhausted by the constant lack of sleep, I nearly passed out again. I would’ve had it been for a soft moan that filled my ears.

My heart sank. I wasn’t with anyone in ages. I hadn’t gone out of the house in months. I didn’t speak to anyone in a very long time. No one should’ve been there. This shouldn’t have been happening. I ran my hand across the bed until my cold fingers touched something even colder than they were. Skin, but it was icy. An icy chill ran down my core as another soft moan escaped into the void. Something physical was straddling me and using me as a living sex toy. Luckily, my libido was dead. I opened my eyes again, only to realize there was a bony hand pressed against my face. It was almost blue, and the fingers were so cold and stiff they felt more like claws than fingers. I wanted to scream, but I could not. I was frozen in place.

My heartbeat rose again, and I felt the adrenaline flood my nervous system once more. Wave after wave of near-boiling blood coursed through my body. My heartbeat became unbearably fast. The thing’s grinding became more forceful and feverous. It was emitting strange choked noises of pleasure while I scrambled with my hand to find my knife. I could barely maintain a grip on it because the sudden rush of adrenaline made me shake. The bed croaked underneath me. I could still barely move my limbs, but the frozen finally moved from my face and traced its way down to my chest.

Whatever was on top of me had the shape of a pale blue-skinned woman. The full moon shone all over her frame, revealing her in full inhuman glory. She cocked her head back with a thick, bushy, disheveled long hair covering her pallid face. Even through her thick bushy locks, I could see her throat was covered in red. Her odor finally reached me. She reeked of rot and wet soil. I must’ve gagged loudly because she stopped moving and lowered her head to face me.

I had almost suffered a heart attack seeing the freakishly long fangs in her red-stained mouth and her misted sunken eyes. Smiling she grasped at my throat. Her grip was unbelievably powerful, and I gasped for air as she started moving her hips again at an ever-increasing speed, her smile never fading from her shriveled face. Fear was burning me from the inside out, my muscles and joints ached and my legs started spasming causing me to scream like a dying animal. Soon enough she was losing herself in the pleasure again. As she started gurgling, seemingly reaching a climax, her head dropped, an expression of fear written all over her mug. Her grip around my throat loosened and the black liquid trickled out of her mouth, a few cold droplets landed on my face, making me wince. She fell, limp, onto the floor.

While she was nearing an orgasm, I managed to stab her.

The encounter with this creature knocked some sense into me, whatever she was – she was a corpse. I wasn’t that.

I spend the rest of the night staring at the remains of the carcass, unable to remove my eyes away from her pallid form. At sunrise, instead of waking up from my nightmare, “in the real world”, I’ve come to realize I was never a dream. I chopped off her head just in case and burned the body and the head separately. Just to make sure I would never end up in a nightmare like this again.

I’ve gotten better since the illness disappeared – my blood is surprisingly healthy now. My mental state has gotten far better than before, probably as a result of better physical health and better circulation. I am never cold anymore, and my senses are wholly functional again. I’m aware I’m not a corpse or anything of the sort. I was the meal ticket of a blood-sucking corpse.

That raises the question if this thing was technically alive, and I am alive and we’re all alive. What is the fucking difference between life and death? Sometimes I still wonder what this is indeed, just some kind of hellish dream and I will soon awake?