Craig Sautter

Fever

My fever seemed to begin with a bite by a small red insect, a spider of some kind, I thought at first, because of its many rapidly moving little legs. Except this creature possessed four intricately diaphanous wings so that when I felt its sharp sting and instinctively brought my right hand up against my left upper-arm to crush it in retaliation, it quickly flew away through the semi-darkness toward a night-light near the oak floor on the other side of my bedroom where it watched vindictively for its effects to take hold, but not before I caught sight of its two searing scarlet pupils bulging out from a pair of tiny egg-yoke yellow eyeballs. At the time I tried to think nothing more of it. But the fire of its sting and the mendacity of the insect’s attack made me angry, then queasy, and it was all I could do to return to reading my French detective mystery before switching off my reading lamp and falling into disturbed sleep. I cannot even now remember whether the dapper Paris police commissioner, Monsieur Bouillion, had knocked on the secret dungeon door of the villainous Garion Conard, behind which he hoped to discover the young and beautiful kidnapped victim, Mademoiselle Camille Dubreuil, who recently had inherited a vast estate from a distant uncle in the southern provinces, making her easy prey for ransom, an excellent mystery I had hoped to continue.

Perhaps, I, too, had been knocking madly on that hidden door just before I awoke in the middle of the night writhing in incredible pain that had made me whimper in my somnolent repose. In the darkness of the room, with no light except that which still shown from my wall bulb, I felt my upper arm pulsating, and I discerned by touch that it had swelled to twice its normal bulk. I gave out a pathetic cry and determined to rush to my bathroom to apply some sort of hydro-cortisone ointment, discovered that I was unable to move my legs, even a millimeter. The venom from the dastardly insect’s bite had partially paralyzed me from my waist down, and I was unable to snap my lower limbs to attention, despite my strident commands. Then I remembered the red varmint and its malicious assault, looked toward the night lamp and to my horror saw a swarm of tiny red insects crawling out from behind the electric socket. I felt a tide of panic rising within me in uncontrollable turbulence. I tried to scream out for help but no sound would come from my swollen throat and parched esophagus. Besides, Collette, my girlfriend of three years, was away on assignment on the coast and her flight was not expected back for a day or two, so there was no one within shouting distance to hear my pitiful pleas for relief and rescue. I felt my temperature soaring with delirious speed. I felt my head pounding as though my brain was a lonely stretch of sandy beach on which a storm-stirred sea smashed wave upon wave. Like a drunken heavy-weight, I absorbed blow after blow and was becoming insensible to anything but stabbing pain.

Was I then hallucinating when I saw the first repugnant mass of red insects dive bomb against my forehead and crawl down inside my nose to embed more stingers in my enflamed nostrils? A few of them ascended the inner nose cartilage to burrow between my frantic eyes. Their stingers were more penetrating than a mad doctor’s five-inch needle and they corkscrewed venom into my nasal cavity, so that when I attempted to breathe the entire inside of my sinuses exploded in a conflagration of spontaneous flames as though I were being burned at the stake for my heresy of human existence.

One advancing flank of tiny red invaders took on my circulatory system, crippling the flow of oxygen that sought to reinforce my collapsing lungs, which burned like a dry hay loft in an old abandoned barn struck by lightning in a furious summer storm. Another contingent battled the white defensive cells of my lymphatic system, soon over-running the tissues of my body and opening the gates to a flood of invisible infections, virus, and bacteria. The malevolent red critters crawled through my spinal cord, taking offensive positions between my vertebrae and hacked away at my networks of nerves, disassembling the communication of a hundred billion cells that made conscious thought possible. I could feel the piercing movements of each brigade as it surged forward and scorched conquered territory. If they could laugh, I would have heard them. Instead, I detected their diabolically excited screams. My skull seemed to split in half, expelling a ball of burning yellow membrane. How I remained cognizant that long I will never know and for how long I suffered so terribly I can never tell, but at some point I collapsed into dazed unconsciousness and became solipsistically catatonic.

Then my real nightmare began. These first swarming red marauders were followed by a steady assault of green spidery assailants crawling in through my gapping mouth, into my ear canals, eating through my skin to occupy front lines of attack against the hegemony of my bio-system and to neutralize all of my autoimmune defenses like an attacking air force wipes out its enemy’s air raid missile defenses. I was to be their living hive, to be eaten from the inside out until I disappeared and nothing would remain on my bed for Collette to discover except the blood soaked flannel pajamas I had been wearing to keep me warm on a winter’s eve as I leisurely consumed my novel. In this state of unconscious awareness, I intimately felt their thousand little legs traversing my interior, each movement a scratching ripsaw against my inner body structure which was about to crumble. From their microscopic snouts they sucked at the watery membrane of my muscles, flesh, and bone marrow, broke through the circuitry of my brain, devoured the cells of my central nervous system. My 650 muscles snapped in scalding rhythm. My 206 bones crumbled. My skin, dissected from its source, curled, and shriveled. My heart, kidney, and liver fought valiantly, but to little avail. The red and green insects traveled through the universe of my cells on rivers of blackened blood and yellow secretion. All this time my agony escalated by multiples. And when the pain seemed that it could not intensify beyond the outer limits that it had already exploded, it escalated even further. I could no longer ask why. I could no longer beg for mercy against these non-human combatants, because I knew they knew no language except their instinct to torture, kill, and consume. And the “I” that had been there hours before leisurely reading in the comfort of my bed no longer existed as anything but a memory of a hideous recollection falling into the tatters of disease.

That is how badly I felt during the week when I suffered most from the Scarlet Fever.

****

Of course, Collette who eventually nursed me back to sanity after she arrived home did not believe my fantastic escapade, not until she washed my sweat-stained white sheets and found the carcasses of two tiny red insects that I had managed to crush in the first attack before they overwhelmed me and dragged me through a living hell.