The room is small in its warmth. I feel swollen in the dim glow of a low fire and a sputtering candle. I am alone, save for my son. Somewhere between toddler and infant, he has awoken and is rolling from his side to his back on the wooden floor. He is too weak to wail. I am too weak to comfort him. The fever that slowly grows in me, that thrives in him, swallowed my wife today. She is gone, and left the front door open to the mountain winter when she wandered out into the snow. Her tracks lead down to Stillson Pass and then wash into a slide at the edge of the logging road. She is gone.
My son is dreaming. He is not asleep, but not awake. The glassy sheen over his heavy-lidded eyes reflects everything—the firelight, the mantle above, my chair, my listless body. I am not dreaming. I am awake with the visions. I sit with the small, slithering, nameless things that lurk behind the bright backdrop of waking and dance free in dreams. And they are not asleep; they are not dreaming. They wait patiently, undeterred by any machination of man or god. They wait for me to follow them, like a spring lamb, to low ceilings and musty soil. All eyes and grim determination. They have secrets to tell. My wife must have been dreaming when she left. They know when you are dreaming.
The snow came fast and hard with the full moon and the fever on its heels. Now the sky is clear and blank with the new moon. The snow looks like iron in the starlight. My eyes are full of the snow, full of its weight, and the pines are silent. No bobwhite or winter finch sings in the damp and heavy quiet, and I wonder if I am sleeping. I wonder if the small things with their thousand eyes and dull teeth will know that I am sleeping. I say my son’s name softly once and then again. I am strong and so is the fever. I have had it for three days. I brought it home with me from the coal camp. My son is too young and weak. He is shivering and the eyes are shivering with him. He will go before me, because I am strong and he is dreaming.
In the light, the snow is dazzling, blinding. All is vapor and magnified sky. I can see the small, sidewinder-like trails through the drifts, and I know that I am to follow them. A fever tells you secrets and they are terrible and vivid. A fever is a small thing and it knows when you are dreaming.
