I woke up in late afternoon, frightened, sweating and feverish, teeth chattering. I could get neither warm enough nor cold enough, my body switching temperatures too fast, and I tried to sit up, to swing my legs over the side of the bed so that I could stand, maybe walk back to the kitchen, for still I thought that surely all I needed was another cup of tea and something solid to eat. But when I tried to put my weight on my legs they let me down and I was back on the bed, too hot and then chilled, and it was too hard. I crawled back under the sheets, damp now from sweat, pulled up the blankets and the quilt slowly, fingers trembling, and I thought hazily that I could sweat it out, no matter how hot I got I would keep the blankets until all the sickness went away in the heat; but then the fever came back, my body was stifling, and I forgot and tossed the covers aside, pulled them back again a few moments later when the sweat felt as if it were freezing on my body, sending cold damp chills all through me, shivering so that it seemed I would never be warm.

For a while again I slept, but it was worse. Nightmares closed in and they were on the surface too, like the heat and cold, so that I saw them clearly and could not tell whether or not they were real, thought sometimes that I was surrounded by these creatures of the dreams, knowing other times, when I was better, that I was asleep and that they were from my sleep.

It was very dark, sometime in the middle of the night, when I woke again, this time to a solid heat that would not go away, and I wished for nothing more than the coldness to come back to chill me. I was thirsty, baked dry, and I had to be strong enough to go for water. I tried my legs again and found that by putting some of my weight on my arms I could support myself, leaning on furniture. I started out that way, not knowing what I would do when there was no furniture to hang onto. At the doorway, clinging to the frame, I could no longer stay upright, there was nothing to hold my weight, and I fell damply to the floor. I think I lay there a long time.