The Demon in the Freezer Read Online Free PDF Page B

malaise, an anxious feeling that things weren’t right, that the drugs weren’t working on his typhoid. He was restless, couldn’t get comfortable, and he took out his colors and his brushes and began to paint. When he became tired of that, he sketched with a pencil. There wasn’t much to see out his window—a nursing sister in a white habit hurrying down a walkway, patches of snow, branches of bare beech trees crisscrossing a sky of cobalt blue.
    MONDAY AND TUESDAY PASSED. Every now and then a nun would come in and collect his bedpan. His throat was red, and he had a cough, which was getting worse. The back of his throat developed a raw feeling, and he sketched and painted. At night, he may have suffered from dreadful, hallucinatory dreams.
    The inflamed area in his throat was no bigger than a postage stamp, but in a biological sense it was hotter than the surface of the sun. Particles of smallpox virus were streaming out of oozy spots in the back of his mouth and were mixing with his saliva. When he spoke or coughed, microscopic infective droplets were being released, forming an invisible cloud in the air around him. Viruses are the smallest forms of life. They are parasites that multiply inside the cells of their hosts, and they cannot multiply anywhere else. A virus is not strictly alive, but it is certainly not dead. It is described as a life-form. There was a cloud of amplified virus hanging in Room 151, and it was moving through the hospital. On Wednesday, January 14th, Peter’s face and forearms began to turn red.
    Stripper
    JANUARY 15, 1970
    THE RED AREAS spread into blotches across Peter Los’s face and arms, and within hours the blotches broke out into seas of tiny pimples. They were sharp feeling, not itchy, and by nightfall they covered his face, arms, hands, and feet. Pimples were rising out of the soles of his feet and on the palms of his hands, and they were coming up in his scalp and in his mouth, too. During the night, the pimples developed tiny, blistery heads, and the heads continued to grow larger. They were rising all over his body, at the same speed, like a field of barley sprouting after rain. They were beginning to hurt dreadfully, and they were enlarging into boils. They had a waxy, hard look, and they seemed unripe. His fever soared abruptly and began to rage. The rubbing of pajamas on his skin felt like a roasting fire. He was acutely conscious and very, very scared. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him.
    By dawn on Thursday, January 15th, his body had become a mass of knob-like blisters. They were everywhere, all over, even on his private parts, but they were clustered most thickly on his face and extremities. This is known as the centrifugal rash of smallpox. It looks as if some force at the center of the body is driving the rash out toward the face, hands, and feet. The inside of his mouth and ear canals and sinuses had pustulated, and the lining of the rectum may also have pustulated, as it will do in severe cases. Yet his mind was clear. When he coughed or tried to move, it felt as if his skin were pulling off his body, that it would split or rupture. The blisters were hard and dry, and they didn’t leak. They were like ball bearings embedded in the skin, with a soft, velvety feel on the surface. Each pustule had a dimple in the center. They were pressurized with an opalescent pus.
    The pustules began to touch one another, and finally they merged into confluent sheets that covered his body, like a cobblestone street. The skin was torn away from its underlayers across much of his body, and the pustules on his face combined into a bubbled mass filled with fluid, until the skin of his face essentially detached from its underlayers and became a bag surrounding the tissues of his head. His tongue, gums, and hard palate were studded with pustules, yet his mouth was dry, and he could barely swallow. The virus had stripped the skin off his body, both inside and out, and the pain