The Fears Within

Cold Feet

Cheimaphobia- Fear of the cold

Louise closed her eyes, breathing in the smell of the cool January air. It was perfect out. Not too cold, not too hot. Perfect. She relaxed, leaning back in the lawn chair set in the middle of the clearing.

She was currently at her winter cottage, spending her vacation in the least coldest part of her state. The forecast was clear, sunny days throughout the week, mid sixties the entire time. Louise smiled, nice and warm in her light jacket and in direct line of the sun.

She hated the cold, have ever since she almost got frostbite when she was little. A lot of her friends, and even her fiancé said that she was overreacting. “What can the cold do?”, He asked her once, “It’s cold, a temperature. Sure you can get sick from the cold, but there’s no reason to be afraid of the cold itself.”

Louise could think of a lot of reasons.

She opened her eyes to stare at the cloudless sky. A bright, robins-egg blue shone through the gaps in the trees. Sunlight bathed Louise in a warm light, making her very content.

Louise was alone, her fiancé hadn’t been able to come with her this week to the cottage so she was by herself. The animals of the forest were all tucked away in their trees and burrows for the winter. And she was still happy.

She watched the sky, the sun filling her with warmth….making her sleepy…

Louise woke suddenly, it was pitch black out.

“Shit…” She muttered, standing up and gathering her things.

The temperature had dropped slightly and she was starting to get worried. If she didn’t get back to the cottage before it got too cold then she would start to freak out, and that couldn’t happen in the middle of the forest.

A wind began to blow through the trees, chilling Louise to the bone. As her teeth started to chatter, Louise began to panic. She tried to take deep breaths, but her heart was thudding in her chest, sending her mind into fearful fantasies. She would freeze, no one would find her body, freezing slowly, slowly to death…

A panicked shriek burst out of Louise, she dropped her chair and ran, dodging in and out of trees.

It was cold, freezing now. Clouds came into the sky at surprising speed, spilling down rain and sleet hard and quick. Louise was getting drenched, and the wetter she got, the colder she became. It was torture, pain wracked itself in waves up and down her body.

Shuddering sobs escaped her lips as the sleet turned to snow. Quickly, the light snowfall turned into a blizzard of unbelievable proportions. Cold, white flakes hit the ground in waves. Soon, Louise was having to drag herself through the trenches of ice and snow.

It was freezing, Louise could almost feel her fingers and toes turning blue. Ice weighed down her hair, sticking to her eyelashes, melting and refreezing every time she blinked. Her tears were flash-frozen to her cheeks.

Louise collapsed in the snow, sobbing and trying to rub heat back into her body. It was no use, though. Her crying wracked through her body, as well as increasingly violent spasms of shivering. She tried to crawl but she could barely move.

There was no point, she was going to die here, in the cold. All alone.

She thought of her fiancé, of how sad he was going to be when she didn’t come home after the week. Oh, he was going to think that she had run off with another man. She didn’t want that. She couldn’t bear the thought of causing him that much pain.

Louise looked up, blinking through the frozen crystals attached to her eyelashes. Abruptly, there was a flickering of light. She blinked more fiercely and saw the window of the cottage, illuminated by the single lamp she had left on before she left the house earlier that day.

A fierce feeling of joy surged up inside her. A new energy surging through her, she climbed out of the snow and lurched towards the cottage. She made it inside, the warmth from the heater falling over her.

A cry of relief escaped her lips as she stumbled over to the coffee table, digging through the contents of it’s drawers. Louise came across a single match, lying the cluttered drawer. She pulled it out with a smile and walked on her knees over to the fireplace.

She struck the match against the brick, and it ignited on the first try. Cupping her hand around the small flame, she held it under the dry logs, waiting until they started to glow from the flame. The fire sprung up from the logs, hot and strong, burning through the logs and giving off a pleasurable heat.

The fire was strange, a cherry red color that was odd for a fire. But Louise didn’t care, she was warm and safe. The ice started to melt off her clothes as the fire started to skip and hiss. Now numb with the feeling of returning heat, she grew concerned as she gazed upon the flames.

Suddenly, the fire leaped, scattering itself about the room. Louise screamed and jumped back, hitting the now aflame curtains and causing her hair to ignite.

She yelled again, dropping to the floor in a small attempt to rid herself of the flames. Nothing worked, her body was leaping with fire, heat burning her skin to black. Her hair was almost completely burned off now, the air thick with the bitter smell of burning skin and hair.

In a last desperate attempt, she braved herself and ran to the door, flung it open and hurled herself into the snow. For a moment, she thought she had succeeded, for the intense heat on her body had stopped. But then she opened her eyes and saw that her skin was still alight with flame, and burning off as she watched.

The snow had muted the pain of the flames, but it was still burning away at her body. By now, the fire had burned off all her nerves and started to melt away at her muscle and bone. She couldn’t move, the fire paralyzing her. Louise watched in horror as her blood boiled away in front of her. Tried to scream as the fire blackened the pearly white color of her bone. It leapt down her throat, burning her from the inside out.

Louise conscious was still working as her limbs turned to ash, falling away into the snow. Her organs boiled, her stomach acid steamed as her intestines burned away. Soon she was only a head. She was still conscious as her heart turned to dust, her eyeballs melting into her sockets, blinding her. Since her sight was gone, Louise wasn’t able to witness as her skull turned to ash, her teeth falling into the snow, the only part of her not combusted. The last thought that ran through her head as her brain started to melt was that her fiancé was wrong.

There was something to being afraid of a temperature.

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Sorry those last couple paragraphs were kind of disturbing XP I was in an evil mood :D