FEVER DREAM 
 
FEVER DREAM
 
Ray Bradbury
 
 
They put him between fresh, clean, laundered sheets and there was always a newly 
squeezed glass of thick orange juice on the table under the dim pink lamp. All 
Charles had to do was call and Morn or Dad would stick their heads into his room 
to see how sick he was. The acoustics of the room were fine; you could hear the 
toilet gargling its porcelain throat of mornings, you could hear rain tap the 
roof or sly rnice run in the secret walls or the canary singing in its cage 
downstairs. If you were very alert, sickness wasn't too bad.
He was thirteen, Charles was. It was mid-September, with the land beginning to 
burn with antumn. He lay in the bed for three days before the terror overcame 
him.
His hand began to change. His right hand. He looked at it and it was hot and 
sweating there on the counterpane alone. It fluttered, it moved a bit. Then it 
lay there, changing color.
 
 
That afternoon the doctor came again and tapped his thin chest like a little 
drurn. "How are you?" asked the doctor, smiling. "I know, don't tell me: 'My 
cold is fine, Doctor, but I feel awful!' Ha!" He laughed at his own oft-repeated 
joke.
Charles lay there and for him that terrible and ancient jest was becoming a 
reality. The joke fixed itself in his mind. His mind touched and drew away from 
it in a pale terror. The doctor did not know how cruel he was with his jokes! 
"Doctor," whispered Charles, lying flat and colorless. "My hand, it doesn't 
belong to me any more. This morning it changed into something else. I want you 
to change it back, Doctor, Doctor!"
The doctor showed his teeth and patted his hand. "It looks fine to me, son. You 
just had a little fever dream."
"But it changed, Doctor, oh, Doctor," cried Charles, pitifully holding up his 
pale wild hand. "It did! "
The doctor winked. "I'll give you a pink pill for that." He popped a tablet onto 
Charles' tongue. "Swallow!"
"Will it make my hand change back and become me, again?"
"Yes, yes."
The house was silent when the doctor drove off down the road in his car under 
the quiet, blue September sky. A clock ticked far below in the kitchen world. 
Charles lay looking at his hand.
It did not change back. It was still something else.
The wind blew outside. Leaves fell against the cool window.
At four o'clock his other hand changed. It seemed almost to become a fever. It 
pulsed and shifted, cell by cell. It beat like a warm heart. The fingernails 
turned blue and then red. It took about an hour for it to change and when it was 
finished, it looked just like any ordinary hand. But it was not ordinary. It no 
longer was him any more. He lay in a fascinated horror and then fell into an 
exhausted sleep.
Mother brought the soup up at six. He wouldn't touch it "I haven't any hands," 
he said, eyes shut.
"Your hands are perfectly good," said Mother.
"No," he wailed. "My hands are gone. I feel like I have stumps. Oh, Mama, Mama, 
hold me, hold me, I'm scared!"
She had to feed him herself.
"Mama," he said, "get the doctor, please, again. I'm so sick."
"The doctor'll be here tonight at eight," she said, and went out.
 
 
At seven, with night dark and close around the house, Charles was sitting up in 
bed when he felt the thing happening to first one leg and then the other. "Mama! 
Come quick!" he screamed.
But when Mama came the thing was no longer happening.
When she went downstairs, he simply lay without fighting as his legs beat and 
beat, grew warm, red-hot, and the room filled with the warmth of his feverish 
change. The glow crept up from his toes to his ankles and then to his knees.
"May I come in?" The doctor smiled in the doorway. "Doctor!" cried Charles. 
"Hurry, take off my blankets!" 
The doctor lifted the blankets tolerantly. "There you are. Whole and healthy. 
Sweating, though. A little fever. I told you not to move around, bad boy." He 
pinched the moist pink cheek. "Did the pills help? Did your hand change back?"
"No, no, now it's my other hand and my legs!"
"Well, well, I'll have to give you three more pills, one for each limb, eh, my 
little peach?" laughed the doctor.
"Will they help me? Please, please. What've I got? "
"A mild case of scarlet fever, complicated by a slight cold."
"Is it a germ that lives and has more little germs in me?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure it's scarlet fever? You haven't taken any tests!"
"I guess I know a certain fever when I see one," said the doctor, checking the 
boy's pulse with cool authority.
Charles lay there, not speaking until the doctor was crisply packing his black 
kit. Then in the silent room, the boy's voice made a small, weak pattern, his 
eyes alight with remembrance. "I read a book once. About petrified trees, wood 
turning to stone. About how trees fell and rotted and minerals got in and built 
up and they look just like trees, but they're not, they're stone." He stopped. 
In the quiet warm room his breathing sounded.
"Well?" asked the doctor.
"I've been thinking," said Charles after a time. "Do germs ever get big? I mean, 
in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and 
how millions of years ago they got together until there was a bunch and they 
made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and 
then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a 
bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn't that 
right?" Charles wet his feverish lips.
"What's all this about?" The doctor bent over him.
"I've got to tell you this. Doctor, oh, I've got to!" he cried. "What would 
happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot 
of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced and made 
more-"
His white hands were on his chest now, crawling toward his throat.
"And they decided to take over a person!" cried Charles.
"Take over a person?"
"Yes, become a person. Me, my hands, my feet! What if a disease somehow knew how 
to kill a person and yet live after him?"
He screamed.
The hands were on his neck.
The doctor moved forward, shouting.
 
 
At nine o'clock the doctor was escorted out to his car by the mother and father, 
who handed him his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. 
"Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs," said the doctor. "I 
don't want him hurting himself."
"Will he be all right, Doctor?" The mother held to his arm a moment.
He patted her shoulder. "Haven't I been your family physician for thirty years? 
It's the fever. He imagines things."
"But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself."
"Just you keep him strapped; he'll be all right in the morning."
The car moved off down the dark September road.
 
 
At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small black room. The 
bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had 
any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the 
bed, but looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. For a 
while he had screamed and thrashed, but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and 
his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. 
Now be was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire 
like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the 
flickerings of a hearth.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a 
vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly 
lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the 
body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his 
body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate.
There were the little hand hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the 
toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.
I am dead, he thought. I've been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is 
all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it 
will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so 
evil it's hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and 
drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the worid than 
has ever been done.
Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His 
lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out 
blue flame, faintly, faintly.
This will be all, he thought. It'll take my head and my brain and fix each eye 
and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle 
in my ears, and there'll be nothing left of me.
He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in 
upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It 
no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. 
His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to 
someone else now. This thing that was being born, this mineral thing replacing 
the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.
He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the 
room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, 
he was blind and deaf, all fire, all terror, all panic, all death.
His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.
 
 
It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that helped carry the doctor up 
the path before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He 
did not wave when the doctor waved and called, "What's this? Up? My God!"
The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.
"What are you doing out of bed?" he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin 
chest, took his pulse and temperature. "Absolutely amazing! Normal. Normal, by 
God!"
"I shall never be sick again in my life," declared the boy, quietly, standing 
there, looking out the wide window. "Never."
"I hope not. Why, you're looking fine, Charles."
"Doctor?"
"Yes, Charles?"
"Can I go to school now? " asked Charles.
"Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager."
"I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with 
them, and spit on them and play with the girls' pigtails and shake the teacher's 
hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up 
and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and 
have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and - all of that I 
want to!" said the boy, looking off into the September morning. "What's the name 
you called me?"
"What?" The doctor puzzled. "I called you nothing but Charles."
"It's better than no name at all, I guess." The boy shrugged.
"I'm glad you want to go back to school," said the doctor.
"I really anticipate it," smiled the boy. "Thank you for your help, Doctor. 
Shake hands."
"Glad to."
They shook hands gravely, and the clear wind blew through the open window. They 
shook hands for almost a minute, the boy smiling up at the old man and thanking 
him.
Then, laughing, the boy raced the doctor downstairs and out to his car. His 
mother and father followed for the happy farewell.
"Fit as a fiddle!" said the doctor. "Incredible!"
"And strong," said the father. "He got out of his straps himself during the 
night. Didn't you, Charles?"
"Did I?" said the boy.
"You did! How?"
"Oh," the boy said, "that was a long time ago."
"A long time ago!"
They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare 
foot on the sidewalk and merely touched, brushed against a number of red ants 
that was scurrying about on the sidewalk. Secretly, his eyes shining, while his 
parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie 
still on the cement. He sensed they were cold now.
"Good-by!"
The doctor drove away, waving.
The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away toward the town 
and began to hum "School Days" under his breath.
"It's good to have him well again," said the father.
"Listen to him. He's so looking forward to school!"
The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed 
them both several times.
Then without a word he bounded up the steps into the house.
In the parlor, before the others entered, he quickly opened the bird cage, 
thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.
Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.