He screamed when the walls of darkness began to close in around him. It was the middle of the afternoon and a shaft of sunlight fell across the grimy blankets on his bed. The sunlight paled, then darkened and was gone. He screamed again. And again.
He heard them move him to the death ward then, but he could not even feel their hands upon him.
Three days later his tongue refused to form words. He fought a nameless terror as he strove with all the power of his will to speak. If he could say only one word, he felt, the encroaching disease would have to retreat and he would be safe. But the one word would not come.
Four horrible days later the sounds around him—the screams and the muttering—became fainter, and he faced the beginning of the end.
At last it was all over. He knew he was still alive because he thought. But that was all. He could not see, hear, speak, feel, or taste. Nothing was left except thought; stark, terrible, useless thought!
Strangely the awful horror faded then and his mind experienced a grateful release. At first he suspected the outlet of his emotions had somehow become atrophied as had his senses, and that he was peaceful only because his real feelings could not break through the numbness.
However, some subtle compulsion within him—some power struggling in its birth-throes—was beginning to breed its own energy and he sensed that it was the strength of that compulsion that had subdued the terror.
He was at peace now, as he had never been at peace before. For a time, he did not question—was entirely content to lie there and savor the wonderful feeling. He had lost even the definition of fear. No terror now from the slow closing of the five doors; no regrets; no forebodings. Only a vast happiness as he seemingly viewed life, suffering, and death as a man standing on a cliff looking out over a great misty valley.
But soon came wonder and analysis. He looked backward and thought: It was a world, but not my world. These are memories but not my memories. I lived them and knew them—yet none of them belongs to me. Strange—this soul-fiber with which I think—the last function left to me—is not a soul-fiber I have ever known before.
And he knew.