Shiver the Whole Night Through

by Darragh McManus

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And four … Screw it. I don’t really have a four.’

  She looked tired once more, plonking back onto the bed beside me.

  I felt this mad urge to raise her spirits again, cheer her up, say something. ‘Well, well, four could be, like … anyone acting suspiciously. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for anything dodgy. Get on to Podsy again too, see if the Guards heard something.’

  ‘He can’t know about this. About me, I mean.’

  ‘I’ll be discreet, don’t worry … Sláine, did you really feel this? That there was someone out here that night, a man, a human being. Or is it some kind of retrospective thing?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. You might be right. Look, let’s assume there was. Again, we need to fix on a start point. Let’s make it that.’

  ‘Good enough.’ I asked, nearly as an afterthought, ‘You reckon it’s anything to do with this weird weather we’ve been having?’

  Sláine raised her eyebrows, as if the thought hadn’t struck her, which surprised me. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Good spot.’

  ‘Well it’s so feckin’ freezing, you know? It’s not normal for Ireland to be this Baltic. And then what happened to you, the cold … Ergo ipso facto: possible connection.’

  ‘Definitely. Good spot, Aidan. Bad Latin, but good spot.’

  ‘Yep. It ain’t easy being this brilliant.’ I stretched my back out. ‘Should I go now? You want me to go?’

  ‘No, just … stay here. For a while longer, stay with me. I don’t … ’ She sighed deeply, a sorrowful sound that set my nerves on edge. ‘It’s not just the logistics of it. Asking you to help me: that wasn’t the only reason. I do need your help, the practical stuff I mean. But I also need you. Someone to share all this with, another … Heh. Another person, if that’s even what I am any more. I don’t want to feel I’m in this thing by myself, you know? That I’m all alone.’

  ‘Whoa. You are not alone. I’m here for you, Sláine. Always.’

  She smiled at me and it was even sadder than that sigh. I thought my heart was going to crack. My mind scrambled around for some words of comfort, anything to salve her spirit. Providence or blind chance landed on these: ‘On that third day, you said you were lonely; you knew I was lonely, like that purple star glowing on the rail track. Could we rupture the fabric of space and time again? We are hearts talking across continents.’

  My voice trailed off. I felt embarrassed, and knowing that I’d no reason for it didn’t make me feel it any less. Sláine caught my hand; hers was freezing but I left mine there.

  She said, ‘That was beautiful. I don’t know it. Where’s it from?’

  ‘You don’t know it cos I wrote it. Unpublished poet, thus far anyway.’ I grinned crookedly and looked away.

  ‘You wrote that for someone else, I presume?’

  ‘Yeeeeah,’ I drawled, reluctantly ’fessing up. ‘But she doesn’t deserve it, you do. So I’m offering it to you now. No obligation to accept.’

  ‘No, I accept. Gratefully. Thanks, Aidan. For everything.’

  I accepted her acceptance in silence. We stayed sitting there, silent, easy together in the silence, silently struggling towards some imperfect form of peace or contentment. Her silent touch burning my hand like core ice, exhilarating and elemental, as if I’d plunged it into the centre of the frozen silent earth.

  Changing

  Time passed then. Days, weeks, and I hardly noticed them. I was wrapped up in this other world, wrapped up in her. Sláine. I was lost in dreams and magic and intrigue, as the earth got ever colder and the woods froze over.

  We met several times a week, sometimes during the day but mostly at night. Outside of those hours – and school and time with my family and snatched morsels of sleep – I was also burrowing into our investigation, trying to get some handle on what the Jesus happened in the forest that fatal night. By the end of December the sleep deprivation was starting to affect me, all this added work and sneaking out in the witching hours. But I didn’t care, and got the energy to keep going from somewhere. From her, maybe.

  Not that I actually got that far, to be honest. I found a few things of potential interest, but by the end of the year we hadn’t come any closer to solving the riddle of Sláine’s death. The library was a dead end: no reports of anything hinky in our area, as far back as newspaper records went. Microfiche, local history books, old journals so fragile and desiccated from age that they were crisp to the touch: I read as much as I could and found zip, except for those strange incidents around 1851 when the sea froze over and all the crows died.

  I waded through an ocean of information, misinformation, conjecture and pure horseshit on the internet, and came across a few references to unexplained deaths, at least superficially similar to Sláine’s. An Inuit settlement in Canada told legends of people being ‘taken’ by the cold, their bodies turned to ice and dust. An eighteenth-century French traveller to the Baltic Sea claimed to have seen a corpse with ‘lines of blue about the skin, not to be found on any natural human form; and eyes turned grey or white, shining in death more than ever this or any man’s did shine in life’. One inmate of a New England mental institution, in the 1890s, apparently said he had worked out a way to cheat death and live forever, ‘if only these ignorant bastards will allow me and my acolyte the freedom to conclude our experiments in commanding the cold’.

  All very vague, and probably as deranged as the New England guy’s cellmates. Most likely fiction, although my experiences of recent months had taught me to keep an open mind. I continued the search. Found a list of various cold snaps in Ireland down the years on some amateur-meteorologist discussion board – nothing to make your hair stand on edge. Whatever else was going on in Shook Woods, this glacial weather seemed little more than a naturally occurring anomaly.

  I hunted down books, online and in the physical world, on the paranormal, the occult, demonology, necromancy, telekinesis, ESP, divination, the Tarot: all those freaky-deaky areas of human enquiry that made me uneasy just reading about them. Reports of spirits moving objects during a seance, voodoo raising bodies from the grave, cults and sacrifices, Satanic rituals, naked men and women smeared in goat’s blood and howling at the moon. The Magus, the Corpus Hermiticum, transcripts of Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, Osthanes, Zoroaster, the Grand Grimoire, the Eighth Book of Moses … Semi-interesting to me, in an abstract way, but seemingly irrelevant to my search.

  I talked to the ancient geezer who ran a New Age-type store on one of the town’s main streets. He seemed offended that I’d imply he had any knowledge of a dark side to the supernatural world, then gave me the address of an even more ancient lady to visit. He said she was his sister, she said they were cousins. Whatever – she was as much use as the proverbial ashtray on a motorbike, even having the cheek to finish by offering a palm reading for the ‘bargain price’ of ten euro. I mentally showed her the facing side of my hand, middle finger raised, and skedaddled.

  (I also, in the midst of this, followed Mr Kinvara’s suggestion and looked up the meaning of ‘bravo’. The online dictionary told me it was originally an Italian word, itself derived from the Latin, as he’d said: a combination of pravus and barberas. Funny, actually, where this term of hearty congratulations or praise had come from: the first part meant ‘wicked or corrupt’, the second ‘savage or outsider’. Well done, you wicked outsider. What the hell, I’d take it as a compliment anyway.)

  I tapped Podsy on a regular basis for skinny from Uncle Tim and the Gardaí. No reports of anything that seemed germane to Sláine’s case. Nobody else found frozen to death. Certainly nobody with ice-blue markings on their skin, irises changed in colour. Sláine, so far, was the only victim of this … thing, whatever it was. That made me feel better, and kind of worse, all at once.

  However, the Guards were keeping an eye on a few unusual incidents, Podsy told me one evening after school. A smattering of other attacks, presumably animals; a bizarre situation going on with some
hallucinating girl. Another idiot found with his ass hanging out of a big oak tree – I didn’t even want to know what that was about. Strange days, I guess, but I wasn’t really paying attention: none of it had anything to do with me and Sláine – it didn’t help us.

  Neither did my beady-eyed impersonation of Sam Spade, keeping a close watch on the streets. Aidan Flood’s on the case, dirtbags, tremble in fear. If there was a dirtbag behind Sláine’s killing, I didn’t see him. No cabal of weirdoes summoning Beelzebub from the pit on a moonlit night. Nobody dressed like Merlin the Magician on Rattle Street, having sex with a chicken and then cutting its throat, or maybe the other way round. No black magic that I could see. Nobody in control of this cold spell that just refused to end.

  Playing the private detective made me feel pretty sharp, like I was some cool son of a bitch in a film. I even trailed a few blokes around, to their homes, their offices, lonely old factories on the outskirts of town – but it came to nothing. The worst I saw was a married father of four nipping behind one of the storage sheds in his lumberyard to do the wild thing with his twenty-year-old secretary. Were they not freezing?

  I stored this information away, mentally and in Word files on my laptop, assuming I’d never use it. And I discussed it with Sláine, regularly. At first she’d be annoyed with our lack of progress, even angry or bitter, which wasn’t like her – but trying to hide it from me, which was. After a while, that passion cooled to disappointment, then resignation. Our investigation had more-or-less ground to a halt by Christmas; both of us seemed to tacitly accept it.

  In the meantime, me and her talked and talked, about everything and nothing. Sometimes deep conversations, sometimes the usual trivial rubbish any young couple come out with. Sometimes we didn’t talk at all, just sat quietly in each other’s company, listening for an owl call or the sound of snow falling off a pine tree’s branch. Those times, the silent times, were almost as pleasurable as when we spoke. But we did speak, a lot, growing closer as each week went by.

  Sláine would tell me about what it was like to be dead. She described the early days of her new life, before and after she met me. It was weird at first for her; she felt isolated and exhausted, at a loss as to what she should do now. How exactly do you fill your days when time has ceased to have any consequence? Do you plan ahead, when the future no longer means anything?

  Worst of all, she said, was how she missed her family. Sláine didn’t cry any more – she didn’t think she could, the tears feeling frozen in her. Something else we had in common, though in my case that was more metaphorical. But she certainly felt that pain of separation, of knowing she’d never speak to her folks again.

  She’d been tempted to make contact, but dismissed it out of hand, almost immediately. It wouldn’t have been fair. How could you do something like that, to your parents or brothers? The shock of it, she said with a smile, might have killed her mother. So she left them be, in their grief and mourning. And dealt with her grief and mourning all on her lonesome.

  I think this was one of the reasons Sláine reached out to me in the first place. We didn’t know each other particularly well when she was alive, so there was no baggage from the past. No memories of what she’d once had, mercilessly pointing out that this, now, here, was inferior. You can’t bear your existence at all, dead or alive, if you’re constantly being reminded that the past was better than the present. I was someone new, a fresh start. I was more than happy with that.

  So, Sláine was dead, alone. But there were some advantages to it. She told me how she started noticing things she’d never have done when alive. Her senses seemed amplified to an extent – hearing, sight, smell. (Not touch, obviously.) She felt stronger, faster, more powerful. And, Sláine said, she could kind of ‘move’ through space in giant leaps – as though she was bypassing large chunks of it, skipping from A to Z without using the rest of the alphabet. That’s how she had transported me home those two times, I assumed, although she didn’t confirm that. She didn’t understand how she could do any of this – she just did it.

  Sláine also felt a change inside, mentally or spiritually or something – she was vague about it, didn’t quite understand it herself. The best way she could describe it was ‘As though I’m opening up to the universe, and it’s opening up to me. But slowly, very slowly. We’ve only just started our little dance.’ Whatever that meant.

  Sláine spent most of her time in Shook Woods. At first she’d been bound within the confines of the forest by some invisible barrier, but very quickly – within a few days – could travel beyond, able to leave whenever she wanted, though as she’d said before, not for long. Some compulsion dragged her back, and she wasn’t unhappy about that. This was where she felt most at ease, most herself. The forest never got boring, she said, or bleak. It was silent and unchanging, and that’s how she liked it. She spent long days and nights wandering around, not for the sake of exploring but simply to be. At times, Sláine admitted, she was even unsure where exactly she ended and Shook Woods began.

  She showed me different parts of it, guided me along invisible trails, pointed out its camouflaged beauty. I was never that much into nature and stuff, but with Sláine as my guide, I came to properly see and appreciate the forest’s wonders. The pines, of course, were its star attraction, shooting into the sky like the pointed contrails of a rocket. But there were other trees, stripped now of their leaves and all the more enchanting for it. And down on the ground, richer than rich, moss and humus, funguses, fragments of branches and leaves, stones and gravel, uncountable quantities of microorganisms. A whole world lived there. Sláine revealed it to me as she told me her story.

  And I told her mine in reply. About my relatively contented early years, which sound like something from a novel: we were poor, but there was a lot of love in that house. How I grew out of childhood, and grew and grew, so I ended up too tall, too skinny, and way too shy and insecure for the battlefield of adolescence. How I limped along through secondary school, not deliriously happy, not miserable either. Your typical, mildly disaffected kid.

  I expanded on the bullying, the break-up with Caitlin, our relationship such as it was. It wasn’t embarrassing, at all, from the beginning, to lay myself bare like that. From the moment we met, I’d been completely comfortable in Sláine’s company – I felt I could tell her anything and she wouldn’t judge, mock, make me feel stupid. She listened and, if I asked, gave an opinion on what I’d said.

  As I talked about it, over those weeks, I realised some deep truths – about myself and other people. First: the worst thing about youth, and how we interact with one another, is that it’s all conspiracies and shifting allegiances. Whispered conversations, designed to exclude. Muted giggles, but just audible enough, aimed in your direction. Friends becoming enemies and you never know the reason why – possibly there is no reason. The strong eating the weak. There’s something brutal and Darwinian about adolescence.

  And we’re dishonest, at this age. Books and films are fond of scenes where the sincere, straightforward teen is shocked on discovering the hypocrisy of adulthood. But in reality, as far as I could see, youth is just as deceitful. You’re putting up a front from an early age – eight or nine years old and there you are, bullshitting your friends about your score in a video game or how much money your aunt gave you for Confirmation. Then you get older and your interests change slightly, but the bullshitting remains. You lie to your friends, or at least exaggerate, about shifting some girl, how much you drank last night, how unlucky you were not to make the football team. It’s all bluster and untruths.

  I always hated that, the fact that you couldn’t be yourself as a kid. You had to play a role, and worse, not even a role you’d chosen. You had to go along with the collective script and make sure to bloody well fit in. Most teenagers who are properly authentic and present a true self to their peers, are derided as anti-social weirdoes. What an irony: for all our declarations about ‘keeping it real’, kids can’t handle sincerity. We d
on’t want real.

  Secondly, I realised something about myself that left me slightly embittered, but at the same time filled with a delirious sense of freedom. There was nothing wrong with me, and there never was. It was others who had the problem. I was fine, I was normal and decent and well-adjusted. Mostly good qualities and a few annoying habits, same as anyone else. I wasn’t even as much of a dweeb or an oddball as I always assumed. I was just a regular guy. They were the ones with social or personality disorders.

  It’s the kind of thing parents would say to console a bullied child, and you appreciate the sentiment, maybe even agree on an intellectual level – but you don’t really believe it in your gut. Now, though, I didn’t only believe, I knew. The bullies were the screw-ups, not me. Now I actually liked myself again.

  Oddly, everyone else seemed to have come to the same conclusion, because the bullying had ended completely. Not only that, I was being treated ‘normally’, the way I was before; which is to say, generally being ignored, with some friendly words.

  Tommy Fox did more than that, and I didn’t quite know why. He began spending some time with me, initiating conversation. Not that I minded – he’d always been all right to me. I was curious, though. I wondered if he had an inkling, on some mysterious level, that I was in contact with Sláine. But he couldn’t know that, could he?

  Whenever he spoke, Tommy would steer the conversation around to her. Again, I didn’t mind, although it was sad, almost depressing, to see that look in his eyes: the pitch-black of heartbroken desperation, illuminated only by a flickering hope that he must have known could never come through for him. I remember thinking one day, this is what it means to lose someone you loved, lose them to death. I thanked my lucky stars it hadn’t happened to me.

  One evening in the forest I asked Sláine about Tommy, after a particularly emotional tête-à-tête which had him in tears. She brushed it off, saying they used to hang out but it was nothing really. At first I was annoyed; it felt so callous, her obvious disinterest. She seemed almost bored by another person’s pain. But then it occurred to me that Sláine meant nothing by it – she didn’t feel much for Tommy now because she didn’t feel much for anyone … except maybe me. She wasn’t herself any more. As she’d explained, regular human emotions didn’t really apply to her.