Shiver the Whole Night Through

by Darragh McManus

  The handwriting was elegant, ornate, done with, I’d guess, an old-fashioned fountain pen. Dark-blue ink, flamboyant loops on the letters f and s, the words slanted quite a bit to the left. The paper looked ancient, though I guessed it had been of high quality when first bought. It was stiff and frayed at the edges, turning a sort of burned-brown colour from age. I handled it gingerly as I read, fingers holding the small pages gently but firmly, like those robotic hands they use for delicate, precise surgery. I reckoned some of the document must have been missing, because the text began on that lower-case word ‘to’, and apparently in the middle of a sentence. So I didn’t have the beginning, which was annoying; I didn’t even know how much was missing. Still I read.

  An amateur historian, I call myself. But I was more than that, much more. I read widely and voraciously, my life entire. The ignorant peasantry mistrusted me to some extent because they didn’t understand why I sought knowledge and wisdom. The priests mistrusted me precisely because they did understand. I had no grand intentions or designs in the beginning, by the by. I was just a man, intelligent, curious, with an open heart and open mind. But knowledge is power, and reading makes us greater beings.

  It even – you may find this hard to believe, considering what you read in these pages – it even brings us closer to God. And I wanted that. I wanted to be as close to God as was imaginable, and be the most fully realised man I could be. Noble ideals, I’m sure anyone would agree.

  How did I come to have these pages in that folder? I tried to remember back to the day at the library, how glacial the weather was outside, all the fascinating stuff I came across about the Famine and Sláine’s ancestors, the freaky cold spell that had encased the area like a snow globe. Had someone put this document into my bag when I went for a smoke break or nipped to the toilet? No, wait …

  The old lady. The one who carried Sláine’s message, but prior to that had helped me pick my stuff off the ground after Rattigan slapped the bag from my shoulder. She could have slipped these small pages into the folder, on top of my foolscap-sized notes. I read on.

  Then the Great Hunger came and destroyed all that, for me and everyone else. Lives, dreams … yes, those noble ideals. We were reduced to savagery, to the level of beasts. When you are starving, nothing matters – nothing – but getting food. Love, decency, family, God himself … all of that pales to insignificance beside the primordial biological imperative: to feed.

  I have watched almost everybody I know die slowly, in agony. Agony. Death by hunger is as bad a death as there is. And if starvation didn’t get them, disease or exhaustion or this infernal cold did. My friends, my workers, business associates, people I loved, people I hated … they were all fellow human beings, and they all died. I cried out to God for help – but God wasn’t listening. Or if he was, he never replied to me.

  The Great Hunger. Another name for the Famine. Something was telling me that this had meaning, it was a message, it was trying to make me see … See what? I didn’t know. Keep reading, damn it. The Famine, the cold, all that death, loitering everywhere with the baddest of bad intent. This man calling out to God. His desperation, his rage … His. Who wrote these lines? Who are you? I kept reading.

  He never helped us! We, his children, dying in our thousands … and he let it happen. Thus my heart turned against him. My wife, my beautiful Eleanor, often asked if I still believed in God, the Christian one of her devotion. She is nervous-tempered and worries too easily. Her question surprised me. Certainly I do; I will always believe. But once, I also loved God. Then love turned to hate – and anger.

  And I went in search of aid elsewhere. I returned to our own gods – the older divinities – the ones who’d ruled this land for thousands of years before that Middle Eastern usurper banished them all. In desperation, I have appealed to these older forces. I had heretofore studied necromancy, demonology, all manner of arcana. I was, you might say, already prepared. Strange – it is as though I knew this crisis would one day come. Now it has, and I alone was ready.

  I stopped, paused, some fraction of a thought echoing from the deepest recesses of my mind. Demonology, necromancy, the study of obscure disciplines and dark, dangerous arts: why was that familiar to me? I read back to the top, and there it was, black on white or blue on yellow, the starkest confirmation. My beautiful Eleanor.

  William John McAuley wrote this. Sláine’s great-great-something grandfather, I remembered now: his wife’s name, the breadth of his reading, his interest in what were considered, back then anyway, ‘questionable’ subjects. He filled these pages and must have left them somewhere, in the hope that another might read them after his … death, whatever. He’d seemed to think he could somehow circumvent death, hadn’t he, there at the start? What had he written … ? I scrolled back the pages, quickly. This thing I now attempt … It may kill me. Or it may refashion me, making me into something new.

  Jesus. I shuddered, an involuntary reaction. What the hell did that mean? And why, again, did I now have McAuley’s last testament in my hands? I hadn’t a clue of either answer, but that nagging sense remained in my nervous system and heart, getting stronger all the time, insisting this was connected, in some as-yet-unexplained way, to what happened to Sláine …

  I raced to the end, my eyes flicking over the words like a careering skater on thin ice.

  I have let my wife leave with our children. She would never have appreciated what I was doing, or agreed to it. I love that woman like I have never loved another, but she is too pious in her devotion to the God who has failed us. She wouldn’t even blame him for the hell we were living in! Too pious, too timid. She would have tried to stop me in this; I think she might even have killed me, had she known. She loves her husband, but she loves that capricious God more. So I let her go.

  Shortly after Eleanor left, the English soldiers came – help finally from the Crown. Too late for her aid, and too late for me: I have also left. I am gone to Shook Woods these past seven nights, far beyond the reach of any mortal authority. And there in the forest, I summoned something more ancient than the Christians’ deity. Something of the land, that dwelled in the very rocks themselves, in the elements: wind, snow, ice. The weather has been cold enough, these long months; I took it as a sign that I was justified. I summoned this presence and told it what I needed and heard what it desired. Now I wait for

  There it came to an abrupt halt. The back end of this letter or diary must have been missing too. I dropped to my knees and searched around the floor, thinking loose pages might have fallen under the bed, unseen and unread. Knowing they hadn’t. Perhaps this was all that survived of McAuley’s epistle. Perhaps this was all they wanted me to know.

  They. He, she, them, whoever. I now knew, at least, who wrote this stuff, but still wasn’t sure who’d given it to me. Or what it meant. All I knew was that it meant something. I felt, as certainly as I’ve ever felt anything, that part of the solution to our riddle lay in these words. At least a clue to guide us towards that solution. The cold, he mentioned it more than once – that was crucial, I was sure. McAuley summoned something, or tried to, or thought he did; and he needed freezing weather to do it.

  I couldn’t wait to talk to Sláine about all this; how excited she’d be, fired-up like me. I knew she’d said at Christmas that she was cool with not knowing exactly what happened to her, that we should move on from the past, but I didn’t truly believe that. Anyone would want to know, wouldn’t they? It’s beyond a choice, it’s down in the guts, it’s in your blood as much as white cells or platelets. You need answers. We all do.

  Midnight seemed an eternity away. I grabbed my coat and hit for the door. A walk, while there was still daylight. A blast of fresh air to clear my mind, blow the cobwebs out, get a better handle on this, freshen me up in readiness for a big discussion with Sláine about what I’d found.

  Two words popped into my head, McAuley’s words, unbidden and very unwelcome: ‘refashion me’. That shudder again, juddering through my body li
ke a convulsion. I told myself to ignore it and left.

  I ambled through town, aimless and directionless, just walking to be out walking, listening to music on my headphones, deliberately not mulling over what I’d read. I could discuss it with Sláine all in good time, see if she had ideas. Two heads are better than one, and so on. Besides, she was a clever girl in life, far more than me, and her mental powers seemed to have grown since her new life began …

  ‘New life.’ Hadn’t McAuley mentioned that, too? My pulse rate ticked up a notch and I thought, we’re close, sweetheart. We’re close, I’m certain of it.

  Passed the local industrial park – tiny, depressing, with its peeling paint and vacant units – then two housing estates, a very plain and modest Protestant church, something else, an empty patch of real estate overgrown with weeds and discarded bottles, something else again, I forget what. After another few minutes I came to Belladonna Way, the poshest street in town. Belladonna, aka deadly nightshade – only in this kip would the fanciest area be named after a poison.

  Gorgeous houses, though. Lots of money went into restoring these beauties, renovating them, building them in the first place. Some of the properties on Belladonna were ancient, dating back to the nineteenth century. A range of architectural designs, though all scrupulously tasteful and, especially, ‘traditional’: Gothic and Neoclassical here, Georgian and mock Tudor there, and none of your ugly Modernist rubbish, thank you very much. A few crows, brooding in the shadows, motionless and black, completed the mood of time-worn, spooky elegance.

  An upstairs light went on in one of the houses exactly as I passed. I stopped, and it went out again. That might have been the home of Mr Kinvara, I wasn’t sure. There was a spacious garage to the rear anyway, and no car out front, which would suggest a man with a collection of vintage motors that he didn’t want getting keyed by some boozed-up knacker staggering home from drinking jungle juice in a ditch. A faint sound of music drifted from somewhere deep within the house – the rear, presumably – a four-note piano motif, vaguely familiar to me. Rising steadily from a mid-tone for the first three, then crashing down, hard and very low, for the fourth. Dum-dum-dum-DUMMM …

  My father had mentioned Kinvara in passing a few days before; maybe that’s why he was in my head. He’d asked Dad to drop over and collect some extra money for that job he did on the cars. My father was a proud man but not too proud to refuse hard cash in straitened times. Kinvara tactfully called it a ‘delayed Christmas bonus’. Dad described the house as ‘smashing’, inside and out; that’s literally the best he could come up with. Said it reminded him of the library of a gentleman’s club in London where he once did maintenance work, decades ago, when he lived in the UK. I guess this meant a lot of plush leather, hardwood bookcases and expensive brandy running hot and cold. The building was, according to my father, a ‘converted something-or-other’.

  Flash bastard, and his own piano too – Kinvara really was like James Bond.

  Dad also said Kinvara was ‘very charming’ and ‘a real gentleman’. And the guy’s first name, it turned out, was Sioda, which sounds like it should be a girl’s name, but apparently isn’t. I’d never come across it before. Means silk, or fairy folk, or something. I’m a dumb-ass when it comes to languages.

  Sioda Kinvara, super-spy! Women swoon for his dapper good looks, men for his sexy cars and a house that looks like Bill Gates’ boardroom. The international man of mystery, hiding out in a sleepy Irish town … Actually, what did he do for a living? My father hadn’t said. I kind of got the impression that Agent Kinvara was a man of independent means and didn’t need a job, so didn’t have one. A perfectly sensible approach to life, really.

  I quit my mental rambling and shuffled on further up Belladonna Way. I thought I heard a car pull out behind me, but it didn’t sound like the souped-up growl of a Jag. As far as I knew. I was as au fait with cars as I was with languages. I kept walking.

  This being dead midwinter, dusk was already beginning to crawl across the sky as I travelled out of town and continued along Distillery Road. So-called because it once was home to a whisky manufacturing business, long defunct, this led in a straight line along one edge of Shook Woods – the far side to its main entrance.

  The album on my MP3 player had ended, I belatedly noticed. Silence in my earphones; I decided on a whim to take them out. I stopped walking and did that and found my tobacco and rolled a smoke. And I heard a clicking noise.

  Faint, distant … but definitely there. I finished assembling the cigarette and listened, and it continued to sound. Maybe a little nearer? A regular click, a tap almost, probably louder in this still, chilled air, minus five degrees and dropping. I lit the smoke and looked up. A man was walking in my direction, same side of the road – cheap-looking overcoat, and no hat despite it being as cold as the proverbial witch’s tender parts.

  Almost dark, I realised. And nobody around, on foot or in a car. This road was hardly used by anyone, since they shut the distillery down. It didn’t really go anywhere, just out to the surrounding countryside, with a number of winding boreens branching off to farms and houses. Nobody in sight, just me and this guy coming towards me. Not in a rush, a steady pace, brisk but casual. His feet hitting the asphalt, that clicking sound now changed into a slap that almost twanged through the air, as if made by someone keeping rhythm on the body of a guitar. Cold air makes acoustics go all screwy.

  I drew on my cigarette and realised I had tensed up slightly. At some point in the preceding two minutes, my nerves had got on edge, just a bit. My heart rate was a little faster. And was that sweat I could feel, surfacing through the skin of my back? I resumed walking, out of embarrassment more than anything else. Can’t stand here indefinitely, it looks suspicious and makes you come across as a hysterical idiot.

  The man’s whole face was in shadow. Why can’t I see your face? I thought. His head wasn’t angled away from me, he didn’t wear a broad-brimmed hat, yet I couldn’t see him properly. It was as though he carried a shadow with him, a personal cloaking device. Something shifted across his face, a wisp of light, and I thought I saw his eyes twinkle, maybe the flash of a smile.

  We continued to approach one another. A creepy feeling of dread, not quite panic but with panic definitely in its future plans, washed down through me. Who was this man? Why was he here? What business did anyone have on this lonely, disused road, in the freezing cold, as night fell?

  We came closer.

  My feet crunched on slush and snow and I wished they’d shut the hell up, stop being so loud, and the man was within twenty yards and I still couldn’t make out his face. I flicked my fag onto the road and found that I’d bunched my hands into fists and was as tense as bejeesus, my heart kicking like a mule and sweat steaming inside my coat and vest and this goddamn guy was almost on top of me.

  Then we met and he stopped and drew in a few paces so I could pass, and I felt like the biggest baby in the world. He smiled and said, ‘Nice evening for a walk,’ his voice faintly familiar or maybe that was my heightened imagination, and I almost laughed with mortification. My face was red, I’m sure, as I recognised how ridiculous I’d been. I mumbled some semi-civilised response and went to go by. He took a step too and stumbled on a tree root, falling against me, lightly touching really, and muttered something, maybe an apology. We carried on our separate ways and I heard his footsteps receding into the distance – the sound of relief.

  This whole mystery thing is getting to you, man. Now you’re imagining things. Guy was out for a walk, dumbo, like you are.

  Half a minute up the road I stopped with a jolt as I realised I still hadn’t seen his face. Weird. We’d passed within two feet of each other, we’d actually touched, and there was still a watery trace of light in the sky, but I couldn’t for the life of me give any part of any description of what that man looked like.

  Was that weird? Probably not. I was on edge, and twilight’s a funny time anyway. People think they see all sorts of crazy shit at twilig
ht.

  I’d talk to Sláine tonight, hopefully put some shape on all this. That’d help, that’d plane some of those edges down. Even if we didn’t come to any conclusion, just talking to my girl would relax me, ground me on this solid earth once more.

  And that was worst-case scenario. Best-case was that together we might be able to work it all out, solve the big mystery. Another case closed by Aidan & Sláine Investigations! Book ’em, boys, and throw away the key.

  I dashed home with dreams of heroes in my head, lay that same head down for a nap so brief it barely warranted the name, showered, ate, drank a gallon of coffee, retired to my room and pretended to be asleep. When I was sure everyone else really was asleep, I made a calm, smooth getaway – I was getting to be a real pro at this.

  I reached our place in the forest by about half-past twelve, hollering a greeting to Sláine as I approached. I noticed with a subconscious tickle of anxiety that the light wasn’t showing. I went in and lit the lamp and looked around. And then realised, through the evidence of my eyes but especially through the sickly quiver I felt vibrating deep, deep in the marrow of my bones …

  Sláine had disappeared. And I was alone.

  Under arrest

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do I need to call a solicitor or someone?’

  ‘No. We’re just talking, Aidan. There isn’t any need to bring in the heavy guns. This is nothing official. Like I say, we’re just … having a little chat.’

  A little chat, my ass. The sergeant, named Parkinson, and Uncle Tim sat opposite me behind a desk in the former’s surprisingly small office in the town Garda station. Uncle Tim had the look of a man who personally regretted the circumstances but was determined to meet his professional obligations, whatever discomfort this may cause him. Of course I wasn’t calling him Uncle Tim – he wasn’t my uncle anyway, and down here, wearing that uniform, he was Deputy Sergeant McGlynn. Tim McGlynn, it almost rhymes. Silly-sounding sort of name. I suppressed a smile. This wasn’t the place for levity, and besides I didn’t feel too light-hearted myself.