Shiver the Whole Night Through

by Darragh McManus

  The authorities were apparently about to make a public announcement, suggesting that everyone lock all doors at night and keep an eye on each other. According to Uncle Tim, they were even considering a legal curfew on anyone being in a public place after eight in the evening.

  I wondered to myself, what would be the point of that? There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this phenomenon anyway, so why would some dictate of the law make a difference? If locked doors and watchful eyes, even their own sense of self-preservation, weren’t enough to keep people safe …

  I laughed cynically and said to Podsy, ‘Ha. Well at least they can’t blame me for it, right? I mean, I can’t manipulate the weather, can –?’

  Hold on. Can I ? No. But then I remembered Sláine’s theory that someone was controlling ‘the cold’, as she called it: that element-with-a-mind which had killed her in Shook Woods. Controlling the cold …

  Sláine. Whose body bore the same eerie marks as these other dead.

  Sláine. Who’d spoken about some unseen force drawing her out of her home that last night.

  Sláine. Who felt a presence, neither living nor dead, in the forest when she died. A presence that pushed into her and pulled out of her and turned her into something new.

  I muttered to Podsy that I needed a smoke and stumbled outside, into the cold, the other cold, the workaday, sane, climatological one. I rolled a fag blindly as fresh elements popped into my head, banging around in there like silver balls in a flashing pinball machine.

  McAuley’s letter. The cold. Death all around. Blue tattooed skin. Arcane lore. The Famine. Inuit legends. Sláine ancestor’s flight. The seas frozen over. Older gods. The New England lunatic. Command the cold and cheat death forever.

  McAuley. God. Hatred. Desperation. Ice-blue irises. Demonology. The cold, the cold, the cold. A Frenchman in the Baltic. 1851. Crows falling from the sky. Sláine’s murder. That killing presence.

  People dying from hypothermia. Someone to blame. Someone in control.

  Command the cold.

  Cheat death.

  McAuley.

  Demonology.

  Part of his letter flowed into my mind – I swear I recalled it verbatim. How this was even possible I do not know but it was there, screaming inside my head:

  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 … I summoned this presence and told it what I needed and heard what it desired. Now I wait for …

  A tap on my elbow. I literally leaped in fright, shrieking, ‘Jesus!’

  Podsy laughed and took a step back. ‘Whoa, horsey. What’s got you so jumpy, jeez. It’s only me.’

  I giggled out of embarrassment – and an escalating sense of horror. I managed to whisper, ‘Sorry. Hate being surprised.’

  ‘Well, here’s a surprise you might welcome: I got those coffees.’

  ‘You shouldn’t … ’

  ‘Nah, I owe you, I’m pretty sure. Borrowed a tenner a while back. Anyway I gotta head. Catch you at school, yeah?’

  I nodded yes, almost struck dumb. Podsy shook his shoulders and rammed his hands deep into his pockets, saying, ‘Sheeee-it. Bloody freezing. This weather is killing me.’

  He loped off into the night. I stood there on that bland modern street outside that cafe with its absurd decor and tried to gulp, but my throat was as dry as sand and it hurt to do that and I had no saliva in my mouth and I think I knew real, elemental terror for the first time in my life. If this was true. If what I thought. If this could be real.

  Jesus. Anything can be real, everything is real. Everything in the heavens is everywhere, anything is all things, the sun is all stars and every star is all stars and the sun …

  ‘This weather is killing me,’ my friend had said. Podsy, you might be more right than you think.

  If this is true we’re all fucked.

  It’s Really You

  I staggered home, grunted at my parents, fell onto my bed. The room spun around me. The whole universe had come off its axis and was hurtling into space at a frightening, unstoppable velocity.

  The truth. Oh God, the truth was horrifying, it was unbearable.

  I forced myself to say the words aloud, to make them real and face my darkest nightmare: ‘McAuley raised a demon. I don’t know how or what exactly, but it was something very bad. He did this, back in 1851, and now he’s returned to haunt us all.’ I swallowed heavily. ‘William John McAuley is killing those people. He’s come back from the grave, and he’s brought coldness and death with him.’

  Okay. Okay, keep cool. Tell yourself to keep cool, Aidan.

  I muttered weakly, ‘Keep cool, Aidan.’

  It was all much too much to handle, especially without Sláine. Exhaustion, both physical and nervous, overcame me, and I swooned into a sleep blacker than death itself.

  Soon I was in the REM state and dreaming furiously. I saw myself wandering through Shook Woods and Sláine appeared before me, her back turned. I called to her and she ignored me so I ran towards her, but no matter how quickly I moved my legs, I couldn’t seem to get any closer, even though she wasn’t moving at all.

  Then she turned and began to shamble in my direction and I was happy at first, only I realised that it wasn’t her, this wasn’t my Sláine: it was a hideous creature, an undead monster, and it wanted me …

  I must have willed myself to wake up. Some primitive fear – a deep-seated memory of reading somewhere that death in a dream can kill you in real life – must have forced me to snap out of sleep. Was that true? I don’t know. It felt like it could be, though. I felt as if I might have died in that dream if I hadn’t woken.

  I sat upright, my heart banging like a hammer on a sheet of steel. God, what was that all about? Something to do with Sláine, I was positive – I needed to talk to her about …

  And then, of course, I realised – with a familiar feeling of nausea in my stomach – that she wasn’t there. I wanted to tell her about this dream but couldn’t. I wanted to ask her those questions which were now queuing up in my mind, like impatient customers in line at the bank, pushing their way to the front of the queue, waving their arms, demanding to be heard.

  Were there others like her? Had some of these victims of the cold risen from the dead, as Sláine did? Had she met them? Were they the same as her, beautiful spectres floating through the forest?

  And most fundamentally, was she with them?

  It was all too much, again. My head was spinning, again. I needed to get it clear. I needed, again and again, some fresh air. So I threw on a coat and went out to get it.

  The town was as silent and empty as an abandoned planet. Absolutely nobody about. This weather, presumably, was keeping people indoors at night, unless they had a damn good reason to come out.

  The temperature stubbornly stayed below freezing. We were locked in this never-ending deep winter, although the town had by this stage come to terms with the situation. It was coping, sort of. Snow fell periodically, most days in fact, but a gentle snow. It floated softly to earth, renewing the piles of snow already there, like a regular reminder of the state we were in. We hadn’t, thankfully, suffered any major storms. I don’t know what people would have done if that happened. By now the town had got used to the big freeze: pipes were properly insulated to prevent them from cracking all the time, lanes were regularly cleared to allow vehicles and pedestrians to move about.

  There was no longer that childlike delight at living inside a winter wonderland – it was just the way things were now – but neither was there the same trepidation and worry. People didn’t worry about how they would deal with the weather because, well, they had dealt with it. Life went on, different to before but with the same pressures and enjoyments, the same obligations and reliefs. It was just much, much colder.

  Still, a vague anxiety persisted, regarding the medium-term future. Even though everyone knew it was impossib
le, that this freakish cold snap would have to end at some point, a gnawing whisper remained at the back of the collective mind: ‘What if it doesn’t? What if we get stuck like this – forever?’

  I smiled grimly. Bad weather? That’s the least of our troubles, folks.

  My mobile phone told me it was coming on for eleven. The streets were piled with snow, up to two feet in places, but the council had done a decent job of keeping them clear for traffic, foot or wheeled. It wasn’t snowing right at that moment, although you got the sense that this was just a reprieve. The sky was blacker than black, a host of stars twinkling up there like lights on a theatre backdrop. I half-heartedly tried to make out different constellations – the Plough, the Hunter, those geometric outlines we’re taught in primary school. I failed – didn’t recognise a thing. It was just a shapeless collection of distant lights, albeit a beautiful one.

  Where was I going? I asked myself. No reply came, so I continued to put one foot in front of the other, shuffling through the whiteness, my breath frosting in front of me as if it were the reins of some invisible horse that was carrying me through the streets.

  I scurried past the scuzzy council estate on the far side of town – that was where the Rattigan clan held court, so it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to hang around. After a while I reached the ancient graveyard where Sláine had been buried and realised I had travelled outside the town. I didn’t remember leaving it, but … appropriate enough. I was still half-dazed and half-dozed. I guess my legs chose a direction because my brain wasn’t giving them any instructions. I went through the open wrought-iron gates and walked up the long driveway.

  The place was even quieter and more lifeless than cemeteries usually are, but it looked incredible, under weeks and months of accumulated snow and ice and frost. The elements gave it a ghostly pallor, accentuating every crypt’s curved edge, every grave-top statue, every listing tombstone. It came across more than ever like the deserted set of a Gothic horror movie: angels and shadows and cold and ruination all mixed together, the moon up above like a spotlight on an open-air shoot, bats and ravens flying here and there like CGI spirits.

  I took a step forward to better appreciate the scene, and something moved behind a towering headstone in the shape of a cross, on top of a hillock at the far end of the cemetery. What was –?

  There. It moved again. A chill rippled up and down me as though icy fingers were using my spine to play the piano. That wasn’t a bird, or a bat, some small animal. It was much too big. It was moving on two legs. And it was as white as snow.

  And oh Christ, it was looking at me.

  For an instant my eyes locked with those eyes, two hideous pits simultaneously glowing white and dark as pitch, and then there was another flash and the thing, the person, whatever it was, had gone. I stepped back, two steps, three, four. I wanted to run but I couldn’t, my brain was giving the instructions now all right, urgent goddamn commands to go go go, but my stupid legs wouldn’t or couldn’t obey.

  Silence. Stillness. No movement, over there or down here.

  Then a wave of terror crashed through me, so violently that I was sure I’d faint clean away, as I realised the thing was almost on me. Charging at me from the side, emerging out of the shadows like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and holy shit it was the monster, the one from my dream. Its skin was frozen stiff in some places and had turned black from frostbite in others, and was covered in tiny blue lines. Ice encrusted its eyebrows and hairline. Its eyes were a terrifying Arctic blue-white, its mouth open to reveal teeth shaped like jagged icicles. The thing was skinny, hunched over, moving with the jerkiness of a clockwork toy, but rapidly. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Its clothes were slightly torn and very dirty but more or less all there: a smart jacket and trousers, shirt, no shoes.

  It resembled a corpse that had been stuffed in a freezer for years but now, somehow, had escaped and was coming for me.

  I screamed. No sound came out. I was paralysed, frozen in terror, and the ice-thing was coming closer and closer … It reached out for me, a horrific leer creasing its face, this creature from the depths of the worst nightmare. Still I couldn’t move. And then the monster’s fingers were on me, digging into my shoulders. I could feel the absolute freeze of it through my clothes and jacket. Such power in those skeletal fingers, drilling down through flesh and fabric, right into the heart of me.

  Oh no. Oh no …

  The thing leaned over, its mouth almost on mine, and breathed in deeply and I could feel the air being sucked from my lungs but not just that. This was worse than suffocating. The oxygen was being replaced – as the creature drew each breath out, it pushed something else in.

  Cold.

  Perfect, implacable, deadly cold.

  Hair follicles electrified, skin tightening against the freezing burn of it, blood vessels petrifying, blood-flow decelerating, lungs hardening, crystallising, organs going into shock, folding in on themselves, slowing, sloooooowing … And then my heart – the cold gone right to my heart, and that great muscle seizing up, the engine of the body breaking down, the thing that drives us, that warms the blood and stirs our passions and makes us what we are, makes us live …

  My whole system freezing. Shutting down. Dying.

  Is this what happened to you, Sláine? Is this … this … what … you …

  Terror-stricken panic had left me on the brink of madness, but my brain and ears still functioned enough for me to make out that the thing seemed to be talking to me. A voice, not a voice, a rasp that somehow conveyed words, came at me, horribly intimate. It said just four, excruciatingly slowly.

  ‘No more. Aidan. Flood.’

  So this was it – no more of poor old me. I was a goner. I’d like to think I possessed enough self-composure, even under such duress, to wryly reflect on the irony of my situation. A few months before I had stood on a bridge and considered throwing my life away by one cataclysmic action, one simple jump. The lure of killing myself had lingered for quite a while afterwards, a seductive perfume hanging in the air. And before that I’d spent months moping because my heart was broken and my ego was battered; moping, hibernating, withdrawing, but not living in any meaningful sense of the word. Now here I was, really on the edge of my mortal coil, about to breathe my last … and I had never desired life so much. I would have given anything, done anything, to earn more time. But I couldn’t. My time was up. After all those wasted hours, countless hours, I had mere seconds left. There’s irony for you.

  I’d like to think that’s how I reacted, with calmness and a touch of gallows humour. It wouldn’t be the truth, though. I was babbling like a lunatic and screaming like a baby.

  So much so that I barely registered when those icy fingers were pulled off my shoulder. When the creature, the thing, was violently wrenched from the ground where it stood and hurled into the shadows. My legs started to wobble as I saw a bright blur move across my eyeline at barely conceivable speed and heard an ungodly screech from those shadows, and the monster emerged from them, leaping towards the blur which I could sort of see now was a person. The creature bared its teeth and charged, claws out, at the person in white, and there was another crazy-fast blur of movement and my head was spinning and then the thing’s head was spinning too but literally, torn clear off its shoulders and flung into the air. The rest of its body, the corpse or whatever the hell it was, slumped to the ground.

  Long pointed boots, decorated with antique-style buttons, came down hard on the body and pounded it into dust in seconds. Then they strode across to where the head lay – sickeningly, it seemed to still be alive, staring at me – and slim hands reached down and lifted it, and with one swift, brutal movement crushed it to powder. They smacked off each other, up and down, knocking off the residue of that thing. That’s the correct word, I think – residue. There had been no blood, no wet organic matter of any kind. The creature seemed to be made out of ice and rubble.

  The person turned to me and my eyes t
railed up along the familiar boots, the overcoat with the high collar, the set of her body, the way she held herself even in repose, and finally the face I knew from my tortured dreams.

  Sláine.

  I whispered, ‘What – the – fuuuuck? Sláine, what was … ’ I collapsed to the ground on all fours and gulped for air. ‘Sláine? Sláine, Jesus. You’re here. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello, Aidan.’

  ‘What was that thing?’

  ‘You mean who.’

  ‘Wha—? That’s a person?’

  ‘Was. Not any more. Now they’re … changed.’

  ‘Oh God. I don’t even … Oh God, I think I’m gonna be sick.’ My stomach heaved but nothing came up except a thin line of drool, slowly dropping from my lip to the ground.

  I looked up at her. ‘Is that you? It is. It’s really you.’ Tears filled my eyes for the first time since Caitlin broke my heart last summer. Only half a year previous, but that time now felt like a lifetime ago. I suppose in one sense it was a lifetime ago.

  Sláine gave a small smile. ‘It’s really me.’

  ‘I’m so happy. You’re here. Back.’

  ‘I am. It’s me.’

  ‘You came back to me.’

  ‘I came back to you.’

  My system was going into meltdown, adrenaline coursing through me, limbs shaking, head whirling like water sluicing down the sinkhole. I retched again and croaked, ‘Jesus Christ. This is … I feel like I’m stuck in some deranged nightmare.’

  ‘It’s no dream, Aidan. It’s all very real.’

  ‘Have I gone mad, then? Am I bloody crazy?’

  ‘No. You’re not crazy. My poor Aidan. You look so pale.’ She smiled sadly. ‘As if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I stared at her. I couldn’t even manage a smile back. Sláine had returned, like I knew she would. She’d returned and saved my life from that … that … I didn’t finish the thought – my mind wasn’t able to process it any further. I tried to stand, and failed. She looked different somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how, because I couldn’t see straight. My vision was blurring and doubling, swimming in front of me.