Shiver the Whole Night Through

by Darragh McManus

  The guy in the armchair said, ‘Don’t worry, Aidan Flood. I will put an end to all your troubles.’

  He placed the gun on the arm of his chair and smiled with a creepy familiarity that made me feel uneasy, somewhere in the back-brain, the animal instinct part. He was familiar to me, too: I’d seen his face before … or something like it. I’d seen it, immobile with terror, on the man standing across the room.

  ‘He’s your brother,’ I said to Sioda – though my words just floated into the chilled air, not specifically in his direction.

  The gunslinger declaimed theatrically, ‘Joseph Kinvara, at your service.’ There was even an ironic little bow for a flourish. ‘Three years younger than my beloved sibling. Call me Joe if you like, whatever suits. Sioda there got the fancy name from our parents. I’d to make do with plain old Joseph.’

  He shrugged. I gazed at him, speechless. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about what to call him. What did I care for strangers’ names, there, right at the end, at the death of everything I knew?

  I gasped. ‘You … you sold me out. Sláine. Why?’

  She didn’t answer. I would have slumped to the floor if she wasn’t now holding me under my arms. One hand rapidly moving over my body, patting me down, as if I were carrying a weapon.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ I breathed. ‘I walked straight into it. Can’t believe how stupid I was. Stupid enough to believe you … ’

  She lifted me to the bed and I flailed onto it like a drunk. Sláine went and stood next to Joseph, who rapped at his brother, ‘You. Go join him.’ Sioda shuffled over and sat beside me. He looked like hammered shit: dazed, exhausted, horrified.

  I said to him, ‘And stupid enough to have you fingered as the bad guy.’

  He didn’t respond, but began muttering under his breath, ‘Oh God. Please, Joseph, stop this madness … ’

  ‘Shut up, Sioda. I’m getting to know my new friend here.’

  I sat up straight and brought my eyes around to meet the other two. Joseph was smiling genially, a trace of a smirk. Sláine was smiling too, sardonic, almost patronising. I suppose it was justified, her obvious feelings of superiority: she was superior. The girl had played me like a violin, the poor lovelorn sap I was. Just like Caitlin last year. So things never really change at all, I reflected bitterly, they just take a different form. That image, the pair of them, seemed to waver somewhat in the wobbling light of several candles, cast from different points around the lodge; neither of the oil lamps were lit, I noticed, though both were filled with fuel.

  I snarled at Joseph, ‘And you. You’re like a guy who came third in your own lookalike contest. Like a bad imitation of yourself.’ I didn’t know where that came from – I just wanted to hurt him. It didn’t work.

  Joseph raised his glass to me and took a hearty drink. ‘Mm. Glenfiddich scotch. Really good stuff.’

  I blurted out to Sláine: ‘You asshole. Why did you do this?’

  She shrugged and gave a gentle laugh. Joseph said, ‘She brought you to me to prove her fidelity. Your life was payment for my full trust. Proof that she hadn’t … had her head turned by someone else. Or her heart. Also, you knew too much. About me, what I intended to do.’ He frowned at her, annoyed. ‘My beautiful Sláine wasn’t supposed to make contact with anyone. I didn’t think she would; that wasn’t in the plan. For some reason, though, she became – friends, I suppose you’d call it, with you. Told you the whole story. Or, you worked it out together. Whichever. It makes no difference, really, and there’s nothing a young lad like you can do to stop me. But it shouldn’t have happened. I did not want that. So she had to make restitution.’

  ‘And I’m the bloody restitution.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He took another drink and seemed to relax again. ‘Ah, what matter? You’ll soon be dead anyway. Sláine has made her mistake, and learned from it. Isn’t that right, my dear?’

  She smiled at him with affection, the same look she’d given me so many times, and something strange happened: I got angry. A fire burning in my belly. I couldn’t believe it. The same shit I got from Caitlin, from Rattigan and Harrington and the rest of them. Sláine and this other idiot might have seen it as something grandiose and special, but that was wrong: they were just bullies, exactly like the others. Mean-spirited, vicious, petty and callous. To hell with her, and back to hell with him and his demon.

  ‘Blow me,’ I snarled. ‘Do whatever you want.’

  Joseph chuckled. ‘I fully intend to do what I want, my boy. Great plans for the future. Sadly, you won’t be around to see them come to fruition. But look on the bright side: you were part of something magnificent. Something vast, almost beyond human comprehension. You were in at the start. Console yourself with that.’

  ‘Don’t think I’ll bother, thanks. Who’s going to do it? You or her?’

  ‘Kill you? Hardly matters, really, does it?’ He sniggered. ‘Or do you have a preference? Perhaps you’d like your one true love Sláine to end it all. You know, it’s funny. Human nature doesn’t change that much. Men have always been slaves to their hearts.’

  I stood and roared in fury and embarrassment, ‘Get fucked, you old creep!’

  ‘Hm. Sláine? If you would.’

  Without moving a muscle she propelled me backwards with an invisible force, slamming me against the wall. Joseph yelped in appreciation: ‘Wonderful! She really is remarkable, isn’t she? A fitting queen for the new world I am about to create.’

  My breath came in torn, painful gasps. I didn’t care. I pushed my hair off my face and slowly pulled my tobacco pouch from my pocket. I threw it at Sláine, one quick flick, without looking in her direction. She caught it, her hand moving at incredible speed.

  I said sullenly, ‘Feel like rolling me a smoke, your majesty? One for the road.’

  I’d barely finished the sentence before she had tossed a rolled cigarette and the pouch back to me. She said flatly, ‘It won’t hurt. Your death. And we won’t turn you into a zombie. We won’t even eat your soul. I’m going to take pity on you and simply kill you. If there’s a heaven, there’ll be something left to go there.’

  I sat in the lotus position on that mattress and lit up. My hands were shaking, but my voice was strong. ‘Super. I appreciate that. Always said you were a top-class girlfriend.’

  ‘Don’t fight it, Aidan. It’s easier that way. Accept your position.’

  ‘My position? What is that, exactly?’

  Sláine spat out, ‘You’re fodder. You’re food for the gods. You’re nothing. An insect to be crushed into the ground if it suits us.’

  ‘Well, shit. If only you’d told me earlier, I’d’ve reconsidered this whole relationship.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally. You’re no more insignificant than any other mortal. All of you are nothing more than our puppets, playthings, slaves or sustenance.’

  Joseph laughed. ‘That’s my girl.’

  Sláine smiled again. ‘It’s not you, Aidan my darling – it’s me.’

  She clapped her hands in delight. I wanted to spit in her face and tear his head off with my bare hands. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do either, but I might as well have the full story, while I was alive to hear it.

  ‘What are you, Kinvara?’ I asked. ‘Some kind of demon? A man who can’t die? What?’

  He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Pff. Does it matter what exactly I am … ? You can consider me the personification of coldness. A consciousness sprung from the infinite potential of zero degrees. Heh. The iceman has cometh.’

  ‘Very poetic and all, but that doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘All right, then. Here it is: I conjured a demon from the depths of hell and now it inhabits me, I inhabit it, we coexist together. We are immortal, indestructible and all-powerful. We cannot be stopped and we will not stop.’

  I tried to keep up a brave face hearing those words, but my Adam’s apple catching in my throat must have sounded as loudly as the bell being struck for the end of days.

  Joseph we
nt on. ‘We – me, to all intents and purposes. This thing does not have a mind in the sense that you understand it. It possesses great powers but requires a human consciousness to harness them. Which is where I come in.’

  He lifted his glass. Quick as a flicker of lightning, Sláine flitted over and refilled it from a large, nearly full bottle. I felt sick, seeing her subservience to this disgusting reptile. The heavenly-white ice queen of my dreams, reduced to a traitorous lickspittle. And worst of all, by her own choice.

  ‘I kill mortal humans,’ Joseph said, ‘and consume their life essence. The warmth of their blood, the electricity of their brains, the force that moves them, that makes people alive … and their souls eternal. The more I consume, the stronger and more perfect I get. I intend to live forever, young man, by using this demonic power. Alas, there’s a price to be paid for everything – including immortality.’

  ‘And you’re making others pay it for you.’

  ‘No. Not completely. I have paid a price, too … ’

  He didn’t elaborate. In the silence I noticed that Sioda was sobbing and moaning, his head in his hands. I wanted to slap him, tell him to man up, get a grip, give me some goddamn help.

  I said to his brother, ‘Yeah? Well, this’s how I see it. I see a power-crazed madman who’s sucking the goodness out of real, living people to feed his sick desires. I see a freak who wants to create an army of zombies that he can use as slaves.’

  ‘Ah-ah. Incorrect. Certainly, I’ll keep the odd one around – slaves, like you said. But other than that, I will simply kill, and keep killing: everyone in your town, the surrounding areas, the world.’

  ‘You don’t deny the power-crazed madman part, then?’

  ‘Of course I deny it. Your accusation is so absurd, it’s hardly worth bothering with. I am perfectly sane, Aidan Flood. Do not doubt that … I’m not even bad. Or immoral, whatever word you want to use. I know, you see all this through the old Judaeo-Christian perspective. “Thou shalt not kill” and so on. Wake up, boy. We’ve moved far beyond those simplistic notions. Good and evil. Pah! Is the avalanche “evil” because it crushes hundreds of people to death? I am on a higher realm now. There is no good and evil where I dwell. There is only the two of us, and the rest of you. Predators and their prey.’

  I tossed my cigarette onto the floor and watched it smouldering there in the damp dirt. ‘Tell me what happened, Kinvara. How’d you do all this?’

  He settled back in his armchair, getting comfortable for the telling. He was enjoying this, the prick, but what could I do? Nothing. It’d kill me to admit it but Sláine had been right: I was weak, powerless, an insect waiting to be crushed.

  ‘From an early age I’ve been obsessed with demonology, necromancy, the occult – much like Sláine’s ancestor, though I hadn’t heard of him before we came here. I read every book even remotely connected to the paranormal, every grimoire of dark magic. Islamic mystics, The Picatrix, The Sworn Book of Honorius, The Book of Enoch, Trithemius, Roger Bacon, John Dee, Malleus Maleficarum, the Bible and Tanakh, Paracelsus and Doctor Faust, The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic … Anything, everything. Even obvious charlatans like Aleister Crowley or Anton LaVey.’

  Joseph paused, regarding me with a strange intensity. He continued, ‘And there’s something about your town. Something strange and magical and dangerous. Something beautiful. I was drawn to it. And I knew … I’d been searching my whole life, and somehow I knew I would find it in this place.’

  ‘Searching for what?’

  ‘Wisdom. Power. Everlasting life … I’d passed through your home town a few times and it practically called out to me: “Here lies your destiny, Joseph. Here you will become great.” So I decided to move permanently. Sioda agreed to facilitate my wishes.’

  The other brother spoke, for the first time in what seemed like hours, his voice barely audible. ‘Joseph is … he’s always been odd. Even as a child, he was peculiar. Awkward, unsociable – just different from everyone else. I’ve looked after him our whole lives. I felt I owed that much to our late mother.’

  Joseph raised a glass and said sarcastically, ‘Dear Mammy. Whose money funded all this – my life of enlightened enquiry.’

  ‘He was always a loner, since we were boys. I took him in, took care of him … He’s lived with me for decades but I never told a soul about him. Joseph stayed in the shadows, a recluse. As far as anyone else knows, I have no brother … ’

  Joseph said roughly, ‘Didn’t I tell you to shut up, Sioda!? Before I cut your tongue out and feed it to you.’ Back to me, in a gentler voice: ‘It’s the forest, I think. These black woods around us. The town itself is strange, there’s no doubting that. You’ve felt it yourself, surely? But the uncanny black heart of it lies in Shook Woods. It beats, that heart – it’s alive. This forest is alive, boy, in ways you could scarcely imagine … They often are. Why do you think cautionary fairy tales are usually set in the woods? That the highest concentration of serial killers in the United States is in the heavily forested north-west? It’s the place where our darkest selves are realised and revealed. Where the deepest melodrama of the human spirit is played out … ’

  He was right, I reflected with dismayed horror. The woods were more than a collection of trees and wildlife: they were some kind of eerie dreamscape, a hellish netherworld into which I’d been drawn. Mysterious, ambivalent, unreal, yet strangely comforting too. The forest, I remember someone writing once, was everything those fairy tales made you feel.

  Joseph snapped out of his soliloquy, smiling self-consciously. ‘Anyway. We moved to your town, and then Providence took a hand. Do you understand, Aidan? This was meant to happen.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that – though, then again, what could possibly be worse than everything else I’d heard?

  ‘The house we bought – it used to belong to one William John McAuley. Recognise the name?’

  I jabbed a finger in Sláine’s direction without doing her the courtesy of looking over there. ‘Her grandfather. Great-great-great-something.’

  ‘How about that?’ Joseph said gleefully. ‘Destiny guided us towards that building. Out of several large, private houses to pick from, all perfectly suitable, we chose that exact one. Sioda liked the library and how the garden was running wild, but that’s neither here nor there. I clearly had a sixth sense.’

  He stood and went on, fired up now. ‘One day, while brother dearest was out and about on his little errands, I did some exploring. And found a secret passage in that library, behind a fake panel in the wall. Do you know what was in there, Aidan Flood?’

  I could guess. I began rolling another cigarette. My throat was parched but that didn’t matter any more.

  ‘McAuley’s writings,’ Joseph said, triumphant. ‘All of them? I’m not sure. But enough. Letters, diaries, notes, records, knowledge he’d accrued, experiments and ceremonies attempted … things he was going to attempt. There were reams of this stuff, volumes of it.’

  I thought about the pages that the unknown someone had deposited in my bag at the library: were they among the texts Kinvara discovered? Had my mysterious ally stolen them from him, and passed them on to me? Or were they duplicates? I decided it was shrewder not to bring this up.

  He was still lecturing: ‘McAuley outlined how to conjure up the demon, the precise words to say, every last crossed t and dotted i. Other parts to it too, certain metals to be worn on your person, foods to be consumed in the lead up, the position of the body, further details. No old rubbish about toad’s blood or the hair of a golden child, none of that shit. This wasn’t pantomime – this was real.’

  I said flatly, ‘I have no doubt.’

  ‘McAuley had tried to do it, back in 1851. He was too weak. I don’t just mean because of starvation, he was obviously too weak in here … ’ He pointed to his head, then his chest. ‘ … And here. McAuley was an amateur, and he failed. He didn’t have the stuff for it. But I did.’

  His eyes darkened, something hideous and
terrible in them, and I trembled with a nameless dread.

  ‘A demon of the cold.’ Joseph paused. ‘There is immortality in coldness, child. Viruses and bacteria, they can survive for millions of years, more or less forever, if the temperature is low enough. Everything stops. Time stops, to all intents and purposes. And that, of course, means death stops too. Observe.’

  Joseph seemed to – this wasn’t possible, but I could see with my own eyes – begin enlarging, his body expanding upwards and out into this small room. His shape became distorted, the torso getting broader, like a caricature. And he was glowing, but not like a light – more that dark glow I once thought I’d seen surrounding Sláine. I actually cowered back, the unlit cigarette falling from my fingers, as did Sioda. Both of us stared, open-mouthed in stupefaction, as Joseph’s eyes rolled and his flesh swelled like a balloon and that thing inside him showed itself finally.

  A face of indescribable malevolence. Eyes half-closed in gloating, mindless ecstasy. Pointed ears, bald skull, naked neck and shoulders, the body surprisingly small – I’d have expected something almost cartoonishly gigantic – but radiating a sense of immense power. It hovered there, about Joseph’s head, an image buzzing and fuzzing in and out like a hologram being periodically flicked on or off, surges of energy, disappearing and reappearing. A vision of hell expressed in the random shifts of electrons.

  I scrunched the blanket under me in a white-knuckle grip and thought I was going to pee my pants. Then Joseph – he, they, who knew any more – spoke, two voices intertwined, something intimate about the sound, almost sensuous, that made me feel nauseous: ‘Last October … Shook Woods and … called this being … gave life … then joined as one … closer than man and wife … soldered together … our very selves … for good and all.’

  His head dropped and the thing vanished and suddenly Joseph was normal again. Well, normal physically. He was clearly as wack-a-doodle batshit crazy as the bastard spawn of Rasputin and Caligula. He shook slightly – presumably this transformation, this revelation, took something out of him. Sláine glided over and helped him back to the armchair. It disgusted me again to see her playing the servile handmaiden to this contemptible shit-bird. Sioda, meanwhile, was curled up in a foetal position, snivelling like a hurt kitten. I guessed he was in shock and wondered why I wasn’t just as bad. I found my rollie and finally got round to lighting it.