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 don’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.
Anyway, it appeared all the other kids had forgotten I was the designated town asshole. I wondered vaguely if some other poor fecker had been chosen to fill the slot. I hoped not, though it didn’t occupy too many of my thoughts. In fact, life in general, interacting with my schoolmates and neighbours, had come to seem less and less important, less real. The woods and Sláine were more solid in my mind. I made an effort to stay connected to my family, Podsy, a few other people. I kept in touch with the world through school, my research, trips to the library, chats with demented old palm readers. Other than that, I let it kind of drift away.
I was happier, more confident in myself. I looked better too, healthier, although I felt tired because of lost sleep. I even put on some weight for the first time since infancy. I wasn’t eating any more than usual – indeed sometimes I’d go all day without food, my tummy tingling with such anticipation about the night’s meeting that I couldn’t stomach a thing. But I got a bit heavier anyway. Maybe it was the absence of stress: all that anxious energy which used to burn up the calories, gone from my life.
As was any love I may have once felt for Caitlin. I stress ‘may’. I was starting to suspect that I’d never truly loved her at all, that it had only been a youthful folly. She must have noticed these changes in me too, because the day before Christmas she approached me outside the chipper, a funny expression on her face, as if she was very nervous but trying desperately to seem cool. For once, Caitlin was on her own, not with the gang, which made me feel more certain of myself. It didn’t even bother me that I’d stuffed my face with garlic chips, which I’d have to wolf down if I didn’t want to speak with my mouth full. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d talked. Sláine’s funeral?
Caitlin made chit-chat, asked me how I was doing, referenced how she hadn’t seen me around much, stuff like that. She even asked after my parents. I let her ramble on for a bit. Somehow, I knew what was coming, and it amused me to see her struggle for the words and the courage to say them. This time, I thought, I’m the one with the power. And it feels goddamn good. I’m not proud of this – it was petty, I know. I couldn’t help it.
Finally Caitlin asked if I was seeing anyone. When I gave a deliberately ambiguous answer, she mentioned, faux-casual, that there was a Christmas dance that night and maybe, you know, if I didn’t have anything else on, like if I wanted to, maybe she and me could go together, or meet up there, whatever, it didn’t matter, she’d be going anyway so might see me there.
I smiled and told her sorry, I did have plans for the night, but I’d maybe see her around sometime. Or, hey, maybe not. Then I sauntered off, munching my chips in the freezing air, leaving her behind, as cold and still as a glacier. And yes, this felt pretty good too. I’m not proud of that either, but I’m not going to lie.
All the while, the weather kept getting colder, and colder, and much, much colder. The meteorological people were increasingly perplexed. Our town, and its hinterland, was in the grip of virtually Arctic conditions. By Christmas we’d had snow every day for weeks. Huge drifts piled up outside houses, smothering streets and cars, making everything look like candy figurines on top of a cake that was covered in white icing. Water pipes seized up or burst constantly, the power cut out periodically. Irish towns weren’t built to deal with Scandinavian temperatures.
Grown-ups moaned about it all the time, bitching that the government wasn’t doing enough to help. Children revelled in it, having countless snowball fights and building snowmen, now that schools were often closed. Experts pondered it, media commentators debated it, farmers worried about it, shopkeepers cursed it, council workers battled against it, religious people saw it as a sign or prayed for it to end.
I loved it. This winter wonderland. Time felt frozen, along with the physical world; the two were in perfect harmony. And more: as the world turned whiter, so too did Sláine. Her clothes, once black, had by now shifted to a sort of pearl-white, with a trace of ice-blue. She glowed more than ever, everything about her. The clothes, her skin, the brilliance of her smile. She was like a photograph that somehow contained both the image and the flash.
We walked the length and breadth of Shook Woods, as well as spending time inside the lodge and a second favourite clearing we’d discovered – smaller than the Greek amphitheatre, more cloistered, a little sitting room set aside by nature in the many rooms of this forested home. I’d crunch noisily over the fresh snowfall, Sláine would float like a spectre. Usually there was nobody around; nobody came to the forest, certainly not in this weather, and never so far in. I did see Robert Marsden once or twice, the guy who found Sláine’s body – in the distance, towards the exit, barely spotted through the massed trees. Doing whatever it is he does for the forestry service. I’m sure he didn’t see us.
The second time this happened I asked Sláine if anyone could see her, besides me. She said it depended on her wanting to be seen. For some reason, I wasn’t sure I believed her. But I had no reason not to – and there hadn’t been any reported sightings of ghosts, no horror stories of girls rising from the dead.
We walked the forest, over days that blurred one into another. Shook Woods, its name now completely appropriate: the frozen forest. The place was even creepier with all this snow and frost; daytime felt as enchanted and perilous as the small hours. It reminded me of a scene out of some eerie old fairy tale, as though Jack Frost or the Snow Queen had become real. But I wasn’t scared; I could never be scared once Sláine was with me. She was my guardian angel, my protector, my comfort and best friend.
We walked and talked and were. Just us two, the snow falling softly like confetti being thrown from heaven, pines closing in around us. The difference between these times in the woods and my increasingly brief visits to ‘real life’ was stark and mesmerising. It honestly did feel like I was stepping between two separate worlds. Back there was mundane waking life; here was an intoxicating dream.
On Christmas Eve, exactly at midnight, we opened that bottle of wine, the expensive one that she’d got God knows where. I hadn’t lied to Caitlin about having other plans. This was where I had to be, the only place I wanted to be.
I poured out two glasses even though only one of us would be drinking, then took a long sip. It tasted delicious. Sláine smiled and raised her untouched glass.
‘Happy Christmas to you, Aidan.’
‘And to you, Sláine.’
We smiled at each other. A fraction of a second passed and suddenly our glasses were back on the table and she was holding me six inches above the ground, her mouth close to mine, her freezing hands at my face, a wash of coldness coming off her like a slowly rolling mist. It made me shiver from head to toe. It was wonderful. I was almost delirious.
I caught my breath. I wished I knew what to say, and realised that nothing needed to be said. We stayed like this for ages, the moment teased out, petrified in space-time.
Finally I whispered, ‘Sometimes I wonder if you’re a dream, a ghost … or a demon.’
Sláine said, ‘Sometimes I wonder that myself,’ and didn’t let go.
I also wondered, from time to time, if I’d fallen in love with her. Funnily enough, it didn’t seem to matter that I couldn’t really answer the question. Whether I was in love with Sláine was outside of all this. By the same token, I didn’t know or care whether she was in love with me.
And I wasn’t sure if I felt sexual attraction for her. She was beautiful, no doubt; her smile made my heart leap in my chest. (There was an irony to it – no way would I have got with a girl that good-looking under normal circumstances.) But did I want her, in the sexual sense? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe the fact that I assumed it was impossible sort of killed those passions before they had a chance to take root.
I didn’t really think about it. Such terms and concepts had no meaning in our world. There was just us, safe inside our frozen little universe, and that’s all we needed.
I did think about the future, though. Not our future, whether there was one or not; that, too, seemed hazy and meaningless. I told myself I’d be all right with whatever happened. I’d accept it, like Sláine had accepted her death and new existence.
But I was beginning to think about my life, where I wanted it to go, what I wanted to do. Not exactly making concrete plans, but I was definitely more positive and enthusiastic about it. For the first time since before the bullying – perhaps the first time ever – I had ambitions for myself. I wanted to do things, not waste my life. I’d already decided to chat to Podsy in January and get some advice on college courses, what he felt I should apply for.
As December 31st came and went, and time rolled forward into the next twelve months, I took stock of where I was. I felt … happy. I had plans. I had a future. We had a future. I think.
That night, on the cusp of a new year, Sláine took my hands and said, ‘Hey, about all that. Trying to work out who killed me, or what happened. Forget about it.’
I was surprised. ‘Huh? You serious?’
‘I am. I think I’ve come to terms with it. We should move on now.’
‘I thought you really needed to know.’
‘I thought I did too. Guess I didn’t. Or don’t any more. Seriously, it’s fine. Nobody else has died, I don’t think? I was wrong about it meaning anything – it was just some freak accident. Like this weather we’ve been having, it’s meaningless, there’s no big story behind it. It is the way it is. I died and somehow came back to life. There’s nothing more to it.’
‘Yeah.’ I chewed this over. ‘Yeah, I think you might be on to something there. I mean I didn’t find shit, really, in all this time. No clues, nothing. Maybe it was just a freak.’
‘Are you okay with that, so? Forget and move on?’
‘Whatever my lady desires.’
So that was that. Everything was really great. It was peachy. It was close to perfect. Except for one thing, one little stone in my shoe. Life, as it so often does, got in the way.
Plans are fine. Plans are great. But the gods, as they say, laugh when men make plans. And my best-laid plans went out the goddamn window when, early in January, three things happened. Big things. Things that changed everything.
People started dying of the cold, the same as Sláine had. The Guards accused me of running a violent hate campaign against several local kids. And on the upside, I think I got a break in solving the mystery of Sláine’s murder. That’s life, I guess: always giving with one hand, taking with the other.