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 impossible, 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 trailed 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.
‘I think I’m in shock. Holy shit.’
‘It’s the adrenaline. You’ll be okay in a few minutes. You’re not hurt.’
‘No, I mean – you’re back.’
‘I am. I’m right here.’
‘You’re not … dead,’ I said faintly. ‘You know what I mean … ’
I thought I was going to pass out. And then, at last, I did.
‘Aidan, we have to go.’
She was cradling my head. I came around gradually, woozily, and saw I was lying on the ground in that old graveyard and Sláine was sitting beneath me, nursing my head on her lap. Oddly, her body felt almost warm to me, as though it retained, or maybe remembered, a trace of the lifeblood that once gave her force. But that was probably just my mind playing tricks, because the ground itself was so perishing – an iceberg would have felt warm by comparison.
She said again, ‘We have to go. It’s not safe here.’
I smiled up at her, remembering her superwoman rescue act … when was that? How long had I been out? I said, ‘What do you mean it’s not safe? I saw what you can do.’
‘I meant for you. We have to go. Now. I didn’t want to … move you while you were out. Didn’t know what effect it might have.’
‘How long was I unconscious?’
‘You weren’t unconscious, you just fainted. I don’t know, a minute or two.’
My smile grew broader, expanding from a small grin to a face-covering beam. ‘You saved me.’
Sláine didn’t reply. She looked around, not anxiously but with a very serious expression. A real taking-care-of-business kind of look.
I said it again: ‘Sláine. You saved my life.’
Finally she graced me with a tiny smile in return. I went on, ‘Not for the first time. You’ve saved me before. You’re my guardian angel, you know that?’
She frowned. ‘I am far from being anyone’s guardian angel, believe me. I’m more like … like the bringer of bad luck.’
‘I don’t believe you. You’re my guardian angel and that’s that, whether you like it or not.’
I wanted to stay there forever, resting in her arms, but Sláine had said we needed to move ass, so I moved mine off the ground and shook myself down. I took a few deep breaths and searched my pockets for the makings of a cigarette. I pulled out the tobacco and said, ‘I got time for a smoke? Sort of think I need one, you know?’
Sláine waved her hand yes and looked away. I studied her surreptitiously while assembling the fag. Her hair wasn’t pinned up high any more; it hung loose around her face, onto the shoulders, curled and shining, a thin braid at either temple; I wondered if she had done those herself. Her eyes were decorated with dark smudgy kohl, or at least the impression of it. And under the surface, she also seemed changed, indisputably. I still couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Something intangible – hard to say exactly but it was definitely there …
‘So what the hell was that?’ I said around the column of smoke billowing from my mouth. ‘The thing that attacked me. You said it was a person, right?’
She stood and nodded. ‘That used to be a woman called Rita O’Leary. She was thirty-nine when she died last Monday night. Her body was discovered the next morning by her husband on one of those laneways that run from the road down to the beach. She’d frozen to death.’
I said hesitantly, ‘And this … it has something to do with you.’
‘In a sense, yes.’
‘No, it does. Sláine, I know what’s going on,’ I blurted out. ‘I’ve worked it out, this whole thing. I even know what … what killed you.’
She stared at me, her expression unreadable. I ploughed on, ‘It’s, aah … Okay, this is going to sound a bit crazy, but bear with me. It’s your ancestor. William John McAuley. I think – I’m pretty sure. I mean I don’t have any proof? But you know, when your gut instinct says something, it’s usually, like, bang on, isn’t it?’
Another smile. Sláine made that ‘hurry up’ gesture with her hand.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just feels a bit weird to me, you know, me being the one telling you something, and not the other way around.’
She tilted her head. I could see her patience was running out.
I took one big breath and launched into it. ‘Okay, here it is: McAuley conjured some kind of demon or some shit. Like, one of the old Celtic gods, or demons, some supernatural force. Some awful creature or presence, a thing made of the cold itself. He wrote about it in this letter that I found, that someone gave me. He was dying, it was the middle of the Famine and he knew he’d die, and he’d turned to hate God cos God didn’t help them when everyone was starving, and McAuley basically said, “Screw you, God, I’m getting help somewhere else.” So he went into Shook Woods one night and conjured up this thing, this demon, and basically cheated death that way. I don’t know where he’s been hiding out ever since, like that was a long time ago and he’s only resurfaced in the last few months. But he has, William McAuley’s definitely back, and he’s the one who killed you that night. Why, I don’t know – maybe because you’re related to him? Or he was lonely – the demon and him weren’t getting on so well, there were definite cracks in their relationship and McAuley was wondering if this really was the right person for him to spend immortality with.’
I laughed nervously. Sláine didn’t. Okay. I hammered on. ‘He knew about this black magic voodoo from his reading – you said yourself he was into all that malarkey. He knew what to do and how to do it. So, that’s what happened. Like I said I don’t have cast-iron proof for this, but it’s a good theory. It’s more than a theory – it all stacks up, everything. There are some gaps, I accept that, but you might be able to fill those in. I’ve read a pile of stuff over the last few months and then tonight Podsy told me there’d been a rash of other deaths from the cold in the last week and a bit, and their bodies were similar to yours and the Guards couldn’t explain it and, you know, it just all came together in my head. Fell into place. This stacks up. He’s the one.’
Still no response. I took a pull on my cigarette and said evenly, ‘Soooo … what do you think?’
Sláine looked around, continuing to scope the place out for danger. Finally she turned back and said, ‘I think you’re actually right. Good work.’
I smiled proudly, dumbly. Sláine was impressed and I felt happy. Even now, at the end of the world, her opinion counted for everything.
She raised a finger to indicate ‘but’ and added, ‘Except for one important point: it’s not William John McAuley. He lies dead in the ground, where he’s lain for the last century and a half. Not even that much: McAuley’s body was found and eaten by animals. There’s nothing left of my ancestor.’
‘But the rest of it, I got that right? Aw, shit. I was kind of hoping you’d tell me I was full of crap, I was insane and there was some banal explanation.’
‘’Fraid not.’
‘Pity. I would have preferred the other explanation. You know, the one that didn’t involve demons.’
I could hardly believe I was making jokes about all this, but there you go: the human heart is strange, and mine had evidently been filled with courage and bravado at Sláine’s return. Speaking of which …
‘Where were you since Sunday?’ I hadn’t meant to ask it yet, but it was out now, I couldn’t rewind time or suck the words back into my lungs.
Sláine said, ‘I’ll tell you, but not here. We need to go somewhere else. You were obviously followed to the graveyard, tracked. We can assume they’ve been watching out for you.’
‘They?’
‘There may be others, we don’t know.’
I gulped heavily. ‘Others … ? Right. Of those things. And actually, it knew my name. That monster, it said my name, Aidan Flood. Uuuugh. So it was sent here. After me.’
‘After you. I think so, yes.’
I forced myself to make another joke, anything to quell this rising swell of panic and fear in my chest. ‘Gee, wasn’t I born under a lucky star? Life just keeps getting better and better. What next? I’m gonna get Satan for a roommate? “Bunch up, Aidan, there’s plenty room in that bed for two.”’
I was babbling a little. Sláine frowned at me. ‘You’ll be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you.’
I sucked hard on the cigarette and tossed it aside. ‘All right. I believe you. So where to? Shook Woods? The lodge, yeah?’
‘No. Further than that.’ Sláine scooted over and wrapped her arms tightly around me. That shivery embrace, as comforting as a mother’s hug and as thrilling as a first kiss.
‘I’m going to bring you somewhere quite far away, very quickly,’ she said. ‘All right? So close your eyes and brace yourself. This might feel a little … weird.’
We’d already done this, when she’d whooshed me through the forest that time; it felt a bit disorientating but not too bad. I expected it to be like that again, only magnified. I could cope with that. I held my breath and readied myself.
‘’Kay. Ready as I’ll ever be.’
And as my eyes closed on Sláine, it struck me, what was fundamentally different about her, how she’d changed.
Her shift from dark to light had been completed. Only her eyes, lips and hair retained colour and shade. Now she was fully white, a brilliant white, like the inside of a supernova.