Shiver the Whole Night Through (16 page)

Now I said, ‘Uh-huh. Patterns in the flow. Sounds like a lame-ass prog-rock band. So did you get any?'

He replied, enthused, ‘Yeah, actually. What we're dealing with here are irregularly occurring phenomena in the electro—' He stopped, seeing the genuine look of bafflement on my face. ‘Okay, look at it like this: you have the normal flow, quote–unquote, of energy out there in space. Over us, here, in Ireland. But what we've been seeing –' He smiled proudly. ‘What
I've
been seeing, and Hiro has been processing, is these unusual spikes. Weirdest thing is, they're coming at quite regular intervals? Which really is weird.'

‘What's weird about it? I'm still a bonehead, Podsy, just like the last time you told me about this stuff.' I gave a small smile. I think it was the first time I'd smiled – properly, happily – since Sunday afternoon. Whether through the coffee, the conversation or the distraction, I felt a bit better, the mental load slightly lifted.

He said, ‘It's weird cos  … 
usually
, with something like this, it's gonna happen randomly. The usual thing with unusual events, ha. But here we have what kind of looks like a pattern. Two or three of these spikes, every week, for about two months now. And that, as it happens, coincides with the cold weather. Which I have to say I'm ticked off that it doesn't look like going away any time soon.'

‘What does Hiro the Hero make of all this?'

‘He's still sifting through the data. But it's picking up – that's the other weird aspect. The rate of these spikes, their frequency, it's accelerating. Last week we had four, this week so far six and it's only Friday yet. So  …  that's it, that's where we stand.' He added as an afterthought, ‘There was one night actually,
man
, the bloody thing nearly went off the scale. Just this huge, I mean a
massive
surge of energy. Few nights ago. Haven't seen anything like it since.'

My curiosity was piqued now. I said casually, ‘Oh, yeah? D'you remember what night?'

‘Yeh, it was Sunday. Which I know cos I was Skyping – yes, you guessed it – Hiro at the time. We chat online most Sunday nights. Our time, obviously, they're already into Monday by that stage.'

Sunday? That could have been Sláine. Whatever happened to her, whatever she did, maybe it had been recorded in electromagnetic radiation, as her mortal death appeared to have been. Written in some invisible ink across our outer atmosphere. For an instant, my heart was kindled with some vague, unsettled feeling that I couldn't put my finger on.

Then I thought, what difference did it make anyway? So her disappearance was recorded on a graph somewhere in SETI headquarters. Big deal. That didn't change the fact that she was gone – and I was miserable without her.

I went for a pee and ordered two more coffees on my way back to our booth. Podsy picked up a sugar sachet and twirled it in his fingers. He said, ‘Any follow-up from the Guards?'

I chuckled. Of course he'd know about my little chinwag with Parkinson; no secret was safe from Uncle Tim and his enormous, uncontrollable gob. I didn't mind. In fact it was quite amusing.

‘Nah,' I said. ‘I think they were fishing.'

‘Me too. I wouldn't worry about it.'

‘Easy for you to say, pally.'

‘No, but seriously. Anyway there hasn't been another incident since Rattigan. Maybe the wild animal or whatever was behind it has died of the cold. Maybe it
was
just coincidence all along.'

‘How's he doing anyway?'

Podsy pouted. ‘Rattigan? Tch. He'll pull through. Cockroaches are virtually impossible to kill off, didn't you know that?'

‘Yeah, well  …  I'm not unhappy about that, I have to say. Wouldn't want the guy
dead
. Despite what the sergeant might think.'

‘Mm, I suppose so  …  Anyway. You're off the hook, I'd say. The Guards have bigger fish to be frying now.'

‘Oh, right? Like what? Banditos riding into town to rob El Banco. Shoot-Out at the Fairly Shitty Corral.'

‘Nah, man. The hypothermia deaths.'

Something gave me the chills as though my mind had seen an awful future looming on the horizon. The worst thing of all was that this something was telling me I'd have a part to play in it.

I said slowly, ‘Podsy. What deaths?'

He looked at me in surprise. ‘The bunch of people killed by the cold? You know about this, right? Wakey-wakey, Aidan. Everyone's talking about it.'

‘Talking – what?'

‘All right, not everyone. Some people. In fairness the cops're trying to keep a lid on it. They're bullshitting people a little, so's not to emphasise too many similarities between the different cases. They're afraid it might start, you know, a panic or whatever.'

‘Killed when?'

‘Last week or so. More, maybe. Ten days?'

How had I not heard about this? Maybe I had, but dumped the information without paying it any attention, like deleting spam email. Christ, I really
had
been sleepwalking through the last few days. And now it appeared I'd woken up into some real-world nightmare.

Podsy went on, warming to his theme. ‘They didn't think anything of it at first, Tim and them. Okay, someone's found frozen to death out by Shook Woods. Whenever, say ten days ago. Which, I mean, isn't crazily surprising of itself, with the big freeze we've had for the last eight weeks. People die from hypothermia in winter, that's a fact of life. So a one-time happening, in this weather? Not a bad percentage. An isolated tragedy, as they say.'

I said, a sinking feeling in my tummy, ‘Go on.'

‘This's where things get weird. That was the first one. Then another body was found within twenty-four hours.
Then
 …  another. Okay, you're still talking isolated tragedies. A bit of a trickle to start with. But at the beginning of this week it just,
whoa
, suddenly there's a
flood
of these things. Bodies, bodies, everywhere. More being found each day.'

‘How many?'

‘I think about two dozen so far, but they're not sure. Hang on, though, I haven't got to the really weird bit yet.'

He gave me the full story, and my heart grew colder with each new revelation. This wave of deaths didn't involve either elderly or homeless folks, as would generally be the case with hypothermia. Most of those who'd perished, literally, were young enough – all under fifty, the majority from about twenty to early thirties (none younger than that, nobody from school). Besides, as Podsy pointed out, our town didn't really have homeless people – it wasn't big enough. The odd chronic drunk might spend the odd night sleeping outside in the rough, kicked from the house by an angry wife, but none of those had passed away anyway; somehow they'd survived a night in the cold. Maybe the old gag about a ‘drink overcoat' had some truth to it after all.

Some of the victims were people I knew. Some were strangers to me, their names unfamiliar. Some men, some women. Students, workers, parents, on the dole, about to emigrate. As far as I could tell they were decent people, cool people, stupid people, annoying people, creeps and sweethearts, assholes and angels. All in all, it was about as random a selection of townsfolk as you could get. As though some giant computer was arbitrarily selecting names off a list and designating them for death.

They had each been found in the morning, frozen, by loved ones or passers-by. None of them were in their homes – all outside, whether that was their front doorstep or on some road far outside town or anywhere in between. (That must have been what Uncle Tim was whispering about on his phone the other day, organising to send out a crime scene unit to where another corpse had been discovered.) The bodies had all turned partly blue with the cold. Some had their eyes closed, and looked almost peaceful; others were staring into the infinite emptiness of death, a horrible grimace on their faces.

Podsy continued to run through the details. I zoned out his voice and thought, not for the first time, he's right – it
is
strange. Done in by the cold: not disease or a car crash or some tragic accident. Not a ‘normal' death, for want of a better word. Of course, on a very simple level it wasn't strange at all: that's what happens if you lie down, outside, with the temperature ten below and dropping. But on a broader level it was so peculiar as to put a shiver – appropriately enough – up my spine. All these youngish people freezing to death, within less than a fortnight, some inexplicable compulsion making them leave their house and lie down to wait for the cruellest of deaths.

And that shiver turned to an eerie prickle in the back of my mind with what Podsy said next – more confidential information from ever-reliable Uncle Tim – all the victims looked the same post-mortem. What he didn't add, but I obviously thought, was: yes, Podsy, the same as Sláine. Their eyes and skin bore the identical marks of each one's demise: those thin light-blue lines covering their bodies, as though death had used them as canvases for a sinister tattoo, their irises changing colour to the same icy-blue as
her
.

Now he said, ‘There has to be something to this. It can't be a coincidence. That sort of biological reaction simply does not take place under regular circumstances.'

I fobbed him off with a non-committal reply. I was running this through my head, this Sláine thing, hoping to find some structure to it.

Podsy continued, ‘Parkinson's really losing his shit over this. Trying to work out why it's happening, and more importantly I guess, to stop it happening again. This – I don't know – phenomenon. Is that the right word?'

I shrugged, another non-committal response. I wasn't sure I trusted myself to say the right thing here, or rather, not say the
wrong
thing.

‘Those animal attacks, that's one thing,' Podsy said. ‘As my dear Uncle Tim declared the other day, “Regrettable, of course, but comprehensible at least.” I love when he tries to use big words like that, he's a gas man  …  But this thing with the cold is just bananas. Like, think about it, Aidan. Why are all these people coming out at night-time in the middle of the worst big freeze for a hundred and sixty years? Some sort of communal madness? Are they sleepwalking? Pff.' He threw his hands in the air. ‘Nobody can say for sure. And the other thing, I mean, none of the victims were suicidal, right? Or at least none had shown suicidal tendencies. As far as the Guards know, nobody had a reason to kill themselves.'

Police and civilians both, he said, had been trying to make sense of these ‘cold' deaths through speculation, deduction, wild guesswork. Such-and-such, it was insisted, must have tripped while walking on the ice and hit his head. Someone else, they reckoned, had been mugged and left unconscious with tragic consequences. A third fatality fell asleep on the road with a feed of drink in his belly. Then the ice and frost got them all.

One guy – this clown called Delaney – had died on the beach, on a wind-blasted, Arctic night the previous weekend. He'd gone there to shift his girlfriend, sheltering behind an upturned rowing boat, and they were in the middle of it when he pulled away. She laughed at first, she later reported, thinking he was playing the fool. Then he gasped and stiffened and finally keeled over onto the sand, unmoving. Still she thought he was joking, until she noticed that no condensation was coming from his mouth. He wasn't breathing any more.

She was totally hysterical talking about it afterwards, Podsy said, babbling about a ‘white spirit' swishing past extremely quickly and what she described as ‘a lightning bolt of fog' shooting out of nowhere and going right down her boyfriend's throat. It was unintelligible gobbledegook – she wasn't making any sense. Nobody took her story seriously. They assumed she was drunk or high, and besides, had suffered a great trauma, so it was to be expected she'd be mentally unhinged for a while.

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.