Joseph took a swig of scotch and said, ‘I conjured up that … thing you saw. Out here in the forest, in a secluded spot, not far from this room. Straight after that hallowed ceremony I went into hibernation for a week or so – sort of suspended, a demonic version of cryogenic freezing, I suppose. Ha! That notion amuses me. Hibernating, growing stronger, becoming different. Becoming more. Waiting, waiting, for circumstances to come into line, exactly right … ’
‘And then you made your triumphant return.’
‘Precisely. Eventually I knew my time had come, my body knew. It knew. And I was resurrected. I took a few days to get used to being alive again, get my breath back, as such. Then I made my first kill.’
‘Sláine.’
He nodded. She didn’t react in any way. I snapped my fingers at her, snarking, ‘Hey, yo. Princess. That doesn’t bother you? Your boyfriend here actually murdered you? How romantic. I mean I really see beautiful things ahead for both of you.’
Joseph stared gloomily at a candle flame as it danced, his face a mask. ‘We are bound, this demon and me. At first I wasn’t … fully in control. But I learned. My strength grew. Now I control it. I can separate myself from the thing whenever I please. At least, I think … Sometimes, though. Sometimes it feels as though I’m sort of … losing myself, all over again … ’
He abruptly slapped the arm of the chair. I jumped with the noise. Joseph continued, evidently back to his cocky self. ‘I had to lure her out here, you know. Lovely Sláine. In the beginning I was unable to leave the woods – they sort of … held me. Pinioned, like the proverbial butterfly in a glass case. It took all my powers of hypnosis and persuasion to bring her to me. But that was only in the beginning. My strength grows all the time, exponentially. These days, I can kill wherever I like. The whole world is my hunting ground. I feast on the warm-blooded buffet table that is the human population.’
I blew smoke in his face, a dismal attempt to annoy him. He didn’t even blink. I said, ‘The way you say that, with such pleasure. Admit it, Joseph – Joe, whatever your goddamn name is – this is about more than eternal life. You’re a sadistic bastard. You enjoy killing.’
‘I won’t deny there’s pleasure to be found in it. To take another’s life – and soul, in this case – yes, it’s a sublime pleasure. One of the perks of the job, you might call it.’ He gazed on Sláine, and there was almost a genuine fondness in it. ‘As is this beautiful woman, of course. A queen should be beautiful, don’t you think? That’s how all the best fairy tales have it.’
‘This is no fairy tale, it’s a goddamn horror story. So it was you who laid Sláine’s body out under that tree. Why there?’
He shrugged. ‘No reason. You have to dispose of the rubbish somewhere. That’s all it was by that stage: rotting matter. The essence of Sláine was gone. It had been freed. The real Sláine you can see before you. Not the weak human she was before I improved her. Now she is radiant, powerful. She is triumphant.’
‘I remember that man finding her corpse, the forestry guy. Clearing old growth … ’
Joseph laughed heartily. ‘“Clearing old growth!” Ha! I’m the one who’s clearing old growth. By the time I’m finished this world will have been remade completely. It’s a new birth, my lad. A bright new dawn for a tired old world. You should think yourself lucky to be a part of it. Not that you’ll stay a part of it for long, but still – can’t have everything.’
I hopped off the bed, a renewed anger prompting me to act before I’d had a chance to weigh up the consequences. I pointed at Joseph and said, ‘This is crazy, man. What you’re doing, it’s evil. And unnatural. Death is a part of life.’ I turned to Sláine and started saying, ‘You said that yourse—’
In an instant she was on me, her fingers at my throat. The cold of it, Jesus, I could feel it going through me. Unable to breathe, my body going into hypothermic meltdown.
She muttered, ‘Don’t move again. Trust me – if you know what’s good for you, don’t do anything stupid.’
Radiant, powerful and triumphant indeed. I looked into her eyes. Nothing there but contempt. Worse, a profound disinterest. I meant zero to her – it wasn’t even worth working up the energy to despise me. I never felt so small and pathetic, so unloved. So alone.
Tears came to my eyes as I realised, finally: I’m dead. And this was just a ludicrous fantasy built on nothing at all.
Sláine dropped me again. I fell to the bed and mechanically rolled another fag. What else are you gonna do, right? The condemned man always gets his last few smokes. I sniffled, saying numbly, ‘Why her? Why Sláine?’
Joseph said, ‘Well, someone had to be the first. And I picked Sláine in tribute to the man who made it possible: William John McAuley. In his honour, and besides which, she is a beautiful young woman in every way – fair of face, full of grace. I’d watched her on weekends home from college since we arrived in your town. I knew who she was, and that she would make a fine consort for me. My helpmeet across eternity … I’d also found an old ring McAuley’d had engraved for his wife Eleanor in the library cubbyhole. Put that on Sláine’s finger as a token of my esteem, her great-grandmother’s ring. And a little clue, maybe, for Sláine to ponder over. I know it can get dull, this immortal life, when you’ve nobody to share it with.’
‘Why didn’t you come to her straight away, then? Once her new life began. She could’ve started helpmeeting the shit out of you from day one. Actually, why’d you wait so long between killing Sláine and, and … this rampage of murder over the last few weeks.’
‘Murder? Tch.’ He seemed disappointed at my naive-weakling bourgeois morality. ‘It’s hardly that. We’ve been over this already, Aidan. It’s not murder when you squash that fly with a newspaper, is it? The two don’t compare, they’re not in the same universe, man and fly. That’s how it is for me now: there’s myself and Sláine, and then all of humanity. We are separate animals. Different universes.’
Without warning Joseph grabbed his glass and flung it at Sioda’s head. The shot missed, the glass smashing into pieces off the wall behind him. Sioda recoiled further into his foetal curl. Sláine replaced the glass, a fresh drink already poured.
‘Christ, that whining,’ Joseph said. ‘Shut up, damn you. Or I will give you an end even nastier than I’d originally intended.’ To me he added, ‘You asked me a question – why did I wait so long? The answer is simple: I was waiting for her.’
He glanced at Sláine. She remained as impassive as an Ancient Egyptian burial mask, though I noticed her body wasn’t completely still, like before: she was drumming her index finger off the fabric of that fabulous antique coat. How gorgeous she looked, I thought, how divine the surface. How demonic the undergrowth.
Joseph went on, ‘I had time, after all. I’ve all the time in the world. I will never die, so I was in no mad rush. And before I made my move I wanted to see how Sláine would … develop. Once she became accustomed to her new existence. I was curious: would it change her the way it changed me? Make her colder, harder? Bring her closer to the state of flawlessness that is absolute zero: unmoving, unchanging, magnificently indifferent. Perfect.’ He smiled with smug satisfaction. ‘It did. I knew it would anyway. I don’t make mistakes. But that was proved when I saw what she was capable of. The way she dismantled those boys and girls, tore them apart, toyed with them, invaded their dreams, drove them mad, launched a virtual one-woman terror campaign … !’ He clapped admiringly. ‘Sláine may have thought it was done for you, revenge on your behalf. I know the truth, and now she does too. She attacked those kids because she could – and because she liked doing it.’
Out of somewhere I found the gallows humour to drawl to Sláine, ‘Told you you shouldn’t have done all that.’ She smiled on me with an insipid pity that was worse than the violent disinterest of five minutes before.
Joseph said, ‘I knew then, for sure, this was the girl for me. No compunctions, no hesitations, no miserable little moral code. Sláine, like me, had the right stuff.
So about a fortnight ago – less, ten or eleven days – I began killing again. I was hungry by then. I’d waited long enough. I sated my thirst, grew stronger, my powers expanding, becoming ever more refined … After a week or so, once I was in the groove, so to speak, I made contact with Sláine. Told her some of what was going on, not all. It’s more romantic to keep a few secrets from each other, don’t you agree?’
Jesus Christ. Could this guy get any more deluded? And yet … she genuinely seemed to have fallen for him. His dark charm, the lure of eternal life. My stomach knotted and roiled like a stormy sea.
‘Then I appeared to her, here, this evening. Told her everything she needed to know, and she told me everything. About your absurd intention to somehow stop me, how you were on the way to this lodge, supposedly to hammer out a battle plan … So, the mountain came to Muhammad, and here we are. The rest, as they say, is history. As you will soon be.’
A thought struck me and I figured I may as well ask about it: ‘Are you responsible for this weather? The cold winter we’ve been having.’
‘Seems so, yes,’ he said. ‘A side effect, not intended. But not unfavourable to my plans. The cold snap helped to cover up what I was doing. Freeze people to death during a mild spell and … well. It tends to raise suspicions. Even among the slow-witted local constabulary you’re blessed with here.’
‘Hell has literally frozen over,’ I said dully. ‘This is it, here. This is hell now.’
That amused Joseph. He chuckled and took another drink. Such a strange place to die, I thought absently, this little hut. I’d never in a million years have imagined these to be the circumstances of my demise.
‘This is hell,’ I went on, almost mechanically, ‘and you are the devil, Kinvara. You’re a sick bastard who should have been put down at birth. Even your own brother can’t stand the sight of you.’
I gestured towards Sioda, who hadn’t moved a muscle for ages. In an instant Joseph had erupted from the seat and was looming over me, towering, growing huge, the evil being inside him emerging once more, the same flicker and blur, a radioactive buzz around Joseph’s head. I flinched back. I actually whimpered. I could smell the scotch off Kinvara, those sickly sweet fumes: a cloud of whisky-perfume, wreathing this hideous twosome. Then I heard them, raw thunder rising to a ragged roar, unbearable, infernal, the demon screeching in counterpoint. It sounded like the rumbling of the massed armies of hell.
‘Be … careful … boy.’
Just as abruptly, the pair had merged again and the man was sitting in his chair. I was shaking, gallons of adrenaline shooting around my system but it was pointless, neither fight nor flight was possible here and I was boned.
Joseph said quietly, ‘Your death is assured, but I can still make it painful. Or perhaps I should take your soul as well? Condemn you to the eternal wandering of a hellish afterlife. The only thing stopping me is Sláine’s soft spot for you.’ He turned to her. ‘What do you say, my love? Shall we consume him wholly? Maybe make him one of our slaves?’
Sláine considered me with a cool, disdainful eye. ‘Tch. He’s not even worth turning into a zombie. Poor pathetic Aidan is only good for throwing away, like any piece of junk.’
Even now, when anger and disbelief had turned to miserable resignation, it still hurt to hear her talk like that. Were the last few months a total lie? Had none of it meant a goddamn thing in reality, outside my delusional mind?
She seemed to soften a bit, handing me Kinvara’s whisky bottle and saying, ‘Don’t be frightened. I told you: when the time comes, you’ll be all right. You won’t even think about it. Have a drink. It’s good for the nerves.’
I grabbed the bottle – it felt heavy, like the weight of some awful knowledge – and slugged from the neck, a measure of sickly, fiery scotch going where it was meant to, more of it dribbling onto my jacket.
Emboldened by the booze, I yelled at her through a scorched throat, flung words in her face as if they were physical things which had the power to hurt, to change, to move: ‘The bullies. The attacks. Even that. I can’t believe I believed you, that you did it for me. God, at least that gave some meaning to all this bloody violence, or justification or something … This awful thing, but done for a good reason … ’ I shook my head angrily. ‘Doesn’t matter. Clearly you were just a bloodthirsty maniac all along.’
She said evenly, ‘Thirsty, yes. But not for blood. Blood is old hat, Aidan. It’s silly stories about vampires. We feed off the cold. We create it, and in turn it gives us life. A perfect symbiosis. A dance of death that will never end.’
‘Don’t you regret anything? Or has your conscience frozen over, too?’ I jerked a thumb in Joseph’s direction. ‘He hasn’t got one, that’s obvious. Too long inside his own madness has turned him into Jeffrey Dahmer. But you, Sláine. Jesus, you were a human being just a few months ago. You felt love, affection, empathy. You kissed your mother goodbye and hugged your granny. You did things, physical things, emotional, just things. You went on the lash with your pals and ye danced together and hugged each other and had the crack and felt good. You played music and helped out with handicapped kids and shifted Tommy Fox. You and him, together, your mouth on his mouth, your hands on his body. Don’t you remember that? What it was like to be a goddamn person?!’
I realised I was shouting. I resumed, quieter. ‘You were a girl, Sláine. A human being, with warm skin and lively eyes and a heart that beat dozens of times a minute. Not long ago, that was you. You must remember what it was like. You have to.’
She stared at me for a long moment. Finally she said, ‘Do you recall what’s written above the door to this lodge? “It does not trouble the wolf how many the sheep may be.” I’m not a girl any more, that’s the point. I’m a wolf now, Aidan. And the fate of the sheep doesn’t trouble me.’
My shoulders slumped, then my whole body. I collapsed onto myself like a marionette with its strings cut. I’d failed, again. It was no use. I was beaten. They wouldn’t listen to reason, had no moral compass. Sláine and Joseph Kinvara were the worst thing imaginable: psychopathic, immortal, all-powerful, unstoppable … and there were two of them, so they’d never get lonely and never get bored. And this nightmare would never end for the human race.
So I chose the coward’s way out. I decided not to stick around. I’m no hero, I admit that. Better to go now, a clean break with life. Better not to fight, as she’d said. Better to hold on to my soul and hope to God there really was one. Hope that God and heaven existed.
But there had to be a heaven, right? Somewhere better than this.
I stood, sighed and said, ‘Okay, do it. Right now.’
Neither of them moved. ‘Kill me. I’m asking you, please. Just kill me. I’ve had enough.’
Sioda finally glanced up from his womb-like crouch. He seemed surprised; perhaps some survival instinct lingered on, making him hope that somehow, some way, we’d both make it out of there alive.
I smiled at him, saying ruefully, ‘Sorry, man. Nothing we can do now.’
Joseph went to rise from the chair but I held up a hand to stop him and looked at Sláine. ‘I’d prefer if you did it.’ I gave a lopsided smile and felt tears pricking my eyes. ‘For … for old times’ sake, yeah?’
She nodded and came over, standing just in front of me. Sláine ending my existence: the ultimate betrayal in a life that sometimes seemed full of them, and there was a weird kind of aptness in that. Why shouldn’t the story of my shitty existence have a disappointing, unhappy ending?
‘It’ll be quick, Aidan,’ she said, smiling, something almost tender in it. ‘No pain. I won’t take your soul. I won’t destroy your face. Your parents will have something decent to bury.’
Amazingly, I really did appreciate this – that my mam and dad could have an open coffin at the funeral. Wow, I thought, smiling inwardly: you’re actually maturing, Aidan. You’re getting outside your own stupid head and thinking about other people for once. Pity this newfound maturity was coming too late, but there y
ou go. Like I said, life’s full of irony.
I appreciated it, but wasn’t going to let on to Sláine. ‘Good for you,’ I drawled with some dying spark of defiance, one last ‘screw you’ to my tormentors. ‘Award yourself a medal. Can we get on with it now?’
She smiled indulgently. ‘Of course. One last smoke before you go? Last meal on death row?’
Before I could answer Sláine had whisked my tobacco out of my pocket, rolled a cigarette and gently slipped it between my lips. I shrugged: sure, whatever.
Sioda swung his legs over the bed and implored his brother, hands together like a religious penitent: ‘For God’s sake, Joseph. For the memory of our mother, stop this insanity. Don’t let this boy die. You hate me, I get that, but think of Mammy, for God’s sake … ’
Joseph sniggered. ‘For God’s sake? There is no god any more, you snivelling little turd. I am God now. Carry on, Sláine. Ignore that worm sitting next to you there.’
I rose from the bed, clutching the bottle of scotch. Sláine stood before me, partly blocking Joseph’s line of sight.
‘That’s it,’ she said, as softly as a mother hushing her child to sleep. ‘Accept the way things are.’
The whisky bottle in my hand. My lighter in her hand. Sioda’s head back in his hands. My life, and death, in Sláine’s hands.
And then, and then, right at the finish, my real ‘screw you’ to the pair of them – not the flip comment of childish rebellion but something heartfelt, fundamental. Something quiet and tender, and all the more powerful for that.
I smiled sadly at her and said, ‘I love you, Sláine.’
There was my triumph. There I was victorious. In letting her know I hadn’t changed, despite everything. My heart hadn’t hardened or frozen over. I still loved her, and always would. I still felt love. Life hadn’t beaten me, they hadn’t beaten me. I was bloodied but unbowed. And I was at peace.
Shiver the Whole Night Through Page 26