Free Shiver the Whole Night Through by Darragh McManus Page B

hadn’t known, until this morning, was that our town suffered worse than most during those terrible times. We’re cut off by the sea on one side, the forest on another and mountains on a third and most of a fourth. Back then there was really only one route in or out – through and over those mountains – and hardly anybody was taking it.
    When the English authorities finally got their act together and came to help in the bleak midwinter of 1851, they arrived in a ghost town. As Mr Lee explained, virtually every last person was dead by the end: of hunger, disease, exhaustion, cold. The few who survived made for safety across the mountains, a perilous journey with low chances of success.
    The company of Crown soldiers found a group of mangy dogs picking at the few corpses that weren’t already eaten by wild animals. Clusters of bones, scraps of clothing; a piece of cheap jewellery here, leather boot there. Makeshift headstones dotted the edge of town, a pathetic attempt to mark the passing of parents, children, friends. But only a handful; probably by the end people hadn’t the energy to do anything but wait there for death.
    Just like Sláine. What a strange thought. I shivered, as though a thousand frozen hands were reaching out to me across the centuries.
    Mr Lee also mentioned how the English thought our town was cursed, calling it Death’s Shadow. I already knew that, we all did; not the sort of nickname you shrug off too easily. Even worse, I thought sarcastically, than ‘dickless loooooser’.
    Anyway, the man in charge decided to start afresh – to slay whatever demons might be present, genuine or imagined. The whole place was razed to the ground, burned into obliteration, and completely rebuilt. Rebuilt for whom? Those few dozen who’d escaped over the mountains – and somehow survived. They returned, in dribs and drabs, bringing others with them, and people passing by decided to stay  …  and over the years, the town was repopulated and reborn.
    But it never forgot: the cold, the hunger, the ever-present unstoppable death.
    Mr Lee finished his talk and called for questions. A girl called Yvonne raised her hand and said, ‘Is anything left of the old town, then, sir?’
    â€˜Well, we have the bridge on the coast road,’ he said, ‘though that’s a little outside town, of course. Built sometime in the fifteenth century. Apart from that, no. Not one thing was left standing.’ He began gathering his things, a sign the class was drawing to a close. ‘I mean, there’s underground. There’re all sorts of stories about tunnels and passages and catacombs, deep underneath the town. Dating from long before Famine times, possibly as far back as the Dark Ages. They wouldn’t have been destroyed in the fire –’
    I was listening intently when something odd happened: Mr Lee’s voice sort of stretched out into a low droning noise, like an Aboriginal didgeridoo. My vision went black at the edges, reforming into a tunnel of light on the teacher’s face. He turned to me, looked me right in the eye, and said, ‘Tonight. Midnight. You know the place.’
    Only it wasn’t
him
– Mr Lee – saying it, it was Sláine. I’d know it anywhere, I’d never forget it. That voice which sounded like the tinkle of ice, which you felt more than heard.
    I thought I heard her whisper something else; it could have been ‘heart’. Then she laughed and there was silence. I snapped back to reality. Mr Lee was still talking: ‘But nobody has any
proof
that they exist. Probably just legends, you know. A bit of local colour. All right, is that it, so? Okay, off you go.’
    I looked around. No one else appeared to have noticed anything strange. What was that, a hallucination? Is that what those feel like? I remembered reading that epileptic fits and brain seizures are often preceded by some bizarro