The Shiver

And the hearth boy.

Photo by Stéphane Juban on Unsplash

If you stand on the sycamore stump at the crossroads of Old Mill and Whippoorwill after the sun goes down, you can see the fire burning up in his cave. If the fire goes out, we’ll all die. He carried it up there when he was a boy, about my age, and he’s kept it burning ever since.

Back when Granny was little there was a plague. A sickness knocked at every door and death held it open for the departed. There were many departed. Granny said every family lost someone. It was like the Passover in the Bible, but God didn’t tell anyone in town how to get passed over. The disease was strange and horrible, no doctor had ever seen anything like it before and the government put the entire town on quarantine.

Granny was the middle of three sisters, her older sister got it first. It started with a chill, like ghost fingers running up her spine. She was cooking one night, stirring a pot of stew, when a chill sent gooseflesh prickling over her skin as the shiver entered her. When the shiver disappeared, her lips were blue, a pale milky blue that made them hard and cold. It was hard for her to talk and Granny said she just moaned most of the time. Over the coming days, the shiver came more often, leaving a different part of her blue when it departed. Eventually, her entire body became like a cold winter sky. Granny said her poor sister could barely move she was so cold, no matter how many heating pads or electric blankets they piled on her.

The worst part was, it wasn’t the cold that killed people, it was how fragile they became. Granny said if a person with the shiver stubbed a toe, the toe would shatter like glass. Her sister was walking down the stairs when she tripped on the afghan wrapped around her, tumbled to the bottom, and shattered into a million pieces. The government cleaned her up with a vacuum cleaner. The dead were all incinerated. Shortly after that Granny’s younger sister got the shiver, too.

Those with the shiver who didn’t crumble to pieces were eventually rounded up and put into quarantine in the school gymnasium. The government couldn’t figure out how the disease spread, but it was spreading fast. There was no identifiable germ, they said. But even after they quarantined the sick, new cases emerged. Granny said she never got sick because she wore all her warmest clothes, all the time, no matter what. And because she banked the hearth fire at night. No one really used their fireplaces by that time because they had central heating and air, but Granny said they started to again when the shiver came. They thought it would help keep the infected warm. Granny said the hearth fire talked to her. The crackling flames told her to keep them alive, so Granny did. She banked the fire tenderly at night and tended to it first thing in the morning, even after her little sister went to quarantine. Soon everyone took these precautions and the shiver stopped spreading. People began leaving gifts for the hearth fire at night, small things, like dark bread, bowls of loamy earth, pretty rocks, and red wine. Of course, the government doctors laughed at the superstitions of the town and refused to acknowledge that they worked. But they were working.

The government doctors, with all their scoffing, also had no idea what caused the disease or how to stop it. They couldn’t say when they would let the people in quarantine out, because they knew nothing. Granny says she doesn’t know what happened in the gymnasium that got the government doctor killed, but a girl named Jenny Tally lost her arm over it. Shattered it clear up to the shoulder, Granny said. Purple blood, thick as cold honey, dripped out of the boney stump as Jenny Tally and all the others walked the streets, looking for their homes with frozen eyes. They no longer wanted a cure. They just wanted to exist and live as they once had. But Granny said the rest of the town didn’t want them back. Cooped up in the gymnasium they had discovered that they could freeze things at a touch. And now they walked the streets, freezing lampposts and bicycles, even a dog. He didn’t live.

“We knew they could kill us with the flick of the wrist,” Granny told me, “but what we didn’t know was that we could kill them too.” They hadn’t thought of it, because the afflicted had been their loved ones. They weren’t anymore. They were monsters. The night the ice people came home Granny was in her bed, watching the snow fall outside her window and listening to the winds try to worry their way in. She heard a sound, a slow shuffle, then a terrible, icy pain overtook her. Chilled fingers threaded her warm ones and a cheek like a frozen pond laid against hers. Her sister had come home. Granny was scared of her frozen eyes, glassy and unmoving, like taxidermy eyes. She screamed and pushed her sister out of the bed. Another sister shattered.

All over town the ice people had returned, trying to fit back into their old lives. They used their chilling touch to threaten and coerce their loved ones into accepting them. Three people died at their hands. It was sad, and terrifying. Until a young boy, younger than Granny was at the time, called the spirit of the underworld up from her fiery pit. The spirit that had been inhabiting the hearth fires. Granny said the boy sat in the town square in the middle of a blizzard and called the mighty spirit of the hearth to inhabit him. The spirit obliged, entering the boy with a savage roar that melted all the ice people, turning them to gooey puddles of pink slush. The boy glowed and flickered at his edges. He left the town that night and climbed up to the cave you can see if you stand on the sycamore stump at Old Mill and Whippoorwill. Granny said the shiver never came back after the boy climbed up there. But his light’s been guttering lately. Someone will have to take his place, she thinks. Granny says I’m the right age. She raps my head with her knuckles and says I’m just the right age.