Besieged

Greta tilts her head to the side and speaks civilly to him for the first time. “You mean in the same way the United States used ‘advanced’ interrogation techniques?”

“Yes, very similar. It was thought at the time that if prisoners were forced to reflect on their crimes, this would somehow inspire true repentance. So they were given the silent treatment for an hour every day: a black bag over their heads and an admonition not to speak but just reflect. Naturally, few of the men could remain silent in such conditions, so they made some noise, and as punishment they were thrown into a dark cell for solitary confinement. This drove many of them mad, and they had an asylum built right next door.”

“Gods below, why didn’t they just club them with a branch and get it over with? Fecking cruel.”

“Why are we here?” Greta says.

“Aye, lad, I know ye didn’t want to speculate earlier, but I think now is the time.”

“Let’s head over to the grass,” Siodhachan says, “and get in touch with Tasmania. See if there are any devils around.”

“Fine. But fecking speculate already.”

“A lot of people died violent deaths here, Owen. The prisoners, yes, but the native Tasmanians before that—the British pretty much wiped them out, so there are no longer any full-blooded natives, and nobody talks about it. Regardless, I don’t think anyone who died here was in a happy place, you know? Not even the guards. It wasn’t the time or place for peaceful living. There are more than fifteen hundred bodies buried on a little island over there,” he says, pointing to the southeast, “called the Isle of the Dead. But they all died right around here.”

“So you’re suggesting this area is haunted,” I says as we step onto the grass. “Big fecking deal. Maybe one of those unwashed crews of nervous lads can film a ghost-finding show here in the dark and jump at every little noise they hear.”

I really should not have said that, because right then a chorus of ragged, smoky screeches tears through the night all around us, as close to the harrowing cry of a ban sidhe as anything mortal might get, and if we hadn’t all clenched as tight as we could, I’m sure we would have shat ourselves, and that’s no lie. I have never heard anything so fecking awful, like claws on steel, shearing away me sanity and all me muscles strung tight as a harp string, expecting a brief final visit from the Morrigan before the darkness takes me.

I’m not the only one who feels it. Siodhachan’s eyes practically pop out of his skull, and Greta crouches and snarls as if she were cornered, and the hound barks.

<Atticus, are those wombats or what?>

“Those are Tasmanian devils,” Siodhachan says, answering the question for all of us.

“They didn’t make noises like that when we were healing them,” I says.

“Something has them upset.”

<Maybe it’s the ghosts. There are more than two and less than all of them, but not by much.>

“You’re being serious, Oberon?”

<Serious enough to ask, “Who ya gonna call?” We could use Holtzmann’s ecto-blaster thingies right about now.>

“You can see them?”

<Yeah, can’t you?>

“Not yet. Which direction are they?”

<Uh.> The hound turns around in a circle. <All directions. Where the devils are. Flying low to the ground—harassing them, I think.>

I can hardly think with all that racket going on, so I asks Tasmania to calm down the devils in the area and stop them screaming. When the night goes quiet, the hound’s ears lie back flat against his head.

<Atticus, what did you just do?>

“Nothing, Oberon.”

“It might have been something I did,” I says.

<Incoming ghosts!>

“What?”

We see them, finally, a few seconds before they’re on us, silent pale wraiths with yawning mouths gliding across the grass from all directions. We’re in the eye of a fecking spectre hurricane, but it’s a quiet, creeping menace coming for us instead of howling fury. Greta shucks off her pants and curses because she knows she’ll be changing when they hit us, and they do hit us. Ye wouldn’t think they could, not physically, but they hit ye in the ether, where they exist entirely and we exist only partially.

“Quick, Siodhachan, summon a mist!”

“What? Why?”

“Because o’ the ghosts, ye blistered tit! Didn’t I teach ye that?”

“No, you didn’t.”

They slam into us then and pass through, one by one, and then circle around for more. We’re chilled to the core by every pass as the cold of the void they occupy seeps into all the tiny in-between spaces within us, and it fecking hurts, a burning freeze that tears cries out of Siodhachan and Greta as I begin to chant a binding to collect a fog about us—though maybe Greta’s cries are the first pains of her transformation, because her skin’s rippling and bones are starting to pop and rearrange themselves.

Perhaps I didn’t teach him after all: Spirits are beings of the ether, a netherworld between planes, so that they are half here and half somewhere else. Water impedes them, which is why ye don’t find a bunch of ghosts haunting the ocean. I’ve seen some o’ these modern movies with water spirits in them—those elven lads in the fecking bogs outside Mordor, for example: That was all bollocks. The truth of it is, back in me own time, if we didn’t want to be haunted by some shite of a human, we’d bury him in a bog. Water kept that spirit inside or, if it was already out, from reaching its anchor or safe harbor before dawn.

The water in the air begins to condense and fog around us when I complete me binding, and then I’m simply rocked by the pain of the spectral attack, and I give voice to it as well, my throat joining Siodhachan’s. That’s why the devils were screaming: The fecking ghosts were attacking them, and as far as I can figure, they did it precisely for those screams, to make living creatures give a voice to their long-suffering pain. Those mad prisoners given the silent treatment would want nothing so much as a voice now, and they had figured out how to make living creatures give them one: Tweak them hard enough in the ether and they’d feel pain in the physical world.

Except why now exactly?

The hound is immune to the attacks, and once Greta is in werewolf form, so is she. They tear into the apparitions and their substance dissolves, unbound by whatever innate ability hounds have to affect spirits. Seeing this, Siodhachan sheathes his sword, strips, and shifts to a hound himself, leaving me the only human plagued by the haunts. Oberon is actually having fun, and I hear his cheerful voice in me head as I freeze from the inside.