<Hey, Atticus, did you know that a group of phantoms is called a rumpus? If these are phantoms, then this would be a rumpus bringing the ruckus.>
The attacks slow down once the fog forms and the hounds and Greta take their toll, thank the gods below, but it’s not enough; there are too many apparitions. I know they’re chewing through the ghosts as fast as they can, but it feels like maybe all fifteen hundred o’ the tortured souls buried on the Isle of the Dead are having a go at me. I can’t stop shivering and feeling little ice picks of pain stab through me guts as clouds of dirty dishwater pass through me with silent screaming faces on them. Soon I’m convulsing too much to keep me feet, and I’m helpless to heal what’s happening. I collapse to me knees and the canines form up around me, which does help, but some ghosts are still getting through and the assault continues.
The only thing I can think of is to bind vapor closer and condense water on me skin, letting it bead up like a sheen of sweat—it’s either that or run over to the ocean and jump in. Except I don’t think I can make it. Nerves fire involuntarily and muscles contract unpredictably. I shove the pain into one headspace and use the other to craft the binding. The fog thickens and collects about me, and I hear the hound complain about it once to Siodhachan—hard to pick his targets in such soup, or something like that. But soon the mist settles about me, seeps into my clothes, and I feel like a hand towel that’s been used too many times, discarded on the floor, an unwanted mess.
The spooky shites don’t want me anyway, and that’s the point of it. The stabbing cold stops, the hounds and Greta move away in diminishing growls—chasing stragglers, I guess—and I’m left alone to shudder in me own private cloud, trying to recover and warm up.
At first I think there’s no use in trying to heal anything, because I’m cold more than anything else, but after checking meself out I realize that I do need to heal. That prolonged assault with multiple ghosts tearing through me did have some side effects: Mutated cells in me pancreas, liver, lungs, and spleen. Cancer.
I see what Siodhachan was getting at now: The cancer in the devils spawned from a malignant spectre looking for a way to scream his defiance into the night. I say as much when Siodhachan returns some time later and shifts back to his human form.
He nods and says, “I figured it was something like that.”
“Where’s Greta?”
<She’s eating a kangaroo and doesn’t want to share.>
“Ah, yes. She gets hungry when she goes wolf. Siodhachan, didn’t ye say this devil cancer appeared in the nineties?”
“That’s right.”
“How could there be that many ghosts around here since then and no one ever noticed?”
“The obvious answer is that there weren’t that many actively haunting the area. Just one or two ghosts could have started it all back then, and that would be considered almost normal for a place like Port Arthur. This mass haunting, though, with so many spirits delighted to attack anyone near the prison, must be a recent development.”
“How do ye fecking develop a rumpus like that, and why would ye bother?”
“My guess is that Loki has been busy stirring up trouble in the planes—him or one of his surrogates. He’s preparing for Ragnarok. The more chaos he can create to distract from his true objectives, the better. I think we’ll start to see much more of this sort of thing. I would bet there are already all kinds of unusual things happening, but this is the first one to interfere with Gaia’s wishes and therefore the first we’ve really seen.”
“Do ye think ye got ’em all? The ghosts, I mean.”
Siodhachan shrugs. “We’ll keep an eye out. In the meantime, if you’re up for it, we can start healing the devils on this peninsula.”
“Oh, I’m up for it,” I says to him, though I’d much rather lie down with a blanket and a bottle of fiery whiskey.
We get to work, going in opposite directions to heal the nearest devils. I head in the general direction of where they say Greta is doing her thing, and once I find her she spends the night guarding me from any further ghosts as I work, though we do not see any.
Working quickly and running between our patients, we heal most of the peninsula’s devils before sunrise, and Greta shifts back to human at dawn and gets dressed.
We meet up with Siodhachan and Oberon at the inn in Dunalley, where they tell us over a breakfast of sausage and eggs that they did find a couple more phantoms and destroyed them.
The apprentices healed a den of devils each in our absence and have plans to move farther afield after breakfast, while catch some much-needed sleep.
Siodhachan and I attend to the rest of the peninsula’s devils that afternoon and wait for nightfall to see if any of what Oberon calls the “Ruckus Rumpus” shows up. A few do, and Oberon sends them to whatever cold oblivion awaits them. Should the cancer reappear on the peninsula after we’ve gone, we’ll know that we didn’t get all the ghosts and we’ll return.
It’s a good start—and I don’t just mean for the wee ones. It’s a good start for me, to learn how fecking huge this planet truly is and what an astounding variety of creatures live on it, because Arizona and Tasmania are about as far from Ireland as bull bollocks are from a popular breakfast food.
It’s also a good start for Greta, methinks, to realize that maybe Siodhachan isn’t all bad.
Or maybe I’m imagining a shred of goodwill there when in fact there isn’t so much as a firefly’s bright arse winking in the darkness. She may be simply putting on a mask of civility because she knows he’ll be going in a different direction from us soon.
He does that a lot—go in a different direction, I mean. I sometimes think if it weren’t for Oberon, Siodhachan would be the loneliest man alive.
But I wonder if he can’t be thought of as a sturdy bridge, who connects people for good or ill but always remains, unshaken by storms or floods, serving his function.
The idea, once I have it, sticks with me, and after we’ve said farewell and separated to tackle the devils on the island as a whole, I look at me apprentices already serving Gaia and see that he’s a bridge between the old Druids and the new. We would none of us be here if it weren’t for him.
Greta may only see what he’s destroyed, but I see what he’s created too, and I have to admit: It makes me proud.
The events of this story, narrated by Atticus, take place immediately before the events of Scourged, Book 9 of The Iron Druid Chronicles.