Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(74)
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.
<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.