CHAPTER NINE
“When I was just a wee lass my grandmother told me I was blessed with the sight. The sight. That’s what she called it,” said Rose. “I called it anything but sight. It seemed every ghost I met had been murdered or tortured in this part of Ireland. I don’t think I slept my entire childhood.”
“I know that feeling,” smiled Julia. “Joseph found me as a little girl talking to ghosts on the front porch of one of our cottages. I’m lucky he didn’t run for the hills then.” She kissed his cheek and Rose smiled, blushing at their obvious affection.
“One of the first ghosts I saw was a man who claimed that Gorman Laughlin had murdered him.”
“Oh, shite,” said Conor looking down at his lap. Rose smiled at him.
“It’s alright. As it turned out, the man was a spy sent from England. He was on the property and your ancestor had the right to kill him. I knew then that I was going to have to work to help these people.
“About ten years ago, there were nine missing people in three months. Nine. The police said they had no clues and no one seemed to want to investigate in Kilkee. So, I did. I regret it every day. The screams, the abject terror I felt in my bones nearly crippled me. But as I got closer, I could feel this dark, evil presence almost attempting to harm me, to grip me and push me.”
“I felt that as well,” said Julia. “It did hit Fitz.” She pointed to the man and the woman shook her head.
“What do you know about the place, Rose?” asked Sean. “We know that the Aire or chieftain, tortured his people and strangers alike. Why?”
“It wasn’t just torture,” said Rose. “It was a game with his ultimate gift as the prize. I will tell you the story that was passed to me.”
***
The Chief stared at his land. The air of Castle O’Shan stood still and dark, laying over the cliffs like a living curse, a cold and iron-scented breath that seemed to rise from the very stones.
Its towers stood black against a bruised sky, and every slit window glimmered with a watchful light, as if the castle itself were studying the souls dragged beneath its gates.
Men spoke of John O’Shan in whispers not because they feared his temper alone, but because they believed he had ceased to be wholly human, preserved by hatred and sharpened by a hunger that no ordinary life could satisfy.
John O’Shan drove his tenants, prisoners, and captives through torment not for sport, though cruelty pleased him well enough, but for a singular obsession.
Somewhere among the broken, the desperate, and the half-drowned, he believed there lived one soul marked by fate, a rare vessel who could unlock the immortality he sought.
So he ordered trials that mangled the body and stripped the mind, certain that only the chosen would endure what ought to have killed any other living thing.
On the night the latest hunt began, the courtyard boiled with shouting, torchlight, and the scrape of chains dropped onto frozen stone. A line of captives broke at once for the outer ward, their bare feet slapping through mud while guards on the walls bent their bows in near-perfect silence.
Then the arrows came, hissing through the dark in black swarms, striking the earth so close they spat dirt into the runners’ faces, and the first true lesson of Castle O’Shan was learned again: escape began with speed, but survival demanded luck cruelly rationed.
They fled between low sheds and toppled carts, hearing the guards crash after them with swords out and boots pounding like war drums. One captive stumbled over a broken axle and vanished beneath three descending blades, while another seized a dropped lantern and flung it into a hayrick, giving the rest a wall of sudden fire and smoke.
Through that orange confusion they ran bent double, coughing, blinded, and certain every shadow behind them hid a steel point eager for the base of the spine.
Beyond the postern gate the land fell away into a maze of thorn and wet heather, and there the horn sounded for the wolves.
The beasts were not ordinary creatures of the hills but gaunt, scar-veined things bred on hunger and blood, taught to follow the scent of terror as hounds follow fox.
Their howls rolled over the dark fields in a tightening ring, and every captive understood that the race had changed from one against armed men to one against teeth that would not bargain and would not tire.
The first wolf sprang from the gorse with its jaws already open, and a woman in a torn gray shift turned at the last instant, thrusting a splintered fence rail into its mouth as if jamming shut the door of death.
Others scattered downhill, sliding through slick grass while arrows skimmed above them from riders now appearing along the ridge.
One man flung himself into a narrow ravine clogged with bramble and lay among the thorns as wolves snuffled at the edges, their hot breath threading through the leaves while blood from his scratched arms dripped soundlessly into the soil.
Those recaptured before dawn were granted no rest. John O’Shan had them hauled in wagons to the cliff road and marched to a ledge above a sea white with winter fury.
There, with guards lining the rock like executioners at ceremony, each captive was bound at the wrists, weighed with a stone to hinder the first frantic strokes, and cast into the roaring black water below.
If they reached the far strip of shingle alive, they were judged worthy of the next ordeal; if they vanished, the lord merely watched for the next body to be thrown.
The sea hit like a hammer, flattening lungs and reason alike. Captives surfaced choking into sleet and foam, hearing the shouts of those from the cliff fade beneath the crash of waves, and began the blind labor of survival.
Some kicked free of their stones and struck out toward the dim smear of shore, only to be hurled backward by currents that spun them as if they were driftwood.
Others vanished between swells so tall they seemed to rise like moving walls, swallowing cries before the sound could fully leave the mouth.
Those who crawled ashore did so on hands and knees, coughing salt and streaked with blood where the hidden rocks had flayed them. No mercy waited there.
Guards mounted on the beach descended at once with hooked poles and naked swords, driving the survivors inland through a cleft path where the stone walls funneled them into single file.
The trial was never simply to live through the water, but to rise from it half-broken and still flee, still think, still refuse the easy invitation to collapse and die where the tide could claim the labor of killing them.
From the battlements John O’Shan watched every stagger, every near-fall, every impossible recovery with a fervor bordering on worship. He searched not for strength alone but for a sign, some defiance of natural law, some glimmer that pain and fear could not extinguish.
When a captive rose after an arrow had pierced the flesh below the shoulder, when another survived the wolves after any sane reckoning said he should have been torn apart, O’Shan leaned forward with bright and fevered eyes, wondering if at last he saw the first spark of the secret that had consumed his life.
At dusk he ordered another chase, this one through the terraced paths beneath the curtain wall where old statues leaned in their niches like saints gone rotten. The captives ran in a ragged pack while guards descended from both sides, blades flashing whenever the torchlight struck them.
Arrows rattled off stone, skidded across steps, and burst into fountains of sparks, forcing the fugitives to lurch from side to side in desperate, ugly motions.
A youth vaulted a fallen balustrade and nearly escaped into the orchard below, only to be seized by the ankle and dragged back upward while the others ran on without daring to look behind.
Everything in Castle O’Shan conspired to make endurance feel supernatural.
The passageways breathed with drafts cold enough to numb a wounded limb in minutes, the cells sweated salt as though the sea were trying to reclaim the masonry, and the bells in the high tower rang at odd hours without any visible hand to pull the rope.
Under such a cloud of dread, even the strongest captives began to imagine the castle choosing who might live, and John O’Shan encouraged the belief because fear, like torture, was another instrument with which he probed the hidden edges of a human soul.
When the moon rose thin and hard as a knife edge, horns called the wolves again and gates opened along the lower yard.
Captives were driven outward by spearpoints, and the hunt took form at once: guards sweeping behind with swords, archers pacing the walls, wolves coursing ahead and then circling back whenever panic split the human line.
One prisoner, maddened by exhaustion, turned to fight a wolf with a length of chain and was dragged from sight in a knot of fur and mud. Another dove through an ice-fed stream and hid beneath its bank while arrows stitched the water above, each impact punching silver droplets into the night.
Rumor among the captives gave shape to the madness. Some said John O’Shan had found, in a sealed chamber beneath the keep, a text bound in skin and clasped with blackened silver, promising that death could be outwitted if one fed the proper life into the proper vessel.
Others swore he sought not a victim but an heir to some older curse, one soul in whom the boundary between flesh and spirit had worn thin enough to be crossed.
Whatever the truth, his trials were designed like questions asked with blades and surf and teeth, and every survivor was merely another answer that failed him.
Yet the air of Castle O’Shan never settled, for John O’Shan’s search had no peace in it and granted none to those trapped within his reach.
So long as the sea kept throwing back a few who would not drown, so long as a handful outran arrows in the dark or rose bloodied from the wolves’ pursuit, he would believe the immortal one remained just beyond his grasp.
And so the torches burned, the horns sounded, and the castle upon the cliff kept breathing its cold breath over the land, waiting for the day one captive survived too much and ceased, forever, to belong among the dying.