Call of the Banshee

They always hear me before they see me.

It’s by design, the way I was created, if I was created. Not sure if I was born or just materialized from silt and forgotten wreckage at the bottom of the lake. No mother, father. My earliest memories are the knifelike scraping in my throat and the concurrent shriek that is my oldest performance and my most primal state of being. The icy water in and all around me. The dark. The sweet and pungent smell of dead things. The flat void of nothingness inside me.

This time, I’m summoned quickly. It’s a man. Not old enough to die from age. Some kind of sickness in the blood, rattling in the lungs. The pall of death has hung about him for four moons now. With each moon that passes he grows weaker, his bones more prominent, his eyes muddy like the skies above the shack’s badly thatched roof. He reeks of sweat.

His caretaker, the girl, has not slept tonight. She has done her best to keep tidy, to keep him comfortable, but she cannot expel the stale miasma that haunts his person, lingers around his pallet and blankets. She props him up to feed him, but the broths and teas spill out of his mouth onto the aged linen. She tries to hide the tears that creep from the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks. It does not matter. His unseeing eyes do not know her.

Tonight, the beat of his heart lurches to a fitful melody. He will die before the sun rises.

I stir in my lake-bottom dwelling. This is my summoning.

When the stars pierce the clouds, I rise from the sediment. The eels make way for me, writhing out of my hair, untwining from my ankles and wrists, as I ascend. My head breaks the surface of the water, then my body, and finally I halt, floating in the open air.

I feel myself ramping up; it begins with an itch that climbs to a feverish intensity, and then becomes a reflex as simple as an exhale. When it comes, there is no gradual crescendo, no low hum that builds. It begins just as suddenly as it will end.

My jaw unhooks and the wail is torn from the hollow of my chest, expelled from me rather than produced by me, sharp enough to peel a ship apart plank by plank. The wild sound of it emboldens the creatures of the night; a chorus of grunts and rattles and caws shake the foliage.

The girl jolts awake. She runs to the window, throws it open. Just as her eyes connect with mine, my howl cuts off, and the silence that follows is deeper than the woods. She trembles violently at the sight of me, and I know what she sees because I’ve seen it in the lake’s mirror: fish-hued flesh, the electrocuted halo of my hair, an open mouth studded with bony fangs, pits of eyes.

Her terror does not bring me joy. Like every creeping moment of my existence, I feel nothing. Not even boredom. Just unending flatness.

“Don’t come any closer.” Her thin voice wavers across the moon-stained lake, but I am already, inexorably, floating toward the man, toward the mercurial stutter of his dying heart.

“Stop!” She shrieks, slams the window shut. I continue my slow journey. I hear her clattering about the shack, falling to her knees, pleading with the man. Her palms brush his cheeks, his hair.

“Please,” she cries.

But the song of his heart must come to an end, in a dance older than the autumn dark.

As I approach, the door to the shack bangs open, splintering against the exterior wall. The scene within would be pitiful if I were capable of feeling pity: the girl had flung her body protectively, pointlessly, over the man. Her father? Uncle? Mentor? Brother? Lover? The sickness has aged him, but he could be young yet. Impossible to know. When she lifts her head, her face pales at the sight of me before her.

“Please,” she begs, wailing now. But I do not stop until I reach the foot of the pallet, see the man in his pathetic entirety.

Skin like candle wax, ribs protruding. Hair matted. Neck lolling to one side. Miraculous that he’s survived in this condition for as long as he has.

This close, I discover the true reason for the man’s hasty end. Two slashes across his abdomen expose the bloodied, gelatinous coils of his innards. An animal attack, perhaps, one far too severe to knit back together. It pulses with infection.

I lick my lips. Something within me opens. Hungry.

Unbidden, my shriek comes forth again, and in her shocked horror the girl screeches with me, though hers is swallowed by mine. The earth beneath us quakes, the ramshackle house groans and shudders.

“You cannot have him!” The girl screams. I ignore her, casting her aside, leaning over my victim, still shrieking.

His eyes bulge as what’s left of his consciousness perceives all that I am. When my breath runs out and the silence following the shriek ensues, I gasp, long and slow. The air in my chest cavity is replaced by the man’s final breath.

And for one precious moment, as I consume all that his man was and ever will be, I feel.

I feel.

Morning sunlight streaming through the window of the shack, dappling the dirt floor with patterns. The whistle of a kettle.

The whine of a fiddle and the stomping of feet.

Yeasty bread rolls, hot from the hearth. They nearly burn his fingertips and tongue, but they taste sweet and fill his belly.

The girl’s twinkling smile as she grabs his hand, pulling him along a road, chattering as they walk.

An older woman encircling him in her arms. His mother, perhaps. The memory is old and faded.

The tang of ale. A knife scraping against a piece of wood, whittling a small four-legged shape. The rush of wind, a plunge into cool water. The glow of a crackling fire. A lingering kiss.

And then, as fleeting as it always is, it’s gone. The shack rematerializes around me. The emptiness returns. For just a moment, there’s a crushing sensation as the last of the warmth from the man’s memories dissipates. And then my taste of humanity is banished once more.

The girl sobs as I retreat, moaning the name of her friend or relative. I float away, back to the watery depths, back to my home of a thousand years. I return.

And I wait.