The song roared louder, making Amanda wince. She saw the lecturer passing her project to the professor.

  There! That was what was making her head spin. She grabbed at the notes and missed. Jamie and Marie were looking at her strangely.

  The song lashed out in its disappointment. Amanda's mind recoiled, hurt, and the music found itself held helpless by her faint. Immediately the song looked for someone else.

  Marie took the sheaf of notes just as Jamie reached for the girl.

  “Don't,” she cried.

  Too late. She saw blue strands of fire leap from Amanda's arm to Jamie's hand. There was only one thing to do. She covered his hand with her own.

  The blue fire writhed beneath her grasp. She called on the power that was hers and drove the fire from him. Beneath her palm, she could feel the fire squirming, withdrawing, retreating, returning to the sleeping form of its unknowing host. Very slowly, she lifted Jamie's hand from Amanda's arm.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  Marie shrugged.

  “Marcus tried to tell you,” she replied, “but you wouldn't believe him. You were lucky.”

  Jamie shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “You were quick.”

  Marie found herself smiling.

  “There is that,” she agreed.

  They sat quietly, looking at each other, the unconscious girl between them.

  At last Jamie spoke.

  “What have I seen?” he asked. “I mean, what was that with the blue lightning and the pottery?”

  “Just the continuing battle between good and evil,” Marie replied.

  Jamie fought the urge to laugh. Considering what he'd just seen, and felt, not laughing wasn't hard. Marie gave him one of the stares she reserved for interesting specimens of pottery.

  After a few seconds of staring, she shrugged, as though deciding something and got slowly to her feet.

  “Sit here,” she ordered, indicating a seat beside the one she had taken in front of the desk. “It's rather a long story.”

  * * *

  Amanda woke to the soft murmur of voices and the fading chimes of music. Her head ached. She lay still, her eyes closed, listening to the sound of Marie talking to the lecturer.

  “... looks like the next will be at the field,” the professor was saying. “We have to find it before it finds a new host.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  There was the sound of someone shifting uneasily on their seat. Amanda felt as though she was being watched.

  “And you think that, whatever it is, it has its eyes on the girl?”

  “Yes, although I believe it would rather an older mind if it could find one.”

  “Mine, for instance,” Jamie said.

  “Yours would do,” Marie agreed.

  Amanda imagined the professor nodding her head. She opened her eyes.

  “I think,” she said, trying to ignore the wild scratch of the song's displeasure, “that you had better tell me what's going on.”

  They were looking at her now. The song screeched its hatred behind her eyes.

  “Please,” Amanda whispered. “I can hear some sort of music. It hurts.”

  “Hurts?” the professor asked.

  “Yes,” Amanda answered. “It hurts, a lot.”

  Marie seemed to relax slightly.

  “Then it's not too late to do something,” she said.

  “Like what?” Amanda asked then, glancing from one to the other. “What's wrong with me, anyway?”

  The song's scream hid the words Marie said. Amanda understood only that something evil had rested in her uncle's field, and woken while she had been visiting. It had sung its way from the field, and lodged a fragment of itself in her mind, and was waiting for the time when it was free to control her totally.

  Now, the professor and the lecturer had to dig whatever form the evil had taken from the soil and stop it from escaping on its own. They had to make it sleep again before she, Amanda, would be free.

  “Can't you destroy it?” Amanda asked, risking the song's wrath.

  The song increased its intensity until Amanda had to sit, cradling her head in her hands, but it did not lash her to unconsciousness again. It had found its nemesis and it could not afford to cease watching her for a moment.

  Looking for support, the song fragment found it could not feel the link between itself and the source that had borne it from the earth. Instead, it could feel only empty distance and no direction to search in. The song withdrew, and hid itself in a corner of the mind its mistress had chosen.

  * * *

  In the field, and on the hill, the ghosts moved. The grass in the neighboring fields was dead, now, and the cows had already begun avoiding the fences of the third and fourth.

  Willis watched the death spread, from the safety of his back porch. As he watched, the sleeping knowledge began to stir and the part of him that was guardian slowly woke.

  The song was in the air now, trying to drift away from the farm, seeking, always seeking. All around the third and fourth fields the white rocks Willis had felt compelled to place along the fence line began to hum their denial. The song echoed back to its source, reporting.

  Deep within the earth, the blade hissed its displeasure and began a different tune. Now, the birds refused to fly anywhere near the field.

  Willis began to see the shapes of shades moving amongst the bare skeletons of once thriving bushes and trees. He moved his livestock to a neighbor’s farm, but wouldn't explain why.

  The part of him that was guardian began to direct the part of him that was not. His wife, Eileen, didn't argue. She was, it seemed, hearing music in her dreams.

  Willis’s first task was to collect more stones, and place them at the end of the field adjacent to the house. He'd seen shadows moving amongst the cow byre and milking sheds, shadows that radiated malevolence as they skulked.

  As the school term moved on, Willis drove the shades back into the field. The few that escaped his first attentions, he ruthlessly hunted amongst the buildings guided by his wife's dreaming and her growing Other Sight. She had guardian blood as well; it was this that had drawn them to each other.

  Together, they found a gap in the stones' barrier of power, and were working to place another stone beside the weak link when the telephone in the farm house rang. With a sigh, Willis wiped his hands on his thighs, and exchanged glances with his wife.

  “Leave 't,” she told him. “It'll ring again.”

  He nodded and they finished sealing the gap. The phone rang through, then was silent. It did not ring again until evening.

  “Hello,” Willis said.

  “Good evening, Mr. Harran,” a woman answered. “My name is Marie Zaubfiend, and I believe I can help you with a problem you have with one of your fields.”

  “Do you now?” Willis challenged. “Speak on, then.”

  * * *

  Amanda listened to her uncle's muted roar of denial when Marie told him what had to be done to restore his field to rights. Marie demanded, and was given, time to explain and, to Amanda's surprise and the song's scratchy displeasure, her uncle agreed to the excavation.

  Jamie grinned at her and Marie was smiling when she replaced the receiver.