painted blue with woad and red with fresh blood.
And stretched out before the fire, naked and helpless, held down on the flat sacrificial stone by four elders of the Tribe—the sacrifice. Young, very young, little more than a child; with a stone blade held firmly over her frantically rising and falling chest. She wasn’t screaming, she knew it would do no good, but her eyes were full of a terrible, hopeless dread.
The fire blazed up, throwing flames and cinders high into the night sky, under the malignant eye of the full moon. Drums pounded deafeningly loud, providing the only music for the dance. A powerful, demanding rhythm, driving the dancers on to further exertions and greater excesses, an endless thunder to madden their already deranged minds. And when the fury and the madness had reached its peak, the stone knife slammed down into the victim’s chest; and everything stopped. She screamed, then, but the sound was lost in the great roar that went up from the rest of the Tribe. The shaman hacked roughly into the victim’s chest, levering aside the bones to cut out the heart and tear it from its cavity. He held the still-beating heart up, and the Tribe howled again. It was still, horribly, a very human sound.
And then, just like that, it was gone. The fire, and the sacrifice, and the dancing primitive people worshipping Something, in their primitive way. The small circle of scientific light was back, bounded by watching cars and the feeling of a Presence, on the night.
Happy shook his head slowly. “Human sacrifice,” he said thickly. “Death and horror and celebration, repeated so often it’s imprinted on this place, like grooves cut in a record. Genius loci, the spirit of the place; a bad place, poisoned by the psychic stain of what happened here . . . Sacrifice, to ensure the sun will rise again, and that spring will follow winter, and that at least some of the babies will live. One life offered up freely for the greater good. In worship to some great Power.”
“But what woke it up, after lying quiet for so long?” said Melody. “There’s always a focal point to every haunting, some single trigger . . .”
“The fools,” said JC. “The bloody fools . . . When the building contractors broke ground here, they must have dug down deep enough to uncover the ancient site. They stopped work and consulted the supermarket bosses, who were afraid that archaeologists might move in and bring operations to a halt, costing them millions. So they had the contractors cover over the disturbed site and built their new car park here anyway.”
“Yeah,” said Happy. “So far, so typical. So?”
“Don’t you get it?” said JC, almost angrily. “First they disturb the energy stored in the old site, the ancient bad place with all its memories of long-forgotten Power. And then they held a big opening ceremony here, made a real celebration of it. Even then, they might have got away with it . . . If an old lady hadn’t died here, killed by a man in a hurry. So—a ceremony, blood and death, calling across the centuries, like to like. A direct link between Past and Present, awakening . . . Something ancient and unspeakably powerful. All it needed to manifest fully was three poor damned fools who thought they knew what they were doing. A telepath, a woman with powerful technology, and a leader who should have known better. It’s us. We did this. We woke it up.”
All six cars started rocking back and forth in place, shaking wildly. Their headlights snapped on, burning bright like dragons’ eyes. Their engines revved and roared like angry beasts, their horns bleating and blaring. Then they all surged forward. The three ghost finders scattered, and the cars ploughed right through Melody’s stacked instruments. The comforting circle of light disappeared, replaced by the fierce, stabbing beams from the cars and the pitiless glare of the full moon. The cars screeched around in narrow turns and came back again, only to slam into each other in head-on collisions, like maddened stags going head to head in rut. They rocked to a halt, steam rising from the crumpled bonnets, their headlights slowly fading like the light going out of dying eyes. The three ghost finders came together again, breathing hard.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t know how to drive a car,” said Happy. “Sorry about your toys, Melody.”
“They’ll give me some more,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
JC glared at Happy. “Concentrate! That was only the overture, to throw us off-balance and remove the advantage Melody’s tech gave us! What do you
“Something’s here,” Happy said slowly. “Something’s right here, with us. The chain of events opened a door, and now Something from the Past is forcing its way through, into the Present!”
JC turned to Melody, scrabbling on her knees amid the wreckage of her instruments. “Anything still working that you can use to break the link between Past and Present, slam the door shut in its face?”
“Not a damned thing!” Melody rose suddenly, brandishing a very large machine-pistol. “On the other hand . . . Any caveman with a club who turns up here is in for a nasty surprise.”
“I want a gun,” said Happy. “You never let me have a gun.”
“Damn right,” said Melody. “I am not having the words
“Hush,” said JC, looking slowly around him. “It’s here . . . I can feel it, like the gaze of a blind god, smell it, like the dragon’s breath . . . the cold of the winter that never ends, the dark between the stars . . .”
“Nothing like imminent death to bring out the poet in you, JC,” said Happy. “How about composing something really lyrical that we can retreat to? Because I’d really like to get the hell out of here . . .”
“Too late! Too late . . .” JC glared about him, searching for an answer he could sense but not pin down. “Think! Something big, Something powerful . . . What did those primitive people dance and sacrifice to, what did they believe in and worship, strong enough to make the sun rise and the winter end? They weren’t ready for gods yet, nothing so civilised . . . But together, their massed minds and desperate need invoked a powerful Force from Outside . . . Created, or summoned, by the terrible brutal passion of their faith . . . A god with no name or singular nature; simply a Presence . . .”
“Could it be one of the Great Beasts?” said Melody. “The Hogge, or the Serpent?”
“No,” Happy said immediately. “I know them. What I’m feeling . . . is even older than they. More primitive. Just a force. A Presence. And since its worshippers had no language to name it, to define it and limit its powers . . . We can’t hope to control or dismiss it with any of the usual techniques or formulas. We don’t have anything we can use against it!”
The dark was all around them now. The supermarket was gone, and most of the car park. Only a circle of moonlight remained, stabbing down like a spotlight, picking them out. No stars shone in that dark night, no distinction left between earth and sky. Just the three of them left, the only living things in the night, huddling together for comfort and warmth, adrift in an endless dark sea. And it was cold, so cold . . .
“Dark and cold,” said JC, shuddering despite himself. “The dark before the sun rises, and the cold of the winter that never ends. It’s threatening us, demanding our worship.”
Suddenly, it was there with them. A vast, endless Presence hammering on the night, manifest but not material, enforcing its awful Presence on the world through an act of sheer malicious will. The monster in the dark that all children know and fear because they are so much closer to the primitive. An ancient Presence, powerful and pitiless, demanding worship and sacrifice, blood and horror. Out of the Past, out of Time, come to drag Humanity down to its own level again.
Happy fell to his knees, both hands pressed to his head. He was crying raggedly, his face distorted by strange passions as he fought to maintain his psychic shields and keep out the primordial demands beating against his thoughts. Melody stood close by him, swinging her machine-pistol back and forth, desperate for something definite she could fight. And JC . . . stood thoughtfully, frowning a little, as though considering some difficult but distasteful problem.
“It wants a sacrifice!” Happy cried out miserably. “A human sacrifice!”
“No,” said JC. “We don’t do that any more.”
“If we don’t give it what it wants, it’ll take us!” said Happy. “And after us, it’ll move on to the city!”
“Well,” said JC, his voice carefully calm and composed, “we can’t have that, can we? Consider the haunting, my friends; every manifestation has its heart, its focus, its specific link to Present Time. And in this case . . . that focus, that last link in the chain of events, has to be the poor little old lady who was killed during the opening ceremony. Find her for me, Happy.”
“Are you crazy?” Happy glared at him through teary eyes. “I don’t dare drop my shields! It’ll eat me alive, I can’t . . .”
JC looked at him, and Happy’s babbling cut off immediately. JC could do that. One moment he was talking quite calmly and reasonably, and the next he was looking at you with eyes dark as the night and twice as cold. JC tried hard to be a good man, but you only had to look into his eyes at moments like that to know he had the
