“So many ghosts. .” said Happy. “I’ve never seen so many in one place, even in the oldest parts of London.”
“What’s calling them here?” said Melody.
JC put his sunglasses back on. “Can’t help feeling I’m getting less and less mileage out of my gaze.”
“Maybe the world’s getting used to it,” said Melody.
JC looked at her. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know!” said Melody.
“Whatever’s at the heart of what’s happening here,” JC said heavily, “we must be pretty close to finding it or it wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop us.”
“I don’t think so,” said Happy, slowly. “It doesn’t feel like that. . I may be wrong, JC, but it really doesn’t feel to me like we’re in any danger from these ghosts.”
JC looked at him. “They seem desperate enough to get in and get at us. Are you sure about this, Happy?”
“Of course I’m not sure!” said Happy. “There’s so much spectral information here, it’s swamping my Sight. But look at their faces! That’s not hate, or malevolence, or even revenge. That’s. . need, anticipation, maybe even hope. They don’t want to kill us; they want something from us. And you know what; I don’t see the blonde woman anywhere.”
“She isn’t a ghost, remember?” said Melody. “Though. . I suppose she could be orchestrating all this, from a distance.”
“Take a good look around, Happy,” said JC. “Are you sure you can’t See her anywhere?”
Happy snarled and shook his head. “I keep telling you; the aether’s so saturated with psychic energies, it’s like trying to look through thick fog.”
“You make this stuff up as you go along, don’t you?” said JC.
Kim suddenly reappeared, right there inside the shrinking circle with them, smiling brightly. Everyone jumped. Melody glared at her.
“How can you be in here, with us-in a circle of scientific reality? Not that I’m not glad to see you, of course, but. .”
“I can be here because I’m linked to all of you,” said Kim. “I belong with you. Your affirmation of my existence overpowers science’s need to deny me.”
“All right, now you’re making stuff up, too,” said JC. “Where have you been, Kim?”
“Searching,” Kim said cheerfully. “The ghosts didn’t want to hurt me; they wanted to point us in the right direction. There’s a power behind these ghosts that’s trying to distract you. Follow me.”
She walked right out of the circle and kept going, and the ghosts fell back on every side, opening a wide corridor for her to walk through. JC and the others moved cautiously after Kim, and the army of ghosts let them. Walking through the ghosts made JC want to shake and shudder. So many ghosts in one place projected a spiritual cold, the absolute opposite of life’s warmth and vitality. JC made himself stare straight ahead. Happy and Melody crowded in close behind him. Kim led them through the main bar and all the ranks and rows of watching ghosts, all the way to the main entrance and out the door. The ghosts stood there and watched them go.
* * *
Outside in the car park, everything had changed. To start with, the car park wasn’t there any more. The concrete base and its surrounding low stone walls had simply disappeared, replaced by a great open area of bare earth punctuated with tufting grass. Like an old clearing in a forest. The sky above was full of stars and a bright full moon. There was no rain, and no wind, but JC could still hear the storm. When he looked up, the storm was circling overhead, like a great whirlpool of disturbed air, hurtling round and round in the sky above the King’s Arms. The pub looked as it had, with friendly lights blazing from all the downstairs windows.
It took JC a moment to realise that the sound of the storm had changed. The roaring and the rage was so much clearer now. It sounded. . like a living thing.
But what drew everyone’s attention away from the pub and the clearing and the storm was even more impressive. Standing opposite the King’s Arms, on the other side of the clearing, towering high above them, was a giant Wicker Man. A huge, roughly human shape, woven together out of dark green wicker strands, with a great barrel chest set on thick, stumpy legs. Stiff, downward-thrusting arms ended in spiky wooden fingers; and all of it was topped with a blunt, square, featureless head. A massive wicker cage to hold all the people and livestock the Druids would burn alive, in sacrifice. Their gift to their gods, for when they wanted things the gods didn’t want to give them, without tribute. Just standing there, its blunt, featureless head rising way up into the night sky, its dark green shape overpowering in the moonlight, the Wicker Man was an ugly, brutal thing.
Its feet stood in a huge pool of recently spilled blood. JC almost choked on the thick copper smell of it. Dark oils dripped from the spike-fingered hands, old-time accelerants to help it burn better. The Wicker Man looked disturbingly real and solid, but it was full of ghosts. All that remained of all the people and animals that had been sacrificed in Wicker Men in the past. They glowed faintly, like ghostly candles, and did not move or speak. They were burned, blackened bodies, faces still stretched in their last, agonised, dying screams. They stared past the wicker bars of their prison with dark, eyeless faces, looking down at the Ghost Finders, begging silently for help. Or revenge. Or-perhaps-their freedom, at last.
Standing before the Wicker Man, smiling calmly and utterly composed, was the blonde woman. She wore a simple white sacrificial shift stained with a great splash of blood across her lower abdomen. Her death wound, still dripping steadily after all the years. She saw JC looking at it and nodded briefly.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Nailed my guts to the old oak tree. They really did. Two of them held my arms, while the third rammed an iron spike right through me, pinning me to the trunk of the tree. It took me a long time to die.”
“Where are we?” said JC. “Or should that be when are we?”
“We’re outside the King’s Arms,” said the blonde woman. “Outside of Time and Space. For the moment. The inn has been here for centuries, under many names and identities, built to help hold off the awful thing the Druid priests created here, in this clearing. They used the power my sacrifice gave them to perform a great magical working, and it all went horribly wrong. I wasn’t killed so they could summon the storm; my death gave them the power to stop it. Except my dying here, in this bad place, gave me power. My dying curse linked me to the storm and this place, which is at least partly why Time and Space are so messed up here.”
“You know,” said Happy, “I have to say, you speak very good modern English for someone who lived and died fifteen hundred years ago.”
“I’ve been hanging around the inn for ages,” said the blonde woman. “Watching, and listening. I paid attention. And it’s not like I have human limitations any longer. You’ve all done remarkably well, dealing with the individual horrors of the King’s Arms, breaking the many chains that held me down. So I am free enough now to tell you the truth of what happened in this awful place. Whether you’ll be able to do anything about it remains to be seen. But I have hope. At last.
“Before there was ever a building of any kind here, this was a place of worship and sacrifice. The Druid priests practiced their nasty arts here, to help them protect and control their people. And in this place, they performed a great and terrible magic, to put an end to a storm that seemed like it would never end. It rained for months, without pause. Flooding the roads and saturating the fields, washing away the good topsoil. Rivers burst their banks and carried away the bridges. Rising waters washed away the crops, flooded the local habitations, and destroyed settlements for miles around. The livestock drowned, and the people were forced to flee the area.
“The Druid priests couldn’t have that. You can’t control people when there aren’t any people. Those who did remain were turning against the priests, who were clearly not in favour with the gods any more. So the priests raised the power they needed, with one of the oldest forms of magic. Necromancy, the magic of murder. They couldn’t stop the storm, or dissipate it, so they did the next best thing and forced it outside our reality. Made a crack in Space and Time and forced the storm through. They sacrificed a lot of people to gain that power. But then, as far as the Druid priests were concerned, that was what people were for. They used Wicker Men, at first. Ranks and ranks of them, stretched out across the land, burning like beacons in the night. And then, when that wasn’t enough, they picked out certain significant people and sacrificed them in the local places of power.