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alone in the stone forest. That something, or rather some large number of somethings, was following along with them. Sticking to the more extreme shadows, staying well out of sight; a presence more felt than properly observed.
    JC pulled everyone in close and kept them moving. He trusted Kim’s sense of direction, but he still had to wonder if they were being herded . . . Whatever was moving silently along with them between the grey trees felt bad. A threat to the spirit as well as the body. Something that served the kind of forces that could only be found in the dark. JC could hear them, after a while, moving in closer, behind and around them. Surrounding them, forever on the edge of vision, barely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Melody waved her machine-pistol around until JC made her lower it again. He didn’t want to start something he wasn’t sure he could win. Until finally the trees fell suddenly back to either side, revealing a huge open space before them—a vast natural amphitheatre. A carefully arranged setting for what was waiting for them.
    The Ghost Finders came to a halt. JC looked up, half-expecting to see an open night sky above, complete with full moon. But there was only stone and gloom above. So JC had no choice but to look at the terrible thing sitting on its throne, before them.
    Lud was huge. A massive, towering, mostly human figure, sitting unmoving on a throne so old . . . that both Lud and his throne seemed impossibly ancient. And equally fossilised. Like the trees in his forest. JC had never seen anything, living or dead, as big as Lud. In his time, in his prime, Lud could have intimidated dinosaurs. His shape and proportions were subtly wrong, even disturbing to any normal human sense of aesthetics; but in the end the thing on the throne looked more like a man than anything else. Its skin was grey and dusty, like the trees. It almost looked like a statue, a nightmare carved in old stone; but it was clearly, unsettlingly, so much more than that. It had a huge, horned, almost skeletal head, with an elongated muzzle packed full of blocky teeth, and two deep, dark, empty eye-sockets. The horns looked more like branches than bone, and even more like branching antlers.
    JC hated to think how big Lud would be if he ever rose from his throne again.
    “He’s been dead for centuries,” Kim said softly. “And he hasn’t moved from that throne since the Romans left Britain.”
    “But, he’s still . . . here,” said Happy. “A physical presence; not just a spirit. Like you.”
    “That is the ghost of a god,” said Kim. “The rules are different.”
    “Rules?” said Melody. “There are rules? Who sets them?”
    “Such things are decided where all the things that matter are decided,” said Kim. “On the shimmering plains, in the Courts of the Holy.”
    “If anything, I think I feel even less confident than before you started explaining things,” said Happy.
    “We’re currently standing under that part of London known as Ludgate,” said Kim. “Where St. Paul’s Cathedral is now. A Christian holy site, put in place over an old pagan site. They did that a lot, to hold the old things down. Lud’s Gate, where the first Wicker Men were ignited; whose awful burning light illuminated Druid Britain from coast to coast. And here before us, on his throne, all that remains of the old god Lud. People have attributed all kinds of stories and powers to him; sun god, warrior god, protector of his people during the long winter . . . but Lud was here long before there were humans around to worship him. He chose to become a humanlike form, so humans could more easily worship him. He wanted to scare them, not scare them off. Lud isn’t even his real name. I don’t think anyone knows what Lud was, originally. Faith is fuel, to his kind. They feed on emotions, and death, and souls. You don’t think The Flesh Undying had the shape it does now, the one we saw in the vision, before it was