It jumped and leapt, and so did the men and women around it, as the Present was abruptly shouldered aside and replaced by the Past. The three ghost finders huddled together, hanging on to each other, as Time Past filled their eyes. Flames burned fiercely, leaping up from a huge banked bonfire, or bale-fire, around which the Tribe danced and howled, jumping and slashing at the air, brandishing roughly carved stone totems. Men, women, and children, shorter and stockier than their modern counterparts, hunched and distorted but still powerfully built; filthy dirty and wrapped in crudely tanned skins and furs. Primitive Man, Pre-civilisation Man, dancing and prancing and slamming bare feet against the bare ground, crude amulets of animal claws and human finger bones hanging round their throats. Shrieking faces, 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.