Bec. Darren Shan

but most are human, stacked carefully in the centre, arranged so that the heads point west, in the direction of the setting sun. The sun guides the dead to the Otherworld and if bodies aren’t cremated, they’re usually laid out facing the path of the ever-moving orb.

      The bones are more recent than the stones. Many are still dotted with scraps of flesh and hair.

      “They must have been brought here after death,” Orna says. “To keep the Fomorii from bringing them back to life.”

      “Perhaps,” Fiachna says. “But why not just burn them?”

      “Maybe the bodies are part of the magic,” Ronan suggests. “The stones might need the power of the newly dead.”

      “Even if they did,” Goll says, “what purpose would it serve? Why drag bodies here just to keep demons from overrunning a ring of stones?”

      The mystery puzzles us through the night – nobody can sleep with all the screams of the demons – but it’s solved early in the morning. As the sun rises the demons retreat. But they only withdraw as far as the trees which encircle the ring. There, under the shade of the rough shelter, they stop and leer viciously at us, pounding the earth with a terrible, steady, threatening rhythm.