The Ritual

by Adam L.G. Nevill

The Gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world. Algernon Blackwood, from The Willows

A crash erupted behind him. A tremendous splintering of wood. From out of the trees.

‘What is it? What is it? What is it?’ Phil repeated in a daze, but within his tone was also an underlying note of acceptance, as if he had been expecting the disturbance and now it had arrived he only wanted to know specific details.

It would be so easy now to just sink to the ground and get recycled, to be eaten or to rot away. The endlessness of it, the sheer size of the land and their total insignificance within it nearly shut his mind down.

I am of the generation of arse, he mouthed and then laughed silently. We couldn’t find water in a reservoir. When we walk in a forest we all die. We are but baby birds fallen from nests to an unforgiving earth.

Though something notable was missing now. But what was it? From inside him, there had been a removal or a raising of something, like a weight. A something that had driven him, wasted him, spent him, left him witless, big-eyed and alight with panic for so long.

If only we could all stand up. All of us who have died unjustly for the Gods of the insane. There would be so many of us.

It should have been funny, but was just dismal and depressing instead.

in a part of the world made by the damaged for the damaged, in the great age of the pathological.

‘One thing at a time, my friend,’ said the part of him that had detached itself from all of the other voices inside him.