The Ritual

by Adam L.G. Nevill

And on the second day things did not get better. The rain fell hard and cold, the white sun never broke through the low grey cloud, and they were lost. But it was the dead thing they found hanging from a tree that changed the trip beyond recognition. All four of them saw it at the same time.

Above them, beyond the reach of a man standing upright, the dead thing sagged. Between the limbs of a spruce tree it was displayed, but in such a tattered state they could not tell what it had once been.

Somehow the shock of this sight made him look younger. Vulnerable, because this mutilated statement up above their heads was the only thing on the camping holiday he did not have an answer for. Didn’t have a clue about.

Because there was no smell coming from the corpse. It was a fresh kill.

Through their discomforts Dom and Phil were missing everything of interest: the sudden strip marshes, the faces in the rock formations, the perfect lakes, the awesome Måskoskårså valley grooved into the earth during the Ice Age, the golden eagle circling above it, and the views of a landscape it was impossible to believe existed in Europe.

He could feel his irritation evolving into anger, manifesting as a tightening across his chest; it seemed to bustle behind his teeth too, as if his jaws were clamping down on a long hot monologue of curses he wished to rain down upon the two men who were turning this trip into what now felt like a death march.

he was probably only encouraging a similar tirade he’d sensed rising in Luke since they met at his flat five days ago. Luke just wasn’t clicking with Dom and Phil at all, and the physical hardship and terrible weather had added a whole new element of corrosive tension and sniping into the mix. Something Hutch had been doing his best to limit by remaining enthusiastic, patient, and with his sporadic optimistic outbursts about the weather changing.

Luke gritted his teeth. His whole face tensed hard. He dropped his head when he realized Hutch was studying him. Hutch was shocked at how much anger Luke had in him these days. Their regular phone calls, that Luke tended to initiate, often deteriorated into rants. It was like his friend could no longer internalize his rage and deal with it. ‘Hey, anger management.’

‘Makes no difference. The Environment office was closed when we left, and I never called ahead to the Porjus branch. It’ll be fine though.

Forward, until Hutch stopped and sighed and put his hands on his knees in a tiny clearing. A brown place where the dead wood and leaf mould was shallow and the thorny vines no longer ripped into socks or left burrs, impossibly, inside shirts and trousers.

And then they were all laughing. At themselves, at their fear, at the thing up in the tree. Now they were away from it laughter was good. It felt necessary.

They were no longer even following an approximation of a direct course; the sense of moving in the right direction stopped for him over two hours before. The forest was leading them.

They could only move where the foliage was thin, or where spaces occurred naturally between the ancient trees, so they were never moving in the right direction for very long. He should have compensated for that. Shit.

And it would mean going past that tree again, with the animal hanging from it. He could not see the idea going over well with Dom and Phil. Luke would be cool with it. The forest made him uneasy too; he could tell.

Luke’s lips moved as he talked to himself; always a sign. And since they had been so deep among the trees he’d been smoking constantly; another bad sign.

At least the exertion was limiting the speculation on how the corpse came to be hanging from the tree. Hutch had never seen, read, or heard of anything like it; not in twenty years engaged in outdoor pursuits. It had confounded Luke too; he could tell his friend was still struggling with the mystery in silence. And also thinking exactly what he was thinking: what the hell could do that to a large animal? In his mind Hutch ran through images of bears, lynx, wolverine, wolves. No fits, but it was one of those. Had to be. Maybe even a man. Whi...

Four kilometres due east from the thing in the tree, they found a house.

Like everywhere else, the seasons were confused. Autumn had come late after the wettest summer since records began in Sweden and the mighty forest was only now beginning to shuck its dead parts to the ground with fury. And as they had all remarked, it was so ‘bloody dark’. The thick ceiling of the trees let little daylight fall below to the tangled floor.

To Hutch, the forest canopy left an incremental impression of going deeper inside something that narrowed around them; while looking for the light and space of an open sky they were actually descending into an environment that was only getting darker and more disorientating, step by step.

like the giant prehistoric trunks that had crashed down years before and been consumed by slippery lichen; and they had zigzagged to all points of the compass to avoid the endless wooden spears of the branches, and the snares of the small roots and thorny bushes, that now filled every space between the trees. The upper branches ratcheted up their misery by funnelling down upon them the deafening fall of rain in the world above, creating an incessant barrage of cold droplets the size of marbles.

By this time Hutch knew that none of them even cared where the trail led, and they would have followed it north, just for the luxury of being able to walk upright and in a straight line.

Even though the trail would lead them either due east or even further out west, instead of southwards, the forest had cut them their first break.

Someone had been here before them and the path suggested it went somewhere worth going. Somewhere out of this dark and choking nowhere. It led to a house.

and Phil’s jeans were sodden and black; the jeans Hutch told him in Kiruna not to take in case it rained. From the cuffs of their sleeves the rain poured onto their scratched and red hands. And it was impossible to tell if the rain had saturated and then seeped into the fleeces and clothes they wore underneath their Gore-Tex coats, or if the moisture was sweat soaking outwards from their hot skin. They were dirty and dripping and exhausted and no one had the nerve to ask Hutch out loud where they could pitch a tent in the forest.

And it was during that time, when the fear in Hutch’s own belly began to turn into a shivery panic reminding him of childhood, and when the realization of the fact that he had made a terrible misjudgement and was now endangering the lives of his three friends hit him, that they found the house.

‘It’s empty. Let’s get in there,’ Phil said, his voice wheezy with asthma.

But Phil never took more than a few steps through the paddock. Whatever instinct made the other three hesitant caught up with Phil and he eventually stopped with a sigh.

They had seen hundreds of these Stugas on the train journey north from Mora to Gällivare, and then again around Jokkmokk. Outside of the cities and towns of northern Sweden there were tens of thousands of these simple wooden houses; the original homes of those who lived in the countryside before the migration to the cities over the last century. Luke knew they were now used for recreation during the long summer months by Swedish families when they renewed their bond with the land. Second homes. A national tradition; the fritidshus. But not this one.

Nothing cute or quaint or homely about it. No sharp right angles or neat windows about its two storeys. Where there should have been symmetry it sagged. Tiles had detached and slid away. The bulging sides were blackened as if there had once been a fire and the place had not seen any attention since. Boards sprung loose near the foundations. The windows were still shuttered fast against winters that had come and gone. Nothing about it seemed to catch or reflect the watery light that fell into the clearing, and it suggested to Luke that the interior would be just as wet and cold as the darkening wood they were lost inside.

Within the confines of his glistening orange hood, Dom’s round face was tight with irritation,

Hutch’s eyes narrowed; they were pale green with long inky lashes and almos...

Phil was so fat his feet were ruined merely by walking outdoors. His feet were ruined the first morning. That’s when he started bitching about them. Even in London he drove everywhere.

Dom was no better. He looked about fifty these days, not thirty-four.

Dom was a marketing director for a big bank with a mouth like a hooligan; what had gone wrong? He used to be a superb fast bowler who came close to county cricket, a guy who travelled across South America, and a friend you could stay up with all night, smoking joints. Now he was one of these married men with children, and a forty-six-inch waist, dressed from head to toe in Officers Club casuals, who tutted and sniggered and ...

They had laughed at his shared flat in Finsbury Park before they and Hutch fell to the usual banter, as if the three of them had been seeing each other every week for the last fifteen years. Perhaps they had. Right from the start he’d felt left out.

Suddenly, Luke couldn’t stop himself glaring, all over again, at Phil’s rounded shoulders and pointy head in the blue hood. He actually hated the sight of him right now, so he made a decision: once he was back in London, he’d even avoid their one drink a year.

Too angry to move or breathe, Luke stared ahead, meeting no one’s eye. As if the exchange had meant nothing to him, Dom followed Hutch back to the house. He even laughed. ‘You’d enjoy that. Beating the buttocks of a fine young man in the woods.’

He had been so excited about hanging out with them all again and looked forward to it for the six months following Hutch’s wedding, when the idea was first mooted. But the trip had been so wretched because he recognized so little of the others now. Which made him wonder if he had ever really known them at all. Fifteen years was a long time, but part of him had still clung to the notion that they were his best friends.

But he was truly on his own out here. They had nothing in common any more.

He just wanted it all to end – the tortuous walking, the rain, the dark unpleasant forest – but they should not be reduced to this: breaking into private property. A place that just wasn’t right. And had they really thought it through? This was a place no more than a few miles from the carcass in the tree. Something they could make no sense of, but should get as far away from as possible before nightfall.

Everyone’s judgement was impaired. Nothing said or done now could be trusted. But somehow it wouldn’t be forgotten or forgiven.

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

He turned around and stared at the wall of dark wood they had just walked out of. Beside the silvery rain falling past the trees and the chaos of bracken between the thick trunks, nothing moved. But the terrific sound of strong fresh wood being snapped still rang through his ears.

What could possibly have broken a tree like that? Somewhere inside there, not too far back, he could almost see the pale sappy fibres and spikes breaking from the bark of a thick limb. Ripped from a blackened trunk like an arm from a torso.

Pulse up between his ears, he stood still, disorientated with fear, like he was waiting for something to smash out of the wood and rush towards him. He briefly imagined a terrific rage and strength, a terrible intent, out there. Imagined it until he almost accepted it.

Thunder rolled across the sky, over the treetops and into the wet murk above the house. The sound of the rain against the wood changed from a pattering to a sky-fall of stones.

Luke snapped out of his trance. Wondered at himself. Exhaustion overwhelmed you. Played tricks with your mind. The dark trees they had been amongst all afternoon and evening had left a stain inside him; a taint upon every thought and feeling if he allowed his mind to drift.

He took one look back at the woods then passed through the doorway to join the others.

Uncovered by yellow torchlight, that struggled to reach far into the cramped hovel, the first thing Luke noticed were the skulls. And then the crucifixes.

From small birds to what could have been squirrels and stoats, small mottled heads had been fixed with rusted nails to the timber walls of the large room on the ground floor. Larger skulls of lynx and deer and elk had mostly fallen from the walls and cracked against the floorboards. One or two still grinned from near the low ceiling, where their porous bones managed to hang on.