The Ritual

by Adam L.G. Nevill

Under the floor, mice scampered. In this place they sounded angry at being disturbed, though something far too confident and unafraid was also suggested in their rustlings.

Around them the house creaked and shifted like a wooden ship trapped in the ice. ‘Is this even safe?’ Phil asked.

At this, they all laughed. Even Luke who couldn’t help himself, or stop himself from warming to Dom all over again. He was being too sensitive. It was the dreadful forest and the desperate walking. His thighs still seemed to be moving as if they continued to clamber up and down rocky slopes and stretch over deadwood. They were just tired. That was all.

Dom dismissed them as being too expensive and said he would use Hutch’s if he needed it. Phil lost his knife on the first day. He’d left it at the first campsite.

another silhouette to

Outside, the thunder ground iron hulls against granite. A vivid flash of lightning followed and seemed far too close to the house.

Phil paused on the first of the stairs on his way up, and fingered a dark crucifix. As if to himself, he said, ‘You’d think they’d...

Phil came down the stairs so quickly it sounded like a fall. If the bangs of his feet didn’t get their attention, his gasps for air did.

Downstairs, three pairs of eyes went round and white. Three torch beams flashed to the foot of the staircase.

Inside Hutch’s mind came the image of meat dripping from a tree.

Luke stood up from where he had been sitting close to the door, still peering out at the rain as if unable to accept that they intended to spend a night here. He kept his shoulders bent forward as if expecting a blow; opened his mouth but couldn’t speak.

It was a preposterous statement, but no one laughed or could even swallow. The very idea of a bed in this place should have cut the tension, but somehow it made everything worse.

A gust of wet air and the smell of damp wood grew stronger indoors, as if eager to replace their presence inside.

It was not possible to creep up the stairs soundlessly, as they would have wished. The planks moved under their feet. They cracked and even boomed with every careful and reluctant footstep taken.

Luke’s pulse threatened to jump out of his mouth and ears at the things his torchlight revealed around Hutch. The old dark wood was crowded with long bearded faces that were nothing more than the patterns in the discoloured grain of ancient timber. It was museum-old, museum-black. It should have been behind glass, not around them in the darkness.

They had been simple and they were old and they wanted comfort from the cross. One would have died first, the other would have lived alone in such despair that just to know it for a moment would make your heart burst.

He tried to shake the terrible feeling from himself. It jostled with his fear. This was never a place for a man to be, ever. He felt that instinctively. You got mixed up with the kind of madness that nailed skulls to walls. Even the cold black air seemed to move about them and through them with a sense of its own purpose.

It was stupid, irrational to think so, but his imagination suspected the house was inhabited with something he didn’t need eyes to see. They were small and fragile here....

It rose from shadow and became shadow again.

The other torch – Luke’s – lit up the horns that rose from above two dark eye sockets. Brownish bone, long and thick.

Black lips were pulled back above long yellow teeth; a grimace to last for all time beneath nostrils that still appeared curiously wet.

The thin black forelegs, or arms, were raised to shoulder height and bent at the elbow. Blackened hands were upturned, the palms facing the ceiling, as if it were commanding all before it to rise, or as if the figure had once been holding objects that were now long gone.

Hutch shone his torch at the scratch marks on the timber roof. Cut deep into the wood were childlike symbols and circles, like on the rune stones they had seen in Gammelstad. The inscriptions appeared randomly, at different heights on some beams, in long lines like Chinese script.

Hutch walked forward. Luke flinched at every step his friend made, as if he were provoking something terrible and sudden to happen just by moving.

‘Who would? It was some kind of temple. Effigy and sacrifice. I reckon it’s supposed to be the Goat of Mendes.’

Just as mad as hatters. Crosses on the walls downstairs and a bloody goat in the loft. A dead man’s hands sown on. Mixing metaphors. Lunacy. Swedish lunacy. It’s the darkness and the long nights. Send anyone mad.’

‘Who’d want to lie in that?’ ‘This guy.’ Hutch grinned and shone his torch right into the goat’s leering face.

Behind him, the flash of Hutch’s camera lit up his retreat.

And he’d been unable to watch Hutch start the fire using four of the crucifixes as tinder. By not watching Hutch snap and twist them into small bundles, he quietly hoped he was exempt from the further misfortune this act of desecration might evoke.

Everything else gone damp inside their packs, was haphazardly suspended from other nails about the room. Dom had taken all of the skulls and crucifixes down. Something else that made Luke uneasy. Though he wasn’t sure why.

He felt the warmth of the whiskey rise from his belly and numb his mind. It was worn out anyway and grateful for this cushion of temporary oblivion, or at least the promise of it.

Something was up. He could feel it. Dom had been blind drunk the day Hutch got married, and the night before they left for Sweden, again in Stockholm, and then in Gällivare before the hike. In fact, at any opportunity he coerced the others to start drinking heavily. Something Luke didn’t have the wallet for in London, let alone Sweden.

But despite his bluster and boisterous approach to everything, Dom was acutely sensitive. Luke wasn’t fooled. He remembered how quickly he fell to pieces after romantic setbacks when they were students.

All living together at number 3, Hazelwell Terrace in Birmingham. The best days of his life. Of all their lives, he liked to think.

It had taken Phil most of the evening to warm up when they met in London. He’d shown up with a long face and a voice both deep and muttery. He’d hardly spoken until they were all drunk at around ten. But it had been his girth – the middle-aged spread – that had given Luke a brief shock when seeing him at Hutch’s wedding for the first time in twelve months.

But Phil had really let himself go. Once the biggest peacock of them all, the man’s style had completely gone now.

Michelle didn’t like him. Didn’t like what he represented, or so he assumed. Single and still living like a student; a man with no clear goals or purpose as she perceived him; a dreamer; a loser. Everything Phil’s wife despised, but maybe feared too as a source of temptation to her husband. Some of her disapproval must have rubbed off on Phil. He was harder on Luke’s lifestyle, and more disparaging about his patchy work history than the others.

Only Hutch still seemed to be in great shape and he was the eldest.

He’d kept up the banter and camaraderie since they returned from the room upstairs. Made sure his humour and enthusiasm for adventure and adversity rubbed off on nervous Luke and the two fat men. But if Luke wasn’t mistaken, Hutch was anxious. If not afraid. And that worried Luke more than his own suspicions of the house and forest.

As they all laughed at this, Luke suddenly felt his body suffuse with a warmth of good feeling for his friends. Maybe even love. He winced at his vow to never see Phil again, and at his outburst at Dom. It was just the situation. It had made them all emotional, irrational.

H is the expert there.’ Hutch sighed. ‘I wouldn’t say expert.’ Dom rubbed his hands up and down Hutch’s head from both sides. ‘Neither would I. Yorkshire bastard.’

‘It would strike you as wrong. It would make you uneasy. Don’t you think?’ Luke noticed Hutch was watching him intently as he spoke, but couldn’t read his expression. ‘The actual environment. The trees. The darkness. It’s not like any forest I’ve ever been inside, and I’ve been in a few. I’ve been camping with H in Wales, in Scotland and Norway. And nothing has ever felt like this. The other forest we saw the first day up here wasn’t the same either. Wasn’t so … rotten. And lightless.’

‘And now this. The forest made these people crazy. Because I don’t think people are supposed to come here.’ ‘And usually they don’t,’ Dom murmured, his eyes closed. ‘That’s why there’s no paths, aye Yorkshire?’ Hutch sighed and rubbed at his filthy face. ‘I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it before. It just suddenly changed. It wasn’t dense enough at first to ward you off. But then it just kind of swallowed us and there was no going back the way we came in.’ He yawned. ‘And I really don’t want to be here any more.’

‘The blasted heath,’ Luke said, smiling. ‘The cursed wood.’

But if the sun had been shining and it hadn’t been raining, I have to ask myself if it would look half as terrifying as it does.’ Luke nodded. ‘I still think it would.’ Hutch yawned around a smile. ‘Me too.’

‘I had this freaky idea earlier. When we were upstairs.’ Luke knew the idea would be unwelcome to the ears of anyone still awake, but could not stop himself thinking out loud. ‘If that thing upstairs was a representation of the thing that threw the carcass into the tree.’

‘It was a shocker to be sure. But we all know,’ he winked at Luke, ‘that things like that don’t exist. More’s the pity. But it’s amazing what mountaineers think they’ve seen when they’re oxygen deprived. And sailors lost at sea. Exhausted soldiers. Same deal. We become detached from the familiar and our ancestral imagination tries to work shit out. Isolation. Long winter darkness. That’s what did this.’ He looked at the ceiling. ‘Someone lost their mind for sure out here.’

this especially works as something Dylan would consider.

TWELVE

I think this chapter is my favorite so far

Into the dark. Throwing your weight forward. Head down to protect your face. Arms flung out, fingers grasping for purchase, to seize handfuls of the sharp sticks and tug them aside. But down sleeves, inside your collar, and into your socks to catch like barbs, go the sticks and they bring you to a thrashing suspension, your feet never finding the ground. Because you cannot feel the earth, the dark clay from which all of it springs.

And there you hang. Gulping at the air like a man drowning. Dizzy with exhaustion, weary like the dying, you hang between the bindings of vine and the scaffolding of sticks. And wait. Wait for it. Loping through complete darkness that begins a foot from your eyes, its stride covers thickets you could not even crawl through.

You haven’t even seen it, but the darkness transmits images at you, composites from a thing you have seen elsewhere, at another time. So maybe the horns will go through you. A puncturing thrust to the dense meat of torso before a furious shaking. Before the teeth get busy. Sharp yellow teeth. Old ivory snapping shut with a woody sound. Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums.