The Ritual

by Adam L.G. Nevill

The people in that basement were in a really bad way. Murdered.’ Phil raised his face to look at a portion of sky visible through the canopy. ‘They hung them. Strung them up for it. I think it was younger then. But it’s still here. They’re gone. The old people I saw in my dream. Who … fed it. But it is still here.’

Clambering in a tight pack, through two miles of undergrowth-tangle on increasingly stony ground that rose uphill, only to emerge through the treeline and be confronted by a valley with steep sides, returned a familiar anxiety to Luke. The notion that had become an idea, and now felt like an acceptance of a fact that they would die out here, threatened to swallow him again.

Dipping away from their feet, large boulders covered the descent into the ravine; the exposed surfaces of the rocks were yellow and pale green with lichen. In the basin of the gorge, a forest of long-stemmed plants with rubbery umbrella-like leaves stretched for thirty metres to the other side, where a rocky ascent waited to take them back onto a swampy soil dense with fir and pine. A strip marsh.