The Ritual

by Adam Nevill

  While the other three squatted in silence – Luke sitting apart from Dom and Phil, who wolfed energy bars – Hutch glared at the map again, for what must have been the fifth time in an hour. With a dirty finger, he traced the intended short cut between the Sörstubba trail they had abandoned at midday and the river trail. He swallowed again at the frisson of panic that had appeared in his throat as the light started to dim.

  In the morning he had known exactly where they were on the map, where they were in the Gällivare municipality, where they were in Norrbotten County, and where they were in Sweden. By late afternoon, with the glimpses of sky through the treetops changing from a thin grey to a thicker grey, he was no longer certain where they were in the forest that intersected the two trails. And he never anticipated so much broken ground or the impenetrable thickets when he chose this route.

  Which wasn’t making any sense at all. 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 needed to move south west, but once they were four kilometres deep it was as if they were being pulled due west, and sometimes even northwards again. 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.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the others. Maybe it was time for another judgement call: to go back the way they had come in. But if he could even find the haphazard route now, it would be dark by the time they returned to the place from where they had started at midday. 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. Which seemed even more disturbing than an animal performing such a slaughter. But whatever had done that much damage to a body, wasn’t far away.

  ‘On your feet, men.’

  Luke tossed his butt and stood up.

  ‘Piss off,’ Dom said.

  ‘Here, here,’ Phil added.

  Dom looked up at Hutch. The lines at the side of Dom’s mouth cut deep furrows through the filth on his face; his eyes were full of pain. ‘I’m waiting for the stretcher, H. I can hardly bend my leg. I’m not joking. It’s gone all stiff.’

  ‘It’s not far now, mate,’ Hutch said. ‘River’s got to be close.’

  FOUR

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

  But this was only after another four kilometres of wading through ivy, nettles, broken branches, oceans of wet leaves, and the impenetrable naked spikes formed by the limbs of smaller trees. 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.

  During the late afternoon and into the early evening, when they were too tired to do anything but stagger about and swear at the things that poked and scratched their faces, the forest had become so dense it was impossible to move in any single direction for more than a few metres. So they had moved backwards and forwards, to circle the larger obstacles, 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.

  But just before seven they suddenly fell across something they were sure they would never see again. A trail. Narrow, but wide enough for them to walk upright in single file, without lurching about or being tugged backwards by a sleeping roll or backpack snagged on a branch.

  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. He could sort out exactly where they were later and chose the eastern direction to try and compensate for the north-westward course the forest had thus far enforced. 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.

  Their packs were soaked. Rivulets of water ran from their coats and soaked the thighs of their trousers, 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. But that was what they had all been thinking; he knew it. On either side of the trail, the undergrowth was as high as a man’s waist. 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.

  A dark and sunken building that slouched at the rear of an overgrown paddock. The ground was covered to the height of their knees with nettles and sopping weeds. A wall of the impenetrable forest they were lost inside bordered the grounds.

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

  FIVE

  ‘We can’t just break in,’ Luke said.

  Phil bumped Luke’s shoulder as he walked past. ‘You can have the tent to yourself, mate. I’m spending the night in there.’

  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.

  It lacked the bright red, yellow, white or pastel walls they were accustomed to seeing on these fairy-tale houses. There was no neat white fence or lawn mowed flat as a bowling green. Nothi
ng 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.

  ‘What now, Hutch?’ Within the confines of his glistening orange hood, Dom’s round face was tight with irritation, but his eyes flicked about. ‘Any more bright ideas?’

  Hutch’s eyes narrowed; they were pale green with long inky lashes and almost too pretty for a man. He took a deep breath, but didn’t look at Dom. He spoke as if he hadn’t heard his friend. ‘It’s got a chimney. Looks solid enough. We can get a fire going. We’ll be as warm as toast in no time.’ Hutch walked to the small porch, built around a door so black it lacked all definition within the front of the house.

  ‘Hutch. I don’t know. Better not,’ Luke said. This wasn’t right. Neither the house nor breaking into it. ‘Let’s get moving. It won’t be dark until eight. We’ve got another hour and could be out of the forest by then.’

  Around Luke the tension from Dom and Phil gathered until it felt like it was squeezing him to a standstill. Phil turned his bulk quickly with a rustle of wet blue Gore-Tex. His doughy face was dark red. ‘What’s wrong with you, Luke? You want to go back into that? Don’t be a stupid arse.’

  Dom joined in. As he spoke a drop of spit hit Luke’s cheek. ‘I can’t walk any more. It’s all right for you, your knee isn’t the size of a rugby ball. You’re as bad as the Yorkshire twat who got us into this.’

  Luke went dizzy and hot. They would be forced to stay here for a night because 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. He’d lived there fifteen years and never used the Underground once. How was that possible? Dom was no better. He looked about fifty these days, not thirty-four. And every time he swore, it made Luke grind his teeth. 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 dismissed him whenever he mentioned some new girl he’d been seeing, or a crazy bar he’d visited back in London.

  He recalled his shock when he’d struggled to continue a conversation with either Dom or Phil on the first day of the reunion, when they all met in London the night before the flight. 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. A lump formed in his throat.

  Hutch must have seen his face. ‘Chieftain,’ he said, and winked at Luke, conspiratorially, like a grown-up coming to the rescue of a boy being picked on in a playground. It just made Luke’s face flush hotter, but his anger immediately switched to himself and against his own poisonous thoughts. Hutch followed the wink with a warm smile. ‘I don’t think we have much choice, buddy. We have to get dry. We’ll never do it in a tent. We’ve been pissed on all day.’

  ‘Knock knock, we’re coming in,’ Phil called out and joined Hutch before the front door with more purpose than he’d shown all day while floundering and wheezing in the undergrowth. 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.

  ‘You can stay outside with the wolf that gave that moose a good seeing-to,’ Dom said with a half-smile on his face.

  Luke refused to meet Dom’s eye, but found his voice; a tight, aggressive, sarcastic thing that slightly shocked him when he heard it come out of his own mouth. But he didn’t care what he said, just wanted the others to know how he was feeling. ‘Or we could feed you and your useless knee to him, and while he’s busy stoving you in, we’ll head to Skaite.’

  Dom paused as he walked after Hutch and Phil. Disappointment and surprise softened his features for a moment before anger tightened them. ‘Spoken with all the petulance of arrested development. Stay outside you silly arse and you can freeze to death. Who’s going to miss you but some tart. This is for bloody real, if you hadn’t noticed. I’d like to get home in one piece. People depend on me back there.’

  Hutch snapped away from the door again, realizing the irritation behind him had turned to provocation. ‘Time gentlemen, please. If you don’t cool it, I’ll fetch me a long piece of green cedar and stripe your arses.’

  Phil burst into his dirty laugh that sounded unpleasant near the house, but didn’t bother to turn around. He banged and pushed at the door.

  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.’

  ‘I would. And I wouldn’t check my swing either. You’d get it backhand.’

  ‘There’s no lock. But it’s stuck,’ Phil said.

  Hutch removed his pack. ‘Not for long. Step aside.’

  Luke took the cigarette packet from the side pocket of his wet combat trousers. His hands were shaking. This was not the time to be analysing the situation, but he couldn’t help it. Could not stop himself thinking about the four of them. Because the trip had been such a disappointment. Not because of the weather; he’d have come out here even if he had known it would rain every day. 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.

  SIX

  Once the door was open, Dom, Phil and Hutch rooted through their packs for torches. Nothing could be seen through the space Hutch had created by directing the stamping sole of his boot around the iron door handle.

  With each bang of Hutch’s foot on the shuddering wood, Luke had winced. The idea of it opening made him nervous. Reluctance to join the others at the door was worsened by his sulking after the confrontation with Dom, which now made him feel foolish, again. But he was also ashamed by this vandalism. He remained in the paddock in the rain while the others crowded around the door egging each other on.

  Like the other three, he was dead on his feet. And wet and hungry and thoroughly miserable. 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.

  Slowly, Luke walked towards the black house. To the sound of their voices. The others were inside now, all talking at the same time. Someone was laughing. Phil. Luke threw his cigarette into the weeds and considered joining them and fo
rcing himself back into the camaraderie.

  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. A trace of an echo, like the hollow sound made by a stone bouncing off tree trunks, seemed to pass away, deep into the forest.

  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.

  Swallowing, and suddenly feeling weaker and more insignificant than he could ever remember, Luke couldn’t move. 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.

  ‘Buddy!’ It was Hutch. ‘Get in here. You have to see this.’

  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 needed to keep active. Focused. He moved to the door. Just inside the frame he could see Hutch’s pale face peering out. He’d taken his hat off.

  ‘Did you hear that?’

  Hutch looked at the sky. ‘I know. Thunder and a cloud burst. We couldn’t have found this place any sooner. I think a storm would’ve finished off the fatties. We’d have been forced to lose them.’