The Ritual

by Adam Nevill

  FORTY

  A flock of birds heaved themselves into the sky, accelerated, swooped to the south; frantic to put distance between themselves and the sound of what now moved over the face of the earth. It was right below their position on the hill, moving through the trees on the south side, its footfalls silent.

  Changing from grey to an Atlantic blue-black, the sky sucked the pitiful remains of the sun’s distant glow up and into itself, dissolving visibility to vague shapes of trees and silhouettes of rock with black swathes of the indefinable between. Spaces that could be redefined by frantic minds to resemble anything at all.

  Dom never stood up. His face blanched under the filth to make his scabbed lips appear dark as if stained by wine. His wide eyes were filled with madness. It was impossible to speak in the gravity of terror that crushed them both against the rocks and made Luke’s left leg shake uncontrollably. He was standing, but only just, and watching the rim of the hillock from where the sound had originated, expecting a long shape to rise at any moment.

  He could not breathe, like the surface of his lungs were adhered together, and around his mind swiftly spun idiot words, and quick flashes of the shattered, mottled remains in that wet cavity beneath the derelict church.

  Within the pit of his belly he tried to find the heat of anger; the rage that made him go to meet it face-to-face when they found poor Hutch, disembowelled and splashing his innards down his legs and onto the black bark of the hanging trees. But there was nothing inside him but a chaotic space with no room for anything beside the kind of terror that could disengage a mind from anything but imbecilic musings.

  And then again, to their left, so suddenly at their side, the bellow opened up the damp and boggy forest that remembered prehistory within its depths of peaty soil and in every single stone. Bestial grunting gave way to a devilish yipping in which words could almost be understood.

  From the very core of each of them, their ancestors seemed to cry out in inarticulate voices. Right then, they screamed in alarm from times before symbols and language could depict such things that hunted and meant murder. Luke believed they were returned, in this cold and in this dark, to a place and into the presence of something from earth’s dawn. Or another, even older place than that. It dominated the land. The boughs and leaves of its territory shuddered, marshy surfaces quivered, and the dank and dripping vales held their breath before its arrival.

  Luke walked towards the sound, to the eastern edge of the hill on which they were about to make their final stand. Or maybe an engagement with it would be nothing more than it taking twitching sacrifices from the summit. Snatching with a swiftness and euphoria that comes to the predator whose hot sinuses and moist valves inflame with the scent of warm flesh and gushing salty blood.

  Luke imagined a sinewy darkness, depressed to the earth. Moving through the shadows, up and over and under things. The very obstacles that banged their shins or brought them gasping to a standstill, it merely glided past, able to slip through any natural barrier. Every inch of ground must have been mapped with nostril and tongue for years.

  He held the knife against his side, and told himself there would be one strike in him. And he must make it instinct-fast. Rapid as a blink. Quicker than a flinch. At the exact moment it came whipping for his throat, or spearing at his torso. One strike, one chance.

  Nearing the edge of the hill, Luke dropped to a crouch and raised his left forearm in the way police dog-handlers do. The hand holding the knife clenched white and readied itself for an upper cut.

  Then he turned more quickly than conscious decisions or explanations would allow for, and ran back to where Dom sat prone and watching him. Ran with great jumping strides beyond balance or thought of where his feet fell; ran as fast as he could at Dom, at the tent, the knife ready.

  And sure enough, just as the tips of the hairs on the nape of his neck had whispered, and as the tiny vibrations in his inner ear bones had trilled, and as the cooling of the blood through his heart warned, it would come in through the back door. Quick and low after luring one of them out to see it.

  Behind the tent, pebbles were disturbed and scattered. There was a snort, as if from a bullock, and then Luke received a sense of a dark shape dropping and melting swiftly away, like the passing shadow of a cloud moving beneath the sun. Obscured by the loose tent and the spruce tree, he imagined, more than he saw, a long, black, nimble presence vanishing down the southern slope of the hill, as fluid as water.

  Luke stopped in a skittering, lurching scramble over the lichen-covered boulders behind the tent, violently expelling his breath in a gust that ended in a cry when he plunged into the miasma something inhuman had left upon the summit. He gathered himself in the very place where it had just been, where it had craned forward to snatch Dom as he sat before the tent, looking the wrong way. Downwind of him.

  ‘Clever bastard.’

  Which was why Dom had not detected the heavy animal spore of a coat wet and fouled and ungroomed, or the hot meaty stench of a large mouth, and the livestock reek of air silently exhaled through a great muzzle.

  At the edge of the hill, Luke looked down to the distant southern treeline. Nothing. There was nothing there at all any more.

  ‘What? Where is it?’ Dom whispered, his voice so tight and high it was unrecognizable.

  ‘Gone. Down there.’ Luke glanced over his shoulder and across the roof of the tent. ‘Look to your front!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To the front!’ Luke bounded back to where Dom sat, staring up at him, terrified and bemused.

  Luke scanned the rocky plateau, the edges of the summit, to the west and the north. Nothing.

  He shook his head and bent over, hands on thighs, gulping at the dusky air. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘What? Where is it?’

  Luke looked at Dom. ‘It drew me out. Made me follow the sounds. But it doesn’t come from there. But from behind you when you’re looking in the wrong direction. It was behind the tent.’

  ‘No.’

  Luke nodded. ‘I suddenly knew what that fucker was up to. It came up the back way, the south side. For you.’

  ‘Shit.’ Dom shuffled to his feet, leaned on his crutch. ‘Behind the tent? You see it?’

  They looked at each other, so deeply into each other’s eyes it hurt. Luke shook his head. ‘But I think it’s big.’

  FORTY-ONE

  ‘It was close again. Did you hear it?’

  But when Luke turned his head to see why Dom had not acknowledged that he had heard it too, Dom’s eyes were closed and he was gripped by an exhausted and haunted slumber, which was all this forest would allow a man.

  He shook Dom’s shoulder.

  Slowly, Dom opened his eyes. ‘Did I sleep?’ His voice was thick, slurred.

  ‘You go and sleep first,’ Luke said quietly, and shone his torch into the entrance of the tent. It was ten thirty and the first hour of eight hours of darkness had passed.

  Sitting back-to-back before the mouth of the tent, they had covered themselves in their sleeping bags, open and spread like blankets, to watch the last of the light fade. Each of them held a torch and a knife.

  Both of them going inside the tent was certain death; they would have to take turns resting. Luke had suggested it earlier, but Dom had balked at the idea of being trapped inside the tent and unable to see around himself. Instead, he’d opted to stay up, to stay awake all night, and to keep watch.

  ‘I won’t sleep,’ Luke said. ‘You go first. You have to sleep, Dom. I’ll keep watch until midnight. You’re no good to us if you fall asleep out here.’

  But Dom continued to sit outside the tent, his shoulder pressed into Luke’s back, his torch flicking about the rocky summit on his side. ‘Sorry. I won’t fall asleep again. I promise.’

  Another hour passed without any sound or sign of it.

  Luke shuddered; his mind was dull. He kept his torch beam trained into the darkness. Already the torchlight was vague, dimming. He would soon have t
o use the spare torch that had belonged to Phil. But his body was enveloped in the soothing warmth of a winter sleeping bag, and he didn’t want to move. Not yet. It was the first time that day he’d felt even a smidgen of comfort.

  Dom wheezed; asleep again beside him.

  Luke’s own mind began to insist on the oblivion of sleep too. No matter the threat of extinction, his head even fell twice before he snapped awake, cold with fear and tightening his grip on the torch.

  Without sleep, how could he even think about the trek tomorrow, back down there and into the darkness of its realm? His body was spent, every muscle flat but aching, his spine a single column of pain. Dom couldn’t be trusted to stay awake if he roused him now to keep a solitary watch while he grabbed an hour’s rest. Dom needed sleep more than he did. Needed to rest that knee. Every minute of sleep Dom secured increased their chances of survival the following day because it would make Dom more alert, while he blazed the trail towards the end of this ancient hell.

  Luke adjusted his position and knelt up inside his sleeping bag, with Dom’s weight against his ribs. Surely he could not fall asleep while kneeling up. Shuddering in the cold, he reached over and took Dom’s torch from out of his lap. Then held each of the torches at waist-height, and trained their pale beams onto the ground either side of where they sat before the rippling tent.

  He sat like that without moving for twenty minutes; then another fifteen; eventually completed an hour. The rhythm of his companion’s breathing lulled him, comforted him. He would not be without it … Every second Dom slept would …

  He flashed open his eyes, after what felt like a moment of them being closed. Luke and Dom were not alone on that hilltop.

  Dozing off into a waiting, beckoning, soothing coma of exhaustion, part of him had remained alert; a neglected, but now revived and finely tuned region of his mind that sometimes roused him at home when a noise within the confines of his flat contained more drama than the scurry of a mouse, or creak of a joist, or ambient shudder of a pipe inside a wall. The part of him that responded to the unnatural sounds of night, suddenly clicked his mind alive without the yawning stupor of a normal waking.

  In the tired torchlight, he could see no further than ten to fifteen feet across the small summit; even the rim of the hill had long vanished into the murk of the cloudy night. The stones closest to the tent were still visible, appearing bluish beyond the torch’s beam as if emitting a strange light, but were bleached like sea shells when directly within it.

  ‘Dom.’

  Against his side, Dom’s solid weight still rested, shoulder blades pushing out from restful inhalations. To his right, between the tent and the southern edge of the hill, Luke’s startled vision told him that the shape, no more than two metres away from the first guy rope, had not been there before he fell asleep.

  ‘Dom.’

  It was not moving. Immobile as a boulder, long as a fallen log on a forest floor, it was nothing to a casual glance, or even peripheral vision. A long dark reaching form that only a man petrified by the hyper-alertness of a hunt might investigate with a second look.

  Luke was too frightened to shine his torch directly at it. He did not want to see it.

  He swallowed. Whimpered, ‘Dom.’

  Dom murmured in his sleep.

  And then the nearest part of the shadow, that defined itself by the thinnest light of the torch that brushed that place, moved. Raised itself no more than a few inches, in the way a stalking cat will engage in the next step towards its prey.

  Luke turned his stiff thighs into a crouch, and then roared with all the power of his lungs. He shone a torch beam into the shape, and dropped the other torch to reach for his knife in the mouth of his sleeping bag.

  What had come up the side of the hill for them, pressed into the ground, was startled by his cry. Within the juddering white light, a black shape flattened itself beneath the light, then withdrew so quickly it almost vanished. Along what could have been a hairy flank something gleamed like oil.

  Luke scrabbled and snatched inside the warm interior of his sleeping bag for the knife. His fingers brushed nylon, a zipper, his own leg, empty air. ‘Dom!’

  Dom woke. Rigid with fear, he pressed his body into Luke’s stomach.

  Time paused. The air tensed taut, in the way it does before the clashing tearing violence of living things coming together to kill.

  Some part of it scraped like bone across stone, backward and down into the darkness beyond the torchlight. It could have been his imagination, but Luke sensed a long shape had cantered, spiderish, sideways, and disappeared behind the tent; and then must have moved, if not flowed, across to the gaunt silhouette of the spruce. Or had even just reappeared there. Because something was now moving, rising up, behind the tree trunk at the far reaches of the arrival of his torch’s beam. And then upward it went some more, behind and seemingly around the trunk, on unseen limbs, that must have been as long as stilts. Or were these merely retreating shadows, created by a torch held in a trembling hand?

  Luke stood. The light from his dim torch frosted the tree, and washed weakly across what could have been long thin moving branches, or something else entirely.

  Fumbling about for his torch and knife, Dom murmured something inarticulate from beneath Luke.

  Above them, before them, the long thin shapes that might have been foliage in raking torchlight moved further upward, spearing through the drizzly air. The briefest visual offering of which liquefied Luke’s guts, then made the sense-memory of his stomach vanish altogether into a total absence.

  Luke moved around Dom and leapt at the tree; as he moved he dropped his right shoulder and filled his fist with the cold density of a heavy rock from the little cairn that weighted down a guy rope. Landing upon his front foot, with the full range of his arm, his shoulder and his back, he catapulted the stone like a baseball, right into the tree and its shadows.

  The terrible thunk of stone on flesh was followed by a shriek that deafened them both. Luke recoiled from the throw. But before he could straighten his spine, something whipped out from the howling presence behind the tree and cracked his skull.

  His vision flared white with pain before his eyes and mind clicked off into complete darkness.

  FORTY-TWO

  Silty light seeped through his half-closed eyelids and worsened the pain. Relentless in its encasement of his entire skull the agony made him feel sick, and bewildered, and unsure of where he was. His head and face and neck were wet and cold, dripping.

  The shape of his head felt too big, ungainly and misshapen. Something wet hung over one eye and restricted the light.

  A rucksack had been slipped like a pillow beneath his head. The angle hurt his neck. He raised himself to one elbow and squinted. Empty of anything but gas, his stomach lurched.

  The awning of the tent flapped like a sail in a swift wind. He could see it through one squinting eye. Two sleeping bags covered his body. The little stove was hissing a blue flame under the steel pan not far from his feet. He reached up and gingerly touched the part of his forehead where the pain started its thunder, before it rolled backwards. Something soft and loose was arranged about his head, squashing his ears flat, and tied tighter at the back. He swallowed at a dry and swollen throat. Water. He was desperate for it. He coughed. ‘Dom.’

  He heard the sound of rocks grinding together under someone’s weight. The clack of a stick followed, accompanied by a gasp of exertion. He turned towards the sound, then closed his eyes as the pain threw itself against one side of his head and nearly made him throw up. Skull fracture. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Suddenly dizzy, he slipped back down to his former position, resting against the rucksack.

  ‘Mate. Thank fuck. You’re awake. Wasn’t sure if you were in a coma,’ Dom said, close enough for Luke to smell his harsh breath and the pungent oily smell of his dirty clothes.

  ‘Any water left?’

  ‘Last of it is in the pan. I used most of it on your head. I had to wash it befor
e I put the bandage on. Coffee and chocolate for breakfast.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve been out cold. It’s made a mess of your face. You need stitches.’

  ‘Is it bad?’ he muttered, and felt stupid. How would Dom know?

  ‘Good news is it didn’t come back after you hit it. What did you do, get it with a knife? Jesus, that sound. You hurt it. You must have hurt it.’

  Luke squinted through the one eye it was easiest to open. ‘Threw a rock.’

  ‘Rock?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Shot.’

  Luke tried to smile, but that made him nauseous too. ‘How bad is it? My head. Don’t B.S. me.’

  Dom paused and looked at his boots, then winced as he returned his gaze to Luke. ‘I’ve never seen so much blood. But that can be misleading. Doesn’t mean it’s serious or anything. There’s more blood in the head than anywhere else in the body. I think. Which is why head injuries look worse.’

  ‘Shit.’ Head injury – the phrase made him tingle, then wash cold all over. It could be really bad: a fractured skull, or a concussion, which would explain the nausea. Maybe something worse; a blood clot, or a head trauma that required immediate surgery to prevent brain damage. Fluid had to be drained. Now.

  Panic started to lurch through him again, to join the squeezing pain that pushed reddish flashes into his vision. He took a deep breath and shuddered down to his toes.

  ‘You are covered in it, mate. I didn’t know it was so bad until the sun came up. I nearly heaved. But we got through it. We made it to morning. Can you believe it?’

  ‘Painkillers. Any of those Nurofen left?’

  ‘Sorry. My knee’s been a bit greedy on that front.’

  ‘I don’t think I can even stand up.’

  Dom stayed silent. ‘Then we’re fucked,’ he eventually said in a voice suddenly empty of any warmth or edge or inquiry. His words were flat and tired; the sound of despair, the voice of yesterday. Dom shuffled back to the stove and looked down at the water in silence. Two tin mugs were lined up beside it, next to the tub of coffee granules. The mugs were stained black inside.