The Ritual

by Adam Nevill

  ‘We need water. Badly. I got to drink something. Then look at my head. I have a shaving mirror.’

  ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘Maybe sterilize the wound with some of that boiled water.’

  ‘Shush. Just—’

  ‘Antiseptic. There was some in the medical kit.’

  ‘All gone. Phil’s blisters.’

  ‘Jesus.’ His face screwed up. He thought he might cry.

  ‘Just take it easy. Drink this coffee. Get your head straight. It’s just a flesh wound. A bump. Looks worse than it is.’

  Was Dom only trying to make him feel better, or did what he say make sense? He had no idea, but it reassured him because he had nothing else to believe in but unexamined statements.

  Dom began pouring boiling water into a mug. ‘Let’s just drink this. Then we can think about what the hell we’re going to do next.’

  It took them half an hour to stumble down the south side of the hill. At the bottom, they paused to get their breath and to wait for their respective agonies to subside enough to raise their chins and look back up at the side of the green and silver tent, rippling in the sudden cool gusts that washed over the hillock.

  Except for two sleeping bags, the knives and the torches, they had abandoned everything else they had carried this far. Three rucksacks, an assortment of soiled clothes, an empty first-aid kit, and the empty gas canister and stove that had made them a final mug of bitter coffee, was all still in place up on the rocky summit. On the lonely and dreary place where they were supposed to have met their end, remained the final clues of what befell their hiking trip. Evidence of four friends who took a short cut.

  They stood on a thin layer of soil covering the rocks at the foot of the hill and both turned and looked at the dark fir trees, solemn in the soft light, awaiting them. Further inside the dark cool forest, a wall of bracken erupted around the last few willows, before the taller spruce and firs resumed their blanket dominance where the soil was deeper.

  As they peered into the woods and prepared to move south west, it was the sight of the uneven ground below them, tumbling up and down through the sentinels of trees, tilting from the sudden rocky crests made slippery with moss, that most disheartened Luke before they even began. Back in there for another day’s tortuous scrabbling and crying out with pain at every step and every motion that involved the carriage of a wound. And they would be moving slower today than ever before. Luke closed his eyes and readied himself. He was finished before he’d even begun, and knew it.

  Dom’s messy bandage had fallen off his head at the first prompt. But at least it had absorbed most of the bleeding, a seeping that continued for the hours he was unconscious. The gash ran from his left eyebrow, up his forehead and into his hair. It was pink and open like a sideways mouth. Using his thin shaving mirror, he thought he had seen a glimmer of bone inside it. The gash was at least five inches long and desperately required stitches.

  With the last absorbent pad from the first-aid kit, he had dabbed at the wound with the last dregs of hot water from the pan, trying not to cry out too loudly at every contact. Dom could not even look at him while he attended to his torn flesh. He’d then placed the gauze pad under the wrappings of the soiled bandage and gently retied it around the crown of his head. Dom had fixed the safety pin in place.

  The most horrifying thing to Luke had been the sight of his own blood-stained face, barely recognizable when it peered back from the tiny shaving mirror. The water Dom had poured over his head had not washed his face clean; much of the streaky dried blood remained caked on. One side of his face was bruised purple, and further blackened with the grime already coating his skin right down to his throat. His left ear was plugged with dried blood and it was like having that side of his head submerged in a bath. If he ever stumbled out of here, he would be scarred for life. His bloodied face and the thought of a cruel white scar made him more miserable and sorry for himself than anything else.

  And now they each held a crutch. Dom had found Luke his own wet branch, so they could both support their wincing, shuffling, wounded bodies with dead limbs from ancient trees.

  As they walked, Luke could not talk to Dom. In silence, he would point a hand at gaps in the forest floor, where he thought it best for them to proceed through, in an approximation of the right outward trajectory. Inside his waterproof, he kept the compass close to his heart. More often than was necessary he would withdraw it and make sure they were close to the coordinates he’d mapped from up in the tree.

  Talking to each other would waste what little strength they had left. Meeting each other’s eyes could vanquish whatever kept the other one going so slowly, and so carefully away from the hill. They stayed close together, but somehow avoided each other at the same time.

  Luke kept the knife constantly in one hand, but had so little balance and so much pain throbbing against the walls of his skull, he had no fight left in him. If they were attacked, they were dead.

  They just hobbled forward, unthinking and unaware of anything but the next footfall; both of them determined to walk in the direction that would take them out of the trees and on to the plain and towards the river below; or to just keep moving until that time when their pursuer decided to take one of them, and then the other.

  When they found Phil hanging from a Scots pine, they didn’t linger. His butchery was worse than the condition of Hutch’s remains; was more akin to what had befallen the animal they all found together, so long ago.

  Dom kept sniffing, mumbling to himself; Luke kept his eyes down. Just once he’d looked up at his friend, so wet and spread about the trees, but he would not look again after he’d seen Phil’s face. They’d even held each other’s eye for a moment.

  Like frightened children, Luke and Dom briefly held each other, arms around necks; each leaning his weight into the other as they staggered under their dead friend’s cold pale feet, away from him and deeper into the forest.

  FORTY-THREE

  And he could think of nothing but water. Daydreamed of cold foresty wetness gushing down his parched throat. Silvery and bubbling across smooth cold pebbles it would rush and foam icy through a clear stream bed and then pour over his dry lips and drench the desert of his mouth. If they found a stream, he would fill his stomach with aching loveliness for hours until every cell in his body was saturated with water. Water. The very word burned his whole being with thirst.

  In his swimming vision he looked down at his hands and wrists that were pin-pricking and itching with sharp little sensations and he saw bandy-legged herds of insects drinking until their black abdomens were bloated. His hands were gloved with them. His neck too. Maybe they were sand flies as the ground was often marshy. He had no strength or balance to knock them away so he let them feed. At least someone is getting something to drink. He smiled, but it hurt the roof of his skull and took him seconds to ease the smile from his face, so that he was only in the rhythmic pain and not the dizzy white agony. He would have liked to share the thought with silent plodding Dom, but speech had become impossible.

  He wondered if there was any synaptic fluid left in the ball sockets of his hips. A terrible bony grinding and clicking was felt throughout his body after every ungainly step now. Whitish dots speckled his vision. To turn around and check on Dom involved stopping and turning his whole body about, because the movement of his neck created streak lightning inside his skull. So he stopped turning about and checking on Dom. And when he did pause to ease over a rock, or a fallen dead tree, Dom often banged into him and grunted. They were walking so close together, and at such a slow pace, any pause threatened to topple them both.

  Luke was too wretched in body and spirit to think long about dear Hutch any more, and poor Phil, whom they were leaving behind. As for the other thing that was surely following them, he would not allow its presence into his exhaustion and delirium either. If he could help it. Not that. They would meet it again soon enough. He knew it. He assumed Dom knew it too.

  At 2
p.m. Luke threw away his crutch and sank to all fours. He would continue on his hands and knees. It was better to have his broken head closer to the earth.

  Dom said something, but he didn’t hear it. Luke just pointed ahead of himself, to correct their passage down a rise and into an incongruously sparse glade, in which the dappling light and dark shadows looked inviting. It was also damp and he wondered if he might extract moisture from the peaty soil.

  Behind him Dom’s crutch clacked against the stones and tree roots as he made his own teetering descent. Every step made his companion grunt in protest.

  At the bottom Luke lay against the cold ground and closed his eyes. Gingerly, he placed his swollen red hands on the outside of the bandage as if to hold in place the shattered crockery of his skull. The tissues of his brain must be bloated now with a great swelling because he could feel tremors inside the vertebrae of his lower back.

  He imagined a doctor saying you shouldn’t move at all. Don’t move. It’s the worst thing you can do with a head trauma. But he wondered if there was any truth to the imaginary physician’s words. He knew nothing about first aid. Or survival, or how to find water and nutrition if the supermarkets were closed. Or what the direction of the wind could tell him, or what information was held in the colour of the sky. He just reacted to shit that had already happened. He was hopeless and broken and deserved to perish. I am of the generation of arse, he mouthed and then laughed silently. We couldn’t find water in a reservoir. When we walk in a forest we all die. We are but baby birds fallen from nests to an unforgiving earth.

  He thought he could hear water and sat up. But it was a breeze. So he sucked at the leaves where the drizzle speckled their bitter waxy blades. Went around the clearing like it was a clock face and he was the minute hand, sucking the leaves. Sometimes a whole drop of rainwater would splash onto his tongue but never reach the back of his throat. He licked the wet bark of a tree. He opened his mouth to the sky, but the rain fell onto his face, not into his gaping maw.

  In the corner of his squeezed-shut eyes that were hurt by even the faint light of shadows, he saw the blurred orange shape of Dom in his waterproof, picking up leaves and bits of bark. He tried to swallow water from them like they were oyster shells and he was gulping their slippery flesh down. His face was a dirty grimace covered in beard and shit.

  Luke checked the compass and held one red hand against the left side of his head like a singer trying to find a note. Through one eye, which seemed to be filling with brown smoke, he could see that they were crawling in the right direction. And then he thought of the vision he had seen from the tree he climbed. That distant edge of the forest. The defined boundary, and the flat mossy stones beyond it. He thought he’d seen water out there too. Maybe he had. Water must have been collecting in stony bits and basins that he could push his face into.

  Flies whined in the moist air and gathered like iron filings against the bloodied turban of bandage on his head.

  He stood up. He wanted to get to the end of the trees. The short rest had allowed a pang of desire to motivate him again.

  ‘Let’s go. Not far,’ he tried to say to Dom, but it sounded like a gargle and made him swallow furiously, and he knew it was the last time he would speak.

  Dom hobbled towards him and they left the clearing.

  Just before six, he had to stop again and crawl on to a fat boulder, because the dizzy spell was so great his stomach convulsed and his skin froze. Somewhere behind him, Dom made a sudden noise.

  Dom’s voice seemed unnaturally loud. It wasn’t quite a word, but must have been a grunt of relief because Luke was allowing them another break. There had been so many now. They rested as much as they moved. Every few metres. And they needed to constantly suck the stones and engulf the wet leaves with their hot mouths. In the distance, Dom’s feet kicked out at something, scuffling up the leaves.

  Once the swooping of his head settled, Luke squinted through one eye and stood up to continue his uncoordinated tiptoeing and groaning. He tried to grunt while pointing one arm at a thicket in which he thought he could see a trail winding closer to salvation.

  And into the tangle he went, the nettles whisking against his waterproof and snagging at the legs of his trousers. Vines would curl like tentacles and he would take a step back until they released him and then step that leg over the vines into more nettles. A familiar pattern they had followed for days. There were rents in his trousers now. Snags and ladders had become holes into which the thorns and gnats could find him.

  Behind him, he sensed Dom’s shape. Stepping carefully, in his footsteps. Maybe watching out for him should he suddenly lose his balance and collapse into the stinging morass of vine and spike. Every step he took was followed by one of Dom’s. There was even something comforting in the way they moved in synchronicity. And Dom was so close to him now, the presence of his bulk was tangible at Luke’s back. But god he stank. Even though his nose and mouth were full of dry blood, Luke could smell Dom’s heavy breath and sweat-saturated clothes.

  But the thicket worsened and without a machete, they would have to retrace their steps and circumnavigate the ridge of thorns. It’s only getting thicker because we are not far from the end, Luke told himself. But we must go back.

  He stopped and slowly turned his body about.

  Then opened his good eye wide. Among the twenty metres of bracken and nettles he had waded into, there was no sign of Dom.

  He frowned. Then a cold feeling of breath-stopping fright brought his heart beat into his ears and eyes and blurred his vision.

  Dom must have gone back already. Because I heard him following me. Every step of the way in here.

  Luke clenched his mind against the sudden nausea of panic that tried to engulf him.

  At the far end of the thicket they had entered, he could see into the dark stony glade where they had just rested. But there was no sign of Dom in there either.

  Holding his head tenderly, he swallowed and swallowed until a trace of saliva moistened his throat. He called out for Dom.

  What was left of his grunty voice seemed to get lost in the woody space that vaulted above and burrowed into darkness on every side. Again he called out. And again. Then with both throbbing eyes wide open he peered, he scrutinized, he begged every inch of forest in the distance for a sign of Dom’s orange waterproof.

  Nothing.

  Dom was no longer with him.

  When had he seen him last?

  He took his memory backwards; slowly through the recent minutes. By that rock on which he had so recently slumped, he had last seen Dom. No. He had heard him there, but had not actually laid eyes upon him. Dom had been behind him at the rock. He had made a sound. That’s right. A grunt, or cry. A sound of surprise? Then he had shuffled his feet about. Kicked at something on the ground.

  Maybe he then walked off in another direction, blind and oblivious with exhaustion and pain from his knee. Stumbled away from Luke and got himself lost.

  Could not have done because as Luke so recently walked through the nettles, he had heard Dom close at his heels, almost on top of him. Had not seen him, no. But had heard him and sensed him and you cannot be mistaken about that. They had been close together. Almost touching.

  The stench.

  Luke raised his knife.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Loneliness came with a suddenness that made Luke shiver. Then came his struggle with himself to not go hysterical with panic. He could do little more than hold himself together when one of the others was near, but now they were all gone …

  His mind spoke to itself. Immediately tried to create companions in that painful mess under the bandage. But the pathetic voices stopped as soon as they began, like nervous children falling into an embarrassed silence at the sudden appearance of a stern adult.

  He remained motionless in the damp clearing where the last two of them had been together. The trees glared at him, patient but unsympathetic, awaiting his next move. The rain dropped with its usual indiffe
rence. He was dying of thirst in his ignorance of where it collected on the ground.

  No one answered his croaks. He wondered how long he should wait. Was there anyone to wait for?

  He shuddered. Gripped the knife. He wanted it to come for him. Right then. To rush low and quick from the underbrush. To lope from the shadows. He was ready to look right into the bright eyes of a devil’s head. He could take the sight and reek of it up close. Would thrust the last of himself at its taut flanks. Rip that sneaky killer a new mouth with a Swiss Army knife.

  He thought of a black beard wet with hot gore, a snout red in the thin light from where it had been snatching at the coils and plump offal of his friends. Tearing and scattering. Before carrying off the flopping white figures to make its grotesque installations in the trees.

  To what end? Why destroy such complicated and sophisticated creations as his friends? Why demolish all those memories and feelings and thoughts that made them? His mates.

  Tears stung Luke’s eyes. He shivered.

  They had come together when young. Were drawn to each other as curious attractions formed permanent bonds amongst all of those people at university, at a time and in a way that can never happen again. They listened to music together and talked for days without pause. They woke in the morning to see each other. They occupied each other’s physical space and head space, and wanted each other’s approval and needed to make each other smile. They had been good together until life and women and work and urges for new places pulled them apart. But there was enough of that connection remaining to bring them back together. Out here. Fifteen years later. To find each other all over again.

  His friends had been destroyed for no reason he could think of. They had been destroyed like most people were destroyed. By just being in the wrong place. After all of that development and growing and cultivating and caution and survivable self-destruction and failure and regeneration and struggling and coping, they had just walked through the wrong bunch of bloody trees. And that was that.