The Ritual

by Adam Nevill

  Come on you bastard.

  He growled at the air, and begged madness to take him away from the paralysing realization of what was lost forever. Because what was the point of reason? You lived briefly, died, were forgotten. Just to glimpse this was enough of a cause to go insane or to put yourself away. Out here you were butchered and then tossed into a sodden crypt. Piled up with the mottled bones of strangers and dead cattle.

  They were my mates.

  The rain pattered near him and the wind made ocean sounds up in the distant treetops. But no one answered him and nothing came for him now he was ready and unafraid and prepared to let his tortured and tired, so tired, and messed-up consciousness end.

  He stood alone and placed his hands on either side of his head. The pain banged from recent exertions. He closed his eyes and he thought of those who were gone, those friends he had lost. Best friends to the end; an end that came too soon, without warning.

  As you are, boys, I will be. Soon.

  He turned and shuffled away into the trees.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Lying on his back, Luke looked up into the distant canopy of a million leaves and the endless networks of branches. In places he could see the sky and it was dark. For a moment, he wondered where he was. Then remembered and closed his eyes again.

  He passed himself from tree to tree, using the great trunks and lower branches as crutches. The constant swoop and hover of flies became a loud whine when one of them disappeared inside his ear to probe. His hands were wet with lymph from where he had clumsily torn at the great white lumps growing into his cuffs. Some of the bites thickened under his watch strap. The splashes the insects made when he swatted them made him thirstier. He prayed it would rain again so the clouds of flies might go. They weren’t supposed to be here; that’s the main reason they went hiking in September, because of the interminable stream of mosquitoes. Hutch had not mentioned these sand flies, or gnats.

  Was this the right direction? He wondered how far he had staggered since leaving the tent. It felt like a month ago. The previous evening occurred in another lifetime. How far now to the end of the trees? Then he stopped caring and just continued; one step at a time, bracing himself for the migraine-judder before each foot landed upon the forest floor.

  After every ten steps he leaned against a tree or sat down in the wet verdure and waited for his vision to settle. His breathing was so heavy that the very act of drawing breath was tiring him as much as pushing his leaden legs forward, time after time.

  He became oblivious to every feature he passed. The forest was just a blur he barely saw but clambered about in. Maybe his body was breaking itself down, one fat cell at a time to fuel this death march. It had been so long since he’d eaten. The burning in his gut had turned to a combination of nausea and aches as his stomach clenched upon itself.

  To alleviate the terrible fatigue and boredom and bouts of terror, he counted what he’d eaten: five cereal bars and half a Dairy Milk bar in thirty-six hours. He repeated the menu in a silent mantra.

  The last time he’d drunk any fluid was in the morning; a cup of thick bitter coffee. The sweat on him turned cold and he stopped again to dry-heave against a tree.

  At 10, his vision was down to five feet, but he continued hobbling in a dark and blurry void that was more disorientation than direction.

  His head was down. Eyes mostly closed. But he suffered a sudden sense that he was not alone. Luke looked up, certain that the presence of other figures had encroached into his immediate space. And he saw, in the dimming gloom between the trees, a whole host of little white figures. Upright, perfectly still, repeated to the ends of his vision. He screwed up his good eye, blinked.

  And all of the … children? … were gone.

  Dwarf willows in thin light; he’d mistaken them for an indistinct crowd of little white people; thin and poised and staring.

  Sometime after midnight, he was sure Hutch had begun to walk behind him. Phil was there too. They had come to their senses and realized this complicated and well-orchestrated practical joke had gone too far, now that he was so lonely and hurt and lost. They were too embarrassed to see his reaction to their cruel ingenuity so kept their faces turned away from him. And he was so upset that they had been fooling with him that he ignored them. He felt sulky and betrayed and wanted to sob hard. Eventually they gave up following him.

  When Dom caught up with him and fell into step again, Luke was too tired to speak to his friend or to ask him where he had been. But he smiled and hoped Dom could sense, in the lightless depths of the nocturnal forest, that he was pleased to see him again.

  When he stopped to rest and slap about for his torch – he was sure he had one earlier – Dom had wandered off again.

  Sitting on a stone Luke passed out.

  And began a conversation with Charlotte in the Prince of Wales pub in Holland Park back home. It was sunny and they were sitting outside, just like they did on their second date when she had come out of the tube station in a short skirt and leather boots and he had been mute with desire and astonishment because she had been wearing trainers and jeans when they first met, when he had gone home content that a girl had taken his number, though was not that bothered about seeing her again. But then was so pleased to be with her that second time, and had decided right there in the beer garden to make a go of it with her. He told her she was a ‘fox’ and she smiled. She reached across the table and touched his face, bit her bottom lip and told him he was ‘lovely’. They sat together for hours. They kissed and told each other everything about their jobs, their hometowns, their families, their last relationships, all of that stuff that can come out on an early date with someone you immediately care about.

  When he awoke, dragged from sleep by the ache in his neck and the throbbing behind the slice in his forehead, he continued to talk to Charlotte until he realized he was alone and leaning against a dead tree in a forest. Moisture had soaked up through his trousers and into his underwear. He was sodden and he shivered. Where was his sleeping bag?

  Through the upper branches of the trees he could see the sky was turning the pale blue-grey of early morning. He looked at his watch: 6 a.m. He had slept for three or four hours. Why had it not killed him here? He tried to work this out, but was too tired and in too much pain to investigate the idea much. Was too thirsty to even swallow. His lips were crusted with salt.

  On his hands and knees he moved so slowly.

  Just another twenty feet then lie down and let the darkness take you.

  Pressing the compass to his one good eye, he saw nothing. Dropped the compass but felt the loop of string around his neck go tight, but could not catch the compass as it swung like a pendulum above the dark earth beneath him.

  Just go up this incline to that tree.

  Down at the bottom of this glade are two stones upon which you can sit.

  Through those two spruce trees the nettles seem to clear.

  Behind that copse of fir there could be water. It looks like the kind of place where there could be water.

  The trees thin at the top of that rise. Let’s go up it sideways. Might be easier.

  At the summit of a mound of earth, around which the forest parted as if to make room for a place where people might gather under the solitary tree, he sat and felt oddly comfortable. Here his skin and head went warm and the pain in his head settled to a distant scream.

  He opened an eye and looked down the slope beyond the grubby toes of his hiking boots. The dawn was red. Or was that his vision? The sunrise blazed through the trees to his left, to the east. He turned his head to see it with the only eye he could keep open. And beyond the scattering of trees down there in the rocky soil he could detect a great whitish space widening out forever, where great black trunks and boughs did not suffocate the red light. He squinted his good eye at the ocean of space and scarlet light beyond the trees. And he wondered if this was the end of the terrible forest, or the beginning of hell, or just the end of his mind. It matt
ered little because he would not move again. Could not. There was not one more shuffle or dragging lurch left inside him. There was nothing left inside him but the dimming of his parts and the quietening of his wordless thoughts.

  But what was that thing standing upright with hell on fire behind its long body? As tall as three grown men standing on each other’s shoulders, at the edge of the black wood; what was it that filled the gap between two epic trees? It was nothing. Because when he tried to see it more fully the blurry vision of the figure vanished, leaving only the scarlet sky and trees.

  But the bark he heard so close to where he was slumped was not a figment of his imagination. No, that was something he had heard before. That dog-bullock cough, from a thing no trespasser here had ever seen and lived to tell of, was real enough. As real as the ridged bark pressing into his spine and the cold wind that curled around his damp face.

  Reaching out in front of his unmoving body, he extended a hand that gripped the knife. Pointed it at the misty treeline with the crimson furnace of dawn burning through the branches and shrubs.

  He must have passed out and stopped breathing because he suddenly awoke with the sound of his own shocked inhalation in his ears and wondered if he had just been dreaming. So what brought him back out of that endless sinking into a darkness where he could not breathe? A voice. He had heard someone speak.

  But he could not care enough and could not stop his head from falling forward again. He felt his chin rest upon his breastbone and closed his useful eye. Still he held the knife, but could not raise his arm at the voice that kept coming towards him. So close now. Calling. Calling. Softly. Calling in the way a loved one summons another, with music in their voice. But it was not coming quickly enough to pull him out of this warm smothering darkness, so complete, into which he sank.

  II

  SOUTH OF HEAVEN

  FORTY-SIX

  They were close.

  Voices.

  Footsteps.

  People.

  A muttering in Swedish or Norwegian outside the warm heavy darkness that engulfed him. A woman, youngish. And … two men, their tones deeper. He sensed their presence above him, over him. The voices of the people then came together, near his feet.

  He was lying down; his limbs and back were stiff, but sunken into a soft surface. Under his shoulders and buttocks, his skin burned where it touched … bedding.

  Something was wrapped around his head; he could feel its touch, its pressure, could sense its size, covering his eyes as well as his skull like a big ill-fitting hat.

  When he tried to open his eyes there was resistance from his eyelids. They were gummed shut. One eyelid partially broke apart and a streak of white pain shot backwards through his pupil. He closed the eye again. If he moved his head at all it would hurt, perhaps terribly, and not stop hurting. He knew this without putting it to the test.

  He gasped. Tried to speak. But there were no words inside the hot arid place that was his throat. A swishing rustle, as if from long heavy skirts sweeping a wooden floor, came out of the darkness and closed about him. And then a small dry hand touched his cheek, to calm him, to bid him be still. An elderly voice made shushing sounds.

  Before he remembered anything from the time before his waking, his being there, he sank away, back into a healing darkness and its blessed warmth.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  He awoke so thirsty he could not swallow and his lips would tear like rice paper if he forced them to part. It was later than before, much later. A great period of sleep had left the back of his eyes feeling bruised.

  This was the same place as before, he assumed with a vague recollection of being half aware of lying in this position, on this same surface, at some other time recently. Though something notable was missing now. But what was it? From inside him, there had been a removal or a raising of something, like a weight. A something that had driven him, wasted him, spent him, left him witless, big-eyed and alight with panic for so long.

  Fear.

  Fear. The choking of it. The flinching and the paralysis. The relentless expectation of its cold jolt. Fear had finally gone from him.

  And the time before he slept came back to him then. Like a gush of darkness through his mouth and eyes and ears. It even felt wet and cold, the terrible rushing of recollection through him, and it filled his nose with the stink of mulch and dead wood.

  Scratched and bleeding, he’d walked to the end of himself. Lungs had burned and legs had cramped, but were now only warm and tired; ghostly outlines of scolds and scars about his tortured body told him a story he did not want repeated.

  Stricken faces were lit up in his mind. Hutch. Phil. Dom. Up in the trees he saw the rags again, the rags and bones. Then he recalled the thin silhouettes of gaunt trees standing before the fire of a red sky. As did something else. It was among the trees, it was of the trees, and it was apart from the trees. Something upright, and watching him before a backdrop of some strange planet ablaze. The electric memory of the smashing of his skull, like a china bowl under a hammer, jolted his whole body. And he was disorientated by the noise of his own shriek in the darkness.

  But he was saved and was now lying in a bed. He had been found, attended to. His heart burst.

  Wrenching his eyes fully open, he felt the sensation of ripping cloth inside his head. A thud of pain behind his eyes followed. Then there was another and another thump, but these were weaker survivable aftershocks, and were smothered deeper inside his skull.

  In this place of his salvation, the air tasted unclean. He thought of used clothes in a charity shop. Thirst burned like salt from a swollen tongue down to his navel. He opened his wooden lips and exposed his gritty mouth to the taste of neglect: moisture in old timber, dust, bed linen so oily it smelled of a hot animal.

  He looked into the pale blank space before his face. Eyes contracting, refocusing, he saw the stitches of a bandage. One layer of material, close enough to his eyelashes to hamper a blink. Faint light seeped through the fabric. He recalled a vague sensation of his head being rolled between quick gentle hands while he slept. Caring hands that nearly made him surface from the fathoms of damaged sleep. It had been a long time ago: weeks? Days?

  Something heavy and thick was covering him from toes to chin. He was warm under its weight despite the stink. Things inside the coverings bit him repeatedly with pinprick teeth. The back of his thighs itched. New constellations of sharp bites spread around his ribs.

  Between his thighs and under his buttocks the bedding was also wet. It alarmed him more than the lice.

  Concentrating hard, he moved his hips, his legs, his feet, then bent his knees, then his elbows. His neck he kept still, and he merely looked up, straight ahead, into the grubby fabric hanging over his eyes while his body reacquainted itself with sensation, with definition and with its possibilities.

  Slowly, he raised his swollen leaden head from the greasy pillow and the scent of dusty feathers rose with him. Tilting his head forward, he squinted under the bandage and down his body.

  And saw rolling hills of ancient eiderdown, patch-worked with colours faded or dark with grime; squares of disparate fabrics reaching to the bumps of his concealed feet. The surface of the coverings were level with the sides of the wooden frame he lay inside. It was like he was inside an old wooden chest or coffin; he had been sunk deep within its inflexible confines and covered over with antique swaddling. It was some kind of bed, but a structure he was immediately afraid there might be a lid for.

  Carefully, he twisted his head to the left and in the greyish light saw a cabinet made from dark timber beside the bed. A dark wooden jug stood beside a wooden cup. Without his consent his throat contracted but barely completed a painful swallow.

  Carefully, he moved on to his left side then shuffled into a foetal position. Propping his upper body on one elbow, he reached for the mug. It was heavy. Full of dusty warmish water. All of which he swallowed, only tasting it afterwards when his mouth became tangy with rust and sparked
steely with minerals. Wild water. Well water.

  A bludgeoning ache behind his eyes rolled in waves and brought his eyelids down fast as storm shutters. His limbs turned to liquid with exhaustion after the simple exertions. Am I that broken? He eased back into the imprint that his long occupancy of the bed had shaped into the bedding. He seemed to sink deeper down than before, the odiferous cavern of unventilated quilt pressing behind his descent.

  Now he was still, the pain inside his skull rang more softly, and the slosh of water in his gut lulled him back to restfulness.

  He was saved. ‘Saved’. He was saved from the terrible forest and what walked through it. He was alive and saved. Saved. Alive. Saved. His face became wet with tears. He sniffed. And then dropped into sleep.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  There are people in the room.

  Again?

  Leaning towards you while you stand in the metal tub, they inspect your white body. They are old. So very old. Every inch of each face is furrowed and wrinkled into clumps of yellowish skin, like under the eyes, which are hard to make out beyond glints within the sunken sockets. But when one of them puts their head through a thin strand of light, you can see a milky-blue cornea surrounded by a discoloured iris.

  One of them could be a woman, but there is so little hair on the patchy skull. Just a few white bits around the sides of the head; the skin traversed by blackish veins. The other could be a man, or maybe even the body of a bird without feathers, shrunken and starved into a shape of sticks.