Adam Nevill - The Ritual

And over he had gone against his will. Into the blinding stink, and the sound of his own cries were obscured by the knocking. Speeding up. Drumming with no rhythm on the scarred black wood. He still seemed to hear the echoes of it now, which is why he could not stop his hands from shaking.

Into the worn circular slot, in the front of the little box, he’d rested his throat. And up, up, up went the thin black forelegs. Up towards the ceiling together. And paused for half a second before they came back down. So fast.

And then Luke had been beside him, shaking him, waking him.

‘Look! Through there. And there. Two of them!’ Luke’s voice broke his reverie. Hutch looked up and squinted at where Luke crouched down, further along the trail, pointing off into the trees.

Hutch’s stomach contracted.

They had been travelling for two hours westward on the increasingly overgrown track when Luke noticed the two buildings engulfed by the undergrowth.

When no one answered him, he turned his head and looked at the other three coming up the narrow trail, their elbows out, fending back the stiff wet branches that hung from the enclosing treeline and draped belligerently across most of the open space. Dom and Phil were both limping. Hutch was hanging back to help Dom over the fallen logs that had begun to present themselves with an alarming frequency beyond the place they had joined the trail the night before.

Luke walked point all morning. It was better to go first; you would be the one to see the way out and by walking out front, all the time yearning for the trees to clear and for a vista of escape to present itself, you were better motivated to keep going.

‘Look!’ Luke called louder this time to be heard over the din of rain scattering through the canopy of leaves above them. He pointed in the direction of the dark sides of two indistinct buildings.

The wooden planks of the visible walls bulged with damp and were black up to the dim windows; though it was hard to tell if they were shuttered or not. A suggestion of a stone chimney jutted from the end of one building before becoming obscured by a mesh of foliage.

‘What’s that, Chief?’ Hutch called back. ‘A nice little café?’

‘Or some big bastard wolverine,’ Dom added.

Luke waited for the others to draw level with him. ‘Another two houses.’

Hutch was breathing hard from supporting Dom’s weight over the last fallen log. He looked at where Luke was pointing.

Between their position and the two buildings, grew a thick bed of nettles with black thorny stems. Above the nettles the bare branches of dwarf birches and willows formed a twenty-metre portcullis of criss-crossing sticks, choking the spaces between the larger trees. It was impenetrable.

‘Just keep moving,’ Dom said. ‘Don’t know what’s inside them.’

Luke nodded. ‘I genuinely hate to think. Wonder why they’re here.’

Hutch rested a hand on Luke’s shoulder. ‘Bum a fag off you?’

‘Sure.’ Luke reached for the side pocket on his waterproof trousers.

Hutch put the cigarette between his lips. ‘Must be an abandoned settlement.’

‘Where more of them mad fuckers lived,’ Dom said.

‘No one’s been here for a while.’ Hutch looked down at his feet. ‘This track must have joined them up with the other place. See this’ — he prodded his foot under a blanket of bracken and lifted it — ‘ruts from a cart wheel under there. You can still see them at the sides of the track.’

Luke rose back to his full height. A knee joint cracked. He visualized the unwelcoming interior of the two buildings; wet, lightless, spoiled with rot and animal spore. He imagined the despair they would feel in the comfortless air, in the desolate age of the place.

‘How’s it looking ahead?’ Hutch asked, breaking Luke’s absorption that made his thoughts sluggish.

‘More of the same,’ he said.

Hutch moaned and rubbed his hands over his face. ‘We’re not making great progress guys.’

‘Piss off,’ Dom said. Bent double, he pushed at the sides of his injured knee with both filthy hands. Raising the foot off the ground like a lame horse, he grimaced. Phil said nothing, but stood and stared in the direction of the abandoned buildings.

Luke took a deep breath and then exhaled. ‘Why don’t you guys take a breather. I’ll scoot ahead and see what’s what further down. It might open up.’

‘And try and clear some of this shit off the path before I get down there. On me hands and knees at this rate,’ Dom said.

Luke smiled. ‘With what, a camping spoon?’

Hutch cackled. ‘Make sure you keep the edges neat.’

Luke moved ahead, more quickly than he had walked all morning. The slow pace set by Dom was reviving his backache and his impatience was fast turning to irritation and a total flattening of his spirits. At times it seemed as if the path had actually come to an end. When he met a blockage now, of which there were many, at least he could turn about and just force his way through backwards, with his arms held across his face to protect his eyes against the whipping branches that scored his cheeks and forehead. It was all difficult ground, and one of his ears was bleeding, but he didn’t have to keep stopping while Hutch held the branches up for Dom and Phil to shuffle through; nor was he subjected to Dom’s constant moaning.

Phil still hadn’t said much. He was either mute from the pain in his blistered heels, or so dead on his feet he couldn’t think straight enough to form a sentence. Or he was still in shock from the night before. Maybe all three.

Twenty minutes out of earshot of the others and the path stopped moving in a straight line; it began twisting about the ancient trunks, sometimes rising and sometimes falling away.

It became exhausting and hard on the joints to haul himself up a tangled incline, festooned with slippery tree roots, to then suddenly descend over uneven ground on the other side. A tree seemed to have fallen about every twenty feet.

He couldn’t believe how much his chest hurt. He thought he was fit. Despite the smoking he worked out three times a week and ran at the weekend, but it was no preparation for this kind of exertion. He tried not to imagine how Dom and Phil felt.

They were all pathetic; getting lost like a bunch of amateurs. The kind of idiots who attempted to climb a mountain without proper training or the right gear; or those wankers who tried crossings of treacherous water and ended up diverting the ocean’s shipping in a search and rescue. People who were lauded as heroes of survival upon rescue. Why? They were nuisances. He could not believe they were fast becoming one and the same.

He put his head down and smashed through the bracken. Gritted his teeth and forced through the pain barrier in his chest and thighs. Refused to be defeated. Enough now. Some sky; that’s what he wanted. A bit of sky and some open ground, soft with leaves, so they could weave effortlessly through the trees.

A branch dug into the loose cloth under his arm and propelled him backwards and onto his backside. He snatched at the branch and tried to snap it, but the supple strength of the wood resisted and made his arms feel like water.

He remained seated, and panted to get his breath back. Hutch insisted they were beginning to angle south west, ‘more or less’. But Luke had instinctively felt himself being led back north west on this trail, and no nearer to the edge of the forest than they were the previous night when they made camp.

He could not stand much more of the suffocating wet wood, forcing him into a crouch, knocking him about, tearing his skin. His throat burned. Dried sweat was producing salt on his skin and chafing the inside of his thighs and beneath his belt all the way around his waist. He wanted to tear his clothes off.