Adam Nevill - The Ritual

Thick with pain, the muscles in his legs began to cramp. They had to get out of the heavy stuff. If the undergrowth didn’t clear very soon, he would walk back and find the others. Then he would retrace their steps back to where they had come onto the trail the day before. Alone if necessary. And he’d go for help. Whether Hutch agreed or not, his instincts were telling him they were approaching that time . The time for drastic action. Of one of them going for help.

He cursed Hutch’s decisions again, his ridiculous baseless optimism. ‘Jesus Hutch! What were you thinking?’ Grinding his teeth, he ran through everything Hutch had said that led them into this mess. His lips began to move and he said things about his best friend he knew would make him cold with guilt and warm with shame later.

Luke closed his eyes. Tried to calm down, to think straight. Slowly, the intense heat of the sudden rage drained away and left him shivering.

It was so dark where he sat in the wet verdure. Little light was descending to the forest floor, but the rain found its way down. The entire wood was sodden. He felt dizzy and took an energy bar from his coat pocket. His hollow stomach ached. Did they even have enough food remaining for one proper meal?

He began to imagine what would happen if he never moved from this spot. Would his body ever be found, concealed beneath these bushes and weeds and nettles? Or would his bones be picked clean by teeming insects and foraging rodents? A too clear image of the remnants of his dirty camping clothes, a faded rucksack and his browned bones grinning from the dark leaves, propelled him into a squat. His lower back ached from where the damp seeped up through the seat of his trousers. The black soil sucked the warmth out of a body.

Back on his feet, he pushed on, driven by the desperate hope that somehow, miraculously, the end of the trees would present itself at any moment. But when he had long passed out of shouting distance with the others, he began to worry he had left the path and was crashing off through the undergrowth in entirely new directions, being led by the forest into the places the thickets were more sparse. At times he would stop and reassure himself that he was following the faint outline of the manmade track. Because if he wasn’t he would never find the others again. There were no landmarks here; it was all the same and then more of the same, stretching into forever.

Thirst burned out of his stomach, up and into his dry mouth; the last of his water had gone over an hour ago. Save sucking rainwater off the leaves from where it dripped all around them, they would need to find running water before the day was out. He doubted any of the others were carrying anything but empty canteens either.

After thirty minutes alone, he blundered into a granite plinth. A standing stone concealed by ivy.

It was the silence Hutch gradually became aware of, though he decided against sharing the observation with the other two, who hobbled beside and behind him on the rapidly narrowing trail. About him, he imagined the forest holding its breath, in anticipation.

Since they had moved away from the derelict buildings, the birds had stopped their sporadic chatter. There was no breeze. Beyond the scuffling of their feet, the almost inaudible patter of rain, and the whipping of leaves against waterproof fabric, the forest had fallen completely silent around them.

It was a stillness that provoked a reaction, a response. He found himself looking with uneasy eyes into the thickets on either side of the diminishing trail. And had they just changed direction again? He wasn’t sure. In places, the trail now seemed to have disintegrated into deceptive-looking shadowy hollows. Areas that promised easier passage through the choking obstacles pushing them to either side of the faint trail; a vague path he often had to stare at hard to even recognize amongst the tangles of briars and pale green ferns.

The light had dropped; the canopy was so thick here. Again. He worried about Luke becoming lost. Stopped and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Was suddenly furious at himself for letting Luke just tear off on his own. ‘Stop.’

‘Eh?’ Dom asked, between his heavy breaths.

Phil stopped; his breath wheezed in and out of his bulk. Hutch heard him suck hard on his inhaler.

‘What is it?’ Dom whispered.

Hutch held up his compass, angled it away from Dom’s wet red face. North west . He wanted to scream. They were shuffling off course again. They were slanting up and back into the forest. Going deeper, not down and outwards. They had been turned around too incrementally for it to feel like a definite change of direction. But when? How had that happened? He would have noticed. Were he not so encumbered with Dom’s heaving uncoordinated bulk against his left side, he might have been more alert.

‘No good.’ He shook his head.

‘What isn’t?’

‘This direction.’ He let go of Dom and slapped his hands against his hips. ‘Shit.’

At first Luke thought it a natural outcrop of rock. They had seen plenty of boulders and even cliff faces on the first day of the hike, which suddenly reared up from the green earth. But once he’d pulled himself around the stone and torn some of the wet ivy from an inclined side, he saw the worn runes. They covered one complete side of the rock, and were ringed by an oval border, thick with petrified lichen.

He turned about, lowering and raising himself on his ankles to peer through the surrounding thicket that had overrun the rock. Between the mesh of dead wood and the thigh-high weeds that coated it, he saw another of the standing stones about twelve feet away from where he was crouching, and then another beyond it.

Breaking away from the face of the stone and lowering himself even further, he rediscovered the path that wound about the three stones but was now impossible to walk upright upon.

He tried to move forward, but his pack became immediately stuck in a branch and held him fast. Swearing through his clenched teeth, he reversed his body. Then removed his pack, groaning when the hot weight of it fell behind him, into the leaf mulch and dirt.

Against the ground, he crawled forward along a natural tunnel that had formed over the surface of the trail. Was it the trail? Yes. He stretched out an arm and followed the cartwheel rut with his fingertips. Small animals must have worn the tunnel through with their scurrying. Face down, he squirmed about and felt the cold damp soil embrace his chest and stomach.

He would move as far as he was able, to see if the foliage cleared from the path ahead. But this was the very last effort he would make in this direction. They’d already been travelling for four hours since sunrise and were no closer to getting out. Once he’d ascertained he had reached the end of the stretch of the track beside the standing stones, he would go back and tell the others it was time for the last resort. His plan. His idea. They could have been four hours into it by now. And it would take the very last of them to get out before nightfall, if they could even find the route they had come through the day before.

After twenty feet on his stomach the steely light suddenly brightened and the range of his visibility increased. He had reached the end of the natural tunnel, and could even look up above ground level.

He pushed his wet and bedraggled body on to its feet and broke through the lighter saplings about the exit. Lifting his legs high, to clear the thorns and nettles, he took a step forward into an area where the forest cleared of the thicker trees and presented an airier space of thigh-deep undergrowth and dwarf birch, with little growing higher.