Adam Nevill - The Ritual

Hutch was swearing aloud from somewhere behind him; he had not followed Luke out through the church arch. ‘What’s wrong?’ Luke called to Phil, then looked at Dom when no reaction was forthcoming.

Dom returned his stare. ‘I don’t fucking know!’

Phil had begun by crying out, like he had been bitten or burnt and was just coming to terms with the pain. But then he had been shouting with more than fear. By the time Luke stumbled over the pews and emerged into the weeds outside the building, Phil was silent and standing still in the rain. It was worse than the shouting.

Luke looked at the back of Phil’s head, blue and pointy with the hood of his coat up. ‘Phillers? What is it?’

Phil was staring into the trees, towards the two rune stones visible from the rough clearing in front of the church. At the sound of Luke’s voice, Phil quickly tucked and then belted himself away. He turned around and stumbled through the undergrowth towards the church like he was wading through seawater in a hurry.

Dom and Luke could not stop themselves exchanging glances, until looking at each other became too awkward. Dom looked over Luke’s shoulder and roared, ‘Hutch! Get your arse out here. Now!’

Hutch said something from inside the walls of the church. It was muffled and too low for any of them to hear. It was like he was preoccupied with something. But what could have been of more concern than the noise Phil had just made?

‘Hutch!’ Luke took long strides back to the church building. He looked through the door and saw Hutch bent over in the gloom. Part of the floor had collapsed again around his hips, and the pews on one side had now dipped into the centre aisle which Hutch must have tried to run across. ‘You all right, mate?’ Luke asked.

Hutch nodded. ‘Which is more than I can say for these poor bastards.’ He had both of his arms stretched towards his feet and was pulling dead branches and leaves from the floor with both hands. He threw the debris onto the collapsing pews.

‘Buddy, something’s up with Phil. You better get out here.’

‘I know. I looked out the door. But he was just standing there. What was it? He see a snake? I told you guys about the adders. You got to stamp your feet before you go into undergrowth.’

‘I don’t think it’s a snake. What the hell are you doing?’

Hutch looked up at him. Only his teeth and the whites of his eyes were clean inside his dirty face against the backdrop of the dark and rotten floor. Hutch looked ill. His face was lined and slack with exhaustion. Whatever he had found seemed to have finished off the last dregs of the optimism and humour that had begun to flicker back to life when they explored the cemetery. ‘Jesus. Jesus Christ. I don’t know what to make of this.’

Luke slid and shuffled his way back inside the building. ‘What? What is it?’

‘I don’t really know if I should touch it.’

Luke leant, gingerly, on the back of the intact pews and peered into the hole Hutch stood inside. Around Hutch’s feet were more of the large wet leaves, thickening to a brownish mulch in the poor light. And there were other things down there too that Hutch had partially cleared of foliage. They looked like more of the dead tree branches, black with damp. ‘What? What am I looking at, Hutch?’

Hutch raised his face. ‘Remains. Human remains.’

‘The crypt?’ Luke hardly heard his own voice and then had to swallow the nerves that put a tremor in his words.

Hutch shook his head. ‘They weren’t interned. No coffins. Just dumped in a pile. They’re all broken. All the skulls are smashed in.’

‘Shit no.’

Hutch bent over and picked something up. Instinctively Luke said, ‘Don’t touch it.’

Hutch raised it to catch the watery light that fell in on them along with a chilling drizzle that was getting heavier. ‘This is from an animal.’ It was a long rib he held up. Then dropped it, slapping his hands together noisily in an attempt to clean them. He bent in again, sorted through the black wet dross around his feet. ‘A mandible. Three vertebrae. Another pile of ribs. Maybe from a horse. Moose. Dunno.’ He bent back into the reliquary. ‘But all mixed up with this.’ The next thing he held up was a human rib cage. An arm soundlessly popped out of it as he raised it from the leaves. The pale brown colour of it was unnerving; it looked newer than the animal bones. ‘And this.’ He next raised a human skull, the jaw long gone, the upper row of teeth blackened, half of the small cranium punched through. He dropped it and aggressively wiped his hands against his trousers.

‘Human remains and animal remains mixed in together. Bloody weird. They’re not all old either. I mean, they’ve all been here ages, but some have been here longer than others.’ He was talking to himself now, oblivious to Luke’s tense presence, as if by speaking out loud he would arrive at a satisfactory explanation for what felt so wrong. They were both now shivering inside their wet-weather gear; shivering from more than just the effects of the cold air and the rain.

Luke could not swallow. And what shocked him more than anything he had experienced since they had become lost, was the evidence in this place that the boundary between men and beasts had been scored out.

‘Children’s bones are in here.’

‘Oh, Christ no, Hutch.’

Hutch sighed,

They all squatted down, around Phil, staring at him. The rain dropped steadily from a darkening sky and made a constant pattering against their coats and packs. Phil looked unhealthily pale and shivered. He’d wrapped his hands under his arms, clutched himself. He glanced over a shoulder. ‘It’s here. It followed us.’

Hutch and Luke looked at each other, then back at Phil. Luke blew two deep lungfuls of smoke into the wet air. ‘What did?’

Dom’s eyes were too wide in his stained and scabbing face. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

Phil swallowed. ‘I saw …’

Hutch groaned and eased himself down and on to his knees. ‘Buddy, buddy, take it easy. Just take it nice and easy. Tell us exactly what you saw.’

‘I went for a piss. And I was looking at the ground so I didn’t hit my feet. But I started to feel weird. You know, like someone was standing next to me. Like they’d come up to me. Was right next to me. And when I looked up … I thought it was a tree or something. Out there. It never moved, but it didn’t look right. I stared at it and … then it moved.’

Luke squinted through the smoke around his face. ‘Eh?’ The other two turned their faces towards the overgrown cemetery.

‘In there.’ Phil pointed at a copse of trees crowding over the first rune stone they had passed. ‘By those trees. At the edge. Something moved out from between them and kind of went backwards really quickly and then it was gone. Never made a sound. It was so fast.’

‘An animal?’ Hutch asked.

Phil shook his head. ‘I thought it was a dead tree. One of those hit by lightning. But then … I don’t know … I thought it was something on two legs. Standing up. Really tall. It’s dark in all that scrub. But something was kind of camouflaged in there, because it was standing really still.’

‘Fucking stop it,’ Dom said. ‘It’s not funny. Not here.’

‘It’s no joke, Dom! I saw something. It was in my dream last night. In that house. Coming down the stairs.’

‘Enough,’ Dom barked. ‘I’m doing my best to forget last night. And whatever the fuck was in that tree yesterday.’

Luke looked out at the forest. Then glanced at Hutch, who looked pale under the filth and all jittery around his big eyes.

‘You don’t believe me?’ Phil said.

Dom’s face was so tense his lips thinned to nothing and his teeth were showing. ‘No we bloody don’t! So stop trying to freak us out!’