Adam Nevill - The Ritual

Loki called Surtr over. She padded across the grass to them. When she came closer Luke could see the white, red and black paint on her face had been perfected into a grin containing as much spite and cruelty as she had been able to fashion into her own features. Even without make-up, she didn’t need much help looking hateful. Is this how she feels inside? he wondered hopelessly, and recalled what he had seen in her eyes when she attacked him; her closeness to him made him shrink inside.

What was wrong with them? All of them?

His stomach fell away at this reminder of their utter unfamiliarity to him; it was profound.

He hated them.

His ankles were lashed to the wooden cross, which was hard and splintery and untreated and felt horrid against his calves and heels. Surtr sat on his chest, facing him, pinned his arms under her buttocks; Loki pressed a huge boot against his throat. And they were swift, they were methodical. They were killers. Killers : the word repeated itself once inside Luke’s mind and it made his whole body go cold.

And then a reel of all they were taking from him flashed up: he saw his mother’s smiling face, his little dog, Monty, with his white head cocked to one side just before a walk, his sister, his father, pretty Charlotte in the beer garden, wearing her knee boots, her overbite too sexy to prevent him making a pass, his CD collection, the Billy Bookcase from IKEA with all of his paperbacks inside, stacked double, real ale in the Fitzroy Tavern … He stopped the film with one tremendous sob. Screwed his eyes shut. Then growled in defiance.

Once his ankles were fastened tightly to the rough wooden plank with the washing line, he could not move his feet or lower legs at all.

He could barely breathe with Surtr’s weight upon his diaphragm either; the metal in her bare genitals was cold against his stomach. ‘Your band stinks!’ he shouted, when he realized that he would not be able to punch and thrash with his arms.

Surtr had pushed the heels of her little fat feet into his armpits, so when Loki reached behind Surtr’s lower back and finally cut the nylon cord from Luke’s wrists, it was easy for Fenris and Loki to take a wrist each and pull his arms apart and to drag the stinking smock over his head. Surtr removed her crushing weight from his chest and helped the boys bag him with the stinking gown; and they hooded him in the musty blood of the poor wretches who had died wrapped in that terrible cloth before him.

Loki and Fenris pulled each of his arms through the tight arm holes of the dress; stretched his arms wide apart and lifted his body onto the crucifix, with his hands pulled out to the ends of the cross beam. And when it came to tie his wrists off, the girl settled her considerable body weight through her knees, hard into his shoulders, which immediately flashed with pain at the point just prior to dislocation. Weak and dizzy and nauseous; he had no choice but to remain still for them.

He wanted to cry and beg and plead right then, but he screamed to control the pain and frustration instead.

Loki wrapped one of his wrists in rope. Fenris tied off the other wrist. Tight thin rope that burned and cut into his flesh, pinned him to that cross in the wet grass beneath a sky from which the last light was draining fast.

When Surtr clumsily removed her big knees off his shoulders, Luke understood there would be no last struggle; no final petulant fight to give them something to remember him by.

Fenris grinned, Loki frowned, and then they were straining with all their might and strength under the weight of the crucifix’s long beam with Luke tied fast upon it. He shook and he struggled against the rough wood as he was raised from the ground. His little stinking white gown dropped down at the front towards his face, and his cock and balls felt horribly exposed to the night air. He felt like a baby, infantilized. There would be no dignity at the end. He hated them with such a black intensity, he could only hope that he might suffer a stroke and deny them his final screams, his abject terror at the very end.

Then he was upside down. Down his body, he looked at where he was skirted in the blood-ruined linen. Saw the black sky beyond his grimy toes. Dropped his head back to the wood. Looked at the grass so close to his face. Studded boots gathered near his eyes. The pressure of blood rushing downwards came into his head quickly. And upon his head they jammed that scratchy spiky crown of flowers, by shoving it upwards. They martyred him with that halo of dead petals.

And then they all began shrieking. They sang out their incomprehensible screechy lyrics. They drank from bone horns. They threw their thin arms at the sky he could see below the soles of his feet.

‘You die on the cross of the false messiah, Luke! It is so exciting, you fucking Nazarene!’ Fenris shrieked into his face.

Luke’s face screwed up involuntarily. He thought he might break down. Then stopped himself. Then tried to get off. Stupidly, he just tried to get off the big upside-down crucifix. Then he sobbed. Then he shouted. Then lost his mind; saw it go, like a watery thing puffing into vapour, before there was just black and red colours and his own screams inside him. Good, because he did not want his mind. Did not want reason, or lucidity, or anything that would enable him to fully comprehend what soon would be coming for him from out of those dark trees, as he hung upside down upon that black cross.

‘Your band fucking sucks!’ he screamed at them again. And laughed like a maniac. ‘You talentless fuckwits!’ Some of the alcohol ran down from his gullet and into his mouth, stinging like battery acid. He spat it out, spat it at them.

The world of upside-down whirled about him; the fire dropped into the sky; the forever of trees clung to the soil with their roots to prevent themselves falling into that eternal canopy of cloudy darkness. He felt as if he were hanging over some great ocean, and could see no land in any direction, and was about to be dropped. If they cut him loose now he knew he would fall straight down and into the sky.

Fenris tried to out-scream him; he was getting to Fenris again. He knew it; skinny weasel-boy Fenris had unfinished business with him and didn’t like any defiance from his victims.

‘Hey Surtr,’ he called out to the excitable figure, thumping herself around the fire with her face all painted like that. ‘I’ll be dead, but you’ll still be fat and ugly. You look like a frog, you fat fuck! Your cunt is the worst thing I have ever smelled!’ he screamed his throat raw.

And then Loki was restraining Fenris, who looked like a Bonobo monkey with a white face, driven mad by some experiment.

Luke screamed into the sky, the earth, the endless trees. He wanted to be mad and screaming when it came, low down and fast and eager. He called out to it. ‘Come on you stinking fuck! Come on!’ He would bite its face with the last of his life.

Soon he was fading, he was feeling faint, his head was swollen and hot and prickly.

Loki was calling to the old woman. He was angry with her. She seemed unconcerned, and sat silently on her little chair. Loki released Fenris, who stomped across to the porch and pointed at the tiny woman in her little chair. He screamed at her too. Clenched his hard white fists and shook them at her. Loki implored her. Then shouted at Fenris, who turned on him. There was some shoving between them. Then Surtr plodded across to the confrontation and screamed at Fenris.

The old woman stood up, and left the porch. She went back inside the house. Closed the door. Left them all outside arguing, with Luke upside down upon the cross.

Eventually their voices petered out. Loki muttered something to Surtr, who walked solemnly to the CD player and killed the music. Not even the fire seemed so fierce now. They were all just outside, getting cold in the damp and dark air. And the woods remained silent too. Like the old woman. Silent and old and indifferent.