Adam Nevill - The Ritual

Though the woods were not completely vacant. Luke’s eyes bulged purple from the terrible pressure inside his head, and his vision darkened like the last of his sight was suddenly going out. But he saw their faces; the pale faces and pinkish eyes catching the flash of the fire as the little white people watched him. Watched him and then withdrew.

The moon is full and the forest outside his room has changed. It is larger than ever before; it covers the entire land to the cold seas on every shore. It is luminous. It is majestic. It is epochal. It is timeless. Before it, he feels smaller than he has ever felt.

The voices return from the space above him; whisperings he can understand.

‘Look. Look,’ they cry out to him. ‘Look down.’

On the grass beneath the great moon-filled sky, he sees a figure dressed in white, crowned with flowers and propped upright in a cart full of bloodied fowl. The passenger is thrown about in its seat like a doll, or maybe it struggles.

Behind the cart, a ragged procession follows; in the places where the silvery light turns back the darkness, he sees the hunched, the loping, and the skipping thin figures in rags older than the crusades. They prance and caper alongside the cart, out to a place so old even the chorus in the attic tell him they have forgotten its true age. Perhaps this is the last of all the old places.

When the time comes will he call with them into the sky? they ask. Will he say the old names with them? When he hears the name he is to speak with them, he cannot breathe.

And from that cart, the figure in the white robe, wearing a crown of dead spring flowers upon its head, is taken down. The figure that is so suddenly him , and now he is amongst the stones. And upon the largest stones around him, his dead friends grimace silently in death. Naked and devoured down to their blood-blackened bones, they are tied to stones carved with forgotten poems. And upon a stone he too is mounted, between his friends, and what was once given will be given again.

From the trees he is watched by small, indistinct figures. They talk and make sounds that remind him of laughter. Their whispering voices fill his eyes and ears like flies.

He sees another place. And in it he can smell tallow and smoke and the reek of soiled straw. He is inside a dark barn, or a simple church; a plain structure of old timber that flickers with the reddish light of a fire.

In here, somewhere in the darkness, a woman groans in the agonies of childbirth. And he cannot prevent his legs from rushing across to where she lies even though his mind is screaming at him to run away.

Her cries are soon accompanied by the sound of newborn livestock. And he is standing amongst a group of small figures, about the shadowy straw-filled manger. And here is a thing, wet and mewling, that he cannot quite see, both of man and of another place, drawn out by its rear hooves from between pale lifeless thighs. It is brought out of the steaming, devastated womb of the dead mother and is clutched by the long fingers of those who witness a miracle.

Luke comes out of the dream with a cry. And looks about the dark room to try and see the faces of the people who are muttering at him so quickly. But the voices fade, retreat above him, back into the attic.

He stands again before the glowing white window of his little room, shaking from the dream of the birthing, and he looks down at the forest bathed in phosphorescent light. At the edge of the trees, small white figures, lightly haired and thin, gather and frolic. He blinks and they are gone too.

He turns around and the old woman comes towards him. Her tiny feet are no longer loud because they are bound in cloth. She offers him a knife. The long thin black one he has seen before.

The point of the blade seems to open a place inside himself that will not allow him to ever feel anything again but rage, or to remember anything but those moments of choking hatred, and to only think instinctively as the creatures of the forest think in order to prolong their lives and to evade the skilful predators.

The chorus above knock their little feet upon the floor of the attic. They bang the old timbers for blood.

He looks down at the old woman, but she is no longer before him in the room. The house cracks about him like an old hand closing its fingers; he stands alone amongst the splinters and the dust, holding the knife.

When the sun broke through the thin cloud, Luke awoke.

Again.

And sat up, gasping. But this time the air was colder and sharper around his naked body and he knew that this time he was really awake.

Luke adjusted his position upon the bed to ease the aches in his ankles. He rubbed at his sore wrists. Widened his feet. The dreams let go of him.

His breath caught in his throat.

He was untied.

Startled mute and perfectly still by this realization, he stared at how the eiderdown had been turned down to the foot of the bed. Between his knees on the tatty sheepskins was a red Swiss Army knife; the main blade folded out. It was his knife.

Draped over the side of the bed was the blood-mired gown and the little crown of flowers.

Naked, Luke squatted upon the floor of his room and watched the door. It was early. Outside his window the sun was bright and steely where it found fissures in the cloud cover. The rain had stopped.

He stilled the rushing of his thoughts; the chattery clutter that was eroding his advantage before he realized he had one. He tried instead to understand his new position in a world that was entirely a place of confusion, of terror, of the impossible and his bafflement before it.

The old woman; she came to him in a dream while he slept in the wretched bed, bound like a captive, like a sacrifice. But now he was free and within his hand was a knife. So she had really come in the night and cut his restraints and left him a weapon?

He gaped, he grinned.

They were so angry with the old lady last night, when she refused to call that thing out there, out from amongst the black trees. She disobeyed Loki; she refused to bring the demon, the God, to take him as he hung upon the cross. And now she wanted him to run, or to get rid of the youths from her home; he wasn’t sure which, but he had good cause to do both.

The impossible idea of him living again, for more than just a few hours, came back to him. It took his breath away, even his balance, and he had to steady himself by putting one hand against the dirty floorboards.

The awareness of his new circumstances shivered through him; it was a white electricity coursing under his skin. It made his eyelids jump and the nerves spark inside his muscles. He was as light as helium, as fast and jittery as a hare.

He could not remember ever feeling the same way before. There seemed to be no limit now to where his mind could reach or to where his limbs could carry him. He was strength. He was unbound.

And unsure he had ever been fully awake before right now, right here; naked and dirty and scarred and so reduced in this moment-by-moment existence. And he understood that he had given up long before this time. Had been drifting. Baffled. Inactive. Futile. His old self was flimsy, insubstantial. His old world grey. There had been hesitation at critical moments; so much self-doubt. He had languished, demoralized, for so long, forever. He understood this. The realizations came all at once and very quickly. His whole life until this moment was preposterous; and himself in that life absurd.

But now he wanted to live.

If he survived the next few minutes, every moment of his life would sing. Each word spoken would have meaning, every meal eaten and drink taken would be a gift: his salvation would be the living of life.