Adam Nevill - The Ritual

One beam of torchlight dropped to the area from which the figure emerged. A small wooden casket the size of an infant’s cradle revealed itself in the dusty yellow underwater light. A coffin possibly, built from wood and dark with age, or painted black.

The other torch — Luke’s — lit up the horns that rose from above two dark eye sockets. Brownish bone, long and thick.

Two thin rear legs, ending in hooves, jutted out from the body then bent at the bony knee joints. The hooves looked as if they were poised upon the sides of the casket in readiness of the horned thing rising out of its box.

Black lips were pulled back above long yellow teeth; a grimace to last for all time beneath nostrils that still appeared curiously wet. Up and down the chest, small pink teats parted the fur. This was the most unpleasant thing of all, worse than the ivory mouth which Luke imagined was about to open and then snap shut with a clacking sound.

The thin black forelegs, or arms, were raised to shoulder height and bent at the elbow. Blackened hands were upturned, the palms facing the ceiling, as if it were commanding all before it to rise, or as if the figure had once been holding objects that were now long gone.

Luke could not speak. Did not know how to react or what to think. He just existed before it and within the terrible presence that filled the cramped space of the attic.

Hutch only spoke after he began picking out the pale objects on the floor with his torch beam. ‘Bones.’

Looking down, Luke saw the dead things, scattered about the wooden casket, as if dropped after the flesh had been eaten from their tiny bones. Rabbits perhaps, and large birds with broken wings and papery skulls. Some of them were still covered with a hairless grey parchment of skin.

‘Over there.’ Hutch shone his torch at the scratch marks on the timber roof. Cut deep into the wood were childlike symbols and circles, like on the rune stones they had seen in Gammelstad. The inscriptions appeared randomly, at different heights on some beams, in long lines like Chinese script.

‘What …’ Luke could not finish the sentence. Questions seemed foolish. How would any of them know what this meant or why it was here?

Hutch walked forward. Luke flinched at every step his friend made, as if he were provoking something terrible and sudden to happen just by moving. Things crunched under Hutch’s feet. Holding his torch higher, Hutch then cast light onto the torso and the face of the upright thing in the box. ‘If it moved, my heart would stop.’

‘Goat?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Quite the opposite.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Who would? It was some kind of temple. Effigy and sacrifice. I reckon it’s supposed to be the Goat of Mendes.’

‘The what?’

‘This thing is stuffed. At the back here’ — Hutch leaned inwards and Luke held his breath — ‘the mice have had a go.’

Luke shook his head. ‘What do we do?’

‘Madness.’ Hutch was talking to himself. ‘Just imagine the craziness of the fuckers.’

Luke wasn’t sure what Hutch meant.

‘The little hands are human. Mummified. Stitched on.’ Hutch turned to Luke. In the illumination from Luke’s torch Hutch’s eyes shone. ‘Just as mad as hatters. Crosses on the walls downstairs and a bloody goat in the loft. A dead man’s hands sown on. Mixing metaphors. Lunacy. Swedish lunacy. It’s the darkness and the long nights. Send anyone mad.’

Luke turned. ‘Let’s go down.’

‘Phil was right. It is a bed.’

‘You’re messing with me.’

Hutch shook his head. ‘I’ve seen them in the housing museum at Skansen. The first time I came over. And in Norway. They used to build these little wooden box beds into the rooms, then fill them with hay. You put a lid on and it becomes a bench during the day. The people must have been tiny back then.’

‘Who’d want to lie in that?’

‘This guy.’ Hutch grinned and shone his torch right into the goat’s leering face.

‘H!’ It was Dom calling out from the foot of the stairs. ‘H!’

Hutch nodded at the staircase. ‘Come on. Let’s split.’

Luke resisted the temptation to take the stairs to the ground floor in two bounds.

Behind him, the flash of Hutch’s camera lit up his retreat.

‘You couldn’t make this up,’ Dom said; his words were slurred after drinking the lion’s share of the Jack Daniel’s. Supped from their plastic mugs after they’d eaten half of the remaining food: the last four tins of sausage and beans, preceded by a first course of powdered chicken soup with noodles. Two chocolate and oat cereal bars each completed the meal. But it wasn’t enough. Despite gulping at the soup and then stuffing the steaming beans into their mouths, even licking the bowls clean, which they had never done before, they remained hungry. This had been the most demanding day so far, even though a shorter distance had been covered than on the previous day.

Phil’s feet were bare and glistening with antiseptic. Dom’s swollen knee was raised and supported under Hutch’s rucksack. All of their thighs were stiff with slowly pumping aches and their lungs were flat with exhaustion. A coma of tiredness had swept through all of them the minute their sleeping bags were unrolled. Luke had never felt so beaten. Had not known it was possible to become so heavy in body and so listless. He could take about one more day of this. Phil and Dom looked like this had been their last.

Enough food for one more day outdoors remained. And only a tea-coloured trickle was left in the small whiskey bottle Dom had lugged around since leaving Gällivare. It was to have been a treat, opened beside some lake of an astonishing Nordic blue, around an open fire, with the sky turning pink as the darkness of night approached. That had been the plan.

Luke watched Hutch push the last leg of the stool through the door of the iron stove they were huddled around. A shower of sparks erupted inside as he rooted the ancient wooden spoke around the hearth. They coughed in the acrid smoke that belched out. The chimney was almost totally closed. Smouldering remnants of the seat formed the base to the red ashes inside the little oven that only heated part of the ground floor, before the draughts from the door and between the floorboards took over with a night chill, a tang of damp earth, and the ferment of rotten wood.

Phil and Dom had smashed the stool to firewood earlier, against Luke’s wishes. Aren’t we in enough trouble? And he’d been unable to watch Hutch start the fire using four of the crucifixes as tinder. By not watching Hutch snap and twist them into small bundles, he quietly hoped he was exempt from the further misfortune this act of desecration might evoke.

Hutch frowned at Dom, then leaned back against his friend’s knees. ‘Go easy on the sauce Domja. It’s got to go four ways. That’s your last tot. I’ve barely had a mouthful.’

Phil smiled to himself. ‘We should save one last swig for when we leave the forest.’

‘I’d see it off tonight. It’s the worst thing you can drink if you’re wet and cold.’ Hutch seemed to stop himself from saying anything further, as if what he had suggested might befall them the following day.

Sitting and leaning forward on top of their unrolled sleeping bags, which in turn were placed on their foam mats on the filthy floor of the hovel, they consumed the hot red air that belched from the tiny door. Even when they got too close and it burned their faces and seared their heavy eyes, they welcomed it. It was the first heat they had felt in two whole days.

Above the stove, hung from a tent’s guy rope fixed between four of the nails that had once held animal skulls in place, sodden clothes gradually steamed and smoked dry in the darkness: four bedraggled fleeces and four pairs of grimy trousers. Their waterproof coats were hanging behind them on the nails of the far wall. Everything else gone damp inside their packs, was haphazardly suspended from other nails about the room. Dom had taken all of the skulls and crucifixes down. Something else that made Luke uneasy. Though he wasn’t sure why.