Adam Nevill - The Ritual

‘Do you think it’s connected to here?’ Luke looked at the floor as he asked all of them the question.

‘I’m trying not to connect the two,’ Phil said. ‘Especially as we have to spend the night in one of the places under consideration. ’

As they all laughed at this, Luke suddenly felt his body suffuse with a warmth of good feeling for his friends. Maybe even love. He winced at his vow to never see Phil again, and at his outburst at Dom. It was just the situation. It had made them all emotional, irrational.

‘What do you think?’ Dom asked.

Luke looked up at him, his eyes narrowed to meet what he felt was a sarcastic challenge.

Dom smiled. ‘No messing. What do you really think?’

Luke shrugged and raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t know. I mean, I cannot think of any reasonable explanation as to how an animal, completely eviscerated, because that’s what it was …’ The three faces around him grew grim, so he altered the tone of his voice and made it sound more confidential and lighter, ‘Got to be hanging from a tree. So high up. I don’t know anything about this area, or the wilderness of Sweden, other than what I’ve read online, or in the travel guide. H is the expert there.’

Hutch sighed. ‘I wouldn’t say expert.’

Dom rubbed his hands up and down Hutch’s head from both sides. ‘Neither would I. Yorkshire bastard.’

‘But,’ Luke said. ‘Don’t you have the feeling …’

‘What?’ Dom asked.

‘That it’s all just wrong.’

Phil laughed. ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

‘Just imagine you weren’t lost and were just walking through this wood, on a day trip.’

Dom burped. ‘A nice, but cruel idea at this point in time.’

‘It would strike you as wrong. It would make you uneasy. Don’t you think?’ Luke noticed Hutch was watching him intently as he spoke, but couldn’t read his expression. ‘The actual environment. The trees. The darkness. It’s not like any forest I’ve ever been inside, and I’ve been in a few. I’ve been camping with H in Wales, in Scotland and Norway. And nothing has ever felt like this. The other forest we saw the first day up here wasn’t the same either. Wasn’t so … rotten. And lightless.’

The others all watched him in silence.

‘Apparently we’re all programmed at a primal level, in the reptilian brain, to fear the woods. But it’s more than that. I’ve felt, since we entered this forest, that this fear isn’t unjustified. ’ Luke took a final long pull on his cigarette and then threw the butt through the tiny door of the stove.

‘Shot,’ Hutch said.

‘Shot,’ Dom murmured.

‘Shot,’ Phil said through a yawn.

Luke leaned back onto the palms of his hands and his head was immediately swathed in the colder air that pooled beyond their tight circle about the stove. He looked up at the ceiling. ‘And now this. The forest made these people crazy. Because I don’t think people are supposed to come here.’

‘And usually they don’t,’ Dom murmured, his eyes closed. ‘That’s why there’s no paths, aye Yorkshire?’

Hutch sighed and rubbed at his filthy face. ‘I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it before. It just suddenly changed. It wasn’t dense enough at first to ward you off. But then it just kind of swallowed us and there was no going back the way we came in.’ He yawned. ‘And I really don’t want to be here any more.’

‘That’s good to know. Thanks for sharing.’ Dom pushed Hutch off his legs and stretched his body out lengthways, in readiness for sleep.

‘The blasted heath,’ Luke said, smiling. ‘The cursed wood.’

Phil stood up. ‘I need a piss.’ He stumbled away, his feet booming on the floor. He disappeared into the annex where the rusty tools were stored.

‘No. Please,’ Luke said, more horrified than he sounded.

‘Phillers, you weasel,’ Hutch cried out, through his giggles.

‘Outside for a shit,’ Dom added.

‘I’m not taking a shit,’ Phil said, his voice muffled in the darkness. ‘Yet.’

Hutch and Dom exploded into laughter.

Luke shook his head, fighting a smile that ached around his mouth. ‘I cannot believe you are my friends. Burning furniture and crucifixes, and now pissing indoors. Totally unacceptable behaviour for fathers and husbands.’

Dom sat up to unzip his sleeping bag. ‘Tell me where you’ve done it. I need to go too. We might as well piss on the same spot.’

When Phil and Dom were lying down inside their sleeping bags, Dom snoring within minutes, Phil wheezy but motionless, Luke remained awake and propped up on one elbow inside his own sleeping bag. Hutch lay concealed in a funnel of red nylon that tapered down to his feet, but stared wide-eyed at the fire he’d replenished with as much dry wood as he could shave from the walls before they all turned in.

‘H?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Forgive me for speaking out loud, but what is the plan?’

Hutch turned his head and grinned. ‘Haven’t got a clue.’

Luke laughed quietly. ‘It’s not been without merit. This trip. We can dine out on it for years. This place is off the scale.’

‘Which is no exaggeration. But if the sun had been shining and it hadn’t been raining, I have to ask myself if it would look half as terrifying as it does.’

Luke nodded. ‘I still think it would.’

Hutch yawned around a smile. ‘Me too.’

Bunching up his last set of unworn and dry clothes inside his pack, Luke fashioned a pillow behind his head. He tried to shuffle closer to the stove without disturbing Phil, but ended up in a foetal position. ‘I had this freaky idea earlier. When we were upstairs.’ Luke knew the idea would be unwelcome to the ears of anyone still awake, but could not stop himself thinking out loud. ‘If that thing upstairs was a representation of the thing that threw the carcass into the tree.’

‘I heard that,’ Phil said, sleepily.

Hutch sniggered. ‘It was a shocker to be sure. But we all know,’ he winked at Luke, ‘that things like that don’t exist. More’s the pity. But it’s amazing what mountaineers think they’ve seen when they’re oxygen deprived. And sailors lost at sea. Exhausted soldiers. Same deal. We become detached from the familiar and our ancestral imagination tries to work shit out. Isolation. Long winter darkness. That’s what did this.’ He looked at the ceiling. ‘Someone lost their mind for sure out here.’

‘Think I would too. This place has put an end to my long-held fantasy about living alone, in a cabin in the woods. But the thing in the tree …’

Hutch yawned, his eyes half closed. ‘Animal. We’re not wildlife experts. For all we know, it is something bears do. Larder or something, like you suggested. Anyway, I better turn in. We can embellish to our heart’s content once we’re in that tourist hut by the river tomorrow.’

Luke nodded. ‘Sure. Sweet dreams.’

Sticks. Spiking cheeks. Looking for eyes. Poking the throat. Sticks. Bristling phalanxes needling from branches and erupting from the ground. Sticks everywhere.

Into the dark. Throwing your weight forward. Head down to protect your face. Arms flung out, fingers grasping for purchase, to seize handfuls of the sharp sticks and tug them aside. But down sleeves, inside your collar, and into your socks to catch like barbs, go the sticks and they bring you to a thrashing suspension, your feet never finding the ground. Because you cannot feel the earth, the dark clay from which all of it springs. Down through cracking bracken, sharp brown thorns and crunching dead wood, your feet plunge. Buried to the knee in small crevasses from which you cannot haul slow spent legs.

And there you hang. Gulping at the air like a man drowning. Dizzy with exhaustion, weary like the dying, you hang between the bindings of vine and the scaffolding of sticks. And wait. Wait for it .