The Ritual

by Adam Nevill

  Before Luke could fully right himself, he caught sight of a small elderly woman in a long dress, moving swiftly from the door towards him. Somewhere under the long black gown, which concealed her body right up to the furrowed chin, her little feet knocked loudly against the wooden floorboards. The sound hurt his head.

  With the faintest touch of her small hands, she guided more than moved him back to the bed. Where he sat, squinting through the shuddering waves of pain that surged from the middle of his head before crashing behind his eyes. He thought he would be sick. His vision broke into silvery dots and the back of his neck froze. Then he was sick. A great squeezing inside his stomach forced a trickle of dirty liquid out of his mouth. The elderly woman muttered something in Swedish.

  At the furthest reaches of his bilious senses, he detected the presence of another figure in the room. When it spoke, in what reminded Luke of Norwegian more than Swedish, he recognized the voice to be that of the youth who had worn the lamb mask.

  The nausea drained from Luke and the walls of the room stilled. He looked again at the old woman. Her face was expressionless, but her small black eyes glimmered in sockets so old the skin around her eyes reminded him of walnut shells. What he could see of them was strange and intense. He could not look into them for long.

  Her lips had sunk inside her mouth; the chin below was deeply grooved and whiskered. The bright white hair about the tiny head was very thick but short, and looked like she had cut it herself, with a knife and a fork.

  He suddenly wanted to laugh madly at this apparition, but he found her weirdness also filled him with a muting unease. Her skin was grey and also yellowy in places, like the flesh of an ageing smoker. She could not have been an inch taller than four feet. From a distance she would resemble a child in a high-necked dress, which looked homespun. Another notion that contributed to his discomfort. About the front of her black gown was a floor-length apron, once white, but now soiled brown with old water marks.

  ‘I don’t come near you if you are going to puke,’ the grinning youth said from behind the elderly woman. The childlike lacy gown had gone from his skinny body. Instead he wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name Gorgoroth and a photograph of a group of men, their faces horribly disfigured with white, black, and blood-red make-up. The cracked white paint on the youth’s face stopped under his chin, leaving his throat clean but still very pale. It was thin and made especially pointy with an Adam’s apple. Between his feminine hands he held a tray. ‘None of us can cook shit. We burn water! But she is OK. If you like fucking stew every day.’

  Luke was not sure whether he should smile, or say thank you. He didn’t know why he was here, or who these people were. He said nothing.

  On the wooden plate, dark floury vegetables were covered with a brown lumpy gravy.

  ‘We have drink. We make it ourselves, so it is very strong. Er … you call it … Moonshine. Moonshine! But maybe you puke very quickly if you drink it today, I think. So you get water.’

  The tray was lowered and placed on the bed. Luke glanced at the youth’s tattooed arms; ink crawled in black vines around circular runes. On the inside of one forearm was a Thor’s hammer. A badly drawn inverted crucifix disfigured the back of a slender hand. Tucked inside his bullet belt was a long knife. The knife handle was made of dark bone. The blade was shiny against the dull leather of his trousers. The sight of it dried out Luke’s mouth.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘My name is Luke. I am hurt. I need … Please, I need for you to get help.’

  The youth stood back. ‘Luke eh? I am Fenris.’ He smiled with pride. ‘You know what that means?’

  Luke stared blankly at him.

  ‘It means Wolf.’ He pronounced it vulf. ‘Ha! Because I am very like the wolf, you know. As many have found out. And the other guy, his name is Loki. You know what it means?’

  When no answer was coming from Luke’s stupefied face, he said, ‘Devil. Because, let me tell you, he is exactly that, my friend. And the girl with the great tits - though don’t tell her I say so – is called Surtr. A pretty name for a demon, eh? It means fire. Her name too, it is the same as she is. You understand me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Luke did not want to hear another word from the figure he found baffling, and utterly idiotic.

  The old woman continued to stare at him, which unnerved him, even though he still avoided looking directly into her almost imperceptible eyes in that small collapsed face. She did not smile. He imagined she never had done.

  ‘So where you come from, Luke?’

  ‘London. England,’ he said automatically.

  ‘Ah, London,’ Fenris repeated, emphasizing the second syllable and pronouncing it ‘don’ not ‘dun’, like those with English as a second language often did. ‘One day, I think, we will play there. At the Camden Underworld maybe. I have never been, but Loki, he has been to London.’

  Luke’s face felt heavy and almost ached from a lack of expression caused by his bemusement at the irrelevance of the youth’s chatter. He could think of nothing to say, and part of him resisted pleading for help; instinctively, he felt it would do him no good.

  ‘And how did you get from London to here, Luke?’

  Luke looked at the floor, closed his eyes on the pain of recollection more than from the discomfort caused by the thin light. ‘A holiday.’

  The youth remained quiet, thinking hard on what Luke had just said. Then suddenly laughed, and laughed, and could not seem to stop. Eventually, he wiped at his eyes, smudging black eye make-up into white face-paint. ‘Some fucking holiday, eh?’ Then he laughed some more.

  If two of his friends had not been butchered so horribly, and the third gone missing, he might have seen the funny side of it too. Instead, the man’s giggling made him angry. But the sharpness of rage was welcome compared to the anxiety he could not swallow. And his irritation proved a refreshing respite from the sickish skittering of nerves in his gut, which seemed to have rendered him strengthless. ‘My friends died. Out there. In the forest. We got lost. We were attacked. By an …’

  ‘You took the wrong path, my friend. Let me tell you that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  For the first time since they met, the youth stopped grinning, or pulling stupid facial expressions and fooling about. He was suddenly serious. He looked over his shoulder at the open door, then back at Luke. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Fenris grinned, shrugged. ‘Your friends, how did they die?’

  ‘They were killed … by something. Out there. In the trees …’ Luke was confused; was lost for words. Did the right words even exist to explain what had happened to poor Hutch? And Phil? Dom too? Luke dipped his head, then looked up at Fenris. Why was he grinning?

  ‘What were their names?’ Fenris asked, but more to change the subject Luke suspected, than through any genuine interest in his friends.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason.’ The youth straightened his face and pulled what he must have imagined was a fierce evil expression. Then seemed to grow bored of that pose, and grinned again instead. ‘So what do you do in London, Luke?’

  Luke’s suspicion flexed. He’d been found with no ID; his passport and wallet were lost in one of the discarded rucksacks. He wondered what he should say, how he should answer the questions the youth had probably been sent to ask him. ‘I sell CDs.’ Say as little as possible, he decided.

  ‘You like music?’ The youth seemed excited by this possibility.

  Luke stayed quiet. But looked at the man’s shirt.

  ‘You heard Gorgoroth?’ Fenris asked.

  ‘Of them.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘I have heard of them.’

  ‘You know true black metal?’

  Luke shrugged.

  ‘Which bands?’

  Luke became annoyed at himself for trying to think of the name of bands whose CDs they sold from the tiny black metal section of the shop. ‘What does it matter?’

&
nbsp; ‘It doesn’t. Which bands?’

  Luke sighed. ‘Dimmu Borgir.’

  The youth spat. ‘Poseurs!’

  ‘Cradle of Filth.’

  The man shrugged, indifferent, yawned.

  ‘Venom?’

  He smiled. ‘The masters! Now we are getting somewhere, Luke from London.’ Then he lowered his voice into a deep mocking tone and frowned. ‘But you clearly need to be educated, my friend. You need to hear Emperor. Dark Throne. Burzum. Satyricon. Bathory. And you will hear them all while you are our guest in this forest of eternal sorrow. And maybe, maybe, if you are a very good boy, we play you Blood Frenzy too.’ The youth feigned disappointment at Luke’s lack of recognition of the name, and at his continuing bewilderment. ‘Blood Frenzy! My band. You work in a CD store, and you have not heard of Blood Frenzy. Luke! Very stupid of you.’

  ‘Fenris.’

  At the mention of his name, the youth stopped grinning. ‘That is my name.’

  ‘I need to take a piss.’

  Fenris barked an order at the old woman, who had done nothing but stare at Luke since her arrival. Slowly, she moved across the room and vanished through the door, her little feet loud against the uneven floorboards.

  Luke removed his eyes from the open door, trying to suppress the keen interest in it they had revealed. ‘And then I want my clothes, Fenris from Sweden.’

  ‘Norway! I am Norwegian. A Viking!’

  ‘OK, Fenris from Norway. I want to leave here. Thank you for taking me from the forest. I would have died otherwise. But my friends were murdered, and I need to report it. And now you and your friends are making me feel nervous.’

  Fenris smiled. ‘Then you are a very wise man, Luke from London. Because wolves and devils and fire are to be feared when they are on the wild hunt.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Fenris grinned his yellow grin.

  The elderly woman returned to the room, with a large wooden bucket she could barely carry. A very old one, a museum piece, the sides bound with circular iron bands. Fenris watched her struggle, but made no attempt to help her.

  The voice of the second youth suddenly boomed from downstairs. He spoke in what Luke had correctly suspected was Norwegian. Fenris rolled his eyes. ‘I must go, Luke. But we will speak again.’ He nodded at the chamber pot the old woman had placed at Luke’s feet. ‘Please, feel free to piss.’ He turned and walked to the door. The old woman clip-clopped loudly after him.

  Luke heard the key turn in the door lock. ‘Why? Why lock it? The door?’ he called out.

  No one answered him.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The cutlery was made from either bone or wood; Luke didn’t know, nor did he want to touch it. The wooden plate was balanced on the foot of the bed and half filled with stew and boiled root vegetable. He dithered, standing over it, his hands wavering uselessly as the smell tormented him. Hunger burned his stomach right back to his spine and made him dizzy. When was the last time he’d eaten? He didn’t know because he did not know how long he had been in the room, in the bed, pissing himself.

  The food was lukewarm, had cooled while Fenris chattered. At least it was soft. Luke knelt before it. Lowered his face to the plate.

  By the time he had licked every dreg of the bitter salty gravy to the side of the plate, he heard a growing tumult of voices and the banging of busy feet beneath his room, one floor down.

  Excitable voices. Shrieking, screaming voices, imitating the vocals in black metal music; growling and gargling, before breaking into cracked falsettos. He wondered if they were communicating with each other in this way, or just trying to outdo each other like children. Fenris was the loudest. Luke doubted the youth’s mouth ever stayed closed for long. His oafish noises were being underwritten by Loki’s booming baritone. Maybe the girl was doing all the jackal noises, in competition with Fenris. He doubted it was the old woman making such a garbled sound. And why did they wear their shoes inside the house? he thought, then felt foolish for the irrelevance of such a query. But the sound of the continual hollow banging of their feet against the wooden floors was maddening, deafening. It made him flinch, set his nerves on edge. It intimidated him; he was afraid it would rise up the stairs to his room at any moment.

  The youths could not use furniture quietly either. Wooden legs of what he guessed were chairs were constantly scraped angrily across the floors. It sounded as if the entire ground floor of the building was being rearranged, or vandalized and things were toppling over and smashing down there. He wondered who the old woman was. Was she related to the band, to this Blood Frenzy? He wanted to know why she allowed them to be so aggressive.

  He was suddenly annoyed at himself for not asking why he was here, or who the old woman was, or about so many other things he desperately needed the answers to. His temperature suddenly plummeted. Were these youths their killers? Had these adolescents hunted them? Murdered his friends? This wolf and devil and fire?

  No, it didn’t fit.

  Luke had not seen their pursuer, their killer, but what he knew and sensed of it was too swift, too silent, for human endeavour. He could not imagine these painted youths capable of such bestial cunning. Nor did they exude its unnatural presence that infiltrated dreams. It. Luke clutched at his face, and started to pant to ease another panic attack.

  The noises of the group banged and screeched outside the house, then lessened as their boots trod upon grass. Save for the idiotic screams, which continued unabated.

  Luke moved across the room to the tiny window. He noted black nails, or tacks, poking from the wall to the right side of the window. Over the bed, sections of the plaster featured rectangles of lighter paint. Pictures and ornaments had been taken down. Not a good sign, though he could not define why. He moved the rag of discoloured netting aside and looked down from the window.

  It was getting dark outside, but there was still some bruised light in the sky. He guessed it was around eight. A dim orangey glow was being emitted from an open door, or from the windows directly beneath his feet that he could not see.

  Outside his little window, the youths were going to light a pyre.

  Dark wooden logs were stacked into a triangular shape, about twenty feet from the house in a wide grassy area that extended to the black trees bordering the property. Coils of briar and dead branches formed another messy layer of kindling around the logs. A red plastic petrol can was visible in the dark grass. Grass that had not been cut for a long time but had been flattened by feet around the pyre in a messy circular patch.

  A few small fruit trees grew in the flat grassy area. Across from the house was a smaller building. It looked like an elaborate Wendy house, or a shed with a solitary door and a porch. A black miniature house that made him afraid; it looked like the disused buildings they had found in the forest. This one was also very old. As was the room, and no doubt the house. Everything around here was morbidly aged and neglected. The very smells of the place were alien to him. The house smelled of the forest. Of the dark dripping heart of the terrible wood, that reared up black and still and impenetrable around the grassy paddock.

  He was suddenly gripped with a terror that the pyre was for him. That the youths were going to burn him alive.

  He forced himself to deny the possibility, to stem the spurt of panic that came into his mouth. They were just young and drunk. They had saved him. They took nothing seriously; they were teenagers. Excitable. That’s all. Someone had gone to fetch a doctor.

  Then why lock the door? Luke turned his head slowly and looked at the little door. To … to keep him safe. But from what?

  Luke shuffled as fast as he dared across the room to the door, the floor gritty under the soles of his feet. Supposing a time came, when the pain in his head lessened and more mobility returned to his body, he wondered if he would need to free himself from the room, silently. The tiny window was too small to climb through, so he was only left with the door as a method of escape.

  He turned the black iron doo
r handle. Locked. He knew it was, but maybe it could be forced open. The house was old, the door narrow, it looked flimsy. But when he shook the handle and pressed his naked shoulder into the wood, the door proved to be more solid and heavy than it appeared, and was also swollen slightly crooked in the doorway. There was little movement of it inside the frame. His brief hope of an easy escape died.

  He bent over and waited for the quakes inside his skull to subside to ripples. Returned to the window.

  Down below, Fenris and Loki had stripped off their T-shirts and revealed their upper bodies to the cold evening air: pale as grubs around the tattoos, chests smooth, upper arms long and thin and festooned with more of the black spiky tattoos. Swathes of matted black hair formed drapes around their freshly whitened faces. He had not realized how long Loki’s hair was until now; it fell past his waist in a tatty curtain. The man’s limbs were spindly, but he was a giant. He had some sort of bandolier that crossed his chest; it was made from black leather and studded. Both men’s forearms bristled with long silver nails, protruding from leather bands that stretched from wrist to elbow.

  Grimaces had been newly depicted on to the young but knowing faces of the two men. They widened their eyes at the dark sky and did more of the idiotic shrieking, with their arms held out from their bodies. Luke could not see the girl.

  Black metal music suddenly exploded from the old CD player. The machine was out of sight, and must have been operated by the girl, who suddenly ran into view, naked. Her buttocks and heavy breasts shook as she ran. There were no tattoos visible on her skin and she had small feet. Absurd feet. Her skin was so pale too, almost luminescent. Upon her head she wore the mask; had become the hare again. Her head looked oversized, shaggy, and the vague shadow her head cast before the orangey glow of the house was not pleasant.

  Messily, Fenris upended the petrol can over the wood. It splashed silvery. Loki produced a Zippo lighter and Luke suddenly identified one major cause of the unrelenting irritation that had refused to subside inside him since he had eaten. He was in withdrawal. And desperately wanted to smoke. Wondered how long it had been since his last cigarette. He’d rather have tobacco than clothes or fucking steel cutlery. ‘Please, please let them have cigarettes,’ he whispered.