The Ritual

by Adam Nevill

  FIFTY-SIX

  He stood at the window. The sky was white with moon. It filled the atmosphere like a planet about to bump into the earth. Stretching away forever before the house, the forest of so many tall black trees was still, but not silent. Strange cries issued in the distance, rising from down amongst the cold lightless spaces, beneath the canopy of great branches, that were like muscular arms raised to the luminous air in praise. Dark leaves upon the peaks of the tallest trees frosted in the falling brightness. Wondrous light, but not comforting light. Though he wished it were.

  Behind him in the room, someone spoke to him in a tiny quick voice. A little person. What they said made sense to him, though he had never heard such things before in his life. He was not allowed to turn around.

  And he felt an urge to go down there, to that whitish clearing beneath his window. Carved within the great ocean of never-ending trees, in this new world, was a circular flat space, carpeted with a soft pelt of shorn silvery grass. He felt euphoric before it, filled with a mad glee, but accepted it would be very hard to get out of the circle and the upright stones if he dared go down there. Down there to turn round and round, before the mouth of the dark stone chamber, while looking up at the white sky. He had done it before. Or had he? He wasn’t sure.

  And in the treeline the figures cavorted. They were children. They were angels. Tears filled his eyes. They were dancing. Or they were stalking around the edge of the clearing. Or maybe their skipping movements, before they dropped to all fours, were a combination of dancing and stalking. Sometimes they rose up on two hind legs and waved, or clawed their thin white arms at the sky.

  It was hard to see the little white people clearly, because of the sudden darting of their pale child bodies into the shadows of the forest. They never remained still for long, and flitted about constantly. But the longer he watched the more he glimpsed of their pinkish eyes and their whippy tails, blood-purple like earth worms, before they withdrew to the endless darkness beneath the treetops.

  Through the glass of the window he strained his ears to hear their voices too, as they called up to him. They cried out for him to come down and do the turning before the black stones, under the white glare of sky. But then he thought the sound they made was more like barking, or coughing, and not voices calling at all. And he was uncertain whether children should have such square yellow teeth in their wide mouths. Clutched in their tiny white fists were bones. Long bones from legs and arms.

  Then he understood that they put the bones inside the stone chamber. It was the chamber that he was to go inside, to wait for another to come. From out there. Deep and far out there, among the forever of black trees, something approached.

  Behind him, the tiny voice and the skitter of tiny fast feet on the wooden floor stopped.

  And, suddenly, he was inside the stone walls of the old chamber of upright stones and he could smell the earthy pungency of the dirt floor inside it. And in the thin light he saw the bones. All of the bones. The bones strewn about the dirt floor. Some still wet and dark. Bones gathered amongst the stones.

  He pitched from sleep and cried, ‘Not in there. Not inside. Please.’

  But the three figures about the bed all reached for him at the same time. Ashen faces cracked with black fissures, came in at him.

  Fenris grinned. The whites of his eyes were incongruous and shocking within their black sockets. ‘We have found your friend. Come and see, Luke.’ His mouth was too red beyond the black lipstick, the tongue too visible, the teeth too yellow.

  In his giant hands, Loki slapped Luke’s forearms together. Luke tried to pull his hands apart, but Surtr worked faster with the nylon hoop. It must have been circling his wrists before he awoke, and now a strap was tugged and the loop whizzed smaller. His flesh purpled under the binding. The skin immediately itched.

  He was pulled into a sitting position. Fenris yanked the eiderdown off his legs. Cold air rushed in and his body seemed frail, ungainly. Shame warmed through Luke.

  ‘Up. Up,’ Loki said.

  Fenris smiled at him. ‘Man, you stink.’

  Luke rose to his knees. ‘No. You’re hurting … Stop.’ And then the pain in his wrists silenced him as Surtr pulled the strap even tighter. Tears melted the vision of her moon-face and her spiteful lipless smile.

  Fenris gripped his hands while Loki shovelled a huge hand under his right arm. Together, they pulled him upright, then off the bed and on to his feet. Fenris smiled right into his face. ‘Big surprise for you today, Luke.’

  Out of the room, then down a cramped wooden corridor they bumped and banged him. Surtr went first with wide bare feet padding across the wooden floors; her raised soles were as black as tar. Loki followed her, dipping his head to avoid smacking it against the ceiling and oil lantern; his bulk eclipsed the thin light in the narrow space. Close behind Luke, Fenris giggled. He felt the youth’s hot breath inside his ear.

  All of them were excited, pushy, shoving, impatient. He wanted to scream at them to leave him alone, but the idea that Dom was here shocked him mute. He was alive then. Impossibly alive. He thought his heart was breaking. ‘Where did you find him? My friend?’

  At the top of the stairs Loki turned his head, the long black hair swaying in an inky torrent. ‘He found us.’

  Luke could barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘Is he all right?’

  Fenris laughed and said, ‘Very well.’

  Loki frowned at Fenris, then turned away.

  ‘Is my friend all right?’ Luke demanded, his disorientation lessening, the pain in his wrists turning to warmth.

  ‘These stairs are very old. They put you on your ass,’ Loki said.

  Fenris pushed Luke from behind. He skittered down the first three steps. Fell against the old walls, righted himself. It was like standing on the deck of a small boat, or walking through a moving train. His balance was shot. Whether it was because he had just woken, or because his hands were tied, or because of his head injury, he didn’t know. And then he was at ground level, the floor solid beneath his naked soles. From the open front door, air fresh with damp and rain and earth engulfed him.

  A cramped brownish hallway materialized. A murky kitchen led off it; inside he saw a black iron stove and chimney, an old wooden table with solid sides of plain board, chairs with rounded legs, peeling cabinets.

  A bigger parlour, the walls dark with ancient timber and chaotic with antlers, skulls and blackened things, then came briefly into view through another doorway to his right. And then he was pushed from behind by Fenris again, and out through the open front door he went, and on to a sloping wooden porch.

  The remains of the pyre from the night before blackened the grass. He could smell old smoke and wet ash.

  To his left, the old woman stood on the porch. The sudden sight of her small body in the long dusty black dress, made him start. Tiny eyes glimmered in her collapsed expressionless face. The uneven ends of her short white hair were wispy in the day’s grim light. She merely watched him. The youths ignored her.

  Luke jerked away from Fenris and stumbled after Loki.

  Desperately, Luke cast his eyes about. ‘Dom. Mate. Dom!’ He desperately wanted to see his friend, and needed to get a sense of the house he was imprisoned within, and essay the grounds, but he only succeeded in a bewildered stumbling into the grass paddock before the porch. And then his eyes caught sight of something up high, straight ahead, caught in a tree like a hapless parachutist gone all limp. He looked away and gasped.

  Then whipped his head back to see the tatty figure in the treeline, strung up directly before the front door; the spot below his little window. In his eyes, the reds and yellows of raw meat, and the sudden white of bone, clashed with the backdrop of dark wintry green.

  ‘We have summoned him wiv our music! See!’ It was Fenris shouting behind Luke.

  Luke dropped to his knees. Looked at the grass and at his bound hands. Peered back up.

  Mackerel light silted down and through the tree branch
es. Dappled with shadow, Dom’s face was perfectly still; white as candle wax across the unshaven cheeks either side of a thick bruised nose, but mired with dark blood around the mouth. His face seemed strangely expressionless, like he had been nonchalant about the circumstances of his final breath.

  As if drunk and embracing the shoulders of friends on either side, Dom’s pallid arms were stretched out and hooked between two tree limbs about eight feet from the ground. His torso and legs drooped, appearing weightless now that everything had been looted from out of his rib cage. The glimmer of the vertebrae, still moist, was worse than the beard of blood around the gaping mouth. He had been peeled from the waist to his heavy thighs. A side of meat in a butcher’s window.

  Luke’s vision went hazy, insubstantial, then whited out. He fell onto his side and looked back at the house. Saw it for the first time. It was made from wood, stained black by age. Had a pointy dark roof. Small windows.

  Two sets of thick-soled boots, embedded with silver rivets from toe to heel, came and stood too close to his eyes.

  ‘Enough now. Just enough now,’ Luke said, though he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. ‘Not Dom. Not my friend. No more.’

  ‘We call to it, it come. Our music is raise magic,’ Fenris said, excitedly. When these words finally assembled into a sentence inside his mind, the information confused Luke. Then he realized he could feel nothing. Nothing at all, as if every nerve had been stripped from out of his body like wiring torn from a wall cavity. When he realized Fenris was not talking about Dom, but about the thing that had brought his remains here, he closed his eyes.

  ‘This is the most remote place in Scandinavia, Luke.’ It was Loki speaking to him now. ‘Where the oldest things can still be found, my friend. Here there are different rules. Different energies, you know.’ Luke continued to stare at the house.

  Then Fenris was talking again, quickly, near where Luke lay in the grass in his dirty underwear, wrists bound with a plastic loop from a DIY store. ‘They kept it alive here. Kept it real.’

  When he spoke next in his deep, softened voice, it was as if Loki was mollifying a confused child. ‘Something is pushing to the surface of the world, Luke. And in us too. Something terrible. Destructive. I sense it in you also. It pulled you in, eh? And all of your friends. Us too. But, I am sorry to say, that sometimes the innocent are sacrificed.’

  Fenris was babbling, breathless with glee. ‘How do you think they have lived here? Lived for so long? No one fucks with them. They live as they please. It is the oldest forest in Europe. It is protected. That is why all this is still here.’

  Loki’s voice remained passive, unshocked, unaffected by the ruin of a father, a husband, a friend, a man, up in that tree. ‘This is the land of our ancestors. Here Odin still rides. And you have to wake up and accept the wishes … the demands of something older and greater than you, Luke. That is all.’

  He heard the voice of the old woman for the first time then. ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas.’

  Loki and Fenris stopped talking and turned to her. Luke looked at her wrinkled impassive face. Some thin grey teeth were visible inside her lipless mouth. ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ she said again, as if simply stating a fact. Her voice was cracked with age, but the intonation was strangely melodic.

  Loki crouched down, swept a curtain of hair over one shoulder and tilted his crudely painted face towards Luke. ‘She says, what was once given, is missing. One will come to fetch it back.’

  And then somehow Luke was on his feet, and the horizon of the forest was jumping in his eyes, and he was running on stiff awkward legs. Running away from it all.

  Past the front of the house he went, then up the side of the building; a dark wooden wall rearing up on his right side, the forest blurring to his left. Behind the building a white pick-up truck with mud-plastered sides was parked before an overgrown orchard, the arrangement of the trees haphazard. Some of the tree branches hung heavy with dark-green fruit: cooking apples. A thin grassy track, grooved to clay in twin tyre tracks, travelled along the side of the sparse gathering of fruit trees, before vanishing round a bend.

  Voices behind: Fenris whooped, then laughed like a jackal. Loki gave orders, his tone unhurried, methodical.

  A glance over his shoulder. The girl ran after him. Ungainly, short legs pumping in tight black jeans; heavy bosom swinging in an oversized hooded top with something printed on the front. Her feet bare, white, thudding. Face round, excited.

  Instinctively, Luke ran towards the clay track. It might lead somewhere. The ground would not be so uneven as the forest floor was bound to be. He could cut into the thick trees further down the track, drop and hide at ground level. The thought pushed him on, his exertions loud within his head. Every footfall jolted up his spine and seemed to widen the crack in his skull, which he would never believe was not there until he dared look into a mirror again. Not being able to pump his arms was slowing him down.

  Eyes wild, teeth gritted, Fenris came at him from between the side of the truck and the shadowy rear of the house, looking to cut him off before he reached the track. A fat girl and a disturbed teenager with their faces painted like corpses, or demons, or whatever they thought they were, were coming for him.

  Luke yanked at his wrist binding. Impotent fury welled up his throat. Even wearing big boots, Fenris was quick. Would have to be faced.

  Luke stopped, turned. Thought of kicking him, heel first. The approach of the girl to his right, distracted him. Cheeks puffed, chest heaving, little hands balled into fists, her washed-out eyes widening: a high-pitched scream came out of her small mouth.

  Fenris pulled up short. Grinned. Danced sideways. Backwards. Cried out something inarticulate, shrieky, triumphant.

  A moment of indecision. Then Luke turned to the girl. She was almost upon him. He kicked everything he had into the gut of the rushing figure.

  Her forward momentum knocked him off his back leg and he was falling. There was a look of surprise, then fear at being hurt, on her face, and she bowed away. The grassy turf came up too fast and slammed into Luke’s shoulders from behind.

  Fenris laughed. Clapped his hands against his thighs.

  The girl was bent double, silent, winded.

  Luke sat up quickly, swivelled his weight onto one buttock. Bent his left leg at the knee to propel himself upwards.

  The toe of Fenris’s boot struck him in the temple. Ice cracked inside his skull. Rivets opened his cheekbone. Red lights flared.

  When his vision juddered back down and settled, he was looking at a dead grey sky and could not close his mouth or clench his jaw. His ear whistled and the side of his head thumped hot.

  Again he tried to get up, but only succeeded in sitting before the girl’s snatching chubby fingers were in his hair. Something had come loose inside her, unhinged: he could see it in her eyes. A belligerent keening sound, like sobbing but harder, came out of her.

  Whatever had dried shut along the top of his head, came apart under his hair with a sticky-tape sound and his scalp flooded hot. The pain made him go white all over; it enveloped him like an immersion in cold water would. He withered into a faint.

  She pulled him back down to the earth, flattened his shoulders against the cold grass. He broke from the faint, but thought he would be sick. Couldn’t breathe. Thrust his hands upward, fingers locked like he was in prayer. His knuckles sank under her small flat chin. She made a sound like air escaping quickly from a cushion, until her mouth clamped shut on the sound.

  Fenris stamped the corrugated sole of his big boot onto Luke’s face.

  Gristle popped. A streak of nose pain took the last of the strength from his limbs. The rubber sole twisted, rearranging the skin, and his features with it.

  Luke knew the fight was over. He was done. Spent.

  Surtr crowded out the light, dropped her heavy round knees onto his shoulders. Straddled his face. Through the delirium of pain, he caugh
t her scent. She was yoghurty, sour-creamy, sebaceous. He was smelling her cunt through a nose he knew to be smashed flat.

  Holding his hair, making rippy sounds, she yanked his head off the ground, then smashed it back down. Up again, then down.

  Then her weight was gone. Suddenly lifted clean off him. And Luke rolled onto his side and choked the rust rush of blood from out of his throat. Spat loops of bloody saliva from his mouth. The sight of it frightened him. In what little of his mind was still working at its frantic scattering of thoughts, he visualized his face disfigured, his skull open, the organ inside grey and shivering at the open sky. He prodded at his wet face with his fingertips. The skin was tight. An egg-shaped lump, hard as bone, had already risen where he had been kicked in the temple. Merely touching it made him feel sick, so he stopped.

  Loki held on to his girlfriend, his acolyte, tightly. Spoke quickly and urgently into her disordered black hair. A smudge of her white face behind the fringe still peered intently at Luke, as if some urgent play had been disrupted by a parent.

  Hung loosely over one of Loki’s shoulders was the dark wood of a stock and the dull gleam of gunmetal. A hunting rifle. If Loki’s white-faced devil hounds had not pulled him down, Loki would have shot him anyway. He was not leaving here. Luke lay back and closed his eyes on a grey world that did not seem to want him in it any more.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  ‘Luke. I am having the hard time keeping you alive right now.’ Loki’s eyes were bright and blue and smiling in the beam of dusty light that fell through the little window. Loki was in a playful mood, a good mood. Grinning, he tossed his mane of black hair over one shoulder. He didn’t seem so dour, so intensely serious now; it was as if the arrival of Luke’s butchered friend had relieved the tension in the air. And he was drunk. Beside the closed door he had propped the rifle against the wall.

  Luke had been lying still for hours before Loki’s arrival. He could not breathe through his nose, which felt like it had swollen to four times its normal size, and his head was open like split fruit. Both of his eyes were swollen, one nearly shut. It felt puffy. He was covered in scores of hard red itching lumps from being bitten senseless by the bugs in the hideous bed. Scores of cuts and scratches covered his ankles and forearms, and he had not washed in a week. He stank. He was thirsty. He was hungry. He was broken. He realized he did not care about much any more.