The Ritual (4 page)

Phil, Dom and Hutch laughed. ‘You all right, mate?’ Hutch then asked as an afterthought. ‘That sounded nasty.’

‘Fine.’ Luke shone his torch at the narrow staircase that led to the second storey. ‘Anyone been up there yet?’

‘With this knee,’ Dom said, ‘I’m not moving again until Hutch fetches help and the Swedish air force lands a helicopter in the garden. Ain’t that right, you hopeless Yorkshire arse? And you can use that map to get the fire going for all the use it’s been.’

At this, they all laughed. Even Luke who couldn’t help himself, or stop himself from warming to Dom all over again. He was being too sensitive. It was the dreadful forest and the desperate walking. His thighs still seemed to be moving as if they continued to clamber up and down rocky slopes and stretch over deadwood. They were just tired. That was all. ‘I don’t want to sound like a fool—’

‘That could be a challenge,’ Dom muttered, as he removed his second boot. ‘Where’s the spray, Hutch?’

Luke looked at Dom. ‘Piss off.’ Then turned to Hutch. ‘But I definitely heard something out there. In the trees.’

Dom grimaced at him. ‘Don’t start with that crap. Things are bad enough in here without you giving me the shits.’

‘I’m not messing around. It was like …’ He couldn’t describe it. ‘A crash.’

No one was listening.

‘I want new feet.’ Phil stood up in his socks. ‘Think I might go and check out the bedrooms.’

‘I’ll take the one with the en suite,’ Hutch said. He was digging at the door of the stove with the penknife he had bought in Stockholm from the outdoor adventure store. Like everything else in the country, it hadn’t been cheap. Luke bought one too because he liked the idea of having a knife in the wilderness. Dom dismissed them as being too expensive and said he would use Hutch’s if he needed it. Phil lost his knife on the first day. He’d left it at the first campsite.

Outside, the thunder ground iron hulls against granite. A vivid flash of lightning followed and seemed far too close to the house. It lit up the dusty wooden floor by the open door.

Phil paused on the first of the stairs on his way up, and fingered a dark crucifix. As if to himself, he said, ‘You’d think they’d make you feel safe. But they don’t.’

EIGHT

Phil came down the stairs so quickly it sounded like a fall. If the bangs of his feet didn’t get their attention, his gasps for air did.

Downstairs, three pairs of eyes went round and white. Three torch beams flashed to the foot of the staircase.

Through which Phil burst, then fell to his knees. He turned on to his backside and shuffled away from the whole idea of the stairs.

Inside Hutch’s mind came the image of meat dripping from a tree.

Dom dropped his feet from the table to the floor. ‘What the hell?’

Luke stood up from where he had been sitting close to the door, still peering out at the rain as if unable to accept that they intended to spend a night here. He kept his shoulders bent forward as if expecting a blow; opened his mouth but couldn’t speak.

Stupidly, in his fright, Hutch felt a yawn rise through him.

Phil tried to shout but it came out a yelp. ‘Something’s’ – he swallowed – ‘up there!’

Hutch looked at the ceiling. He dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘You are kidding me.’

‘Let’s go,’ Dom said.

Hutch held a hand up. ‘Ssh.’

Around the table, Dom and Phil scrabbled for their boots. Heads close, Dom asked Phil something in a whisper. Phil turned his head quickly towards Dom’s face. ‘I don’t know! I saw it. In the bed.’ It was a preposterous statement, but no one laughed or could even swallow. The very idea of a bed in this place should have cut the tension, but somehow it made everything worse.

Hutch held up two hands, palm outwards. They were filthy. ‘Quiet! Cool it. Just cool it. There can’t be anyone here. Look at the dust. There were no footprints when we came in. It’s not possible.’

Plump face bloodless and quivering, Phil struggled to speak. ‘It’s in there. Up there.’

‘What?’ Dom demanded.

‘An animal?’ Luke asked.

Hutch looked at Luke. ‘Get your shank out.’

Luke frowned.

‘Knife,’ Hutch said, then held up his own.

Dom had one boot on and was stabbing his naked toes at the other wet boot which scooted across the floor. ‘This is getting stupid. Bloody stupid.’

Hutch strained his neck forward. ‘Can’t be an animal. Listen.’

Dom pulled the second boot back on and winced. ‘Fuck this. I’m off.’

‘Dom, shut it! Listen.’ Hutch walked slowly to the foot of the stairs.

Luke moved away from the door to let Phil and Dom pass on their way out. ‘Easy H. Could be a bear.’

Hutch shook his head. ‘It would be down here with us by now.’ He looked at Phil and Dom who stood together on the porch, peering back inside. A gust of wet air and the smell of damp wood grew stronger indoors, as if eager to replace their presence inside. ‘Phil. Was there a hole or something up there?’

‘Eh?’

‘A hole? In the roof? A window busted? Was it an animal?’

Phil swallowed. ‘It was sitting up. Staring at me.’

‘What?’ Dom asked.

‘I don’t know. I saw some eyes in my torchlight. And something black. Something big. But it didn’t move. It just sat there and stared at me.’

Dom threw his head back. ‘Jesus Christ. I can’t believe this!’

Hutch glared at him. ‘Dom. Cool it. We’d have heard anything alive in here long before now. You can hear mice under here and they’re the size of your thumb.’

Hutch looked at Luke, hoping to prompt an idea. But Luke’s expression told him that it didn’t look like he was convincing anyone about an absence of life in the building. Around them, the sound of rain pelting the walls like hail threatened to engulf the shuffling of their feet.

Hutch looked at the ceiling. ‘We can’t go back out in this. The temperature will drop like a stone in an hour. We’re already soaked. We’ll freeze.’ For a few seconds no one spoke, but glances were exchanged back and forth.

Luke suddenly grinned at him. ‘You first then.’

NINE

It was not possible to creep up the stairs soundlessly, as they would have wished. The planks moved under their feet. They cracked and even boomed with every careful and reluctant footstep taken. Hutch went first holding his torch in one hand, his knife in the other. Luke stayed close behind him, but not too close that he couldn’t turn and bolt down the stairs if Hutch so much as flinched. The tiny knife handle hurt his fingers. He relaxed his grip.

‘Anything?’ Luke whispered, looking up through the narrow, black wooden tunnel they squeezed clumsily through; a thin passage that reeked of the old sheds in an allotment he’d explored as a kid, fragrant with cat urine and clotted with dross.

‘Nah,’ Hutch said, his voice tight like he was holding his breath.

Luke’s pulse threatened to jump out of his mouth and ears at the things his torchlight revealed around Hutch. The old dark wood was crowded with long bearded faces that were nothing more than the patterns in the discoloured grain of ancient timber. It was museum-old, museum-black. It should have been behind glass, not around them in the darkness. He suddenly respected Phil for going upstairs on his own.

The thought of people once living here with no electric light or power in the foul wood, filled Luke with such a sense of wretchedness he felt like his soul was being pulled down and through his feet. They had been simple and they were old and they wanted comfort from the cross. One would have died first, the other would have lived alone in such despair that just to know it for a moment would make your heart burst.

He tried to shake the terrible feeling from himself. It jostled with his fear. This was never a place for a man to be, ever. He felt that instinctively. You got mixed up with the kind of madness that nailed skulls to walls. Even the cold black air seemed to move about them and through them with a sense of its own purpose. It was stupid, irrational to think so, but his imagination suspected the house was inhabited with something he didn’t need eyes to see. They were small and fragile here. They were defenceless. They were not welcome.

Hutch peered around the bend in the staircase. Luke caught his face in profile with the light from his torch. He’d never seen Hutch with that face before. Pale and drawn like he’d received bad news. His eyes were big and doleful. And watering. ‘OK,’ Hutch whispered. ‘There’s a few more steps and it opens into a room. Like an attic. I can see the underside of the roof. It’s pretty wet up here.’

‘Real slow, H. Slow,’ Luke whispered back. As they groaned under Hutch’s boots, Luke briefly wondered if he would be able to take those last few stairs. Holding his breath, he forced himself to follow.

Hutch was three footsteps ahead of him when he stopped moving. Shoulders down, head cocked forward, Hutch stared at something ahead of him, in the upstairs room, out of Luke’s sight from where he was standing on the last two stairs. Hutch swallowed. He’d seen it too then; he was looking at what sent Phil crazy.

‘What?’ Luke whispered. ‘Hutch. What?’

Hutch shook his head. He winced. It looked like he might cry. He shook his head again, and sighed.

Now Luke didn’t want to see it either, but felt his feet shuffle him upwards. ‘Is it OK? Is it OK? Is it OK?’ he whispered, then realized he had said it three times. He could not take the sight of any more blood today.

‘This is wrong,’ Hutch said in a little-boy voice. Luke stared at the side of Hutch’s face. He climbed the last step and stood beside his friend, then turned his whole body to face the room. At what both of their torches were now directed at.

TEN

It rose from shadow and became shadow again.

At the far end of the attic the silhouette sat upright and completely still between the two sides of the angled roof. Crowded and lightless, the place it occupied pooled with darkness above and below the moving torch beams, which seemed frail in here, powdery at their furthest reach but strong enough to pick out the dust and silvery webs on an old black hide. In the patches of hair moistened by drops of rain from the roof beams, it glistened.

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?’