The Ritual (41 page)

Up on the balls of his feet, his breath too loud and unable to stop it wheezing in and out of his mouth like he was a tired old dog, he moved across to the truck. He could only see the white shape of the vehicle in his peripheral vision because not for a second did he take his eyes from the trees.

The haphazard and sparse plantation of fruit trees in the orchard, and the open gulley of the dirt track, would allow him to sight the rifle through their exposure, but he dearly wished the rear of the truck had not been so close to the treeline.

He decided to go inside the truck cabin through the driver-side door, with the rifle pointed at the forest until the last moment. There would be one shot, if that, if it chose to come at him from the trees as he entered the vehicle. Twenty feet, one bound.

Driver-side door open. Unwilling to even blink, he eased himself up and onto the broad bench before the steering wheel. Wound the passenger-side window right down, pulled his door closed and then rested the underside of the rifle barrel on the bottom of the passenger-side window frame. If the truck still functioned and moved him down the track, he’d be able to shoot from that side.

He placed the knife on the top of the plastic dashboard, took the keys from his mouth and tried to slip the ignition key into the slot on the steering column. His hands were shaking too much. One hand was dark black with his own blood from where it had clutched at his hip; the sight of it made him feel faint, sick again. On the third attempt he got the key into the slot.

Turned it. There was a click. Green lights glowed to indicate oil, temperature. Amber low-lights circled the speedometer clock and fuel gauge. He depressed the clutch with the sole of a dirty bare foot. The pedal was stiff. He turned the ignition key over again.

The cabin shook. The engine started immediately, impossibly. But there should be no fuel. Something should be wrong with the engine. Nothing should go right for him. That was the way of things.

He shut down the train of thought.

And the engine cut out. Cold. He turned the key again. The engine rocked into life. Sputtered out again. Luke checked the fuel gauge; about one tenth of a tank. They’d drained it for their stupid pyres. How far would that much petrol get him?
Far enough.

Turning the key a third time, he worried about flooding the motor. The engine roared, then chugged into a shaky life. He depressed the accelerator pedal, kept the engine ticking over, idling with a bad cough. The truck was old, had been in the rain; how long would it take to warm up? Was there time for all that?

He looked back at the treeline, cursing himself for becoming distracted; it only took a moment to die out here. Phil had learned that the hard way.

Nothing moved.

The windshield was too blurry to see through. He found the switch for the wipers on the indicator column. Turned the wipers on, and the fog lights, and the hazard lights. ‘Shit.’
No, leave them on.

Handbrake off. Clutch down, into first gear. Right hand on the wheel. Left hand back to holding the rifle stock steady, the end of the barrel aimed through the passenger-side window, finger on the goddamn trigger.

The truck moved, under him, along the grass towards the mouth of the thin track. He was revving too high. Eased back on the accelerator. It was disorientating; operating a vehicle, moving it with these tiny pressures of feet and legs. The last time he had driven had been a van five years before when he moved flat, from one dark corner of London to another.

The truck left the paddock and bumped along the track, the tyres seeming to find the grooves they had made coming in. This was too easy.

Eyes everywhere: to the treeline at the left side of the track, back across the bonnet, through the spindly trees of the orchard, then back again to the forest on his left. Nothing moving out there. Hope surged fiery through his chest. Stupidly, he burped. He needed air; opened the driver-side window.

He looked into the rear-view mirror for the first time. His vision swam. His face was smeared with blood from where he had wiped red sticky hands at sweat and tears; a dirty beard made him look Neolithic; his red-rimmed eyes were those of the witless; something like a crust on a Cornish pasty ran down his hairline, under the tiara of dead flowers, and ended within his left eyebrow; deep pale worry lines cracked the filth beside his eyes and mouth.

Past the orchard, the dark house almost vanishing from out of the rear-view mirror, and he realized he was chanting, ‘Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.’

He stopped speaking and cooled with dread at the sight of how the trees then leant in and curved over the muddy track up ahead. And once he was passed the orchard, the world went dark and he was in a natural tunnel; a funnel of dense foliage. It whipped, it scraped the sides of the truck. It came in through the open driver-side window and tried to slap an eye stinging shut. He drew the barrel of the gun back inside. Started winding up the windows. Was doing too much for his fragile coordination to cope with. With a jolt, the vehicle stalled.

‘Shit fucker!’ Getting angry now. The rifle butt was stuck on something, would not allow itself to be pulled into the truck cabin any further, which prevented him from winding the passenger-side window all the way shut. He had become a quivering thing of rushing thoughts in a thick heavy head, and was all big elbows and jerky feet; he hated himself, hated the trees, this land, everything. He believed in malign divine presences, supernatural forces of fate that kept him here, off balance and absurd in his mismanagement of everything. He was a bleeding farce.

‘Stop! Stop it!’ he told the dominant voice inside his mind.
You got this far. You did what you had to do to get this far.

Took a breath. Looked down to his right. Slowly raised the rifle butt from out of a tear in the vinyl seat cushion. Wound the passenger-side window all the way up to shut and seal himself from the cold wet breath of the forest and the trees that were too unnervingly close. Took another big deep steadying lungful.

Restarted the engine. Out of instinct, he checked the rear-view mirror. Squinted. Had a long dark branch fallen across the back of the truck’s flatbed? Yes, and now it felt like the rear wheels had lowered slightly, or sunk into the clay.

He caught his breath.

Yanked his head around.

Looked through the glass panel behind his head.

And saw the end of a black shape step off the rear of the vehicle.

And vanish into the trees.

But it had left something behind.

Luke looked into the flatbed. Surtr stared back at him. Pale-blue eyes wide in surprise, lipless mouth open, as if to say,
Remember me?

Beneath her breasts, her rib cage had been torn asunder like a cardboard box. She had red-whitish flesh wings attached to an all too visible spinal column. She was all gone, down to her dark, sopping abdomen, but sat upright, her inert body resting against the tail gate of the truck. An inconceivable strength had done that to sinew, muscle and bone; literally torn her body wide open.

I’m still here
, it was telling him.
Still with you, every inch of the way
.

Clumsily, he snatched up the rifle, but the dimensions of the cabin prevented him from moving the long firearm around. The engine cut out.

‘Stop!’ he cried at himself. What did it matter, which way the gun was pointing? The rifle was next to useless inside the cabin; could not be manoeuvred at all. What he needed was speed.

He turned the key over hard, so the starter motor squealed. The cabin shook as the engine came back to reluctant life again. He went from first to third gear in seconds and threw his feet from accelerator to brake, accelerator to brake, while tossing the steering wheel and the truck from side to side, down the track. Beneath the metal floor he felt the tyres grip and slip and fight to stay aiming straight ahead and away from this place.

He flushed hot and cold, twice nearly crashing the vehicle off the road and into the trees. No seatbelt. ‘Stupid bastard!’ In his rear-view mirror, Surtr lolled and shook, bumped and banged, but would not take her eyes from him.

And then, suddenly, something moved behind her.

Only sporadically did the white-grey light break through the canopy of foliage over the rutted road, and shine steely through the tree branches that desired, and were designed, to smother the track into oblivion. But over the lolling pale head of his passenger in the rear, he saw something running quickly on all fours, behind the truck. But only briefly, for no more than a moment; no longer than it took him to say, ‘Oh God.’

He checked the road in front of the bonnet, then looked into the mirror again. Behind the vehicle, a lanky darkness rose to full height and stepped away into the jumping shadows at the side of the track in the time it took to blink an eye. The figure had been at least twenty yards behind his rear bumper, but tall on those black legs, thin as stilts, that bent the wrong way at the knee joint.

He hurriedly turned the headlights on, then switched them to full beam; the sudden strobe of white light was an instant comfort inside the cocoon of rain-heavy leaves that now draped themselves across the windscreen like the flabby hands of protesters, attempting to slow down a diplomat’s car driving through a crowd.

It
had been running down the road behind him, was keeping up. A thing dark. Thin rear legs. No tail. A brief ripple of light across a flank tooled with muscle. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

He was doing thirty miles an hour when he smacked his head against the steel underside of the cabin roof and was forced to brake, to slow down. One eye shut from the pain; an old wound up there had reopened or just set fire to itself again.

Crawling, skidding; he spent more time looking into the rear-view mirror, than he did over the wet white bonnet.

Which is why he did an emergency stop when something darted across the front of the vehicle. His breastbone hit the steering wheel and set the horn blasting; his forehead banged, slapped, then pressed flat, against the cold inside of the windscreen.

For a while he did not know which way he was facing, until his senses landed safely and reorientated his spatial awareness. He pulled himself back hard into his seat.

As he lowered his eyes, he caught the last of something moving; close to the ground, slipping into the trees. It was a thing both lean and brawny.

Had he not stopped he would have hit it. ‘Fuck!’

The engine had stalled again, and if it stalled once more he swore he would get out of the cabin and put a bullet through the bonnet of the spluttering shuddering mess of a truck.

He got it started again as the panic made his jaw shake as if he were suddenly freezing.

Were the rear wheels now stuck in a rut though? The truck would only now move in increments, as if the handbrake was still on. The engine whined and steamed. Then the whole vehicle jolted forward, almost pitching him off the road.

Something had been holding the truck again, from behind.

Luke glanced at the rear-view mirror. A black shape suddenly flared up, and reared away as if on long quivering stilts.

And then it was on the roof. Clambering and all about the windows on every side. He heard himself scream. The dim light dimmed.

The banging of hammers upon the roof; the ricochets of bone feet on metal smarted inside his tender ears. A pink-teated underside of a great belly across the windscreen, black-haired and doggish. Hint of an amber eye the size of an apple to his right.

He looked at the eye.

Saw a great mouth opening instead. Black gums, and yellow canines the length of middle fingers. Breath condensed on the glass, then it was gone.

And so was he, with the accelerator plugged to the metal floor, and his thoughts reeling round and round in a terrible whirlpooling skull-wind, and the branches of trees grooved the side panels, and twigs scratched at the glass like they had claws of their own and wanted to shell him like an oyster.

Bang! Bang! Bang! The hooves of horses across a metal sheet, as something stamped upon the cabin roof again, then ran across the flatbed and vanished, taking poor Surtr with it, like her remains were the remnants of a disembowelled doll, held by one ankle.

Luke was still screaming when the truck veered from one side of the road to the other, entering the forest a few feet on either side of the track. A headlamp went smash. The bumper tore off, and the wheels went over it with a crumple he felt more than heard.

He stamped on the brake to regain control of the vehicle. The truck slid. Came to a jolting stop that put his forehead into the windscreen again.

He sat back, gaping. He’d got the vehicle wedged at an angle, diagonally across the track. Up ahead, the tunnel of overhanging forest narrowed, and completely shut off the light.

Reverse. First gear. Reverse. First gear … A ten-point turn before he stopped counting and began whimpering.

He thought of getting out and using the rifle. Then was certain, again, that he should just put the end of the barrel inside his mouth and end the delay of his demise. It was inevitable.

Fear and big white eyes inside a suit of dirty skin: that’s all he was now.

His arms and legs were shaking. He watched his knee for no longer than a second but its palsy alarmed him. His hands and feet were all pins and needles, until he made his limbs work again by scrabbling for the knife between his legs where it had jumped from the dash. He gripped the knife handle between the palm of his right hand and the outside of the steering wheel. The blade was dull, thick with blood at its base. Its presence inside the cabin made him feel strength in the form of a thin wire of tension within the bones of his forearms.

Slowly, in first gear, he nudged the truck back onto the track and further into the shadows, into the greater darkness where daylight had no place and never had done. Driving fast was out of the question; this was second-gear driving all the way through. But
it
had not broken inside the vehicle.
Could not. Maybe.
He told himself he could tentatively wheel his way out of here, like a nervous motorist with a flat tyre in a safari park.