The Ritual (9 page)

He put his head down and smashed through the bracken. Gritted his teeth and forced through the pain barrier in his chest and thighs. Refused to be defeated.
Enough now.
Some sky; that’s what he wanted. A bit of sky and some open ground, soft with leaves, so they could weave effortlessly through the trees.

A branch dug into the loose cloth under his arm and propelled him backwards and onto his backside. He snatched at the branch and tried to snap it, but the supple strength of the wood resisted and made his arms feel like water.

He remained seated, and panted to get his breath back. Hutch insisted they were beginning to angle south west, ‘more or less’. But Luke had instinctively felt himself being led back north west on this trail, and no nearer to the edge of the forest than they were the previous night when they made camp.

He could not stand much more of the suffocating wet wood, forcing him into a crouch, knocking him about, tearing his skin. His throat burned. Dried sweat was producing salt on his skin and chafing the inside of his thighs and beneath his belt all the way around his waist. He wanted to tear his clothes off.

Thick with pain, the muscles in his legs began to cramp. They had to get out of the heavy stuff. If the undergrowth didn’t clear very soon, he would walk back and find the others. Then he would retrace their steps back to where they had come onto the trail the day before. Alone if necessary. And he’d go for help. Whether Hutch agreed or not, his instincts were telling him they were approaching
that time
. The time for drastic action. Of one of them going for help.

He cursed Hutch’s decisions again, his ridiculous baseless optimism. ‘Jesus Hutch! What were you thinking?’ Grinding his teeth, he ran through everything Hutch had said that led them into this mess. His lips began to move and he said things about his best friend he knew would make him cold with guilt and warm with shame later.

Luke closed his eyes. Tried to calm down, to think straight. Slowly, the intense heat of the sudden rage drained away and left him shivering.

It was so dark where he sat in the wet verdure. Little light was descending to the forest floor, but the rain found its way down. The entire wood was sodden. He felt dizzy and took an energy bar from his coat pocket. His hollow stomach ached. Did they even have enough food remaining for one proper meal?

He began to imagine what would happen if he never moved from this spot. Would his body ever be found, concealed beneath these bushes and weeds and nettles? Or would his bones be picked clean by teeming insects and foraging rodents? A too clear image of the remnants of his dirty camping clothes, a faded rucksack and his browned bones grinning from the dark leaves, propelled him into a squat. His lower back ached from where the damp seeped up through the seat of his trousers. The black soil sucked the warmth out of a body.

Back on his feet, he pushed on, driven by the desperate hope that somehow, miraculously, the end of the trees would present itself at any moment. But when he had long passed out of shouting distance with the others, he began to worry he had left the path and was crashing off through the undergrowth in entirely new directions, being led by the forest into the places the thickets were more sparse. At times he would stop and reassure himself that he was following the faint outline of the manmade track. Because if he wasn’t he would never find the others again. There were no landmarks here; it was all the same and then more of the same, stretching into forever.

Thirst burned out of his stomach, up and into his dry mouth; the last of his water had gone over an hour ago. Save sucking rainwater off the leaves from where it dripped all around them, they would need to find running water before the day was out. He doubted any of the others were carrying anything but empty canteens either.

After thirty minutes alone, he blundered into a granite plinth. A standing stone concealed by ivy.

TWENTY

It was the silence Hutch gradually became aware of, though he decided against sharing the observation with the other two, who hobbled beside and behind him on the rapidly narrowing trail. About him, he imagined the forest holding its breath, in anticipation.

Since they had moved away from the derelict buildings, the birds had stopped their sporadic chatter. There was no breeze. Beyond the scuffling of their feet, the almost inaudible patter of rain, and the whipping of leaves against waterproof fabric, the forest had fallen completely silent around them.

It was a stillness that provoked a reaction, a response. He found himself looking with uneasy eyes into the thickets on either side of the diminishing trail. And had they just changed direction again? He wasn’t sure. In places, the trail now seemed to have disintegrated into deceptive-looking shadowy hollows. Areas that promised easier passage through the choking obstacles pushing them to either side of the faint trail; a vague path he often had to stare at hard to even recognize amongst the tangles of briars and pale green ferns.

The light had dropped; the canopy was so thick here.
Again.
He worried about Luke becoming lost. Stopped and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Was suddenly furious at himself for letting Luke just tear off on his own. ‘Stop.’

‘Eh?’ Dom asked, between his heavy breaths.

Phil stopped; his breath wheezed in and out of his bulk. Hutch heard him suck hard on his inhaler.

‘What is it?’ Dom whispered.

Hutch held up his compass, angled it away from Dom’s wet red face.
North west
. He wanted to scream. They were shuffling off course again. They were slanting up and back into the forest. Going deeper, not down and outwards. They had been turned around too incrementally for it to feel like a definite change of direction. But when? How had that happened? He would have noticed. Were he not so encumbered with Dom’s heaving uncoordinated bulk against his left side, he might have been more alert.

‘No good.’ He shook his head.

‘What isn’t?’

‘This direction.’ He let go of Dom and slapped his hands against his hips. ‘Shit.’

TWENTY-ONE

At first Luke thought it a natural outcrop of rock. They had seen plenty of boulders and even cliff faces on the first day of the hike, which suddenly reared up from the green earth. But once he’d pulled himself around the stone and torn some of the wet ivy from an inclined side, he saw the worn runes. They covered one complete side of the rock, and were ringed by an oval border, thick with petrified lichen.

He turned about, lowering and raising himself on his ankles to peer through the surrounding thicket that had overrun the rock. Between the mesh of dead wood and the thigh-high weeds that coated it, he saw another of the standing stones about twelve feet away from where he was crouching, and then another beyond it.

Breaking away from the face of the stone and lowering himself even further, he rediscovered the path that wound about the three stones but was now impossible to walk upright upon.

He tried to move forward, but his pack became immediately stuck in a branch and held him fast. Swearing through his clenched teeth, he reversed his body. Then removed his pack, groaning when the hot weight of it fell behind him, into the leaf mulch and dirt.

Against the ground, he crawled forward along a natural tunnel that had formed over the surface of the trail. Was it the trail? Yes. He stretched out an arm and followed the cartwheel rut with his fingertips. Small animals must have worn the tunnel through with their scurrying. Face down, he squirmed about and felt the cold damp soil embrace his chest and stomach.

He would move as far as he was able, to see if the foliage cleared from the path ahead. But this was the very last effort he would make in this direction. They’d already been travelling for four hours since sunrise and were no closer to getting out. Once he’d ascertained he had reached the end of the stretch of the track beside the standing stones, he would go back and tell the others it was time for the last resort. His plan. His idea. They could have been four hours into it by now. And it would take the very last of them to get out before nightfall, if they could even find the route they had come through the day before.

After twenty feet on his stomach the steely light suddenly brightened and the range of his visibility increased. He had reached the end of the natural tunnel, and could even look up above ground level.

He pushed his wet and bedraggled body on to its feet and broke through the lighter saplings about the exit. Lifting his legs high, to clear the thorns and nettles, he took a step forward into an area where the forest cleared of the thicker trees and presented an airier space of thigh-deep undergrowth and dwarf birch, with little growing higher.

The rain came down in silvery spikes. The jagged pieces of exposed sky he could see through the upper reaches of the wet spruce bordering and overhanging the clearing were bleak and dark with rain. A bit of white sky was all you got up here at about 5 a.m., then it just went grey. The path was somewhere beneath the undergrowth. It must have been, because it had once led to a building.

Luke stood still and stared across the clearing at what presented itself to him on the other side. A church. And what he had just crawled through was a cemetery. A very old one too if the graves had been marked by standing stones.

TWENTY-TWO

None of them said anything when Luke reappeared, without his rucksack. He’d been careless rushing back to find them; a deep scratch was hot and inflamed down his left cheek. It had bled along his jaw line and coagulated. And he was unaware that the tree branch that had lashed into his mouth had cut his top lip and painted his teeth with a scarlet film. Dom and Hutch just stared at his wild eyes, breathless attempts to speak, and at his wet and cut face.

On his way back from the cemetery, he had been gripped with an urgency that made him feel hot and loose and angry inside. He’d begun punching branches that hung across his return path; had even stopped to smash flat some small toadstools. Because getting back to the others had been harder than his leaving of them, as if the forest forbade it. He was reminded of his dream and was not grateful at all for the recollection. He’d stopped a dozen times and unhooked the sharp ends of broken branches from his jacket. It was now torn under one arm. He could not remember the undergrowth being that bad coming the other way. The constant hampering and snagging of the foliage, and his uncoordinated stumbling through it, made him hot and dizzy with a rage familiar to him, and always unhealthy. He had cursed the wood, cursed Hutch, cursed Dom, cursed this world and his reduced position in it. He’d boiled. And every step of the way back to the others, his thoughts had been dark with the image of the decrepit broken church in the dismal wet world.

And when he found them again, he could not believe how slowly the other three had been moving, how little ground they had covered since he had been away. He felt as if he’d had to retrace his steps all the way back to the same place where he had left them.

Luke straightened up from where he had been bent over to catch his breath. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’

‘What happened?’ Hutch asked.

‘Eh?’

‘Your gear? Where is it?’

‘I dumped it. Was slowing me down.’

Dom looked at Hutch and frowned, as if this act of madness confirmed a belief he had long held about Luke. ‘What the fuck you going to sleep in then?’

‘Not permanently. Just so’s I could get back to you guys faster.’

‘Why?’ Hutch said, with a nonchalance that annoyed Luke. ‘You find something?’

‘Because …’

‘Because what?’ Dom asked.

What the hell was wrong with them, ambling down the path like this? Dom and Hutch had been smiling about something when he reappeared. He even thought he had heard them laughing from a distance. ‘Are you even taking this seriously? ’ he asked and immediately wished he hadn’t when he saw Dom and Hutch’s surprised faces. Phil stood behind them. He had more colour in his cheeks now, but looked at Luke with a mixture of disappointment and caution. The hood of his coat was half off his head and made him look ridiculous.

‘’Course we are, you silly arse,’ Dom barked. ‘Think I’m enjoying this?’

Hutch said, ‘Dom,’ quietly. But there was something in that rebuke, something about Dom’s flat, stolid, scowling face; and something in Hutch’s supporting grin, that made Luke think his vision had lightened, as if the terrible pressure of rage that suddenly filled his body again had forced the darkness out of his eyes. He felt weightless and could hear nothing but a hot rushing through his ears. His voice seemed to originate from somewhere outside of his head. He didn’t recognize himself in his own voice, as if it was a recording played back to him, to his embarrassment. ‘You call me that again and I’ll put you on your fucking arse.’

He watched his own progress, as if disembodied, as he walked three steps up to Dom, whose face went pale and stiff as if he’d been forced to look at something unpleasant.

A remote part of Luke remained conscious of what the other bigger part of himself was now doing on instinct. It was the rage he brought back to them from the trees; the endless wet trees that would never let them go. And it demanded an eruption from him. ‘Did you hear me, bitch?’ he shouted into Dom’s face and watched a droplet of froth from his own shouting mouth hit Dom’s cheekbone.

‘Luke!’ Hutch shouted from beside him. ‘Woah!’

But he was not to be brought out of this trembling mad place until something snapped him out of it. With both hands, he shoved Dom backwards, hard. Dom lost his balance and dropped his weight onto his bad knee and then fell sideways into the undergrowth. Something swished behind Luke and hard fingers clamped around his biceps. He was pulled back and away from Dom, his feet clearing the ground at one point. All the strength seemed to leave his body for a moment. He scrabbled to find his feet when Hutch let him go a few feet down the trail.