The Ritual (15 page)

‘Night,’ he said to Hutch.

‘Night,’ Hutch replied under the noise of the tent’s zipper going back up. Luke watched the tent shake about as Hutch prepared his bedding, saw the bright yellow disc of torchlight skim about the inside of the tent like the luminous eye at a porthole of some submersible craft, with the forest about them a deep black sea.

Luke sat down within the awning of his tent, listened beyond Phil’s wheezy breathing and Dom’s snoring. In minutes of his torch being clicked off, Hutch was whistling through his nose as he too fell into a heavy sleep.

Luke took out his cigarette packet. His face and skin were burning from exhaustion, his head felt unnaturally heavy, but his mind was still too active to let itself fully rest. At least out here he could smoke.

He lit up. Smoked the cigarette slowly. And silently, he asked himself again, how was it that some people got left behind?

When he finished the cigarette, he wiped at his eyes and climbed into the tent he shared with Phil.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The moon, large and so bright. Is it possible for it to be so near the earth? To arc across the night sky from one end of the horizon to the other?

Silver light frosts the treetops that stretch away forever. Near the ground, the air is bluish-white and gassy as moonlight mingles with the cold. And the wood looks like the bristling surface of an army, with lances, standards and great armoured backs rising out of a dark mass, once seething forward and now frozen as if a terrible march or retreat has been suspended. But it parts around this place. Avoids it. Thick trunks of ancient trees and whipping walls of bracken pull back from the edge of the paddock, from where they uneasily circle the loose, faded and stained tents. Nothing but long weeds and grass dare to mill about the campsite.

And what is that hanging from the treeline? Stretched between the black fringe of the wood like washing blown from a line and caught in the high tiers of forlorn branch and limb, something flutters. They could be shirts, holed and ragged. Discarded things with torn sleeves. Three of them, matched with three sets of frayed leggings, thin as long johns arranged below. And all stained with rust.

Skins. Stripped from dead things. Peeled off and flung upwards to hang like pennants, about the place you sought refuge in.

And now something is moving out there, through the vague and dark spaces behind the treeline. Wood cracks and splinters as it moves, just out of sight.

Pacing the weed-fringed clearing it begins to announce itself more readily with a yipping sound that occasionally breaks into a bark, and soars up to the icy clarity of indigo-black sky. A cry this place has known for a long time before you stood here, shivering and alone.

It’s trying to tell you something.

It is letting you know that you can wait for it here and watch it come fast from the trees, or you can try to run on slow and strengthless legs. Flee out there, through the spikes and snares of ungroomed woodland. Into the heaving army that will not let you pass easily through its rows and ranks.

It must be tall, because the branches so far from the ground begin to move straight ahead of you. Some are bent aside and allowed to whip back into place, where they settle and shudder. And through the silvery leaves come the deep guttural grunts. Almost a voice, but not something you can understand. Thick with doggish whines, bull coughs and jackal cries. Its breath turns to fog among the leaves and now you can see no more than the suggestion of something long and black moving swiftly between bush and trunk.

Sinking lower to the ground, it makes ready to appear.

Then the air is filled with screams, but not the cold air here, Luke realizes. But in the air of the world outside his nightmare something even worse was now occurring.

TWENTY-NINE

At first Luke heard the screams from a distance, inside his dream. And then someone’s terror was all around him as he lay with his eyes open, staring at the dark roof of the tent he shared with Phil.

Heavy with the thick fugue he had been jerked from, his first thought was to lie still in the dark and to wait for the cries to stop. Only the screams of hysteria, of mindlessness, did not cease. The awful sound of a man shaken apart by panic and fear to the point of extinction, turned the very air into a turbulence in which no clear thought could form or settle within earshot of it.

In the sightless cold he had awoken into, Luke then comprehended, both with shock and a sudden relief, that the noisy commotion was coming from the adjoining tent. It was Dom.

The loose fabric on the ceiling of his own tent rippled from the commotion in the neighbouring tent, from where the screams were issuing. It all brought to his mind the sense of someone being violently yanked from their berth, accompanied by sounds of cloth torn into long strips and a thrashing of bushes.

Luke sat bolt upright and fumbled for the zipper of his sleeping bag. Then snatched about for his torch in the darkness, but his hands could not find it. By the time he gave up on the torch and pawed his shaky fingers across his damp trousers, needing to find the shape of the Swiss Army knife in the front pocket, Phil sat up beside him.

‘What is it? What is it? What is it?’ Phil repeated in a daze, but within his tone was also an underlying note of acceptance, as if he had been expecting the disturbance and now it had arrived he only wanted to know specific details.

And then their movements and their words stopped, as did Dom’s wailing. All was frozen into silence by the sudden roar of pain unleashed by Hutch. A short expulsion of noise from an agony so great it made the listeners feel sick. It was followed by a childlike whimper, and nothing more.

Away from their camp tunnelled the noise of a heavy weight at ground level, rushing into the forest, snapping aside and crushing flat all woody impediments as it retreated at speed into the returning silence that was once again only dimpled with gentle rainfall upon the leaves and the fabric of their half-collapsed tents. Then into this vacuum came several strange bird and animal cries, as if these creatures had also shared the terror of the rout of the camp, out there in their own darkness, and were now calling out nervously to survivors buried in rubble.

Phil’s torch clicked alight. Coloured entrails of clothing spilled from his rucksack. Two damp waterproof coats lay dishevelled by the sagging entrance. No inch of groundsheet was free of the clutter Phil had littered about the tent. In the mess, Luke saw his own torch, snatched it up.

Beside them, through the thin material that pressed against Luke’s body as he scrambled to his hands and knees, they heard Dom’s rhythmic panting in the next tent. He sounded like a man suffocating, or suffering some kind of fit.

Luke kicked free of his sleeping bag. He trod on his cold waterproof trousers, still damp with yesterday’s rain, and shivered when the naked parts of his body touched the clammy groundsheet and the interior of the tent’s moist fabric. Bent double, shuffling to the entrance, he looked about for his boots. They were still wet inside. He discarded them. Behind him, Phil clutched at his own clothes.

Knife extended, Luke ducked through the unzipped flap. Lost his balance, swore, then righted himself and rose into the night air. It punished his cheeks. Around his startled senses a thousand things dripped into the darkness. Through small apertures in the forest canopy the sky was a black void that quickly swallowed his torch’s feeble beam. He could not move his body out of the tent’s porch.

When the white light of his torch came down to earth it found the second tent.

There were several things terribly wrong with it.

Luke heaved in his breath and tried not to sob: the tent had completely collapsed into a lumpy mess of nylon and guy ropes and much of one side had been torn away; the ripped white netting of the inner compartment had been revealed, its incongruous appearance utterly shocking against the wet black earth; around the jagged edges of the rent in the outer skin of the tent, a liquid glistened in a series of long streaks and clots, and even pools. Shaking from his hand that held the torch, the beam of weak white light trembled about the heavy stains on the torn nylon. They were bright red in colour: oxygenated blood.

Luke’s mind could not be whole, or steady. There was a rushing of incomplete thoughts and notions, some utterly petty, in and out of the space inside him where his mind needed to define itself and focus. He could not move; just stood upright in his underwear and shuddered from the cold, from the emotion, from the sudden surge and ebb of adrenaline in his own blood.

Somewhere inside the punctured rag that was once a two-man tent, Dom lay gasping. Luke did not want to look under the wet green and yellow nylon. Guy ropes lay slack as if the tent cloth was a sail collapsed upon a yacht’s deck at night in some black godless sea, with a crew member trapped beneath it.

The articulated fibreglass poles of the dome frame had been pulled apart in some places, and protruded in the disorderly display of fabric. The tent now reminded him of a great kite that had smashed to earth. Inside the crumpled mess was pain and bleeding. Something Luke wanted to run from without seeing.

He turned about where he stood and flashed his torch across the uneven and encroaching perimeter of the clearing. Mossy bark, blackened tree branches, dark sopping leaves, shadows between. Inside himself he cringed and thought of what Phil thought he had seen in the cemetery. He expected to see the limbs of trees suddenly animate and draw his stare to a terrible shape taking form. But nothing moved.

He swallowed noisily, blinked his wide dry eyes. ‘Dom! Dom!’ he suddenly called at the lumpy remnants beside his own half-collapsed tent. Flashed his torch over the ruin again. ‘Are you hurt, mate?’ His voice seemed to die before two words were out of his mouth. His chest shuddered like it had just endured a great sob or an intake of icy air.

Got to keep it together.

‘Where’s Hutch?’ Phil said from the ground level beside Luke’s naked legs. He had come pushing, clumsily, through the doorway into the porch of their tent on his hands and knees. His torch beam clashed with Luke’s, tried to move it aside while it flicked and probed at the heap beside them.

Luke stepped out of the tent’s porch in his underwear. The shock of the cold earth against his pale bare feet punched his breath back inside his chest. Disorientated, he trod on the end of a tent peg, then tripped over one of their tent’s few taut guy ropes and fell sideways into the trees. A sudden slap of wet verdure against his soft face, and the poke and snap of a small branch under his weight, forced him to right his position, to get fully to his feet, to gather his bearings. Wakefulness came fully and coldly and shivering right then.

‘Domja!’ Luke called, resorting to the nickname he used in better times. It drew a reaction. A punching out, a raking of fingers from inside the deflated green and yellow tent.

‘Easy. Easy,’ Luke said, but then stepped back as Dom came through the rent on his hands and knees. Dom was wearing a purple fleece, boxer shorts and thick grey socks. His sleeping bag followed him through the tear, caught on one foot. He kicked it away and stood up as best he could. The leg with the grubby bandaged knee was hopelessly bent. His dirty streaky face looked like it had just emerged from a coal mine; it shuddered in the light from the two torch beams. He eyes were red and wild.

Phil was on his feet now too, his legs bare, boots unlaced, hair sticking upright in a fan across one side of his head.

‘Where the fuck is H?’ Dom demanded of them, breathless. He looked at Luke, then at Phil, then Luke again. ‘Where the fuck is he?’

THIRTY

They returned to the campsite two hours after waking. Above the forest, where they could see it, the sky was now a dark indigo.

No one spoke from the shock of it all. They were numb with fright and sick at the colossal thought they each tried to comprehend, then accept. Something that would keep rearing up in their minds and hearts when they were too tired to suppress it and were caught off guard. Something impossible, something consuming, something choking.

They had called his name a hundred times; hobbling and shuffling in a nervous pack, torch beams flashing all about them at the dripping impenetrability of the forest; heads whipping back and forth at every meagre sound or far-off screech of a bird in the cold air, until they were dizzy and aching and exhausted by their own skittish fears. No one answered their calls; calls that were strident at first, then desperate, and finally just hoarse and not penetrating much beyond the immediate thickets.

‘Hutch!’

‘Mate!’

‘Hutch!’

‘H!’

It had been too dark to see the evidence of his departure. But Hutch was gone and now they were left alone with his blood that was dark and thickening all about the broken-down tent.

‘Can you take the other tent down?’ Luke asked them, breaking a long silence with a voice that was flat and distant to his own ears. ‘And pack it up. Plus your gear. We need to move the minute the light improves.’

Mystified, Dom and Phil just stared at Luke. Shocked and angry with him too, but also listless and apathetic, they just stared, and stared. He tried to explain himself. ‘I’m packed. The map. I need to look at it.’ He glanced at the destroyed tent. ‘Maybe sort Hutch’s things as well.’

It was four in the morning; they had been woken at two. But at least they were all inside their sleeping bags by eleven the night before, so a few hours’ sleep were behind them. Not enough to recover from the previous day’s exertions, Luke calculated, but enough to give them a few hours of strength this coming morning. The most important hours of the entire trip so far. Luke knew the edge of the forest must be reached in the coming morning, by noon latest. Dom’s knee would slow him to a weak shuffle soon after. Once that happened, they would not progress more than a mile or two before nightfall.