The Ritual (2 page)

Hutch was shocked at how much anger Luke had in him these days. Their regular phone calls, that Luke tended to initiate, often deteriorated into rants. It was like his friend could no longer internalize his rage and deal with it. ‘Hey, anger management.’

Luke looked startled. Hutch winked at him. ‘Can I ask a huge favour?’

Luke nodded, but looked wary.

‘Like I said, cut the Slim Fast Massive some slack.’

‘I will.’

‘I know there’s some attitude there. Especially Dom. But they’re both feeling the strain right now. Not just this. Other shit too.’

‘Like what? They never said anything to me.’

Hutch shrugged; could see how disappointed Luke was to be in the dark about Dom and Phil’s domestic situations. ‘Well … kids and stuff. You know Dom’s youngest lad has a few problems. And Phil’s wife is a permanent state of ball-ache for the guy. There’s some trouble at both mills, if you follow. So go easy, is all I’m saying.’

‘Sure. No worries.’

‘On the bright side,’ Hutch said, trying to change the conversation, ‘we cut this crap in half today, then we get more time in Stockholm before we head back. You love that town.’

‘I guess,’ Luke said.

‘But?’

Luke shrugged. Blew smoke out through his nose. ‘At least here, we are on a trail we can see on the map. The forest is new ground. It’s off piste, mate. There are no trails marked.’

‘It’ll be a treat. Trust me. Wait until you get inside. It’s National Park. Completely untampered with. Virgin forest.’

Luke’s index finger tapped the map. ‘Maybe … but you don’t know what the ground is like in there. At least this rock is flat. There’s marshes in there, H. Look. Here. And here.’

‘We won’t go near them. We’ll just weave through the thinnest band of the trees, here, for a couple of hours, and
voilà
… pop out the other side.’

Luke raised his eyebrows. ‘You sure? No one will know we’re down there.’

‘Makes no difference. The Environment office was closed when we left, and I never called ahead to the Porjus branch. It’ll be fine though. That’s only a precaution for winter. It’s hardly even autumn. There won’t be any snow or ice. We might even see some wildlife in there. And the fat men couldn’t walk on sponge for another two days, let alone rock. This short cut will halve the distance. We’re still looking down the barrel at walking through the second half of today. And we’d need another whole day and evening to reach Porjus tomorrow. Look at them. They’re done, mate.’

Luke nodded, exhaled long twin plumes of smoke down his nostrils. ‘You’re the boss.’

TWO

FOUR HOURS, TWENTY MINUTES LATER

Dead wood snapped under their soles and broken pieces were kicked away. Branches forced aside snapped back into those walking behind. Phil fell and crashed into the nettles, but stood up without a murmur and jogged to catch up with the others who were almost running by this time. Their heads were down and their shoulders were stooped. Twigs whipped faces and laces were pulled undone, but they kept going. Forward, until Hutch stopped and sighed and put his hands on his knees in a tiny clearing. A brown place where the dead wood and leaf mould was shallow and the thorny vines no longer ripped into socks or left burrs, impossibly, inside shirts and trousers.

Luke spoke for the first time since they’d stumbled across the dead animal. He was breathless but still managed to get a cigarette into his mouth. Only he couldn’t light it. Four attempts he made with his Zippo until he was blowing smoke out of his nose. ‘Hunter I reckon.’

‘You can’t hunt here,’ Hutch said.

‘Farmer then.’

‘But why put it up there?’ Dom asked again.

Hutch took his pack off. ‘Who knows. There’s nothing cultivated in the whole park. It’s wilderness. That’s the whole point of it. I could use a smoke.’

Luke wiped at his eyes. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Bits of powdery bark kept getting under his eyelids. ‘A wolf killed it. It was an elk, or deer. And … something put it in the tree.’ He threw the packet of Camel cigarettes at Hutch.

Hutch picked the cigarette packet from the ground.

Phil frowned, stared at his feet. ‘A forest has wardens. Rangers. Would they …’

Hutch shrugged, lit up. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the first people to walk through this bit. Seriously. Think of the size of the county. Twenty-seven thousand square kilometres. Most of it untouched. We’re at least five kilometres from the last trail, and that’s hardly ever used.’

Luke exhaled. He tried again. ‘A bear. Maybe a bear put it up there. To stop things eating it. You know, on the ground.’

Hutch looked at the end of his cigarette, frowned. ‘Maybe. Are they that big in Sweden?’

Dom and Phil sat down. Phil rolled a sleeve up a chubby white forearm to his elbow. ‘I’m scratched to buggery.’

Dom’s face was white. Even his lips. ‘Hutch! I’ll ram that map up your useless Yorkshire arse.’ He often spoke to Hutch like this. Luke was always surprised at the outbursts, at the violence of the language. But there was no genuine hate in these exchanges, just familiarity. It meant Dom and Hutch were closer these days than he and Hutch. And he’d always considered Hutch to be his best friend. It made him envious because Dom and Hutch were better friends. They’d all known each other for fifteen years, but Dom and Hutch were just as close as they had been back at university. They even shared a tent. Both Luke and Phil felt short-changed by the arrangement; Luke could tell Phil felt the same way, even though it would be impossible for them to admit it without offending each other.

Dom pulled a boot off. ‘Some holiday, you tosser. We’re lost. You haven’t got a clue where we are, have you, you mincing fruit?’

‘Dom, cool your boots. Just about a click that way’ – Hutch pointed in the direction they had been scrambling towards – ‘you’ll be eating hot beans and sausage beside a river. There’s a quartet of Swedish beauties pitching their tent right about now, and getting the camp fire ready. Relax.’

Phil laughed. Luke smiled. Dom felt obliged to join in, but in seconds his laughter was genuine. And then they were all laughing. At themselves, at their fear, at the thing up in the tree. Now they were away from it laughter was good. It felt necessary.

THREE

They never found the river, and the mouth-watering dream of Swedish girls and hot beans with sausage dimmed like the September light, and then vanished along with any expectation of finding the end of the forest that day.

While the other three squatted in silence – Luke sitting apart from Dom and Phil, who wolfed energy bars – Hutch glared at the map again, for what must have been the fifth time in an hour. With a dirty finger, he traced the intended short cut between the Sörstubba trail they had abandoned at midday and the river trail. He swallowed again at the frisson of panic that had appeared in his throat as the light started to dim.

In the morning he had known exactly where they were on the map, where they were in the Gällivare municipality, where they were in Norrbotten County, and where they were in Sweden. By late afternoon, with the glimpses of sky through the treetops changing from a thin grey to a thicker grey, he was no longer certain where they were in the forest that intersected the two trails. And he never anticipated so much broken ground or the impenetrable thickets when he chose this route.

Which wasn’t making any sense at all. They were no longer even following an approximation of a direct course; the sense of moving in the right direction stopped for him over two hours before. The forest was leading them. They needed to move south west, but once they were four kilometres deep it was as if they were being pulled due west, and sometimes even northwards again. They could only move where the foliage was thin, or where spaces occurred naturally between the ancient trees, so they were never moving in the right direction for very long. He should have compensated for that.
Shit
.

He glanced over his shoulder at the others. Maybe it was time for another judgement call: to go back the way they had come in. But if he could even find the haphazard route now, it would be dark by the time they returned to the place from where they had started at midday. And it would mean going past that tree again, with the animal hanging from it. He could not see the idea going over well with Dom and Phil. Luke would be cool with it. The forest made him uneasy too; he could tell. Luke’s lips moved as he talked to himself; always a sign. And since they had been so deep among the trees he’d been smoking constantly; another bad sign.

At least the exertion was limiting the speculation on how the corpse came to be hanging from the tree. Hutch had never seen, read, or heard of anything like it; not in twenty years engaged in outdoor pursuits. It had confounded Luke too; he could tell his friend was still struggling with the mystery in silence. And also thinking exactly what he was thinking:
what the hell could do that to a large animal?
In his mind Hutch ran through images of bears, lynx, wolverine, wolves. No fits, but it was one of those. Had to be. Maybe even a man. Which seemed even more disturbing than an animal performing such a slaughter. But whatever had done that much damage to a body, wasn’t far away.

‘On your feet, men.’

Luke tossed his butt and stood up.

‘Piss off,’ Dom said.

‘Here, here,’ Phil added.

Dom looked up at Hutch. The lines at the side of Dom’s mouth cut deep furrows through the filth on his face; his eyes were full of pain. ‘I’m waiting for the stretcher, H. I can hardly bend my leg. I’m not joking. It’s gone all stiff.’

‘It’s not far now, mate,’ Hutch said. ‘River’s got to be close.’

FOUR

Four kilometres due east from the thing in the tree, they found a house.

But this was only after another four kilometres of wading through ivy, nettles, broken branches, oceans of wet leaves, and the impenetrable naked spikes formed by the limbs of smaller trees. Like everywhere else, the seasons were confused. Autumn had come late after the wettest summer since records began in Sweden and the mighty forest was only now beginning to shuck its dead parts to the ground with fury. And as they had all remarked, it was so ‘bloody dark’. The thick ceiling of the trees let little daylight fall below to the tangled floor. To Hutch, the forest canopy left an incremental impression of going deeper inside something that narrowed around them; while looking for the light and space of an open sky they were actually descending into an environment that was only getting darker and more disorientating, step by step.

During the late afternoon and into the early evening, when they were too tired to do anything but stagger about and swear at the things that poked and scratched their faces, the forest had become so dense it was impossible to move in any single direction for more than a few metres. So they had moved backwards and forwards, to circle the larger obstacles, like the giant prehistoric trunks that had crashed down years before and been consumed by slippery lichen; and they had zigzagged to all points of the compass to avoid the endless wooden spears of the branches, and the snares of the small roots and thorny bushes, that now filled every space between the trees. The upper branches ratcheted up their misery by funnelling down upon them the deafening fall of rain in the world above, creating an incessant barrage of cold droplets the size of marbles.

But just before seven they suddenly fell across something they were sure they would never see again. A trail. Narrow, but wide enough for them to walk upright in single file, without lurching about or being tugged backwards by a sleeping roll or backpack snagged on a branch.

By this time Hutch knew that none of them even cared where the trail led, and they would have followed it north, just for the luxury of being able to walk upright and in a straight line. Even though the trail would lead them either due east or even further out west, instead of southwards, the forest had cut them their first break. He could sort out exactly where they were later and chose the eastern direction to try and compensate for the north-westward course the forest had thus far enforced. Someone had been here before them and the path suggested it went somewhere worth going. Somewhere out of this dark and choking nowhere.

It led to a house.

Their packs were soaked. Rivulets of water ran from their coats and soaked the thighs of their trousers, and Phil’s jeans were sodden and black; the jeans Hutch told him in Kiruna not to take in case it rained. From the cuffs of their sleeves the rain poured onto their scratched and red hands. And it was impossible to tell if the rain had saturated and then seeped into the fleeces and clothes they wore underneath their Gore-Tex coats, or if the moisture was sweat soaking outwards from their hot skin. They were dirty and dripping and exhausted and no one had the nerve to ask Hutch out loud where they could pitch a tent in the forest. But that was what they had all been thinking; he knew it. On either side of the trail, the undergrowth was as high as a man’s waist. And it was during that time, when the fear in Hutch’s own belly began to turn into a shivery panic reminding him of childhood, and when the realization of the fact that he had made a terrible misjudgement and was now endangering the lives of his three friends hit him, that they found the house.

A dark and sunken building that slouched at the rear of an overgrown paddock. The ground was covered to the height of their knees with nettles and sopping weeds. A wall of the impenetrable forest they were lost inside bordered the grounds.

‘It’s empty. Let’s get in there,’ Phil said, his voice wheezy with asthma.

FIVE

‘We can’t just break in,’ Luke said.

Phil bumped Luke’s shoulder as he walked past. ‘You can have the tent to yourself, mate. I’m spending the night in there.’

But Phil never took more than a few steps through the paddock. Whatever instinct made the other three hesitant caught up with Phil and he eventually stopped with a sigh.