The Ritual (20 page)

Before he could decide on when to strike out for the closest edge of this wooded hell, the world below him erupted into a loud voice. No, two voices. One inarticulate, the other calling for, ‘Phil. Phil. Phil.’ Each word gradually ascended in volume, until the voice was shouting. Then it settled for cries of ‘Oh God. Oh God.’ This second voice came from closer to the tree. It came from the tent.

Up in the spruce, Luke could not move his legs. His fingers closed tighter around the branches he was gripping. The thick rounded wood beneath his feet burned into his soles as if to fuse him into the limb.

It’s taking them. Won’t see me up here. Don’t move, don’t move. It’s still light, you can run. Wait. Wait here. Wait
.

But then his head dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and he looked through the leafy branches below for his companions. Turning to the side, at the waist, he peered through the web of verdure and black bough, down to his left where the sounds of terror and distress called up from the earth.

There was the tent. Where was Dom?

There was Dom, standing up, a few feet away from the green and grey tent, looking down the slope, bent over. But silent now.

Luke began his descent, both legs shaking as his eyes peered between the lines of branches and the crevasses of empty air, disguised by false ceilings of green leaf, until his soles found and gripped the branches he had already traversed on the way up. He tried to keep his focus short, on foot placements and no further; not the distant hard ground that he could fall down to and be broken upon.

‘Dom!’ he called. ‘Dom!’ he called again. There was no answer, but he kept on going down, limb by limb. His voice sounded feeble, silly, up in the air. Trembling feet hovered above branches too low to comfortably descend upon, his body clutched to the trunk. He went down like a terrified blind man trying to get down a ladder where the thin air told him he was up high enough to die if he slipped. Descending with his body shaking with fear and tense with adrenaline; going down, branch by branch, until he swung by his hands and dropped to the rocky ground of the hilltop.

Pins of pain shot through his feet and he stumbled sideways, then pitched right over, smacking his face against a gnarly tree root breaking from the stony ground. The sudden pain sobered him, angered him. He got to his knees. Stood up, shaky on legs weakened from exertion.

His eyes darted everywhere, looking for what he did not want to see. A long thing, he imagined. Black, loping. Bright wet colour about its mouth.

But he just saw the inert tent, Dom turning back towards it, but looking over his shoulder. And about the tent was the stony ground and grey-black boulders, the dark moss and pale-yellow lichen, and a few small trees on the summit struggling through for life and for the sky. There was no Phil on their hill. A little pile of firewood thus far collected was scattered near Dom’s feet, like he had recently dropped it.

Luke’s own breath suddenly deafened him. Sweat joined the drizzle and ran into his eyes; blurred his vision that would not stop jumping and trying to see the worst in every direction. He wanted to scream and run fast, anywhere. Panic swamped his mind. He shouted something to clear his head, and then forced himself to stand still, to slow his jumping eyes.

His vision cleared. His line of sight extended to where it had been before he lost his head. He came back into himself swiftly. Then Dom rushed at him.

And Luke saw that Dom was shaking with eyes too wide for any face but the face of the witless. His mouth was open and ruddy and gasping out incoherent whimpers mixed with shuddering inhalations.

Like a drowning man, Dom seized him. Snatched handfuls of Luke’s waterproof and then slipped sideways and onto his hip, pulling Luke over with him. Until they both kicked and scrabbled and pushed at each other on the hard ground, but could not break apart because Dom’s white-knuckled hands were clamped onto his waterproof; the fabric tugged out and into an expanse of stretched and ripping material that Luke felt come further away from the seams under his arms.

‘Dom,’ he muttered. ‘Dom, let go.’ But Dom hung on to him like he was a life raft in black drowning water. He didn’t want to go under alone and he clutched at the only safe and companionable thing within his reach.

‘Let go!’ Luke roared next to Dom’s face. But Dom only whimpered and said, ‘He’s gone. Took … Took …’

Until Luke grasped Dom’s dirt- and sweat-streaked head in both hands and squeezed, shouting, ‘Get off. Get off me,’ crushing that frantic, saucer-eyed face. Which crumpled. The hands on his chest, tangled among his clothes, went limp and dropped away. Dom lay on his side and covered his face with his filthy fingers.

Luke kicked away at the hard ground until he was standing upright and flattening his jacket down at the front. He scrabbled for the little oval shape of the closed penknife in his trouser pocket. He got it out, got it open. A pitiful little blade, dull in the dusk light on the desolate hillock.

He walked away from Dom. Didn’t blink once until his eyeballs felt like they had soap rubbed into them. Walked straight to the edge of the summit and looked down the rocky slope they had ascended, down to where Phil had been gathering firewood.

‘Phil!’ he called at the top of his voice. Called until his lungs squeezed out all of the air and hung spent and exhausted inside his chest. ‘Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil!’ Then he was coughing, his throat wrenched and painful.

There was no sign of Phil at all, and no response from the eternity of wet trees and dark hollows and eruptions of tangled undergrowth. No bird calls, not a breath of wind; even the rain seemed to have paused in shock at what must have come from those trees to snatch a full-grown man from his feet.

THIRTY-EIGHT

‘I … I heard him scream. I never let him out of my sight. I swear. He was twenty feet away. It was the stove. I was checking the water. Leaning over to see if it was boiling. Then I heard him scream …’ Dom talked the quavers out of his voice, until it became flat and quiet. ‘He’s gone.’

Luke crouched beside him, the knife still clenched in his fist. He looked away from Dom and the tent. Scanned the surrounding rise of boulder and stone to make sure nothing was coming for them.

‘Jesus. Jesus Christ.’ He could not accept this. That Phil was gone too; being pulled apart down there, somewhere in the shadows … He stopped the thought from blossoming into something more sudden and red and wet than it already was.

It wasn’t possible. Any of this. Perhaps if he wasn’t so tired, with every muscle hurting under his damp skin, and his mind thick and dizzy with fatigue, he would go mad. Three days in this place had blunted his edges. His personality was disappearing, paring itself down to instinct and fear. How a rabbit must think. You didn’t need to be sentient out here, just afraid all the time and quick to act when the world suddenly felt wrong around you; too still, too easy. That’s when you died out here.

He should go now. Take off on his own. He really should. He stood up and looked to the other side of the hill.
It
was taking them one by one then vanishing. Splitting up might confuse it. He should use the last of the light and the last of his legs and just run and never look back.

But would it change its pattern and kill them both tonight? First Dom up here, alone inside the tent, and then him down there, tangled in the undergrowth and delirious with exhaustion. Easy prey.

The dream. The sticks.

Dom’s shivering face looked up at him. The rims of his eyes were bright red. Dirty and bruised and dishevelled and wet, wearing only grimy boxer shorts and a waterproof, he looked pathetic. Something thickened and surged in Luke’s chest. He shuddered. Dropped to his knees and put his arms around Dom’s shoulders. Squeezed his eyes shut. Dom trembled, but his hands gripped the waterproof around Luke’s waist and he clung on like a child after a terrible fright.

In the drizzle and thin light, they held each other for a long time, in silence.

THIRTY-NINE

It was getting dark now and there would be no fire. Just their torches and the little blue whoosh of the camping stove, both resources that would need to be used sparingly until the morning. They sat back to back, in front of the tent after finishing the last energy bars and the rest of the sugar. It settled them for a while. A slender stream of nutrients in their exhausted blood allowed a brief period of calm to take possession of them.

A cold breeze blew constantly from the south west; below the hill it stirred the trees like a great and impatient breath. The rain had petered out, but the air was chilly. Shades of evening were created all about them by the dark weight of the cloud cover above. Darkness would soon overcome them.

They sat on Phil’s sleeping bag to save their buttocks freezing against the unforgiving stones, and each took a 180-degree view of the hill, keeping watch, alone, and trying to steer their thoughts away from Phil.

Dom began to laugh, but without any warmth, and broke the long silence that began when their backs first pressed together. ‘Everything I wanted to get away from for a week, I’m desperate to see again. Fucking crazy.’

Luke could feel the broad weight of Dom’s shoulders easing further into him. He hadn’t realized a body could be so heavy, so dense. Luke cleared his throat. ‘You’re not wrong.’ He stared into the distance. ‘I’ve been at my wits’ end. With my whole life. For so long.’ He smiled with tight trembling lips. ‘Being disappointed is normal to me. But why is it only now it doesn’t seem so bad? Any of it. Jesus, I wish I could be back there. In my shitty old flat with a cup of tea.’

Dom laughed again, then Luke did too, until Dom stopped and there was a sudden intake of breath from him. ‘Christ. I love my kids. I won’t see …’ And then he was weeping soundlessly, his shoulders moving against Luke.

A lump grew inside Luke’s throat. He shook his head. Still could not believe for a moment that he was here, sitting like this; there was no more Phil, no more Hutch. He sat mute, and stared out as the light dimmed like his sight was slowly going out. The cold moistened against his face and stiffened his joints.

The true gravity of his friends’ loss had been restrained by some inner function inside him. But his thoughts would keep darting back to the sheer wordless enormity of their demise; the inexpressible force of it could shut him down.

Then this cold horror and grief would turn towards that image of three little blonde girls on the screensaver of Phil’s phone, and the suspension of his feelings could no longer be maintained.

How would the news be imparted to them? Who could explain such a thing? How was it even done? Hutch had a wife. Luke swallowed. His lips trembled and his eyes burned wide. He tried to swallow it all away, but could not. His legs were shaking, his hands too.

His thoughts flitted to the absence of himself back in England. And his imaginings found his mum and dad, his sister, an aunt. They would hold the weight of grief and memory after his loss. That too would dim in time. But not for a while. Jesus, they’d have to fly out to Sweden and talk to polite officials, wait for search parties to come back in with empty hands and disappointed faces. He could see his mum’s face long with worry, his dad’s arm around her dipped shoulders. Maybe they would make the news, the four English guys lost up by the arctic circle. A mention in a broadsheet. Maybe. Jesus. Dom had a family. Kids. Hutch had a wife. A wife, goddamnit. Phil had kids.

It was too great a weight for his thoughts to bear. Suddenly he could not breathe as all of those faces from Hutch’s wedding, all stricken with shock and bafflement and grief, poured into his mind at the same time, vanished, then came back in again. ‘Jesus. Dom. Oh Jesus. Dom,’ he said, but softly.

Dom turned his head, sniffed. ‘All right?’

But Luke could not calm down. It was like inhaling that massive bong back at uni. He’d never been as frightened until that point; terrified of losing control and not being able to find his old self again, as his memory rewound quickly and seemed to erase itself, as he vomited and suffocated and gasped over a toilet. And now he was swamped by that same icy panic and fear all over again and was consumed with a terror that he would never feel any different again. Heart hammering up inside his throat, sweat popped from his scalp and poured into his woollen hat.

It was natural, he told himself. Go with it again. Let it burn out. Find its own end.

‘You OK?’ Dom asked.

Luke took three deep lungfuls of air and squeezed his eyes shut until the panic slowly subsided; he opened them when the rhythm of his heart softened. Then fished for his tobacco, papers and lighter in the top pocket of Hutch’s commandeered jacket. He nodded. ‘Considering.’

‘I know,’ Dom said. ‘I know.’

Luke struggled to keep his hands still as he tried to roll the paper around the shreds of tobacco. He failed. Tried again. Failed. Tried again. His hands had never been so filthy. Black as pitch under the end of his nails. Would he ever get those fingers clean again?

‘Can I have one of those?’ Dom asked, his voice thick with phlegm.

‘You sure?’ he said without thinking.

‘In our present circumstances, there are greater risks to be faced than smoking. But can you roll it? I’ve forgotten how.’

‘Yeah. No problem.’

He passed a messy cigarette and his lighter over his shoulder to Dom. Their last little comfort from the other world. When their fingers touched briefly, the tiny contact made Luke quiver with shame when he recalled punching Dom’s face. Striking his actual, living, expression-filled face. He remembered the surprise, the shock, the fear, the hurt. Like a child’s face.
When we’re frightened and hurt are we ever anything else?

‘Man, I’m sorry.’ He could barely get the words out.

‘Mmm?’

‘What I did. I can’t believe I did that. I’m just … angry. All the time. It’s not right. I’m not dealing with things … well.’

‘I can be an arsehole.’