The Ritual (25 page)

Before he remembered anything from the time before his waking, his being there, he sank away, back into a healing darkness and its blessed warmth.

FORTY-SEVEN

He awoke so thirsty he could not swallow and his lips would tear like rice paper if he forced them to part. It was later than before, much later. A great period of sleep had left the back of his eyes feeling bruised.

This was the same place as before, he assumed with a vague recollection of being half aware of lying in this position, on this same surface, at some other time recently. Though something notable was missing now. But what was it? From inside him, there had been a removal or a raising of something, like a weight. A
something
that had driven him, wasted him, spent him, left him witless, big-eyed and alight with panic for so long.

Fear.

Fear. The choking of it. The flinching and the paralysis. The relentless expectation of its cold jolt. Fear had finally gone from him.

And the time before he slept came back to him then. Like a gush of darkness through his mouth and eyes and ears. It even felt wet and cold, the terrible rushing of recollection through him, and it filled his nose with the stink of mulch and dead wood.

Scratched and bleeding, he’d walked to the end of himself. Lungs had burned and legs had cramped, but were now only warm and tired; ghostly outlines of scolds and scars about his tortured body told him a story he did not want repeated.

Stricken faces were lit up in his mind. Hutch. Phil. Dom. Up in the trees he saw the rags again, the rags and bones. Then he recalled the thin silhouettes of gaunt trees standing before the fire of a red sky. As did something else. It was among the trees, it was of the trees, and it was apart from the trees. Something upright, and watching him before a backdrop of some strange planet ablaze. The electric memory of the smashing of his skull, like a china bowl under a hammer, jolted his whole body. And he was disorientated by the noise of his own shriek in the darkness.

But he was saved and was now lying in a bed. He had been found, attended to. His heart burst.

Wrenching his eyes fully open, he felt the sensation of ripping cloth inside his head. A thud of pain behind his eyes followed. Then there was another and another thump, but these were weaker survivable aftershocks, and were smothered deeper inside his skull.

In this place of his salvation, the air tasted unclean. He thought of used clothes in a charity shop. Thirst burned like salt from a swollen tongue down to his navel. He opened his wooden lips and exposed his gritty mouth to the taste of neglect: moisture in old timber, dust, bed linen so oily it smelled of a hot animal.

He looked into the pale blank space before his face. Eyes contracting, refocusing, he saw the stitches of a bandage. One layer of material, close enough to his eyelashes to hamper a blink. Faint light seeped through the fabric. He recalled a vague sensation of his head being rolled between quick gentle hands while he slept. Caring hands that nearly made him surface from the fathoms of damaged sleep. It had been a long time ago: weeks? Days?

Something heavy and thick was covering him from toes to chin. He was warm under its weight despite the stink. Things inside the coverings bit him repeatedly with pinprick teeth. The back of his thighs itched. New constellations of sharp bites spread around his ribs.

Between his thighs and under his buttocks the bedding was also wet. It alarmed him more than the lice.

Concentrating hard, he moved his hips, his legs, his feet, then bent his knees, then his elbows. His neck he kept still, and he merely looked up, straight ahead, into the grubby fabric hanging over his eyes while his body reacquainted itself with sensation, with definition and with its possibilities.

Slowly, he raised his swollen leaden head from the greasy pillow and the scent of dusty feathers rose with him. Tilting his head forward, he squinted under the bandage and down his body.

And saw rolling hills of ancient eiderdown, patch-worked with colours faded or dark with grime; squares of disparate fabrics reaching to the bumps of his concealed feet. The surface of the coverings were level with the sides of the wooden frame he lay inside. It was like he was inside an old wooden chest or coffin; he had been sunk deep within its inflexible confines and covered over with antique swaddling. It was some kind of bed, but a structure he was immediately afraid there might be a lid for.

Carefully, he twisted his head to the left and in the greyish light saw a cabinet made from dark timber beside the bed. A dark wooden jug stood beside a wooden cup. Without his consent his throat contracted but barely completed a painful swallow.

Carefully, he moved on to his left side then shuffled into a foetal position. Propping his upper body on one elbow, he reached for the mug. It was heavy. Full of dusty warmish water. All of which he swallowed, only tasting it afterwards when his mouth became tangy with rust and sparked steely with minerals. Wild water. Well water.

A bludgeoning ache behind his eyes rolled in waves and brought his eyelids down fast as storm shutters. His limbs turned to liquid with exhaustion after the simple exertions.
Am I that broken?
He eased back into the imprint that his long occupancy of the bed had shaped into the bedding. He seemed to sink deeper down than before, the odiferous cavern of unventilated quilt pressing behind his descent.

Now he was still, the pain inside his skull rang more softly, and the slosh of water in his gut lulled him back to restfulness.

He was saved. ‘Saved’. He was saved from the terrible forest and what walked through it. He was alive and saved. Saved. Alive. Saved. His face became wet with tears. He sniffed. And then dropped into sleep.

FORTY-EIGHT

There are people in the room.

Again?

Leaning towards you while you stand in the metal tub, they inspect your white body. They are old. So very old. Every inch of each face is furrowed and wrinkled into clumps of yellowish skin, like under the eyes, which are hard to make out beyond glints within the sunken sockets. But when one of them puts their head through a thin strand of light, you can see a milky-blue cornea surrounded by a discoloured iris.

One of them could be a woman, but there is so little hair on the patchy skull. Just a few white bits around the sides of the head; the skin traversed by blackish veins. The other could be a man, or maybe even the body of a bird without feathers, shrunken and starved into a shape of sticks.

Bent in their loose black garments, like robes hanging from bare bone, they squint and peer at your hips, ribs and shoulders.

Fingers with knuckles the size of peach stones, covered in skin as translucent as the flesh of cold chicken, prod at your freckled belly, as if you are a joint of meat. Dark teeth spike behind the tight grins of lipless mouths, grooved like muzzles.

You try and speak but you can’t get your breath. They mutter to each other in words you cannot understand. Lilting, musical voices, that rise up and down in strange cadences.

Tallow candles are lit and placed about the walls, making shadows flicker and rise up and down the dark wood, highlighting the horns and discoloured bones nailed to the planks.

Then from above you, through the ceiling, you hear the knocking. The banging of wood on wood. Mad tappings and rappings without rhythm, like a child with a stick and a saucepan. And maybe it is an animal, a dog or something up there, because something is whining. The sounds are dulled through the smoke-blackened ceiling; this whining and mewling amidst the banging.

You are grateful that this makes the old people in the dirty black wool move away from you. But you are only relieved for a moment, because the figures move towards the door where they seem to suddenly be in a hurry to get out. One of them fumbles with the door latch and the other peers up at the ceiling, with eyes full of glee, and more teeth showing than before, at the sound of hard feet resounding against the floor upstairs; unsteady at first, and then cantering.

You try to follow the old people out of the door, but it’s not possible for you to move and step over the edge of the black iron tub. Your ankles are tied together with something thin and painful where it squeezes your skin, and when you look up you can see your hands going purple from where they are bound together at the wrist with a leather strap that loops over a blackened iron hook in the ceiling.

Then the old people are gone and you are alone in the cold metal basin. But something is coming down from the room upstairs. You can hear its bone feet on the wooden steps of a staircase outside this room, and you can hear the sound of something squeezing its body down and through a narrow passage, accompanied by quick gusts of excited breath.

A thick shape fills the doorway of your room. You scream when you realize it is coming through on all fours, with the long horns out front.

Luke woke with a cry.

Panted hard like he had just smashed across the finishing line of a sprint down a running track. He called out for his mother.

The remnant of his waking was swift and the nightmare receded to a sepia blur, then vanished. He was awake and gasping into the old bandage tied about the front of his face, reaching down to the tip of his nose. He blinked rapidly. Moaned. Because for a few disorientating moments, he thought he was hanging from the ceiling, tied by his wrists. But it was nothing more than the gibberish of shock after waking in darkness.

Moist and warm, the moulding of the bedding clung about him and outlined his physical shape; prone, stretched out.

He peered beneath the bandages, his eyes slitted to restrict the scorching of the thin light. He saw the murky outline of the old eiderdown; the sides of the box bed; perhaps a dim dark wall beyond his feet.

Still safe. Still saved.

He’d had a bad dream. No problem there. No surprises. There would be others.

He thought of his open wound; the cracks in his skull. He touched the bandage.

Breathed out, slowly.
Sit tight.
He was safe and help was on its way.

He closed his eyes.

FORTY-NINE

So many violent sounds smashed him from sleep. For a few dazed seconds, he continued to mumble to the thin seated figures of whom he had been dreaming. Then he addressed the origin of the noise erupting from somewhere beneath his feet, ‘Please. Who?’

Something or someone was screaming. It was a high-pitched, inhuman cry. Beneath these relentless shrieks, a sound like the plates of the earth grinding together in an earthquake became an impossible rhythm.
Drums.

The bed vibrated. He felt a thicker thrumming sensation in his hands and feet, and in the pit of his stomach.
Bass.

Music.

He released his breath. The entire room was not filled with a million insects buzzing against each other, inside some giant smoking hive; these were guitar strings being shredded rapidly and amplified into distortion. Some type of extreme music was erupting from nearby. From out of speakers so worn, damaged, and too small for the task set them, they crackled and snapped like cooking fat.

Luke came up from the stinking eiderdown and slumped onto his elbows; his eyes behind the bandages were stuck between a squint and full closure. He clawed at his face. Shoved the bandage up his forehead. The entire loose arrangement of dressings dropped off his head, as if a cap had been tugged away by an unexpected hand from behind. Cold stale air fell fast and cooled against his scalp. He forced his eyelids wide apart. Focused on the room. And then whimpered.

Three figures stood at the foot of the bed, and the very sight of them made him quite sure that the hell of the Bible was real, and that he had awoken in one of its rooms.

Black horns jutted from the head of the goat-headed figure in the middle. Hard as oak, polished like stone, the horns rose from a bristly forehead; curving outwards along their length, before tilting vertically into sharp points at their conclusion.

The sight of them took his breath away and thrust a snapshot of another dark place that made no sense into his mind; a mind that was now opening and closing its doors and windows like a film speeded to a blur.

The goat’s coal-black ears stuck out at ninety degrees from the great motionless skull, as if the creature had just been surprised in a forest glade. The yellow eyes with their large oval pupils were curiously feminine, softened by light-brown eyebrows and long eyelashes. Black fur, as glossy as a horse’s tail, dropped from beneath the beast’s chin.

Alone, even without the support of its two ghastly companions, the goat seemed to rise and not only fill the dim room to the ceiling, but command the entire space. It was blasphemously majestic, and shocking, and maddening, all at once.

Luke expected its horns to drop, and for it to begin a terrible rooting through the eiderdown. He imagined himself retreating up the bed to the rear wall where he would be gored. Opened, ragged up the front and emptied steaming into the bedclothes. He thought of dear Hutch, of Phil, and his face screwed into an involuntary palsy.

But the goat just stood above him, motionless, almost solemn; towering right up to the brownish ceiling.

Was this their executioner? But if so then why was it wearing a dusty black suit and grubby collarless shirt? The fraying sleeves of the jacket were halfway up its front legs. Or were they forearms? The soiled jacket was so tight across the shoulders, the figure’s long front limbs were pinched against its torso. It looked like the creature had taken the suit from a much smaller dead man.

Luke looked at the other two figures.

Like the cast of some degenerate Victorian pantomime, they crowded the upright goat and issued across the bed a scent of disused props, of dusty backstage places, of old sweat.

The hare was too terrible to look upon for long. And the fact that it was diminutive, no taller than five feet, somehow made its visage even worse to behold than the goat with its appalling height.