The Ritual (26 page)

Tatty brownish fur sprung in clumps from a long face. Mad eyes, fiery with amber but also black with rage at their heart, bulged from bony eye sockets. A pair of tall ears were cocked forward, almost twitching. More similar to tusks than teeth, two long pillars of discoloured bone dropped from its dirty black mouth, guaranteeing its prey a deep and fatal penetration.

With a gasp, Luke raised a hand feebly, as if to ward off the toothy menacing he anticipated, so busy and sharp, about his throat. Tufty, stained and stitched, its long neck bushed and bristled down to a pair of naked milky shoulders, and to a heavy bust, tipped with pink nipples, bright and puckered hard.

Aghast, Luke looked away from it. Demands for his attention were now being made by the lamb. It snorted. The first sound any of the figures had made. He stared into the lamb’s dead bluish eyes, fringed with pink rims and bleached eyelashes. It seemed to regard him with a great sadness, like a face from a freak-show daguerreotype. Fur stiff and yellowing with age was close-cropped about the head but still managed to curl like a human child’s. Atop its head, a garland of dried flowers had been entwined with a spray of heather. Beneath its little square teeth and small chin, a stiff circular collar of lace jutted out. Brittle with age and watermarked, the gown it wore brought to mind both a burial shroud and an old-fashioned christening dress made for a little girl. But the latter juvenile suggestions of its attire did not soften Luke’s shock at seeing the upright lamb at the foot of his bed. Did not soften it at all, but prolonged it.

Amidst the cacophony of the shrieking music, and as his mind struggled to comprehend the surreal horror of this welcoming party, he felt unable to move, or speak, or to even think clearly. And his visitors just stood there, still as mannequins, staring at him, their bright hideously animate eyes unmoving, as if they were waiting in expectation for something from him: a word, a scream, some feeble defence.

Suddenly, the great black head of the goat turned to the lamb and something passed between them. The lamb turned sideways, revealing its pink whisker-filled ear, and bent down towards the floor that Luke could not see. A white human arm shot out of the lace gown, the forearm girlishly pale and thin, but blackened with spiky tattoos above the wrist. The music abruptly ceased. Silence expanded.

Luke sat up fully, backed against the end of his little box and pulled his knees into his stomach. His shock lessened in the sudden quiet, but not by much. Beneath him, his quick movements disrupted the dirty sheepskins from a bed of old hay that filled the little box.

Why am I not in a hospital bed?
And he also wondered whether this second unwelcome appearance of a black goat into his life had burned up another of the fuses inside him, and that without the fuse he would remain a very nervous man for the rest of his life.

The goat raised two long-fingered human hands. Which were the first things attached to the creature that Luke was pleased to see, as he had been expecting hooves.

Dirty fingernails atop the slender fingers gripped the furry cheeks of the goat head and pushed upwards, removing the mask, but revealing a face beneath it that Luke at once wished had remained covered.

The face was caked in some kind of white cosmetic. It bleached the skin of all colour save the black lines cutting grooves into the forehead and at each side of the downturned sullen mouth. The eyes had been made especially hollow-looking with solid patches of black make-up, caked inside the sockets. The lips had been painted black too, but inside the hot mask much of the cosmetics had sweated off the thick vulval mouth of the figure, which sneered at Luke and exposed teeth the yellow-brown of unboiled corn.

Long black hair, clotted with sweat, fell like oily string about the figure’s large mournful face. Dark lines, carved as much as painted from between the bridge of the nose and into the forehead, gave the pallid face a permanent frown. The eyes were a cold bright blue; their expression intense, contemptuous, self-serious. The man’s beard was long and matted. Streaks of white greasepaint had run into it, frosting the hair, making Luke think of the foliage of wintry trees glimpsed on the banks of model railways.

Taking in his new surroundings as quickly as possible, Luke looked for a door in the plain but stained walls. Between the hare and the goat he spied one where two of the unadorned walls joined; a narrow aperture. It was closed. And all about him, the ancient plaster bulged from between warped timber, giving the room a misshapen bulbous character that made him even more uneasy. If that were possible, and he found that it was. A small window covered in brownish net curtains emitted a smoky light into the room.

Inside the ancient bed, with the sheepskin so soiled it made his skin feel rubbery, he realized that his body was also still filthy from his ordeal in the forest. The fact that he had not been bathed concerned him so much, he felt that if he dwelled upon it, he would begin to cry with all of his heart.

‘Welcome,’ the white-faced man said. The voice was extremely deep, but affected. The sudden brief animation of his mouth and the timbre of his voice made the man appear younger than Luke had at first thought when the figure unmasked. He now put the figure in his early twenties, even his late teens.

Luke coughed, to clear his throat of what felt like splinters. Swallowed. ‘Where am I?’ His voice was a croak, dried out, insubstantial.

‘South of heaven,’ the unsmiling figure replied in the deep voice that sounded even more absurd on its second airing.

A thin delinquent hyena laugh erupted from inside the lamb’s head; the harshest edges of the sound muffled by the confines of the mask. The figure leaned forward to grasp its own woolly horror of a head under the tiny ears and removed it after a twisting struggle. Straightening his spine and snapping his head backwards, the youth whipped his own long black hair from his wet face. Several strands no thicker than shoe laces clung to his moist cheeks.

The lamb’s thin face, which struggled between being boyishly pretty and weasel-like, was also plastered with white make-up. But crimson streaks had been daubed down his cheeks as if made by tears of blood, and also crafted to run from each nostril and from the corners of his downturned black-lipped mouth, like newly shed red blood.

Luke swallowed. ‘Who are you?’

In response to the question, the lamb issued a horrible sound that was both a bark and a high-pitched screech. Then the youth giggled to himself. Within the black caves of eye make-up, his pale-blue eyes were bright with glee. It sounded as if he had screamed, ‘Oscar Ray.’

Luke frowned, swallowed again, and again. ‘Oscar Ray?’

‘Oskerai!’ the figure shrieked again, looking even more damaged as it extended two spindly white arms from the nightgown and thrust them into the air.

‘We are the wild hunt,’ the tall figure said, his tone pompous, the words heavily accented.

‘The final gathering,’ a petulant, excitable female voice cried from inside the terrible head of the hare. Despite knowing there was a human being inside the hare head-piece, Luke knew he would never feel comfortable within the presence of its mad eyes and dirty teeth.

‘I don’t understand,’ Luke said, and hoped they could not read the depth of his fear and alarm; he was old enough to know it was always a mistake to reveal such in the company of the unstable.

Off came the wretched head of the female hare, to reveal the plump head of a young woman in her late teens, possibly younger. She too had painted her face, but where the others had created grotesque expressions resembling imperious grimaces or bloodied scowls, the girl’s use of white face-paint and black kohl had been more artful. Her spherical head depicted a permanent expression of spiteful mirth, as if the bright red splashes about her lips and chin were evidence of a recent sadistic act performed with the use of her mouth.

To engage their sympathy, and to put an end to this unnerving game, Luke touched the hot part of his head that felt too big to be healthy. Crusted blood in a thick seam indented his probing fingertips. The wound was still wet and open in the middle. The dressing behind him on the greyish pillow was the same one Dom had clumsily wrapped about his skull when he was out cold on the high ground, on the last night they spent outdoors. The white-faced youths had not even attempted to dress his head with a new bandage, let alone bathe his tormented and filthy body.

Now he was sitting up, the pain deep inside his skull, and the constant swoop of nausea it transmitted, made him horribly aware of his desire for an X-ray. ‘Hospital. A doctor. My head.’ They continued to watch him without emotion. ‘I need help. Please.’

The youth who had been the goat defiantly raised the chin on his mournful grimacing face. ‘Soon.’ With that, he turned, ducked his head, and strode noisily at the tiny door. He must have been nearly seven feet tall; his height freakish within the dimensions of the room. Steel shin guards flashed upon the giant’s biker boots, where they shot out from the too-tight and short trouser legs. The thick heels of his boots were studded with either rivets or small nails.

The hare suddenly shrieked at Luke and stuck out a tongue so incongruously red between its liquorice-black lips, that Luke physically recoiled. On her fat dirty feet, she then skipped after the giant and squeezed herself through the doorway.

Luke looked to the remaining youth, who appeared even more idiotic when alone, dressed in his horrid nightgown, the narrow face daubed with clown paint.

‘My friends,’ Luke pleaded. ‘They were killed. Murdered. You have to call the police. Now. You hear me?’

Head tilted to one side, the youth screwed his face into a quizzical expression. Then, imitating the taller youth by adopting a deep voice and mocking tone, said, ‘You must understand, there is no police here. No doctors. You are many miles away from such things. But you are lucky to be alive. Very lucky, my friend. We have no phone. But someone has gone to fetch help for you. Soon it comes.’

Bewildered, Luke gaped from inside the reeking box bed. ‘I don’t—’

Within the nightgown, the figure puffed out its chest. ‘You are fine. Be cool.’ Then he turned, picked up the CD player, and followed his companions out the door.

The clunk of a heavy key inside an old iron lock preceded the heavy booming of three sets of feet through a hollow wooden space, or a corridor, beyond the walls of the room. And for a long time after they had left him alone, Luke stared in mute shock at the locked door.

FIFTY

The clunk of a big key in the old lock of the door roused Luke from where he sat in a daze, on the side of the box bed.

He stood up too quickly, and fell against the cabinet. The wooden mug clanged against the floor, the jug wobbled sideways and jetted its remaining contents across the cabinet surface. The unlocking and opening of the door became hurried.

Before Luke could fully right himself, he caught sight of a small elderly woman in a long dress, moving swiftly from the door towards him. Somewhere under the long black gown, which concealed her body right up to the furrowed chin, her little feet knocked loudly against the wooden floorboards. The sound hurt his head.

With the faintest touch of her small hands, she guided more than moved him back to the bed. Where he sat, squinting through the shuddering waves of pain that surged from the middle of his head before crashing behind his eyes. He thought he would be sick. His vision broke into silvery dots and the back of his neck froze. Then he was sick. A great squeezing inside his stomach forced a trickle of dirty liquid out of his mouth. The elderly woman muttered something in Swedish.

At the furthest reaches of his bilious senses, he detected the presence of another figure in the room. When it spoke, in what reminded Luke of Norwegian more than Swedish, he recognized the voice to be that of the youth who had worn the lamb mask.

The nausea drained from Luke and the walls of the room stilled. He looked again at the old woman. Her face was expressionless, but her small black eyes glimmered in sockets so old the skin around her eyes reminded him of walnut shells. What he could see of them was strange and intense. He could not look into them for long.

Her lips had sunk inside her mouth; the chin below was deeply grooved and whiskered. The bright white hair about the tiny head was very thick but short, and looked like she had cut it herself, with a knife and a fork.

He suddenly wanted to laugh madly at this apparition, but he found her weirdness also filled him with a muting unease. Her skin was grey and also yellowy in places, like the flesh of an ageing smoker. She could not have been an inch taller than four feet. From a distance she would resemble a child in a high-necked dress, which looked homespun. Another notion that contributed to his discomfort. About the front of her black gown was a floor-length apron, once white, but now soiled brown with old water marks.

‘I don’t come near you if you are going to puke,’ the grinning youth said from behind the elderly woman. The childlike lacy gown had gone from his skinny body. Instead he wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name Gorgoroth and a photograph of a group of men, their faces horribly disfigured with white, black, and blood-red make-up. The cracked white paint on the youth’s face stopped under his chin, leaving his throat clean but still very pale. It was thin and made especially pointy with an Adam’s apple. Between his feminine hands he held a tray. ‘None of us can cook shit. We burn water! But she is OK. If you like fucking stew every day.’

Luke was not sure whether he should smile, or say thank you. He didn’t know why he was here, or who these people were. He said nothing.

On the wooden plate, dark floury vegetables were covered with a brown lumpy gravy.

‘We have drink. We make it ourselves, so it is very strong. Er … you call it … Moonshine. Moonshine! But maybe you puke very quickly if you drink it today, I think. So you get water.’

The tray was lowered and placed on the bed. Luke glanced at the youth’s tattooed arms; ink crawled in black vines around circular runes. On the inside of one forearm was a Thor’s hammer. A badly drawn inverted crucifix disfigured the back of a slender hand. Tucked inside his bullet belt was a long knife. The knife handle was made of dark bone. The blade was shiny against the dull leather of his trousers. The sight of it dried out Luke’s mouth.