The Ritual (34 page)

Such a reaction of despair seemed provocative in this place. He caught a suggestion of a dry mouth within a dry head, that had been pressed to the wall at his left, but was now gaping, or gulping towards, his presence. And then the body below the head, and the other two bodies flanking it, twitched ever so gently in their moorings, as if keen to be much closer to him in the musty darkness.

Luke dropped his eyes to the floor, to evade the signs of their restlessness. But in the thin brownish light he saw that the legs of the upright figures resting against the walls ended in bone. In hooves. And that their murky lower limbs bent the wrong way at the knee. It was as if animal limbs had been stitched into their groins. Luke thought of the thin forelegs of another
thing
they had discovered in another blasphemous attic, and of the tiny black mummified hands fixed upon its bony wrists.

He whimpered. He mewled.

Luke pushed backwards against Fenris’s pressing shoulder; he felt like he was being manoeuvred too close to the edge of a cliff, or within reach of a dangerous and cornered animal. Fenris dug his heels in, tried again to move Luke closer.

‘Nay,’ said the old woman.

‘Nay, nay,’ said Loki.

But Fenris would not be told and he pushed harder until Luke nearly toppled forward and fell. He thrust out one leg to keep his footing. His face skimmed closer to the seated figures on the little chairs.

Before him, a gasp. A sudden intake of breath inside a bone-dry chest. An audible creak, as the jaw widened in a little mottled face.

The second figure’s head seemed to shake in a slight palsy, as if it were confused. Then an eye opened in what was mostly a skull papered with brown skin. The eye was bluish at its centre, milky at the edges. And wet.

Luke sucked in his breath.

The figure’s mouth dropped open. A hint of tongue whisked inside; no bigger than the flick of a small fish’s tail.

Both figures shifted on their chairs. More animate, their tiny movements progressed from vibrations to a sudden confused animation. He heard the scrape of old cloth, the click of bone in socket. They were afraid. Or was it excitement that made them move like that upon those small wooden chairs?

And then the old woman was standing before the two little seated figures; shielding them, and pushing Luke and Fenris backwards with her small hard brownish hands. Her black eyes were fixed on Fenris’s face, over Luke’s shoulder, and her eyes were filled with so much loathing it was hard to look too long into them.

One of her small arms then withdrew from Luke’s belly that she pushed at; and suddenly that little hand moved behind her grubby apron, before returning with something extending from her tiny hand. Something thin and sharp and glinting within the tiny liver-spotted fist. Luke looked down and focused on the blackened steel of an old blade, an inch from his naked gut: narrow as a pencil, a museum piece, a relic whipped from a still life painted by a Dutch master. It prodded at him again.

There was commotion of heavy boots from somewhere behind him in the attic. And Loki’s voice was suddenly loud all about them. Fenris began wheedling with Loki in Norwegian. Then he talked quickly and angrily at the elderly woman, who in turn bared her blackish gums and dark teeth and growled at Fenris like a small bear.

Luke was suddenly pulled away, backwards, to the entrance, his feet kicking and scuffling for balance on the old dusty floorboards. The lantern light leapt and retracted from behind him; it surged up and dropped down the underside of the ancient roof. And the amber light gave the impression that a row of the thin figures against the right wall, were all leaning forward at the same time as if eager for him to remain in there with them.

Then Luke was spun around above the opening to the attic staircase, and pushed at it by Loki; one huge hand cupping the back of his head. But Luke needed little encouragement and leapt down the stairs, skittering, stumbling, missing his footing, and crashing to his knees at the bottom.

He was talking, quickly, to himself; had not realized he was doing so.

Surtr stood before him, looking as frightened as he felt.

He tried to get up, but in his jittery panic fell forward onto his face. His forehead hit the floor, caught the tip of his swollen nose. Tiny broken bones moved within the inflamed tissue. His eyes turned over, white, and his stomach flopped inside out. He bleached into a faint for a few seconds, banged his mouth against wood, then woke and clasped his face with the imploring fingers of his bound and useless hands.

In the distance, up above him, there was shouting: Loki and Fenris. And another sound. One far more disconcerting. A deep, throaty growling that evolved into bleating. It didn’t sound like a person. Didn’t sound like it had come out of a human mouth at all. And it was then combined with a stream of words twisted enough in their anguish to inform the listener that hysteria was building within the speaker. It must have been the voice of the old woman.

FIFTY-NINE

‘Now maybe you take us seriously, eh?’ Loki stood over Luke, shaking his head in grave disappointment.

Luke looked up from the box bed through the one eye that remained open. Inside his mouth he could feel bits of teeth, like sand, from where he’d fallen onto his face. But, strangely, there was no tooth pain.

Fenris had been sent outside by Loki, to calm down. When they came down from the attic, Loki had bellowed at Fenris. He’d even cuffed him hard, outside of Luke’s room, and then shoved him down the stairs. Surtr had meekly followed the petulant Fenris into the paddock outside. He could hear her now, outside his window, continuing Loki’s admonition of sulky disobedient Fenris.

Leaning over the box bed, which Luke had crawled back to after falling down the attic stairs, Loki rebound Luke’s ankles with a new nylon tie. And Luke did not resist, having had enough of fists and boots and shoving and yanking, but he had wondered if they found the little white loops here, in this place, or whether they had carried the ties with them, and had used them on other wrists and other ankles as they made their way north. The notion made him feel faint and nervous again. He thought he might hyperventilate.

A slight easing of the terrible nausea from his head wound was now the only positive thing that he could identify within his reduced and wretched state.

Loki sat down on the end of the bed. The giant was breathing hard. He spoke with difficulty, was wheezy; it sounded like he had asthma, like Phil. Poor Phil.

‘So now you know, Luke from London. Know that you are nothing. A worm compared to what is here.’ He pointed one long finger at the ceiling. Then he looked at the little window, before checking the watch face between the two studded wristbands on his forearm. He looked back at Luke, his cold blue eyes alight with excitement inside their black sockets. ‘She can call it, you know? We know she can. And she know we are fucking serious. She has promised to call it. For us. And for you, Luke. So tonight we try again.’

Loki screwed his face up into a demoniac scowl, and stuck his dark-red tongue out. Grinned. ‘You are the lucky man. Tonight you meet a God, and you know the true meaning of a blood frenzy, Luke. You have been a great deal of trouble for me. But later, I think we will all be much happier people. Make peace with your dead God. Maybe you see your friends again soon, yes?’

Loki left him alone.

Luke continued to stare into space for a long time, unable to focus his eyes on anything around him. Up above him, in the attic, he occasionally heard the little loud feet of the old woman moving about up there; she still had not come down since the confrontation. That place was beloved to her. But Luke knew he’d rather die than ever see it again.

After a while she began to weep. Through her little sobs, she spoke in her old lilting language to those around her in the dusty darkness. And Luke did not know why, but he felt a great sympathy for her. Soon, his own tears cut across his cheeks.

The wind buffeted his little window and the clouds stifled the weak white sunlight. As the air dimmed about him, his thoughts lowered their own lights. And he wept for himself, and for his friends, and his heart’s pouring seemed to flow into the great sadness that ran through the world and through all who were in it.

Maybe for short periods of time it seemed to him, inside that stinking bed, that some people were exempt from tragedy and pain, but these respites were short; in the scheme of things and in the length of eternity, respites were nothing but anomalies in a relentless flow of despair and pain and sadness and horror that surely would eventually sweep everyone away.

And for the first time since he had been at school, Luke prayed. The enormity of what existed in this place made him think in those terms. In the epic terms of gods and devils, and in the terms of magic and the great incomprehensible age that had swept through here and left such terrible things behind. It did him good to pray, and to cry and scour his damaged lumpy face with stinging brine; to dissolve some of the cold despair.

Outside, beneath his window, the music came roaring out of the old CD player and he could no longer hear the old woman above him. Intermittently, Fenris and Loki scraped their throats to reproduce black-metal vocals. They were drinking again; he could tell by the idiotic jackal giggle that Fenris produced when downing the moonshine. And so it all continued; it was dull in its predictability. Evil was, he decided, inevitable, relentless and predictable. Imaginative, he’d give it that much, but soulless.

He dabbed at his nostrils, carefully, with the back of one filthy hand. It was hopeless; he couldn’t even wipe his own nose. It was gushing with snot and blood. He dropped his head back onto the grey pillow and closed his one good eye; the other had shut itself down. He lay still, in silence, on the reeking sheepskins and waited for the light to completely fade out, for the sky to darken.
To finally get this over with
.

And in the long hours in which he waited alone with his thoughts, he tormented himself briefly by replaying his attempts at escape. In his memory, once he’d hit Fenris with the jug, he should have beaten Surtr off before she struck his head wound. He should have been quicker and harder with her. He imagined himself doing it all over again, but successfully this time, and then running downstairs and finding one of the knives, or the rifle.

Or he should have just run straight into the woods after they showed poor Dom to him; he should not have aimed for the track beside the orchard. What had he been thinking? If he had gone into the woods maybe he could have hidden, then crawled away later. And the opportunity to dig through that wall was gone now too; he had fallen asleep and dreamed of his own death instead, and now his wrists and his ankles were tied. It was like this entire situation was part of some terrible destiny; like fate had drawn him here to be sacrificed. Like Loki had said.

‘Piss off,’ he murmured to himself.

But even if he had escaped from the house, and made it out there – what then?

He swore at himself. Sniffed. Winced.

This is how things were now. The thought settled heavily upon him, but at least acceptance brought the relief that comes with the final acknowledgement of a painful, decisive truth. When aspirations and pretension and effort can finally be set aside as the wastes of mental effort they usually are. No more yearnings or cravings or anxieties. It would all be over soon enough.

He had just been caught up in the way of the world; on one of its lunatic fringes perhaps, but had still been swept away by the true and deeper undertow of tragedy nonetheless. What happened to you eventually was just more extreme out here; that was the only difference to being ground down by increments in the other world he had failed at and had now departed for good. The possibilities for destruction here were not so different in any other place; they just took different forms. Nor was the intent for violence any different here; that was everywhere he had ever lived. Or the self-absorption, the pathological ambition, the spite and delight in the downfall of others – all of that was back home too. It led here eventually. It was building everywhere. It was in the blood. A few natural disasters, or the wrong people take charge, or a war gets out of hand and changes the colour of the sky, or the earth becomes irreparably poisoned and water and food run short … and skulls would be smashed, again. Over and over again.
Ragnarok
. This was the chaos Loki wanted. And he wanted it sooner rather than later, even if it was only around him to begin with, in his dismal, misguided, obsessive existence.

To think he’d always championed the outcast too; been a friend of the misfit, the underdog. He was the last person they should have been snuffing out. But losers just wanted to swap places with anyone above them in the hierarchy. It made his life seem even more hopeless.

‘Fuck it.’

His own weaknesses and mistakes and defects seemed pitiful in comparison to Blood Frenzy. He couldn’t even be bad properly. At least these guys really went for it. He wanted to laugh, but also acknowledged that he had probably lost his mind.
At last. About fucking time.
What good had it been anyway?

Maybe a terrible Karma had indeed led him here. Just so he could realize all of this now, the hard way. He grinned, and showed his own bloodied teeth to the dirty ceiling.

‘I wanted it to stop out here. Just for a bit. To be with my friends for a few days. That was all,’ Luke said out loud to God, to the things in the attic, to anyone who might be listening. He’d just wanted a break from the world he didn’t get along with: his job, the dismal flat, the same nullifying disappointment every day, the getting older and the growing into it all. He had wanted a change and he had got one.

He smiled and then he sniggered. A bubble of blood popped on his lips. He suddenly felt mad, and wild, and free of the burden of himself.

The sound of big heavy feet outside. Loki.
Thank fuck
: Loki wouldn’t kill him yet. He’d have a little more time to sort his head out before the end. He was beginning to interest himself; was finally in agreement with himself.