The Ritual (10 page)

‘You fuck!’ Dom struggled to his feet; all chubby arse, shirt pulled out, and clumsy stiff movements. Then Dom was coming at him, the limp gone. Hutch was knocked aside. The whites of Dom’s eyes were going pink to red. His freckled knuckles moved slowly then made a wet slap sound against Luke’s mouth that he felt like a push, not a blow, but it made his top lip instantly go numb. Is that it, he thought. Is that all a punch feels like?

They seemed to stare at each other for a long time, until the idea that he had been struck mingled with the supporting notion that this was a contact that stated he should just continue to accept Dom’s jibes, criticisms, bullish rants, and his disregard for anything Luke had said since they had met the night before the trip. But this role assigned to him in their little group hierarchy was not one he would accept any longer.

When he swung his fist from the left, he’d taken his arm back enough to make his shoulder go tight, lock and then release his hand like a spring. Dom’s arm didn’t rise quickly enough to defer the strike, and Luke’s knuckles impacted with a loud smack under Dom’s right eye.

Dom’s head snapped back, and his expression was one of bewilderment and distaste. Luke’s second fist came in from the other side. He watched his own arm, in its wet khaki sleeve, whip about quickly to make his hard fist strike Dom again, this time on the jaw. He had been aiming for the jaw.

Dom went down quickly, and didn’t get his arms out to break his fall, because his hands were still clutching at his face.

Hutch and Phil took a step away from Luke, almost cowering. They looked at him like he was a dangerous stranger. They were shocked. Frightened of him. But he wanted to keep on punching. He wished Dom had not gone down so fast. Then he could feel the satisfaction of hitting his face really hard again, and again, with clenched fists.

It had not hurt his hands at all and the sudden release of energy, twinned with Dom’s fall, gave him a sudden lunatic rush of euphoria. His body seemed to re-form itself again into a tight, stable and defined frame; his whited-out vision rushed back into his head, and returned to full colour; his hearing cleared as if a blockage of warm bath water had just drained out. He realized he was panting so hard he had started to wheeze.

Dom sat up with his legs splayed and his head dipped over his chest. Both of his hands were clutched around his mouth. No one could see his face.

Dom was crying. He was so angry, he was actually crying. ‘I’ll not spend another fucking minute with that bastard!’ From where he sat on the fallen log, Luke could hear Dom’s voice penetrating through the trees. It was high-pitched now and squealing.

‘He can piss off in the opposite direction … No I fucking won’t … It’s not you who’s had that bastard have a pop at you … That loser’s a headcase. He always has been. That’s why he can’t hold a job down for five minutes. And why he’s always single. Makes sense doesn’t it? He’s a twat. I don’t have the patience for him any more. Who does? He needs to fucking grow up. I’ve no time for the stupid bastard.’

Then the terrible heat was back inside Luke’s body and he was suddenly crashing and stumbling back to where Hutch and Phil were holding Dom, out of sight. His teeth were gritted so hard Luke regained enough control of himself to know that a tooth could snap at any moment and fill his head with a white lightning of agony. He unlocked his jaw.

‘Keep it up, you fat fuck!’ he bellowed as he came into view and watched Phil and Hutch scrabble aside. Dom put two hands up and shouted, ‘Piss off!’

This time he was punching so quickly between Dom’s raised palms, he immediately felt something rip at the base of his neck, then go tight and hot. Three punches littered across Dom’s face and Luke felt a nose slide and then snap under his knuckles, like the wishbone at a Sunday roast. The fourth and fifth blows struck the top and back of Dom’s head as Dom collapsed into the undergrowth. He curled himself into a ball on the floor and pulled both arms over his head. The last punch hurt Luke’s little finger, the knuckle above it, and the bone behind the knuckle. He put the hand under his armpit and stepped away from Dom.

‘Another word. Another word …’ He tried to speak but was breathing too hard to get it out, and his voice was trembling with emotion.

‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Take it easy. Shit.’ Hutch was talking quickly and holding Luke’s shoulders now with iron fingers, leading him away.

‘Any more from him, and I’ll put him out of the game. I swear.’

They walked together, away from the other two; Hutch’s hand around his elbow. Dom had not uncurled himself from the ball. Phil was crouched down, talking to Dom in a low voice, but Luke could not hear what he was saying.

‘Jesus, Luke. Listen to yourself. You’re talking like a binton. A chav. This isn’t you. What the hell?’

Luke sat down on the fallen log where he had been a few moments before. His hands were shaking so badly Hutch had to take the packet out of his hands and light two cigarettes. One for each of them.

‘Calm down. Take it easy. Just relax. Cool your boots. Man, what has got into you?’

Luke didn’t speak, just smoked the cigarette in quick inhalations until he felt sick. So much cortisone and adrenaline had leaked into his empty stomach along with phlegm and cigarette tar, he thought he might throw up. He unzipped his coat down to the waist, and bent over. Sucked in the cold wet air in great heaving lungfuls. He’d never felt so drained in his life. He started to shudder.

‘Well, I guess that is the official end to the holiday,’ Hutch said after a few minutes’ silence.

Luke started to smile, felt ashamed, and then found himself laughing in silence. Hutch was smiling too, but only as part of a thin and pained expression. He shook his head. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you, Chief. God knows I’ve thought of giving Dom a shoeing over the years, but people like us just don’t do things this way. What were you thinking?’

Luke looked at Hutch and saw the disappointment in his friend’s eyes, the permanent estrangement. You could never come back from an event like this. Nothing would ever be the same again. He knew his friendship was over with all three of them.

‘Shit,’ he said and shook his head. He had to take a moment and swallow hard several times, otherwise his eyes would well up and he’d start crying. A lump closed his throat down. It would be impossible to speak for a while. He stood up and walked away from the dead and fallen tree.

‘What am I doing here?’ Luke said, further down the path. Hutch had followed him, his head bowed, his face pale and long with the strain of dealing with them all, on top of the situation they were in. They were forcing him to be a parent, to make every decision.

‘I couldn’t even afford to come. But I won’t have him call me a loser.’ His chest was going tight and he wanted to say so much to justify what he had just done, because of how Dom made him feel, but it wasn’t coming.

Hutch looked at the sky and blinked as the rain hit his face. ‘I better get back to the walking wounded.’

‘He doesn’t know anything about me any more. Nothing. None of you do.’

‘He doesn’t mean anything by it. No one does.’

‘Am I being a prick?’

Hutch looked at his feet and sighed.

‘You think so too. It’s OK. Say it. I don’t give a shit any more. I’m happy to take off now, Hutch.’

‘Don’t be so free with the crazy talk. We’ve had enough of that.’

‘I meant to get help.’

‘We’re not there yet. Not by a long chalk. This is just a setback. And I do wish you’d all just chill out a bit. This really isn’t helping.’

‘I’m sorry. I just lost it.’

‘You don’t say.’

They couldn’t look each other in the eye. They looked at the earth, at the sky, at the endless trees and bracken all around them that were all utterly indifferent to them.

‘Man. I went for miles, H. I reached the end of the line and got scratched to buggery. To find a way out. And when I came back … I just got so angry. I lost it. Because … you’d hardly moved. Like there was no urgency.’

‘That’s crap, and you know it.’

‘I meant—’

‘They can’t walk. They’re both broken. I was just trying to keep their spirits up. Keeping them talking and trying to take their minds off the situation.’

‘And I fucked it.’

‘Totally.’

Luke sighed. Touched his face where Dom had hit him. It wasn’t even sore, just puffy. ‘I had so much to tell you.’

Hutch turned his head to the side. ‘See a way out?’

Luke shook his head. ‘Nah. And it just gets worse. All of this shit.’ He kicked at a bush.

Hutch closed his eyes and made a groaning noise. Then opened his eyes and sighed. ‘Next year, we’re renting a caravan.’

‘I was just about to throw the towel in and come back when I found a cemetery.’

Now he had Hutch’s attention again.

Luke nodded. ‘Tors, standing stones, whatever you call them.’

‘Rune stones.’

‘Rune stones. All overgrown. In a big thicket that I crawled under. But on the other side of it is a church.’

‘You are shitting me.’

‘I’m not. A really old church. Like one of those buildings we saw in Skansen. In the housing museum. And the forest clears up a bit around it.’

Hutch’s face brightened. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked back along the track towards the others, who were still out of sight. Luke slowed down. ‘I’ll keep a low profile and walk out front.’

‘Good idea. But it means I’m now stuck in the rear with the fear again. Cheers.’

Luke was about to laugh, but Hutch wasn’t smiling as he turned and walked away.

TWENTY-THREE

‘Strange. Real strange, fella,’ Hutch said to Luke, who walked so close to him in the scrub, he felt like a child behind an older boy, seeking guidance.

‘What?’

Hutch stopped by a pile of rocks tumbled about a slight rise in the tangled earth of the cemetery; the rocks were engulfed in waist-deep foliage, right up to the flattish but tilting stone at the top. ‘It’s a cromlech. Bronze Age.’

Luke squinted at Hutch, pulling aggressively on the filter of his cigarette with lips he could only half feel.

‘This was the roof.’ Hutch tapped the flat tilting rock on top of the stone pile. ‘All these stones are on a mound. A burial mound. That’s why the stones are raised like this. The rocks underneath this big flat one were the sides, but they’ve fallen in. And back over there’ – Hutch pointed his stick at another small hill behind the mound – ‘another one. Cromlech. Or dolmen. Old, old graves, mate.’

He turned suddenly and pointed his stick at the tangle of white-trunked silver birch trees and brambles that engulfed an outcrop of large rounded stones, grey with reindeer moss, at the far side of the clearing. They had walked around it earlier trying to find more of the rune stones. ‘And that’s a partially collapsed passage grave. Big one. Sure of it. Would have been about twenty feet long. You can see the two upright stones where the entrance would have been. It’s the giveaway that it’s a passage grave. They’re all over Sweden. Dolmens too. But not usually in the same place. Passage graves are Iron Age.’

He turned about, his face intense. ‘And if you look around, the long flat stones we keep tripping over are bits of upright stone coffins. Built much later still. I reckon we can only see a few of the rune stones too. Rest are hidden out there in the trees. But I’ll bet they form a circle. A perimeter around a much older site holding the cromlechs and passage grave.

‘Look at the trees too. There’s a chestnut. Oaks. Mountain ash, as well as the birch. Like an enclosure. A boundary to create repose inside. Christian cemeteries have them. So these trees were planted even later. Probably when this church was built in the last few centuries. It’s amazing. What a find.’

Luke stayed quiet; just watching Hutch’s tense, committed face.

‘The Stone Age graves must have been built, I reckon, about three thousand years BC. They’re so old they just look like piles of rocks now. I’d have walked right past them if we hadn’t seen the rune stones and the church. The cromlechs and passage grave should all be completely covered over by now. Or had the boulders removed. Only bits of it still visible, you know? But this has all been preserved at some point. Not recently, but at some time in the past few centuries. They’re not this intact unless they are cared for. Someone has been looking after this site for about four thousand years. Must have been, until that church was abandoned and the stone graves toppled over out here.’

Luke looked at him closely, awaiting a final summation that would shed some light on how this would lead to them escaping from the forest. Because he didn’t want Hutch’s enthusiasm ending on the refrain that they were currently lost inside a forest that contained an undiscovered 4,000-year-old burial site. And that they had spent six hours that day following an old path to it; a trail grooved with cart wheels from the terrible houses abandoned amongst the trees.

Hutch winked at him, his eyes wide. ‘Come on, let’s get into that chapel.’

The tier of stone at the foundations had slumped into the black soil, and the next tier had slipped down to pull the entire structure gradually earthwards. Its right angles and straight lines had become concave; it sagged. The roof was gone. Some beams with slate tiles attached remained, exposed like the bones of a blackened rib cage. The three window casements on either side were empty of glass. Vestiges of a rotten wooden shutter hung from an iron fitting on one side. Any other visible metal was either black with rust or had corroded to a stain on the dark stone.

Twenty feet from the ruined porch of the chapel, Phil and Dom were sitting down on their rucksacks in a demoralized and exhausted silence. Dom had his trouser leg pulled up again and was pressing at the sides of the grubby bandage Hutch had fastened around his swollen knee for support. His mouth was bruised and his bottom lip was split and still bleeding into the dirt on his chin. The top of his nose was purple and fat, his top lip stained crimson. Two pieces of white toilet paper hung from each nostril.