The Ritual (31 page)

Luke could barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘Is he all right?’

Fenris laughed and said, ‘Very well.’

Loki frowned at Fenris, then turned away.

‘Is my friend all right?’ Luke demanded, his disorientation lessening, the pain in his wrists turning to warmth.

‘These stairs are very old. They put you on your ass,’ Loki said.

Fenris pushed Luke from behind. He skittered down the first three steps. Fell against the old walls, righted himself. It was like standing on the deck of a small boat, or walking through a moving train. His balance was shot. Whether it was because he had just woken, or because his hands were tied, or because of his head injury, he didn’t know. And then he was at ground level, the floor solid beneath his naked soles. From the open front door, air fresh with damp and rain and earth engulfed him.

A cramped brownish hallway materialized. A murky kitchen led off it; inside he saw a black iron stove and chimney, an old wooden table with solid sides of plain board, chairs with rounded legs, peeling cabinets.

A bigger parlour, the walls dark with ancient timber and chaotic with antlers, skulls and blackened things, then came briefly into view through another doorway to his right. And then he was pushed from behind by Fenris again, and out through the open front door he went, and on to a sloping wooden porch.

The remains of the pyre from the night before blackened the grass. He could smell old smoke and wet ash.

To his left, the old woman stood on the porch. The sudden sight of her small body in the long dusty black dress, made him start. Tiny eyes glimmered in her collapsed expressionless face. The uneven ends of her short white hair were wispy in the day’s grim light. She merely watched him. The youths ignored her.

Luke jerked away from Fenris and stumbled after Loki.

Desperately, Luke cast his eyes about. ‘Dom. Mate. Dom!’ He desperately wanted to see his friend, and needed to get a sense of the house he was imprisoned within, and essay the grounds, but he only succeeded in a bewildered stumbling into the grass paddock before the porch. And then his eyes caught sight of something up high, straight ahead, caught in a tree like a hapless parachutist gone all limp. He looked away and gasped.

Then whipped his head back to see the tatty figure in the treeline, strung up directly before the front door; the spot below his little window. In his eyes, the reds and yellows of raw meat, and the sudden white of bone, clashed with the backdrop of dark wintry green.

‘We have summoned him wiv our music! See!’ It was Fenris shouting behind Luke.

Luke dropped to his knees. Looked at the grass and at his bound hands. Peered back up.

Mackerel light silted down and through the tree branches. Dappled with shadow, Dom’s face was perfectly still; white as candle wax across the unshaven cheeks either side of a thick bruised nose, but mired with dark blood around the mouth. His face seemed strangely expressionless, like he had been nonchalant about the circumstances of his final breath.

As if drunk and embracing the shoulders of friends on either side, Dom’s pallid arms were stretched out and hooked between two tree limbs about eight feet from the ground. His torso and legs drooped, appearing weightless now that everything had been looted from out of his rib cage. The glimmer of the vertebrae, still moist, was worse than the beard of blood around the gaping mouth. He had been peeled from the waist to his heavy thighs. A side of meat in a butcher’s window.

Luke’s vision went hazy, insubstantial, then whited out. He fell onto his side and looked back at the house. Saw it for the first time. It was made from wood, stained black by age. Had a pointy dark roof. Small windows.

Two sets of thick-soled boots, embedded with silver rivets from toe to heel, came and stood too close to his eyes.

‘Enough now. Just enough now,’ Luke said, though he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. ‘Not Dom. Not my friend. No more.’

‘We call to it, it come. Our music is raise magic,’ Fenris said, excitedly. When these words finally assembled into a sentence inside his mind, the information confused Luke. Then he realized he could feel nothing. Nothing at all, as if every nerve had been stripped from out of his body like wiring torn from a wall cavity. When he realized Fenris was not talking about Dom, but about the thing that had brought his remains here, he closed his eyes.

‘This is the most remote place in Scandinavia, Luke.’ It was Loki speaking to him now. ‘Where the oldest things can still be found, my friend. Here there are different rules. Different energies, you know.’ Luke continued to stare at the house.

Then Fenris was talking again, quickly, near where Luke lay in the grass in his dirty underwear, wrists bound with a plastic loop from a DIY store. ‘They kept it alive here. Kept it real.’

When he spoke next in his deep, softened voice, it was as if Loki was mollifying a confused child. ‘Something is pushing to the surface of the world, Luke. And in us too. Something terrible. Destructive. I sense it in you also. It pulled you in, eh? And all of your friends. Us too. But, I am sorry to say, that sometimes the innocent are sacrificed.’

Fenris was babbling, breathless with glee. ‘How do you think they have lived here? Lived for so long? No one fucks with them. They live as they please. It is the oldest forest in Europe. It is protected. That is why all this is still here.’

Loki’s voice remained passive, unshocked, unaffected by the ruin of a father, a husband, a friend, a man, up in that tree. ‘This is the land of our ancestors. Here Odin still rides. And you have to wake up and accept the wishes … the demands of something older and greater than you, Luke. That is all.’

He heard the voice of the old woman for the first time then. ‘
Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas
.’

Loki and Fenris stopped talking and turned to her. Luke looked at her wrinkled impassive face. Some thin grey teeth were visible inside her lipless mouth. ‘
Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas
,’ she said again, as if simply stating a fact. Her voice was cracked with age, but the intonation was strangely melodic.

Loki crouched down, swept a curtain of hair over one shoulder and tilted his crudely painted face towards Luke. ‘She says, what was once given, is missing. One will come to fetch it back.’

And then somehow Luke was on his feet, and the horizon of the forest was jumping in his eyes, and he was running on stiff awkward legs. Running away from it all.

Past the front of the house he went, then up the side of the building; a dark wooden wall rearing up on his right side, the forest blurring to his left. Behind the building a white pick-up truck with mud-plastered sides was parked before an overgrown orchard, the arrangement of the trees haphazard. Some of the tree branches hung heavy with dark-green fruit: cooking apples. A thin grassy track, grooved to clay in twin tyre tracks, travelled along the side of the sparse gathering of fruit trees, before vanishing round a bend.

Voices behind: Fenris whooped, then laughed like a jackal. Loki gave orders, his tone unhurried, methodical.

A glance over his shoulder. The girl ran after him. Ungainly, short legs pumping in tight black jeans; heavy bosom swinging in an oversized hooded top with something printed on the front. Her feet bare, white, thudding. Face round, excited.

Instinctively, Luke ran towards the clay track. It might lead somewhere. The ground would not be so uneven as the forest floor was bound to be. He could cut into the thick trees further down the track, drop and hide at ground level. The thought pushed him on, his exertions loud within his head. Every footfall jolted up his spine and seemed to widen the crack in his skull, which he would never believe was not there until he dared look into a mirror again. Not being able to pump his arms was slowing him down.

Eyes wild, teeth gritted, Fenris came at him from between the side of the truck and the shadowy rear of the house, looking to cut him off before he reached the track. A fat girl and a disturbed teenager with their faces painted like corpses, or demons, or whatever they thought they were, were coming for him.

Luke yanked at his wrist binding. Impotent fury welled up his throat. Even wearing big boots, Fenris was quick. Would have to be faced.

Luke stopped, turned. Thought of kicking him, heel first. The approach of the girl to his right, distracted him. Cheeks puffed, chest heaving, little hands balled into fists, her washed-out eyes widening: a high-pitched scream came out of her small mouth.

Fenris pulled up short. Grinned. Danced sideways. Backwards. Cried out something inarticulate, shrieky, triumphant.

A moment of indecision. Then Luke turned to the girl. She was almost upon him. He kicked everything he had into the gut of the rushing figure.

Her forward momentum knocked him off his back leg and he was falling. There was a look of surprise, then fear at being hurt, on her face, and she bowed away. The grassy turf came up too fast and slammed into Luke’s shoulders from behind.

Fenris laughed. Clapped his hands against his thighs.

The girl was bent double, silent, winded.

Luke sat up quickly, swivelled his weight onto one buttock. Bent his left leg at the knee to propel himself upwards.

The toe of Fenris’s boot struck him in the temple. Ice cracked inside his skull. Rivets opened his cheekbone. Red lights flared.

When his vision juddered back down and settled, he was looking at a dead grey sky and could not close his mouth or clench his jaw. His ear whistled and the side of his head thumped hot.

Again he tried to get up, but only succeeded in sitting before the girl’s snatching chubby fingers were in his hair. Something had come loose inside her, unhinged: he could see it in her eyes. A belligerent keening sound, like sobbing but harder, came out of her.

Whatever had dried shut along the top of his head, came apart under his hair with a sticky-tape sound and his scalp flooded hot. The pain made him go white all over; it enveloped him like an immersion in cold water would. He withered into a faint.

She pulled him back down to the earth, flattened his shoulders against the cold grass. He broke from the faint, but thought he would be sick. Couldn’t breathe. Thrust his hands upward, fingers locked like he was in prayer. His knuckles sank under her small flat chin. She made a sound like air escaping quickly from a cushion, until her mouth clamped shut on the sound.

Fenris stamped the corrugated sole of his big boot onto Luke’s face.

Gristle popped. A streak of nose pain took the last of the strength from his limbs. The rubber sole twisted, rearranging the skin, and his features with it.

Luke knew the fight was over. He was done. Spent.

Surtr crowded out the light, dropped her heavy round knees onto his shoulders. Straddled his face. Through the delirium of pain, he caught her scent. She was yoghurty, sour-creamy, sebaceous. He was smelling her cunt through a nose he knew to be smashed flat.

Holding his hair, making rippy sounds, she yanked his head off the ground, then smashed it back down. Up again, then down.

Then her weight was gone. Suddenly lifted clean off him. And Luke rolled onto his side and choked the rust rush of blood from out of his throat. Spat loops of bloody saliva from his mouth. The sight of it frightened him. In what little of his mind was still working at its frantic scattering of thoughts, he visualized his face disfigured, his skull open, the organ inside grey and shivering at the open sky. He prodded at his wet face with his fingertips. The skin was tight. An egg-shaped lump, hard as bone, had already risen where he had been kicked in the temple. Merely touching it made him feel sick, so he stopped.

Loki held on to his girlfriend, his acolyte, tightly. Spoke quickly and urgently into her disordered black hair. A smudge of her white face behind the fringe still peered intently at Luke, as if some urgent play had been disrupted by a parent.

Hung loosely over one of Loki’s shoulders was the dark wood of a stock and the dull gleam of gunmetal. A hunting rifle. If Loki’s white-faced devil hounds had not pulled him down, Loki would have shot him anyway. He was not leaving here. Luke lay back and closed his eyes on a grey world that did not seem to want him in it any more.

FIFTY-SEVEN

‘Luke. I am having the hard time keeping you alive right now.’ Loki’s eyes were bright and blue and smiling in the beam of dusty light that fell through the little window. Loki was in a playful mood, a good mood. Grinning, he tossed his mane of black hair over one shoulder. He didn’t seem so dour, so intensely serious now; it was as if the arrival of Luke’s butchered friend had relieved the tension in the air. And he was drunk. Beside the closed door he had propped the rifle against the wall.

Luke had been lying still for hours before Loki’s arrival. He could not breathe through his nose, which felt like it had swollen to four times its normal size, and his head was open like split fruit. Both of his eyes were swollen, one nearly shut. It felt puffy. He was covered in scores of hard red itching lumps from being bitten senseless by the bugs in the hideous bed. Scores of cuts and scratches covered his ankles and forearms, and he had not washed in a week. He stank. He was thirsty. He was hungry. He was broken. He realized he did not care about much any more.

And he hated himself for being relieved the giant was in a good mood. And he loathed himself for feeling some gratitude towards Loki too; since they dragged him out of the forest, Loki had now saved him from the other two twice.

But saved me for what?

He was tired of being helpless. Sick and tired of being sick and tired of this room, and of the stinking box bed in it, which would not dry and now reeked of his own ammonia. He had already been exhausted by his fear and pain and wretchedness before they even found him, and now the thin, indefatigable, but ultimately futile hope that had sustained him since he had awoken in this place was exhausting; the hope that somehow these young people would recognize some common humanity they shared with the dirty wounded man from the forest, and that upon recognizing that he was a good person, they would let him go. Its twin, the pathetic clawing infantile hope that help from the outside world would suddenly materialize way out here, was also exhausting. Hope was now more tiring than anything else. Its perpetual rise and fall through the terrible ache in his head, and its arrival and its disappearance while he passed in and out of consciousness, and while he moved from one strange world to awake in another crueller place, was more painful and more hateful to endure than the sadism of these adolescent bullies.