The Ritual (7 page)

Phil’s lips trembled like a child’s in the middle of a fright. His voice was too low for words to be heard. When Hutch touched the fingers of one hand, Phil whimpered and dropped his head between tensed shoulders.

‘It’s all right, mate.’ Hutch held Phil’s hand and gently led him from the annex. The smell of stale urine on damp wood came out with him.

He was covered in his blue waterproof by Dom, huddled out the door of the hovel by Hutch, and taken into the dull aluminium light of early morning.

The forest around the wild paddock looked exhausted after the lightning storm, even relieved. Long wet grass and the cold fresh air revived Phil. He came back to them, to the world, with three powerful heaving sobs that sounded incongruous, strange, unlike any sound they had heard Phil make in their presence before. And then he was standing before them, blinking, with only the top half of his indignity covered. His forlorn eyes questioned each of them, but he received no answer, no understanding. The other three just returned a sense of awkwardness and mystification to him. And they could not hold his intense stare for long.

Hutch turned back to the hovel. ‘Come on. Let’s get packed up.’

Luke moved ahead of him. ‘Amen to that.’

‘Wait,’ Dom said. ‘What the fuck?’

Luke nodded at the hovel. ‘I told you it was a bad idea. Who knows what we stirred up.’ He was about to elaborate, but thought better of it. Phil and Dom stared at Luke, their faces stricken with a desperation to comprehend what he had just suggested.

Hutch paused on the threshold, looked over his shoulder, his face grimed with smoke and dirt. His eyes appeared too big for his dirty face. ‘There’ll be time to talk about it when we’re tear-arsing out of here.’

SIXTEEN

‘How about here?’ Dom leaned forward, his arms hurriedly pulling at the undergrowth, trying to move saplings and nettles aside to find a section of the dreary silent forest clear enough for them to walk through.

The remnants of the path that brought them here continued out of the clearing due north, in the opposite direction they needed to take. The tension among the others, their very desperation to get away from the house fast, seemed to bustle all about Hutch’s body and get inside his thoughts. Mostly, he just avoided their eyes as he scratched about for a solution in silence.

Again, they were thwarted. Needed to move out in a south-westerly direction, to correct the easterly drift along the path the evening before. The edge of the forest in the thinnest band of trees on the map could not be more than six, maybe seven kilometres away, but only if they followed a south-westerly route, then turned due south at some point. There was no way he was going to start the day by leading them north; he reckoned Dom had half a day’s limited mobility left in his bad leg.

‘Hand me the machete and we’ll make a start,’ Hutch said, at the south side of the paddock, further along the treeline from Dom.

‘Then where?’ Dom’s voice broke into a shriek. ‘How the bloody hell do we get out of here?’

From the western side of the clearing, Luke jogged over and stood behind Hutch. ‘Anything?’

Hutch pulled his torso back from behind a dead spruce tree. ‘Nothing over here. It’s all debris. Full of snags and logs. Even the standing trees are dead. I can’t see further than fifteen feet. It’s worse than anything we saw yesterday.’
Like it built up overnight
, he was tempted to say out loud in the spirit of the paranoid frustration they were all directing into him. ‘We’ll never force a path through. We could try, but we’d move about ten feet an hour.’

Dom seized a handful of dwarf willow and yanked at it, his teeth set in a grimace. ‘Why? Why is it like this?’ A branch bent to him, and then stopped moving, burning his hands and greening them with a watery sap. Dom dropped the branch, but kicked uselessly at it with his good leg. Then winced in pain. ‘Shit! What about that right to roam bullshit-line you sold us back home? Who can roam through this crap?’

‘It’s virgin forest.’

‘What? It’s bloody dead, H. There’s nothing virginal about it.’

Hutch looked at Luke’s tired face. ‘Lukers, toss us a fag.’

Luke handed Hutch his packet of Camels. Hutch leaned into the flame of the Zippo. Took a long drag and then wiped at the sweat on his forehead, before inspecting the back of his hand and wincing. ‘Some little shit just bit me. Gnats.’

‘If it wasn’t so wet I’d set fire to the bitch,’ Dom said, his hands on his knees, his face a picture of hopelessness. ‘Burn our way out. The whole bloody place should be scorched earth.’

Hutch sighed through a cloud of fragrant smoke. He looked at his hands; the tips of his fingers were still trembling. He swallowed. ‘It’s never been managed. There’s never been any clear-cutting. That’s the point.’

Under the dirt, in the rivulets his tears cut below his eyes the night before, Dom’s face whitened with anger. None of them had washed their hands and faces for two days. ‘Then why the hell did you bring us in here, if we can’t bloody walk through it?’

‘I never planned for us to get stuck in it. I just wanted to see a bit of it. This far north. Something original on the short cut.’

‘It’s bloody original all right. So original, no fucker in their right mind would come up here for a holiday.’

‘And few do. Not in this part. Only scientists and conservationists would usually go this deep, I reckon. We’re only here by accident. Because of the short cut. We were only supposed to quickly cut through it.’

‘Cut through my ass! We’re stuck, H! Trapped like rats!’

Hutch sighed; looked to Luke for support, which he had done rarely on the trip so as not to create the clique he sensed that Luke wanted. Hutch’s voice sounded weak, insubstantial, when it came out of his mouth again. ‘These national reserves are here to protect the last bit of real biodiversity, Dom. For the future. It’s just about gone everywhere else.’

Luke looked about himself, as if seeing it for the first time. Hutch took another drag on his cigarette. He talked himself down from the urgent instinctive need to just start crashing out, southwards. A dark silhouette from his dream reared up in his mind; an unpleasant reminder of something he was committing every ounce of mental discipline to suppress. He took a deep breath. ‘This is one of the last parts of the Boreal coniferous belt. Goes all the way from Norway to Russia. It’s what grew after the Ice Age. This. It’s been around for that long. A Norwegian spruce can even live for five hundred years. A Scots pine for six. Can you imagine it? It shrunk by ninety per cent in the last century. All cut down and cleared. But they left parts like this, in the national parks, so fungi and lichen can grow in all this shit we can’t get through. To preserve the habitats. For birds and insects. Wildlife. This whole place is chock-full of rare species. All of that forest we saw from the train on the way up is managed. Probably no more than a hundred years old. They don’t let forests get this old any more.’

Momentarily, Luke looked grateful; at least he always appreciated how much thought went into where Hutch took them. Because he always invested himself wholly into anything he organized. Always wanted his companions to see something wonderful. It was his fault they were lost. But even though they were lost, he reminded himself, at least they were stranded inside something so few people, even most Swedes, would ever see. Something this old and undisturbed. He thought of reminding Dom of this, then decided against it. Because it no longer served as a source of compensation for him either, if he were honest with himself.

‘It’s on all of the trees.’ They heard Phil’s voice, coming to them across the small clearing about the black hovel they were still trying to escape from. It had been twenty minutes since they had dressed in their grubby, smoky clothes and packed up. ‘Goes in a circle. Round the house.’

Luke, Hutch and Dom all turned to look at Phil on the far northern side of the clearing. He was standing near the thin track that wound outwards into the darkness. They all exchanged glances with tight-lipped faces.

‘What’s that, mate?’ Hutch called out.

‘On the old ones. The ones with the dead branches.’

‘What’s he going on about?’ Dom asked.

Hutch shrugged. ‘Guy’s really shaken up.’

‘You think he’s lost it?’

‘I think we all did last night. If Luke hadn’t woken me up, I’d still be up in that attic. Kneeling before the goat.’

Laughter burst from Luke. It sounded too high in the still air and in the enclosure of the trees around the hovel. It sounded inappropriate, like laughing out loud in church.

Hutch smiled. ‘Jesus, boys. How are we going to P.R. this when we get home?’

Dom slapped the back of Hutch’s head, his face expanding into a tight and forced grin. ‘We gotta get there first, you useless Yorkshire bastard. Never mind virgin forests and Ice Age fungus. I want to put me feet back on concrete.’

Hutch side-stepped the second swat. ‘Come on. Let’s go see what the fat man wants.’

SEVENTEEN

‘What is it, mate?’ Hutch asked Phil, who was leaning forward with one dirty hand spread on the dark bark of a thick tree trunk. Phil hadn’t said much to anyone since they woke him, and he’d shrugged off any attempt to speak of how he came to be naked in that tiny sordid space that they had all used as a urinal at some point the night before, except for Luke who had gone outside. Luke, Hutch and Dom were all too tired and shaken to talk of their own experiences in any detail either, each acknowledging in an unspoken way it was the sort of thing you only discussed once you were at a safe distance from the source. But the night seemed to have affected Phil worse than the others.

‘Here. See it? And it’s on all of the other trees on this side.’ Where the bark had been sheared away or smoothed down in a band about the tree at waist-height, Phil’s red fingers pointed at a series of marks or scratches, cut deep into the wood, which had then darkened with age but not become entirely invisible.

Hutch bent over and traced a finger around the marks.

‘What is it?’ Luke asked.

Dom sighed with irritation and looked up at the sky.

‘Runes,’ Hutch said. ‘Remember those runes on the stones we saw in Gammelstad?’ He glanced over his shoulder at Dom and Phil. ‘Me and Luke saw some in Skansen and Lund too, a couple of years back.’

‘No way,’ Phil said, his face stricken, as if this observation by Hutch was evidence to him of something far worse than their current dilemma.

‘Yes way. Good spot, Phillers. I bet these are real old too. Vikings used them about a thousand years ago.’

‘They can’t be that old,’ Luke said, leaning down beside Hutch.

‘No shit. But someone still knew how to use them after the Vikings.’

Luke placed an index finger on one. ‘Looks like a B. The trees get how old?’

‘This is a Scots pine. A big one too. Dead as a door nail, but they can live for about six hundred years.’

Dom threw both hands into the air, his waterproof swishing as he moved. ‘OK. OK. So what’s the plan, Time Team? I’d say runes on old bastard trees are at the bastard bottom on our list of priorities, boys.’

Hutch and Luke moved away from the tree.

‘It’s all wrong,’ Phil said to himself. ‘Wrong.’

‘Yessum,’ Hutch said. Then looked at the sky, so pale and white, the sun itself could have been white. Rain began to patter against their coats and rucksacks. ‘Great.’

From the breast pocket of his coat, Hutch pulled out the plastic wallet with condensation on it. The map was sealed inside. He knelt down and removed the map from its sheath. He unfolded it by one half and put the compass against it. ‘Chaps. I reckon we’re about here. A fair way inside the tip of this band of woodland. I was trying to get us down to here yesterday, so we can pick up the Käppoape trail. A morning’s walk on that and we’d be beside the Stora Luleälven River. Following that east to Skaite for a few hours would put us by the overnight cabins there. And a branch office for the Environment Protection Board. But we can’t make it any further south through the scrub here. This place is so old, if there was ever another path going south out of this clearing, it’s gone now. And if the undergrowth doesn’t clear up, there is still the best part of a day between us and the end of the forest.’

‘So what?’ Dom said.

Hutch wrinkled his eyes and gritted his teeth in a wince. ‘Well, we can’t risk following that track north.’

Phil said nothing. He stood apart from them and stared at the house.

‘Hang on. Hang on. Gimme the map,’ Dom demanded.

Hutch pulled it away from Dom’s grasp. ‘What are you going to do with it hobble-horse?’

‘Let me see, you Yorkshire ring-piece.’ Dom snatched the map from Hutch’s hands and then held it a few feet from his face.

Luke hung his head and pulled his fingers down his cheeks. ‘Maybe we should go back the way we came in.’

Dom shook his head. ‘No. If we go back the way we came in, it’ll take a whole day just to get back to where we started from yesterday at noon.’

‘As long as we don’t get lost again,’ Luke said. No one else took him up on the observation. Hutch and Dom stared at each other with tense faces.

Dom’s jaw trembled. ‘And then another day to get back to the STF cabin we left two days ago!’

‘Agreed,’ Hutch said to Dom. ‘Or the same amount of time again to get to Porjus on your bad leg. So I think we should see where the track we used to get here goes, in the opposite direction. Then see if we can cut down south from it at some point.’

Dom frowned. ‘Well, it ran from west to east in a straight line. It’ll take us straight back out west. What’s west?’

‘Norway,’ Luke said.

Dom slapped the map down against his thighs. ‘We need to get south, H, to come out on the other side of this blasted heath.’

‘You don’t say. But we can’t get through, dufus. There is no way we can move south from here. And we’ve enough food for one more day, tops. Considering how many calories we’re going to be expending walking on this terrain today, we’ll need every crumb of it. For argument’s sake, if it takes us all day to get out, we’ll have to camp tonight above the river. Tomorrow, on the outside of the blasted heath, our army will be marching on an empty stomach for about half a day. And that’s the worst-case scenario we are facing. So there is no need to panic, but we have to make the right choice now. No indecision. I’m confident that if we just retrace the path it’ll lead us, more or less, above a good point to make an exit. With any luck, the trail might naturally turn south at some point. Skaite can’t be that far. A day, day and a half tops at a very limited pace.’