The Ritual

what they were scuffling across.
    From somewhere to his left, amber light shone. Loki’s old oil lantern had been placed on the floor. Loki crouched beside it, his shoulder hunched against the slope of the roof. Briefly, he
looked into Luke’s wild eyes and then turned his head, and raised the lantern to cast its meagre glow out there. So he could see. See it all.
    The grubby light opened the space to Luke’s eyes, which he wanted to shut and keep shut: the lamp illuminated a long rectangular loft with sloping sides that ran the length of the upper
storey of the building. The ceiling was low as it sloped down from beneath a central beam that Luke could barely stand upright beneath; the furthest edge of the attic space remained in shadow. But
to his left and right he could see plenty.
    The terrible monument in the forest, the church, was not good enough for them. For some reason these dead had to be brought home and displayed here.
    Small, thin bodies stood against the two side walls, or sat with their ankles crossed, their bony knees gleaming smooth. Hairless heads were bowed. Mouths hung open, giving their parchment faces
the vacancy of the sleeping.
    They were little people and their clothes had either blackened and adhered to their meagre frames, or their raiment was bleached of all but the dimmest colours and was now loose and dusty about
the insubstantial shapes inside.
    Some of the figures were belted together with rags, to keep their arms held at their sides. But then over there, were crude wooden boxes full of bones, the skulls bulbous upon the dusty sticks
of collapsed limbs. Other occupants of the reliquary were reduced to mere cairns of bone and dust and dross upon the wooden floor. And there were other figures cramped into little chests, their
remains mostly whole, their skin dark and leathery, their hairless heads propped upon the carved wooden sides of the ancient caskets. Another mottled figure had been crudely sown into what looked
like silver birch bark, in which it sat and grinned at eternity over the rim.
    Further in, as Luke was pushed forward by insistent Fenris, the heads of another half a dozen of the interned upright figures were yellowish. Lipless grimaces seemed poised to speak. Papery eyes
were sightless, but seemingly raised in the murk as if anticipating the return of light. Their raiment was dark, their flesh tight on the bones beneath the petrified cloth, but not hardened, not
fossilized yet. The lustre of their skins suggested a suppleness that Luke would rather not have noted.
    At the end of the attic, he could see the old woman, but her face was inscrutable. She stood in partial shadow beside two small and huddled figures, draped in some kind of dusty black vestment
or robe. They sat upon small wooden chairs. Ancient chairs. Children’s chairs. Side by side, like a little king and queen interned in some airless tomb to honour their afterlife.
    Luke recalled fragments of a recent dream. He thought of the sounds that came down to him through the ceiling in the night. The disintegration of even more of his sanity felt tangible. It slid
with his reason into a rout of silent panic.
    And then the whispering began. Behind him. Around him. Lilting up and down, up and down. No louder than the scratch of a rat’s claws, but the faintest of choirs from the driest of mouths
was still determined to be heard. Impossible.
    ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ said Loki from the corner.
    ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ repeated Fenris into his ear.
    Luke thought, or he imagined because nothing that old can live, that he then saw movement upon those little chairs.
    He strained his eyes in the dim light. There it was again. A twitch of one dry head. The gentle elevation of a pointed chin. A rustle of old paper. A sigh.
    Fenris pushed him closer on legs he could barely feel.
    The grubby silhouettes of a gaunt and wasted ancestry watched him from both sides. Like leaves disturbed by a barely perceptible draught, he then detected other suggestions of movement about
him. In order to subdue a scream, he told himself the ghastly animation was merely caused by the surge and retraction of amber light from the moving lantern. But he could not turn his head and
confirm this desperate hope that the subtle restlessness of the parched and the mummified upright figures, was nothing more than a trick of light, or a gust of air