The Ritual

rising through the ancient
timbers of the house. And soon such conjectures ceased, because the seated figures on their little thrones suddenly commanded all of his attention.
    A small mouth opened to reveal toothless gums, thin as cartilage. After a flicker, an eyelid parted in its deep socket. A faint glimmer of a black eye shone in the lamplight.
    The hand of the second little figure dropped from its armrest and into its dry lap; the fingers clattered as if they were holding dice. The head of the figure dipped, then rose, suggesting the
figure was emerging from, or trying to keep itself from, a deep sleep. One of its thin feet moved, the bony foot clad in a pointed shoe, the leather creased and blackened by centuries.
    They lived.
    ‘These are the ancient ones,’ Loki muttered.
    Momentarily Luke’s thoughts moved from rout to clarity. Their own dead and slowly dying were precious. The lives of strangers were meaningless; they were to be hunted and slaughtered like
deer in the forest, then dumped in a rubbish-filled crypt of an abandoned church, while these brittle remains were stored here with reverence.
    ‘The past and the present are the same thing here,’ Loki whispered.
    Fenris removed his hand from Luke’s mouth. Luke shuddered, and made a sound like he was stepping into cold water. And suddenly he grasped that the old woman of the woods was defined by
this closeness to her dead. They existed continuously. She lived with the dead. Kept alive a bond with the dreadful things of another time. The church and cemetery was a place of sacrifice, while
the old servants of an old religion reposed here. It was despicable.
    Luke groaned again as the impossible registered as reality. There was more shock than awe. As the air left his lungs, it sounded as if his life was leaving him too.
    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