The Ritual

had been simple and they were old and they wanted comfort from the cross. One would have died first, the other would have lived alone in such despair that just to know it for a moment
would make your heart burst.
    He tried to shake the terrible feeling from himself. It jostled with his fear. This was never a place for a man to be, ever. He felt that instinctively. You got mixed up with the kind of madness
that nailed skulls to walls. Even the cold black air seemed to move about them and through them with a sense of its own purpose. It was stupid, irrational to think so, but his imagination suspected
the house was inhabited with something he didn’t need eyes to see. They were small and fragile here. They were defenceless. They were not welcome.
    Hutch peered around the bend in the staircase. Luke caught his face in profile with the light from his torch. He’d never seen Hutch with that face before. Pale and drawn like he’d
received bad news. His eyes were big and doleful. And watering. ‘OK,’ Hutch whispered. ‘There’s a few more steps and it opens into a room. Like an attic. I can see the
underside of the roof. It’s pretty wet up here.’
    ‘Real slow, H. Slow,’ Luke whispered back. As they groaned under Hutch’s boots, Luke briefly wondered if he would be able to take those last few stairs. Holding his breath, he
forced himself to follow.
    Hutch was three footsteps ahead of him when he stopped moving. Shoulders down, head cocked forward, Hutch stared at something ahead of him, in the upstairs room, out of Luke’s sight from
where he was standing on the last two stairs. Hutch swallowed. He’d seen it too then; he was looking at what sent Phil crazy.
    ‘What?’ Luke whispered. ‘Hutch. What?’
    Hutch shook his head. He winced. It looked like he might cry. He shook his head again, and sighed.
    Now Luke didn’t want to see it either, but felt his feet shuffle him upwards. ‘Is it OK? Is it OK? Is it OK?’ he whispered, then realized he had said it three times. He could
not take the sight of any more blood today.
    ‘This is wrong,’ Hutch said in a little-boy voice. Luke stared at the side of Hutch’s face. He climbed the last step and stood beside his friend, then turned his whole body to
face the room. At what both of their torches were now directed at.

TEN
    It rose from shadow and became shadow again.
    At the far end of the attic the silhouette sat upright and completely still between the two sides of the angled roof. Crowded and lightless, the place it occupied pooled with darkness above and
below the moving torch beams, which seemed frail in here, powdery at their furthest reach but strong enough to pick out the dust and silvery webs on an old black hide. In the patches of hair
moistened by drops of rain from the roof beams, it glistened.
    One beam of torchlight dropped to the area from which the figure emerged. A small wooden casket the size of an infant’s cradle revealed itself in the dusty yellow underwater light. A
coffin possibly, built from wood and dark with age, or painted black.
    The other torch – Luke’s – lit up the horns that rose from above two dark eye sockets. Brownish bone, long and thick.
    Two thin rear legs, ending in hooves, jutted out from the body then bent at the bony knee joints. The hooves looked as if they were poised upon the sides of the casket in readiness of the horned
thing rising out of its box.
    Black lips were pulled back above long yellow teeth; a grimace to last for all time beneath nostrils that still appeared curiously wet. Up and down the chest, small pink teats parted the fur.
This was the most unpleasant thing of all, worse than the ivory mouth which Luke imagined was about to open and then snap shut with a clacking sound.
    The thin black forelegs, or arms, were raised to shoulder height and bent at the elbow. Blackened hands were upturned, the palms facing the ceiling, as if it were commanding all before it to
rise, or as if the figure had once been holding objects that were now long gone.
    Luke could not speak. Did not know how to react or what to think. He just existed before it and within the terrible presence that filled the cramped space of the attic.
    Hutch only spoke after he began picking out the pale objects on the floor with his torch beam. ‘Bones.’
    Looking down, Luke saw the dead things, scattered about the wooden casket, as if dropped after the flesh had been eaten from their tiny bones. Rabbits perhaps, and