The Ritual

about their waists, and thickened their pale arms with studded armbands to their shoulders; their biceps bristled with actual nails. Each of them wore the band’s own
shirt, featuring the gloomy lake and spiky red writing. Their faces were freshly decorated and thickened with white paint. Eye sockets were blacked out and long imperious grimaces had been effected
through their artificially downturned mouths. Only Surtr remained naked. She had no tattoos on her short plump body, but her labia were encrusted with silver piercings.
    With the sole of his boot, Fenris rolled Luke onto his back. Loki grabbed Luke’s ankles and pulled him across the wet grass, to the foot of their crucifix.
    It may have looked insubstantial, but it took the total strength of both young men to lever the wooden cross back out of the hole and to then begin lowering it earthward; at least they knew
enough to sink deep foundations.
    Fenris caught his eye as he watched them slowly work the crucifix back towards the ground. ‘Nice touch, eh? Old-school black metal!’
    When the crucifix was no more than a few feet from the ground, they let it fall with a whump onto the grass beside him, ready for his binding to it. Then they used their hands to roll his
body over and over, before Fenris seized his ankles and moved them to the foot of the long upright plank.
    Loki called Surtr over. She padded across the grass to them. When she came closer Luke could see the white, red and black paint on her face had been perfected into a grin containing as much
spite and cruelty as she had been able to fashion into her own features. Even without make-up, she didn’t need much help looking hateful. Is this how she feels inside? he wondered hopelessly,
and recalled what he had seen in her eyes when she attacked him; her closeness to him made him shrink inside.
    What was wrong with them? All of them?
    His stomach fell away at this reminder of their utter unfamiliarity to him; it was profound.
    He hated them.
    His ankles were lashed to the wooden cross, which was hard and splintery and untreated and felt horrid against his calves and heels. Surtr sat on his chest, facing him, pinned his arms under her
buttocks; Loki pressed a huge boot against his throat. And they were swift, they were methodical. They were killers. Killers: the word repeated itself once inside Luke’s mind and it
made his whole body go cold.
    And then a reel of all they were taking from him flashed up: he saw his mother’s smiling face, his little dog, Monty, with his white head cocked to one side just before a walk, his sister,
his father, pretty Charlotte in the beer garden, wearing her knee boots, her overbite too sexy to prevent him making a pass, his CD collection, the Billy Bookcase from IKEA with all of his
paperbacks inside, stacked double, real ale in the Fitzroy Tavern . . . He stopped the film with one tremendous sob. Screwed his eyes shut. Then growled in defiance.
    Once his ankles were fastened tightly to the rough wooden plank with the washing line, he could not move his feet or lower legs at all.
    He could barely breathe with Surtr’s weight upon his diaphragm either; the metal in her bare genitals was cold against his stomach. ‘Your band stinks!’ he shouted, when he
realized that he would not be able to punch and thrash with his arms.
    Surtr had pushed the heels of her little fat feet into his armpits, so when Loki reached behind Surtr’s lower back and finally cut the nylon cord from Luke’s wrists, it was easy for
Fenris and Loki to take a wrist each and pull his arms apart and to drag the stinking smock over his head. Surtr removed her crushing weight from his chest and helped the boys bag him with the
stinking gown; and they hooded him in the musty blood of the poor wretches who had died wrapped in that terrible cloth before him.
    Loki and Fenris pulled each of his arms through the tight arm holes of the dress; stretched his arms wide apart and lifted his body onto the crucifix, with his hands pulled out to the ends of
the cross beam. And when it came to tie his wrists off, the girl settled her considerable body weight through her knees, hard into his shoulders, which immediately flashed with pain at the point
just prior to dislocation. Weak and dizzy and nauseous; he had no choice but to remain still for them.
    He wanted to cry and beg and plead right then, but he screamed to control the pain and frustration instead.
    Loki wrapped one of his wrists in