The Ritual

his tears.
    They thought they could take life away from him.
    There were three of them. He thought of the sheath knives, the rifle. They were teenagers. Children even. Probably too young to go to prison. Could he hurt them if it came to it? This sudden
stab of his conscience made him groan. This was no time or place for a conscience.
    He rose and walked to the window of his room, and looked out at the upside-down cross, felled and flat upon the grass.
    It was simply a world where one will dominated another. It was an uncompromising era. Insistent wills eroded him, dominated him, they always had done. Some even greater will, guiding all of the
others who had tormented him in his life, had led him here for the final reckoning of himself; in a part of the world made by the damaged for the damaged, in the great age of the pathological. If
he survived the morning, he swore he would fight it, them, whatever, forever.
    He could defer to no one and nothing but his own survival now. It was an every man for himself world. He did not make it so; he had resisted it but was tired of being the victim.
‘Victim,’ he whispered the word. ‘Victim.’ Saying it was like sucking a battery. He victimized himself. And he would not have it any more. He would die here unless he killed
them all. He was in the now; he knew what that meant.
    Could he kill? he asked himself. His stomach turned over. Would he recognize himself after he did this thing? This was not some horror film; he would actually have to smash a knife through human
skin into the density of a body.
    He began to shake. Maybe he should just run, hide, run, hide, hope.
    No. They would come after him.
    He looked at the ceiling. He had to sow with salt the place where such things could still exist. He would need to go to the red, hot, unthinking place inside himself: the place he inhabited when
he attacked the passenger on the train, and punched poor Dom off his feet. He needed to find the place inside himself that led to the smashings, the snappings, the middle fingers at drivers who did
not stop for pedestrians on crossings, the grindings of his teeth to sand when he could not sleep and thought of the sociopaths he had worked with. The pathetic rage that destroyed his possessions
and furniture, that turned itself against the inconsiderate and the rude in public, was always simmering in him, ready to boil. The gas needed to be turned up a notch. Right now. His life depended
upon it happening. And he would need to stay inside that hot red place of instinct and rage until they or he were dead.
    It was unthinkable; it was mandatory.
    But it wouldn’t come. In his thoughts and feelings he found it hard to change places with them. To suddenly be the one who was violent and determined.
    He closed his eyes. Imagined their horrid painted faces; the triumphant smiles of these intense, committed, wilfully idiotic, cruel people. They were unfathomable. Why should they live, and he
not? Why?
    They deserved to die. He wanted them dead. He wanted their young but poisonous blood shed, and this wretched part of the world erased from the earth. Blood and soil. Yes, they were right.
Ragnarok was coming down fast, but not in the way they anticipated. He’d give them their blood and soil.
    He was naked so he put on the little stained gown. It smelled of rust. Then he crowned himself, as the old woman wished.
    But if he overcame them . . . He remembered the terrible forest, and of what walked upon its floor. Luke shuddered. Closed his eyes against it all.
    He crept towards the door. One thing at a time.
    ‘One thing at a time, my friend,’ said the part of him that had detached itself from all of the other voices inside him.

SIXTY-FIVE
    The door to his room was unlocked. When he opened it, he expected someone with a painted face to suddenly come through it, grinning; or, at the very least, to be outside
waiting for him in the shadows. But there was no one in the corridor.
    He went out and into the dark house on careful feet. Pulled the door closed behind him, but paused when the old hinges began to groan. He left it ajar.
    Listened as he had never listened before. Somewhere, something was dripping: a monotonous sound, ambient. There was a far-off creak in the roof, then a wooden floorboard moaned under his dirty
feet. The old house was always shifting; the old spine trying to support the weight of its years.
    At one end of the thin passage was the little door to the attic; to