The Ritual

large birds with broken wings
and papery skulls. Some of them were still covered with a hairless grey parchment of skin.
    ‘Over there.’ Hutch shone his torch at the scratch marks on the timber roof. Cut deep into the wood were childlike symbols and circles, like on the rune stones they had seen in
Gammelstad. The inscriptions appeared randomly, at different heights on some beams, in long lines like Chinese script.
    ‘What . . .’ Luke could not finish the sentence. Questions seemed foolish. How would any of them know what this meant or why it was here?
    Hutch walked forward. Luke flinched at every step his friend made, as if he were provoking something terrible and sudden to happen just by moving. Things crunched under Hutch’s feet.
Holding his torch higher, Hutch then cast light onto the torso and the face of the upright thing in the box. ‘If it moved, my heart would stop.’
    ‘Goat?’
    ‘Looks like it.’
    ‘Jesus.’
    ‘Quite the opposite.’
    ‘I don’t get it.’
    ‘Who would? It was some kind of temple. Effigy and sacrifice. I reckon it’s supposed to be the Goat of Mendes.’
    ‘The what?’
    ‘This thing is stuffed. At the back here’ – Hutch leaned inwards and Luke held his breath – ‘the mice have had a go.’
    Luke shook his head. ‘What do we do?’
    ‘Madness.’ Hutch was talking to himself. ‘Just imagine the craziness of the fuckers.’
    Luke wasn’t sure what Hutch meant.
    ‘The little hands are human. Mummified. Stitched on.’ Hutch turned to Luke. In the illumination from Luke’s torch Hutch’s eyes shone. ‘Just as mad as hatters.
Crosses on the walls downstairs and a bloody goat in the loft. A dead man’s hands sown on. Mixing metaphors. Lunacy. Swedish lunacy. It’s the darkness and the long nights. Send anyone
mad.’
    Luke turned. ‘Let’s go down.’
    ‘Phil was right. It is a bed.’
    ‘You’re messing with me.’
    Hutch shook his head. ‘I’ve seen them in the housing museum at Skansen. The first time I came over. And in Norway. They used to build these little wooden box beds into the rooms,
then fill them with hay. You put a lid on and it becomes a bench during the day. The people must have been tiny back then.’
    ‘Who’d want to lie in that?’
    ‘This guy.’ Hutch grinned and shone his torch right into the goat’s leering face.
    ‘H!’ It was Dom calling out from the foot of the stairs. ‘H!’
    Hutch nodded at the staircase. ‘Come on. Let’s split.’
    Luke resisted the temptation to take the stairs to the ground floor in two bounds.
    Behind him, the flash of Hutch’s camera lit up his retreat.

ELEVEN
    ‘You couldn’t make this up,’ Dom said; his words were slurred after drinking the lion’s share of the Jack Daniel’s. Supped from their plastic mugs
after they’d eaten half of the remaining food: the last four tins of sausage and beans, preceded by a first course of powdered chicken soup with noodles. Two chocolate and oat cereal bars
each completed the meal. But it wasn’t enough. Despite gulping at the soup and then stuffing the steaming beans into their mouths, even licking the bowls clean, which they had never done
before, they remained hungry. This had been the most demanding day so far, even though a shorter distance had been covered than on the previous day.
    Phil’s feet were bare and glistening with antiseptic. Dom’s swollen knee was raised and supported under Hutch’s rucksack. All of their thighs were stiff with slowly pumping
aches and their lungs were flat with exhaustion. A coma of tiredness had swept through all of them the minute their sleeping bags were unrolled. Luke had never felt so beaten. Had not known it was
possible to become so heavy in body and so listless. He could take about one more day of this. Phil and Dom looked like this had been their last.
    Enough food for one more day outdoors remained. And only a tea-coloured trickle was left in the small whiskey bottle Dom had lugged around since leaving Gällivare. It was to have been a
treat, opened beside some lake of an astonishing Nordic blue, around an open fire, with the sky turning pink as the darkness of night approached. That had been the plan.
    Luke watched Hutch push the last leg of the stool through the door of the iron stove they were huddled around. A shower of sparks erupted inside as he rooted the ancient wooden spoke around the
hearth. They coughed in the acrid smoke that belched out. The chimney was almost