The Ritual

pantry. Dark and brown and cool inside. A chunk of black bread he snapped from the hard loaf and crammed it to his mouth. Sucked it more than chewed it. Coarse against his tongue, it
tasted of blood. There was a salted joint of meat in there; two sacks of beets; jars full of pickles and preserves lined four long shelves; dusty cooking apples; salt. Turnips, carrots, ancient
coffee. But nothing to go. Blood Frenzy must have arrived empty-handed; these were her meagre provisions. They’d come to the end of the earth for this. Later, he could eat later. When he was
gone.
    Keys, keys, fucking keys.
    He went up the stairs slowly, backwards, trying to keep the chewing mouth in his hip closed. He needed to wash it, bind it. At the top of the staircase, he turned himself around. Sent the barrel
of the gun into the murk first and followed it with his body. He wondered if Surtr could have come back inside the house and crept up here. He dismissed the idea, but felt tense and brittle, like
he would shatter at the first sound of her still being around.
    Down the corridor. A peek into the first room. Two sleeping bags on the floor. One blue, one yellow. Loki and Surtr’s room. Clothes strewn everywhere. Untidy, dirty, angry people. He went
inside, looking for Loki’s jacket. Then turned and gasped. Nearly shot from the hip, when he saw the three animal masks they had worn that first day. All three were lined up and staring from
a wooden sawbuck table that looked as if the Vikings had made it. Did they bring the animal heads here, or had they come with the room?
    A miasma of sweat and hair grease wafted off their clothing. In the mess on the floor he found a leather biker jacket. It was riddled with spikes around the shoulders; riveted with steel at the
waistline and elbows. Celtic Frost, Satyricon, Gorgoroth, Behemoth, Ov Hell, Mayhem, Blood Frenzy, painted carefully in white paint on the back panel. Inside a pocket, a jingle-jangle. Six keys,
attached to an inverted steel crucifix: what else?
    For some reason Luke zipped the pocket closed after extracting the keys, then asked himself, ‘Why?’ Shook his head. It was like walking through treacle now. Was the house so hot? He
could only remember being cold in here before. The building listed like a boat in a squall. The rifle was so heavy; the barrel banged against things. He swore at it. His face was burning, wet.
    Back outside in the corridor, he glanced past his old room and at the little door that led to the attic staircase. Listened. A voice. He frowned. Moved down to the door, but it grew faint. He
looked at the ceiling. Realized the voice was not coming from up there, but from outside. Someone was singing.
    He went back into Loki and Surtr’s room and peered down through the dirty glass of the window. Nothing out back in the orchard. He paused, listened again. It was coming from the other side
of the house. Unable to bear going back inside the room they had kept him locked inside, he descended the stairs, breathless, dazed, his wounds burning but wet.
    In the hallway, he raised the rifle butt to his shoulder and walked at the front door. The parlour door was still closed; the kitchen, he saw after a quick sweep with his jerky eyes, was empty.
Back door was still open.
    He stepped over Loki, looked outside.
    The little old woman stood by the site of the second fire, just beyond the radius of scorched grass. A tiny figure dressed in black to her neck, facing the trees, indifferent to the motionless
body of Fenris on her lawn. For such a small person, her voice carried. The wailing that came out of her was almost Arabic in intonation, but then Luke thought of North American Indians too. And
whatever she sang lilted up and down in the singsong cadences of Swedish. She clapped out a beat with her little hands. What she sang was simple, repetitive, like a nursery rhyme. The same few
lines, going up and down, over and over. He began to recognize one word. ‘Moder.’
    She called it out again, and again, at the end of the third line of the three-line verse: ‘Moder.’
    Mother.
    ‘No,’ he said to himself. ‘Please no.’
    The realization came quick and cold like the contents of a pail of freezing water thrown straight into his face. He swung his head like a tired horse, and knew that no man should be made to
witness such things. Was he in hell? Had he died in that forest with his friends, and now this was an endless narrative of atrocity in an afterlife