The Ritual

totally closed. Smouldering remnants of the seat formed the base to the red ashes inside the little oven that only
heated part of the ground floor, before the draughts from the door and between the floorboards took over with a night chill, a tang of damp earth, and the ferment of rotten wood.
    Phil and Dom had smashed the stool to firewood earlier, against Luke’s wishes. Aren’t we in enough trouble? And he’d been unable to watch Hutch start the fire using four
of the crucifixes as tinder. By not watching Hutch snap and twist them into small bundles, he quietly hoped he was exempt from the further misfortune this act of desecration might evoke.
    Hutch frowned at Dom, then leaned back against his friend’s knees. ‘Go easy on the sauce Domja. It’s got to go four ways. That’s your last tot. I’ve barely had a
mouthful.’
    Phil smiled to himself. ‘We should save one last swig for when we leave the forest.’
    ‘I’d see it off tonight. It’s the worst thing you can drink if you’re wet and cold.’ Hutch seemed to stop himself from saying anything further, as if what he had
suggested might befall them the following day.
    Sitting and leaning forward on top of their unrolled sleeping bags, which in turn were placed on their foam mats on the filthy floor of the hovel, they consumed the hot red air that belched from
the tiny door. Even when they got too close and it burned their faces and seared their heavy eyes, they welcomed it. It was the first heat they had felt in two whole days.
    Above the stove, hung from a tent’s guy rope fixed between four of the nails that had once held animal skulls in place, sodden clothes gradually steamed and smoked dry in the darkness:
four bedraggled fleeces and four pairs of grimy trousers. Their waterproof coats were hanging behind them on the nails of the far wall. Everything else gone damp inside their packs, was haphazardly
suspended from other nails about the room. Dom had taken all of the skulls and crucifixes down. Something else that made Luke uneasy. Though he wasn’t sure why.
    He felt the warmth of the whiskey rise from his belly and numb his mind. It was worn out anyway and grateful for this cushion of temporary oblivion, or at least the promise of it.
    In the swimming gloom where the backdrop of ancient blackened timbers disappeared beyond the reassuring glow of the flames, Luke was struck by the wear on the three faces around him, lit up by
the reddish flicker. His own must look the same.
    Patches of Dom’s unshaven jaw shone silver in the glow from the fire. He was going grey. Even his fringe was salt and pepper now. Deep shadows gathered under his eyes too. They looked too
old for his face. He had three kids to look after, and a big mortgage to pay. He’d not mentioned anything in any detail about his current circumstances, but said, ‘Great. Never been
better,’ when Luke asked him ‘How’s things?’ during the small talk of that first evening together in London. But the absence of specifics might be the clue. Other than a
brief conversation about schools he exchanged with Phil on their first afternoon in Stockholm, Dom had not mentioned Gayle, his wife, once: the bone-thin and unhappy woman Luke had met for the
first time at Hutch’s wedding.
    Something was up. He could feel it. Dom had been blind drunk the day Hutch got married, and the night before they left for Sweden, again in Stockholm, and then in Gällivare before the hike.
In fact, at any opportunity he coerced the others to start drinking heavily. Something Luke didn’t have the wallet for in London, let alone Sweden. He barely scraped enough together to cover
his share of the walking holiday, and secretly suspected Hutch suggested camping in the first place so he could be included in the reunion. But despite his bluster and boisterous approach to
everything, Dom was acutely sensitive. Luke wasn’t fooled. He remembered how quickly he fell to pieces after romantic setbacks when they were students. All living together at number 3,
Hazelwell Terrace in Birmingham. The best days of his life. Of all their lives, he liked to think.
    And before this trip, he couldn’t ever remember Phil’s face looking anything other than pink and shiny, like it had just been scrubbed. But his cheeks looked jowly now and his
usually florid face was blackened with dirt. An inflamed scratch arched above an eyebrow. Occasionally Phil would reach up and touch it with a neat fingernail. His