The Ritual

now.
    His arms and legs were shaking. He watched his knee for no longer than a second but its palsy alarmed him. His hands and feet were all pins and needles, until he made his limbs work again by
scrabbling for the knife between his legs where it had jumped from the dash. He gripped the knife handle between the palm of his right hand and the outside of the steering wheel. The blade was
dull, thick with blood at its base. Its presence inside the cabin made him feel strength in the form of a thin wire of tension within the bones of his forearms.
    Slowly, in first gear, he nudged the truck back onto the track and further into the shadows, into the greater darkness where daylight had no place and never had done. Driving fast was out of the
question; this was second-gear driving all the way through. But it had not broken inside the vehicle. Could not. Maybe. He told himself he could tentatively wheel his way out of here,
like a nervous motorist with a flat tyre in a safari park.
    Minutes passed. How many he could not possibly know. But as each wheel turned one full rotation and he rolled forward and further along this hairline crack in the surface of the greatest forest
of Europe, he promised himself that he would get out, and that this terrible black tunnel would end and that what stalked him through it could not possibly break into his shell of metal and . .
.
    He eased around a tight curve in first gear, and his one working headlight showed him a long stretch of narrow and straight track ahead. And the light also flashed upon what coiled and tensed
down there on such long limbs.
    Something tall and lean but shaggy about its haunches, was risen and poised; with bony arms, long as a stallion’s forelegs, hanging before it. And the great shape of its head was raised as
if to catch a scent or sound on the breeze. It was waiting. Waiting for him.
    The terrible head-shape was so long, ragged. It pulled itself back into a centre of gravity, anchored in thighs springloaded to strike. A glimmer of headlight flashed across corneas
amber-red.
    He thought it was an impossibly tall man. For a moment. Or an ape, a large scrawny one, poised to pounce like a great cat. But then of it, and about it, as it lowered down upon great muscled
haunches, and before it fled right at him, were the briefest features of other things that made Luke suffocate on a tongue he was sure he had swallowed in his terror.
    A thick-haired face, black, with a wet bovine muzzle, made itself temporarily available for scrutiny. The almost human eyes filled his mind. Eyes curiously sentient. Eyes revealing a hideous
intent. To merely see them made him whimper. But in the visible moments of its swift charge it seemed mostly goatish, that shape of a head upon the bullock neck; though the yellow teeth should have
been in the mouth of something else, long extinct. And extending from all of this, were the greatest of horns, from another place altogether. And it was coming at him. And he was going at it.
    The engine screamed at the end of first gear, for he had no presence of mind to go up to second. And he screamed over the engine, so loudly, until blood came up and into his mouth, and his
vision blurred.
    Then it was through the windscreen.
    Poles of aged bone ploughed into the webbing glass. The steering wheel snapped in half. The top of a skull, broad as a small table, followed through. Glass cubes covered Luke like sugar
crystals. He heard a sound like the puncturing of some giant ball, and on either side of his neck the horns kept on going and going through the rear of the seat and the sheet metal of the cabin
behind his shoulders. Until his nostrils and teeth and eyes were pressed into oily bristles that tasted like old meat and shat-upon straw. Something snapped like plastic between his eyes. His
already broken nose.
    Billows of steamed-out breath, cankerous with dead shoals of fish and sulphurous with a pig’s dung, infused the cabin, the world. And he was sick into it, onto it, that great matted skull.
Just before it began the terrible thrashing of its head.
    Luke was stuck fast into his seat. But the vehicle rocked like it had been T-boned at a junction by a speeding bus. Then two wheels were off the ground at the front. The rear wall of the cabin
caved in and there was the grinding of great stones as those horns moved deeper into the steel of the cabin. The roof suddenly groaned like an old floor and then buckled like a paper bag. It