The Ritual

whenever it dropped and he fell into a dark red sleep for seconds, or minutes,
or even hours; he couldn’t be sure. Eventually his shivering became too intense, so he staggered back onto his feet, shouldered the rifle and started walking even further away from the
trees.
    Beyond one of the great reaching crests of the forest, where the mighty trees thrust out together like a sweeping arm, he found another track: narrow, stony, overgrown, but offering the
suggestion that someone with purpose had worn this thin line into the landscape of stone and grey reindeer moss. Someone that had also once walked away from the dreadful forest.
    He didn’t know which way was north or south, or where the track went, but the very sight of it made him weep and shudder down to his toes.
    So into the darkness he shivered violently and he walked on legs like stumps and on feet he could not feel. Thin traces of moon and luminous cloud lit themselves up. He often stared at his hand
before his eyes but could see nothing. The oblivion didn’t last for long and the sky faded indigo, then dark blue, then pink, then white-grey.
    For brief moments, his mind went clear and he felt warm. And he recalled things with so great a clarity, it took a conscious force of will to assure himself that he was not back at work, or in
London, or talking to Hutch in a bar in Stockholm about books.
    But in the repetitive, tedious delirium, in the tramp tramp tramping of his numb feet, in some incongruous moment of clarity, he decided that earning £863 a month after tax at the age of
thirty-six did not matter any more. Nor did owing NatWest Bank twenty-five grand in a loan for a business that had failed so long ago. It was irrelevant. The fact he disliked his job, and hated two
of his colleagues, and was as poor as the poorest migrants around him at home in Finsbury Park, and that he dreaded Christmas because there were fewer and fewer places for him to go, and that he
only owned three pairs of shoes, did not matter. And all of this fell from him. His eyes now looked at something that was beyond the horizon and so deeply inside himself at the same time. And he
knew that what he now felt could never be truly revisited again. But that also did not matter. Enough of it would survive inside him, and live. And he knew the things that held him in place, and
reflected an image of who he had once been back to himself, and that marshalled everyone else around him, and that those things a man should strive for and achieve in the old world were all now
unimportant.
    Even though he was crippled and caked in dross and stained with blood and his head was still crowned by the dead flowers, like they were holding irreparably damaged parts of his skull together,
he felt light and giddy and unburdened. He was naked, and his head was bright with a whitish light even though the sky was grey and the rain fell upon him.
    Nothing mattered at all but being here. Himself. There was still some life in him. His heart beat. Air passed in and out of his lungs. One foot followed another. Knowing how quickly and suddenly
and unexpectedly life could end, how irrelevant life was anyway to this universe of earth and sky and age, how indifferent it was to all of the people still in it, those who would come to it and
those who had already left it, he felt freed. Alone, but free. Freed of it all. Free of them, free of everything. At least for a while. And that’s all anyone really had, he decided, a little
while.

THE RITUAL
    Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of two other novels of supernatural horror: Banquet for
the Damned and Apartment 16 . He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com

Also by Adam Nevill
    Apartment 16

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    Tired, bedraggled and wretched is the writer who walks alone. So many thanks to Hugh ‘Hershey’ Simmons for not only reading this book so thoroughly (and more than
once at that), but for the expeditions he has led; especially the one that gave birth to this idea, that saw us forced to make camp in the snow, shortly after finding two dead sheep hanging from
trees. I’ve carried the recollection for nineteen years until it found a home in this story.
    The deepest affection to Anne for her love, support, patience and advice, and to my dad for his careful readings again.
    National Parks in Sweden: Europe’s Last Wilderness by Claes