The Ritual

his own suspicions of the house and forest.
    Phil shuffled about on his sleeping bag. ‘I’m so tired I can’t see straight, but I don’t imagine I’ll get a minute’s sleep here. My arse is already
bruised.’
    ‘There’s a bed upstairs if you want it, Phil,’ Hutch suggested, then took a sip from his mug.
    To which they all grunted their approval at the display of sick humour.
    Dom stared into the fire. ‘Do you think anyone will believe us? About this?’
    ‘I have photos,’ Hutch said. ‘Got a smoke on ya, Lukers?’
    ‘Not of the thing in the tree,’ Dom said with such a serious facial expression, Luke began to laugh as he lengthened an arm with a cigarette pinched between two fingers. Which set
Phil off too, chortling and wheezing.
    Hutch smiled and accepted the cigarette from Luke. ‘We can go back in the morning if you like.’ He winked. ‘I’m sure your kids would like to see it from all
angles.’
    ‘You could frame it,’ Phil said, his face relaxing into a smirk and his eyes twinkling by the light of the red flames.
    ‘Do you think it’s connected to here?’ Luke looked at the floor as he asked all of them the question.
    ‘I’m trying not to connect the two,’ Phil said. ‘Especially as we have to spend the night in one of the places under consideration.’
    As they all laughed at this, Luke suddenly felt his body suffuse with a warmth of good feeling for his friends. Maybe even love. He winced at his vow to never see Phil again, and at his outburst
at Dom. It was just the situation. It had made them all emotional, irrational.
    ‘What do you think?’ Dom asked.
    Luke looked up at him, his eyes narrowed to meet what he felt was a sarcastic challenge.
    Dom smiled. ‘No messing. What do you really think?’
    Luke shrugged and raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t know. I mean, I cannot think of any reasonable explanation as to how an animal, completely eviscerated, because that’s what it
was . . .’ The three faces around him grew grim, so he altered the tone of his voice and made it sound more confidential and lighter, ‘Got to be hanging from a tree. So high up. I
don’t know anything about this area, or the wilderness of Sweden, other than what I’ve read online, or in the travel guide. H is the expert there.’
    Hutch sighed. ‘I wouldn’t say expert.’
    Dom rubbed his hands up and down Hutch’s head from both sides. ‘Neither would I. Yorkshire bastard.’
    ‘But,’ Luke said. ‘Don’t you have the feeling . . .’
    ‘What?’ Dom asked.
    ‘That it’s all just wrong.’
    Phil laughed. ‘No shit, Sherlock.’
    ‘Just imagine you weren’t lost and were just walking through this wood, on a day trip.’
    Dom burped. ‘A nice, but cruel idea at this point in time.’
    ‘It would strike you as wrong. It would make you uneasy. Don’t you think?’ Luke noticed Hutch was watching him intently as he spoke, but couldn’t read his expression.
‘The actual environment. The trees. The darkness. It’s not like any forest I’ve ever been inside, and I’ve been in a few. I’ve been camping with H in Wales, in
Scotland and Norway. And nothing has ever felt like this. The other forest we saw the first day up here wasn’t the same either. Wasn’t so . . . rotten. And lightless.’
    The others all watched him in silence.
    ‘Apparently we’re all programmed at a primal level, in the reptilian brain, to fear the woods. But it’s more than that. I’ve felt, since we entered this forest, that this
fear isn’t unjustified.’ Luke took a final long pull on his cigarette and then threw the butt through the tiny door of the stove.
    ‘Shot,’ Hutch said.
    ‘Shot,’ Dom murmured.
    ‘Shot,’ Phil said through a yawn.
    Luke leaned back onto the palms of his hands and his head was immediately swathed in the colder air that pooled beyond their tight circle about the stove. He looked up at the ceiling. ‘And
now this. The forest made these people crazy. Because I don’t think people are supposed to come here.’
    ‘And usually they don’t,’ Dom murmured, his eyes closed. ‘That’s why there’s no paths, aye Yorkshire?’
    Hutch sighed and rubbed at his filthy face. ‘I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it before. It just suddenly changed. It wasn’t dense enough at first to ward you off.
But then it just kind of swallowed us and there was no going back the way we came in.’ He yawned. ‘And I really don’t want to be here any