The Ritual

into the front of the box had been a small circular gap to rest his throat. So that his head would hang into the unbreatheable musk of devil and animal. His
head was to hang below its teat-pocked belly, pinkish under the longer black hairs. Then those hooves would smash down like a hammer onto a dinner plate.
    Bits of skull littered the dirty straw between the black stick legs of the thing. The forelegs were long and down they came again and again to make the imbecile rhythm of hoof on wood.
    Its body had been so tall, like it had long outgrown its little cradle. And he knew the horns on the terrible head were scratching the beam in the middle of the ceiling.
    And over he had gone against his will. Into the blinding stink, and the sound of his own cries were obscured by the knocking. Speeding up. Drumming with no rhythm on the scarred black wood. He
still seemed to hear the echoes of it now, which is why he could not stop his hands from shaking.
    Into the worn circular slot, in the front of the little box, he’d rested his throat. And up, up, up went the thin black forelegs. Up towards the ceiling together. And paused for half a
second before they came back down. So fast.
    And then Luke had been beside him, shaking him, waking him.
    ‘Look! Through there. And there. Two of them!’ Luke’s voice broke his reverie. Hutch looked up and squinted at where Luke crouched down, further along the trail, pointing off
into the trees.
    Hutch’s stomach contracted.

NINETEEN
    They had been travelling for two hours westward on the increasingly overgrown track when Luke noticed the two buildings engulfed by the undergrowth.
    When no one answered him, he turned his head and looked at the other three coming up the narrow trail, their elbows out, fending back the stiff wet branches that hung from the enclosing treeline
and draped belligerently across most of the open space. Dom and Phil were both limping. Hutch was hanging back to help Dom over the fallen logs that had begun to present themselves with an alarming
frequency beyond the place they had joined the trail the night before.
    Luke walked point all morning. It was better to go first; you would be the one to see the way out and by walking out front, all the time yearning for the trees to clear and for a vista of escape
to present itself, you were better motivated to keep going.
    ‘Look!’ Luke called louder this time to be heard over the din of rain scattering through the canopy of leaves above them. He pointed in the direction of the dark sides of two
indistinct buildings.
    The wooden planks of the visible walls bulged with damp and were black up to the dim windows; though it was hard to tell if they were shuttered or not. A suggestion of a stone chimney jutted
from the end of one building before becoming obscured by a mesh of foliage.
    ‘What’s that, Chief?’ Hutch called back. ‘A nice little café?’
    ‘Or some big bastard wolverine,’ Dom added.
    Luke waited for the others to draw level with him. ‘Another two houses.’
    Hutch was breathing hard from supporting Dom’s weight over the last fallen log. He looked at where Luke was pointing.
    Between their position and the two buildings, grew a thick bed of nettles with black thorny stems. Above the nettles the bare branches of dwarf birches and willows formed a twenty-metre
portcullis of criss-crossing sticks, choking the spaces between the larger trees. It was impenetrable.
    ‘Just keep moving,’ Dom said. ‘Don’t know what’s inside them.’
    Luke nodded. ‘I genuinely hate to think. Wonder why they’re here.’
    Hutch rested a hand on Luke’s shoulder. ‘Bum a fag off you?’
    ‘Sure.’ Luke reached for the side pocket on his waterproof trousers.
    Hutch put the cigarette between his lips. ‘Must be an abandoned settlement.’
    ‘Where more of them mad fuckers lived,’ Dom said.
    ‘No one’s been here for a while.’ Hutch looked down at his feet. ‘This track must have joined them up with the other place. See this’ – he prodded his foot
under a blanket of bracken and lifted it – ‘ruts from a cart wheel under there. You can still see them at the sides of the track.’
    Luke rose back to his full height. A knee joint cracked. He visualized the unwelcoming interior of the two buildings; wet, lightless, spoiled with rot and animal spore. He imagined the despair
they would feel in the comfortless air, in the desolate age of the place.
    ‘How’s it looking ahead?’ Hutch