The Ritual

The time for drastic action. Of one of them going for help.
    He cursed Hutch’s decisions again, his ridiculous baseless optimism. ‘Jesus Hutch! What were you thinking?’ Grinding his teeth, he ran through everything Hutch had said that
led them into this mess. His lips began to move and he said things about his best friend he knew would make him cold with guilt and warm with shame later.
    Luke closed his eyes. Tried to calm down, to think straight. Slowly, the intense heat of the sudden rage drained away and left him shivering.
    It was so dark where he sat in the wet verdure. Little light was descending to the forest floor, but the rain found its way down. The entire wood was sodden. He felt dizzy and took an energy bar
from his coat pocket. His hollow stomach ached. Did they even have enough food remaining for one proper meal?
    He began to imagine what would happen if he never moved from this spot. Would his body ever be found, concealed beneath these bushes and weeds and nettles? Or would his bones be picked clean by
teeming insects and foraging rodents? A too clear image of the remnants of his dirty camping clothes, a faded rucksack and his browned bones grinning from the dark leaves, propelled him into a
squat. His lower back ached from where the damp seeped up through the seat of his trousers. The black soil sucked the warmth out of a body.
    Back on his feet, he pushed on, driven by the desperate hope that somehow, miraculously, the end of the trees would present itself at any moment. But when he had long passed out of shouting
distance with the others, he began to worry he had left the path and was crashing off through the undergrowth in entirely new directions, being led by the forest into the places the thickets were
more sparse. At times he would stop and reassure himself that he was following the faint outline of the manmade track. Because if he wasn’t he would never find the others again. There were no
landmarks here; it was all the same and then more of the same, stretching into forever.
    Thirst burned out of his stomach, up and into his dry mouth; the last of his water had gone over an hour ago. Save sucking rainwater off the leaves from where it dripped all around them, they
would need to find running water before the day was out. He doubted any of the others were carrying anything but empty canteens either.
    After thirty minutes alone, he blundered into a granite plinth. A standing stone concealed by ivy.

TWENTY
    It was the silence Hutch gradually became aware of, though he decided against sharing the observation with the other two, who hobbled beside and behind him on the rapidly
narrowing trail. About him, he imagined the forest holding its breath, in anticipation.
    Since they had moved away from the derelict buildings, the birds had stopped their sporadic chatter. There was no breeze. Beyond the scuffling of their feet, the almost inaudible patter of rain,
and the whipping of leaves against waterproof fabric, the forest had fallen completely silent around them.
    It was a stillness that provoked a reaction, a response. He found himself looking with uneasy eyes into the thickets on either side of the diminishing trail. And had they just changed direction
again? He wasn’t sure. In places, the trail now seemed to have disintegrated into deceptive-looking shadowy hollows. Areas that promised easier passage through the choking obstacles pushing
them to either side of the faint trail; a vague path he often had to stare at hard to even recognize amongst the tangles of briars and pale green ferns.
    The light had dropped; the canopy was so thick here. Again. He worried about Luke becoming lost. Stopped and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Was suddenly furious at himself for letting
Luke just tear off on his own. ‘Stop.’
    ‘Eh?’ Dom asked, between his heavy breaths.
    Phil stopped; his breath wheezed in and out of his bulk. Hutch heard him suck hard on his inhaler.
    ‘What is it?’ Dom whispered.
    Hutch held up his compass, angled it away from Dom’s wet red face. North west. He wanted to scream. They were shuffling off course again. They were slanting up and back into the
forest. Going deeper, not down and outwards. They had been turned around too incrementally for it to feel like a definite change of direction. But when? How had that happened? He would have
noticed. Were he not so encumbered with Dom’s heaving uncoordinated bulk against his left side, he might have been more