The Ritual

alert.
    ‘No good.’ He shook his head.
    ‘What isn’t?’
    ‘This direction.’ He let go of Dom and slapped his hands against his hips. ‘Shit.’

TWENTY-ONE
    At first Luke thought it a natural outcrop of rock. They had seen plenty of boulders and even cliff faces on the first day of the hike, which suddenly reared up from the green
earth. But once he’d pulled himself around the stone and torn some of the wet ivy from an inclined side, he saw the worn runes. They covered one complete side of the rock, and were ringed by
an oval border, thick with petrified lichen.
    He turned about, lowering and raising himself on his ankles to peer through the surrounding thicket that had overrun the rock. Between the mesh of dead wood and the thigh-high weeds that coated
it, he saw another of the standing stones about twelve feet away from where he was crouching, and then another beyond it.
    Breaking away from the face of the stone and lowering himself even further, he rediscovered the path that wound about the three stones but was now impossible to walk upright upon.
    He tried to move forward, but his pack became immediately stuck in a branch and held him fast. Swearing through his clenched teeth, he reversed his body. Then removed his pack, groaning when the
hot weight of it fell behind him, into the leaf mulch and dirt.
    Against the ground, he crawled forward along a natural tunnel that had formed over the surface of the trail. Was it the trail? Yes. He stretched out an arm and followed the cartwheel rut with
his fingertips. Small animals must have worn the tunnel through with their scurrying. Face down, he squirmed about and felt the cold damp soil embrace his chest and stomach.
    He would move as far as he was able, to see if the foliage cleared from the path ahead. But this was the very last effort he would make in this direction. They’d already been travelling
for four hours since sunrise and were no closer to getting out. Once he’d ascertained he had reached the end of the stretch of the track beside the standing stones, he would go back and tell
the others it was time for the last resort. His plan. His idea. They could have been four hours into it by now. And it would take the very last of them to get out before nightfall, if they could
even find the route they had come through the day before.
    After twenty feet on his stomach the steely light suddenly brightened and the range of his visibility increased. He had reached the end of the natural tunnel, and could even look up above ground
level.
    He pushed his wet and bedraggled body on to its feet and broke through the lighter saplings about the exit. Lifting his legs high, to clear the thorns and nettles, he took a step forward into an
area where the forest cleared of the thicker trees and presented an airier space of thigh-deep undergrowth and dwarf birch, with little growing higher.
    The rain came down in silvery spikes. The jagged pieces of exposed sky he could see through the upper reaches of the wet spruce bordering and overhanging the clearing were bleak and dark with
rain. A bit of white sky was all you got up here at about 5 a.m., then it just went grey. The path was somewhere beneath the undergrowth. It must have been, because it had once led to a
building.
    Luke stood still and stared across the clearing at what presented itself to him on the other side. A church. And what he had just crawled through was a cemetery. A very old one too if the graves
had been marked by standing stones.

TWENTY-TWO
    None of them said anything when Luke reappeared, without his rucksack. He’d been careless rushing back to find them; a deep scratch was hot and inflamed down his left
cheek. It had bled along his jaw line and coagulated. And he was unaware that the tree branch that had lashed into his mouth had cut his top lip and painted his teeth with a scarlet film. Dom and
Hutch just stared at his wild eyes, breathless attempts to speak, and at his wet and cut face.
    On his way back from the cemetery, he had been gripped with an urgency that made him feel hot and loose and angry inside. He’d begun punching branches that hung across his return path; had
even stopped to smash flat some small toadstools. Because getting back to the others had been harder than his leaving of them, as if the forest forbade it. He was reminded of his dream and was not
grateful at all for the recollection. He’d stopped a dozen times and unhooked the sharp ends of broken