The Ritual

go.’
    They walked back along the track towards the others, who were still out of sight. Luke slowed down. ‘I’ll keep a low profile and walk out front.’
    ‘Good idea. But it means I’m now stuck in the rear with the fear again. Cheers.’
    Luke was about to laugh, but Hutch wasn’t smiling as he turned and walked away.

TWENTY-THREE
    ‘Strange. Real strange, fella,’ Hutch said to Luke, who walked so close to him in the scrub, he felt like a child behind an older boy, seeking guidance.
    ‘What?’
    Hutch stopped by a pile of rocks tumbled about a slight rise in the tangled earth of the cemetery; the rocks were engulfed in waist-deep foliage, right up to the flattish but tilting stone at
the top. ‘It’s a cromlech. Bronze Age.’
    Luke squinted at Hutch, pulling aggressively on the filter of his cigarette with lips he could only half feel.
    ‘This was the roof.’ Hutch tapped the flat tilting rock on top of the stone pile. ‘All these stones are on a mound. A burial mound. That’s why the stones are raised like
this. The rocks underneath this big flat one were the sides, but they’ve fallen in. And back over there’ – Hutch pointed his stick at another small hill behind the mound –
‘another one. Cromlech. Or dolmen. Old, old graves, mate.’
    He turned suddenly and pointed his stick at the tangle of white-trunked silver birch trees and brambles that engulfed an outcrop of large rounded stones, grey with reindeer moss, at the far side
of the clearing. They had walked around it earlier trying to find more of the rune stones. ‘And that’s a partially collapsed passage grave. Big one. Sure of it. Would have been about
twenty feet long. You can see the two upright stones where the entrance would have been. It’s the giveaway that it’s a passage grave. They’re all over Sweden. Dolmens too. But not
usually in the same place. Passage graves are Iron Age.’
    He turned about, his face intense. ‘And if you look around, the long flat stones we keep tripping over are bits of upright stone coffins. Built much later still. I reckon we can only see a
few of the rune stones too. Rest are hidden out there in the trees. But I’ll bet they form a circle. A perimeter around a much older site holding the cromlechs and passage grave.
    ‘Look at the trees too. There’s a chestnut. Oaks. Mountain ash, as well as the birch. Like an enclosure. A boundary to create repose inside. Christian cemeteries have them. So these
trees were planted even later. Probably when this church was built in the last few centuries. It’s amazing. What a find.’
    Luke stayed quiet; just watching Hutch’s tense, committed face.
    ‘The Stone Age graves must have been built, I reckon, about three thousand years BC. They’re so old they just look like piles of rocks now. I’d have walked right past them if
we hadn’t seen the rune stones and the church. The cromlechs and passage grave should all be completely covered over by now. Or had the boulders removed. Only bits of it still visible, you
know? But this has all been preserved at some point. Not recently, but at some time in the past few centuries. They’re not this intact unless they are cared for. Someone has been looking
after this site for about four thousand years. Must have been, until that church was abandoned and the stone graves toppled over out here.’
    Luke looked at him closely, awaiting a final summation that would shed some light on how this would lead to them escaping from the forest. Because he didn’t want Hutch’s enthusiasm
ending on the refrain that they were currently lost inside a forest that contained an undiscovered 4,000-year-old burial site. And that they had spent six hours that day following an old path to
it; a trail grooved with cart wheels from the terrible houses abandoned amongst the trees. Hutch winked at him, his eyes wide. ‘Come on, let’s get into that chapel.’
    The tier of stone at the foundations had slumped into the black soil, and the next tier had slipped down to pull the entire structure gradually earthwards. Its right angles and
straight lines had become concave; it sagged. The roof was gone. Some beams with slate tiles attached remained, exposed like the bones of a blackened rib cage. The three window casements on either
side were empty of glass. Vestiges of a rotten wooden shutter hung from an iron fitting on one side. Any other visible metal was either black with rust or had corroded to a stain on