The Ritual

the dark
stone.
    Twenty feet from the ruined porch of the chapel, Phil and Dom were sitting down on their rucksacks in a demoralized and exhausted silence. Dom had his trouser leg pulled up again and was
pressing at the sides of the grubby bandage Hutch had fastened around his swollen knee for support. His mouth was bruised and his bottom lip was split and still bleeding into the dirt on his chin.
The top of his nose was purple and fat, his top lip stained crimson. Two pieces of white toilet paper hung from each nostril.
    As Luke stood before the porch of the chapel he realized with discomfort that it was the first time he and Dom had been this close, and fully in sight of each other, since the fight. Something
he could hardly believe had happened now. An event that made him restless with shame and anxious about his sanity. He was exhausted, his blood sugar was low, he’d hardly had any sleep in
three days . . . but still. It was Dom he had attacked. Dom: his friend.
    Luke had stayed so far down the track on his way back to the cemetery; making sure he turned and walked ahead the moment the others broke through the foliage and saw enough of him to know they
were heading in the right direction. Occasionally, Hutch would shout, ‘Chief! Where are you?’ or ‘Chief, show yourself!’
    But now they were all gathered in one place and he and Hutch had completed their tramp around the accessible cemetery grounds and had turned their attention to the ruined church, it was harder
for Luke to keep his distance from Dom.
    The sight of what he had done to Dom’s face made him feel sick. Guilt replayed the shock and fear on Dom’s face the second time he attacked him, over and over again in his
imagination, and he could think of little else now. It was throttling him. He would have to see someone; get help, when he got home. Because he knew only too well that this was not the first time
this blinding suspension of self-control had occurred, and recently too.
    He desperately wanted to apologize, but couldn’t face another confrontation. It would come. Dom had to vent at some point. The best thing he could do, he kept telling himself, was to atone
by getting them all out of this mess. By finding an escape route. Water first. Then a path out. He would do this for these men he had once loved like brothers, even if they weren’t his
friends any more.
    Hutch peered at the weathered stone arch around the doorway. He bent in close and gently scraped his penknife against the stone. Luke stood behind him. If Dom hadn’t been mute with
smouldering anger, he would have been shouting right now, and demanding Hutch explain what he was doing looking at old bits of stone when he was hungry and wet and lost. At least it was good not to
hear that voice encroaching again on the stillness and limited space they had managed to find here amongst the endless thickets.
    Hutch slapped his hand against the arch, as if to indicate that when the rest of the building collapsed to rubble the arch would still be standing.
    Upon the two stone pillars of the arch, markings depicted what could have been figures of men or animals, but they were so spongy with the lichen that Hutch scraped at with his penknife, it was
hard to be certain what they had once represented. Runic inscriptions and other indecipherable carvings framed the characters and leaping figures in the centre of each pillar. Wheels with angular
markings were carved into the worn limestone arch above the granite pillars. Above it, a wooden apex must once have completed the doorway, but it had rotted down to dark wet stumps.
    Inside, the walls had once been covered in plaster; almost all of it had fallen away to reveal rough granite blocks beneath. The exposed stone was speckled with a milky green lichen. Rotten with
damp and spored with black fungus, the remains of two rows of sagging wooden benches, or pews, still faced forward to a pulpit that looked like a lump of stone hewn roughly from a quarry. The top
of the altar was covered with dead bits of forest. The floor was knee-deep with leaf mulch and dead branches that had fallen through the holed roof.
    ‘A small congregation,’ Hutch said. ‘Probably held about twenty.’
    Luke could not bring himself to speak. He was too uncomfortable with Dom’s presence somewhere behind him; it glared against his back, all molten with rage and salted by grief.
    ‘Odd though. Really odd.’ Hutch stepped through the arch and onto