The Ritual

back to the church building. He looked through the door and saw Hutch bent over in the gloom. Part of the floor had collapsed again around his hips,
and the pews on one side had now dipped into the centre aisle which Hutch must have tried to run across. ‘You all right, mate?’ Luke asked.
    Hutch nodded. ‘Which is more than I can say for these poor bastards.’ He had both of his arms stretched towards his feet and was pulling dead branches and leaves from the floor with
both hands. He threw the debris onto the collapsing pews.
    ‘Buddy, something’s up with Phil. You better get out here.’
    ‘I know. I looked out the door. But he was just standing there. What was it? He see a snake? I told you guys about the adders. You got to stamp your feet before you go into
undergrowth.’
    ‘I don’t think it’s a snake. What the hell are you doing?’
    Hutch looked up at him. Only his teeth and the whites of his eyes were clean inside his dirty face against the backdrop of the dark and rotten floor. Hutch looked ill. His face was lined and
slack with exhaustion. Whatever he had found seemed to have finished off the last dregs of the optimism and humour that had begun to flicker back to life when they explored the cemetery.
‘Jesus. Jesus Christ. I don’t know what to make of this.’
    Luke slid and shuffled his way back inside the building. ‘What? What is it?’
    ‘I don’t really know if I should touch it.’
    Luke leant, gingerly, on the back of the intact pews and peered into the hole Hutch stood inside. Around Hutch’s feet were more of the large wet leaves, thickening to a brownish mulch in
the poor light. And there were other things down there too that Hutch had partially cleared of foliage. They looked like more of the dead tree branches, black with damp. ‘What? What am I
looking at, Hutch?’
    Hutch raised his face. ‘Remains. Human remains.’
    ‘The crypt?’ Luke hardly heard his own voice and then had to swallow the nerves that put a tremor in his words.
    Hutch shook his head. ‘They weren’t interned. No coffins. Just dumped in a pile. They’re all broken. All the skulls are smashed in.’
    ‘Shit no.’
    Hutch bent over and picked something up. Instinctively Luke said, ‘Don’t touch it.’
    Hutch raised it to catch the watery light that fell in on them along with a chilling drizzle that was getting heavier. ‘This is from an animal.’ It was a long rib he held up. Then
dropped it, slapping his hands together noisily in an attempt to clean them. He bent in again, sorted through the black wet dross around his feet. ‘A mandible. Three vertebrae. Another pile
of ribs. Maybe from a horse. Moose. Dunno.’ He bent back into the reliquary. ‘But all mixed up with this.’ The next thing he held up was a human rib cage. An arm soundlessly
popped out of it as he raised it from the leaves. The pale brown colour of it was unnerving; it looked newer than the animal bones. ‘And this.’ He next raised a human skull, the jaw
long gone, the upper row of teeth blackened, half of the small cranium punched through. He dropped it and aggressively wiped his hands against his trousers.
    ‘Human remains and animal remains mixed in together. Bloody weird. They’re not all old either. I mean, they’ve all been here ages, but some have been here longer than
others.’ He was talking to himself now, oblivious to Luke’s tense presence, as if by speaking out loud he would arrive at a satisfactory explanation for what felt so wrong. They were
both now shivering inside their wet-weather gear; shivering from more than just the effects of the cold air and the rain.
    Luke could not swallow. And what shocked him more than anything he had experienced since they had become lost, was the evidence in this place that the boundary between men and beasts had been
scored out.
    ‘Children’s bones are in here.’
    ‘Oh, Christ no, Hutch.’
    Hutch sighed, and sifted his foot through the wet dark detritus.

TWENTY-FIVE
    They all squatted down, around Phil, staring at him. The rain dropped steadily from a darkening sky and made a constant pattering against their coats and packs. Phil looked
unhealthily pale and shivered. He’d wrapped his hands under his arms, clutched himself. He glanced over a shoulder. ‘It’s here. It followed us.’
    Hutch and Luke looked at each other, then back at Phil. Luke blew two deep lungfuls of smoke into the wet air. ‘What did?’
    Dom’s eyes were too wide in