The Ritual

it come fast from the trees, or you can try to run on slow and strengthless legs. Flee out there, through the spikes and snares of
ungroomed woodland. Into the heaving army that will not let you pass easily through its rows and ranks.
    It must be tall, because the branches so far from the ground begin to move straight ahead of you. Some are bent aside and allowed to whip back into place, where they settle and shudder. And
through the silvery leaves come the deep guttural grunts. Almost a voice, but not something you can understand. Thick with doggish whines, bull coughs and jackal cries. Its breath turns to fog
among the leaves and now you can see no more than the suggestion of something long and black moving swiftly between bush and trunk.
    Sinking lower to the ground, it makes ready to appear.
    Then the air is filled with screams, but not the cold air here, Luke realizes. But in the air of the world outside his nightmare something even worse was now occurring.

TWENTY-NINE
    At first Luke heard the screams from a distance, inside his dream. And then someone’s terror was all around him as he lay with his eyes open, staring at the dark roof of
the tent he shared with Phil.
    Heavy with the thick fugue he had been jerked from, his first thought was to lie still in the dark and to wait for the cries to stop. Only the screams of hysteria, of mindlessness, did not
cease. The awful sound of a man shaken apart by panic and fear to the point of extinction, turned the very air into a turbulence in which no clear thought could form or settle within earshot of
it.
    In the sightless cold he had awoken into, Luke then comprehended, both with shock and a sudden relief, that the noisy commotion was coming from the adjoining tent. It was Dom.
    The loose fabric on the ceiling of his own tent rippled from the commotion in the neighbouring tent, from where the screams were issuing. It all brought to his mind the sense of someone being
violently yanked from their berth, accompanied by sounds of cloth torn into long strips and a thrashing of bushes.
    Luke sat bolt upright and fumbled for the zipper of his sleeping bag. Then snatched about for his torch in the darkness, but his hands could not find it. By the time he gave up on the torch and
pawed his shaky fingers across his damp trousers, needing to find the shape of the Swiss Army knife in the front pocket, Phil sat up beside him.
    ‘What is it? What is it? What is it?’ Phil repeated in a daze, but within his tone was also an underlying note of acceptance, as if he had been expecting the disturbance and now it
had arrived he only wanted to know specific details.
    And then their movements and their words stopped, as did Dom’s wailing. All was frozen into silence by the sudden roar of pain unleashed by Hutch. A short expulsion of noise from an agony
so great it made the listeners feel sick. It was followed by a childlike whimper, and nothing more.
    Away from their camp tunnelled the noise of a heavy weight at ground level, rushing into the forest, snapping aside and crushing flat all woody impediments as it retreated at speed into the
returning silence that was once again only dimpled with gentle rainfall upon the leaves and the fabric of their half-collapsed tents. Then into this vacuum came several strange bird and animal
cries, as if these creatures had also shared the terror of the rout of the camp, out there in their own darkness, and were now calling out nervously to survivors buried in rubble.
    Phil’s torch clicked alight. Coloured entrails of clothing spilled from his rucksack. Two damp waterproof coats lay dishevelled by the sagging entrance. No inch of groundsheet was free of
the clutter Phil had littered about the tent. In the mess, Luke saw his own torch, snatched it up.
    Beside them, through the thin material that pressed against Luke’s body as he scrambled to his hands and knees, they heard Dom’s rhythmic panting in the next tent. He sounded like a
man suffocating, or suffering some kind of fit.
    Luke kicked free of his sleeping bag. He trod on his cold waterproof trousers, still damp with yesterday’s rain, and shivered when the naked parts of his body touched the clammy
groundsheet and the interior of the tent’s moist fabric. Bent double, shuffling to the entrance, he looked about for his boots. They were still wet inside. He discarded them. Behind him, Phil
clutched at his own clothes.
    Knife extended, Luke ducked through the unzipped flap.