The Ritual

Lost his balance, swore, then righted himself and rose into the night air. It punished his cheeks. Around his startled senses a thousand
things dripped into the darkness. Through small apertures in the forest canopy the sky was a black void that quickly swallowed his torch’s feeble beam. He could not move his body out of the
tent’s porch.
    When the white light of his torch came down to earth it found the second tent.
    There were several things terribly wrong with it.
    Luke heaved in his breath and tried not to sob: the tent had completely collapsed into a lumpy mess of nylon and guy ropes and much of one side had been torn away; the ripped white netting of
the inner compartment had been revealed, its incongruous appearance utterly shocking against the wet black earth; around the jagged edges of the rent in the outer skin of the tent, a liquid
glistened in a series of long streaks and clots, and even pools. Shaking from his hand that held the torch, the beam of weak white light trembled about the heavy stains on the torn nylon. They were
bright red in colour: oxygenated blood.
    Luke’s mind could not be whole, or steady. There was a rushing of incomplete thoughts and notions, some utterly petty, in and out of the space inside him where his mind needed to define
itself and focus. He could not move; just stood upright in his underwear and shuddered from the cold, from the emotion, from the sudden surge and ebb of adrenaline in his own blood.
    Somewhere inside the punctured rag that was once a two-man tent, Dom lay gasping. Luke did not want to look under the wet green and yellow nylon. Guy ropes lay slack as if the tent cloth was a
sail collapsed upon a yacht’s deck at night in some black godless sea, with a crew member trapped beneath it.
    The articulated fibreglass poles of the dome frame had been pulled apart in some places, and protruded in the disorderly display of fabric. The tent now reminded him of a great kite that had
smashed to earth. Inside the crumpled mess was pain and bleeding. Something Luke wanted to run from without seeing.
    He turned about where he stood and flashed his torch across the uneven and encroaching perimeter of the clearing. Mossy bark, blackened tree branches, dark sopping leaves, shadows between.
Inside himself he cringed and thought of what Phil thought he had seen in the cemetery. He expected to see the limbs of trees suddenly animate and draw his stare to a terrible shape taking form.
But nothing moved.
    He swallowed noisily, blinked his wide dry eyes. ‘Dom! Dom!’ he suddenly called at the lumpy remnants beside his own half-collapsed tent. Flashed his torch over the ruin again.
‘Are you hurt, mate?’ His voice seemed to die before two words were out of his mouth. His chest shuddered like it had just endured a great sob or an intake of icy air.
    Got to keep it together.
    ‘Where’s Hutch?’ Phil said from the ground level beside Luke’s naked legs. He had come pushing, clumsily, through the doorway into the porch of their tent on his hands
and knees. His torch beam clashed with Luke’s, tried to move it aside while it flicked and probed at the heap beside them.
    Luke stepped out of the tent’s porch in his underwear. The shock of the cold earth against his pale bare feet punched his breath back inside his chest. Disorientated, he trod on the end of
a tent peg, then tripped over one of their tent’s few taut guy ropes and fell sideways into the trees. A sudden slap of wet verdure against his soft face, and the poke and snap of a small
branch under his weight, forced him to right his position, to get fully to his feet, to gather his bearings. Wakefulness came fully and coldly and shivering right then.
    ‘Domja!’ Luke called, resorting to the nickname he used in better times. It drew a reaction. A punching out, a raking of fingers from inside the deflated green and yellow tent.
    ‘Easy. Easy,’ Luke said, but then stepped back as Dom came through the rent on his hands and knees. Dom was wearing a purple fleece, boxer shorts and thick grey socks. His sleeping
bag followed him through the tear, caught on one foot. He kicked it away and stood up as best he could. The leg with the grubby bandaged knee was hopelessly bent. His dirty streaky face looked like
it had just emerged from a coal mine; it shuddered in the light from the two torch beams. He eyes were red and wild.
    Phil was on his feet now too, his legs bare, boots unlaced, hair sticking upright