The Ritual

through the filth on his face; his eyes were full of pain. ‘I’m waiting for the stretcher, H. I
can hardly bend my leg. I’m not joking. It’s gone all stiff.’
    ‘It’s not far now, mate,’ Hutch said. ‘River’s got to be close.’

FOUR
    Four kilometres due east from the thing in the tree, they found a house.
    But this was only after another four kilometres of wading through ivy, nettles, broken branches, oceans of wet leaves, and the impenetrable naked spikes formed by the limbs of smaller trees.
Like everywhere else, the seasons were confused. Autumn had come late after the wettest summer since records began in Sweden and the mighty forest was only now beginning to shuck its dead parts to
the ground with fury. And as they had all remarked, it was so ‘bloody dark’. The thick ceiling of the trees let little daylight fall below to the tangled floor. To Hutch, the forest
canopy left an incremental impression of going deeper inside something that narrowed around them; while looking for the light and space of an open sky they were actually descending into an
environment that was only getting darker and more disorientating, step by step.
    During the late afternoon and into the early evening, when they were too tired to do anything but stagger about and swear at the things that poked and scratched their faces, the forest had
become so dense it was impossible to move in any single direction for more than a few metres. So they had moved backwards and forwards, to circle the larger obstacles, like the giant prehistoric
trunks that had crashed down years before and been consumed by slippery lichen; and they had zigzagged to all points of the compass to avoid the endless wooden spears of the branches, and the
snares of the small roots and thorny bushes, that now filled every space between the trees. The upper branches ratcheted up their misery by funnelling down upon them the deafening fall of rain in
the world above, creating an incessant barrage of cold droplets the size of marbles.
    But just before seven they suddenly fell across something they were sure they would never see again. A trail. Narrow, but wide enough for them to walk upright in single file, without lurching
about or being tugged backwards by a sleeping roll or backpack snagged on a branch.
    By this time Hutch knew that none of them even cared where the trail led, and they would have followed it north, just for the luxury of being able to walk upright and in a straight line. Even
though the trail would lead them either due east or even further out west, instead of southwards, the forest had cut them their first break. He could sort out exactly where they were later and
chose the eastern direction to try and compensate for the north-westward course the forest had thus far enforced. Someone had been here before them and the path suggested it went somewhere worth
going. Somewhere out of this dark and choking nowhere.
    It led to a house.
    Their packs were soaked. Rivulets of water ran from their coats and soaked the thighs of their trousers, and Phil’s jeans were sodden and black; the jeans Hutch told him in Kiruna not to
take in case it rained. From the cuffs of their sleeves the rain poured onto their scratched and red hands. And it was impossible to tell if the rain had saturated and then seeped into the fleeces
and clothes they wore underneath their Gore-Tex coats, or if the moisture was sweat soaking outwards from their hot skin. They were dirty and dripping and exhausted and no one had the nerve to ask
Hutch out loud where they could pitch a tent in the forest. But that was what they had all been thinking; he knew it. On either side of the trail, the undergrowth was as high as a man’s
waist. And it was during that time, when the fear in Hutch’s own belly began to turn into a shivery panic reminding him of childhood, and when the realization of the fact that he had made a
terrible misjudgement and was now endangering the lives of his three friends hit him, that they found the house.
    A dark and sunken building that slouched at the rear of an overgrown paddock. The ground was covered to the height of their knees with nettles and sopping weeds. A wall of the impenetrable
forest they were lost inside bordered the grounds.
    ‘It’s empty. Let’s get in there,’ Phil said, his voice wheezy with asthma.

FIVE
    ‘We can’t just break in,’ Luke said.
    Phil bumped Luke’s shoulder as he walked past. ‘You can have