The Ritual

runny drop from his mouth, then turned away and heard a splash. He looked up at Hutch.
    Stripped naked. No sign of his clothes. Opened down the front of his torso to a groin black with old blood. Pale muscular legs stained brownish. Feet drifting in space at the height of their
heads. Eyes open wide, as was his mouth, the latter filled with a swollen tongue. His expression was one of mild surprise in an ashen face not without a suggestion of life, as if he were merely
looking out and into the middle distance where something had caught his eye and made him stare, distractedly.
    Inside his torso nothing appeared to have survived the attack and most of one shoulder and the adjoining bicep muscle were gone to the white of bone. Where two branches extended out from the
side-by-side pillars of dead spruce trees, he had been wedged fast, his weight supported by the passage of a branch under each armpit.
    His body had been arranged as if crucified and positioned to face them as they came stumbling and panting through the trees.
    Luke’s scalp tingled and the temperature of his body plummeted down to his icy toes. His vision began to judder and some white light flashed at the side of his eyes. He thought he was
going to faint. Muscles twitched in his face, mostly around his mouth. He couldn’t stop the spasms.
    Then his head suddenly cleared of everything but a thought that fell like a blow against his face: how did Hutch’s killer know they would pass this way?
    For the three hours after breaking camp they had followed the most obvious route southwards, down through the forest, directed by convenience through the spaces between thick towering spruce and
the thinnest undergrowth on the forest floor to this very spot. Which would mean they were being watched right now and Hutch’s body had been hastily erected and exhibited only minutes before
their arrival at this terrible place: a carcass presented to them by something with great strength that could climb.
    As soon as Luke endured these thoughts, the air of the old wooded land abounded with a bark that could also have been a cough. The same bestial outburst he and Hutch heard the night before while
sitting around the flickering stove flame.
    Luke swivelled his entire body about, his vision flickering and failing to settle on any single point out there in the trees. He dropped his rucksack to the ground and flailed for the knife in
his pocket.
    Dom leapt back from the tree, then stumbled in agony after thrusting his whole weight onto his angry knee. Through the brownish muck on his bruised face, his complexion was bleached with terror
and pain.
    Phil crashed back through the undergrowth towards them, stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. Rising with a strangled animal sound in his throat before it formed into, ‘Fuck, oh fuck.
Fuck.’ He then turned about in a circle, dizzy and ungainly, his rucksack hanging from one elbow.
    ‘Knife,’ Luke called to Dom, holding his own penknife up high and out from his body. Dom slapped frantically about the pockets of his waterproof.
    The bark came again from a new direction, and a position closer to them, somewhere behind where Phil was frantically peering about. The rough challenge of the bark was followed by two hard
snorts and then the kind of whinny that jackals make with their black lips pulled high in television documentaries.
    Luke moved towards the sound, his breath and blood so loud in his skull he fought to hear anything else. Every muscle buoyant with warmth and a sudden energy, he moved quickly, dodging about the
trees, light on the balls of his feet, his knife gripped so tightly his whole arm felt rigid-white.
    Somewhere within the mad euphoria that propelled him out there to stab and hack, to slash, to bellow, to not think or care in the reddish place a man can inhabit, he heard his name being called
repeatedly by Dom and Phil. Their voices drew him back into himself and he lost momentum, entertained doubt. But then grew hot with rage again and shouted so he could stay within the place he
needed to be in to face anything, anything at all. ‘Come on! Come on!’
    He paused and crouched down. Turned about by increments, staring so hard into the lightening forest his forehead throbbed with pressure. He wanted to see it. To suddenly close with it. His teeth
ground. ‘Come on!’ Then again with his chin raised and shoulders back, ‘Come on!’
    The forest remained still. No bird sang or called. Life