The Ritual

he looked through the leafy branches below for his companions. Turning to the side, at the waist, he peered through the web of verdure and
black bough, down to his left where the sounds of terror and distress called up from the earth.
    There was the tent. Where was Dom?
    There was Dom, standing up, a few feet away from the green and grey tent, looking down the slope, bent over. But silent now.
    Luke began his descent, both legs shaking as his eyes peered between the lines of branches and the crevasses of empty air, disguised by false ceilings of green leaf, until his soles found and
gripped the branches he had already traversed on the way up. He tried to keep his focus short, on foot placements and no further; not the distant hard ground that he could fall down to and be
broken upon.
    ‘Dom!’ he called. ‘Dom!’ he called again. There was no answer, but he kept on going down, limb by limb. His voice sounded feeble, silly, up in the air. Trembling feet
hovered above branches too low to comfortably descend upon, his body clutched to the trunk. He went down like a terrified blind man trying to get down a ladder where the thin air told him he was up
high enough to die if he slipped. Descending with his body shaking with fear and tense with adrenaline; going down, branch by branch, until he swung by his hands and dropped to the rocky ground of
the hilltop.
    Pins of pain shot through his feet and he stumbled sideways, then pitched right over, smacking his face against a gnarly tree root breaking from the stony ground. The sudden pain sobered him,
angered him. He got to his knees. Stood up, shaky on legs weakened from exertion.
    His eyes darted everywhere, looking for what he did not want to see. A long thing, he imagined. Black, loping. Bright wet colour about its mouth.
    But he just saw the inert tent, Dom turning back towards it, but looking over his shoulder. And about the tent was the stony ground and grey-black boulders, the dark moss and pale-yellow lichen,
and a few small trees on the summit struggling through for life and for the sky. There was no Phil on their hill. A little pile of firewood thus far collected was scattered near Dom’s feet,
like he had recently dropped it.
    Luke’s own breath suddenly deafened him. Sweat joined the drizzle and ran into his eyes; blurred his vision that would not stop jumping and trying to see the worst in every direction. He
wanted to scream and run fast, anywhere. Panic swamped his mind. He shouted something to clear his head, and then forced himself to stand still, to slow his jumping eyes.
    His vision cleared. His line of sight extended to where it had been before he lost his head. He came back into himself swiftly. Then Dom rushed at him.
    And Luke saw that Dom was shaking with eyes too wide for any face but the face of the witless. His mouth was open and ruddy and gasping out incoherent whimpers mixed with shuddering
inhalations.
    Like a drowning man, Dom seized him. Snatched handfuls of Luke’s waterproof and then slipped sideways and onto his hip, pulling Luke over with him. Until they both kicked and scrabbled and
pushed at each other on the hard ground, but could not break apart because Dom’s white-knuckled hands were clamped onto his waterproof; the fabric tugged out and into an expanse of stretched
and ripping material that Luke felt come further away from the seams under his arms.
    ‘Dom,’ he muttered. ‘Dom, let go.’ But Dom hung on to him like he was a life raft in black drowning water. He didn’t want to go under alone and he clutched at the
only safe and companionable thing within his reach.
    ‘Let go!’ Luke roared next to Dom’s face. But Dom only whimpered and said, ‘He’s gone. Took . . . Took . . .’
    Until Luke grasped Dom’s dirt- and sweat-streaked head in both hands and squeezed, shouting, ‘Get off. Get off me,’ crushing that frantic, saucer-eyed face. Which crumpled. The
hands on his chest, tangled among his clothes, went limp and dropped away. Dom lay on his side and covered his face with his filthy fingers.
    Luke kicked away at the hard ground until he was standing upright and flattening his jacket down at the front. He scrabbled for the little oval shape of the closed penknife in his trouser
pocket. He got it out, got it open. A pitiful little blade, dull in the dusk light on the desolate hillock.
    He walked away from Dom. Didn’t blink once until his eyeballs felt like they had soap rubbed into them.