The Ritual

pitiful remains of the sun’s distant glow up and into itself, dissolving visibility to vague shapes of trees and
silhouettes of rock with black swathes of the indefinable between. Spaces that could be redefined by frantic minds to resemble anything at all.
    Dom never stood up. His face blanched under the filth to make his scabbed lips appear dark as if stained by wine. His wide eyes were filled with madness. It was impossible to speak in the
gravity of terror that crushed them both against the rocks and made Luke’s left leg shake uncontrollably. He was standing, but only just, and watching the rim of the hillock from where the
sound had originated, expecting a long shape to rise at any moment.
    He could not breathe, like the surface of his lungs were adhered together, and around his mind swiftly spun idiot words, and quick flashes of the shattered, mottled remains in that wet cavity
beneath the derelict church.
    Within the pit of his belly he tried to find the heat of anger; the rage that made him go to meet it face-to-face when they found poor Hutch, disembowelled and splashing his innards down his
legs and onto the black bark of the hanging trees. But there was nothing inside him but a chaotic space with no room for anything beside the kind of terror that could disengage a mind from anything
but imbecilic musings.
    And then again, to their left, so suddenly at their side, the bellow opened up the damp and boggy forest that remembered prehistory within its depths of peaty soil and in every single stone.
Bestial grunting gave way to a devilish yipping in which words could almost be understood.
    From the very core of each of them, their ancestors seemed to cry out in inarticulate voices. Right then, they screamed in alarm from times before symbols and language could depict such things
that hunted and meant murder. Luke believed they were returned, in this cold and in this dark, to a place and into the presence of something from earth’s dawn. Or another, even older place
than that. It dominated the land. The boughs and leaves of its territory shuddered, marshy surfaces quivered, and the dank and dripping vales held their breath before its arrival.
    Luke walked towards the sound, to the eastern edge of the hill on which they were about to make their final stand. Or maybe an engagement with it would be nothing more than it taking twitching
sacrifices from the summit. Snatching with a swiftness and euphoria that comes to the predator whose hot sinuses and moist valves inflame with the scent of warm flesh and gushing salty blood.
    Luke imagined a sinewy darkness, depressed to the earth. Moving through the shadows, up and over and under things. The very obstacles that banged their shins or brought them gasping to a
standstill, it merely glided past, able to slip through any natural barrier. Every inch of ground must have been mapped with nostril and tongue for years.
    He held the knife against his side, and told himself there would be one strike in him. And he must make it instinct-fast. Rapid as a blink. Quicker than a flinch. At the exact moment it came
whipping for his throat, or spearing at his torso. One strike, one chance.
    Nearing the edge of the hill, Luke dropped to a crouch and raised his left forearm in the way police dog-handlers do. The hand holding the knife clenched white and readied itself for an upper
cut.
    Then he turned more quickly than conscious decisions or explanations would allow for, and ran back to where Dom sat prone and watching him. Ran with great jumping strides beyond balance or
thought of where his feet fell; ran as fast as he could at Dom, at the tent, the knife ready.
    And sure enough, just as the tips of the hairs on the nape of his neck had whispered, and as the tiny vibrations in his inner ear bones had trilled, and as the cooling of the blood through his
heart warned, it would come in through the back door. Quick and low after luring one of them out to see it.
    Behind the tent, pebbles were disturbed and scattered. There was a snort, as if from a bullock, and then Luke received a sense of a dark shape dropping and melting swiftly away, like the passing
shadow of a cloud moving beneath the sun. Obscured by the loose tent and the spruce tree, he imagined, more than he saw, a long, black, nimble presence vanishing down the southern slope of the
hill, as fluid as water.
    Luke stopped in a skittering, lurching scramble over the lichen-covered boulders behind the tent,