The Ritual

with Dom’s weight against his ribs. Surely he could not fall asleep while kneeling up. Shuddering in the cold, he reached
over and took Dom’s torch from out of his lap. Then held each of the torches at waist-height, and trained their pale beams onto the ground either side of where they sat before the rippling
tent.
    He sat like that without moving for twenty minutes; then another fifteen; eventually completed an hour. The rhythm of his companion’s breathing lulled him, comforted him. He would not be
without it . . . Every second Dom slept would . . .
    He flashed open his eyes, after what felt like a moment of them being closed. Luke and Dom were not alone on that hilltop.
    Dozing off into a waiting, beckoning, soothing coma of exhaustion, part of him had remained alert; a neglected, but now revived and finely tuned region of his mind that sometimes roused him at
home when a noise within the confines of his flat contained more drama than the scurry of a mouse, or creak of a joist, or ambient shudder of a pipe inside a wall. The part of him that responded to
the unnatural sounds of night, suddenly clicked his mind alive without the yawning stupor of a normal waking.
    In the tired torchlight, he could see no further than ten to fifteen feet across the small summit; even the rim of the hill had long vanished into the murk of the cloudy night. The stones
closest to the tent were still visible, appearing bluish beyond the torch’s beam as if emitting a strange light, but were bleached like sea shells when directly within it.
    ‘Dom.’
    Against his side, Dom’s solid weight still rested, shoulder blades pushing out from restful inhalations. To his right, between the tent and the southern edge of the hill, Luke’s
startled vision told him that the shape, no more than two metres away from the first guy rope, had not been there before he fell asleep.
    ‘Dom.’
    It was not moving. Immobile as a boulder, long as a fallen log on a forest floor, it was nothing to a casual glance, or even peripheral vision. A long dark reaching form that only a man
petrified by the hyper-alertness of a hunt might investigate with a second look.
    Luke was too frightened to shine his torch directly at it. He did not want to see it.
    He swallowed. Whimpered, ‘Dom.’
    Dom murmured in his sleep.
    And then the nearest part of the shadow, that defined itself by the thinnest light of the torch that brushed that place, moved. Raised itself no more than a few inches, in the way a stalking cat
will engage in the next step towards its prey.
    Luke turned his stiff thighs into a crouch, and then roared with all the power of his lungs. He shone a torch beam into the shape, and dropped the other torch to reach for his knife in the mouth
of his sleeping bag.
    What had come up the side of the hill for them, pressed into the ground, was startled by his cry. Within the juddering white light, a black shape flattened itself beneath the light, then
withdrew so quickly it almost vanished. Along what could have been a hairy flank something gleamed like oil.
    Luke scrabbled and snatched inside the warm interior of his sleeping bag for the knife. His fingers brushed nylon, a zipper, his own leg, empty air. ‘Dom!’
    Dom woke. Rigid with fear, he pressed his body into Luke’s stomach.
    Time paused. The air tensed taut, in the way it does before the clashing tearing violence of living things coming together to kill.
    Some part of it scraped like bone across stone, backward and down into the darkness beyond the torchlight. It could have been his imagination, but Luke sensed a long shape had cantered,
spiderish, sideways, and disappeared behind the tent; and then must have moved, if not flowed, across to the gaunt silhouette of the spruce. Or had even just reappeared there. Because something was
now moving, rising up, behind the tree trunk at the far reaches of the arrival of his torch’s beam. And then upward it went some more, behind and seemingly around the trunk, on unseen limbs,
that must have been as long as stilts. Or were these merely retreating shadows, created by a torch held in a trembling hand?
    Luke stood. The light from his dim torch frosted the tree, and washed weakly across what could have been long thin moving branches, or something else entirely.
    Fumbling about for his torch and knife, Dom murmured something inarticulate from beneath Luke.
    Above them, before them, the long thin shapes that might have been foliage in raking