The Ritual

heavy. Full of dusty warmish water. All of
which he swallowed, only tasting it afterwards when his mouth became tangy with rust and sparked steely with minerals. Wild water. Well water.
    A bludgeoning ache behind his eyes rolled in waves and brought his eyelids down fast as storm shutters. His limbs turned to liquid with exhaustion after the simple exertions. Am I that
broken? He eased back into the imprint that his long occupancy of the bed had shaped into the bedding. He seemed to sink deeper down than before, the odiferous cavern of unventilated quilt
pressing behind his descent.
    Now he was still, the pain inside his skull rang more softly, and the slosh of water in his gut lulled him back to restfulness.
    He was saved. ‘Saved’. He was saved from the terrible forest and what walked through it. He was alive and saved. Saved. Alive. Saved. His face became wet with tears. He sniffed. And
then dropped into sleep.

FORTY-EIGHT
    There are people in the room.
    Again?
    Leaning towards you while you stand in the metal tub, they inspect your white body. They are old. So very old. Every inch of each face is furrowed and wrinkled into clumps of yellowish skin,
like under the eyes, which are hard to make out beyond glints within the sunken sockets. But when one of them puts their head through a thin strand of light, you can see a milky-blue cornea
surrounded by a discoloured iris.
    One of them could be a woman, but there is so little hair on the patchy skull. Just a few white bits around the sides of the head; the skin traversed by blackish veins. The other could be a man,
or maybe even the body of a bird without feathers, shrunken and starved into a shape of sticks.
    Bent in their loose black garments, like robes hanging from bare bone, they squint and peer at your hips, ribs and shoulders.
    Fingers with knuckles the size of peach stones, covered in skin as translucent as the flesh of cold chicken, prod at your freckled belly, as if you are a joint of meat. Dark teeth spike behind
the tight grins of lipless mouths, grooved like muzzles.
    You try and speak but you can’t get your breath. They mutter to each other in words you cannot understand. Lilting, musical voices, that rise up and down in strange cadences.
    Tallow candles are lit and placed about the walls, making shadows flicker and rise up and down the dark wood, highlighting the horns and discoloured bones nailed to the planks.
    Then from above you, through the ceiling, you hear the knocking. The banging of wood on wood. Mad tappings and rappings without rhythm, like a child with a stick and a saucepan. And maybe it is
an animal, a dog or something up there, because something is whining. The sounds are dulled through the smoke-blackened ceiling; this whining and mewling amidst the banging.
    You are grateful that this makes the old people in the dirty black wool move away from you. But you are only relieved for a moment, because the figures move towards the door where they seem to
suddenly be in a hurry to get out. One of them fumbles with the door latch and the other peers up at the ceiling, with eyes full of glee, and more teeth showing than before, at the sound of hard
feet resounding against the floor upstairs; unsteady at first, and then cantering.
    You try to follow the old people out of the door, but it’s not possible for you to move and step over the edge of the black iron tub. Your ankles are tied together with something thin and
painful where it squeezes your skin, and when you look up you can see your hands going purple from where they are bound together at the wrist with a leather strap that loops over a blackened iron
hook in the ceiling.
    Then the old people are gone and you are alone in the cold metal basin. But something is coming down from the room upstairs. You can hear its bone feet on the wooden steps of a staircase outside
this room, and you can hear the sound of something squeezing its body down and through a narrow passage, accompanied by quick gusts of excited breath.
    A thick shape fills the doorway of your room. You scream when you realize it is coming through on all fours, with the long horns out front.
    Luke woke with a cry.
    Panted hard like he had just smashed across the finishing line of a sprint down a running track. He called out for his mother.
    The remnant of his waking was swift and the nightmare receded to a sepia blur, then vanished. He was awake and gasping into the old bandage tied about the front of his