The Ritual

face, reaching down to the
tip of his nose. He blinked rapidly. Moaned. Because for a few disorientating moments, he thought he was hanging from the ceiling, tied by his wrists. But it was nothing more than the gibberish of
shock after waking in darkness.
    Moist and warm, the moulding of the bedding clung about him and outlined his physical shape; prone, stretched out.
    He peered beneath the bandages, his eyes slitted to restrict the scorching of the thin light. He saw the murky outline of the old eiderdown; the sides of the box bed; perhaps a dim dark wall
beyond his feet.
    Still safe. Still saved.
    He’d had a bad dream. No problem there. No surprises. There would be others.
    He thought of his open wound; the cracks in his skull. He touched the bandage.
    Breathed out, slowly. Sit tight. He was safe and help was on its way.
    He closed his eyes.

FORTY-NINE
    So many violent sounds smashed him from sleep. For a few dazed seconds, he continued to mumble to the thin seated figures of whom he had been dreaming. Then he addressed the
origin of the noise erupting from somewhere beneath his feet, ‘Please. Who?’
    Something or someone was screaming. It was a high-pitched, inhuman cry. Beneath these relentless shrieks, a sound like the plates of the earth grinding together in an earthquake became an
impossible rhythm. Drums.
    The bed vibrated. He felt a thicker thrumming sensation in his hands and feet, and in the pit of his stomach. Bass.
    Music.
    He released his breath. The entire room was not filled with a million insects buzzing against each other, inside some giant smoking hive; these were guitar strings being shredded rapidly and
amplified into distortion. Some type of extreme music was erupting from nearby. From out of speakers so worn, damaged, and too small for the task set them, they crackled and snapped like cooking
fat.
    Luke came up from the stinking eiderdown and slumped onto his elbows; his eyes behind the bandages were stuck between a squint and full closure. He clawed at his face. Shoved the bandage up his
forehead. The entire loose arrangement of dressings dropped off his head, as if a cap had been tugged away by an unexpected hand from behind. Cold stale air fell fast and cooled against his scalp.
He forced his eyelids wide apart. Focused on the room. And then whimpered.
    Three figures stood at the foot of the bed, and the very sight of them made him quite sure that the hell of the Bible was real, and that he had awoken in one of its rooms.
    Black horns jutted from the head of the goat-headed figure in the middle. Hard as oak, polished like stone, the horns rose from a bristly forehead; curving outwards along their length, before
tilting vertically into sharp points at their conclusion.
    The sight of them took his breath away and thrust a snapshot of another dark place that made no sense into his mind; a mind that was now opening and closing its doors and windows like a film
speeded to a blur.
    The goat’s coal-black ears stuck out at ninety degrees from the great motionless skull, as if the creature had just been surprised in a forest glade. The yellow eyes with their large oval
pupils were curiously feminine, softened by light-brown eyebrows and long eyelashes. Black fur, as glossy as a horse’s tail, dropped from beneath the beast’s chin.
    Alone, even without the support of its two ghastly companions, the goat seemed to rise and not only fill the dim room to the ceiling, but command the entire space. It was blasphemously majestic,
and shocking, and maddening, all at once.
    Luke expected its horns to drop, and for it to begin a terrible rooting through the eiderdown. He imagined himself retreating up the bed to the rear wall where he would be gored. Opened, ragged
up the front and emptied steaming into the bedclothes. He thought of dear Hutch, of Phil, and his face screwed into an involuntary palsy.
    But the goat just stood above him, motionless, almost solemn; towering right up to the brownish ceiling.
    Was this their executioner? But if so then why was it wearing a dusty black suit and grubby collarless shirt? The fraying sleeves of the jacket were halfway up its front legs. Or were they
forearms? The soiled jacket was so tight across the shoulders, the figure’s long front limbs were pinched against its torso. It looked like the creature had taken the suit from a much smaller
dead man.
    Luke looked at the other two figures.
    Like the cast of some degenerate Victorian pantomime,