The Ritual

they crowded the upright goat and issued across the bed a scent of disused props, of dusty backstage places, of old sweat.
    The hare was too terrible to look upon for long. And the fact that it was diminutive, no taller than five feet, somehow made its visage even worse to behold than the goat with its appalling
height.
    Tatty brownish fur sprung in clumps from a long face. Mad eyes, fiery with amber but also black with rage at their heart, bulged from bony eye sockets. A pair of tall ears were cocked forward,
almost twitching. More similar to tusks than teeth, two long pillars of discoloured bone dropped from its dirty black mouth, guaranteeing its prey a deep and fatal penetration.
    With a gasp, Luke raised a hand feebly, as if to ward off the toothy menacing he anticipated, so busy and sharp, about his throat. Tufty, stained and stitched, its long neck bushed and bristled
down to a pair of naked milky shoulders, and to a heavy bust, tipped with pink nipples, bright and puckered hard.
    Aghast, Luke looked away from it. Demands for his attention were now being made by the lamb. It snorted. The first sound any of the figures had made. He stared into the lamb’s dead bluish
eyes, fringed with pink rims and bleached eyelashes. It seemed to regard him with a great sadness, like a face from a freak-show daguerreotype. Fur stiff and yellowing with age was close-cropped
about the head but still managed to curl like a human child’s. Atop its head, a garland of dried flowers had been entwined with a spray of heather. Beneath its little square teeth and small
chin, a stiff circular collar of lace jutted out. Brittle with age and watermarked, the gown it wore brought to mind both a burial shroud and an old-fashioned christening dress made for a little
girl. But the latter juvenile suggestions of its attire did not soften Luke’s shock at seeing the upright lamb at the foot of his bed. Did not soften it at all, but prolonged it.
    Amidst the cacophony of the shrieking music, and as his mind struggled to comprehend the surreal horror of this welcoming party, he felt unable to move, or speak, or to even think clearly. And
his visitors just stood there, still as mannequins, staring at him, their bright hideously animate eyes unmoving, as if they were waiting in expectation for something from him: a word, a scream,
some feeble defence.
    Suddenly, the great black head of the goat turned to the lamb and something passed between them. The lamb turned sideways, revealing its pink whisker-filled ear, and bent down towards the floor
that Luke could not see. A white human arm shot out of the lace gown, the forearm girlishly pale and thin, but blackened with spiky tattoos above the wrist. The music abruptly ceased. Silence
expanded.
    Luke sat up fully, backed against the end of his little box and pulled his knees into his stomach. His shock lessened in the sudden quiet, but not by much. Beneath him, his quick movements
disrupted the dirty sheepskins from a bed of old hay that filled the little box.
    Why am I not in a hospital bed? And he also wondered whether this second unwelcome appearance of a black goat into his life had burned up another of the fuses inside him, and that without
the fuse he would remain a very nervous man for the rest of his life.
    The goat raised two long-fingered human hands. Which were the first things attached to the creature that Luke was pleased to see, as he had been expecting hooves.
    Dirty fingernails atop the slender fingers gripped the furry cheeks of the goat head and pushed upwards, removing the mask, but revealing a face beneath it that Luke at once wished had remained
covered.
    The face was caked in some kind of white cosmetic. It bleached the skin of all colour save the black lines cutting grooves into the forehead and at each side of the down-turned sullen mouth. The
eyes had been made especially hollow-looking with solid patches of black make-up, caked inside the sockets. The lips had been painted black too, but inside the hot mask much of the cosmetics had
sweated off the thick vulval mouth of the figure, which sneered at Luke and exposed teeth the yellow-brown of unboiled corn.
    Long black hair, clotted with sweat, fell like oily string about the figure’s large mournful face. Dark lines, carved as much as painted from between the bridge of the nose and into the
forehead, gave the pallid face a permanent frown. The eyes were a cold bright blue; their expression intense,