The Ritual

contemptuous, self-serious. The man’s beard was long and matted. Streaks of white
greasepaint had run into it, frosting the hair, making Luke think of the foliage of wintry trees glimpsed on the banks of model railways.
    Taking in his new surroundings as quickly as possible, Luke looked for a door in the plain but stained walls. Between the hare and the goat he spied one where two of the unadorned walls joined;
a narrow aperture. It was closed. And all about him, the ancient plaster bulged from between warped timber, giving the room a misshapen bulbous character that made him even more uneasy. If that
were possible, and he found that it was. A small window covered in brownish net curtains emitted a smoky light into the room.
    Inside the ancient bed, with the sheepskin so soiled it made his skin feel rubbery, he realized that his body was also still filthy from his ordeal in the forest. The fact that he had not been
bathed concerned him so much, he felt that if he dwelled upon it, he would begin to cry with all of his heart.
    ‘Welcome,’ the white-faced man said. The voice was extremely deep, but affected. The sudden brief animation of his mouth and the timbre of his voice made the man appear younger than
Luke had at first thought when the figure unmasked. He now put the figure in his early twenties, even his late teens.
    Luke coughed, to clear his throat of what felt like splinters. Swallowed. ‘Where am I?’ His voice was a croak, dried out, insubstantial.
    ‘South of heaven,’ the unsmiling figure replied in the deep voice that sounded even more absurd on its second airing.
    A thin delinquent hyena laugh erupted from inside the lamb’s head; the harshest edges of the sound muffled by the confines of the mask. The figure leaned forward to grasp its own woolly
horror of a head under the tiny ears and removed it after a twisting struggle. Straightening his spine and snapping his head backwards, the youth whipped his own long black hair from his wet face.
Several strands no thicker than shoe laces clung to his moist cheeks.
    The lamb’s thin face, which struggled between being boyishly pretty and weasel-like, was also plastered with white make-up. But crimson streaks had been daubed down his cheeks as if made
by tears of blood, and also crafted to run from each nostril and from the corners of his downturned black-lipped mouth, like newly shed red blood.
    Luke swallowed. ‘Who are you?’
    In response to the question, the lamb issued a horrible sound that was both a bark and a high-pitched screech. Then the youth giggled to himself. Within the black caves of eye make-up, his
pale-blue eyes were bright with glee. It sounded as if he had screamed, ‘Oscar Ray.’
    Luke frowned, swallowed again, and again. ‘Oscar Ray?’
    ‘Oskerai!’ the figure shrieked again, looking even more damaged as it extended two spindly white arms from the nightgown and thrust them into the air.
    ‘We are the wild hunt,’ the tall figure said, his tone pompous, the words heavily accented.
    ‘The final gathering,’ a petulant, excitable female voice cried from inside the terrible head of the hare. Despite knowing there was a human being inside the hare head-piece, Luke
knew he would never feel comfortable within the presence of its mad eyes and dirty teeth.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ Luke said, and hoped they could not read the depth of his fear and alarm; he was old enough to know it was always a mistake to reveal such in the company
of the unstable.
    Off came the wretched head of the female hare, to reveal the plump head of a young woman in her late teens, possibly younger. She too had painted her face, but where the others had created
grotesque expressions resembling imperious grimaces or bloodied scowls, the girl’s use of white face-paint and black kohl had been more artful. Her spherical head depicted a permanent
expression of spiteful mirth, as if the bright red splashes about her lips and chin were evidence of a recent sadistic act performed with the use of her mouth.
    To engage their sympathy, and to put an end to this unnerving game, Luke touched the hot part of his head that felt too big to be healthy. Crusted blood in a thick seam indented his probing
fingertips. The wound was still wet and open in the middle. The dressing behind him on the greyish pillow was the same one Dom had clumsily wrapped about his skull when he was out cold on the high
ground, on the last night they spent outdoors. The