The Ritual

white-faced youths had not even attempted to dress his head with a new bandage, let alone bathe his tormented and filthy body.
    Now he was sitting up, the pain deep inside his skull, and the constant swoop of nausea it transmitted, made him horribly aware of his desire for an X-ray. ‘Hospital. A doctor. My
head.’ They continued to watch him without emotion. ‘I need help. Please.’
    The youth who had been the goat defiantly raised the chin on his mournful grimacing face. ‘Soon.’ With that, he turned, ducked his head, and strode noisily at the tiny door. He must
have been nearly seven feet tall; his height freakish within the dimensions of the room. Steel shin guards flashed upon the giant’s biker boots, where they shot out from the too-tight and
short trouser legs. The thick heels of his boots were studded with either rivets or small nails.
    The hare suddenly shrieked at Luke and stuck out a tongue so incongruously red between its liquorice-black lips, that Luke physically recoiled. On her fat dirty feet, she then skipped after the
giant and squeezed herself through the doorway.
    Luke looked to the remaining youth, who appeared even more idiotic when alone, dressed in his horrid nightgown, the narrow face daubed with clown paint.
    ‘My friends,’ Luke pleaded. ‘They were killed. Murdered. You have to call the police. Now. You hear me?’
    Head tilted to one side, the youth screwed his face into a quizzical expression. Then, imitating the taller youth by adopting a deep voice and mocking tone, said, ‘You must understand,
there is no police here. No doctors. You are many miles away from such things. But you are lucky to be alive. Very lucky, my friend. We have no phone. But someone has gone to fetch help for you.
Soon it comes.’
    Bewildered, Luke gaped from inside the reeking box bed. ‘I don’t—’
    Within the nightgown, the figure puffed out its chest. ‘You are fine. Be cool.’ Then he turned, picked up the CD player, and followed his companions out the door.
    The clunk of a heavy key inside an old iron lock preceded the heavy booming of three sets of feet through a hollow wooden space, or a corridor, beyond the walls of the room. And for a long time
after they had left him alone, Luke stared in mute shock at the locked door.

FIFTY
    The clunk of a big key in the old lock of the door roused Luke from where he sat in a daze, on the side of the box bed.
    He stood up too quickly, and fell against the cabinet. The wooden mug clanged against the floor, the jug wobbled sideways and jetted its remaining contents across the cabinet surface. The
unlocking and opening of the door became hurried.
    Before Luke could fully right himself, he caught sight of a small elderly woman in a long dress, moving swiftly from the door towards him. Somewhere under the long black gown, which concealed
her body right up to the furrowed chin, her little feet knocked loudly against the wooden floorboards. The sound hurt his head.
    With the faintest touch of her small hands, she guided more than moved him back to the bed. Where he sat, squinting through the shuddering waves of pain that surged from the middle of his head
before crashing behind his eyes. He thought he would be sick. His vision broke into silvery dots and the back of his neck froze. Then he was sick. A great squeezing inside his stomach forced a
trickle of dirty liquid out of his mouth. The elderly woman muttered something in Swedish.
    At the furthest reaches of his bilious senses, he detected the presence of another figure in the room. When it spoke, in what reminded Luke of Norwegian more than Swedish, he recognized the
voice to be that of the youth who had worn the lamb mask.
    The nausea drained from Luke and the walls of the room stilled. He looked again at the old woman. Her face was expressionless, but her small black eyes glimmered in sockets so old the skin
around her eyes reminded him of walnut shells. What he could see of them was strange and intense. He could not look into them for long.
    Her lips had sunk inside her mouth; the chin below was deeply grooved and whiskered. The bright white hair about the tiny head was very thick but short, and looked like she had cut it herself,
with a knife and a fork.
    He suddenly wanted to laugh madly at this apparition, but he found her weirdness also filled him with a muting unease. Her skin was grey and also yellowy in places, like the flesh of an ageing
smoker. She could not have been an