The Ritual

where thorns had curled and torn, the scratches
shrieked with their own tiny voices. Even between his fingers there were cuts he could not recall the cause of.
    He looked at the dirty swollen skin of his hands and forearms. And to think, he’d believed himself saved. His chest tightened and his skin pinpricked cold; the sensation felt horribly
familiar.
    Lying on the wooden floor, he curled into himself, held his broken head, and quietly wept until he was exhausted by the effort of producing tears.

FIFTY-FIVE
    After the sobbing of Surtr finally ceased downstairs, Luke rested on top of the musty eiderdown and listened to the night. Dry blood stiffened and cracked upon his face. There
were no electric lights inside the room. No power sockets. No electricity. So when the world outside went dark, so did the room, and the house around it. The coastal sounds of the trees swished
near the house, but rose in deeper longer waves further out, stirred by the first strong wind he could remember since he’d arrived in Sweden.
    He listened to the wind until a new commotion of footsteps came up the stairs. He assumed it was the youths and the old woman, rising to murder him. Luke tensed, stopped breathing.
    Someone banged about in a room further down the corridor outside of his room – maybe two sets of feet – and then a door closed on those sounds. Other sets of feet shuffled and bumped
downstairs, on the ground floor, but to destinations in other parts of the building.
    He sucked in his breath, relaxed back into the mattress. His captors must have been going to their beds to sleep; some of them had gone into a room on this storey of the house. He sensed that it
was a large building; it creaked and yawned like an old sailing ship, and he could hear the adjustments of its timbers in the distance. Sometimes he thought he could feel the floor under the bed
moving too. He doubted the building was structurally safe.
    Eventually, despite the headache and nausea, he fell into a coma of exhaustion.
    To wake from a disorientating dream that involved him turning round and round and looking at a moon-white sky. Something had broken him from sleep. Noises. Above his room.
    It must have been well after midnight. It was pitch-black outside and the sky through his little window had not yet begun to lighten for dawn.
    But floorboards of a room directly above the ceiling of his room were creaking. And there was a faint bumping up there too. No scratching like the activity of mice or birds, but the shifting
sounds of motion from a more substantial presence. Or presences.
    Yes, he became sure that something, bigger than a dog or cat, was on the move upstairs, fumbling about. The pattern of movement brought to his imagination the image of several small children,
blind and stumbling round the walls of an enclosed space, looking for a way out. He pushed the image from his thoughts. It was not the kind of thing he wanted to think about on his own in the
dark.
    Gingerly, he edged himself off the bed. The floor emitted a loud and lasting crack. Up above him all fell silent. He paused, held his breath and strained his ears for a few seconds. Then trod
carefully upon the floor again. The silence of night amplified his movements as if through loud speakers.
    He swore silently. The house was listening. The darkness was following him.
    Nothing was moving above him now, but its presence still conveyed the sense that whoever it was had begun to listen intently to his movements.
    He started to panic. Whimpered. He needed to act. To do something. Now.
    At the window, he quickly moved his hands around the frame, then the glass. Could see nothing through it. The stars and moon were blotted out by cloud. The window was definitely too small to
crawl through if he punched the glass out. His shoulders would not fit. The drop would snap an ankle anyway, maybe two. He shuddered. No more pain. Please.
    Testing sections of the floor before he gave them his full weight, he moved unevenly across the room to the door. Pressed himself against it, felt its contours with the palms of his hands,
turned its handle uselessly, implored it to have a flaw that would allow him to leave. But the door was solid. An old thing, not a moulding, no hardboard involved in its construction. He scratched
at the thick hinges. He’d need a crowbar to get this bastard out of the frame.
    On his hands and knees, he moved about the floor. Using the tips of his fingers, he picked at