The Ritual

you stink.’
    Luke rose to his knees. ‘No. You’re hurting . . . Stop.’ And then the pain in his wrists silenced him as Surtr pulled the strap even tighter. Tears melted the vision of her
moon-face and her spiteful lipless smile.
    Fenris gripped his hands while Loki shovelled a huge hand under his right arm. Together, they pulled him upright, then off the bed and on to his feet. Fenris smiled right into his face.
‘Big surprise for you today, Luke.’
    Out of the room, then down a cramped wooden corridor they bumped and banged him. Surtr went first with wide bare feet padding across the wooden floors; her raised soles were as black as tar.
Loki followed her, dipping his head to avoid smacking it against the ceiling and oil lantern; his bulk eclipsed the thin light in the narrow space. Close behind Luke, Fenris giggled. He felt the
youth’s hot breath inside his ear.
    All of them were excited, pushy, shoving, impatient. He wanted to scream at them to leave him alone, but the idea that Dom was here shocked him mute. He was alive then. Impossibly alive. He
thought his heart was breaking. ‘Where did you find him? My friend?’
    At the top of the stairs Loki turned his head, the long black hair swaying in an inky torrent. ‘He found us.’
    Luke could barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘Is he all right?’
    Fenris laughed and said, ‘Very well.’
    Loki frowned at Fenris, then turned away.
    ‘Is my friend all right?’ Luke demanded, his disorientation lessening, the pain in his wrists turning to warmth.
    ‘These stairs are very old. They put you on your ass,’ Loki said.
    Fenris pushed Luke from behind. He skittered down the first three steps. Fell against the old walls, righted himself. It was like standing on the deck of a small boat, or walking through a
moving train. His balance was shot. Whether it was because he had just woken, or because his hands were tied, or because of his head injury, he didn’t know. And then he was at ground level,
the floor solid beneath his naked soles. From the open front door, air fresh with damp and rain and earth engulfed him.
    A cramped brownish hallway materialized. A murky kitchen led off it; inside he saw a black iron stove and chimney, an old wooden table with solid sides of plain board, chairs with rounded legs,
peeling cabinets.
    A bigger parlour, the walls dark with ancient timber and chaotic with antlers, skulls and blackened things, then came briefly into view through another doorway to his right. And then he was
pushed from behind by Fenris again, and out through the open front door he went, and on to a sloping wooden porch.
    The remains of the pyre from the night before blackened the grass. He could smell old smoke and wet ash.
    To his left, the old woman stood on the porch. The sudden sight of her small body in the long dusty black dress, made him start. Tiny eyes glimmered in her collapsed expressionless face. The
uneven ends of her short white hair were wispy in the day’s grim light. She merely watched him. The youths ignored her.
    Luke jerked away from Fenris and stumbled after Loki.
    Desperately, Luke cast his eyes about. ‘Dom. Mate. Dom!’ He desperately wanted to see his friend, and needed to get a sense of the house he was imprisoned within, and essay the
grounds, but he only succeeded in a bewildered stumbling into the grass paddock before the porch. And then his eyes caught sight of something up high, straight ahead, caught in a tree like a
hapless parachutist gone all limp. He looked away and gasped.
    Then whipped his head back to see the tatty figure in the treeline, strung up directly before the front door; the spot below his little window. In his eyes, the reds and yellows of raw meat, and
the sudden white of bone, clashed with the backdrop of dark wintry green.
    ‘We have summoned him wiv our music! See!’ It was Fenris shouting behind Luke.
    Luke dropped to his knees. Looked at the grass and at his bound hands. Peered back up.
    Mackerel light silted down and through the tree branches. Dappled with shadow, Dom’s face was perfectly still; white as candle wax across the unshaven cheeks either side of a thick bruised
nose, but mired with dark blood around the mouth. His face seemed strangely expressionless, like he had been nonchalant about the circumstances of his final breath.
    As if drunk and embracing the shoulders of friends on either side, Dom’s pallid arms were stretched out and hooked between two tree limbs about