The Ritual

eight feet from the ground. His torso and
legs drooped, appearing weightless now that everything had been looted from out of his rib cage. The glimmer of the vertebrae, still moist, was worse than the beard of blood around the gaping
mouth. He had been peeled from the waist to his heavy thighs. A side of meat in a butcher’s window.
    Luke’s vision went hazy, insubstantial, then whited out. He fell onto his side and looked back at the house. Saw it for the first time. It was made from wood, stained black by age. Had a
pointy dark roof. Small windows.
    Two sets of thick-soled boots, embedded with silver rivets from toe to heel, came and stood too close to his eyes.
    ‘Enough now. Just enough now,’ Luke said, though he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. ‘Not Dom. Not my friend. No more.’
    ‘We call to it, it come. Our music is raise magic,’ Fenris said, excitedly. When these words finally assembled into a sentence inside his mind, the information confused Luke. Then he
realized he could feel nothing. Nothing at all, as if every nerve had been stripped from out of his body like wiring torn from a wall cavity. When he realized Fenris was not talking about Dom, but
about the thing that had brought his remains here, he closed his eyes.
    ‘This is the most remote place in Scandinavia, Luke.’ It was Loki speaking to him now. ‘Where the oldest things can still be found, my friend. Here there are different rules.
Different energies, you know.’ Luke continued to stare at the house.
    Then Fenris was talking again, quickly, near where Luke lay in the grass in his dirty underwear, wrists bound with a plastic loop from a DIY store. ‘They kept it alive here. Kept it
real.’
    When he spoke next in his deep, softened voice, it was as if Loki was mollifying a confused child. ‘Something is pushing to the surface of the world, Luke. And in us too. Something
terrible. Destructive. I sense it in you also. It pulled you in, eh? And all of your friends. Us too. But, I am sorry to say, that sometimes the innocent are sacrificed.’
    Fenris was babbling, breathless with glee. ‘How do you think they have lived here? Lived for so long? No one fucks with them. They live as they please. It is the oldest forest in Europe.
It is protected. That is why all this is still here.’
    Loki’s voice remained passive, unshocked, unaffected by the ruin of a father, a husband, a friend, a man, up in that tree. ‘This is the land of our ancestors. Here Odin still rides.
And you have to wake up and accept the wishes . . . the demands of something older and greater than you, Luke. That is all.’
    He heard the voice of the old woman for the first time then. ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas.’
    Loki and Fenris stopped talking and turned to her. Luke looked at her wrinkled impassive face. Some thin grey teeth were visible inside her lipless mouth. ‘Det som en gang givits ar
forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ she said again, as if simply stating a fact. Her voice was cracked with age, but the intonation was strangely melodic.
    Loki crouched down, swept a curtain of hair over one shoulder and tilted his crudely painted face towards Luke. ‘She says, what was once given, is missing. One will come to fetch it
back.’
    And then somehow Luke was on his feet, and the horizon of the forest was jumping in his eyes, and he was running on stiff awkward legs. Running away from it all.
    Past the front of the house he went, then up the side of the building; a dark wooden wall rearing up on his right side, the forest blurring to his left. Behind the building a white pick-up truck
with mud-plastered sides was parked before an overgrown orchard, the arrangement of the trees haphazard. Some of the tree branches hung heavy with dark-green fruit: cooking apples. A thin grassy
track, grooved to clay in twin tyre tracks, travelled along the side of the sparse gathering of fruit trees, before vanishing round a bend.
    Voices behind: Fenris whooped, then laughed like a jackal. Loki gave orders, his tone unhurried, methodical.
    A glance over his shoulder. The girl ran after him. Ungainly, short legs pumping in tight black jeans; heavy bosom swinging in an oversized hooded top with something printed on the front. Her
feet bare, white, thudding. Face round, excited.
    Instinctively, Luke ran towards the clay track. It might lead somewhere. The ground would not be so uneven as the forest floor was bound to be.