The Ritual (11 page)

As Luke stood before the porch of the chapel he realized with discomfort that it was the first time he and Dom had been this close, and fully in sight of each other, since the fight. Something he could hardly believe had happened now. An event that made him restless with shame and anxious about his sanity. He was exhausted, his blood sugar was low, he’d hardly had any sleep in three days … but still. It was Dom he had attacked. Dom: his friend.

Luke had stayed so far down the track on his way back to the cemetery; making sure he turned and walked ahead the moment the others broke through the foliage and saw enough of him to know they were heading in the right direction. Occasionally, Hutch would shout, ‘Chief! Where are you?’ or ‘Chief, show yourself!’

But now they were all gathered in one place and he and Hutch had completed their tramp around the accessible cemetery grounds and had turned their attention to the ruined church, it was harder for Luke to keep his distance from Dom.

The sight of what he had done to Dom’s face made him feel sick. Guilt replayed the shock and fear on Dom’s face the second time he attacked him, over and over again in his imagination, and he could think of little else now. It was throttling him. He would have to see someone; get help, when he got home. Because he knew only too well that this was not the first time this blinding suspension of self-control had occurred, and recently too.

He desperately wanted to apologize, but couldn’t face another confrontation. It would come. Dom had to vent at some point. The best thing he could do, he kept telling himself, was to atone by getting them all out of this mess. By finding an escape route. Water first. Then a path out. He would do this for these men he had once loved like brothers, even if they weren’t his friends any more.

Hutch peered at the weathered stone arch around the doorway. He bent in close and gently scraped his penknife against the stone. Luke stood behind him. If Dom hadn’t been mute with smouldering anger, he would have been shouting right now, and demanding Hutch explain what he was doing looking at old bits of stone when he was hungry and wet and lost. At least it was good not to hear that voice encroaching again on the stillness and limited space they had managed to find here amongst the endless thickets.

Hutch slapped his hand against the arch, as if to indicate that when the rest of the building collapsed to rubble the arch would still be standing.

Upon the two stone pillars of the arch, markings depicted what could have been figures of men or animals, but they were so spongy with the lichen that Hutch scraped at with his penknife, it was hard to be certain what they had once represented. Runic inscriptions and other indecipherable carvings framed the characters and leaping figures in the centre of each pillar. Wheels with angular markings were carved into the worn limestone arch above the granite pillars. Above it, a wooden apex must once have completed the doorway, but it had rotted down to dark wet stumps.

Inside, the walls had once been covered in plaster; almost all of it had fallen away to reveal rough granite blocks beneath. The exposed stone was speckled with a milky green lichen. Rotten with damp and spored with black fungus, the remains of two rows of sagging wooden benches, or pews, still faced forward to a pulpit that looked like a lump of stone hewn roughly from a quarry. The top of the altar was covered with dead bits of forest. The floor was knee-deep with leaf mulch and dead branches that had fallen through the holed roof.

‘A small congregation,’ Hutch said. ‘Probably held about twenty.’

Luke could not bring himself to speak. He was too uncomfortable with Dom’s presence somewhere behind him; it glared against his back, all molten with rage and salted by grief.

‘Odd though. Really odd.’ Hutch stepped through the arch and onto the floor of the church. Luke followed him. The floor felt spongy, almost mobile, beneath his feet, like he was walking on a mattress. The floor sloped.

And then Hutch was suddenly down on his side, his legs buried to mid-thigh in the leaves behind the first row of pews. ‘Shit.’ Hutch didn’t move. ‘I’ve gone right through the floor.’

Luke looked down at his own feet. ‘You OK?’

Hutch didn’t answer and didn’t move anything but his head. He looked down at what his legs had disappeared into, then propped himself up on one arm, which he had to bury to the elbow in fallen leaves to find something solid enough to support his upper body.

‘Hutch. You all right?’

‘Think so. But I’m scared to look.’

‘Here. Let me give you a hand.’

‘Careful,’ Hutch said. ‘It’s rotten through.’

Luke stopped, then inched towards the interior wall on his left, instinctively feeling that the floor at the base of the walls would be a safer option.

Hutch stood up fully inside the hole he had made. ‘Just as well the wood is soft. Imagine what splinters could have done.’

‘Or a rusty nail.’

Hutch leaned his head back between his shoulders and shouted ‘Fuck off!’ at the remnants of roof. Then raised a foot from the hole and tried to find an adjacent piece of board sturdy enough to take his weight near the bench on his right side.

‘I’m on my way over,’ Luke said

‘Nah. We don’t both want to end up in the crypt.’

Luke let out a strangled laugh that sounded aggressive to his own ears. He shut it off and stopped smiling.

The floor was firmer at the side, and Luke carefully worked his way to the last row of the pews. Then he stepped over the first little black bench and into the space between the two end rows. He could barely get the width of one leg between them. ‘People must have been tiny. Like children.’

His own observation unnerved him in the faint but perceptible way the interiors of historical buildings always did when he ducked through tiny doorways and saw the little beds and chairs that once serviced the long-dead. Perhaps it was this sudden and unwelcome reminder of his own mortality that made him feel, so acutely, a sense of a frightening loss that was like vertigo. That all things must pass. That anyone who had lived there and used the furniture before it became antique was now dust. The dank oppressive atmosphere of the enclosed and rotten space he was inside added a sense of desolation. Despite the rain, he was glad it had no roof. Even the dull mackerel light was welcome. He felt suddenly grateful for the company of the others. ‘The last thing this place feels is holy.’ He could not stop himself from just blurting it out.

‘I know what you mean.’ Hutch had regained his feet and was standing in the narrow aisle between the pews, testing the floor in front of him, before taking careful steps forward as if he was walking on ice.

Luke stepped over the next row of pews but the section of floor he placed his foot upon was soft and gave way. He withdrew the leg and tried further down until he found a firmer spot. Hutch reached the altar.

‘You reckon where you are can take our combined weight?’ Luke asked Hutch.

‘I reckon.’ Hutch wiped the thick mulch of dead leaf mould from the top of the altar, until his bare hand reached stone.

Luke gingerly approached the altar from the side, rubbing his back against the dark wall that was down to stone in most places, the plaster having been dissolved by the rain falling through the roof for … for how long he had no idea. But for a long time.

‘Anything on it?’ he asked.

‘Like what, a virgin sacrifice?’ Hutch replied without smiling.

‘Runes and shit.’

‘Nope. Just a weird hollow. See, right in the centre. It’s been hollowed out.’

‘Baptism font.’

Hutch nodded. ‘You could be right, Chief.’

‘What did you mean before?’

‘Eh?’

‘Before. You said it was odd.’

Hutch frowned at Luke, then his grimy forehead smoothed out. He tapped a finger against the top of the stone he stood behind. ‘No crucifixes on the stone arch. All the carvings on the stone face are pagan.’

‘Really?’

‘Old too. And those runes. You know those circular markings on Viking carvings? Serpents? With those long snaky bodies, all swallowing each other at one end?’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

‘Well, I think there was once a pair of those on it, with what looks like carvings of’ – he wafted his hand towards the door and the wood outside – ‘all of this around them. Vines and leaves. The rain has corroded most of it.’

‘Cool. I’ll take a look.’

‘I chipped away a little bit of the dirt with my penknife on the pillars. It’s quite intricate, which is odd because the actual building is very basic. Like a shed or croft. But it must have been a Christian church once. Probably the last time it was used. It’s weird because there are no Christian symbols in here. No Christian headstones outside either. So no one was interned here in the last … millennia. How does that work?’

‘The church has just been built over an earlier site?’

‘Exactly. A sacred site, I think. And the church must have once been the centre of that … settlement we found. Which can’t be more than a century old, like this building. So people still came to worship, but stopped burying their dead here. Weird.’

The mention of which did something unpleasant to Luke’s empty stomach. In the maelstrom of his confusion and his disorderly thoughts, he wanted to start peppering Hutch with questions but held his tongue. And felt anxious to get moving again; to get away from the place, and quickly.

‘And the other crazy thing is,’ Hutch said, raising both hands into the air, ‘it’s still here.’

Luke frowned.

Hutch pointed at the stone plinth. ‘No one has carted any of this off to a museum. I don’t think there are that many good examples left of the Norse carvings in the wild. They’re all uprooted and preserved. Protected from acid rain in display cases in museums down in Lund or Stockholm. That’s where I’ve seen them before.’ Hutch lowered his voice. ‘So, between me and you, I’d guess that no one knows this is here.’

Luke could not hide his shock at hearing this fact voiced, even though he had privately arrived at the same disconcerting conclusion.

‘No one has been through here since this place was abandoned. I’d put money on it, Chief.’

Luke shook his head in disbelief and with a disquiet he hoped did not show.

Hutch’s voice lowered even further. ‘And if we weren’t lost and soaked and hungry, it would be pretty cool to discover it. We’d make the papers.’

‘But now it’s just freaky and scary.’

‘Exactly. And we still might make the papers for another reason.’

They looked at each other and were both beginning to crack mad grins when Phil started shouting outside.

TWENTY-FOUR

Luke burst out of the church. Dom was on his feet, but poised to cringe or run, it was hard to tell. Phil stood knee-deep in undergrowth with his back to the chapel, staring into the overgrown cemetery. When he turned about his face was tight with shock and terror. The same expression he had that morning when they found him naked and incoherent in the hovel. His trousers were undone. He must have been taking a piss. If he had not been so disturbed by what he had just seen, it might have been funny.

Hutch was swearing aloud from somewhere behind him; he had not followed Luke out through the church arch. ‘What’s wrong?’ Luke called to Phil, then looked at Dom when no reaction was forthcoming.

Dom returned his stare. ‘I don’t fucking know!’

Phil had begun by crying out, like he had been bitten or burnt and was just coming to terms with the pain. But then he had been shouting with more than fear. By the time Luke stumbled over the pews and emerged into the weeds outside the building, Phil was silent and standing still in the rain. It was worse than the shouting.

Luke looked at the back of Phil’s head, blue and pointy with the hood of his coat up. ‘Phillers? What is it?’

Phil was staring into the trees, towards the two rune stones visible from the rough clearing in front of the church. At the sound of Luke’s voice, Phil quickly tucked and then belted himself away. He turned around and stumbled through the undergrowth towards the church like he was wading through seawater in a hurry.

Dom and Luke could not stop themselves exchanging glances, until looking at each other became too awkward. Dom looked over Luke’s shoulder and roared, ‘Hutch! Get your arse out here. Now!’

Hutch said something from inside the walls of the church. It was muffled and too low for any of them to hear. It was like he was preoccupied with something. But what could have been of more concern than the noise Phil had just made?

‘Hutch!’ Luke took long strides back to the church building. He looked through the door and saw Hutch bent over in the gloom. Part of the floor had collapsed again around his hips, and the pews on one side had now dipped into the centre aisle which Hutch must have tried to run across. ‘You all right, mate?’ Luke asked.

Hutch nodded. ‘Which is more than I can say for these poor bastards.’ He had both of his arms stretched towards his feet and was pulling dead branches and leaves from the floor with both hands. He threw the debris onto the collapsing pews.

‘Buddy, something’s up with Phil. You better get out here.’

‘I know. I looked out the door. But he was just standing there. What was it? He see a snake? I told you guys about the adders. You got to stamp your feet before you go into undergrowth.’

‘I don’t think it’s a snake. What the hell are you doing?’

Hutch looked up at him. Only his teeth and the whites of his eyes were clean inside his dirty face against the backdrop of the dark and rotten floor. Hutch looked ill. His face was lined and slack with exhaustion. Whatever he had found seemed to have finished off the last dregs of the optimism and humour that had begun to flicker back to life when they explored the cemetery. ‘Jesus. Jesus Christ. I don’t know what to make of this.’

Luke slid and shuffled his way back inside the building. ‘What? What is it?’

‘I don’t really know if I should touch it.’

Luke leant, gingerly, on the back of the intact pews and peered into the hole Hutch stood inside. Around Hutch’s feet were more of the large wet leaves, thickening to a brownish mulch in the poor light. And there were other things down there too that Hutch had partially cleared of foliage. They looked like more of the dead tree branches, black with damp. ‘What? What am I looking at, Hutch?’