Free The Ritual by Adam Nevill Page A

black wood. He still seemed to hear the echoes of it now, which is why he could not stop his hands from shaking.
    Into the worn circular slot, in the front of the little box, he’d rested his throat. And up, up, up went the thin black forelegs. Up towards the ceiling together. And paused for half a second before they came back down. So fast.
    And then Luke had been beside him, shaking him, waking him.
    ‘Look! Through there. And there. Two of them!’ Luke’s voice broke his reverie. Hutch looked up and squinted at where Luke crouched down, further along the trail, pointing off into the trees.
    Hutch’s stomach contracted.

NINETEEN
    They had been travelling for two hours westward on the increasingly overgrown track when Luke noticed the two buildings engulfed by the undergrowth.
    When no one answered him, he turned his head and looked at the other three coming up the narrow trail, their elbows out, fending back the stiff wet branches that hung from the enclosing treeline and draped belligerently across most of the open space. Dom and Phil were both limping. Hutch was hanging back to help Dom over the fallen logs that had begun to present themselves with an alarming frequency beyond the place they had joined the trail the night before.
    Luke walked point all morning. It was better to go first; you would be the one to see the way out and by walking out front, all the time yearning for the trees to clear and for a vista of escape to present itself, you were better motivated to keep going.
    ‘Look!’ Luke called louder this time to be heard over the din of rain scattering through the canopy of leaves above them. He pointed in the direction of the dark sides of two indistinct buildings.
    The wooden planks of the visible walls bulged with damp and were black up to the dim windows; though it was hard to tell if they were shuttered or not. A suggestion of a stone chimney jutted from the end of one building before becoming obscured by a mesh of foliage.
    ‘What’s that, Chief?’ Hutch called back. ‘A nice little café?’
    ‘Or some big bastard wolverine,’ Dom added.
    Luke waited for the others to draw level with him. ‘Another two houses.’
    Hutch was breathing hard from supporting Dom’s weight over the last fallen log. He looked at where Luke was pointing.
    Between their position and the two buildings, grew a thick bed of nettles with black thorny stems. Above the nettles the bare branches of dwarf birches and willows formed a twenty-metre portcullis of criss-crossing sticks, choking the spaces between the larger trees. It was impenetrable.
    ‘Just keep moving,’ Dom said. ‘Don’t know what’s inside them.’
    Luke nodded. ‘I genuinely hate to think. Wonder why they’re here.’
    Hutch rested a hand on Luke’s shoulder. ‘Bum a fag off you?’
    ‘Sure.’ Luke reached for the side pocket on his waterproof trousers.
    Hutch put the cigarette between his lips. ‘Must be an abandoned settlement.’
    ‘Where more of them mad fuckers lived,’ Dom said.
    ‘No one’s been here for a while.’ Hutch looked down at his feet. ‘This track must have joined them up with the other place. See this’ – he prodded his foot under a blanket of bracken and lifted it – ‘ruts from a cart wheel under there. You can still see them at the sides of the track.’
    Luke rose back to his full height. A knee joint cracked. He visualized the unwelcoming interior of the two buildings; wet, lightless, spoiled with rot and animal spore. He imagined the despair they would feel in the comfortless air, in the desolate age of the place.
    ‘How’s it looking ahead?’ Hutch asked, breaking Luke’s absorption that made his thoughts sluggish.
    ‘More of the same,’ he said.
    Hutch moaned and rubbed his hands over his face. ‘We’re not making great progress guys.’
    ‘Piss off,’ Dom said. Bent double, he pushed at the sides of his injured knee with both filthy hands. Raising the foot off the ground like a lame horse, he