The old man leaned closer and whispered something into the dying man’s ear, then stood up, his joints cracking. He was visibly pleased with himself, and I was terrified of him.

The cult member looked at me, tears welling in his desperate eyes.

‘Help me, please!’ he begged. ‘Do it for me! Use the knife! I can’t stand this anymore. I can’t stand his words!’

I should have killed him. I should have pressed the blade into his flesh to end his suffering. I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. It was none of my business, and I had my own imminent death to worry about anyway.

We carried on, leaving the corpses behind. The surviving cultist wailed like a deer with its bones broken in a forest trap. I almost took pity on him, but by that time I was far too exhausted to do anything about it.

Only then did we notice the dozens, if not hundreds, of corpses among the trees, their rotten fingers still clenching the ceremonial knife issued by the Magistrate. Apparently this spot is a fixture in the forest; cultists travel here to die, but their death signifies nothing. It is an empty gesture, which only made their selfish act of eating the last of the food even more annoying.

By then the only ones left were me, Nora, the two pensioners, and a Frenchman in his thirties. The Frenchman stuttered irritatingly, sometimes tugging on his lower lip, as if that would wake him up from this nightmare.

‘You know, maybe we’re all dreaming,’ I said to him. ‘Our brain is dreaming every single second, Nora told me. Maybe when we die we awaken in a new life that’s not part of a dream.’

He looked at me like I was mad, and I realized I had spoken to him in Hungarian and that he hadn’t understood a word.

I never spoke to him again.

The transformation

I began hearing Jufus’ voice more and more often from the woods. Once I thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I asked Nora whether she had heard or seen our guide too, but she just shrugged her shoulders. Her lips were cracked from dehydration, her skin stretched tight over her bones.

The pensioners walked cheerfully along the impassable roads, their clothes still immaculate. They were committed to their goal; they had a higher purpose, just like Nora.

At last they found the place they had been looking for. Of course it could be that I was only hallucinating from fatigue, thirst, hunger, and madness, but who cares? By this point, the traveler no longer cares about the line between illusion and reality.

‘This is the place where the ritual is performed,’ Jufus whispered in my ear, coughing up dead air and blood from his lungs.

It was a cave. Around the opening hundreds of wolf skele­tons lay scattered.