Summer is waning. It’s still warm, so that the first chill of autumn feels pleasant rather than threatening, and perhaps, Tyler thinks, just this once, nature has played a trick, and instead of summer ending, another longer, hotter summer is about to begin. Already the summer just passed has taken on the sheen of fond memory. He’s nostalgic for things that happened four weeks ago, two weeks ago. “Remember the party at Johnny’s?” he says, and everyone nods in cordial agreement. He remembers the party, the dancing in the back garden, the sunrise. Drinking cans of Tyskie. Talking shit.
He blows weed smoke out the window of his parents’ second-hand Japanese car, speeding through the countryside. Though he just passed his test in June, he knew these roads – he grew up round here – and he takes the bends Need For Speed fast. He holds the spliff with right hand over left shoulder, eyes on the road, and feels the fingers of Ad, Johnny’s younger brother, take it. Beyond the window, the fen is squished to a flat smudge of greys and blacks. A full moon stamps the brown, tactile sky. He pulls onto an A-road. Harsh orange streetlamps slide through the darkness. The street grows houses, scattered and ramshackle at first, then terraces of tatty bungalows, an Asda, a roundabout.
Cobber, riding shotgun, is running his mouth at Dan, who is sat behind him. He’s been talking for a while, but Tyler’s tuned most of it out, so at first what he’s saying doesn’t make any sense. Then Tyler realizes he’s talking about the Festival.
“It would have been easy for those people to track. They had wise men, chaps who knew all this stuff. Lunar cycles, astronomy, seasons. Nearest full moon to the autumn equinox – that’s when the days and nights are the same length. And tonight both in one. Super. Harvest. Moon.”
Cobber’s going to university (uni, his mum calls it) in Swansea next week. To study geography or business or something. Dan’s got into somewhere in London – anywhere to get away from here, he said. Ad, being younger, still has another year of college, but his chances of getting in anywhere are about as good as Tyler’s were. So at least there’ll be someone to hang around with. So Dan and Cobber say.
Tyler maneuvers the car through the heavy traffic of town. In his opinion, the Festival is just another excuse for a piss-up in this hole. Cobber’s spouting some nonsense about “marketing opportunities for the pubs,” and Tyler genially tells him to shut the fuck up. Ad chuckles at this, but, to be fair, Ad chuckles at anything.
After finding a side street to park on, Tyler messes up the reversing, and has to pull out and try again three times, and even when he succeeds the car’s about a meter from the curb. Everyone ribs him.
“Gimme a break. I can’t park when I’m high.”
Dan raises an eyebrow at this, and something about the way he does it is so perfect that it gets everyone in hysterics.
First round is Cobber’s, at the Green Man. The pub is packed, and it takes ten minutes for him to get to the bar, by which time Tyler’s weed buzz is starting to fade. They neck the drinks, then Cobber suggests the Long and Short, “for old time’s sake,” which is funny, because they only started going there this year. The Long and Short is never busy, not even tonight, and they find a table that seats all four of them easily. Dan gets the beers in, rips open a packet of prawn and cocktail crisps and puts them in the center of the table. They taste amazing – salty and fiery and sweet. Ad says they taste like vomit, and now he’s said it Tyler can taste it too, but even that doesn’t ruin it.
Cobber is back onto his Internet-cribbed Festival facts again, and Tyler can tell Dan is bored, but he’s being polite, because, well, he’s Dan.
“The Festival is thousands of years old. Not hundreds, thousands.” Cobber puts in these annoying pauses when he’s telling you something to emphasize the point he’s trying to make. “No one really knows how old. But. There have been people in the fens for a long, long time. Always celebrated the harvest moon.”
“And now look what we’ve done to it. All about money these days,” says Dan.
“Oooooold maaaan Daaaaan,” Tyler says, and, even though it’s an ancient joke, from a distant playground, it still gets a chuckle, from everyone but Cobber. He’s waiting to get back into his story, and when the laughter dies off, he continues.
“So. Everyone would do their harvesting, and then they’d bring in all the chaff from the fields. Make this massive pile. Build an enormous bonfire. Bigger than their little mud huts. But. Before they lit it, they would crown the Summer King. Now, the Summer King was the most handsome chap in the village. Everyone wanted to be the Summer King. For a day, you were the boss. You could tell everyone what to do. Your parents. The old farts. Your mates. Bring me a drink. Bring me food. Get down on your knees. Anything.”
“Anything?” says Dan, with a hint of piss-take at the corner of his mouth – a dirty joke that doesn’t need putting into words. Cobber frowns over his wannabe hipster specs, peeved that Dan’s not taking his story seriously.
“Anything,” says Cobber, “and they’d do it with a smile. Best of all – you could marry any girl you chose. Make her your Summer Queen. The King just pointed at the one he wants. Then the old folk get together and they do the wedding, right then and there. The King and Queen would wear these white gowns – obvious virginity symbol – and everyone would stand around holding hands while they said their vows. They might only have met that morning. Then, after the wedding, well – the King could take his privileges as a, ummm, married gentlemen.” It takes Ad a second to compute this, but when he does he laughs awkwardly, his mouth full of Kronenbourg. It is possible, Tyler surmises, that Ad is still a virgin, despite the stories he’s told them. Not that Tyler’s own experiences are that much to brag about.
“It was considered good fortune to be a baby conceived at the Festival by the Summer King.” Cobber takes a long pull at his pint. He places it back on the table. Flicks his gaze round the group. “So,” he continues, “After the wedding and the bedding, the Summer King would go and get drunk as he could. Absolutely twatted. His mates would help him, too. Because that was the only way to deal with it.”
A question flickers in Tyler’s marijuana-addled mind. “Deal with what?”
“Well, y’see, you only get to be Summer King for a day. Then the druids stuck him on the bonfire and lit the match.” Cobber looks at Tyler directly and says, “They burnt the fucker alive.”
***
The Long and Short gets boring after a while. A while being two rounds. No girls, just old men propping up the bar, watching the football highlights on silent TV screens. Cobber leans back and yawns. The empty pint glasses stand on the table like soldiers.
“Reckon I might call it a night,” he says.
Tyler is annoyed at this. “I thought we were going out?”
“We are out,” says Cobber. “But I got stuff to do tomorrow. Packing, y’know.” He won’t meet Tyler’s gaze.
“I thought we had a plan. Last night of the summer? Come on. Let’s get wrecked.”
Cobber is unconvinced. There is a desperate edge to Tyler’s voice that he has failed to keep out. But Dan – always Dan – picks up on it.
“Yeah, come on pals. No grumbling. The Grapes have got a DJ on, of all things. Besides,” adds Dan, “these boys won’t smoke themselves.” He gives a surreptitious nod down. Tyler sees that he has two pre-rolled joints in his hand, held beneath the table.
“Dan – you are the man.”
Tyler turns back to the group. Cobber’s grumpy, but he acquiesces with a nod.
“That’s more like it.”
Chairs are shoved backwards, backs are slapped and faces pulled into anticipatory dance floor gurns. Dan proposes a brief diversion to Chapel Fields for the smoking. The park is quiet, which is good. They find a pair of benches, and Tyler maneuvers himself and Dan onto one, relegating Cobber and Ad to the one opposite, a spliff per bench. Cobber seems to be enjoying himself again, his wobble forgotten, and he starts talking to Ad about politics, a subject he has only recently acquired an irritating passion for. Ad pretends to listen, sucking hard on the spliff, blowing plumes of blue smoke up to the treetops.
“So,” Tyler says to Dan, “looking forward to it?”
It being leaving home.
“Cannot come a moment too soon,” Dan says, then realizes, too late, that of course Tyler is staying here. “I’ll miss this, though. Nights out.”
“You’ll have that in London.”
“Won’t be the same… You know what you should do, mate? Why don’t you get a job in London? Move up? We could hang out.”
“A job doing what? Anyway, you’ll have your new friends. Won’t want me around.”
“Don’t be a twat,” Dan says. “You are welcome anywhere I go.” And in that instant, Tyler knows that he means it. He passes the spliff. “What are you going to do, then?”
“I thought I told you. Dad reckons he can get me a job at the farm. Just till I figure out what to do next.”
“Cool. Cool.” But Dan looks away, and Tyler senses that Dan’s thinking, how long till he figures out what to do next, though?
***
Outside the Grapes is a Festival night queue, stretching halfway across the front of the pub. Ad curses at this bad fortune, but Tyler recognizes the lanky bouncer from somewhere – their mums are friends, maybe? He strides down the length of the queue to position himself in front of the bouncer – the name Marco keeps coming into Tyler’s head but he’s certain that’s not right. Yet Marco or whatever cracks a grin when he sees Tyler, who thumbs back at his mates, asks if there’s any chance they can get in, thinking he’s pushing his luck. But Marco says “Sure dude,” unclips the rope and in they go, to scornful, satisfying looks from the queue.
Inside it’s heaving, but by now Tyler is drunk and high enough for the crowd and the music to feel promising, exciting. All four press through the throng, find a space in the outdoor area. The DJ is playing some weak house, but it’s nice and loud and on the tiny dance floor people are already shuffling about. Dan makes a rollie, and they all just nod at each other, checking the place out.
“Ad’s round,” says Cobber, but suddenly Ad is no longer there. Tyler has a hunch, and when he turns it’s confirmed: Ad’s dancing already, face scrunched up like a baby taking a dump. “He does have a special talent, doesn’t he?” says Cobber; a reference not to Ad’s dancing skills, but his ability to disappear when it’s time for his wallet to come out. Tyler heads over and grabs him by the shoulder.
“Drinks, Ad?”
“Yeahyeahyeah,” he says, “Alright.” He heads off. He’s a good lad, really.
Tyler is about to head back and scav some tobacco from Dan when a girl catches his eye, a girl he hasn’t seen before. She’s dancing with a friend. He’s aware of his attraction to her before he realizes what it is he finds attractive – shiny dark hair, dimpled smile. Nice body, and she knows it, by the tightness of the white tank-top she’s wearing. The fact that she’s dressed to impress somehow makes her sexier. She knows her apples from her onions, Tyler’s dad would say. She’s looking at Tyler. He smiles, nods a greeting. Plays it cool and rejoins Dan and Cobber.
It’s an hour later before he sees her again, by which time he’s drunk two more pints and is nursing a third. He’s dancing, trying not to spill any lager. The music has got better, or he’s got drunker, and there’s a dark closeness to the sound, futuristic, organic. The bass drum sounds like a heartbeat. Boom-boom. Pause. Boom-boom. Pause. Boom-boom.
The girl squeezes past on her way back from the toilets, and Tyler grins as her breasts are forced against him. He’s drunk, and he knows he’s drunk, and he’s hopeless at chatting girls up anyway. He lets his body do the talking. She smiles back and when she moves a step away he changes his dancing, subtly, almost unconsciously, directing it at her. She responds and then they’re dancing together and, Jesus, she is cute, cuter up close than Tyler realized. Her face and her movement seem to become the entirety of his senses. Everything outside is just blurred light, like he’s going into hyperspeed and she’s the destination. He offers her a swig of his pint and she laughs and takes one.
He’s not normally this bold, but something feels right. He leans in and puts his lips on hers. They’re soft and small, and there is a faint tang of alcohol but the rush that the kiss gives him is as stunning as a slap in the face, and it would take a lot more than sour cider to make him want to stop. She pushes back against him. With his free hand he reaches round to the small of her back and pulls her in closer and he feels, without reason, without preamble, that maybe this is the girl he’s been waiting to meet. Maybe this girl – whose name he doesn’t even know – maybe this girl could turn out to be something.
But she pulls back, drops her head, and the kiss ends. She shouts in his ear. “I’ve got a boyfriend. Sorry. I’m wasted.”
He’s disappointed but won’t let it show. His eyes track her as she heads back to her friend. He watches them talking. She’s talking about him because she’s saying, “Don’t look, don’t look,” he can tell by her just-kissed lips, and she’s miming making out, and she and her friend are laughing. Dan hovers somewhere on the edge of Tyler’s vision, offering him a shot glass brimming with Jäger.
Maybe she does have a boyfriend. Maybe she doesn’t.
Tyler pours the rest of the lager down his throat, then chugs the shot. He feels it sliding down his throat into his body. It tastes of flowers.
***
Another two pints and he’s sitting on a low wall near the edge of the dance floor. It’s one in the morning, according to his phone. He’s no idea how it got so late. He feels queasy and tired. Cobber didn’t last long at the Grapes, chipping off mumbling something about buses. Ad’s got his tongue down some random’s throat. Dan’s around somewhere, talking to this idiot they all used to go to school with. None of the few girls still here will meet Tyler’s stare, and he doesn’t trust himself to talk to them. The fact dawns on him with direct simplicity: it’s time to leave. He doesn’t say any goodbyes.
Back in the car, he retrieves his stash from the glove compartment and skins up, using the glossy car manual as a makeshift table. His fingers are clumsy with drink, and he spills some of the precious green, but he’s too drunk to care too much about it. He thinks about sparking up here, but there’s still a big Festival crowd out, threaded with pairs of Day-Glo police officers. He decides to wait until he gets home.
He moves the car slowly through town. Once he gets to the Asda roundabout, the crowd melts away, as does the law enforcement. Then he can gun it a bit more, window down, spliff safely in the coffee cup holder. Cold air slams his face. The lines in the road disappear up into the darkness. He fumbles at the radio, and some weird late night show comes on. People talking in low voices about movies or relationships or classical music. It’s comforting, and he keeps it on, but turns the volume down, so he can’t hear what they’re saying. Just the low murmur of voices beneath the whipping wind, the bass growl of the engine. He pushes the speedometer up to eighty. Eighty on a dual carriageway. No problem. He speeds past lorries, other cars. People going places in the dead of night. In the pocket of his jeans, his phone buzzes. He looks down, and he sees that it’s Dan calling. The name DAN is glowing through the denim, and, for a second, it’s like he’s an android with LEDs on his upper thighs, and he looks up and then –
***
A sound jerks him from not-sleep. A roaring sound like a wave hitting the shoreline but cranked up, more aggressive, rising, falling, rising.
Cars.
Cars speeding past.
He can’t see them. All he can see are orange and red coronas of light on a field of darkness. His eyes won’t focus.
A pain in his left arm, like someone’s reached in and plucked a nerve like the string on a guitar. It takes a moment for his mind to decide that this sensation is pain. As soon as it makes that decision, he gasps in agony. The gasp doesn’t take, so he tries again, and now a tiny rivulet of air is sucked in, and that’s enough to make him cough and splutter.
Some small and hard objects slip up his chest. Coins. Loose change from his pocket. But why are they falling up? Then the answer comes.
He’s upside-down.
This helps him compute what he’s seeing. It’s mostly darkness, but if he strains his eyes to the right, there is light. Light reflecting off black tarmac. A triangle of hard shoulder. The outer edge of headlamp beams, streaming past.
He’s trapped, he realizes, in his car, and it’s upside-down, and he needs to get out. But he’s all crunched up into a ball somehow, and he can feel the seatbelt pressing into his thigh in a way that promises to turn from annoyance into soreness soon. He tries to move his left arm again but another giddy shudder of agony deters him. And his right arm is trapped beneath him, like he’s playing the world’s most advanced game of Twister.
He remembers playing Twister, his dad and sister on the mat, while Mum spun the wheel.
“Right hand, red.”
He remembers her saying it very clearly. It was his birthday and he hadn’t wanted Twister. But he moved his hand anyway, and somehow wedged it beneath his dad’s leg. Dad slipped and when he fell, he shrieked. He’d twisted his ankle. He swore at Tyler, and then Tyler said, I didn’t want Twister anyway, I wanted an Xbox, and Dad said, well you got Twister you ungrateful little shit, and Tyler ran off to his bedroom crying.
This memory makes Tyler feel sad. He doesn’t want to feel sad right now. He wants to get out of the car. He tries to heave himself up, straighten his legs, but the car must have been bent in the crash and he can’t find anything to push against with his feet.
Footsteps. A man shouts.
“Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
Yes, Tyler longs to say. Yes, I can hear you. But his mouth isn’t working like it should and now he’s thinking about his mouth, he tastes blood. A slow pump from a stinging tear in his mouth. A dribble trickles down the side of his nose and pools at the corner of his left eye. He blinks it clear. Now half his vision is shaded crimson. But at least he can still blink, he thinks.
“He’s in there. I can see him. He’s not moving.”
Tyler can feel his feet too, and flex them. That’s good. That means his back isn’t broken. He hopes that’s what it means.
Another voice. A woman asking a muffled question.
He smells something. Ganja. He realizes that in some ridiculous fashion the spliff has landed near enough to his nose that he can smell the drugs. Then he smells something else. Acrid smoke.
“Just call the ambulance, Suze. Christ.”
The man’s voice reminds Tyler he was thinking about his parents, his birthday. “We spoiled him,” he heard his dad saying, after the Twister incident. Tyler was upstairs in his room. He could hear them talking through the floorboards.
“We spoiled him,” Dad said, and Tyler heard his mum trying to placate him.
“Yeah we spoiled him, but that’s our mistake.”
“He never tries at anything, he never tries. We just give him everything he asks for. We hand it all to him on a plate.”
And then – yes – like figuring out some Chinese metal puzzle – Tyler manages to turn his head in a way that doesn’t hurt, and he can turn it back again, though it’s painfully stiff. And now he can see more – the traffic flying down the dual carriageway, two pairs of feet, and right in front of him, just outside the window, a man’s face. He must be holding it upside down but because Tyler’s upside down too, it looks the right way up. He’s an older man. Forties, maybe.
“He’s moving!” the man yells back. Please come closer, Tyler thinks. The man comes closer. “Suze! Tell them he’s moving!” He’s looking at Tyler, but at his face somehow, their eyes not connecting. Tyler feels suddenly lonely.
He hears Suze’s voice from somewhere beyond the man. “Five minutes, they said. Don’t move him, they said.”
Then: “What’s that?” she screams, “Get back! Get back!”
Earlier on the day of Tyler’s birthday, he’d been playing a different game. His dad had hidden his birthday present somewhere in the house. It was an annual ritual, Tyler seems to remember, for him and his sister, though he doesn’t recall it happening again after that birthday. He searched for his present everywhere – under his bed, under his parent’s bed, in the bathroom, in the downstairs toilet, in all the cupboards in the house. Nothing.
“Cold,” his dad kept saying, whenever Tyler would go to a new room. “Cold. Cold. Icy cold.”
Suze interrupts his dad. She’s shrieking now, and Tyler wants her to be quiet, but can’t figure out how to tell her.
“It’s on fire! Get back, Bob, get back!”
Don’t go Bob, mate, Tyler thinks. But Bob squeezes his brow together, rights himself, and now Tyler can’t see Bob’s head, just feet backing away. And he can see what Suze is talking about too. An orange flicker from somewhere at the edge of his sight. An orange tongue of flame.
“He’s alive,” Bob says, enigmatically, in the distance.
Dad hadn’t hidden the present anywhere in the house. Once Tyler realized this, he stepped out the back door.
“You’re getting warmer,” Dad said.
Outside, it was bright flawless daylight. Tyler stepped down the garden path.
“You’re getting warmer,” Dad said.
The grass in the garden was neat and lush. He walked down the path, toward the shed at the bottom of the garden. Dad would have hidden it in the shed, of course he would, where else would there have been? Tyler reached the shed door, and knew that when he opened it, his present would be there. On the shelf. Wrapped and shiny and promising everything. A present so perfect that he wouldn’t want anything else ever again.
He put his hand on the shed door.
“You’re getting warmer.”
Somewhere, far away from there, Tyler hears a siren. But the smoke is thicker now, and he coughs, and he spasms, and the fire in the car must be catching, for he can see it in more than one place now. Suze screams and screams.
That orange tongue licks at his feet.
He’s getting warmer.
-- Michael Button is a writer of fiction. His work has been described by Stephen King as "satisfyingly macabre'. In 2024, he placed first in the Passage Prize Fiction contest with "English Bones." He also co-wrote a YA historical novel published by Welbeck in 2021 and is the writer of "Slay," an audio drama released on Audible in 2024. Other fiction has been published by Cemetery Dance, Hodder & Stoughton and in various anthologies. He lives in the English countryside with his husband and two walloping dogs. Currently he is working on a horror novel called Rehab.