TW // Death
The cold was bitter and angry, sucking at skin cells with a declaration of hunger. Mike chugged his cider as his eyes twitched between his friends. He was nervous, which was not out of character; anxiety broadly framed much of who he was. But this scenario was out of the ordinary, and it made his mind fidget with the contemplated possibilities. A firework popped in a nearby garden, and he nearly dropped his drink.
“Calm down, Mikey.” Paula said, with a patronising smile and raised, gloved palms. “There is really nothing to worry about.” The smile lingered and he knew he was in the middle of some strange initiation.
“Yeah, chin up, Mikey-boy!” Ed yelled through his latex Donald Trump mask. “It’s just a bit of fun.”
“I’m calm, I’m chill.” Mike lied, clumsily rolling a cigarette with frozen fingers.
“Tell that to your face.” Paula said, before sipping an almost fluorescent rose from a plastic cup.
“When does it all start?” Eve said as she appeared with another round of drinks clasped between mittened hands.
“Five minutes.” Ed mumbled through the dense plastic as he took his Guinness.
“And we just follow the procession?” Mike said, after a puff of his cigarette, leaning against a wall to pronounce his nonchalance.
“We have to dodge the fireworks, while trying not to spill our drinks.” Eve said through a half-laugh, half-shiver.
“Yeah, no spilling, Mikey.” Ed replied, “there’s not another pub for a mile and a half and we don’t want anybody dying of thirst.”
The night seemed heavy, as though the clouds were leaning on the rooftops they gathered inches above; a grey-black mob of foreboding. Snaps of firework gave the overhead plumes a density and life: they were in the bowels of a burgeoning storm; a pulsing island in a tremulous sea.
“Here it comes.” Paula said with a sing-song tone, jumping on the spot and craning her neck to look down the road. Mike could hear it: the un-lubricated squeal of tyres; the drum-roll thud of a thousand footsteps; the chants of an ancient people. And it was getting louder. The sides of the buildings began to glitter with the reflected fires that were heading their way. Yellow and gold ghouls danced across the stone-washed, ancient walls.
“Don’t be scared.” Plastic Donald Trump said as he bounced on the balls of his feet.
Nothing could have prepared him for the carnage that poured into view amid smoke and flame and steady, slapping feet. Hundreds of people, in a white and blue striped uniform, pulling rusted trolleys. Some were piled high with severed logs, branches, fence-posts; others were aflame: yellow and orange tongues finding holes in the deteriorated metal, intense heat making everything glimmer, ethereal. Their bearers were chanting, carrying torches that swung and spat and set the night aflame. Age was no obstacle to be a member of the cult: children and the elderly alike partook in the pyrotechnic procession.
“What the fuck is this?” Mike muttered under his breath.
“You don’t get this in America, big guy?” Ed wheezed, seemingly struggling for breath amidst the latex.
The procession wheeled its way up to the pub they were stood without and then carved right, to run down the hill and deeper into the town. The heat was almost unbearable, as each trolley, torch, or grinning, yelling participant passed and batted away the autumn chill. The suggestions of winter were displaced in an instance as the world was alighted yellow and orange and red. Normal life was suspended as the surging mass trawled along, dressing up the stasis with colour and sound and wet-hot licking flames. Mike recalled seeing a documentary where people had been suddenly transported to the past on a particular street in northern England. Liverpool? Yes, that’s it. The mobile phones and commercial fascias disappearing, and top hats and horse-and-carts taking their place. This was just like that. Suddenly, he was distant, backwards, swallowed up in a ritual of a time long before, askance and unnoticed; irrelevant. A firework cracked in the air, and somebody screamed. Smoke filled his nose, and his body growled with an intense urge to run. But his feet were planted on the trembling stones and his hand bent the plastic that contained his too-cold pint, and his eyes stung with the heat, the fumes, the brightness, and the desperate flickering to consume the innumerable, gathering threats that faced him. This is hell.
“Let’s go!” Eve’s screamed instruction was almost entirely drowned by the thudding, broiling procession. She raised her drinks in the air and marched down the road, down the hill beside the fire, the laden barrows, and the chanting, marching people in matching attire.
“They do this every year?” Mike managed after a nauseous gulp.
“Every year for the last five centuries. It’s because some monks were murdered back in the day. It’s all for show, but some show it is, right?”
“Yeah, cool.” Mike sipped his drink to pretend his stomach wasn’t churning into oblivion. Some show.
“They think it might get banned soon. Too dangerous!” The Donald Trump mask shook with his laughter and a grey fog chugged from its edges as it met the cold.
No shit. Mike was grasped and dragged along by his friends and marvelled at how comfortable they were surrounded by such carnage; how normal everybody was behaving in spite of the madness. Normal, pristine cars lined the roads down which jutting kindling, licking flames and aged trolleys meandered. How is this acceptable, how is this allowed? Spectators darted across the road in front of the procession, kids hand in hand, laughing into the windless cold. Is this funny? Is any of this funny?
They wound as a great burning snake down into the centre of town, blowing into closed palms and sipping drinks to further entwine with the spectacle. You could hear the echoes of screams and whistles through the ages, the fire seemed to drag them out of the leaning and mossed stone walls as the chants bounded from the rough structures.
“What do you think of it?” Paula said, walking beside him and linking his arm.
“It’s crazy.” Mike said, though with every step deeper into the town, alongside the procession, he felt more relaxed, less violated by its presence.
“Oh, it’s great.” She laughed, but it seemed she was in part at least convincing herself this was true.
“You would say that! You must’ve seen this a thousand times.”
“Just twenty, dumb-arse. I’m not that old.”
“You were forged in these fires.”
“Literally.” Another laugh, this time more relaxed, and then a hesitation. “What do you think of Ed?”
“He’s… a lot.” Mike said, frowning a little. They were on the same floor in their university halls, and there hadn’t been any suggestion of animosity between them to this point, but the question was heavy with meaning; angered. “But he’s funny.”
“He’s a mess.” There was no laugh with the words this time, and her eyes burned into Ed’s back as he skipped down the road, spilling beer and laughing maniacally into the mask.
“Aren’t we all?”
“No, Mike. We’re not.”
A firework fizzed along the road, skidding and sliding between wheels and legs and feet before exploding in a shower of green and gold. Laughter and screams merged with the fizzing smoke as Mike watched Paula disappear into the night.
More beers and more walking and the evening’s distortion had faded. Mike found himself even beginning to enjoy it. The typically quaint and bizarre Britishness of it all was hilarious, the earnest, costumed obsession with the past, and the levity in celebrating truly horrific historic events, were fascinating. It was all sniggered and half-remembered, half-understood and taken half-seriously. It was Britishcore.
More fireworks (Mike didn’t even flinch, benumbed by the haze and the alcohol and the surrounding shrugs and smiles) and smoke formed a layer on the road, dense and thorough. The parade passed through it, lungs awash and panting. It was gladiatorial. This is something to be survived, something that might be a rite of passage in a fantasy novel. This wasn’t the intersecting freeways and Big Gulp sterility of America; this was raw immersion in an anachronistic frivolity. Mike had never felt so far from home. The walk became almost relaxing and the drone of stamped feet, the repetition of snaps and bangs, a white noise against the settling night. The roads wound and wound, up and down, and through the town - Mike felt his thighs ache with the changing gradient and the constant surging forward of the plethora around him - and then there came an ending. A wide field, enclosed by thick trees that burst through the thick smoke-fog, glistened with the moisture of day and the crystallisation of cold night. And, in the middle, a pyre. It was twenty feet of stacked crates and jutted logs and racks of sticks and compressed, layered cardboard that reached up in the centre of the expanse, foreboding in its potentiality.
“Here she is.” Ed said with the muted whistle, skipping ahead with Eve into the gathering crowd to secure a prime location for the coming event.
“Quickly, drink this.” Paula poured a wine in Mike’s mouth with urgency - it was over-sweet, warm, and he winced - and gripped his arm to drag him forward. His feet were loose from the cold and the booze as they swung through swayed elbows and sauntering attendees to over-wet and muddied grass to the foot of the tower. “It gets bigger every year!” Her eyes were glassy as they consumed the roughshod tower that loomed over them.
The crowd gathered and a calm settled among them: conversations became whispered, cigarette were rolled below darting eyes, steam painted everything a wan grey. The procession emerged. They carved their way down the hill in a half silence - no more chanting, no more banging - the time for expressive frivolity was over. The fires were repeated in the hanging fog, torches sliced its belly. Ed made a sound like a howl and was then gone. The procession had everybody within its spell, and they breathed in expectant syncopation.
The world seemed to turn on its edge and Mike gripped the metal fence at his side, embracing the cold, wet, and the stability it offered. Something was off. His stomach lurched and he made to retch but composed himself. His head swam. And then settled. The procession entered the metallic perimeter and turned his way, the hooded woman at its lead heading straight for him. Oh, no. She reached the fence that separated them and removed her hood. Her hair was long and fair, her face plain and thin. Her eyes never left his. The crowd held its breath. The only sound was the crackling of the torch in her hand, and the distant screams of unoiled trolley wheels entering the temporary arena. She nodded, silent. Someone breathed. She offered the torch with a slight bow and Mike took it. The fence was opened, and the woman stepped back and she gestured for him to pass, to ignite the tower, to commence the ritual, the finish the evening. It was joyous, breathtaking power. He had been consumed by the occasion, by the phantasm that he had walked alongside throughout the evening. It was a moment of considered acceptance. He was finally welcomed. He walked and the silence persisted, but for the crackle of the tightly wrapped torch and the creak of the dead stacks of wood: a flinch away from the inevitable. He waited, breathed, and waited a moment more before touching the torch to a rough outcrop of wood six inches from the floor. In seconds the fire had leapt from this to another and then another. Mike breathed the fumes of expedited flame as they were urged on and up and in further to the structure with a crackle and wheeze and shiver of yellow-orange. Another breath and he had to take a step away from the heat, from the raging growth ahead of him: his elemental creation. A handful of woos slipped from the crowd as they marvelled at what had been done, and what was coming. Mike spun to find his friends, to bask in the glory of his moment. Paula’s face was set and grim, eyes fixed up into the tower. The whole crowd followed her gaze. His eyes couldn’t find Eve. Nor Ed.
He swallowed a rough gulp and slowly turned to look at what he had set into motion, knowing in his heart that it was dreadful even before it came into misted focus. Ed was tied with ropes tight around his neck and chest and thighs and ankles; half dangling, half pinned to the side of the piled pallets, twenty feet from the ground. There was a suggestion of a wriggle, an affront to being there, but it was muted; restrained.
No, no, no.
There were no shouts of distaste from the crowd, even his own voice was choked to silence, but the staring masses seemed transfixed, enriched by the process. The fire was fast, and Ed’s screams were muted by the mask that bubbled and foamed. The heat was too much and then it was gone, along with the crowd and the smoke that burned a hole through their misted ceiling. Eve’s hand found his shoulder as he sat slumped before the wet and hissing ash. Paula crouched and whispered a well done and then led them away into the undying night.