I was challenged to write a short story using this prompt:
Your protagonist wakes up, brain foggy and coughing loudly as they inhale smoke. They smell wood burning and people chattering. They attempt to stand but discover their hands and feet are bound. This discovery clears their mind and they struggle against the rope in desperation while scanning their surroundings.
It is dark, but through a crevice, they spot flames coming closer, burning its way through the wood that encircles the protagonist.
Bangs and pops erupt overhead and from the flashes, the protagonist sees a crowd further back from the flames and that’s when it fully hits them. They’re inside a lit bonfire and someone had deliberately put them there.
The genre is scary, horror, which is not a genre I generally write in. I’m a thriller, suspense writer but hey, I’m was up for the challenge so below is what I came up with.
Bonfire Night
A cough, sharp and hacking, was what brought Alex back to the world. It tore through his chest, a dry, rattling spasm that tasted of soot and chemicals.
His brain felt thick, packed in cotton wool. Sleep. He’d been asleep. But where? The air was wrong. It was hot, and it carried the rich, acrid scent of woodsmoke. Beneath him, the ground was hard and uneven, a lattice of unyielding ridges.
He heard voices. A low, happy murmur, the sound of a gathering. People were chattering, laughing. A woman’s high-pitched giggle cut through the air.
A party?
He tried to sit up, to rub the sleep-grit from his eyes.
He couldn’t.
His hands were not his own. They were bound tight at the wrists, the rope coarse and biting. He pulled, a reflexive, panicked jerk, and the fibers dug deeper.
The cotton wool in his brain evaporated, replaced by the icy-hot shock of adrenaline.
He was tied.
He kicked out. His feet were bound too, lashed together at the ankles. He was trussed, helpless. He strained against the ropes, the sudden, desperate struggle of a trapped animal. The movement sent a jolt of pain through his shoulder, which felt bruised and heavy.
His mind, now terrifyingly clear, raced. Where am I? What happened?
He forced his eyes open, blinking against the stinging smoke. It was dark, but not completely. He was in an enclosed space, a cage of some kind. The walls were wood, stacked in a dense, crisscross pattern. He was lying on a bed of sticks and larger branches, a hollow in the center of a massive pile.
The pub. The Hallowed Hare. I was at the pub.
The memory surfaced, fragmented. He’d been asking questions. Questions the locals didn’t like. He was an outsider, a PI from the city, hired to find a missing journalist named Julian. The trail had led him to this isolated village, Little Hallow, a place that seemed to exist out of time. He’d been polite, persistent. He’d bought rounds. The landlord, a man with a face like a friendly potato and eyes as old as the hills, had poured him a pint on the house.
“A local brew,” the landlord, Hemlock, had said, smiling. “We call it ‘Guy’s Folly.’ A real warmer, for a cold night like tonight.”
Alex had drunk it. He remembered the taste, sweet and herby, with a bitter aftershock. He remembered the room starting to tilt. The laughter of the locals seeming to grow distant. He’d tried to stand, to get to the door, and hands—strong, farmer hands—had gently, firmly, helped him. Not to the door, but to a back room.
“He’s had one too many,” Hemlock’s voice had boomed. “Let’s get him a bed for the night. Our hospitality.”
Hospitality.
He was in a pyre. A bonfire.
Through a small crevice between two logs, Alex saw them. The flames. They were still distant, a ring of orange and yellow light at the base of the structure. They were burning their way inward. The chattering of the crowd was the soundtrack to his execution.
A sudden, percussive THWUMP echoed from above, followed by a sharp CRACKLE-POP!
Alex flinched, his heart seizing. Another WHUMP. Another series of pops.
Fireworks.
A cascade of green and red stars exploded overhead, visible through the gaps in the wooden roof of his cage. The light was dazzling, and in that split second of brilliant, chemical illumination, he saw.
The crevice in the wall was now a window. The fire had burned away an outer layer, and the light from the fireworks flooded in, casting the world in a flashing, epileptic glare.
He saw the crowd.
They were gathered in the field, a hundred people or more, standing a safe distance back. Families. Children on their fathers’ shoulders. They were all looking at the bonfire. At him. Their faces, upturned and washed in the strobing light of the fireworks, were a mixture of awe, celebration, and a chilling, reverent focus. They were watching.
They weren’t here to rescue him. They were here to see him burn.
This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a drunken prank. This was a ritual.
He was the “Guy.”
“Help!” The word was a raw croak, swallowed by the roar of the approaching flames and the sudden SHRIEK of another rocket. “Somebody, help me!”
He thrashed, twisting his body, sawing his wrists against the wood beneath him. The rope was thick, old-fashioned hemp. It gave nothing.
The heat was becoming a physical weight, pressing against his skin. The air was a soup of smoke, searing his lungs with every breath. He could feel his hair begin to crisp, the horrific smell of it joining the woodsmoke.
Julian. The missing journalist. His notebook, which Alex had found buried under a rock cairn in the woods, had been filled with ramblings about the town. ‘They don’t just celebrate the fifth of November,’ Julian had written in a frantic scrawl. ‘They practice it. The cleansing. The fire. The Hallow Man. It’s not an effigy, it’s a replacement. They feed the fire. They feed the Hallow.’
Alex had thought him paranoid, delusional. Now, he was the Hallow Man.
No. Not like this.
He stopped struggling. He forced his panic down, tamping it into a cold, hard knot of fury. He was an investigator. He solved problems. This was just a problem. A very, very bad problem.
His pockets. They’d taken his phone, his wallet. But what else? He always carried… yes.
He rolled onto his right side, grunting as the movement pressed his face closer to the hot, splintery floor. His jacket pocket. He fumbled with his bound hands, his fingers numb and clumsy. He felt the cold, familiar shape of his keys. And attached to the ring… a small, Swiss-made multi-tool.
It was tiny. A keychain ornament to most. To him, it was a lifeline.
Getting it out of his pocket with his hands tied behind his back was a nightmare of contortion. He scraped his knuckles raw, his muscles screaming. The crowd let out a collective “Ooooooh!” as a particularly large firework exploded, painting his prison in a temporary blue light. He didn’t care. He was focused.
He got it. The little red rectangle was in his bound fists.
Now the hard part. Opening the blade.
He wedged the tool against a log, trying to get his thumbnail into the groove of the small knife. His hands were slick with sweat. The tool slipped. He tried again. Slipped.
“We commit this offering to the fire!” a voice boomed, cutting through the din. Hemlock. He was preaching. “We cleanse the outside. We purify the Hallow. As our fathers did, and their fathers before them!”
A great “Amen!” rose from the crowd.
The heat was intense. The lower half of the pyre was fully engulfed. The floor beneath Alex was growing hot, the wood starting to smolder. He could feel the fire licking up the inside of the structure now.
He screamed, a high-Full, animal sound of pain and frustration. He jammed the multi-tool against the log and, with a desperate, thumb-breaking twist, the tiny blade flicked open.
It was barely an inch long. A toy.
It would have to be enough.
He jammed his bound wrists down onto the blade. He began to saw.
The rope was thick. The blade was small. It was like trying to fell an oak with a fingernail file. Smoke filled his vision, and he was coughing more than breathing, great, shuddering whoops that left him weak.
Saw. Don’t think. Saw.
The fire was no longer outside. It was inside. A tongue of flame, bright and fast as a lizard, licked up through a gap in the floor, just inches from his face. He recoiled, smashing his head against the wall of his cage.
The crowd cheered, mistaking the inferno’s sudden surge for part of the show.
Saw. Saw. Saw.
He felt a single fiber snap. Then another. He pulled, and the rope bit into his skin, but he felt it give. He was halfway through.
He put all his weight into it, his shoulders on fire, his lungs burning. The rope was smoking from the friction.
Snap.
His hands were free.
A sob of relief died in his throat. He clawed at the ropes on his ankles. They were simpler, a single loop. The tiny blade, hot enough to burn his fingers, sliced through them in seconds.
He was free. And he was in hell.
The entire pyre was an inferno. The smoke was a solid, choking black wall. He was blind, burning. The way he had come in was gone. The structure was collapsing in on itself.
He looked up. The “roof” was a jumble of larger logs and old furniture. It was the only way.
He stood, his legs cramped and weak. A wave of vertigo hit him, and the heat was so intense it felt like a physical blow. A beam, eaten through by the fire, collapsed next to him, sending up a geyser of sparks.
He jumped, grabbing a cross-beam. The wood was hot, scorching his palms, but it held. He pulled himself up, scrambling into the chimney of his own funeral pyre.
He was climbing. Up, toward the fireworks.
Below him, the center of the pyre, where he had been, collapsed into a vortex of white-hot embers. He had gotten free with seconds to spare.
He climbed, the structure groaning around him. He was a soot-blackened creature, his clothes smoldering, his skin blistering. He reached the top—a tangled mess of branches and a broken armchair.
He burst through the top of the bonfire.
For a second, he was visible to all. A silhouette, wreathed in smoke, standing atop the blazing tower.
The crowd’s joyous chatter, the “oohs” and “aahs,” died. A single, collective gasp was sucked from a hundred lungs. This was not in the program.
Alex didn’t give them time to think. He looked for the weakest, lowest point of the pyre’s edge. He saw it—a section where the fire had burned less fiercely, shielded by the wind.
He leaped.
He hit the ground, a ten-foot drop, and rolled. The impact jarred every bone in his body, but it also extinguished the flames that had caught on his jacket.
He was out. He was alive.
He lay on the damp grass, 30 feet from the inferno, gasping the cool, clean, beautiful November air. He was a mess of burns, bruises, and cuts, but he was breathing.
He pushed himself to his knees.
The field was silent. The fireworks had stopped. The only sound was the crackle of the bonfire.
He stood up, a nightmare figure of ash and terror. He turned to face his audience.
The crowd was frozen. The children were no longer on their fathers’ shoulders. The celebratory masks and silly hats they wore suddenly looked grotesque.
He saw Hemlock at the front, his face, moments before so full of righteous fury, now a mask of slack-jawed disbelief. He was holding a ceremonial-looking torch.
“He… he…,” Hemlock stammered. “The fire… it rejected him.”
A murmur of fear, true, superstitious fear, rippled through the townsfolk.
“He’s the devil!” a woman shrieked from the back.
“He’s unclean!” another man shouted, but his voice wavered.
Alex took a step toward them. The crowd took a step back. He took another. They recoiled again. He was the monster now. He was the thing that should not be. The sacrifice that had refused to die.
“It’s just a fire,” Alex rasped. His throat felt like it was full of broken glass.
“Blasphemy!” Hemlock roared, finding his voice. He pointed the torch at Alex. “Seize him! He’s tainted the ritual! He must be… he must be finished!”
But no one moved. They were simple townsfolk, believers in a dark tradition, but they were not warriors. They were facing a man who had just walked out of a 40-foot bonfire. He might as well have been a god.
“You burned Julian,” Alex said, his voice a dead, smoky thing. It wasn’t a question.
Hemlock’s face twitched. “He was an impurity. He came here, prying, judging… just like you. The Hallow provides, but it must be kept pure. The fire cleanses!”
“You’re murderers,” Alex said. He took another step.
Hemlock, in a fit of panicked rage, threw the torch at him. Alex side-stepped it. The torch landed on the wet grass, sputtering.
And then he heard it. The sound of the outside world.
A siren.
It was distant, but growing. A wail of blue and red, cutting through the ancient dark of the valley.
Alex almost smiled. Before he’d gone to the pub, he’d done his due diligence. He’d activated the tracking on his phone and sent a timed email to his boss, and to the county police, not the local constabulary. ‘If you don’t receive an ‘all-clear’ code from me by 10 PM, Nov 5th, execute recovery protocol. Location attached. Suspect high risk. Town is hostile.’
He’d set his own dead man’s switch.
The crowd heard it too. The spell was broken. The ancient, dark magic of the Hallow was being shattered by the mundane, insistent scream of a police car.
Panic erupted. The reverent crowd became a mob, but not one bent on violence. They were terrified. They were scattering, running for the woods, for their cars, for the dark alleys of the village. They were shedding their ritual masks, becoming just scared, guilty people.
In seconds, the field was almost empty. Only Alex and Hemlock remained, two figures illuminated by the raging pyre and the approaching blue lights.
Hemlock looked at the bonfire, now burning low, its purpose unfulfilled. He looked at the approaching sirens. Then he looked at Alex, who stood, blackened and bloody, but unbroken.
“You’ve ruined everything,” Hemlock whispered. There were tears in his eyes. “You’ve killed the Hallow.”
“You did that,” Alex coughed, “when you fed it your children.”
Hemlock stared at the fire, a strange, terrible peace settling on his features. “The fire must be fed.”
Before Alex could move, the landlord turned, clasped his hands behind his back as if going for a Sunday stroll, and walked, calm and purposeful, straight into the heart of the bonfire he had lit.
He didn’t scream.
Alex watched him go, then turned away. He sank to his knees, his strength gone.
The police cars skidded to a stop on the mud. Doors slammed. Shouts.
“My God… what happened here?”
“Get a bus! Now! We have a severe burn victim!”
Alex looked up at the uniformed officer, a man he’d never seen before, a man from outside.
He held up his hand, his palm blistered and black. In it, he was still clutching the tiny, warped, and blackened-red multi-tool.
“Bonfire Night,” Alex croaked, and then let the darkness he had cheated finally take him.
By Pamela Beach ‘Beyond the Blog’
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Pamela Beach is a multi-genre author, poet, and lyricist who writes from her home on California’s foggy Central Coast. She is the creator of the “Morro Bay fog-mythos” and author of The Unstoppable You. You can read more of her work and explore her complete “fog-mythos” collection at her blog, Beyond the Blog with Pamela Beach
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