New Flash Fiction: One Summer Evening

The nights are drawing in and summer seems a long way off now. For Josh Whittaker, in this short story by Daniel Lamb, it is even farther away! But, before we embark upon the story, let's meet its author. Daniel Lamb describes himself as a 22 year-old biped humanoid with a good memory and a vivid imagination. He has always wanted to be a writer.

Actually, there was a brief period of time in his youth when he wanted to be an actor, and an even briefer period of time when he also had aspirations of rock superstardom. In a way, he considers writing to be a form of acting anyway and has thus decided that he is killing two birds with one stone. He lives in a small village in the North West of England where nothing much ever happens and he has to make things up instead. He recently graduated from university and is still coming to terms with living in the real world. 

One Summer Evening
by Daniel Lamb


Josh Whittaker said he saw the Devil once.

He said he saw the Devil while he was out riding his bike one summer evening. He said the Devil appeared to him at the bottom of Seven Drive, right in the middle of the road. First, the sky turned grey and cloudy and the world went silent as though someone had just pressed the mute button on the remote control of life. And then the Devil was standing there in front of him. Josh didn’t describe what the Devil looked like, even when we asked him. He just called him the Devil, and in a way that was enough. He said the Devil spoke to him and tried to hand him a strange pinprick of silver light. After that, Josh rode off as fast as he could and didn’t look back.

We all got a fright when Josh told us his story in school the next morning, but it was a safe sort of thrill, removed from the actual peril of the experience, and not the genuine terror with which Josh recounted it. I could tell he wasn’t lying. Whether he’d actually seen the Devil or not, he believed he had. And he made us believe it, too.

For weeks afterwards, Josh’s story stuck in my mind and I would find myself imagining what the Devil had looked like. Thick protruding horns, huge and gnarled and twisted; small angular eyes filled with red malevolence; a knowing grin revealing sharp stubby parchment yellow teeth, teeth which had rent flesh and drawn blood, and a slithering snake-like tongue, forked at the tip, which had surely tasted it. This image would come to me unbidden as I lay in my bed at night, with the wind rattling against my bedroom window, and tried to drop off to sleep. And, of course, sleep would not come easily.

Josh did not tell us the story again. He died shortly afterwards. He was hit by a car whilst out riding his bike one summer evening. Allegedly, he swerved wildly into oncoming traffic. There no warning. No avoiding him. Seemingly no good reason at all for him to do so. But I often wonder. I have wondered for nigh on thirty years about what really happened to Josh Whittaker.

And I am not sure I ever want an answer.