Past Dark

Cycle (I)

CHRIS PETERSON RIDES the black Egli-Vincent down the misty road winding its way into Denton, the grey rain curtain obscuring the town from view, but he knows it's there.

He painstakingly restored the bike – a seventies model – back to its former glory, years before, and he's maintained it ever since. It seemed only right to ride it back home after so long. Everything started with the bike, and he's never forgotten it.

Chris goes carefully on the wet tarmac, the bike's big headlight cutting through the fine drizzle. The road descends through the woody hills, passing the turn-off for the valley he'd called home until the age of sixteen. It runs into the main road which feeds all of Denton like an artery. Chris feels compelled, for a split second, to turn right into the valley, ride through his old neighbourhood straight away. See if it's changed. See if it looks any different from the last day he saw it, the day he left, a day very much like this one.

But he won't.

It can wait until tomorrow. It's wet; he's been driving for hours; and the first item of business is to get himself a room somewhere. And he's got to find a suit hire before everything shuts for the afternoon . . .

He rides on past the turning, straight on to that artery, following the flow of blood to the heart of his past. The trees cower over the road, stark, wet branches like gnarled, outstretched fingers against the soft grey sky. Slushy leaves line the verges, in the mud. Chris manages a few glances in the direction of the trees, as if he'll be able to see anything through those dense, shadowy sentinels. He passes another turn-off on the left that cuts through the woodland. The narrow road doesn't look as though anything has travelled along it for a long, long time. Sometimes you know when not to go walking down a dark alley on your own, and Chris knows the same can be said for certain roads. They lead to unfortunate places, some of them. Places your gut tells you to avoid, best left consigned to the imagination. Those woods were always like that. It was said there was an old mental hospital out there somewhere – abandoned in the twenties – but for all the time they spent in those woods as kids, they never came across it. Possibly, it had been absorbed by Mother Nature. Or it had simply faded from memory and ceased to exist, lost for all time.

Now he gets a shiver up his spine when he looks into the shadows behind the first line of trees, but back then, as a boy, those woods had been full of promise, a mysterious expanse, ripe for exploration.

Chris continues on, the rain picking up a bit now. He turns left at the bottom. One vein into another vein, all headed the same direction. With his old haunt, the valley, at his back, he clatters over the railway crossing and into Denton. Into the past.

~***~

Late afternoon and Denton dissolves out of the blue-grey rain, the town a derelict of a bygone age. The sun is sinking, the sky now the colour of wet denim behind the mist. Along the high street are the mainstays of the town he can recall from his childhood: the sweet shops, pubs, bookies, clothes shops, launderettes, chippies and undertakers. Some are still there. Most are not. Apart from the undertakers – they're never short on business.

He can see Denton has become like the rest of the country, a hodgepodge of shuttered business premises, boarded up windows and broken dreams. Perhaps that sums up Denton perfectly. A whole ghost town of memories lost to the rain. For the high street, it has been a case of survival of the fittest. Retail natural selection. Darwinism taken to another extreme.

Chris turns off to the left, past the old library. A part of him feels relief when he sees it's still there. Lit windows, bright squares of hope frosted by condensation. Within, the shadows of people at tables, heads lowered over books. He remembers now how late the Denton Library used to close. A stab of dread hits him when he recalls how they'd stayed there one night until closing time, and why they'd made their visit . . .