Imagine Being Here at Night

I wrote this last year. I have no idea why I decided to write everything in the 3rd person, nor why I decided to fictionalise all names. I also changed round some details of the murder that had happened. I'm superstitious that way. It was all about a creepy trip to Wild Park woods in Moulscoomb that Joe and me made in the autumn of 2006.

The more he thought of his 35th autumn, the less it seemed that autumn had begun on that hot afternoon on the beach. He remembered - suddenly- (or perhaps not, this suddenly was stretched over a number of days) something that had occurred in October of that year. This day had the taste of something blue and wrong, a too big moon, wrongly reflecting, something bitter in the water. A light poison perhaps, too thin to poison anyone. It hadn't been very much really, nothing at all, not even an event, hardly worth remembering.
He remembered James' mouth, sober and thin lipped, and the dark cast of his eyes, remembered him rolling a cigarette as they stood at the base of the woods near the edge of town. 'There's not much of a fort there - not really a fort at all - just a wall really'. The last point been a lie too. The 'iron age fort' that the maps of North Lane Station had promised was only a few stones on top of a hill in a large circle. He had been before and was inevitably disappointed.
He couldn't remember why he had wanted James to come so much to the woods that day. It had been a Saturday in October - one of those nondescript days where the sun seemed cool and the air refreshing. Perhaps it had even been grey. Town had bored them, and the usual ritual of cafes and bookshops and charity shops had soon paled. 'It's not far' (another lie) 'just up Abbotsbury Road'.
When he had first moved to North Lane Station, he had lived in one of the dismal Sunday estates on the edge of town, right at the end of Abbotsbury Road. Liminal roads of houses, rumours of bored teenage gangs looking for trouble that he never seemed to see. The days before night-buses. Endless post-pub walks down the long parallels of Abbotsbury Road. Sometimes in the small hours, he thought to himself that he seemed to have been walking forever.
It had taken them about an hour to reach the base of the woods - the entrance just behind some kind of small industrial estate full of squat buildings without name. They first had to ascend a small slope to reach the trees - dewy grass, and the occasional empty beer of can (this made him nervous for some reason - a place for drunks and not for families - empty cartons of orange juice might have made him feel better) and all this amid sinisterly hidden piles of stinking dog shit. They looked up at the woods, at the trees above them. They weren't impressive trees - didn't really get impressive trees down here on the south coast - but in their thick and tangled nature there was something a little oppressive about them. As they moved up through the wood - and the trees were too close together - they tasted the darkness of the air and the dank breaths taken in of a place that people rarely came to.
James knew about the murder, though he can't remember if he had told him that day, or previously. A child found dead here in the 1980s (the late summer of 1986 to be precise). A man arrested whose name he had forgotten, charged and probably still alive in some prison somewhere. 1986. He had been 14 at the time. The same age. They stopped for a while, smoked roll-ups and wrote poems, sat on the edge of a fallen trunk whose underside was rich with the forbidding white of mushrooms. He couldn't remember any of his poem, but remembered a line from James; why would anyone want to come here? The place was unnerving, but was this place itself or the knowledge of what had happened? '
This is real corner-of-the-eye stuff' James had said, 'imagine being here at night'.
Their creepy glee had become laced through with something else.
Imagine being here at night.
They moved up further into the wood. The ground levelled out slightly. There were trees felled here, and over the stumps someone had lain a track of planks, a waist high ramshackle rollercoaster, made from bits of roughly nailed wood. Cobbled fences. Stolen bonfire fuel probably going back years of autumn. It was quite impressive. They had discussed who had built this - this makeshift course for riding BMX bikes over. It displayed a certain level of ingenuity, but this deep in the woods (they were only ten minutes up from the road) it was a little unnerving.
Why would anyone want to come here?
Disquiet turned to a small panic when they heard voices - and a flash of teenager-bright shirt through the trees. The people who had built the tracks no doubt, or people who were using them. Through silent agreement both him and James moved silently and quickly away. Leave this place behind. He presumed they came eventually to the disappointing stones of the fort, but he didn't remember that at all