Petrol Station Tales 2: The Secret Places of Dawn

After I had been working at the petrol station for a while, I discovered that a bus ran from outside of my house to Hove railway station, five minutes away from where I worked. On Sunday mornings there were no buses however, and I would regularly walk the hour or so into work.
I would leave the house at 5:30am, armed with my walkman and tapes ('Utopia AD' by The Black League and 'Novembrine Waltz' by Novembre were then-current favourites.) Still half asleep, I would walk through the pre-dawn blackness. Often it would be raining, certainly bleak and cold weather, but I found something quite hypnotic about that walk. The streets were silent; no cars, no people. Down Edward Street, where I would pass a shop selling autographs of celebrities (a faded photograph of Joanna Lumley, chemical and paper-stare luminous and ghostly) cross the Old Steine, where the ornate fountain seemed like a remnant imposter from some lost manor, then I would cut through the centre of town before the final half hour long walk along the Old Shoreham Road.
Houses as dark as a Blitz-era blackout, the vast and empty space of Hove Recreation ground... I would imagine figures in there watching me. Melancholy spirits watching this usurper pass by in their time. On the other side of a stone wall that towered over me, a twisted wood, crammed with ancient trees, squatting over a darkness I could only ever imagine.
These were the secret places of dawn, fragments of forgotten places in forgotten times. I wouldn't -and didn't- think twice about them when I passed by in bright daylight. In that pre-dawn darkness though, they seemed to thrum with a haunted resonance. Echoes of places that existed only in the dying hours of street light. I would imagine dreamers in houses, stirring against the rain at their windows. I would think of my friends, all asleep, in that land far, far away from where I was.
In that odd loneliness, there was some solace, in hese secret places that I became a part of.