A Night-Walk Under the Lantern Constellation

Walked Em to work last night, the first hour after nightfall. Went for a wonder when I had left her. A light rain, but the breeze had died down. everything orange and black. Sudden glimpses of how deep autumn can be.
Slipped from Cromwell to those streets over the other side of the railway line. A sudden falling of quietness. Far from the noise of the city, suburban-gothic geography, all knee high walls and curtains drawn against the road. Passed the abandoned house that always used to fascinate me so much. A death-house for those years I spent living in the flat on Wilbury crescent. Now being renovated, scaffolding covering the once decaying works, looking all shiny and new and not frightening.
A sharp turn to the right. To my left, down an embankment, the railway line, and to my right, more houses. The overhanging branches of the trees always seemed to create pockets of deeper shadow here. The solitary street lamp seemed muted (I suddenly realise that I describe quite a lot of things as being 'muted') and I remembered walking this way in the early morning when I worked at the petrol station. Often the street lamp - and the one at the entrance to the alleyway over the railway line was not working. A road of dead lamps. A pool of thick night.
Back in those black early mornings of winter at the petrol station, when, half-asleep and exhausted, I would cross the alleyway over the railway tracks, I would imagine a huge black dog to be waiting for me. Black Shuck country. They're said to haunt these liminal places, boundaries between one place and the next; rivers, hedges, green lanes, bridges... I paused and looked down the lines; one way past our old garden at Wilbury Crescent, and the other where the tracks disappeared under the bridge across the Old Shoreham Road. A red light shining as always. Red for danger.
In the newsagent in Scotland (the V.G as it was called) there used to be a small book section upstairs. Back when I was, -what, seven or eight-, there was a book whose jacket fascinated me. It was called 'Red for Danger' and showed a railway line disappearing into a night-time forest. Deep in the depths of the forest a red light shone out. My seven or eight year old self was mystified and fascinated. What kind of book was this? I knew I was too young for it, and never saw the book again... When I was 19, I began thinking about this fascinating cover again. I began using the image of the red light shining in a forest in some song lyrics, wondering over the book, this childhood ghost and what it was about. Over the course of the next week I came across two different copies of the book in charity shops with two different covers. Strange serendipities. For some reason I didn't buy the book until years later when I was at Worcester studying (ostensibly) for my dissertation. I came across a copy of the book in the market hall at Worcester. This time I had to buy it. A book of railway disasters, oddly enough, by an author (L.T.C.Rolt) whose ghost stories I was studying for my dissertation.
Passed by the old flat at Wilbury Crescent. All black with no lights on, and those echoes of silence... but no memories; it feels I never lived there. Every time I pass the flat I have never seen lights on. Always empty. Maybe we were the last residents.
I looped back onto Cromwell Road, and walking along the edges of St Annes Well Park I glanced up at the sky. Stopped in sudden shock. Six or seven large and bright lights loomed over the trees. A collection of those curious air-fire lanterns which seem to be popular in Brighton at the moment. Rising through the air they looked like the forerunners of some extra-terrestrial invasion force, or a new, possibly Lovecraftian constellation of carnivorous and sinister stars.