Dark Dead Days (short story)

 He thinks of the three red lights.

Round, in a neat vertical line on the mast as if they’ve been put there as

part of a game. They glower in the night like planets.

For all their significance, he wasn’t actually sure what they were, what the

mast was for exactly. Radio? Electricity? For him it was just a marker - a

sort of welcome that guided the way. It always meant the end of a long

journey, it meant they were nearly home.

What did home mean to him now..?

He hadn’t been back up for ages - a Christmas about 12 years ago. He’d

lived in the city for almost 20 and could finally afford to buy his own little

flat - around the corner from the cobbled street with the bakeries and the

coffee shops and the Saturday market.

Where you lived was surely home.

But he often found himself referring to it just as the flat.

(I’ve left it in the flat; let’s go back to the flat). At least he could say mine.

Is there always some sort of pull to the place you came from - an umbilical

thread that keeps you tethered?

He always thought about salmon when he thought about things like that -

where you felt you belonged, where you might end up.

He had read that they can find their way back to the same river they were

born in - something to do with the Earth’s magnetic field or a smell or just

their instinct. They go back to start the cycle again; to make their own

contribution to life; to die.

He imagines flashes of silver, slick bodies, scales that sparkle through the

rush and churn of copper-coloured water. The fish explode with energy as

they swim and thrash, then leap.

*

He has decided to drive and is on what he considers the final stretch -

where the road is tight and sinuous. He realises that he has always marked

the journey in increments that get smaller the further north he travels: 100,

150, 10, like he is moving along a drawing of seismic waves.

He wanted to arrive before it got dark but stopped earlier for longer than

planned. The sun is beginning to set.

The day can disappear quickly here in winter. It happens faster when the

sky is grey and flat - a veil of milky cloud that the sun can never quite

break through.

But it has been clear and crisp and for now there is still some light. Dark

clouds are creeping along the sky and are turning cherry blossom-pink.

When he sees them like that he is always reminded of candy floss - sugar

magicked on to sticks and floating through warm summer nights by the

river.

Colours always did feel different up here. It’s like the wide sky makes more

room for them, pulls them from the earth: the purple scrub of heather, the

acid yellow of gorse. You can watch a slick of silver-grey looming before it

rains.

The sun has moved behind the cloud but just before it goes fully into the

night there is one final flash - gold on grey on green. It’s like there is a crack

in the sky and the sun is spilling out.

It starts to drizzle then and the windscreen wipers, sensing the change,

have come on automatically. He finds himself almost hypnotised by their

rhythm, the sweeping right-left like a metronome. The wipers are a little

slow to react and it gives him time to see that the raindrops are actually

quite fat and viscose, that they spread out into the shape of a leaf or a little

dinosaur footprint when they land. It is in fact sleet that is falling, and the

satisfying splat it makes as it hits the windscreen sounds like it is trying to

bite through the glass.

In the trance he finds himself thinking about the last time he was here -

snow actually fell on Christmas Day and it went on to be one of the coldest

winters in years.

There is a tug at his stomach as if it has been gently squeezed.

It wasn’t as if there were arguments - any banging doors or shouting

(although he wondered if that would be easier).

Sometimes it was the things that went unsaid that were painful. Raised

eyebrows, sideways glances, conversations heard through walls that were

always quiet enough as to be indecipherable.

2There was always a sense of being out of place that could never be

overcome.

Perhaps now it would different.

Of course there were phone calls and messages, occasional photographs

sent. But it all felt like it was through the safety of distance, slightly

removed from reality. There was the barrier of a screen in your hand.

He still always planned on, or at least thought about, going up for

birthdays, for long weekends in summer. But they only ever stayed as

thoughts.

He didn’t go back up at Christmastime because he usually had to work.

Easier to stay where he was. Then he found he liked spending the day

alone, that there might be something poetic about it. There was the vague

hope too of dashing off last minute to Paris or Copenhagen or Prague; a

tiny chalet tucked away somewhere in the Alps. Of course it never

happened but it felt like the possibility was always there.

He thought about spending the day at the zoo because it was open then -

Christmas with the pandas who didn’t know or care that it was Christmas.

*

The sleet has stopped and the sky is now the colour of a bruise. The last

gasps of daylight give it an otherworldly glow - a purple haze that lasts just

for a minute - before darkness sets in completely.

There is no moon tonight.

There is the beam of the car headlights which are now on full, the flash of

barriers and signs and reflectors lined up like constellations. There is the

occasional square of yellow of the window of a house.

The road follows the coastline - its jagged edges and steep sides normally

announcing themselves as you approach a bend. But in the thickness of

night it has disappeared - the sweep of cold sea below gone for now too.

The world suddenly seems closed in, narrowed by the absence of light, as if

everything has fallen away. All that remains is the road and the car and

everything inside. He glances down, comforted somehow by the dials and

the glow of the dashboard.

He is drawn to look up to his left then, picturing the black fields and bog he

3knows spreads out beyond the other side of the road. In his head he moves

birdlike across the land, flying over untroubled sheep and ruined crofts

and lochs that in this moment must look like tar. He flits between wind

turbines and through trees, over a burn towards the railway line. The train

will be coming up now too, its wheels rattling into the dark.

He was on the train the last time he came up. It took all day but he decided

on that occasion that he didn’t mind. You could read and sleep and work,

have a glass of wine. He liked how you could really see the way the land

changed in a way you didn’t from the road. Through the haze of the

window hills rise and fall like waves then melt into the peatland that

surrounds them. The train snakes south across the ground and goes right

along the shore - he remembers going to sleep once as the early train left

and woke up on the waves.

But he had forgotten just how long it made the already-long journey feel:

one hour in a car took two on the train. It was an alternate world where

everything slowed down.

And so he wanted to drive. To get there faster, to arrive when he wanted -

go where he wanted too. To have a car was to have freedom. There is the

hint of a smile as he thinks about driving to the beach or the forest, places

he remembers as a child.

*

He turns a corner, relieved that the bends and twists are uncoiling. He feels

that he could follow the road, sense his position on it, as if he was here all

the time: an atavistic skill invoked without noticing.

But suddenly there they are.

He had always thought there were three lights but he sees now that there

are only two. The power of false memory.

Being in a pair somehow changes them - they feel like guards, like a

confrontation.

The redness is incendiary.

The lights are not a welcome, but a warning.