Eclipsed in Time

Laura gnawed through the plastic wrapper that separated her from the two fluid ounces of energy drink contained in the tiny bottle. She should have been able to easily peel the plastic away without the use of her teeth, but her fingernails had been chewed to stubs and thus she worked at the packaging like a wild animal hungering for unattainable sustenance.

Outside, the towering light posts of the dollar store parking lot flickered incessantly, creating a fluorescent strobe that threated to drive her to madness if she couldn’t just open the fucking package and get the caffeine that her body so desperately craved.

At home, in Laura’s real life, she had quit caffeine. She told friends and colleagues she awakened her mind with meditation sessions instead of partaking in the anxiety-inducing drug, but her meditation practices were actually just microdoses of a rage that spiked her adrenaline and kept her going. You don’t need caffeine when you have 38 years of pent up aggression lurking in your soul.

Even still, sometimes pure aggression isn’t enough to keep the adrenaline flowing, so she had taken to snagging a tiny bottle of liquid assistance from time to time. She had once been fairly certain these little energy drinks were advertised as not having any caffeine, and were instead filled with mysterious and probably cancer inducing chemicals parading as herbal supplements. It wasn’t until she was fairly hooked on them that she learned they had exactly the same amount of caffeine as she had been ingesting before her fabricated period of enlightenment.

Laura had felt strangely guilty about consuming these little bottles once she learned the truth, but right now she felt nothing but a need to erase the tugging pain behind her eyes and gain a moment or reprieve from the disconcerting fog that had chased her ever since getting the lawyer’s call 48 hours prior. She was about to go down the rabbit hole, and like Alice she needed a tiny sip of liquid to help with the descent.

Having downed the sickly sweet contents of the energy drink, Laura engaged her Tesla into drive. Just as she was about to accelerate the flickering light overhead went out and cast the distant reaches of the craggy parking lot into complete darkness. Only her headlights sliced through the night in the front of the car, but they exposed only the desolation of an eerily empty parking lot. Behind her, and to both sides of her peripheral, she tried to avoid staring into the abyss. She reminded herself that she was too old to be scared of the dark. She reminded herself that this was the town she had grown up in; she had worked two miserable years at this very dollar store. And yet, she could not suppress the sense that something was out there watching her just beyond the point where the prism of her headlights faded.

She collected herself and was about accelerate once more when “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane came blaring through her speakers so loudly that she slammed her foot onto the break with unnecessary force and felt her heart shift into double time. She cursed into the darkness, eyes scanning wildly about the vacant lot before realizing her phone had just synced back up with the Telsa’s bluetooth and resumed her Pandora station.

Heart still racing in her chest, she drove away from the eerie scene with as much gusto as felt prudent given her familiarity with the overzealous police that patrolled this small town. They would pull her over just for having the audacity to show up in their rural home with a putzy white Tesla, so she didn’t need to give them the added reason of exceeding the speed limit. In truth, she hated the vehicle, which had been a gift from her ex-husband not long before their parting. At first she had tried to believe that the car was a thoughtful gesture; a recognition of her love for the environment that stemmed from a life-long passion for hiking and camping. But really it had just been a feeble effort to smooth over irreconcilable differences, not the least of which was his need to show off his money.

She pulled off the town’s one and only paved street and onto a dirt road that was framed by a thick black fringe of pines that reached so high above her that she could barely make out the night sky beyond. She had not wanted to come out here after dark, but she needed to conclude her business as quickly as possible. Her four-year-old son Sam was staying with her ex and his new wife. They were both kind, accomplished people who would take great care of Sam and that’s what really motivated her to get back as quickly as possible.

“Call Alice when she was just small” Grace Slick sang from the car’s speakers. Laura hadn’t been down this road since she’d left for college twenty years prior, but she still had a sort of muscle memory for the divots and bumps of the dusty road, and focused on the song lyrics to crowd out all the messy thoughts pressing in on her mind.

She reached the house just as Grace was advising to “feed her head” and then the music fell silent as her phone lost its signal for good. The only sound around her was that eerie hum of nighttime insects and whispering winds that had always haunted her when trying to fall asleep as a teen. After her mother had passed, her father was entirely lost and the only family he had to fall back on was Great Uncle Charlie, who lived in the dilapidated family farmhouse in upstate Vermont. Great Uncle Charlie may have been the only landing available to her falling father, but it was a rough landing indeed. The old man had no social skills and had only allowed them to move in with him because it was a family house, and thus they were entitled to it as much as he was.

And that was what had brought Laura to the property; Great Uncle Charlie had passed, outliving his nephew by 17 months, and leaving Laura as the sole heir to this kingdom of leaky roofs, moldy rooms, and swampy fields.

The Tesla was irritatingly silent amidst this display of desolation, and she turned it off. The nearest place she knew of to charge the damn thing was about 100 miles away, so she didn’t want to waste a trickle of charge. The headlights died away and in the full darkness the stars slowly emerged as her eyes adjusted. The house was a daunting silhouette against the canvas of space; a massive structure with a sharp, steep roof topped by a widow’s walk that had been unstable for an untold number of years. Yet even as a teen it was easy to see that this had once been a handsome farmhouse in a time when the fields were ripe with crops and livestock and not sinking into the groundswell of water a little more each year.

Laura reached for the plastic bag of supplies she had procured from the dollar store. She was searching for the flashlight, but pulled out the pair of eclipse glasses she had bought on impulse. It turned out that tomorrow she would be in the path of a total solar eclipse, and when she saw there was one last pair of flimsy cardboard glasses she had thrown them on the counter top for the bored cashier to ring up.

Now she tossed the glasses back into the bag and grabbed the flashlight. She emerged from the car before her discomfort could turn her around, and was immediately thankful she had remembered to wear rubber boots as the muddy ground sucked at her soles. She strode across the mucky dirt driveway with purpose. She would do a quick search of the house tonight, spend a little time on the grounds when the sun came up, and then be on her way back to Sam before noon. She was hopeful she would be out before the eclipse even happened.

When she had been contacted about her great uncle’s passing and her inheritance of the estate, she had wanted to say “no thank you” to all of it. While it was true that it had become trendy to fix up old Vermont farmhouses and turn them into cutesy bed and breakfasts, this place had been a near tear down 20 years ago, so she imagined it was quite uninhabitable by now. Laura was the type of realist who had majored in business because she didn’t want to be poor ever again. She had abandoned dreams of working out in nature and had moved to Boston (a city she despised) for a pragmatic job and a seemingly pragmatic marriage. She was not about to entertain silly notions of finding some Instagram house flipper to con into buying the shitty old place.

Despite being a realist, what had compelled Laura to check out the house was a silly rumor that she had learned about not long after her father dragged her to the old family farmhouse. The rumor was that her father’s family, the Grants, had not lost all their money when the farm ceased to operate. The rumor was that Old Man Charlie was the last keeper of a family treasure trove. It was absurd of course; Great Uncle Charlie was the kind of guy who had more patched holes in his trousers than actual fabric, was rail thin and paper white from a poor man’s diet of canned goods, and had refused electric be brought into the house because he couldn’t afford it and didn’t see the need for it. The idea that he had some pile of gold and silver hidden in the field stone basement was utter bullshit. Yet despite having a broken back that kept him from working, Charlie had always kept up with the property taxes.

It was a stretch for a realist like Laura, but even realists need a win from time to time. She made six figures but in post-pandemic Greater Boston that barely afforded a two bedroom apartment for her and her son. Her husband paid his child support, but she had been the one who wanted out of the marriage so he had kept the house with the inground pool and two car garage. Laura was fine with that; she never actually liked the house. But she wasn’t fine with the idea that Daddy and Stepmom would be taking Sam to Disney World, and on cruises, and Bruins games, and all that shit that would make Sam love them more and make her the “Poor Mom”. More than anything, Laura fucking hated feeling poor.

So here she was, re-entering the adolescent home of nightmares to see if Uncle Charlie may have left a little something behind. As always the door was unlocked, and as always it creaked with unnecessary volume. She cast the flashlight around the interior and saw the sturdy but chipped staircase that led up to the second floor. Yellow wallpaper peeled down around her, and uneven, warped floor boards groaned beneath her weight as entered. All in all, it looked exactly as she had remembered.

When Laura turned thirteen she went from living in a quaint Massachusetts town where she played soccer on the weekends and spent summers camping with her loving parents, to a teen whose mother had passed and father couldn’t hold down a job. It had all been almost too much to handle, but moving to this wretched old house had nearly broken her. In Vermont she was hours away from her friends in a place with no phone, electricity, or running water. At the regional high school she was already the strange new girl, but the fact that she was living in the old Grant estate made her an outright freak. Many times she pondered calling child services; even as a young teenager she knew she should not have been living in such conditions. Yet her father was all she had, even if he was unwell. And so she pushed through, focusing on graduating, getting into college, and never being a social pariah again.

As Laura walked the halls of the old house, she had that prickling feeling at the base of her neck like she was being watched. She made a wide arch with the flashlight, searching about her, and a series of pale faces gazed at her with dark eyes from the end of the hall. Pictures of generations of Grants in lopsided frames were the only decorations adorning the house, and they had always given her the creeps. Great Uncle Charlie rarely spoke, but when he did it was only to complain about the changes her father did eventually make to the house (such as a solar array to provide some basic amenities to the home), or to ramble about the ancestors in the photos. “Still watching us” he’d always say at the end, her mouth twisting into a bitter look of resentment. “Always watching us.”

She always wanted to tell him to just take the pictures down if he hated them so much, and once in a rare act of rebellion Laura had tried to do just that. But it seemed like they had been glued or bolted to the wall and they would not come free from the wall no matter how hard she pulled. Laura had given up with a shriek of rage and slammed the door of her bedroom before falling into a pile of tears.

Now she tore her eyes away from the black and white photos; faces of people she never knew stuck in time. She had been asked an incomprehensible number of times if the Grant Farm was haunted, and she had always said it was not. It was true; nothing went bump in the night besides the mice in the walls. There were no poltergeists or spectral images floating about the dusty halls. But there were those photos, so in a way it was a lie to deny that the place was haunted. And then there were the last two living Grant men, wandering about, whispering unheard laments.

Laura searched in all the usual places one might look for hidden treasure. She started with the study where sagging bookshelves still held dull tomes dated to the point of irrelevance, such as eight volumes on “Great American Lawyers” from 1908 and numerous editions of Grolier Encyclopedias. She then searched the water logged basement where Mason jars housing horrific and unidentifiable blobs rusted away beneath piles of dust and cobwebs. The last place she tried was the widow’s walk, but a quick assessment of the decayed spiral staircase made her determine that it was very unlikely a 92-year-old man had been ascending and descending that death trap to extract funds.

She tried to make her way to the large barn behind the house; it had been tilting sideways increasingly with each year that passed, but still had not managed to hit the ground. However, the incessant rains of spring had turned the field around the barn into a bog, and she didn’t want to drown in the dark miles away from anyone who could hear her screams. So she climbed into her Tesla, downed a bag of salty provisions procured from the Dollar Store, and despite the cold she fell asleep before she knew it.

When she woke up, the sun was high up in the sky and she had a crick in her neck that made her feel downright dizzy. She found her phone case haphazardly strewn on the passenger’s seat and noted that it was nearly noon. She tried to curse but her mouth was too dry from her dust-filled searches and her snack of choice. She reached into the trusty dollar store bag and extracted a bottle of water that she downed in a series of gulps. She couldn’t believe she slept so long in such an uncomfortable state, but now she just needed to check the stupid barn and she could set the whole ridiculous thing to rest and get back to Sam.

The barn did not look any less ominous in full daylight, in fact, the bright sun just exposed its true shambles. It was still standing, but it looked like a strong wind might turn the wooden structure into a pile of Pick-Up-Sticks. She was still feeling enticed to take a look inside for some reason, so she skirted the worst of the puddles and her pants were only soaked up to the knees by the time she trudged into the open frame of the barn and peered into the darkness beyond.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the slits of light leaking through the broken slats of the roof, dust dancing in each sun beam in a rather magical way. The ground was muddy but not flooded, so she endeavored a hesitant step inside. She wasn’t sure how she had convinced herself that this pit was worth investigating; it was practically heaped to the beams with rusty farm equipment that had been abandoned before even Uncle Charlie was born.

“My father was the last one to farm this land” the old man had wheezed while looking at the dusty picture frames on the yellowing walls. “He packed everything up into the barn when I was still shitting in diapers.”

Laura approached a heap of rusted metal and tried to see if there was anything behind the wall of decay, but for her efforts she nearly poked her eye out on some murderous looking agricultural equipment. She swore a blue streak, cursing first her stupidity for thinking there was anything of value in this old dump, and then cursing her father for making her ever live in this place. Suddenly she was on her knees in the mud sobbing wretched tears for every misfortune and stupid decision she had ever made.

When she pulled herself together and escaped the muddy fields she changed out in the open because there were no people out here, and the day was surprisingly warm for April in Vermont. She fetched some wet wipes from her handy Dollar Store cache and cleared the snot and tears and drool from her face. Looking at her phone she saw that it was mid-afternoon now, and suddenly realized the eclipse was about to start. Feeling far too drained to start her drive back just yet, she munched on a Powerbar and downed another bottle of water before taking a peak at the sun using the cardboard glasses she had procured.

She had never seen an eclipse before, and was surprised by the little thrill she felt when she saw the edge of the sun being clipped by the moon. She sat on the hood of the car and let the sun soak her skin, warming up all the places where the cold mud had sunk into her skin earlier. Every so often she would put the glasses back on her face and peer up once more to watch the moon’s slow interruption of the sun. She felt a moment of peace taking in the blue skies, warm sun, and singing birds. Sam had wanted to come with her; he had inherited her love for nature. She realized he would have loved this eclipse as well, but she had been ashamed for him to see the ugly place she had once lived.

As the eclipse neared completion it became notably colder and she had to retrieve her old UMass hoodie from the back seat to stay warm. The world seemed to grow quiet, and she never realized how friendly the ambiance to chirping insects and distant tweeting birds was until it ceased. She shivered for reasons that had nothing to do with the darkening skies, and once again felt that someone was watching her from the long shadows that the old farm house now cast along the front yard.

She focused her attention on watching the sun diminish and felt the breath leave her body as totality was achieved and the sun became invisible through her lenses. She removed the glasses and gazed upon the eclipse; her pragmatic mind boggling at the sight of such perfect celestial alignment. The whole world was dark and silent.

Laura looked to the house that had stolen the golden years of her adolescence and saw that it had changed somehow. It was just a silhouette in the dark, but it stood straighter. As her eyes adjusted it wasn’t just straighter; the paint was crisp and no longer peeling. She was certain she was losing her mind, but she drifted towards it like a moth drawn to the light.

With each nearly involuntary step forward, she absorbed more oddities of the scene. The muddy driveway was now pristine; a neat gravel path lined by rich green grass that was well-maintained. Beyond the house, the fields were no longer swamplands but flat, groomed plots of land that awaited planting. Even the dead trees had come back to life; still bare of leaves but with the healthy vigor of maples in early spring. And that wasn’t all that had come back to life.

On the suddenly restored wrap-around porch of the farmhouse stood every pale figure that had ever gazed at her from the photos affixed to the walls. Laura felt her feet involuntarily draw her closer to these ghastly visages. Her heart raced in fear and her mind reeled to reject what it was seeing, yet she kept moving towards those unsmiling faces, those dark and unreadable eyes.

She was finally able to stop herself at the bottom of the porch steps, and now she gazed up at the undead collected there, framed against the darkness of the eclipse. She saw that they weren’t all exactly as they had seen in the pictures; in particular, one man sported a gruesome wound; half of his face missing as though it had been cleaved away by something sharp. His one remaining eye seemed to bore into her soul and she would have shouted on in pain if her jaw wasn’t locked in place.

The crowd of ghosts suddenly parted and a man that Uncle Charlie had once pronounced to be her “great-great grandfather” stepped forward. He was a tall man with a lean, angry face. But he wasn’t marred like the one who stood just behind him, and when he opened his mouth to speak he felt suddenly solid and real.

“You’re here for the gold” he said, his voice deep and stronger than what one might expect of an apparition. She did not answer, and he did not seem to require it of her. It was not a question. “They said there was no real gold to be found in Vermont, but I had the misfortune of finding a large chunk of it when drilling the new well. I was excited to mine it until I realized it was a part of the fabric of this land. If I removed it, it would release an aquifer and flood our fields. So I left it.” His demeanor darkened further. “But my son did not.”

The man missing half a face stepped forward and his awful condition was fully exposed; brain matter seeping from behind a crushed mesh of skin and skull, his tongue lolling out from the opening created by smashed teeth and missing jawbone.

“As you can plainly see, he can’t speak and we haven’t much time until the eclipse passes and regular time resumes. My son destroyed the farm for his greed, and the farm paid him back in kind. His wise wife cast the gold back into the well, but her own son tried to fetch it back years later and he was cursed with a broken back.” 

Another man stepped from the crowded porch now, and she recognized him as her bitter Great Uncle Charlie. He said nothing but stared at her with knowing eyes and she flinched under the scrutiny. To her immense relief, his gaze softened and she realized he was fading away. Every one of them was fading away, and the sky was gradually growing lighter.

“You can take the gold if you like, but everyone who touches it is cursed” said the old man, and then, they were all gone and she stood alone in the mud, the house back to its ruined state. The light was slowly returning to the world around her, and Laura didn’t have time to question whether she was insane because she suddenly knew exactly where the gold was hidden.

She ran to the barn and grabbed a rusted sledgehammer. She entered the ruined house and stood before the pictures of all those dead who had been so real just moments ago. She heaved the sledgehammer from her shoulder and hit the wall with force, bursting apart the plaster and revealing brick underneath.

This time her heart raced with excitement instead of fear. She knew the gold was behind this wall, sealed away for safekeeping. Gold that could help get her and Sam out of their cramped apartment, could pay for trips to beautiful places, would ensure he always had the cool clothes and best sports equipment. As she contemplated how she could get through the brick, she remembered how Same had wanted to come to this house with her. He hadn’t even known where she was going, just that it would be near the mountains. And he loved the mountains. And he loved his mother.

She dropped the sledgehammer and left the cursed house for the last time.