Ruins

A tale from the Midnight Vault II

Photo by nokting Je on Unsplash

dedicated to the land and those who have loved it

Eve Jocassee woke curled like a clenched fist, her breath in fast, shallow gasps, and her body trembling with the force of each pounding heartbeat.

She’d dreamt again of the ruins.

This time she’d gone farther down the path than she usually dared, emboldened by the hope that somewhere she’d find an answer, or at least a clue. The ruins were spreading, turning the woods into a cemetery of skeleton structures rising from the ground in scattered rows.

Eve had left the family home and the forest it fronted more than two decades before, but recently her dreams had been haunted by something beneath the land she’d once walked with great wonder. In sleep, she’d find herself in the woods behind her childhood home, but the ground where she’d once hiked and played and searched for frogs was pocked with ruins. Sometimes she stumbled across earthen foundations lined with stones or impaled by stairs to shadowy stories high above her head. Other times, she’d find the pine straw studded with pilings, shadowy steel scaffolds, or half-standing walls with windows like gaping mouths.

Just as mysterious as the source of the ruins was the fear that they produced. She’d feel the ruins before she could see them. The shift from dream to nightmare announced its arrival with a sense of dread that soaked into every fiber of her awareness. In the dream state, where her limbs were made strictly of imagination, the dread was somehow an embodied elemental force.

Eve was no stranger to nightmares, but these had such a decidedly different flavor. And the dread! That dread was like nothing else. It was so thick and palpable that it followed her long after waking. Each time, the ruins called her deeper into the forest, to witness what, she didn’t know, and didn’t want to, until she’d woken, recovered, and realized that these nightmares were something different from the norm.

In the safety of daylight, her waking mind liked to puzzle over these recurring dreams and what they meant. Freud would have a field day, she thought. Deep, dark, dreadful secrets buried beneath the surface of my childhood home and haunts? Jeez, it was practically obvious, yet these ruins seemed to speak of something more physical than psychological.

And so it went. Every few months, the ruins would rise in her dreams, and she’d wake, shaken but compelled to unearth the secrets behind this sprawling, crypt-like city.

As a child, she’d often found hidden things in those woods. She was fascinated by the remnants of a moonshine still that was at least as old as her grandparents. The jagged and rusted remains of a giant steel vat poked through the fallen leaves like an open mouth waiting to snap like a trap on little legs. Far less enticing were the annual offerings of the deer stands. She’d return to the woods after hunting season to find the ground beneath them littered with beer cans, whiskey bottles, and sometimes magazines with dirty pictures that made her feel curious, yet fearful.

Eve questioned her parents, keeping the dreams secret, while searching for darkness or shadows that might rise from the spaces she’d loved to explore. She e-mailed queries, searched online archives, and did her best long-distance digging into any place that might have a clue, but nothing offered answers to the ruins.

On visits home, she’d follow in the footsteps of her dreams, walking into the forest, tracing the paths and borders that looked so similar, yet so different from the dreamscapes. She found neither the dread nor any clues to what may be there.

The land, it seemed, held its secrets close, preferring to speak to her after sunset.

“Darlin,’ I saw Margaret from the Historical Society at the store last week, and she asked when you’d be back in town. Did you ever find what you were looking for?”

“No, not at all. There were some interesting photos, and I really could have spent hours just digging through the old county records, but nothing about our woods.”

“Well, come enjoy your woods while they still look like you remember, sweetheart. We received a Notice of Easement from Flat Rock Power. They’re gonna put one of those transmission towers on the back of the property near where the creek used to be.”

“What? Why are they coming over here?”

“That new data center has its own substation, and it needs to connect to our grid too. You saw what they did on Morning Creek. They cut all those trees and dug up the pond that the Canada Geese always come to in the winter.”

“Can you say no?”

“I wish we could. It’s all fully legal, and no one can fight it. We just have to hope they won’t cut more than they have to. We won’t see the plans for a couple of months.”

The forest was slowly shrinking, but the dreams continued, as did her search for the ruins.

Photo by Aron Marinelli on Unsplash

Eve came home for Christmas. The season brought bare branches and little to block her path or bite her legs as she climbed over fallen trunks and scaled the wooded slopes. Even in winter, the birdsong was thick, and the deer were many. At the property line, fluttering neon orange and pink flags marked a trail along the pines as far as her eyes could see. There were no ruins to be found, but the ribbons were concerning.

Eve’s dream began in a rolling pasture roughly a mile from her home. To her left were “her” woods, to her right was her childhood friend, whose home perched on the hilltop behind them. They walked together through tickling thigh-high grass, flanking the barbed-wire fence where the field met forest.

Cresting a hill she remembered fondly, she was slammed with a wall of dread. It rose from her feet like pins and needles, freezing her in place. The ground beneath her prickling feet revealed the edge of an empty earthen cellar. To her left, a door emerged from the waving wheat, stone steps followed, rising one by one, beckoning her to enter the open threshold. On her right, a chimney rose above four roofless wooden walls.

“Sarah! Run! To your house, let’s go!”

Eve’s mouth choked out her words, but it was the only thing she could move. Her eyes flitted between the cellar and the structures, seeing no movement, hearing no sound, but feeling the wrongness pulse from the ruins, growing, expanding, around and within her. The dread was unbearable. It crawled and twisted inside her as if her very nerves were wrenching away, wanting to burst through her skin and escape, leaving her frozen bones behind.

Eve reached for the light and blinked into the room where she’d grown up, but was now a guest. This was the first time the dreams had come while she slept on the land they showed her.

Later that morning, she called Sarah, whom she trusted with the truth.

“God, that’s so creepy! Sorry, I can’t think of anything about that land that would cause it, though. It’s just been pasture for generations.”

Her friend was sympathetic and curious, but had no answers.

“Speaking of my old house, did I tell you Dad sold it? The pasture land was sold for some huge development, and he doesn’t want to be next to it. They’re going to bulldoze the house, can you believe it? I have to get my old stuff from there, but I haven’t felt up to it. Do you want to go together? We could walk around that part of the pasture if you think it would help.”

They met the next day. Sitting together on the site of countless sleepovers, where they’d skipped school, and snuck more than a few sips of Crown Royal, they laughed and reminisced and spoke of the years those fields had offered a safe space to wander, share secrets, and escape parental ears and eyes.

Later, they crossed the pasture, the tall grass snapping and frosted ground crunching beneath their feet, to the fence between field and forest. There were no ruins, but a winding river of neon ribbons rippling and crackling in the cold breeze.

Leaving was harder that year. The sense of time and change and growing unknown was palpable. Before Eve left, they’d gotten word of the development. They’d seen the buzzing drones and later color-coded maps of the complex that would change acres of forest into industry. Notices and timetables arrived like obituaries as they prepared to flatten the slopes and forests, and tame the land into something more suitable.

The call came a few months later.

“They’ve started blasting, Eve. They’re using dynamite on the granite so they can dig the foundations. They let us know when to expect it, so that’s not so bad, but it’s breaking my heart.”

Eve was numbed by the news. The pain was close enough for her to see it, but deep enough for her to know that if she teetered too far, the damage from the fall would be devastating.

Eve’s dreams returned to the ruins a final time. Her well-worn path into the forest split suddenly into a dozen dirt roads, forking and expanding before her eyes like the branches of the towering oaks above her head. The ruins rose along the paths, concrete columns and wire-filled pilings pierced through the pines like the ribs of fossilized giants.

The dread filled her body, oceanic, almost orgasmic, but these waves brought no pleasure; only panic bubbling and boiling beneath her skin. As each wave came, she fought to stay standing, to keep her senses, her very self from being swept away, but the dread churned on like a maelstrom, swirling her vision and consciousness into its blackened core.

She woke as always, with a racing heart and rasping breaths. In the darkness of her room, her clarity was heavy as cement.

All this time, she’d misunderstood. No secrets were rotting deep in that land she loved, and no hidden horrors or mysterious monsters were asking to be unearthed. Those earthen foundations held no ghosts. Those structures weren’t buried; they were yet to be built.

These weren’t relics of the past. They weren’t ruins. They were warnings.

Eve was no oracle. The dreams were from the land itself. These wise other-than-human beings who’d been here long before and would remain, in some shape or form, long after her, had sensed the ruin to come.

The soil she’d stood on was being covered with cranes, steel, and capital. Dynamite burst the granite she’d once scuttled over, and tarmac covered the creek where crawdads and salamanders had swum.

Those seismic waves of dread rose not from the ruins, but from the acres that held them. They were shockwaves from rock crushers and dynamite blasts, the rumbling treads of the earthmovers, and the weeping shudders and pounding heart of the land that she loved.

Icy dread melted to rivers of grief. The land, the trees, the paths her feet had worn beneath the branches and across the hills and to the creek, had called to her to witness what was coming.

She closed her eyes against her tears to dream a vision of gratitude and grief, and whispered vines of memories to weave around the ruins like remembrance flowers.

It was time to go again to the woods, to walk the land yet unscarred, to offer thanks for what they’d had, and to pay her respects for the losses to come. She’d sit and tell the land she’d understood, and then they’d grieve together.