Missing Time on a Rural Road — 2 Hours Gone

I clocked out at 8:47 PM and my dashboard read 11:14 — still parked on the same stretch of Lincolnshire road, two hours and twelve minutes simply gone. If you've ever experienced missing time or unexplained lights over open fields, this one will stay with you.

Chapters:
0:00 The Clock That Couldn't Be Right
1:29 Clocking Out — The Drive Begins
2:20 Radio Cuts Dead, Light Appears
3:45 Stopped on the Verge
6:20 11:14 PM — Two Hours Gone
7:26 Home: Jodie Asleep, Dust on the Roof
9:08 Pete's Voicemail Changes Things
9:24 Three Years Later, Same Road
11:17 The Bag, the Voicemail, the Question

Written and narrated by Alice Kettleby.
Original fiction — names, places and events are invented.
#MissingTime #RuralHorror #ParanormalStory

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Have you ever looked at a clock and felt the number on it simply couldn't be right — not wrong by a minute or two, but wrong by so much that your whole sense of the evening just... collapses? That happened to me. Rural Lincolnshire, England. October 2019. I was thirty years old, driving home from a late shift at the grain depot just outside a village called Wetherton Cross.

The road I use is called Fenwick Drove. Eight miles of dead-straight tarmac cutting through harvested fields. I'd driven it five nights a week for three years. I knew every crack in it. I hold a private pilot's licence — still do. I log aircraft movements as a hobby. I can tell you what a Cessna looks like at eight hundred feet in thin cloud.

That matters later. My sister Jodie was staying that week — her first visit in eighteen months. I'd promised her I'd be home by nine-thirty so we could eat together. That promise is important. Remember it. There's a bend about five miles along Fenwick Drove — the Lacey's Farm turnoff.

A dead oak stands there, half-split by lightning. Every night my headlights caught it white on the approach. Every single night. I clocked out at 8:47 PM. I know that precisely because I checked. Waved to my colleague Pete at the gate. Got in my grey Vauxhall Astra and pulled onto the A-road toward Fenwick Drove.

Clear night. Cold. Half-moon. The combines had already been in from the fields, leaving bare stubble stretching away in every direction under the widest sky Lincolnshire gives you in October. Wide and utterly still. Fifty miles an hour, radio on low — a news reader giving Tuesday's weather forecast.

I remember glancing at the trip meter: 4.2 miles from the depot. Eleven minutes from home. Everything measurable, everything accounted for. Past the Briar Dyke bridge the radio didn't fade — it snapped dead. Not static first. Just gone. And I noticed my breath had started clouding in front of me.

The heating hadn't dropped. Why was it suddenly that cold? Then I noticed a pale amber light low over the eastern field — steady, perfectly still. My first thought was farm security lamp. But there's no post out there. I put one up myself last spring. There's nothing. I slowed and looked properly.

No navigation strobes. No red-green wingtip pattern. No descent profile consistent with an approach path. As a licensed pilot I can say with confidence — that was not an aircraft. The farm-lamp idea didn't hold either. That field is open bare stubble — I'd driven it daily for three years.

No post, no structure, nothing within half a mile. The light was too high, too uniform. Then the light began moving — parallel to the car, matching my speed of forty-eight miles per hour precisely. I found that strange enough to slow to thirty, just to test whether it would follow.

It did. I stopped the car on the verge. The light stopped too. I sat with the engine running, hazards off, just watching it hang in the cold air about two hundred metres out. Neither of us moved. Then the interior of the car went quiet in a way that was different from ordinary quiet.

The engine noise was gone. The tick of the cooling system. All of it — just gone. Not faded. Gone. A heaviness settled through my chest and arms. Not painful — more like the pressure you feel at depth in water, pressing me gently back into the seat. I couldn't lean forward. I stopped trying.

The amber light expanded slowly, and beneath it a shape resolved. I'll describe it carefully: roughly the underside of a disc — not unlike an inverted wok, but vast. Maybe sixty metres across. Maybe more. What I keep coming back to is those apertures — evenly spaced around the rim, each one pulsing blue-white, slow and rhythmic, exactly like a monitor's standby light in a dark room.

I tried to reach for my phone on the passenger seat. I remember the intention clearly — reach, pick it up, photograph it. But my arm moved through the air like the air had turned solid. Then total silence, and then something I can only call a hum — felt entirely in my chest, not my ears.

Steady, almost calm. Like a sustained organ note inside a cathedral. Very still. I believe — and I hedge this deliberately — I saw a shadow pass across the inside of that amber light. Upright. Thin. Looking down. It showed no curiosity I could recognise. None at all. One word reached me — or something shaped like a word.

Not heard. Felt. I can only paraphrase it as: stay. Not threatening. More like being told to wait by someone who was simply too busy. There was no fade. No blackout I experienced as a blackout. One moment the shape was directly above me. The next I was simply sitting in the parked car, engine still running, fields completely empty.

I looked at the dashboard clock: 11:14 PM. I looked at my watch. 11:14. I sat there reading those numbers. I'd left the depot at 8:47. I was still half a mile past Briar Dyke bridge. I did the arithmetic out loud, actually spoke it to the car. Depot at 8:47. Light appeared around 9:02.

Now 11:14. Two hours and twelve minutes simply missing. I said those words aloud and they meant nothing. I hadn't moved. Tyres still on the verge grass. Hazards still off. Fuel gauge identical to when I'd stopped. Two hours and twelve minutes — and then I heard something: a single low tone from the back seat, fading before I could turn.

I drove the last three miles in complete silence. Didn't touch the radio. Gripped the wheel. And when I came around toward Lacey's Farm, the dead oak appeared in my headlights exactly as it always does. I got home at 11:29. Stood in the hallway, coat still on. The TV was on — but when I looked at the sofa, the blanket Jodie keeps folded there was spread open, as though someone had just stood up.

Next morning I found it on the roof of the Astra — a ring of very fine pale dust, chalky, slightly iridescent, coating the paintwork in a near-perfect circle. It smelled faintly metallic and clean. I photographed it on my phone. I took a sample in a small zip-lock bag, sealed it, labelled it with the date.

The deposit itself faded over six days, as though the paintwork was slowly absorbing it. Mixed silicate and trace magnesium — consistent with mineral soil, the report said. Nothing unusual. Then I scrolled down and read the last line again: 'trace isotopic ratios outside expected regional range.

' They hadn't explained that part. Why hadn't they explained that? I sat with Jodie for exactly twenty-two minutes before I told her — I'd timed myself, kept delaying. She's a nurse; she doesn't dismiss things easily. Then she asked, very quietly, whether I might have fallen asleep at the wheel.

I didn't argue. I opened the photos on my phone and slid it across to her. She turned it slowly, zoomed in twice. Then she set it face-down on the table. Not dismissing it. Closing it. Her hands stayed flat on top. Pete said he saw nothing that night. But last month I found a voicemail he'd left at 9:40 PM — his voice, his number — saying something had killed his radio dead near the dyke bridge.

He has no memory of making that call. In early September 2022 I was driving Fenwick Drove again, same direction, nearly the same time. Near the bridge my phone battery dropped from sixty-one percent to four percent in under a minute, then stopped falling. I watched it happen. But in my headlights, the stubble field to the east held a wide geometric flattening — a pressed circle in the cut stalks that hadn't been there on my morning commute.

I stopped the car. I looked at it maybe thirty seconds, then raised my phone to the window to photograph it. As the shutter fired, my phone screen went black. Fully charged. When it came back, the photo was there — but the timestamp read 3:00 AM. He looked at the photograph for maybe four seconds.

Then he said he'd never seen that pattern before — not in twenty years. He corrected himself almost immediately. Deer pressure, he said. Just deer pressure. His eyes didn't come back to the phone. I drove out of that depot yard and only then noticed my logbook was open on the passenger seat — to October 2019.

I hadn't touched that page in three years. I don't know how it got there. I still hold my pilot's licence. I still log aircraft movements the way I always have. But driving Fenwick Drove now, five nights a week, I notice I am already slowing before Briar Dyke — before I've made any decision to slow.

The real scar is this: I don't make firm promises anymore about what time I'll be home. My partner accepts that now without comment. I've never fully explained it to her. I probably never will. I keep the zip-lock bag in the kitchen drawer. What I can't answer is this: why is there less dust in it now than there was six months ago, when nobody has opened it, and the seal is still intact.

Last spring I found an old voicemail on my phone — left the night of October 2019, at 10:58 PM, from my own number. Sixteen seconds of that hum. Nothing else. I'd never made that call. I've listened to it forty times. Whatever was there — they didn't seem angry. That shadow in the amber light seemed occupied with something else entirely.

Clinical, almost. But some nights I wake certain I've heard that hum again, and I'm never sure if it's memory or something closer. I've never looked at a wide Lincolnshire sky the same way since. The change is specific: I count horizons now — north field, east field, south. Every drive.

Every night. I've done that, without missing once, for two thousand, one hundred and forty-two nights. Three weeks ago someone left a comment under a forum post I'd never written, using my name, describing Fenwick Drove, getting the date exactly right. When I clicked the profile it had been deleted.

Has anyone else had that? Some nights I slow down at Briar Dyke bridge without meaning to. My foot just lifts off the accelerator. I scan the eastern field. Nothing there. But I look. Every time, I still look.