1234 Souls Lane (Rewritten)

Chapter Three- The Nightmare

Chapter Three- The Nightmare

Three days later and Jenny was fully moved in and settling into her new home. Her home. She liked the thought of that. Something to call her own, something no one could take from her. Her mother and father had passed last year in a car wreck with a drunk driver. She was an only child, it was just her, just the way it had been for the past three years. Her parents families lived somewhere in Europe, they moved around quite often. Maybe they were making it their life's goal to see as many countries as they possibly could before they passed? Who knows, maybe they were just crossing things off of their bucket list.

Her ex-fiancé had broken off their engagement last year to be with another woman. No just any woman, no, it had to be her one and only friend. Call if cliché, call it what you will — it was the reason the currently didn't want any girlfriends or a relationship. But Jenny didn't let that deter her from living the way she wanted to live, and right now, she was living exactly how she wanted to.

Alone.

It was a quarter till nine o'clock, Jenny was worn out from cleaning the old massive house and organizing her things as she wanted them as well as the furniture that was provided with the home. She took down the creepy picture in the living room the very first day she moved in. She couldn't bare to look at it a second longer. Something about that cloaked figure set her nerves on edge.

She climbed into bed completely exhausted and as soon as her head hit the pillow she was fast asleep.

***

Jenny was dreaming of a very ancient looking forest. It was midnight and the moon was perfectly crescent, the stars were illuminating the sky with their beautiful light. Her eyes, however, were glued to the fog that crept around slithered around the tree trunks and seeping into the soil — almost like it was being sucked into an invisible vacuum in the earth. Jenny's heart lurched into her throat, her stomach knotted and her nerves seared with the burn of adrenalin, a cold sweat broke out over her body and as she inched forward to a very scary looking tree that seemed to go on forever into the sky with branches that resembled more like a thousand arms and hands reaching out to snatch her up in its unforgiving embrace.

Fog billowed behind her as she moved another inch towards the tree. Mist clung to her skin, her damp hair was beginning to stick to the side of her neck and loose locks began to mold to her cheeks and forehead. Dampness was thick in the air it was almost suffocating. The smell of fresh dirt tickled her nose like someone had been digging recently; and she didn't want to know what they were digging for or trying to cover up. The smell of mold, mildew, and moss made her crinkle her nose up in distaste, but the closer she moved toward the tree, the more the smell began to transform into something else.

Her skin prickled in clear warning the closer she got, and with each step, fear seemed to sweep an icy hand down her spine causing her to shiver and wrap her arms around her toros. She was hesitant for a long moment, but in the end, she pursed her curiosity and ignored the clear warning bells that were sounding an alarm inside her head. "Run! Run, you fool!" Yet, she there she was... standing in front of the almost-black-looking tree.

The stench, oh god, the stench was so strong it made her stomach roil and churn. She tried to stave off the urge to empty the contents of her stomach, but once the scent of decay thickened more — seemingly like a hand curling around her throat — she gagged and sputtered coughs trying to suck in clean air, all she ended up doing was breathing in more stench of rotting flesh and what tasted like rusty metal. That's when she almost lost it, the need to regurgitate was making her jaws burn and her mouth to water.

Once she found some semblance of settling her stomach, she slid her gaze to the smooth, dark bark on the tree trunk and found an odd looking symbol that seemed to be carved into the tree and then sealed in blood. The same symbol on the front door of her "new" home. What could that mean? She thought.