The Nightmare (Home Pt1)

    Abby Green woke in a cold sweat. Her face and chest soaked in the horror of the nightmare still clinging to her. The images etched into her mind, so vivid and dark they shook her down to the core.

    She hadn’t been able to sleep for well over a month without reliving the horror that filled her aching mind. Dream after dream, each one more horrific then the previous, every lurid image cast on the preceding, each haunting her the same.

     A crow, with its black coat and piercing eyes, watching her, calling to her. Each cawing screech nagging as she focused more intently on the bird's flight. Each nodding moment always the same, the bird feasting on the bones of the bloated dead. Picking the decaying flesh from the soft underside of a rotten corpse, a babe, whose body lies floating just below the south side of the old dock. Hung suspended in place by a shoelace twisted around a reaching root that sipped from the lake. The root belonging to a grand old oak from which the crow roosts.

     "A child, but who's child?" She thought to herself, trying hard to recall whether or not her dream had ever revealed the identity of this poor baby. It didn't seem to matter to her either way, as the horror that she has been living, has caused her to wither inside. She struggled to regain the composure that was being sucked from her body. Each day she left a little more of herself inside the horror of her dream. She felt hopeless, powerless to stop her downward spiral.

    “Even the lake seemed dead these days”, she thought to herself. Snugged in the comfort of a blanket, Abby sat perched in an old rocking chair watching the fog roll in from the far end of the inlet. It hung laden in the morning air. Heavy. Dense. Wrapping itself around the dock, the boat house, and shallow end of the lake, where the marsh filtered the cool water of deep into the warm watershed. It settled among the reeds and the cat tails, and marched steadily out morass.

    “Spanish moss” Abby muttered to herself, thinking of how much it reminder her of Spanish moss. The way it hung on every limb, every eve of the boat house, down to the tiniest blade of grass. Across the open knoll above the sandy beach, it hung haunting, ominous and pressing. Early autumn days at the lake were never supposed to be this cool, damp and heavy with fog. The house and it’s surrounding seemed to be increasingly disturbed, weighted in something chilling, something hiding in the shadows just beyond the fields that encircled the house.

    Over the past month she had noticed the fog grew denser, colder, with each passing day, with each passing dream.

Reviews

[Larry Dyson]

excellent start for a book..hope you finish it ..the descriptives are rich and haunting..

[KATHY SUE SILLS]

Great suspense story! a dark haunting story with awesome descriptions! I would love to read more of this!

[Inyourshadow]

Never a god omen to dream of babies as they fortell of a death of a close one. Such a dark and eerie opening to your hopefully to be continued piece. The description of the crow and the tree was wonderful. Looking forward to more, keep it coming

[Stef Outsiders]

Oooo chills... got goosebumps...