I see things in my sleep, things I dare not tell to others because of how real they are. My dreams have turned into my nightmares and those nightmares have turned into reality. A dark, cold, demented and twisted version of my reality.
My name is Jake Golding, I am 32 years old and I already have a beautiful wife, Sarah Golding, age 30, who is the love of my life. I also have two wonderful children who I adore who's names are Henry Golding and Jess Golding, ages 12 and 15 respectively. These three people were my world and my life. After all having a family is a wondrous thing and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
We decided to have a fresh start by moving into a new town, new neighbours and a new house. We used to live in Dallas until gun violence increased exponentially and with plenty of robberies and murders going around well it was just too dangerous to live there anymore. So without much doubt we decided to move from America to Australia and have a fresh start in Nairne, Adelaide, SA.
The house itself had a great view of the countryside which inhabited much of these parts, significantly different to what we're used to in America. It was a plain, old two story house out in the countryside with a couple of streets and houses to accompany the space. The house itself needed a coat of paint and a bit of a fix but other than that it was a beautiful sight with a pond in the backyard, the house made of mostly wood and a grand fireplace.
It took a few weeks to do the house up but after that it looked as good as new and we already made friends with the locals and my kids were actually loving school. Me and my wife loved it here and it seemed the kids did too. So by now you're probably wondering what the point to this story is? The point is simple, never think there isn't something sinister lurking underneath the happiness and the sunshine.
After one week had passed since fixing the house my nightmares started. Well to be honest I had a few of them when I was young and again when I lived in Dallas but I was hoping they were gone. My mum claimed that she saw me sleepwalking once and using the tomato sauce to draw all over the walls, almost gave my little sister a heart attack.
I never really saw any pictures or videos or memory of this so I thought it was just parent superstition. That's what I thought until now. My nightmares come to me like any other dream except when it starts its hard to wake up. I feel like I'm trapped in a dark room full of people I can't see staring at me, mocking me and telling me to come closer. I'm just sprawled out across the floor, staying in the only source of light I could find, hearing nothing else except taunts, screams and music playing.
That's when I see a flash of white and a crack in the darkness which I would always look up at to see what caused it. And always the same girl, who looked like Jess, would look up at me and smile. But it wasn't the smile she gave me in reality, it was sick and twisted with her teeth rotting and dripping with blood.
Flies would swarm around me in the room and I would have no choice but to run as fast as I could through the hoard of invisible creatures until I reached Jess, always on my knees. I would look up and see an expressionless blank, bleeding face look down at me and see that demented smile break out across her face.
I guess that's when I wake up and see Sarah stare at me in horror, I look down at myself and feel a slight pain in my right arm and little lines of blood throughout my side of the covers. That's when I looked down at my arm and see cuts all along from the elbow to the hand, covered in dripping, crimson blood.
I hear my wife start crying and start to wonder what the hell just happened.
For the next few days after explaining to my family about the nightmares I've been having, Sarah made me sleep in the basement and see what would happen the following morning. To add to trying to remember what happened and as proof that I'm not insane I start to right entries in my journal about what happened each morning.
Morning 1: I woke up in the basement to find the windows cracked, bottles broken and a couple of pillows ripped to pieces. Henry comes down to the basement and says to me he saw me walk up to the fridge and devour all of the food like a rabid creature.
Morning 2: I woke up to find my bed in ruins, wooden boxes holding mementos and old, thrown away objects from the past thrown all over the basement with the boxes ripped open.
Morning 3: I woke up to see cuts all over my left arm, a tooth chipped and the TV turned on, its grey and fuzzy, illuminating the dimly lit basement. I walk upstairs to find the windows in each room cracked, the bathroom mirror cracked and the bath full of water. Sarah tells me that I walked out of the front door and then went around the house twice before collapsing on the front lawn.
Morning 4: My right ear is bleeding, my right hand, thumb, middle finger and pinky all broken and a long but not deep cut along my chest. Henry comes in and says that I went into his room and started ripping off the heads of all the toys in his room. He isn't happy with me so I apologise and avoid him for the entire morning. I get up and go to the lounge-room, and see Jess huddled up against the sofa crying. She says that I almost strangled her to death.
Morning 5: I remember my dream, I walked through a house almost identical to the one I lived in and saw Jess sitting by the fireplace. She plays with the fire before getting up and opening a flask. I reach out for her yet she simply smiles at me before pouring the contents of the flask all over her body. The liquid looks almost like...oil.
She starts crying before lighting a match on the fire burning in the fireplace and throws it into her mouth. Her entire body ignites and I see her simply standing there, slowly burning and bleeding to death. She tilts her head as the lounge slowly catches fire. I slowly back away from the flames beginning to spread everywhere but find my back against a brick wall. Jess tilts her head some more, black and burning, saying "daddy I'm burning" over and over again like a chorus.
I wake up and run straight upstairs into Jess's bedroom and see Sarah and Henry panicking. Sarah starts calling 911 and Henry crumples onto the floor and starts crying. I push through them to see my 15 year old daughter's right side of the body burned severely, the right side of her face also burned. I hear her scream like the constant screams I here in my dreams, playing on constant replay, the song of insanity.
Morning 6: Jess is in hospital, we were asked to go back home and head back over there in the morning. I wake up and see written in blood all over the walls "I know what you did to me." I look at myself and see more cuts along my stomach area and my chest area along with my left leg. I'm covered in dried up blood and crying out in sharp pain.
I slowly make my way upstairs where Henry says he saw me in the swimming pool, he saw me turn up the thermometer to 60 degrees Celsius, and he says he saw steam rising from the pool. Yet there were no burns on my body, so if I went in there why didn't I burn?
Henry, Sarah and I headed back to the hospital where the doctor in charge of Jess was trembling. He made us walk into her room where I saw the entire left side of her body covered in burns. She was a ruined mess, the quilt covered in red and he eyes slowly looking up at me, her lips turning into a smile before I here a slight chuckle.
Morning 7: Sarah raced down the basement stairs and told me to get up and get some clothes on. She says that something miraculous has happened to Jess at the hospital so I quickly put on some clothes and drive down to the hospital. I see Jess in her room sitting on a chair by the window, smiling at all of us, her body completely healed as if nothing had ever happened.
Sarah tells me at home after we were told we could bring Jess back that she is going to lock me up in the basement for the greater good. She says that each morning she will unlock the door for me to leave but is afraid of me at night now.
Morning 8: I wake up to the screams of my son Henry and my wife beginning to cry above me. I quickly get up and start knocking at the door, begging Sarah to open it which she quickly does so only to see me covered in blood and a knife in my hand. She sees the basement completely ruined, the TV still on that grey, fuzzy screen and windows shattered.
I push past her and drop the knife that I didn't know I had in my possession until Sarah's reaction and race up to Henry's room. I see his bedroom full of claw marks along the walls and my son, naked with his his back red raw with over fifteen deep cuts all over it.
Morning 9: I wake up to find myself on the grass, breathing in the cold morning air and smelling the scent of blood and bone wafting past me. I scramble up on my feet and walk into the house to see all the windows broken and the front porch splintered. I see Sarah backing away from me, she has a black eye and bruises all along her body.
I try to get near her but she screams at me and tells me to get out of the house. I gaze past her as she screams at me and see Jess, naked and bloody. But the most unusual thing besides that was the fact that in the cracked mirror I didn't see her reflection.
After a certain time passes Sarah chains me up to my bed, boarders up the broken Basement windows and chains the basement door as well before locking me up in the basement to sleep.
Morning 10: I open my eyes and see myself in chains still, nothing happened to the basement or to me over the course of the night. I wonder if Sarah's plan had actually worked. I look all over the room until I see Sarah over by the fuzzy TV staring at me with wide open eyes.
I look at her arms and see them all covered in cuts before seeing a hammer in her left hand. She slowly walks over to me, smiling while she does it. "Honey what are you doing?" I asked her.
She simply smiled down at me and replied "I'm going break you sweetheart." I started to panic, wiggling as strongly and as quickly as I could but to no avail.
"Don't worry honey, it will all be over soon" she said to me.
"What the fuck are you doing Sarah? This isn't you, you're in a trance, you're not yourself. Just wake up!" I shouted at her.
She kneeled down beside me and whispered in my ear "Sarah's dead honey, I ate her just like I ate your daughter."
She smiled at me before she pulled out some nails from her pocket. I knew exactly what she was about to do next. She put the first one on my two feet which were chained together and started to scream in pain as she slammed the hammer down making the nail stab straight into my feet.
She then started hammering the nails into my left and right hand before dropping the hammer and slowly unlocking the chains on me. Sarah took the chains off my body before leaving the basement. As she locked the door all I heard was her laugh, her insanely twisted laugh.
That's the end of my journal for there was nothing after that except the next events.
That night I heard loud bangs and crashes coming from upstairs before hearing Sarah screaming and Henry once again crying. I had to do something, whatever these nightmares I've been having, whatever paranormal entity has been unleashed I had to do something.
I started pushing my hands upwards as blood oozed out of the nail wounds and skin peeling slowly off the sides of the nails. After five minutes of what seemed like endless pain I managed to pull my hands free from the nails. With my two free but bloody hands I tore out the nail from my feet and started to crawl slowly up the basement stairs.
As I made my way towards the basement door I saw one of my older journals that I used to write in when I was back in Dallas. With nothing left to do since the door was locked I opened up the journal and flipped to the pages about my older nightmares.
And that's when it all unfolded before my very eyes. I drew pictures of all of my nightmares. I drew pictures of the burning of Jess, the scarring of Henry, the beating of Sarah, the destroyed basement, the burning pool and the ruined house. Everything I had written and dreamed about became reality, it had all unfolded before my very eyes.
I flipped over to the next page as I heard more screams and cries above and looked on in sheer horror. I leaned up against ruined walls and started rocking back and forth as I constantly heard the song "Ring Around the Rosy" play over and over again. I didn't want to know the things that would happen next for what happened next would be the end of what I lived for, what I loved.
So I simply cry myself to sleep and let the end of my nightmares unfold around me as I fade into darkness.