Laura stared at the blank document on her laptop screen and blinked. The cursor blinked in return, but to her dismay, no words magically appeared on the page. This was always how it started. She'd spend days staring at the screen, typing a few sentences here and there and then deleting them, sure she'd used up every drop of creativity and that there was nothing left in her. No more stories, no more words, and no way she could possibly write another novel. Stop it, she told herself, you do this every single time and once the words start to flow, everything works out fine. It's the getting them started part that is so hard.

Laura Davis had written 6 New York Times bestsellers and was under contract with her publisher for two more. She needed to get a proposal to her agent but didn't even know what the next book was going to be about. What only her agent and a couple of close friends knew, was that the ideas for her stories of horror, hauntings, and the supernatural usually came to her in her sleep. Her fans all knew the story of her past, of course. Once her first novel hit the bestseller list someone had made the connection. She was the sole survivor of a mass murder that had taken place in Denver in 1998. Her twin sister Lisa and both of their parents had been stabbed to death in the middle of the night. A 12 year old Laura had been found the following morning, covered in her sisters' blood and hiding under the bed. She had spent countless hours in therapy as a young girl trying to forget those events, and for the most part she had. Every so often though, the nightmares would start up again. As much as she dreaded them, they had provided her with the ideas for her books. They never involved the actual events of the night she had lost her family, but the fears you would expect a child to experience in the wake of those events. Monsters, murderers, and every sort of horror imaginable would come forth from her subconscious every so often, especially in the fall, as the anniversary of the murders approached and her family was on her mind. And when they got too bad, there were always the sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed. If she took them too often her dreams would only get wilder, but for a night or two, they helped her rest. If only she could find a way to bring on the nightmares when she needed an idea, then stop them once she got what she needed. Wishful thinking. If she could figure out a way to control dreams to that extent, she wouldn't have to write to make a living.

Deciding that wishing wasn't going to make the words come, she headed into the kitchen to find something that could pass for dinner. She'd never been much of a cook. She missed her mom's cooking too much, she always told herself. No way to compete with that, so why bother. She found a frozen chicken and pasta entree in the freezer, popped it into the microwave, and poured herself a glass of wine while waiting for it too cook. Once the microwave beeped, she took her meal and her wine back into the den to stare at the screen some more. While she ate, she tried to remember the things that had happened to her and her sisters in her childhood home before she had gone to live with her Aunt Lucinda. Everything about that time was hazy, and she tried not to think about it too often. Once the police had finished their investigation, She had moved into her Aunt Lucinda's apartment in the city. Laura still owned the old home, and had thought about moving back there from time to time, but decided that it wasn't a good idea to stay in the house. She couldn't explain why, but she always felt that she wasn't alone there, and so many bad things had happened there. Deep down she knew that she really needed to sell the place, but couldn't bring herself to give up the only remaining link she had to her family. She'd just keep renting it out for now. She could only barely remember the house anymore, or the yard. She could see images of the bedroom she shared with her twin sister, but most of the rest of the place was a blur. Probably better that way. She took her now-empty microwave container to the kitchen to throw it away, refilled her wine glass, and returned to her desk chair. After another 15 minutes of staring at the screen didn't cause any words to appear or any new ideas to pop into her mind, she crossed her arms on the edge of her desk and laid her head down on them, trying to let her mind wander into the places where her nightmares came from, and her stories lived.

Within minutes she had dozed off on the desk. She normally had to dwell on the past for days to trigger a nightmare, but not this time. In the hazy non-reality of her dream she found herself at the end of a long hallway. The ceiling was high, like it would appear to a child, not a full grown adult. She looked toward the end of the hallway to the door that stood ajar and knew that no matter what happened, she did not want to enter that room. It was her room, hers and Lisa's, and terrible things had happened there. She'd seen things so terrible that her mind had completely blocked them out, and she was terrified at the thought of remembering. Her heart started to pound even before her foot took the first step down the hall. She was powerless to stop. She tried to call out for help, but no more than a muffled sob came from her lips. Her feet continued to move of their own accord, taking her slowly down the hallway, one heavy footstep at a time. A loud knocking that she at first took to be her heartbeat came from upstairs. Slow and rhythmic, her feet started to move in time to the beat, bringing her ever closer to the room where her sister had died. She reached the doorway, but it did not stop the dream-her. She continued walking and passed right through it into the center of the room. She wanted to close her eyes and not see, but the dream girl, the girl she had been, could not. The knocking stopped abruptly and so did Laura. She was now able to move her body according to her own will and her first thought was to run back down the hall, out of this house, and out into the night. She turned back towards the door and stopped breathing. Her twin, Lisa, stood between her and the door. Not the beautiful, always smiling girl she remembered but a somber Lisa, her long blond hair tangled and matted, her face streaked with dirt. The only clean spots on her face were the tear tracks down both cheeks. She wore a pale blue nightgown. They had both had one, just alike. Pale blue with lace around the neck and little butterflies all over. She had thought they were so pretty and delicate when their mother had brought them home, but not now. She tried not to look, but she could see that Lisa's nightgown was shredded, as though it had been sliced repeatedly with a knife, and almost completely soaked in blood. She found herself frozen once again as Lisa took a step closer, and then another, and stood only inches from Laura. Lisa leaned forward and whispered into Laura's ear. "I know what happened. It's time you did too."

With a start Laura jerked awake, knocking both the keyboard the wine glass off the desk and onto the carpeted floor. The red wine seeping into the cream colored carpet looked so much like the blood stains on Lisa's nightgown that she screamed in terror. She quickly realized what she was seeing and where she was, but her heart was still pounding and she was shaking so badly she had to hold onto the desk to steady herself for a moment before she could reach down to pick up the glass. "Be careful what you wish for, isn't that the expression?", she thought to herself. She'd wanted a nightmare, but not one like this. She'd never seen Lisa in her dreams before, or any of her dead family for that matter. That made this dream far worse than the monsters under her bed or the mad men chasing her through the woods, or any of her dreams' normal occupants. She took several deep breaths trying to calm herself, and then headed to her bedroom. The stain would have to wait. She walked into the master bathroom and poured a glass of water with shaking hands, and then took the prescription bottle down from the medicine cabinet. She'd take the sleeping pills tonight. She needed an idea for her next book, but she had no intention of writing about something that hit so close to home. All she wanted was to close her eyes and forget what she had just seen. She swallowed the little white tablets and got undressed, letting her pants and sweater lay on the floor where they fell, and then walked into the bedroom and climbed into bed without even bothering to put on her pajamas.

Showered and dressed, and with a dreamless night behind her, Laura was feeling herself again as she drove into St. Paul. She was meeting Toni Cox, her agent, for breakfast this morning. Still not completely sure what she would tell the other woman when asked about the new book, she was confident that something would come to her on long drive into the city. Just enough of an idea to hold Toni off until she could come up with something better, that was all she needed.

Thirty minutes later as Laura walked into the cafe, she saw a petite brunette in a booth next to a window waving her over. "I've ordered us coffee.", Toni said as she approached the table.

"Wonderful," said Laura. "I didn't take time to make any at home this morning."

"Oh, no. The only time you don't have at least 2 cups of coffee before leaving the house is when you've overslept after taking those sleeping pills. You haven't been using them again, have you?"

While Toni knew about the pills, she didn't realize the severity of the nightmares they were meant to stave off.

"Just last night.", Laura replied. "I haven't taken any in months, but I was having a little trouble getting to sleep after spending all day working on the new book. Couldn't wind down, you know?"

"So, I hope that means we have a story for the new book?", asked Toni.

Laura mentally kicked herself for bringing the book up so soon. A nice mushroom and cheese omelet first might have given her time to think. "Well, I have been mulling over a few things.", she finally answered.

"Which usually means you have no idea.", said Toni.

"I do have ideas, it's just trying to decide which one will actually fill a book.", Laura insisted. "I'm pretty sure this one is going to be a ghost story."

"Great," said Toni. "You haven't' done one of those for a while and the fans love them. Your ghost stories have always been your best received books. So, tell me about this one. Are we going with the Victorian style again?"

"No, I think this one will be more modern.", Laura spoke without really thinking about what she was saying. "A woman is being haunted in her dreams, and then in her real life by a ghost who wants her to do something. I haven't figured out what yet, though." Now where did that come from, she thought, but didn't say.

"Well, I'm glad you have a direction in mind. I admit that I was starting to getting a little worried. You usually have the next idea before you even finish the current project. I'll tell you what, write up a proposal this afternoon and send it over. I'll still be able to get it to the publisher this week."

"Ok, I have some errands to run after breakfast, but I'll get something to you this afternoon when I get back home. Now, can we order some food? I'm starving!"

Even after stopping to pick up a few groceries and rent a carpet steamer, Laura was still home by eleven AM. Leave it to Toni to suggest breakfast at 7 in the morning. Who really got up that early? Anyway, she had plenty of time to try to clean the wine from her carpet and get a proposal typed up. She wasn't sure she liked the idea she'd given Toni, but it was a start. It wasn't like she'd never changed her mind about a book's direction after getting started before. 

Laura put away the groceries, and then filled the steamer's tank with hot water and the cleaning solution she'd purchased. She scooted the desk a little to make room for the steamer and got to work. The solution sprayed down into the carpet and as she passed back over the stain, the steamer sucked up hot water, cleaning solution, dirt and red wine as a muddy red-brown liquid. Gross, she thought. This really does look like blood. She shivered slightly remembering how the stain had looked like blood seeping into the carpet when she had spilled it the night before. "Enough of that!", she said aloud, shaking her head as if to shake off the memory. She finished steaming the area and pushed the desk back into place, careful not to scoot it onto the wet area.

She took the steamer back into the kitchen to empty the water reservoir into the sink. As she was pouring the foul-looking liquid out she thought she heard a thud coming from the den. "Great.", she mumbled. "What did I knock over scooting that desk around?" She took the few steps across the kitchen to the den's open entryway. The wineglass was on the floor, right where it had fallen last night. She stared at it for a minute, sure that she'd put into the sink last night. She could remember putting it into the sink, couldn't she? Well, thankfully it was empty so at least she wouldn't have to re-clean the same spot. She must have been so shaken by her nightmare that she'd just left it on the desk and it had rolled off. She scooped it up and headed back to the kitchen.

With the steamer cleaned and reassembled, and the wineglass washed and put back into the cabinet, there was nothing else to delay her from writing the promised book proposal except for a lack of coffee. She never wrote without coffee or wine on the desk beside her, and after last night, she didn't think she'd be in the mood for wine for a while. She brewed a fresh pot of Indonesian java, poured herself a mug full and inhaled the rich, nutty aroma. Too bad it never tasted the way it smelled. Coffee in hand she headed once more to her desk to try to write.

With at least a vague idea in her head, the proposal took only a few minutes to type up and she emailed it to Toni with a feeling of satisfaction. Now she felt like she was actually getting somewhere. And who was to say that it wouldn't work. She didn't care to relive her own past, but the idea of a woman haunted by her past was a common enough theme in literature. She just had to find a way to make her protagonist's problems unique. Opening up a blank document once again, she started to type.

Two hours and 3,000 words later, she had the beginning of a book. It would be about a woman who had witnessed a murder as a child, but had no memory of it until the victim started coming to her in her dreams. Her heroine would investigate the cold case, and ultimately discover the killer using her ingenuity combined with her suppressed memories. This could be good, Laura thought. Sure, people would assume she was alluding to her own childhood tragedy, so she'd have to make sure there were very few similarities. That shouldn't be hard since she really didn't remember anything about the night her family was killed.

She got up to take a break and stepped to the end of her desk to see if the carpet was dry yet. The stain, which had faded almost completely after steaming it, was back. It didn't look like she had done anything to clean it. That wasn't supposed to happen, was it? Maybe she didn't follow the instructions when she steamed it and the wine left behind was coming up to the surface. That made sense, she guessed. She went into the kitchen and turned on the water to let it get as hot as it could, and pulled out the instructional booklet to see if she'd added enough cleaning solution the first time. She skimmed through the booklet, and once assured that she had done everything correctly, added cleaning fluid to the reservoir and took the steamer back into her den. Setting the steamer down with a thud, she stopped and listened. She thought she had heard a second thud coming from somewhere down the hall. Hearing nothing more, she bent to plug in the steamer. The sound came again as she rose. She backed out of the room slowly, and stopped when she reached the kitchen, listening and looking around for any sign of an intruder. She couldn't hear anything, but before checking the rest of the house she took a large knife from the butcher block on the counter. There was no where to hide in the kitchen, but she checked in the utility room just to be sure, even though the noise had come from the other end of the house. Before moving on, she checked the back door to be sure it was locked. It was. She checked the living room next, and checked the lock on the front door. That one was locked too. She made sure no one was hiding in the coat closet. Then she went quietly down the hall past the den, checking each room in turn. The small powder room was empty. That left the three bedrooms. She entered the larger guest room first and saw no sign of anything having been disturbed. She got down on the floor to peek under the bed, and checked the closet. Nothing. Starting to feel ridiculous, she held her knife in front of her and entered the second guestroom. Following the same procedure, she checked under the bed and in the closet, but found nothing out of place. She moved quietly back out into the hall and then took the final two steps to her own bedroom.

Laura shivered as she walked into the master bedroom, partly from anticipation, but mostly due to the drop in temperature as she entered the room. She must have left the window open, she thought, noting the curtains swaying slightly. Was that how someone had gained entrance? If someone had gained entrance, that was. She walked to the window and peered outside before lowering it the last inch or two. No obvious footprints on the ground under the window, so that was good. She looked around the familiar room for anything out of place, anything that might indicate someone had been in here, but saw nothing amiss. She entered the master bathroom and found nothing there either. Feeling a wave of relief at being alone in the house, she lower the knife and headed back to the hall, stopping to peek inside the closet as she walked by. She barely managed to hold back the scream that tried to escape her throat as she opened the door and found herself staring into the icy blue eyes of her sister. Her dead twin. Lisa stood in the very center of the small closet, in the same ragged, bloodstained nightgown that she had been wearing in Laura's dream. Laura squeezed her eyes closed, willing the apparition to disappear, and when she opened them, it was gone. She stood still for several seconds trying to catch her breath and slow her beating heart before she could find the courage to step into the closet and verify that nothing was there. No ghost, no intruder, no prankster, nothing but her clothes and some spare blankets on a high shelf around the top of the closet. I'm hallucinating, she thought to herself. She closed the closet door and fought to resist the urge to run from the room, from the house itself. There was nothing to run from, she reminded herself. It was just an illusion. She was just remembering her dream, after being spooked by some noise that she may have imagined as well.

She returned to the kitchen. The chunky oak furniture and cabinetry, along with the bright yellow walls and the sunflower wallpaper on the wall behind the table had a cheerful, homey feel and she felt her heart rate begin to slow back to its normal pace. She really needed to write something upbeat for a change. All of this dwelling on nightmares had her seeing them in the daytime! She decided some lunch would make her feel better, so a can of condensed chicken noodle soup, along with a can of water, were dumped into a sauce pan on the stove-top to heat. While she waited for her soup to get hot, she found her mind wandering back to her childhood. They'd been a happy family before moving to Denver. Her Dad had been promoted, and with the promotion came the move. She'd spent her earliest years in a cramped apartment, so both of the girls had been excited about the new house and new school. They'd still shared a bedroom, but it was so much larger, and they each had their own bed. She'd loved it when they first moved in. Funny, her memories of the house seemed to stop after the first month or two. They'd lived in the house for nearly a year before, well, before that night. She couldn't bring herself to refer to it as anything more than "that night". She remembered playing hide and seek with her sister in the house and out in the yard. There was a big yard with tall trees, a shed, a detached garage, plenty of places to hide. She could remember the warm sun and running barefoot in the grass that summer before school started. They barely spent any time indoors during the summer, but that fall, well, Colorado got cold in the winter. They'd had to remain indoors, and mom didn't like them running through the house. They weren't allowed to play in the basement, but sometimes they would sneak downstairs with flashlights and sneak around, even though there were perfectly good electric lights on one side. The basement was unfinished, and the side with the washer and dryer was well lit but the other side was always dark. Dad would always complain about the bulbs burning as soon as he put them in the lights over there. There were shelves full of Christmas decorations, out of season clothes, spare rolls of paper towels and toilet paper. There was something else about that side of the basement, something she could almost remember but it was more of a feeling than an actual memory. A cold, uneasy feeling, but before the thought could fully materialize, her daydreams were interrupted by the sound of the soup boiling over on the stove.

After cleaning up the soup and eating what was left in the pan, Laura had actually managed to spend the next several hours writing. Since she had promised a book about a woman haunted by her past, she found it easy enough to spend the next couple of hours describing the woman's life, her work, her home, her family life, and sprinkle in a few references to a past tragedy that the reader knew would come back to haunt her sometime within the next few chapters. When the ideas stopped flowing freely, she sat up straight, rubbing her neck and stretching her back, both of which were aching after sitting hunched over the keyboard for so long with no break. She decided to make a run into town to pick up Chinese takeout for dinner. A change of scenery might get her creative juices flowing again, and she certainly needed to get up and move around for a while.

Laura's modest ranch style house was located in a small suburb of St. Paul. The drive into the business district of town was only a few miles and the drive took her less than 10 minutes. She found a parking spot in the shopping center parking lot right in front of China One, went inside, and placed an order for crab rangoon and Kung Pao chicken. Just as she sat down at a table to wait for her order, she noticed a familiar face enter the restaurant and walk up to the counter. Ben Tyler was the realtor who had helped her find her house when she first moved into the area. He also handled the details of the rental of the house in Denver for her, so all Laura had to do was collect the monthly check and pay the realtor fees. Ben didn't actually deal with the renters himself, since the property was so far away, but he made contact with someone in a local office near Denver to handle that for her. His office was in the same shopping center as the Chinese restaurant, and it wasn't uncommon to find him here after work. Besides being Laura's realtor, Ben was also one of her best friends. As one of the first people she'd spent any time with when she arrived in town, he'd become her tour guide and occasional lunch companion, and eventually her confidant. Besides Toni and her sometimes therapist, Dr. Mark Evans, Ben was the only person who knew about the terrible nightmares Laura occasionally experienced.

"Hi Laura.", Ben said walking over. "Eating alone tonight?"

"Hi Ben.", she replied. "Just picking up some kung pao for dinner so I don't have to cook. Besides, Chinese food is easy to eat while typing."

"Working on the next book, huh?", he asked, sitting across from her in the booth. "I'm working tonight too. I'm actually glad I ran into you here, saves me a call."

"Oh? What's up?", she asked, already guessing. A business call from Ben usually meant one thing, renters breaking their lease.

"Dave's putting the ad back in the paper.", he said.

"Not again!", she moaned. "Was it another transfer? Doesn't anyone stay in one place for longer than 4 months anymore?"

"Well, this one was unique. Should give you a laugh, at least.", he said with a smile. "The couple who were renting the home insist that it's haunted. Can you believe that one?" He laughed, and seemed to be waiting for her to laugh along with him, but she was too shocked.

"Haunted? Are you kidding? What are they claiming happened? They think they saw ghosts in the house?" she shot the questions at him without giving him a chance to answer.

"Hey, don't worry about it. First of all, we've never had a problem getting renters, so it won't sit open for long. And no, nothing as specific as ghosts floating through the kitchen or anything. They just claim to hear sounds, feel cold spots, that sort of thing. Things that you always find in old houses that can always be explained rationally, given a chance. They haven't given anyone a chance though, just said to keep their security deposit, that they were too scared to stay and they wanted out. It's up to you if you want to demand rent for the term of the lease, or just let it go."

"Let it go.", she said. "If they were really scared I can't blame them for leaving, but I can't imagine there actually being anything to be scared of." Her voice trailed off a bit at the end as she thought about the nearly surfaced memories from earlier that day. She'd been afraid of the basement, hadn't she? But that was ridiculous. There couldn't really be anything to be afraid of. She'd been a little girl, and the basement had been dark. That's all it was. Surely she'd remember if there had been anything more to it than that.

"You know, the housing market is doing great in that area. If you're ready to sell it would be the perfect time." This wasn't the first time Ben had tried to talk her into selling. The rent income was nice, but the upkeep and property taxes ate up a lot of that money.

"I don't know Ben. I keep thinking I might want to go back there someday, that I might, well, maybe I'll actually want to remember what happened at some point, and I think being there, in that house, might be the only way I'm ever going to remember everything."

Ben knew about Laura's past, as did most of her fans, but as a friend, he was one of the few people to also also know how little she actually remembered about what had happened to her family. Most people assumed she just didn't talk about it.

"Don't you think it might be easier knowing that you couldn't go back?", he asked her. "If you sell, then it's out of your hands. The house is gone, the idea of returning to that place would go away too. Besides, maybe the nightmares would stop. It's fall Laura, are they getting bad again? They always seem to be worse this time of year."

"I need them, Ben.", she answered. Part of her was angry that he would bring it up, but another part of her knew that he was probably right. "Those nightmares are what keep kung pao on my table. And you know Dr. Evans thought going back there might be the only way to free those memories I've suppressed for so many years. I'm...I'm just not sure I'm ready to try it yet."

"I'm sure the Kung Pao itself could induce enough nightmares for an entire series if you ate it right before bed.", he joked. "Really Laura, as a friend I'm just concerned for your well-being. I'm sorry if I'm butting in where I have no business to, but sometimes it worries me, the way you cling to that old house. When is the last time you saw Dr. Evans, anyway? I haven't heard you mention him in months. And if you aren't ready now, do you really think you ever will be? It's the past Laura. Let it stay in the past. Sell the house and just let it go."

The teenage boy behind the counter called out Laura's number.

"That's me," she said, rising from her seat.

"Promise me you'll at least think about selling this time? The house is empty, and it would be so easy to put it on the market now instead of looking for new renters."

She hesitated for a moment, then nodded and answered, "I promise I'll think about it. I'll talk to you tomorrow, after I've had some time to consider it, ok?"

"Ok. If you're free, come by my office around noon. We can go to lunch and talk about it."

"All right, I'll see you around noon tomorrow." With that, she walked up to the counter to pick up her dinner, then headed back home.