The Light That Guides You Home

Chapter 1

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 sister 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.