He’d seen her several times a day ever since. She was everywhere, all over the house, and he tried ignoring her, tried talking to her, tried yelling at her, tried praying. He tried everything he could think of to get rid of her, but she would not go away.

He was getting desperate, and he considered calling a priest or an exorcist or someone from a tabloid TV show. He had to do something.

She appeared that night in his dream.

It was a kinder, gentler ghost in his dream. There was not that overwhelming sense of wrongness that he’d experienced in the presence of the figure in life. Instead, the ghost was the same as the real Carole—only dead. She was standing in a field, next to a haystack, the kind of haystack that wasn’t used anymore, and she was pointing toward a far-off light in the darkness.

“Return,” she whispered.

He knew what she was telling him to do, and goose bumps popped up on both his arms. She was telling him to return home, to the house in Oakdale, the house of his birth. He did not know how he knew this, but he did, and even as he accepted its dream logic he was fighting against the request.

“No,” he told the ghost.

“Return,” she repeated.

Panic welled within him. Not because of Carole’s ghost but at the prospect of returning to the house in Oakdale.

“Return.”

Norton awoke, breathing hard, drenched with sweat. He sat up in bed, reached for the cup of water he always kept on the nightstand and drank it all. He hadn’t thought about the house in Oakdale for… hell, decades. He hadn’t consciously avoided thinking about it—at least he didn’t think he had—but he realized now that that was probably exactly what had happened.

He had not been back to Oakdale since moving forty years ago.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. If he’d been so grounded and logical and rational, if he hadn’t believed in ghosts, why had he never gone back?

Why had he been afraid to go back?

Those were not questions he could answer.

He got out of bed, walked over to the window.

Carole was there.

She was not in his dream now. She was outside, on the grass, next to the tree, her ghost skin absorbing rather than reflecting moonlight.

“Return,” she whispered, her words echoing in his head far louder than they had any right to do. “Return.”

Frightened, he shivered, turned away.