THE POWER OF THREE (4 page)

             
"We're happy you've moved here and I hope you enjoy your house," she said.

             
Linda nodded and took the keys. She waited for the realtor to leave. She wanted to go into the house alone this time. She had bought the house through the internet without ever stepping foot in it. It raised eyebrows in a town this size, but her business was strictly her business and this is how she meant to do it. Once in town she had taken a tour with the realtor and that was enough. She signed the papers and now had possession.

             
"Well..." the real estate lady stepped back a step.

             
"Thank you for all your help," Linda
said,
her back to the unopened front door.

             
Now the realtor smiled, said, "Okay then," and turned for her car at the curb.

             
Linda waited until she saw the car pull into the street and that it had disappeared down the tree-lined avenue. Only then did she face the door and insert the key to unlock it.

             
She had been here before. The realtor hadn't recognized her, not her face or her name. The tragedy that happened in this house was in the dim past when Linda was just six years old. Now she was sixty and she had finally come back to confront what evil lay in the rooms beyond the door.

             
The gloom reached out as she stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She stood a moment feeling how the house moved, as if a shiver had gone through the floorboards and walls and ceilings. "Yes, I'm back for you," she said out loud.

             
When she was six, she had a room up the stairs on the second floor. Her parents occupied a room down the hall. She had known for as long as she understood her surroundings, which might have been around age
three, that
the house was alive.
Monstrously alive.
She had no words to explain it to her parents and wondered at how they didn't know. Only by age six did she even realize she was the only one keyed into the notion that the house was evil.
That the house was sentient.
That it had thoughts and perpetuated crimes.

             
She had been the one to discover her parents' bodies. Harper and Livy Broderick lay in their bed bludgeoned to death, their faces destroyed, their skulls shattered,
their
brains lying on the pillows like gray clots of wormy matter. Linda had run screaming from the house and had
never been back.

             
Until now.

             
It had taken her fifty-four years. After being orphaned and taken by her mother's sister across country, she grew up with her aunt in Palo Alto, California. After an unremarkable childhood, she had gone on to the university at Berkeley where she secured a bright future for herself in psychology. She taught freshmen their first psychology courses, snagged tenure, and lived a quiet life. She had never married, owned no pets, and claimed few friends beyond faculty members. It was her inner life that teemed with energy and curiosity that kept her anchored in the world.

             
Since childhood she had been psychic. No one knew; no one even suspected. She had been born with the gift. That was why she had known about the house and how it breathed, how it possessed malevolent desires. After her parents were murdered--
by the house--
though no one believed it--the gift grew exponentially. She began reading her Aunt Helen's every thought and thankfully they were kind and forgiving thoughts so that Linda felt safe in her care. In awe of this new experience, playing with it as she might a new toy, she began to reach out with her mind and read her teachers' thoughts, the thoughts and intents of her classmates, even the thoughts of strangers. She could turn the gift on and off or she thought she might have gone mad with all the streams of thoughts like a million light ribbons streaming toward her night and day from every living creature she encountered. She would slam the door of her mind. That's how she envisioned it--a slamming of a door. When she did that, people were as opaque as dirty dishwater. When she opened the door again, she could read them.

             
This gift gave her a leg up on the students in grade school, high school, and college. She graduated early and entered Berkeley by the time she was sixteen.

             
She didn't really use the gift to cheat her way through life or to do anyone harm. She knew instinctively that if she were to use it in self-interest or against another, it might vanish. She wasn't sure of that because she'd never tried it, but in some way she just knew.
Not that she wasn't tempted.
She once wrote down a list of all the ways she could use her ability to make money, interfere in people's lives, and get
herself
promoted to powerful positions. In the end, she couldn't do it.

             
The Idea came to her in her twenties once she had gotten her degrees and was hired on at Berkeley as an assistant psychology professor. The Idea gave her life meaning. It drove her. She had been haunted by the loss of her parents all of her life, and although she knew it had to do with the house they lived in, she didn't know what she might do about it. Then the Idea came to her that she might expand her supernatural ability beyond reading minds in a psychic way to reading the minds of that which was not human.

             
She wanted to read animals. Inanimate objects. She wanted to read the world and what comprised it--the earth itself. If she could train herself to do that, she could certainly read a house.
The house that sat at 2242
Maycroft
in Hayden, Alabama.

             
Questions ate at her for years, for decades. Why had the house killed her parents? Why had it not killed her, too? How could a house be as alive as people who walked the earth? How was it a repository of such hate that it could reach out and take the lives of the innocent?

             
Being a psychology professor, Linda realized her gift and her goal to read other than human
beings,
must remain a secret. She could not tell anyone, ever. Psychology was a science and science did not allow for mumbo-jumbo, for ghosts and shadows that walked, for houses that could rise up and strike down a married couple sleeping peacefully in their bed.

             
The first inkling Linda had that she
might
be able to read an animal was when she was on
a day trip to the zoo. It was a brilliant spring day and she hadn't anything else to do on that Saturday. She meandered down shaded lanes past giraffes and elephants, through the snake house, past the bird sanctuary. The air was redolent with the scent of flowers. She thought about getting something to eat at one of the little food carts scattered throughout the zoo--maybe a hot dog...and cotton candy. She came upon the gorilla exhibit where a Silverback lived with his harem of females. He was outside of the man-made caverns this day, reclining like a majestic god on a slick, brown slab of rock. Linda stood at the guard rail fence, pondering his great wide chest, his beautiful human-like hands, and the fine intelligent brow. She wondered what he was thinking...

             
I hate you like all the rest. You're not so different, woman.

             
She came upright, her spine stiffening, and frowned.
Had she really heard him say that to her?
She inclined her head, staring hard at the gorilla's face.
Are you talking to me?

             
Who else? How many of you do you think can read my
mind
?You're
the first. Fancy that.

             
What she had hoped one day to be able to do had happened without her even trying. She was so stunned her mind emptied and she was wordless.

             
What do you want to know, what's your game, woman?
he
asked.

             
Linda leaned a bit over the fence and projected her thoughts to him.
Are all of you as intelligent and self-aware as you?

             
The gorilla swiped with one large hand at flies trying to light on his face. He turned his head from her and stared at a wall of the near cave as if bored and woefully unimpressed with the gaggle of humans who watched him. She thought he wasn't going to answer, or he hadn't heard her, or he refused to speak with her this way. She waited, leaning back now, glancing around at the few others who had gathered near the fence to stare at the Silverback.

             
He turned his head again and stared straight at her.
Of course we
are,
what a stupid question! You think I'm an advanced gorilla, that only I have a brain and can think for myself? You think men are the only creatures on this planet
who
has a soul, a will, and a life plan? Then you are as deluded as all the others, the silent
ones.
Then
he made a dismissive sound that echoed in her head.

             
Linda spent hours at the gorilla exhibit that day. She and the Silverback had long, philosophical, stunning conversations about the nature of the world and the place animals had in it.

             
At home again she fell exhausted in the easy chair in her living room, the afternoon light leaking through the drawn drapes to fall across her legs. She was too tired to even turn on a lamp, much less go to the kitchen to rumble through the cupboards to find something for dinner. She had never searched out the food carts at the zoo. She hadn't eaten since breakfast. There were so many more important considerations.
Such as...

             
...her place in the world as a human being had been usurped. She had often thought, looking at a dog or cat or squirrel or cow that those creatures must dream and have yearnings.
That they must feel some of the same emotions as humans.
That they couldn't be as dull and empty as outer space.

             
Now she had proof. She was not mad, that never entered her mind for a moment. The gorilla really had talked with her--for hours. She didn't have voices loose and floating through her mind like a schizophrenic. She was an educated woman who had read the thoughts of others since childhood. She knew a sentient being when she met one.

             
After that, she practiced speaking with other animals. She found a lizard sunning itself on her porch one day and crept up on it, careful not to frighten it away. She projected her thoughts
as hard as she could--
Are you there? Do you hear me?
--then waited.

             
Two minutes passed.
Three.
Just as she was about to abandon the exercise, the lizard slid out its neck until it looked to be holding a coin inside, the skin there changing to muddy red, and it said to her,
What do you care? You're not the cat.

             
Linda laughed. You're not the cat, it had said! So the animal kingdom also possessed wit and humor.

             
She spent just a few minutes communicating with the lizard before it sped off, climbing quickly down the porch post to the ground and disappearing without a word.

             
For the next year she practiced all the time. She visited the zoo often, communing with birds, animals, and reptiles. Some species were brighter and smarter than others. Some refused to engage, grunting at her in disdain. Others laughed at her while nearby zoo patrons looked on, hearing nothing but squeals and growls and huffing.

             
One day a student happened by Linda's house in Palo Alto, walking a large spotted mixed breed dog on a leash. Linda was in the yard planting gladiola bulbs.

             
"Hey,
Ms
Broderick!"

             
Linda swiveled from where she was hunched over the gladiola bed and put a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. "Hello,
Justina
."

             
The student strolled up the sidewalk, the dog at her side. "I've been working on that essay you gave us to do. The research I'm finding on it is amazing."

             
Linda put down the trowel and bag of bulbs. She rose, dusting off her gloves before removing them. Suddenly a thought slammed into her brain.
I hate this bitch and I'm going to EAT her first chance I get!

             
Linda's head came up, her eyes widening. She looked down at the dog. "What kind of dog is that?"

             
"Oh,"
Justina
reached down to pet the dog's head. "He's just a Heinz 57, all mixed up, you know. I found him sniffing around my back door, hungry and lost, so I adopted him. I named him Spoof." The girl grinned. She was not Linda's brightest student, but it hadn't seemed there was anything about her that would make a dog
hate
her so much. Maybe she should get into her head...