THE POWER OF THREE (5 page)

             
"Do you have a dog?" the girl asked.

             
Linda answered no automatically, and put herself on autopilot as she and the girl held a conversation about pets and psychology and the essay she had assigned the class.

             
Inside
Justina's
head Linda could find nothing too desperately ugly or diseased. She was a poor student as far as grades went, but she was earnest and tried hard. She had dreams of teaching the same courses as her professor. (She wouldn't make it.) She liked a young man who was using her for sex. (Weren't they all?) She loved the little dog called Spoof who sat patiently at her feet. (That wanted to kill her.)

             
Linda turned her attention to the dog.
What's up with you? Why do you want to hurt his girl who has saved your life?

             
It didn't take long, merely seconds, to understand the mutt was damaged. The brain in its skull had taken blows, probably from a past master, and it hated all humans, each and every one. It was biding its time until ready to snap and to thrust its long snout forward to clamp down on
Justina's
throat.

             
"
Justina
."

             
The girl stopped talking at the interruption. "Yes?"

             
"Have you taken your dog to the vet yet?"

             
"For shots, yeah.
Why?"

             
"Take it back to the veterinarian and ask for a scan of your dog's brain. They can do that for you, find out if
its
had any...well, damage done to it."

             
"But why would I do that?"

             
Linda took her wallet from out of the back pocket of her jeans. She had needed it when she went to the store for the gladioli. "Here," she whipped out a hundred dollar bill. "It's on me. I insist you take it and have the scan done. I have a feeling something's wrong with...Spoof."

             
"Gee, you don't have to do that,
Ms
Broderick..."

             
"Oh, yes, I do. I've seen dogs like this before, wanderers, stray dogs, dogs that have been abused by former owners. Sometimes they have problems and it would be best to know, wouldn't it? Now take this and go today. Go back to your vet."

             
Justina
looked uncertain, but took the money. "I guess I'll do it, if you insist. Gosh."

             
The dog glared up at her. She wanted to tell it something that would help take away the hatred, but she knew nothing she said to it was going to work. This dog wanted to kill something and if it got the chance, it was
Justina
it would kill--or die trying.

             
As the semester droned on, Linda was happy to see
Justina
in class, alive, well, being her average energetic self. She was stopped by her a week after the dog incident and told how
Justina
had taken the dog to the vet's office. She had the scan done. They had told her the dog had a tumor nearly half the size of the brain and the best thing to do was put it to sleep. She gave in since the vet left her no alternative.

             
Then, in the telling of this,
Justina
burst into tears and gave Linda a look. In her mind she thought,
It's
your fault! He could have died at home with me if he was going to die. You made me take him to the vet. My poor
poor
Spoofy...

             
Linda felt it was better the girl held a grudge against her than to lose her young life on account of a defective animal.

             
Over the years, Linda performed these minor miracles that saved both human and animal. Being thus busy with her teaching, the writing of her papers to be published in psychology periodicals, and marveling at how she could find ways to intervene between Fate and the Dark Void, time flew by on gilded wings. It seemed to Linda that not one New Year's Eve was over before another one found her at a faculty party blowing silly horns and throwing confetti into the air.

             
Still she worked on the third level of her gift. She could read humans when she wanted--though she did not always want to and kept the door of her mind shut against it more and more often. She could read animals, but reading them made her so gloomy over their plight that she had become vegan, gave money to animal shelters and animal causes, and was wracked with guilt over how her own species felt so superior to the rest of God's creatures on the planet. She shied away finally from interacting with the animal world whenever possible.

             
Now she must find a way to communicate with
things
, with objects. Because never far from her mind was the house in Hayden, Alabama.
The house that lived.
That had thoughts and created maelstroms and took lives on a whim just because it could. Some days she fantasized taking a trip to Alabama and sneaking up on the house and setting it on fire. She could burn the bastard to the ground.

             
If she did that, however, she would never know the truth.
The reason behind murder.
The face of the evil that lurked within those walls.
She would never know the monster
who
took her parents and changed her life forever.

             
And she could not return to discover those mysteries until she could perfect her gift--if it
could be perfected any further--to commune with all things, even those not thought of as sentient or having mind.

             
Being not only a teacher, but a student of the sciences, Linda had a scattering of knowledge about the universe and the matter that made it up. Stephen Hawking had once postulated the matter swirling around the edge of black holes disappeared. Other physicists disputed him, claiming that of course matter could not disappear! Nothing could ever completely disappear--go from being real matter to a state of...nothing. Matter might transmute, it might become energy, but it did not, no, it did not
disappear
. For twenty years Hawking stubbornly held onto his theory and even had a mathematical equation that proved it.

             
Yet after mulling the problem over of disappearing matter,
Hawking
himself finally came up with a different theory and a different equation. At a conference of his peers he admitted he had been wrong. He had now solved the problem of disappearing matter. It didn't really disappear! He thought now that it winked out of this universe and appeared in another, for there were parallel universes, they all knew that. It was still matter; it just lived somewhere else. And although it seemed it had disappeared, it hadn't at all. Voila! Problem solved.

             
His peers were amused. Again, they were not going to take him seriously. It was a ridiculous idea and they just weren't going to have anything to do with it.

             
Linda did not know whether Hawking had it right yet or not. What she did know, that Hawking and all the other physicists did not know, was that matter probably was not just inert molecules and atoms. She knew the atoms in tables and chairs, bricks and mortar and...
houses
... was made of the very same stuff as she was, as everyone and everything was made of. At the base level, molecules were just that--molecules and no more. Taken together they formed the aging Linda Broderick, the people on the street, the cars they drove,
the
buildings where they worked. It made up the trees and the sea, the earth itself. Take an atom from a tree and at the very microscopic level of it, that molecule was no different from the one in a single strand of Linda's hair.

             
She couldn't prove to others or write a paper with sure evidence that matter, other than what made up living things, might be alive. Possess mind.
And intent.
Except for the house in Hayden, Alabama.
That was the proof, to her, that things lived, that objects had intelligent force, that houses could harbor hate and then kill because of it.

             
If the house that killed her parents could think, then all things could think. Or were they merely moved by some other intelligence?

             
These puzzling questions kept after her over the years and through all her trials trying to find a way to speak with so-called non-living matter.

             
Her breakthrough came in her fifty-eighth year and it came out of the blue without her forcing it the way it had happened with the gorilla at the zoo.

             
The walls of her house in Palo Alto began to weep.

             
She was sleeping, dreaming of standing naked in her classroom before a group of thirty students. She was mortified and woke herself up feeling startled and ashamed.
Naked?
Her old wrinkled ass standing before God and heaven for all to see? She was so glad it had been a nightmare.

             
She threw off the covers and swinging her legs over the side of the bed, felt for her house shoes with her feet. She slipped them on and was on the way through the dark to the bathroom when she heard the faintest of cries. She halted, frozen in place.

             
Was someone in the house?

             
She listened. When she could hear nothing but the distant whir of the refrigerator in the
kitchen and the soft sound of a breeze brushing the limbs of a climbing
bougainvillaea
against her bedroom window, she started again for the bathroom to relieve her bladder. She had drunk too much water before bed...

             
The cries came again, louder, more insistent.

             
Again she stopped and this time she opened up the channels in her head that could hear
thoughts, that could talk with animals,
and she heard...

             
We are so tired...

             
"Who are you?" She knew this was not a human's thoughts. She wasn't afraid, but definitely disturbed. This was something new and she wasn't sure she was ready for it.

             
Her curiosity drove her on despite her feeling of trepidation. Standing completely still, her urgency to urinate having left her temporally, she asked again, aloud, "Who are you?"

             
We are the walls.

             
Linda now turned in a circle, spinning on her heels, trying to make out the walls of her bedroom that lay covered with darkness and shadows.

             
"Why...why are you crying?"

             
We are old. We have soaked up too many years of despair from the inhabitants of this place. We weep from it.

             
Linda had not been the first tenant of the house she lived in. She tried to remember how old it was, when it had been built. In the 1930s, she thought. It was an old Berkeley, California adobe bungalow in a row of old bungalow style houses in an older neighborhood.

             
It could have housed dozens of families over the years. Did walls soak up
emotions,
did they remember history, the past? Did they
feel
?

             
Now she was getting somewhere, now that the walls were talking to her.

             
She told the walls to wait, (Wait!) she had to make a bathroom run. She finished and hurried back to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, communing with wood and adobe. She learned that all things were sponges. All things, from rings worn on the hand, to walls that held up a house, to grass people trod, were all as absorbent as a ball of cotton. Impressions were made on them, and not just footprints. In a way they interacted with other living things. Because all things were alive!

             
Her idea had been right. Why she had been given this breakthrough after so many years yearning for it, she didn't know. She might be the most gifted psychic in the world. Not that she could share that accolade, for she would be immediately laughed at and shunned, if not locked away. Being a psychologist she knew the limits of psychology--and it did not accept thought transfers between humans and animals, much less humans and inanimate matter.

             
She spent the night consoling the walls of her house. "It's just the way of the world," she advised. "People have trouble, people live in trouble,
trouble
is what life hands us."

             
The walls wept and talked and cried in whispers to break the heart. They were old and saturated with memory. They had even taken
her own
low points in her thought processes and hugged them close to their elements of wood, clay, sand, straw, and water.