THE POWER OF THREE (8 page)

             
Again he sat long moments before answering. "What exactly are we talking about? Do you think you're possessed?"

             
"No, I think a house is possessed."

             
"A house."
He sat back in his chair. "Why would a house be possessed?"

             
"Because it's been baptized with blood.
Do you know any history of this town?"

             
He nodded.
"A little.
I've lived here all my life."

             
"And you're what, forty, forty-five?"

             
"Forty-two."

             
"Then you weren't here when my parents were murdered.
By a house."
She pulled photocopies of old news items from her purse that she'd gotten from the library and pushed them across the desk to him.

             
He sat reading. When finished, he looked sick. He glanced up and said, "This says the couple was killed by intruders."

             
"No, they weren't."

             
Confused, the Father looked again at the papers. "But it says..."

             
"They were my parents. I was six. It happened a few minutes after 3A.M. on a November night. I heard my mother scream and ran down the hall. I saw what murdered them. I saw...I saw the whole world shattering and falling into chaos. I had suppressed that memory until I came back, bought the house, and moved into it. Now the walls are alive, Father. If you want to help me, you have to believe me. There's real evil there. It's alive."

             
His thoughts leaped out to her and she blinked. He thought,
You
should burn the bastard down
.

             
She looked down to her hands in her lap. Her back still hurt and she was hunched over to relieve pressure on the muscles. "I can't do this alone. I've already tried. And I have to tell you, the evil there might be unleashed if something...happens...to the house."

             
I'd burn it
, he thought.

             
"Unleashed," Linda repeated.
"Set free.
What do evil spirits do if they're part of a structure and then that structure
disappears.
Do the spirits disappear? No. They are unleashed."

             
"I'm not an exorcist," he said. "I'm not sure I even, well, you know, believe in exorcism."

             
She snatched the papers from his desk and stuffed them into her purse. She rose painfully and turned for the door.

             
"I'm sorry, Miss Broderick. Maybe I could come pray..."

             
"Forget it." She was at the door and into a hallway. She heard the snick of the door closing at her back. Damn him. Damn the church that refused to help her. The one church she thought might be on her side. Damn them all.

             
Watch it.

             
Linda halted, holding onto the wall leading out to the vestibule. "What?" she asked. The wall beneath her hand was wood paneled like the walls of her house. They grew warm and she jerked her hand away, startled.

             
Watch your blaspheming. You're in the Lord's house.

             
"I'm sorry," she said, knowing she was talking with the walls and all the matter that made
up the church. "But why won't he help me? If those are demonic manifestations in the house, why can't he come and force them away?"

             
We'll talk to him.

             
"He can't hear you! Only I can hear you."

             
He listens to his heart. We can make his heart talk.

             
Somewhat cheered, Linda made her way on out of the church, down the long, wide steps, and to her car. She was on her way now to the doctor for something to help her back problem.

             
Then she would go home and threaten the things in the walls.
One more time.

             
#

             
The three of them came together as one.

             
The woman who had lived in the house before.

             
The child who would one day live in the house as an adult.

             
And the Catholic priest who believed in the supernatural nature of his god, but not in the supernatural nature of the netherworld.

             
It was Saturday evening, late, the sun down and twilight coming like a thief to cover the house in writhing blue-gray shadows. The priest came to the door, a black Bible in his hand.

             
Linda answered the knock, standing back in surprise to see him.
"Father!
What are you doing here?"

             
"I had some spare time. I thought I'd come by to see if I could...well, help you with that problem you mentioned. I've been thinking about what you said and I don't think it will hurt to bless the house."

             
Linda's face fell into sober folds of flesh. A blessing wouldn't do any
good,
she knew that, maybe even he knew that. She felt she had aged an extra ten years since being in Hayden. She stepped aside and ushered the priest in. She led him to the living room. He took the sofa and she sat in the high-backed wood rocker. "I don't think you can bless it. If you do, it won't help."

             
Let him just try.

             
"Shut up!" Linda shouted, twisting in the rocker to stare hard at the wall. Realizing she had spoken aloud, she turned back with a sheepish look on her face. "I'm sorry, Father, you must think I'm mad."

             
He had his gaze lowered and was patting the Bible in his lap. "I only want to help you."

             
He can't help you.

             
"It doesn't matter that you're not Catholic."

             
He knows you're not Catholic
.

             
"It really doesn't matter if you don't believe in religion at all."

             
You believe in
Us
.

             
"I appreciate it, Father, but I don't think this is going to work."

             
He is the Father of Whores, the Father of Slugs and Swine and Rabid Dogs.

             
Linda tried to block the talk from the walls. She tried to shut the doors in her mind.

             
Not this time
, the walls said.
We reign here. You have no power here. And neither does
He
.

             
A breeze came through the windows, rattling the drapes aside. The breeze changed into a wind. The drapes fluttered like the leathery wings of a bat, floating out from the windows. Linda and the priest looked at one another, sharing the same fear.

             
"You should go," she said. "The house is coming alive."

             
He shook his head, reached into a small pocket at the top of his vest and withdrew a crucifix.

             
The wind became storm and small, loose objects in the room prattled like naughty children, skipping across tabletops and the coffee table, falling off shelves and rolling beneath furniture.

             
Tell him to put it away!
the
walls screamed at her.

             
I won't,
she told the forces building all around them.

             
"Father, this might get bad."

             
"I know that now," he said, standing with the crucifix in one hand, the Bible in the other. "I didn't believe you. I thought you might be having a mental breakdown. Now, I'm beginning to see the problem."

             
He sees
Nothing
! He's blind as a turtle down a hole in the ground! Send him away!

             
"They're telling me to send you away." Linda stood too, reaching down to try to keep a small vase of flowers on the coffee table from tumbling over and spilling water. The wind only increased, the room feeling as if it had been turned into a wind tunnel.

             
"Then they really do talk to you?" the priest asked.

             
The paneled walls began to breathe, insanely bowing out into the room before being sucked back to lie flat as walls should. The priest gasped and began to mumble prayers. He clutched the crucifix and raised it above his head.

             
We'll kill him. The blood of a dead priest is just what we need.

             
Leave him alone.
Linda sent the thought forcefully outward as if it were a dart.
I'll make him leave.

             
"Father, I changed my mind. I don't think a blessing will do any good and you said yourself you aren't an exorcist. I need you to go now."

             
Too late.
It was a chanting of voices, not just one. It was a cadre of souls locked in the walls, making their will
known
as one entity.

             
The wind swept along the floor like a sheering wind found in nature. It lifted the priest off his feet and flung him across the room onto the floor. He lost both the Bible and the crucifix. He began to keen and double up as if a hot fireplace poker was being stabbed into his gut.

             
"STOP IT!"

             
Not this time, Linda. We're taking him. We're taking you. We've waited long enough, but we needed two, always two. We knew you'd bring him.

             
#

             
In the dim hallway off the entrance, the child Diane
Blume
stood smiling like the devil Himself. She clapped her hands together in glee, going up on her tippy toes with excitement. The wind swirled all around her, leaving her in a perfect vacuum.

             
She was like Linda in only some ways. She had the ability to read minds--those of man,
those of creature, and those that possessed houses, the spirits macabre that dwelled within walls and floors, in ceilings, in brick and mortar and wood. Yes, she had been granted that most ultimate gift. But beyond that, far beyond it, she had been promised dominion over the world once the spirits in this house were released with her help.

             
She had been playing a game with the old woman the way she played all her games--in dark deceit and without remorse. She had been born to rule. She was the spawn of evil, the death knell for the coming century of devastation that waited to devour the earth. She knew what the old woman did not know: That the house on 2242
Maycroft
was more than a house. It was more than natural, it was supernatural. It had been built from the ground up as a portal, as a way through dimensions from the dark to the light, from Hell to the surface. It needed certain humans to cast open the gate. Linda Broderick, left alive at the murder scene of her parents, was one of those humans. She was very powerful, but she was godless and rudderless and without faith in anything other than science. Though shown over a long lifetime that the world was not anything the way it appeared, given the gift to see things as they really were, she was still without insight or understanding.

             
The other human the house needed was the child, Diane. She was born of common human parents, but within minutes of birth taken for a specific purpose and given gifts Linda had never even dreamed might be possible.

             
There was no coincidence that she was six years old or that Linda had been ripped from the bosom of her family at the same age. Six was the number of perfection when the human child could be fully possessed, fully owned.

             
The house owned her as it had always owned Linda. It would take the two of them to fulfill the Last Plan, the plan that brought about the beginning of chaos and the end of time.

             
Diane lifted her arms and opened wide her eyes, relishing the coming alive of the house. The smoky demons were forming in the cracks and fissures of the house foundation, slithering up into the floors, spreading out to the walls, invading every inch of the house.