THE POWER OF THREE (9 page)

             
The wind howled like a mad dog frightened by a full moon. Furniture in the living room where the priest lay imprisoned by invisible chains on the
floor,
began to move. All the pieces of furniture scooted at first, and then the sofa, the tables, the chairs all began to walk, using their wooden legs, stomping out slow rhythms as they came toward the epicenter of the storm. The vase of flowers spun in the air, faster and faster. The cushions from the sofa rose and danced in the air maniacally then slammed against the wall and began to creep up toward the ceiling.

             
It was all alive.

             
Linda tried to get to the priest to help him from the floor, but the wind held her back with wide hands.

             
It's happening all over again, Linda thought. It's what was going on in my parents' bedroom the night they died.

             
She saw then the smoky columns of figures in their infernal rags, their faces blank and indistinct,
their
arms outstretched toward her, their fingers ending in talons.

             
Where are your weapons?
she
asked of them. She was quaking with involuntary spasms, her back screaming from the odd positions her body twisted into from the waist. She was a stick figure, a pretzel person, her feet lifting off the floor, her arms
pinwheeling
,
her
head turning back and forth on her neck until it was a blur. She struggled to keep her mind whole.

             
We don't need them this time. There will be no bodies left to be found. You're coming with
Us
.

             
"I won't go with you! You don't have the power to make me! I cast you out. Be gone!" It
was all she knew to say.

             
The smoke-filled creatures laughed, the cacophony rising like the herald of trumpets. They paced towards the old woman. She was weak and disoriented and lost as she spun and twisted in the air. Others rose up from the floor then bent down and covered the body of the priest making him shriek.

             
The girl stepped from her hiding place in the hall and stood in the living room entrance. She pointed at Linda and
said,
her voice large and louder than the wind of chaos whirling throughout the house, "They granted you the gift of knowledge. You've talked with the sun, the moon, the earth. And still you didn't reach understanding. They gave up on you six years ago and brought me forth.
You're
not the One. I AM THE ONE!"

             
Linda cried out knowing in her heart that the girl was right. She had but a few scant moments to review her life from age six to sixty. Why had she not questioned how she could communicate with what a human was not allowed communication? It had been granted her,
given
to her. She had been spared death so long ago in this house because she'd been chosen to bring forth the minions of Hell.

             
And you failed. We tried so hard with you. This time we gave all the gifts at once to the child. She will lead us out of the darkness and into this world at last. YOU, we have no more use for.

             
The priest lay wailing on the floor, dozens of
taloned
hands piercing his flesh. His eyes were popped from their sockets. His arms, legs, and torso were gripped by hard claws and torn bit by bit, the pieces flying off into the windy maelstrom that swirled madly all around.

             
Linda, seeing truth, recognizing everything at once and how it had been planned for her, cried out weakly.

             
We sacrifice
You
. We sacrifice Him. We Come Forth...

             
There was a rending that spelled doom, a sound that could break eardrums and make them bleed. The house convulsed along with its dying human inhabitants--the woman, the priest man.

             
The room filled with bloody flesh.
With bone and cartilage.
With blood and feces and portions of intestines.
Brains broke into particles and dusted the air. Blood splattered and dripped from the walls.

             
When it was done, when the house had been baptized this final time, the wind died, the smoky demons slithered back into the walls, and Diane stepped back with a happy sigh. Outside she heard the beginning of the end. Sirens wailed. Trees split and cracked, sending limbs and trunks to the ground. Houses toppled in upon themselves, imploding. Cars slammed into other cars, into curbs, into houses and buildings. A cry was rising, a human cry of great suffering.

             
The walls of the dead had brought about the catastrophes that had been waiting since the beginning of the planet to take it down.

             
The child who helped make it so went to the door and, opening it, stood looking out into a sky that was scarlet streaked with ebony. She saw that chaos held dominion.

             
And it had only begun.

THE END

             
A LITTLE LIFE
 

             
By
 

             
Billie Sue
Mosiman
 

             
Copyright Billie Sue
Mosiman
2012
 

             
Fire
--the killer, the rapist of dreams, the taker of innocence.

             
It was before eight o’clock in the morning and I had been up late reading the night before. I came awake…

             
I swam up from sleep, dragged as if from a pounding surf--choking, suffocating. The house was on fire, I knew it instantly. Fear scoured me inside out with claws of sudden panic. I first sat up, disoriented, already afraid, but not knowing why. In seconds I was out of the bed wearing only what I had slept in—bra, panties,
a
half-slip. The bedroom door was closed, which drove me toward it in leaps. It was never closed. I saw smoke billowing from around the door frame and beneath the door.
 

             
Brady
! I knew the house was on fire and my baby was out there beyond that door somewhere, in all that deadly smoke. There was no more thinking beyond this. Adrenalin and fear took precedence over thought.

             
Door flung open, I rushed down the long hall leading to the living room. Black and pungent smoke issued from there, presenting a wall of darkness shot through with flame. My heart wasn’t even in my chest anymore. It might have died it beat so
hard,
it might have stepped out of my body and flown away from the event unfolding before me. One thing I knew: my heart was breaking, was broken,
was
dying. I ran forward breathless, racing into the darkness of the smoke calling and calling, “BRADY
BRADY
BRADY
!”

             
Reaching the doorway that opened to the living room, I saw the flames were as alive as a living monster can ever be. It had a life of its own, a grinding, roaring life devouring everything in its path in seconds, in nanoseconds. I glanced left to the open kitchen and it too was full of smoke so I couldn’t see beyond the edge of the wall.
PHONE
.
I made to grab for the wall phone, but it was melting and I jerked my hand away from it. Flames licked up the wall like liquid running uphill, pulled by backward gravity, eating away at the wall, grasping at the bottom edge of the plastic phone. The panic I felt now was so high I was no longer a human in all senses of the word. I was a dead woman walking. Because I knew this very moment had changed everything forever and chances of my son being alive were so low I might fall down and stay there for the flames to find me because if that was true, how was I supposed to live?

             
Yet I ran, pushed from behind by blind panic, pulled from ahead by hope. I ran like I was on fire when I wasn’t, ran back down the hallway calling, calling, weeping, gnashing my teeth, dying inside. I wasn’t running to save myself, to hell with me. I was racing the destruction, moving as fast as I could to out-distance the monster. My one reason for living at that point was to save my son. I got to the spare bedroom door and it was closed. I flung it open praying Brady was inside, safe.
Be here!
I thought frantically. I found Eddie hiding behind the door. I had forgotten about him. He backed out, his eyes wide and round. He knew the house was on fire, I didn’t have to tell him. It was in his eyes, it was in the way his hands were wrung together in
front of him. Eddie was nine and a boy I watched during the day after his mother dropped him off at my house around seven every morning. He would go to the spare bedroom and go back to sleep on the sofa. I would later wake him and Brady for breakfast. His mother picked him up at five after her work. “Eddie, Eddie, the house is on fire!”

             
I think he said, “I know!” There was a freight train in the house, a noise so deafening that I couldn’t hear words. The fire was coming, fast it was coming, starving, it would eat us…it was coming.

             
I saw the sliding windows across the room and the early morning sun beyond the panes.
 
They were positioned halfway up the wall and weren’t large, but they meant escape. I grabbed the closest thing to hand, a heavy empty champagne bottle I used for a flower vase. Taking it by the neck, I swung hard, and smashed the window, busting it like hell was riding on my shoulders. Glass splintered, sending shards flying and falling all around. I turned and took hold of Eddie. “You’re going out. Get away from the house.”

             
I saw sharp glass still sticking up from the sill and broke it out with my right hand, cutting a deep gash in my palm. I lifted Eddie and threw him out, heaving his weight up and over the window sill. I turned, the smoke now filling this room. I had to find Brady, my little boy, my lost little boy. If Eddie was all right, Brady had to be all right. He must be in his room, having run from the fire.

             
I raced out and down the hall to the door across from my bedroom. This was my son’s bedroom where the door stood open. No one was inside. I screamed “BRADY!”

             
He was nowhere, nowhere,
nowhere
. Not in his bed. Not standing there waiting for me as Eddie had been. Not in his closet.

             
He was gone, gone, gone. I went back down the hall, knowing there was just one place left to search before I had to get out of the fire. I already could hardly breathe the smoke boiled so thickly all around me. I threw open the bathroom door, but it was black in there, same as in the living room and kitchen, black as death, with flames licking orange and red and yellow up the walls. He couldn’t be in there or he was lost anyway. Where was he, my baby? God, why was this happening, why couldn’t I find him and get him out of here?