WALLS OF THE DEAD (3 page)

That day it didn't.

She placed her clothes in the closet and the drawers. Old furniture had come with the house and what there was of it, though scant, was enough. She went to the grocery and brought in bags of food to put away in the refrigerator, freezer, and kitchen shelves. She set out a skillet on the gas stove and heated olive oil. She threw in chopped vegetables--carrots, celery, mushrooms, onions, broccoli, chunks of fresh tomatoes. She seasoned it with lemon pepper, a little saffron, and salt. She sat at the old wooden table in the kitchen and ate slowly, savoring the different flavors. The crunch of the broccoli and carrots made sounds that reverberated inside her head.

Outside her head nothing moved. Nothing voiced an opinion. There was not a sound.

"I'm patient," she told the house. "I'm here for the long haul. I'm not going anywhere. And I'm pretty damned old so if you want to try to kill me, be my guest. But I'll give you some trouble with that."

The walls were silent.

#

Linda sat in a rocker in the living room. She had never owned a rocking chair before. She really liked it. Liked the regular rhythm she could set it to, liked the movement of her body back and forth, almost like swinging in a swing. The room smelled like pine because she had mopped the floor with Pine-Sol. It reminded her of the old days, so many years ago, when she was a girl here and her mother mopped the floors with the same product. She breathed in deeply, feeling peaceful.

She had owned the house for four months. That it did not speak to her, that it held itself tightly together and stone cold silent, didn't bother her. She knew it would come around. It had business yet to do with her and her with it. If it was being stubborn, she could out-stubborn it. If it wanted to play this waiting game, she knew how to wait. All she had left was time--and her thirst for revenge.

She heard a car horn outside and it made her recall that days before she had heard a moving van pulling into a near driveway. She had stood in her front yard watching as a young family moved into the house next door. It was a mother, father, and two children--a girl around six and a boy who was probably nine or ten. She waved at them and they waved back, calling a hello. "Hello! Hello, how are you?"

Now as she sat in the rocker in the hours after lunch, thinking of little but how this house was obstinate and impenetrable, a knock came at the door.

She rose slowly, noticing her back was sore, but what did she expect, she was going to be sixty-one in a few weeks. She opened the door to find the girl from next door on her step. "Hi there! How do you like your new house?"

Linda liked children although, funny enough, she had never longed for any of her own. The little girl smiled to reveal a gap between her front teeth.
How adorable!
Linda thought, smiling back.

You too!
the little girl thought back to her.

Linda's smile faded and was replaced with a questioning look. "You read my mind?"

The little girl glanced down and put her hands behind her back.

"You don't have to ashamed of it. Or afraid. Do your parents know?"

"No."

"Come inside and we'll talk."

In the living room Linda now turned on a lamp near the sofa and sat next to the little girl whose name was Diane Blume. "All right, tell me, how often do you read minds?"

"All the time."

"How long have you been doing it, Diane?"

"Since I was little."

Linda held back her grin. "About how old when you were little?"

The little girl shrugged shyly. Then she said, "When I was three?"

A tiny blip crossed Linda's mind. She had been three when she first understood she could hear what other people were thinking. She had been six...

"How old are you now?"

Linda almost narrowed her eyes to hold back the answer she was sure to come from the girl.

"I'm six!"

That's when the walls began to talk.

Same as You
, they said, a unison of singsong voices. Though they weren't unpleasant voices Linda had jumped up, coming off the sofa like a shot. She looked at the walls.

"Miss Linda, what's wrong?" The girl was up too and coming to stand near her.

"It's..."

"The walls?"

Linda stared down at the child. "You can hear the walls?"

Diane didn't even have to answer. Linda read her mind and knew everything. This child was like her doppelganger, her double. She had been born with the gift and she hadn't had to wait for years and maturity or strive to learn how to hear the thoughts projected out from animals and objects. She already had been listening to walls.

"Come, sit back down." She led the girl back to the sofa where they took their seats. Linda held the girl's hand. "Tell me what you know about this house."

It's a bad house, Miss Linda. It wants to kill you.

"It's killed before," Linda said.

The child sat quietly, listening, but not for Linda's thoughts. Now the house was talking to her, but not to Linda. After some moments the girl looked up into her face and talked to her in silence.

Yes, it's killed before. It was built in 1879. It was made by a bunch of people who all lived here together. They knew...they knew...magic. They had rituals. They made sacrifices. Blood sacrifices.

She couldn't take it any longer. She didn't think she wanted to know anymore, not now. This time when she stood, Linda pulled the girl along to the front door. "I don't think you should come here again. It's using you. I think it's dangerous here. Not just for me, but for you, too. Do you understand?"

"A house never told me before it wanted to kill someone." The little girl looked sad and lost, unable to process all that she knew.

"It's just this house, Diane. There must be places in the world where bad things happened and the walls soaked it all in and grew in evil ways. This is one of those places. Don't come back, all right? Stay with your parents and don't let anyone know all the things you hear. People won't understand. They'll think something's wrong with you and there isn't. You believe me, don't you? There's nothing at all
wrong
with you."

Plumbing the child's mind she could tell her words were being accepted, but there was still a great deal of fear. It was like walking through a jumbled room full of bright toys, where some of the toys were coming alive, and the young mind couldn't take it all in.

Once the girl was gone, Linda sank against the door, her eyes closed. Was it a coincidence that through her long life she had never come across another person with such a strong gift as her own and then when she had returned to this house the child next door was not only like her, but possessing a gift much too strong and heavy a burden for a six-year-old? It had been Linda's experience that coincidences were something to look upon with skepticism. This was
too much
of a coincidence. A once in a lifetime event.

She was sure she had been right in warning the girl away from this house. Though she was the one who had communicated with it, Linda couldn't in good conscience involve a child. Not in this house. Not in a place stained in blood and roaring with murder lust.

She couldn't hear it, but she knew it roared, knew it as well as she did the back of her hand.

#

She woke at 3A.M. with a roar in her head. She sat up, holding her temples as if her head might explode. It wasn't a noise caused by a physical headache or pain. It was the house.

Roaring like Niagra's waterfalls. Roaring like a mad tornado. Roaring in anger and murderous rage.

"STOP IT!"

Instantly the house quietened. Linda was now wide awake and could feel the blood pulsing in her temples where she still held onto her head. She removed her hands and balled up the sheets in her fists. The room felt as if it were spinning. She tried to hold onto reality, but maybe that's what this was, at least in this house. Then the memories came flooding back so swiftly they caused her to hold her breath. She felt as if she'd been knocked in the chest.

...she was six years old. It was 3A.M. and the noise woke her. She could hear her mother's thoughts all the way down the hallway.
Get away, get away from me!

She went running out of her room, her bare feet cold on the wood floor. There was a wind at her back, an impossible wind. She knew something terrible was about to happen. She had to get to her mommy and daddy, she had to save them.

Down the hallway she flew fleet as a cat. Her parents' door was closed. She reached for the door knob and turned it. She could hear her mother's frantic voice full of fear and her father now raising his voice in that selfsame fear. She rushed inside and saw...

Many things. Many THINGS. They were as insubstantial as smoke. They had circled her parents' bed. They looked to be wearing shredded clothes. They were carrying weapons. Some had cleavers like her mother used in the kitchen to cut apart chickens. Some held carpenter hammers. Some raised huge axes.

STOP IT! That was her silent cry to the creatures. They ignored her. She said it with the last ragged breath of her voice, STOP IT!

They ignored her as if she wasn't even there. There was wind in this room and dark chaos running rampant.

Her parents were trying to get out of the bed, but hands came out of darkness and held them fast, pushing them down on their backs. Moonlight from the long windows splashed the bed with ivory beams. Her mommy and daddy had their mouths open on long, unending screams. They had neither the time nor the sense left to even notice she stood impotently by watching.

Then the things made of smoke began to use the weapons that worked just as they would have had they been made of wood and metal. The clubbing began abruptly and stopped abruptly. Linda stood by aghast, her mind slipping right away, her mind closing to the carnage and the death of her mommy and daddy, her mind finally giving out altogether to leave her lying on the bedroom floor in an empty and deadly silent house of death.

#

Linda came to herself. Found herself sitting in the bed shaking so hard the bed rattled. Crying so hard she couldn't get her breath.

Had she really been there and seen it? Until now she hadn't known that. She had thought she'd found her parents in the morning and run screaming from the house. All these long years she had believed that.

It was so real, the dream or memory she had just relived.

You were there. We saw You.

Linda flinched so hard she pulled a muscle in her back. She gave a little cry of pain. The house had spoken again.

"Why didn't you take me then? Why didn't you kill me too?" She was shouting, furious with those who lived in these walls, who made this house evil.

We were in no hurry. We knew You'd come back. We've been waiting.

Despite the pain from her back muscles, Linda hurried from the bed, threw on her house robe and slipped on her shoes. She was down the stairs and standing outside on the front lawn as fast as she could get there.

She was bent from the waist. She couldn't straighten up without an intense pain shooting from her back, down her legs and up into her shoulders. She glanced up at the house in the dark that came with the deepest part of the night. It sat brooding, bathed in blue shadow, leering from the windows, hunching like a grotesque beast. It seemed to lean toward her; it seemed to breathe in and out like a bellows, the windows and walls expanding and contracting.

She hated it, of course she hated it. She wouldn't let it take her. It couldn't take her or beat her or kill her, not if she didn't let it. There was yet no reason she could accept for the house having murdered her parents. In the walls, yes, THINGS lived, imbuing the house with their mad thoughts. In the walls were the souls, the damned and lost souls who had built the house and held satanic rituals and spilled blood to gain some ground with the master of hell. Were they still committing those blood sacrifices the night they took her parents away? Were they lost in between worlds, trapped in the walls like spiders, ever longing to make amends with blood to their demon god?

Limping to her car, Linda climbed carefully into the driver's seat. She started the engine and backed out the drive. She drove around the block thinking and thinking, until her thoughts moved in a circle, round and round.

She parked across the street from 2242 Maycroft and turned off the car's engine. She leaned her head against the steering wheel to wait for the sun to rise.

#

She woke stiff and hurting, her hand going to her back. She winced, groaning. She would need to take something to help the muscle inflammation.

Consulting her wristwatch she saw it was just a few minutes past seven A.M. Her neighbors would be coming out soon to drive to their jobs. She didn't want them to find her in her sleepwear sitting in her car across from her own house. Whatever she did this was a situation between her and the house. She didn't want anyone interfering.

She started the car and drove it into her own driveway, parking it. She hobbled from the car to the house, opening the door slowly, not knowing what might confront her. She stood in the doorway, much more frightened now than she had been before. Now she knew a little about the house that pointed to not only its evil beginning, but how it operated whenever it felt the urge. The walls shimmered and shivered.

She willed it to stop.
Be still
, she admonished the house.
I'll leave again if you won't be still.

For a few more moments, as if defying her, the walls moved as if alive, and she stood in the doorway, her hand on the doorknob, her back killing her. She waited.

Finally it ended and light spilled through the door that had been held at abeyance before. The colors in the red patterned carpet rug sprung to life. The polished wood paneled walls shone with a mellow brown vigor. The furniture gleamed and the taupe drapes lay quietly at each side of the windows.

Sighing, Linda stepped inside and closed the door. In the bathroom, she opened the medicine cabinet and hunted for ibuprofen. She shook out four tablets and ran water in the glass she kept on the sink. On the way out the door of the bathroom she swallowed down the medicine. She still had to walk bent over to keep from having tremendous, debilitating pain.