WALLS OF THE DEAD

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  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.

  She was astounded by the depth of feeling the walls held, how perfectly human those feelings seemed to her.

  After that night, the walls talked constantly. They wept and sighed and rapped at the door of her mind wanting in. She would be forced to move if this kept up, but then all the walls everywhere would begin to speak, it didn't matter where she went. Even the most modern of homes, or the newly constructed, would have something to say.

  She was able, after a time, to hear the thoughts of furniture, of sidewalks, of cars and trucks. She heard the harsh whispering from the sea when she went to the shore. She heard the low booming voices of mountains in the Sierra Madres. In the end, after months of tuning in to the world around her, Linda heard the voice of the earth, of the moon and the sun. I am forever, said the sun. I want to be like the sun, the earth said. I am complete in my being, said the moon, with a giggle in its voice.

  It was all so fantastic that she was like a spinning ball of sparkling fire moving from one moment to another. In her classroom the desk and chalkboard spoke to her. The clothes on the backs of the students whispered. The halls and the lockers, the teachers' lounge, the steps leading outside, it all spoke in small whispers, enchantments from the ether that only Linda could hear.

  That was when she knew it was time. She was not only immured to the mutterings of all things, but she was resilient as well. As she had trained herself to monitor or shut the door against the thoughts of man or animal, she could now also cut off the communication going on between herself and all things that clattered and strove to share their worlds with her.

  She got on the internet and found the house at 2242 Maycroft for sale. She bought it the minute she closed the sale on the bungalow that wept to see her go. She retired from the university despite the Dean begging her to stay.

  She packed her few clothes, boarded the plane for Alabama and never looked back.

  #

  Now. Now she stood in her old home with her back to the door and the walls, floors, and ceilings shivered in either anticipation or dread, she did not know which.

  "I've come to find out why you did it. Why you killed them."

  Though the house was alive with movement that happened only from the corner of her eyes, Linda wondered if it would speak.

  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 f
lavors. 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. Th
ey 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.