THE POWER OF THREE

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  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?

  Yelling, screaming for him, I retreated to my bedroom again, got my window open and climbed up, still calling, hoping for a small voice to answer. I was crying hysterically, trying to find clean air to breathe. I tipped over the sill, falling to the ground outside with a hard thump that knocked the wind out of my lungs, leaving me in fetal-form,
knees to chest, waiting an eternity for air so I could move, so I could run for help, so I could find someone to save my baby.

  Across the street I flew, making for the home of my friends, the only ones who might be home and not at work on this bright, sunny week day in October. I got to the front door and lifted both my arms to bang the door and then I saw the horror of my condition, my skin falling off my arms in strips, blackened with soot. Does not matter, I thought, nothing matters. I hit the door with both damaged arms, fists balled, banging and screaming, “FIRE FIRE FIRE, help me!”

  The door flashed open and the man stood there. He glanced quickly at me--burned, skin hanging, wild in my underwear, wild in my eyes, and then he looked across the street at the burning house. He was moving like thunder, like lightning, he was moving faster than any man ever moved, with me right behind him.

  I heard sirens and knew someone had called the fire department. Sanchez hit my front door like a bulldozer. He put his shoulder into it and all his weight, but the door held, vacuumed closed by the sucking hot fire inside. He hit it again and again and suddenly the front plate glass picture window in the front of the house exploded, spewing glass all over the front lawn, scorching black clouds of smoke chasing it.

  I can’t remember the sequence of events after that. An ambulance came and they had to physically force me onto a stretcher and tie me down. I saw my arms had clear plastic wrap around them, but I didn’t remember when that had been done or by whom. Later I discovered it had been Sanchez’s wife, who had she not done that, I might have lost at least one of my arms to the deep burns. “I just wrapped Saran Wrap around and around your arms, trying to keep the air from them,” she said weeks later when I asked. “The doctor said I did the right thing.”

  I fought the ambulance attendants. Firemen were spraying my house with water and I had yet to find my son. I kept telling people to let me go, I had to get inside, I had to find Brady, I had to save him.

  My next recollection was in the emergency room with the whole place swarming with doctors and nurses. I remember how they peeled off my wrist watch, how the skin peeled down with it like a rubber glove coming off, how they pulled off my rings and the skin pulled off down my fingers. My wedding ring, I never have taken that off, I thought, my mind a hazardous wasteland of meaningless connections. I was crying and screaming and they were giving me shots of something to try to calm me down enough to try to dress my wounds.

  The problem was no one was telling me where my baby was, where he had gone, why wasn’t I with him? I shouldn’t be alive. It wasn’t fair I was alive.

  My mother-in-law was the first to show up at the hospital while I was in emergency and as soon as I saw her face, I knew it was probably a lost cause, that my son was in the inferno they’d taken me from, but I said, “Ma! Brady’s in the house! I tried to find him, I couldn’t find him! Someone find him!”

  Time sped forward again, whole pieces of life being wiped out by sorrow, by anguish, by my dying heart that longed only for forgetfulness. I came to again in a room where my husband hung over me, eyes glassy with tears. It was not a regular hospital room, but some kind of holding area where I lay alone. I tried to say something about how I’d tried, how hard I’d tried, and how much I hurt, how much my soul was teetering on the edge of giving up. I couldn’t tell him more. I couldn’t tell him how bad this thing hurt deep down inside. It was worse than dying. Dying was preferable to this depth of pain. I shut my eyes and I stopped breathing. Just like that.

  I heard in the distance my husband call for a nurse, his voice seemingly half a hospital away. “Help! She stopped breathing!”

  Then I heard a woman’s voice. I knew she was the nurse who had been called, though my eyes were closed and I saw only the dark. She said and kept saying, “Breathe! You don’t need to die yet! Breathe, goddamnit!”

  It didn’t seem to me that I should. I was becoming more and more content and at peace. I knew I was dying. I was letting myself die. It felt that was my only alternative. I was twenty-four years old and this was the end. All my pain and sorrow was moving away from me as if it were a mist, drifting away. I was in an ebony void without star or planet, a place of such ultimate peace that I felt it enveloping me and helping me forget. I wanted to forget the world. I wanted to leave the world. I knew without anyone telling me that Brady was gone. Brady died in the fire. Why should I live? I was his mother. He was my only child. I hadn’t kept him safe. Something happened while I slept and it was my fault, my fault, all my fault. I needed to die. I needed to die right here and now in this cold dark peaceful place and be done with the world and all the grief it was sure to bring if I continued living.

  Then the nurse’s voice intruded even louder and I was annoyed. I was dying and that’s exactly what I wanted and what I deserved. Yet this woman wouldn’t shut up. She kept shaking me and screaming right into my ear, “Breathe! Breathe, goddamnit!”

  Isn’t that odd, I thought. The nurse is so frantic, she’s cursing. She really wants me to come back…

  I sucked in air without my volition. Her voice made me do it. I was following orders even though I didn’t want to do it. I was breathing again and I opened my eyes to see a woman’s face, relief like a red flag waving in her eyes.

  I was in the world again and damned to live.

  Days went by. I was in a critical care burn unit under an oxygen tent. I rarely woke. I was told later that I died two or three times and was resuscitated. Smoke inhalation had done great damage and my arms, especially the left one, was burned terribly. I had third degree burns over a large portion of my body. Arms, hands, face, chest, maybe even my legs, I didn’t know. Even my hair had been singed down to a couple inches of length, curled like fried snakes on my head.

  When I finally woke to myself, I knew life was so dreary that I was going to have to find some way to live through it without a road map, without a rule book. First, I had to know what happened.

  A fire department marshal came to see me and explained. “We investigated and found the fire started near a chair that had an outlet nearby. Either the boy you were babysitting or your son turned the swivel chair around and around with the wire wrapping around the metal bottom until it shorted out. We think the older boy did it, but there’s no way to say for sure. You saved Eddie by throwing him out the window.

  “We estimate you were in the fire for ten minutes. Most firemen without an oxygen mask would have succumbed. It’s a miracle you’re alive.

  “You son didn’t suffer. He was found across the room sitting on the floor near the sofa. The smoke would have…”

  I couldn’t hear any more, not another word. I had the picture that would be indelibly etched in my brain forever. “Please stop,” I begged. “No more, please…”

  Brady had been near the sofa when I’d come to the entrance of the living room and I couldn’t reach him, why hadn’t I been given the time to reach him? Why hadn’t I woken five minutes earlier, three, two? Why couldn’t I have rushed through the flames and grabbed him up and rushed my baby away from danger? If I had known, if I could have seen him, I would have braved anything, any fire, any danger.

  My visitor went away, his head hanging in a despair almost as deep as my own.

  Days later too many people came to visit once I was out of ICU and in a private room. When something of this import, a tragedy of this measure, happens, your relatives come, your friends, your friends’ friends. One day a preacher came. I didn’t know him. He said he was the pastor of the church my in-laws went to. I expected the usual religious comfort a man of the church might want to give me. I was disappointed. He began saying all the wrong things.

  “Your arm looks bad. You know, I knew someone had his arm burned that bad and he lost it.”

  I looked away. I wanted to tell this horrible man to go, to leave, but my throat was filled with tears. My throat constricted, leaving me voiceless. It choked me until I could manage to swallow down all the pain.

  The pastor went on, compoun
ding his errors. “I heard you’re a smoker. They found your cigarette lighter on the floor where you’d been reading a book. Maybe if you had…”

  I turned to him, my anger overriding grief. “They didn’t start the fire! The fire marshal said it was caused by an electrical short. Now you get out of here. You get out of my room and don’t you EVER COME BACK! What kind of a bastard, are you?”

  The man back-pedalled to the door and disappeared, leaving me weeping. I already had my guilt and it was boulder-sized, it was the size of a mountain, it was really as large as the world. I didn’t need more guilt to shoulder. If I had one ounce more I would stop breathing again, I would just close my eyes, tune out reality, and go back into that pleasant nowhere of the void.

  People came and went, some helping, some not. They held a funeral for Brady without me because I couldn’t be released from the hospital yet. I was shown pictures of the little white casket in the church. I was shown clippings from the newspaper showing the house with windows broken, soot streaked all around the frames, soot lines reaching to the roof, half the roof collapsed. In the yard lay a tricycle lying on its side. Brady’s toy, a forlorn thing, spoke silent volumes of what had happened at this place.

  There was no going back to the house. It was destroyed, the fire eating up half of it and the floors falling through to the basement. The finance company let us sign off the mortgage. They knew what had happened, what terrible thing we had survived. It had been in all the newspapers.

  People stayed with me every hour at the new house we had rented--my brother, my female neighbor from across the street whose husband had tried, even with his life, to save my baby. I was fed Valium and moved in a medicated daze. Even when Mrs. Sanchez tried to brush my burned hair and couldn’t get a brush through it, even when she began crying, I couldn’t feel very much.