THE POWER OF THREE by Billie Sue Mosiman Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
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                  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.
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                  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