WALLS OF THE DEAD by Billie Sue Mosiman

The house was alive, always had been, from the first foundation stone to the shingles on the rooftop.
    On the doorstep the realtor handed over the keys to 2242 Maycroft Street to Linda Broderick. The realtor smiled knowing the commission she was receiving would pay off her new outdoor swimming pool. Though the house had been empty and for sale for a long time--two years--the price was still high for the area and the small town of Hayden, Alabama.
    "We're happy you've moved here and I hope you enjoy your house," she said.
    Linda nodded and took the keys. She waited for the realtor to leave. She wanted to go into the house alone this time. She had bought the house through the internet without ever stepping foot in it. It raised eyebrows in a town this size, but her business was strictly her business and this is how she meant to do it. Once in town she had taken a tour with the realtor and that was enough. She signed the papers and now had possession.
    "Well..." the real estate lady stepped back a step.
    "Thank you for all your help," Linda said, her back to the unopened front door.
    Now the realtor smiled, said, "Okay then," and turned for her car at the curb.
    Linda waited until she saw the car pull into the street and that it had disappeared down the tree-lined avenue. Only then did she face the door and insert the key to unlock it.
    She had been here before. The realtor hadn't recognized her, not her face or her name. The tragedy that happened in this house was in the dim past when Linda was just six years old. Now she was sixty and she had finally come back to confront what evil lay in the rooms beyond the door.
    The gloom reached out as she stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She stood a moment feeling how the house moved, as if a shiver had gone through the floorboards and walls and ceilings. "Yes, I'm back for you," she said out loud.
    When she was six, she had a room up the stairs on the second floor. Her parents occupied a room down the hall. She had known for as long as she understood her surroundings, which might have been around age three, that the house was alive. Monstrously alive. She had no words to explain it to her parents and wondered at how they didn't know. Only by age six did she even realize she was the only one keyed into the notion that the house was evil. That the house was sentient. That it had thoughts and perpetuated crimes.
    She had been the one to discover her parents' bodies. Harper and Livy Broderick lay in their bed bludgeoned to death, their faces destroyed, their skulls shattered, their brains lying on the pillows like gray clots of wormy matter. Linda had run screaming from the house and had never been back.
    Until now.
    It had taken her fifty-four years. After being orphaned and taken by her mother's sister across country, she grew up with her aunt in Palo Alto, California. After an unremarkable childhood, she had gone on to the university at Berkeley where she secured a bright future for herself in psychology. She taught freshmen their first psychology courses, snagged tenure, and lived a quiet life. She had never married, owned no pets, and claimed few friends beyond faculty members. It was her inner life that teemed with energy and curiosity that kept her anchored in the world.
    Since childhood she had been psychic. No one knew; no one even suspected. She had been born with the gift. That was why she had known about the house and how it breathed, how it possessed malevolent desires. After her parents were murdered-- by the house-- though no one believed it--the gift grew exponentially. She began reading her Aunt Helen's every thought and thankfully they were kind and forgiving thoughts so that Linda felt safe in her care. In awe of this new experience, playing with it as she might a new toy, she began to reach out with her mind and read her teachers' thoughts, the thoughts and intents of her classmates, even the thoughts of strangers. She could turn the gift on and