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periodicals, and marveling at how she could find ways to intervene between Fate and the Dark Void, time flew by on gilded wings. It seemed to Linda that not one New Year's Eve was over before another one found her at a faculty party blowing silly horns and throwing confetti into the air.
                  Still she worked on the third level of her gift. She could read humans when she wanted--though she did not always want to and kept the door of her mind shut against it more and more often. She could read animals, but reading them made her so gloomy over their plight that she had become vegan, gave money to animal shelters and animal causes, and was wracked with guilt over how her own species felt so superior to the rest of God's creatures on the planet. She shied away finally from interacting with the animal world whenever possible.
                  Now she must find a way to communicate with things , with objects. Because never far from her mind was the house in Hayden, Alabama. The house that lived. That had thoughts and created maelstroms and took lives on a whim just because it could. Some days she fantasized taking a trip to Alabama and sneaking up on the house and setting it on fire. She could burn the bastard to the ground.
                  If she did that, however, she would never know the truth. The reason behind murder. The face of the evil that lurked within those walls. She would never know the monster who took her parents and changed her life forever.
                  And she could not return to discover those mysteries until she could perfect her gift--if it could be perfected any further--to commune with all things, even those not thought of as sentient or having mind.
                  Being not only a teacher, but a student of the sciences, Linda had a scattering of knowledge about the universe and the matter that made it up. Stephen Hawking had once postulated the matter swirling around the edge of black holes disappeared. Other physicists disputed him, claiming that of course matter could not disappear! Nothing could ever completely disappear--go from being real matter to a state of...nothing. Matter might transmute, it might become energy, but it did not, no, it did not disappear . For twenty years Hawking stubbornly held onto his theory and even had a mathematical equation that proved it.
                  Yet after mulling the problem over of disappearing matter, Hawking himself finally came up with a different theory and a different equation. At a conference of his peers he admitted he had been wrong. He had now solved the problem of disappearing matter. It didn't really disappear! He thought now that it winked out of this universe and appeared in another, for there were parallel universes, they all knew that. It was still matter; it just lived somewhere else. And although it seemed it had disappeared, it hadn't at all. Voila! Problem solved.
                  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