Read THE POWER OF THREE for Free Online Page A

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