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a way they interacted with other living things. Because all things were alive!
                  Her idea had been right. Why she had been given this breakthrough after so many years yearning for it, she didn't know. She might be the most gifted psychic in the world. Not that she could share that accolade, for she would be immediately laughed at and shunned, if not locked away. Being a psychologist she knew the limits of psychology--and it did not accept thought transfers between humans and animals, much less humans and inanimate matter.
                  She spent the night consoling the walls of her house. "It's just the way of the world," she advised. "People have trouble, people live in trouble, trouble is what life hands us."
                  The walls wept and talked and cried in whispers to break the heart. They were old and saturated with memory. They had even taken her own low points in her thought processes and hugged them close to their elements of wood, clay, sand, straw, and water.
                  She was astounded by the depth of feeling the walls held, how perfectly human those feelings seemed to her.
                  After that night, the walls talked constantly. They wept and sighed and rapped at the door of her mind wanting in. She would be forced to move if this kept up, but then all the walls everywhere would begin to speak, it didn't matter where she went. Even the most modern of homes, or the newly constructed, would have something to say.
                  She was able, after a time, to hear the thoughts of furniture, of sidewalks, of cars and trucks. She heard the harsh whispering from the sea when she went to the shore. She heard the low booming voices of mountains in the Sierra Madres. In the end, after months of tuning in to the world around her, Linda heard the voice of the earth, of the moon and the sun. I am forever , said the sun. I want to be like the sun , the earth said. I am complete in my being , said the moon, with a giggle in its voice.
                  It was all so fantastic that she was like a spinning ball of sparkling fire moving from one moment to another. In her classroom the desk and chalkboard spoke to her. The clothes on the backs of the students whispered. The halls and the lockers, the teachers' lounge, the steps leading outside, it all spoke in small whispers, enchantments from the ether that only Linda could hear.
                  That was when she knew it was time. She was not only immured to the mutterings of all things, but she was resilient as well. As she had trained herself to monitor or shut the door against the thoughts of man or animal, she could now also cut off the communication going on between herself and all things that clattered and strove to share their worlds with her.
                  She got on the internet and found the house at 2242 Maycroft for sale. She bought it the minute she closed the sale on the bungalow that wept to see her go. She retired from the university despite the Dean begging her to stay.
                  She packed her few clothes, boarded the plane for Alabama and never looked back.
     
                 
 
     
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                  Now. Now she stood in her old home with her back to the door and the walls, floors, and ceilings shivered in either anticipation or dread, she did not know which.
                  "I've come to find out why you did it. Why you killed them."
                  Though the house was alive with movement that happened only from the corner of her eyes, Linda wondered if it would speak.
                  That day it didn't.
                  She placed her clothes in the closet and the drawers. Old furniture had come with the house and what there was of it, though scant, was enough.