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

she had been promised dominion over the world once the spirits in this house were released with her help.
                  She had been playing a game with the old woman the way she played all her games--in dark deceit and without remorse. She had been born to rule. She was the spawn of evil, the death knell for the coming century of devastation that waited to devour the earth. She knew what the old woman did not know: That the house on 2242 Maycroft was more than a house. It was more than natural, it was supernatural. It had been built from the ground up as a portal, as a way through dimensions from the dark to the light, from Hell to the surface. It needed certain humans to cast open the gate. Linda Broderick, left alive at the murder scene of her parents, was one of those humans. She was very powerful, but she was godless and rudderless and without faith in anything other than science. Though shown over a long lifetime that the world was not anything the way it appeared, given the gift to see things as they really were, she was still without insight or understanding.
                  The other human the house needed was the child, Diane. She was born of common human parents, but within minutes of birth taken for a specific purpose and given gifts Linda had never even dreamed might be possible.
                  There was no coincidence that she was six years old or that Linda had been ripped from the bosom of her family at the same age. Six was the number of perfection when the human child could be fully possessed, fully owned.
                  The house owned her as it had always owned Linda. It would take the two of them to fulfill the Last Plan, the plan that brought about the beginning of chaos and the end of time.
                  Diane lifted her arms and opened wide her eyes, relishing the coming alive of the house. The smoky demons were forming in the cracks and fissures of the house foundation, slithering up into the floors, spreading out to the walls, invading every inch of the house.
                  The wind howled like a mad dog frightened by a full moon. Furniture in the living room where the priest lay imprisoned by invisible chains on the floor, began to move. All the pieces of furniture scooted at first, and then the sofa, the tables, the chairs all began to walk, using their wooden legs, stomping out slow rhythms as they came toward the epicenter of the storm. The vase of flowers spun in the air, faster and faster. The cushions from the sofa rose and danced in the air maniacally then slammed against the wall and began to creep up toward the ceiling.
                  It was all alive.
                  Linda tried to get to the priest to help him from the floor, but the wind held her back with wide hands.
                  It's happening all over again, Linda thought. It's what was going on in my parents' bedroom the night they died.
                  She saw then the smoky columns of figures in their infernal rags, their faces blank and indistinct, their arms outstretched toward her, their fingers ending in talons.
                  Where are your weapons? she asked of them. She was quaking with involuntary spasms, her back screaming from the odd positions her body twisted into from the waist. She was a stick figure, a pretzel person, her feet lifting off the floor, her arms pinwheeling , her head turning back and forth on her neck until it was a blur. She struggled to keep her mind whole.
                  We don't need them this time. There will be no bodies left to be found. You're coming with Us .
                  "I won't go with you! You don't have the power to make me! I cast you out. Be gone!" It was all she knew to say.
                  The smoke-filled creatures laughed, the cacophony rising like the herald of trumpets. They paced towards the old