The house talked; Linda Randolph could hear it. The objects in it talked, too -- chairs, tables, couches, a big, squashy hassock that squatted obscenely in a corner of the bedroom. But the voice of the house was loudest. Sometimes it said, "leave him"; sometimes it wailed, "I'd wish he'd die." And sometimes its suggestion was more direct. Linda was afraid that, as her husband suggested, she was losing her mind. Either that, or her husband was truly involved with dark and brutal forces beyond the limits of human sanity.