Poltergeist Read Online Free PDF Page A

direction or anger. The wind, too, seemed lower; the lightning was now so far away it barely flickered on the horizon, barely disturbed the static on the set. The thunder was gone altogether.
    Four bodies slept soundly in the big California King—Steve, Robbie, Carol Anne, Diane. They looked chalky in the glow of the picture tube, looked like ghosts. In the rest of the house, all was still.
    Suddenly Carol Anne opened her eyes. She sat up, crawled to the end of the bed, climbed down to the floor, walked up to the television.
    Shadow-images moved in the snow, shaped in the static.
    “Hello,” she rasped.
    Muffled whispers crept out of the screen. A voice. No, many voices, moving as the shapes moved. Semiforms with semivoices, calling, moving, shifting.
    “I can’t hear you,” Carol Anne answered in wonder. She wasn’t afraid, only curious, or just a little amazed. “Are you there?”
    The whispers grew. Tiny flashes of light sparked across the screen now, like microscopic photon explosions, crystals of light. Carol Anne reached out her hand.
    A hand reached back.
    A hand of smoke, formless, without substance, exuded from the television screen toward the little girl. Without form, yet somehow handlike, with fingers that curled upward, then down, momentarily encompassing her head—palpating her, testing, tasting the softness of her hair, her delicate neck.
    Then it rose, this handlessness rose above the girl and stretched farther into the room, stretched its pulsing tendrils along an ectoplasmic arm that grew longer every second, remaining attached to the screen—stretched until the hand hovered above the bed, above the peaceful sleepers.
    Slowly, deliberately, it lowered itself to the bed, to each figure in turn. First it settled over the boy, pushed a cold finger in the slight depression of his chest, stroked his cheek, muffled his whimpers.
    Then Diane. It crawled along her skin, rolled her over, pressed her down, while another finger wrapped around Steve’s leg, squeezed, grew.
    Presently it rose again, hung above them in the air once more. Carol Anne watched in fascination. Its fingers never ceased moving, probing. Finally, it reached the wall above the bed and stopped, its greenish, tentacular arm extending the length of the room. It grew brighter, it was engorged with light . . . when all at once it shot out of the set and into the wall with a deafening BAM.
    Everyone jumped awake, Robbie immediately crying. The room suddenly began shaking, the window cracked, pictures dropped from the walls, light bulbs exploded. The ceramic figurines flew across the room, shattered against the dresser.
    And then, just as suddenly, everything stopped. The room fell into an unnatural hush. Outside, the storm passed away utterly.
    For a long moment, no one—nothing—moved.
    And then Carol Anne whispered: “They’re here.”

CHAPTER 2
    Monday morning, Steve began clearing away the debris from the side of the house—the branch that the lightning had sheared off the oak, parts of torn-up bushes, shingles, soggy papers. It was a mess.
    Beyond him in the back, a bulldozer made deep cuts in the earth, sloping at one end, squared-off at the other: groundwork on the swimming pool. Inside, he could hear Diane bustling around the kitchen, clattering dishes, making breakfast. Just another typical insane Monday morning.
    Ben Tuthill walked across the lawn from his house in the rear, hands in his pockets. Tuthill was dumb, bald, and puffy. Steve couldn’t stand him; still, he felt obliged at least to run through the neighborly forms. He was always willing to give the asshole one more chance, though he was never quite sure why.
    Tuthill left his hands in his pockets as he got closer to Steve—he wasn’t about to dirty his hands helping a jerk like Freeling with any manual labor. He’d mostly just come over to gloat, and make some obscure point. Steve ignored him for a few seconds longer than was polite, to finish clearing some