The Mask Read Online Free PDF

herself. What in the name of God am I so scared of?
    She struggled against the unreasonable terror that had locked her muscles and joints. She started to get up from the chair, and that was when it happened.
    A murderous barrage of lightning crashed like a volley of mortar fire, seven or eight tremendous bolts, perhaps more than that—she didn’t count them, couldn’t count them—one right after the other, withouta significant pause between them, each fierce boom overlapping the ones before and after it, yet each clearly louder than its predecessors, so loud that they made her teeth and bones vibrate, each bolt smashing down discernibly closer to the building than had the bolt before it, closer to the seven-foot-high windows—the gleaming, flashing, rattling, now-black, now-milky, now-shining, now-blank, now-silvery, now-coppery windows….
    The sharp bursts of purple-white light produced a series of jerky, stroboscopic images that were burned forever into Carol’s memory: Paul and O’Brian standing there, silhouetted against the natural fireworks, looking small and vulnerable; outside, the rain descending in an illusion of hesitation; wind-lashed trees heaving in a strobe-choppy rage; lightning blasting into one of those trees, a big maple, and then an ominous dark shape rising from the midst of the explosion, a torpedolike thing, spinning straight toward the center window (all of this transpiring in only a second or two, but given a queer, slow-motion quality by the flickering lightning and, after a moment, by the overhead electric light as well, which began to flicker, too); O’Brian throwing one arm up in front of his face in what appeared to be half a dozen disconnected movements; Paul turning toward O’Brian and reaching for him, both men like figures on a motion picture screen when the film slips and stutters in the projector; O’Brian lurching sideways; Paul seizing him by a coat sleeve, pulling him back and down toward safety (only a fraction of a second after the lightning splintered the maple); a huge tree limb bursting through the center window even as Paul was pulling O’Brian out of the way; one leafy branch sweepingacross O’Brian’s head, ripping his glasses loose, tossing them into the air—his face, Carol thought, his
eyes
!—and then Paul and O’Brian falling to the floor, out of sight; the enormous limb of the shattered maple slamming down on top of O’Brian’s desk in a spray of water, glass, broken mullions, and smoking chips of bark; the legs of the desk cracking and collapsing under the brutal impact of the ruined tree.
    Carol found herself on the floor, beside her overturned chair. She couldn’t remember falling.
    The fluorescent tubes blinked off, stayed off.
    She was lying on her stomach, one cheek pressed to the floor, staring in shock at the shards of glass and the torn maple leaves that littered the carpet. As lightning continued to stab down from the turbulent sky, wind roared through the missing window and stirred some of the loose leaves into a frantic, dervishlike dance; accompanied by the cacophonous music of the storm, they whirled and capered across the office, toward a row of green filing cabinets. A calendar flapped off the wall and swooped around on wings of January and December, darting and soaring and kiting as if it were a bat. Two paintings rattled on their wire hangers, trying to tear themselves free. Papers were everywhere—stationery, forms, small sheets from a note pad, bulletins, a newspaper—all rustling and skipping this way and that, floating up, diving down, bunching together and slithering along the floor with a snakelike hiss.
    Carol had the eerie feeling that all of the movement in the room was not solely the result of the wind, that some of it was caused by a…
presence.
Something threatening. A bad poltergeist. Demonic spirits seemedto be at work in the office, flexing their occult muscles, knocking things off the walls, briefly taking up residence