Thirteen Chairs Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t—’
    And then he was blinded by bright light. A red BMW was coming at them far too quickly and on the wrong side of the road. He was thrown against the door as thetaxi swerved violently. He felt the bump and lurch of it leaving the road, but they did not slow down. He was pressed back into his seat as the car sped over a short patch of rough earth and on into the woodland.
    ‘Oh God!’
    Something was happening to the driver’s skin. The scratches and scars on his hands and neck were opening up to weep tears of blood.
    The car swerved through the trees, branches crashing against the roof and windscreen.
    The driver’s hands were clamped tight on the steering wheel, his body hunched in concentration as he steered them, at terrifying speed, deeper into the wood. Lines of blood were extending back from his growing scars.
    When, at last, the driver turned his head, he recognized Korbin’s face at once, even through its mask of blood.
    The wood was denser now. They were racing straight toward a sturdy and immovable tree trunk. There was no way round it, and they were travelling absurdly fast.
    He threw his arms pointlessly up in front of his face, but through the gap between them he could still see the tree trunk growing in an instant to fill the full extent of the headlights’ glow, and the driver’s face bloodied, decayed and distorted, grinning back at him in the instant before his annihilation.
    Time stopped. The snowflakes hung in the air. Hecould see the pattern of the bark on the tree, a trailing thread from his coat sleeve catching the light from the dashboard, the unholy leering smile of the driver.
    There was a scream forming in his lungs and it would never be released.
    ‘
You have reached your final destination.
’

 
    M r Harlow’s head is slightly bowed over his notepad, and he remains hunched and still for a moment. Then he taps a finger lightly, once, on the open page, as if placing a final full stop, and closes the pad. Only then does he half raise his eyes to look for a reaction. The others gently nod their approval.
    ‘Thank you,’ says the pale man, with a slow small bow of the head.
    Jack closes his eyes and shakes his head, as he tries to dislodge from it the images that the story has put there: not only those that the story described, but also the ones that Jack has imagined for the moments after the end. He doesn’t want them in there.
    ‘Thank you, Mr Osterley,’ says Mr Harlow quietly. Then, after a pause, he draws in a modest breath and blows out his candle. He allows himself a weak smile as he pushes his chair back from the table, away from the light, and leans back, happy to retire into darkness.
    ‘Yes. Thank you, Mister Harlow,’ says Piotr the giant. His impressively bushy beard quivers with glee as he speaks in a heavy accent that Jack can’t quite place. ‘Is very good tale! Is magnificent. It give me the geesebump, is so scary! And I am bravest man from my village. I do not scare so easy! Oh no! Not on my nelly!’
    ‘Thank you, Piotr,’ says Mr Osterley calmly and quietly. ‘Your enthusiasm has been noted.’ There seems to be no reproach in his voice, but still the big man falls
instantly silent, like an over-excited schoolboy who’s been told off.
    ‘I just like story,’ he mumbles, hunched over now, as if trying to compress his immense frame into a smaller shape.
    ‘Oooh, and quite right too,’ says a woman’s voice. Jack looks over. She is quite small, this woman, and enormously untidy. Everything about her is untidy: her clothes, her hair, even her skin somehow seems to be the wrong size for her. She looks like a baby bird with scruffy explosions of tangled hair that set off in a variety of directions from her head, like patches of newly sprouting feathers. ‘It was a smashing story. Well done, Mr H,’ she says. Her head jerks as she speaks, her eyes swivelling madly to maintain a fix on whoever she’s looking at. She reminds Jack of his great-aunt