Dean Koontz: The Mask

across 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 seemed

to be at work in the office, flexing their occult muscles, knocking things off the walls, briefly taking up residence in a body composed only of leaves and rumpled sheets of newsprint.

That was a crazy idea, not at all the sort of thing she would ordinarily think of. She was surprised and disconcerted by a thrill of superstitious fear that coursed through her.

Lightning flared again. And again.

Wincing at the painfully sharp sound, wondering if lightning could get into a room through an open window, she put her arms over her head, for what little protection they provided.

Her heart was pounding, and her mouth was dry.

She thought about Paul, and her heartbeat grew even more frantic. He was over by the windows, on the far side of the desk, out of sight, under some of the maple tree’s branches. She didn’t think he was dead. He hadn’t been directly in the path of the tree. O’Brian might be dead, yes, depending on how that small branch had struck his head, depending on whether he had been lucky or not, because maybe a pointed twig had been driven deep into his eye and his brain when his glasses had been knocked off, but Paul was surely alive. Surely. Nevertheless, he could be seriously injured, bleeding.

Carol started to push herself up onto her hands and knees, anxious to find Paul and give him any first aid he might need. But another bolt of blinding, ear shattering lightning spent itself just outside the building, and fear turned her muscles into wet rags. She didn’t even have the strength to crawl, and she was infuriated by her weakness, for she had always

been proud of her strength, determination, and unflagging willpower. Cursing herself, she slumped back to the floor.

Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

That incredible thought struck her with the same cold, hard force as had the forewarning of the window's implosion, which had come to her an instant before the impossible barrage of lightning had blasted into the courtyard.

Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

No. That was ridiculous. The storm, the lightning — they were nothing more than acts of nature. They hadn’t been directed against Mr. O’Brian just because he was going to help them adopt a child.

Absurd.

Oh, yeah? she thought as the deafening thunder and the unholy light of the storm filled the room. Acts of nature, huh? When have you ever seen lightning like this before?

She hugged the floor, shaking, cold, more afraid than she had been since she was a little girl. She tried to tell herself that it was only the lightning that she was afraid of, for that was very much a legitimate, rational fear, but she knew she was lying. It was not just the lightning that terrified her. In fact, that was the least of it. There was something else, something she couldn’t identify, something formless and nameless in the room, and the very presence of it, whatever the hell it was, pushed a panic button deep inside her, on a sub-subconscious, primitive level; this fear was gut-deep, instinctive.

A dervish of windblown leaves and papers whirled across the floor, directly toward her. It was a big one:

a column about two feet in diameter, five or six feet

high, composed of a hundred or more pieces of this and that. It stopped very near her, writhing, churning, hissing, changing shape, glimmering silver-dark in the flashing storm light, and she felt threatened by it. As she stared up at the whirlwind, she had the mad notion that it was staring down at her. After a moment it moved off to the left a few feet, then returned, paused in front of her again, hesitated, then scurried busily to the right, but came back once more, looming above her as if it were trying to make up its mind whether or not to pounce and tear her to shreds and sweep her up along with the leaves, newspaper pages, envelopes, and other flotsam by which it defined itself.

It’s nothing more than a whirlwind of lifeless junk! she told herself angrily.

The wind-shaped phantom moved away from her.

See? she told herself scornfully. Just lifeless junk. What’s wrong with me? Am I losing my mind?

She recalled the old axiom that was supposed to provide comfort in moments like this: If you think you’re going mad, then you must be completely sane, for a lunatic never has doubts about his sanity. As a psychiatrist, she knew that hoary bit of wisdom was an oversimplification of complex psychological principles, but in essence it was true. So she must be sane.

Nevertheless, that frightening, irrational thought came to her again, unbidden, unwanted: Something’s trying to stop us from adopting a baby.

If the maelstrom in which she lay was not an act of nature, then what was it? Was she to believe that the lightning had been sent with the conscious intent of transforming Mr. O’Brian into a smoking heap of charred flesh? That was a fruitcake notion, for sure.

Who could use lightning as if it were a pistol? God? God wasn’t sitting up in Heaven, aiming at Mr. O’Brian, popping away at him with lightning bolts, just to screw up the adoption process for Carol and Paul Tracy. The Devil? Blasting away at poor Mr. O’Brian from the depths of Hell? That was a looney idea. Jesus!

She wasn’t even sure she believed in God, but she knew she definitely did not believe in the Devil.

Another window imploded, showering glass over her.

Then the lightning stopped.

The thunder decreased from a roar to a rumble, fading like the noise of a passing freight train.

There was a stench of ozone.

The wind was still pouring in through the broken windows, but apparently with less force than it had exerted a moment ago, for the whirling columns of leaves and papers subsided to the floor, where they lay in piles, fluttering and quivering as if exhausted.

Something…

Something…

Something’s trying to stop us from— She clamped off that unwanted thought as though

it were a spurting artery. She was an educated woman, dammit. She prided herself on her levelheadedness and common sense. She couldn’t permit herself to succumb to these disturbing, uncharacteristic, utterly superstitious fears.