The Mask (v5.0), page 1
ACCLAIMED BESTSELLERS BY
DEAN KOONTZ
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
“Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer!”
—Associated Press
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
“A master storyteller…always riveting.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
MR. MURDER
“A truly harrowing tale…superb work by a master at the top of his form.”
—Washington Post Book World
THE FUNHOUSE
“Koontz is a terrific what-if storyteller.”
—People
DRAGON TEARS
“A razor-sharp, nonstop, suspenseful story…a first-rate literary experience.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
SHADOWFIRES
“His prose mesmerizes…Koontz consistently hits the bull’s-eye.”
—Arkansas Democrat
HIDEAWAY
“Not just a thriller but a meditation on the nature of good and evil.”
—Lexington Herald-Leader
COLD FIRE
“An extraordinary piece of fiction…It will be a classic.”
—UPI
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
“Koontz is brilliant.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
“A fearsome tour of an adolescent’s psyche. Terrifying, knee-knocking suspense.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
THE BAD PLACE
“A new experience in breathless terror.”
—UPI
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
“A great storyteller.”
—New York Daily News
MIDNIGHT
“A triumph.”
—New York Times
LIGHTNING
“Brilliant…a spine-tingling tale…both challenging and entertaining.”
—Associated Press
THE MASK
“Koontz hones his fearful yarns to a gleaming edge.”
—People
WATCHERS
“A breakthrough for Koontz…his best ever.”
—Kirkus Reviews
TWILIGHT EYES
“A spine-chilling adventure…will keep you turning pages to the very end.”
—Rave Reviews
STRANGERS
“A unique spellbinder that captures the reader on the first page. Exciting, enjoyable, and an intensely satisfying read.”
—Mary Higgins Clark
PHANTOMS
“First-rate suspense, scary and stylish.”
—Los Angeles Times
WHISPERS
“Pulls out all the stops…an incredible, terrifying tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
NIGHT CHILLS
“Will send chills down your back.”
—New York Times
DARKFALL
“A fast-paced tale…one of the scariest chase scenes ever.”
—Houston Post
SHATTERED
“A chilling tale…sleek as a bullet.”
—Publishers Weekly
THE VISION
“Spine-tingling—it gives you an almost lethal shock.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
THE FACE OF FEAR
“Real suspense…tension upon tension.”
—New York Times
Berkley titles by Dean Koontz
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
THE FUNHOUSE
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
DARKFALL
SHATTERED
THE VISION
THE FACE OF FEAR
DEAN
KOONTZ
THE MASK
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
The Mask was previously published under the pseudonym Owen West.
THE MASK
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Nkui, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Jove edition / November 1981
Berkley edition / December 1988
Copyright © 1981 by Nkui, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
Visit our website at www.penguin.com
ISBN: 978-1-101-57928-2
BERKLEY®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is dedicated to
Willo and Dave Roberts
and to
Carol and Don McQuinn
who have no faults—
exceptthat they live
too far away from us
A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that
she died so young.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Lenore”
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”
Extreme terror gives us back the
gestures of our child hood.
—Chazal
THE MASK
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part Two
7
8
9
10
11
12
Prologue
LAURA was in the cellar, doing some spring cleaning and hating every minute of it. She didn’t dislike the work itself; she was by nature an industrious girl who was happiest when she had chores to do. But she was afraid of the cellar.
For one thing, the place was gloomy. The four narrow windows, set high in the walls, were hardly larger than embrasures, and the dust-filmed panes of glass permitted only weak, chalky light to enter. Even brightened by a pair of lamps, the big room held on tenaciously to its shadows, unwilling to be completely disrobed. The flickering amber light from the lamps revealed damp stone walls and a hulking, coal-fired furnace that was cold and unused on this fine, warm May afternoon. On a series of long shelves, row upon row of quart jars reflected splinters of light, but their contents—home-canned fruit and vegetables that had been stored here for the past nine months—remained unilluminated. The corners of the room were all dark, and the low, open-beamed ceiling was hung with shadows like long banners of funeral crepe.
The cellar always had a mildly unpleasant odor, too. It was musty, rather like a limestone cave. In the spring and summer, when the humidity was high, a mottled gray-green fungus some times sprang up in the corners, a disgusting scablike growth, fringed with hundreds of tiny white spores that resembled insect eggs; that grotesquery added its own thin but nonetheless displeasing fragrance to the cellar air.
However, neither the gloom nor the offending odors nor the fungus gave rise to Laura’s fears; it was the spiders that frightened her. Spiders ruled the cellar. Some of them were small, brown, and quick; others were charcoal gray, a bit bigger than the brown ones, but just as fast-moving as their smaller cousins. There were even a few blue-black giants as large as Laura’s thumb.
As she wiped dust and a few cobwebs from the jars of home-canned food, always alert for the scuttling movement of spiders, Laura grew increasingly angry with her mother. Mama could have let her clean some of the upstairs rooms instead of the cellar; Aunt Rachael or Mama herself could have cleaned down here because neither of them worried about spiders. But Mama knew that Laura was afraid of the cellar, and Mama was in the mood to punish her. It was a terrible mood, black as thunderclouds. Laura had seen it before. Too often. It descended over Mama more frequently with every passing year, and when she was in its thrall, she was a different person from the smiling, always singing woman that she was at other times. Although Laura loved her mother, she did not love the short-tempered, mean-spirited woman that her mother sometimes became. She did not love the hateful woman who had sent her down into the cellar with the spiders.
Dusting the jars of peaches, pears, tomatoes, beets, beans, and pickled squash, nervously awaiting the inevitable appearance of a spider, wishing she were grown up and married and on her own, Laura was startled by a sudden, sharp sound that pierced the dank basement air. At first it was like the distant, forlorn wail of an exotic bird, but it quickly became louder and more urgent. She stopped dusting, looked up at the dark ceiling, and listened closely to the eerie ululation that came from overhead. After a moment she realized that it was her Aunt Rachael’s voice and that it was a cry of alarm.
Upstairs, something fell over with a crash. It sounded like shattering porcelain. It must have been Mama’s peacock vase. If it was the vase, Mama would be in an extremely foul mood for the rest of the week.
Laura stepped away from the shelves of canned goods and started toward the cellar stairs, but she stopped abruptly when she heard Mama scream. It wasn’t a scream of rage over the loss of the vase; there was a note of terror in it.
Footsteps thumped across the living room floor, toward the front door of the house. The screen door opened with the familiar singing of its long spring, then banged shut. Rachael was outside now, shouting, her words unintelligible but still conveying her fear.
Laura smelled smoke.
She hurried to the stairs and saw pale tongues of fire at the top. The smoke wasn’t heavy, but it had an acrid stench.
Heart pounding, Laura climbed to the uppermost step. Waves of heat forced her to squint, but she could see into the kitchen. The wall of fire wasn’t solid. There was a narrow route of escape, a corridor of cool safety; the door to the back porch was at the far end.
She lifted her long skirt and pulled it tight across her hips and thighs, bunching it in both hands to prevent it from trailing in the flames. She moved gingerly onto the fire-ringed landing, which creaked under her, but before she reached the open door, the kitchen exploded in yellow-blue flames that quickly turned orange. From wall to wall, floor to ceiling, the room was an inferno; there was no longer a path through the blaze. Crazily, the fire-choked doorway brought to Laura’s mind the image of a glittering eye in a jack-o’-lantern.
In the kitchen, windows exploded, and the fire eddied in the sudden change of drafts, pushing through the cellar door, lashing at Laura. Startled, she stumbled backwards, off the landing. She fell. Turning, she grabbed at the railing, missed it, and stumbled down the short flight, cracking her head against the stone floor at the bottom.
She held on to consciousness as if it were a raft and she a drowning swimmer. When she was certain she wouldn’t faint, she got to her feet. Pain coruscated across the top of her head. She raised one hand to her brow and found a trickle of blood, a small abrasion. She was dizzy and confused.
During the minute or less that she had been incapacitated, fire had spread across the entire landing at the head of the stairs. It was moving down onto the first step.
She couldn’t keep her eyes focused. The rising stairs and the descending fire repeatedly blurred together in an orange haze.
Ghosts of smoke drifted down the stairwell. They reached out with long, insubstantial arms, as if to embrace Laura.
She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Help!”
No one answered.
“Somebody help me! I’m in the cellar!”
Silence.
“Aunt Rachael! Mama! For God’s sake, somebody help me!”
The only response was the steadily increasing roar of the fire.
Laura had never felt so alone before. In spite of the tides of heat washing over her, she felt cold inside. She shivered.
Although her head throbbed worse than ever, and although the abrasion above her right eye continued to weep blood, at least she was having less trouble keeping her eyes focused. The problem was that she didn’t like what she saw.
She stood statue-still, transfixed by the deadly spectacle of the flames. Fire crawled lizardlike down the steps, one by one, and it slithered up the rail posts, then crept down the rail with a crisp, chuckling sound.
The smoke reached the bottom of the steps and enfolded her. She coughed, and the coughing aggravated the pain in her head, making her dizzy again. She put one hand against the wall to steady herself.
Everything was happening too fast. The house was going up like a pile of well-seasoned tinder.
I’m going to die here.
That thought jolted her out of her trance. She wasn’t ready to die. She was far too young. There was so much of life ahead of her, so many wonderful things to do, things she had long dreamed about doing. It wasn’t fair. She refused to die.
She gagged on the smoke. Turning away from the burning stairs, she put a hand over her nose and mouth, but that didn’t help much.
She saw flames at the far end of the cellar, and for an instant she thought she was already encircled and that all hope of rescue was gone. She cried out in despair, but then she realized the blaze hadn’t found its way into the other end of the room after all. The two points of fire that she was seeing were only the twin oil lamps that had provided her with light. The flames in the lamps were harmless, safely ensconced in tall glass chimneys.
She coughed violently again, and the pain in her head settled down behind her eyes. She found it difficult to concentrate. Her thoughts were like droplets of quicksilver, sliding over one another and changing shape so often and so fast that she couldn’t make sense of some of them.
She prayed silently and fervently.
Directly overhead, the ceiling groaned and appeared to shift. For a few seconds she held her breath, clenched her teeth, and stood with her hands fisted at her sides, waiting to be buried in rubble. But then she saw that the ceiling wasn’t going to collapse—not yet.
Trembling, whimpering softly, she scurried to the nearest of the four high-set windows. It was rectangular, approximately eight inches from sill to top and eighteen inches from sash to sash, much too small to provide her with a means of escape. The other three windows were identical to the first; there was no use even taking a closer look at them.
The air was becoming less breathable by the second. Laura’s sinuses ached and burned. Her mouth was filled with the revulsive, bitter taste of the smoke.
For too long she stood beneath the window, staring up in frustration and confusion at the meager, milky light that came through the dirty pane and through the haze of smoke that pressed tightly against the glass. She had the feeling she was overlooking an obvious and convenient escape hatch; in fact she was sure of it. There was a way out, and it had nothing to do with the windows, but she couldn’t get her mind off the windows; she was fixated on them, just as she had been fixated on the sight of the advancing flames a couple of minutes ago. The pain in her head and behind her eyes throbbed more powerfully than ever, and with each agonizing pulsation, her thoughts became more muddled.
I’m going to die here.
A frightening vision flashed through her mind. She saw herself afire, her dark hair turned blond by the flames that consumed it and standing straight up on her head as if it were not hair but the wick of a candle. In the vision, she saw her face melting like wax, bubbling and steaming and liquefying, the features flowing together until her face no longer resembled that of a human being, until it was the hideously twisted countenance of a leering demon with empty eye sockets.
