The Mask
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EAN
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OONTZ
T
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ARKNESS
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EY TO
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IDNIGHT
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R
. M
URDER
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IDEAWAY
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IRE
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OICE OF THE
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IGHT
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IDNIGHT
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IGHTNING
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ASK
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ATCHERS
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IGHT
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ARKFALL
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ISION
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ACE OF
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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
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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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.
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Visit our website at www.penguin.com
ISBN: 978-1-101-57928-2
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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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
Prologue
L
AURA
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 sometimes 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.
