The Mask

curtains of mist and gray rain that wavered and whipped and billowed beyond the glass.
    The sirens swelled.
    “More than one truck,” O’Brian said.
    The fire engines were right outside the office for a moment—at least two trucks, perhaps three—and then they passed, heading into the next block.
    O’Brian pushed up from his chair and stepped to the window.
    As the first sirens dwindled just a little, new ones shrieked in the street behind them.
    “Must be serious,” Paul said. “Sounds as if at least two engine companies are responding.”
    “I see smoke,” O’Brian said.
    Paul rose from his chair and moved toward the windows to get a better look.
    Something’s wrong here.
    That thought snapped into Carol’s mind, startling her as if a whip had cracked in front of her face. A powerful, inexplicable current of panic surged through her, electrified her. She gripped the arms of her chair so tightly that one of her fingernails broke.
    Something… is… wrong… very wrong…
    Suddenly the air was oppressively heavy—hot, thick, as if it were not air at all but a bitter and poisonous gas of some kind. She tried to breathe, couldn’t. There was an invisible, crushing weight on her chest.
    Get away from the windows!
    She tried to shout that warning, but panic had short-circuited her voice. Paul and O’Brian were at different windows, but they both had their backs to her, so that neither of them could see she had been gripped by sudden, immobilizing fear.
    Fear of what? she demanded of herself. What in the name of God am l 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, without a 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 torpedo like 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 sweeping 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