Four Past Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t like the silence of the plane. It made perfect sense to her that most of the people would be asleep, and that the ones who were awake would be keeping as quiet as possible out of consideration for the rest, but she still didn’t like it. An animal, one with extremely sharp teeth and claws, awakened and started to snarl inside of her head. She knew the name of that animal; it was panic, and if she didn’t control it fast, she might do something which would embarrass both her and Aunt Vicky.
    When I can see, when the doctors in Boston fix my eyes, I won’t have to go through stupid stuff like this.
    This was undoubtedly true, but it was absolutely no help to her right now.
    Dinah suddenly remembered that, after they sat down, Aunt Vicky had taken her hand, folded all the fingers but the pointer under, and then guided that one finger to the side of her seat. The controls were there—only a few of them, simple, easy to remember. There were two little wheels you could use once you put on the headphones—one switched around to the different audio channels; the other controlled the volume. The small rectangular switch controlled the light over her seat. You won’t need that one, Aunt Vicky said with a smile in her voice. At least, not yet. The last one was a square button—when you pushed that one, a flight attendant came.
    Dinah’s finger touched this button now, and skated over its slightly convex surface.
    Do you really want to do this? she asked herself, and the answer came back at once. Yeah, I do.
    She pushed the button and heard the soft chime. Then she waited.
    No one came.
    There was only the soft, seemingly eternal whisper of the jet engines. No one spoke. No one laughed (Guess that movie isn’t as funny as Aunt Vicky thought it would be, Dinah thought). No one coughed. The seat beside her, Aunt Vicky’s seat, was still empty, and no flight attendant bent over her in a comforting little envelope of perfume and shampoo and faint smells of make-up to ask Dinah if she could get her something—a snack, or maybe that drink of water.
    Only the steady soft drone of the jet engines.
    The panic animal was yammering louder than ever. To combat it, Dinah concentrated on focussing that radar gadget, making it into a kind of invisible cane she could jab out from her seat here in the middle of the main cabin. She was good at that; at times, when she concentrated very hard, she almost believed she could see through the eyes of others. If she thought about it hard enough, wanted to hard enough. Once she had told Miss Lee about this feeling, and Miss Lee’s response had been uncharacteristically sharp. Sight-sharing is a frequent fantasy of the blind, she’d said. Particularly of blind children. Don’t ever make the mistake of relying on that feeling, Dinah, or you’re apt to find yourself in traction after falling down a flight of stairs or stepping in front of a car.
    So she had put aside her efforts to “sight-share,” as Miss Lee had called it, and on the few occasions when the sensation stole over her again—that she was seeing the world, shadowy, wavery, but there —through her mother’s eyes or Aunt Vicky’s eyes, she had tried to get rid of it ... as a person who fears he is losing his mind will try to block out the murmur of phantom voices. But now she was afraid and so she felt for others, sensed for others, and did not find them.
    Now the terror was very large in her, the yammering of the panic animal very loud. She felt a cry building up in her throat and clamped her teeth against it. Because it would not come out as a cry, or a yell; if she let it out, it would exit her mouth as a fireball scream.
    I won’t scream, she told herself fiercely. I won’t scream and embarrass Aunt Vicky. I won’t scream and wake up all the ones who are asleep and scare all the ones who are awake and they’ll all come running and say look