Four Past Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

fire in her Atlantic Avenue condominium near the waterfront. But the sound was still there.
    It was a little girl, screaming shrilly.

5
    â€œWould somebody speak to me, please?” Dinah Bellman asked in a low, clear voice. “I’m sorry, but my aunt is gone and I’m blind.”
    No one answered her. Forty rows and two partitions forward, Captain Brian Engle was dreaming that his navigator was weeping and eating a Danish pastry.
    There was only the continuing drone of the jet engines.
    The panic overshadowed her mind again, and Dinah did the only thing she could think of to stave it off: she unbuckled her seatbelt, stood up, and edged into the aisle.
    â€œHello?” she asked in a louder voice. “Hello, anybody !”
    There was still no answer. Dinah began to cry. She held onto herself grimly, nonetheless, and began walking forward slowly along the portside aisle. Keep count, though, part of her mind warned frantically. Keep count of how many rows you pass, or you’ll get lost and never find your way back again.
    She stopped at the row of portside seats just ahead of the row in which she and Aunt Vicky had been sitting and bent, arms outstretched, fingers splayed. She was steeled to touch the sleeping face of the man sitting there. She knew there was a man here, because Aunt Vicky had spoken to him only a minute or so before the plane took off. When he spoke back to her, his voice had come from the seat directly in front of Dinah’s own. She knew that; marking the locations of voices was part of her life, an ordinary fact of existence like breathing. The sleeping man would jump when her outstretched fingers touched him, but Dinah was beyond caring.
    Except the seat was empty.
    Completely empty.
    Dinah straightened up again, her cheeks wet, her head pounding with fright. They couldn’t be in the bathroom together, could they? Of course not.
    Perhaps there were two bathrooms. In a plane this big there must be two bathrooms.
    Except that didn’t matter, either.
    Aunt Vicky wouldn’t have left her purse, no matter what. Dinah was sure of it.
    She began to walk slowly forward, stopping at each row of seats, reaching into the two closest her first on the port side and then on the starboard.
    She felt another purse in one, what felt like a briefcase in another, a pen and a pad of paper in a third. In two others she felt headphones. She touched something sticky on an earpiece of the second set. She rubbed her fingers together, then grimaced and wiped them on the mat which covered the headrest of the seat. That had been earwax. She was sure of it. It had its own unmistakable, yucky texture.
    Dinah Bellman felt her slow way up the aisle, no longer taking pains to be gentle in her investigations. It didn’t matter. She poked no eye, pinched no cheek, pulled no hair.
    Every seat she investigated was empty.
    This can’t be, she thought wildly. It just can’t be! They were all around us when we got on! I heard them! I felt them! I smelled them! Where have they all gone?
    She didn’t know, but they were gone: she was becoming steadily more sure of that.
    At some point, while she slept, her aunt and everyone else on Flight 29 had disappeared.
    No! The rational part of her mind clamored in the voice of Miss Lee. No, that’s impossible, Dinah! If everyone’s gone, who is flying the plane?
    She began to move forward faster now, hands gripping the edges of the seats, her blind eyes wide open behind her dark glasses, the hem of her pink travelling dress fluttering. She had lost count, but in her greater distress over the continuing silence, this did not matter much to her.
    She stopped again, and reached her groping hands into the seat on her right. This time she touched hair ... but its location was all wrong. The hair was on the seat—how could that be?
    Her hands closed around it ... and lifted it. Realization, sudden and terrible, came to her.
    It’s hair, but the