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Stephen King
Scene of the film 'The
Langoliers'
About three hours after Flight 29 took off, a little girl named Dinah Bellman
woke up and asked her Aunt Vicky if she could have a drink of water.
Aunt Vicky did not answer, so Dinah asked again. When there was still no answer,
she reached over to touch her aunt's shoulder, but she was already quite sure
that her hand would touch nothing but the back of an empty seat, and that was
what happened. Dr Feldman had told her that children who were blind from birth
often developed a high sensitivity - almost a kind of radar - to the presence or
absence of people in their immediate area, but Dinah hadn't really needed the
information. She knew it was true. It didn't always work, but it usually did ...
especially if the person in question was her Sighted Person.
Well, she's gone to the bathroom and she'll be right back, Dinah thought, but
she felt an odd, vague disquiet settle over her just the same. She hadn't come
awake all at once; it had been a slow process, like a diver kicking her way to
the surface of a lake. If Aunt Vicky, who had the window seat, had brushed by
her to get to the aisle in the last two or three minutes, Dinah should have felt
her.
So she went sooner, she told herself. Probably she had to Number Two - It's
really no big deal, Dinah. Or maybe she stopped to talk with somebody on her way
back.
Except Dinah couldn't hear anyone talking in the big airplane's main cabin; only
the steady soft drone of the jet engines. Her feeling of disquiet grew.
The voice of Miss Lee, her therapist (except Dinah always thought of her as her
blind teacher), spoke up in her head: You mustn't be afraid to be afraid, Dinah
- all children are afraid from time to time, especially in situations that are
new to them. That goes double for children who are blind. Believe me, I know.
And Dinah did believe her, because, like Dinah herself, Miss Lee had been blind
since birth. Don't give up your fear ... but don't give in to it, either. Sit
still and try to reason things out. You'll be surprised how often it works.
Especially in situations that are new to them.
Well, that certainly fits; this was the first time Dinah had ever flown in
anything, let alone coast to coast in a huge transcontinental jetliner.
Try to reason it out.
Well, she had awakened in a strange place to find her Sighted Person gone. Of
course that was scary, even if you knew the absence was only temporary - after
all, your Sighted Person couldn't very well decide to pop off to the nearest
Taco Bell because she had the munchies when she was shut up in an airplane
flying at 37,000 feet. As for the strange silence in the cabin ... well, this
was the red-eye, after all. The other passengers were probably sleeping.
All of them? the worried part of her mind asked doubtfully. ALL of them are
sleeping? Can that be?
Then the answer came to her: the movie. The ones who were awake were watching
the in-flight movie. Of course.
A sense of almost palpable relief swept over her. Aunt Vicky had told her the
movie was Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, and said she
planned to watch it herself ... if she could stay awake, that was.
Dinah ran her hand lightly over her aunt's seat, feeling for her headphones, but
they weren't there. Her fingers touched a paperback book instead. One of the
romance novels Aunt Vicky liked to read, no doubt - tales of the days when men
were men and women weren't, she called them.
Dinah's fingers went a little further and happened on something else - smooth,
fine-grained leather. A moment later she felt a zipper, and a moment after that
she felt the strap.
It was Aunt Vicky's purse.
Dinah's disquiet returned. The earphones weren't on Aunt Vicky's seat, but her
purse was. All the traveller's checks, except for a twenty tucked deep into
Dinah's own purse, were in there - Dinah knew, because she had heard Mom and
Aunt Vicky discussing them before they left the house in Pasadena.
Would Aunt Vicky go off to the bathroom and leave her purse on the seat? Would
she do that when her travelling companion was not only ten, not only asleep, but
blind?
Dinah didn't think so.
Don't give up your fear ... but don't give in to it, either. Sit still and try
to reason things out.
But she didn't like that empty seat, and she 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 had 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 firebell 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 at the scared
little girl, look at the scared little blind girl.
But now that radar sense - that part of her which evaluated all sorts of vague
sensory input and which sometimes did seem to see through the eyes of others (no
matter what Miss Lee said) - was adding to her fear rather than alleviating it.
Because that sense was telling her there was nobody within its circle of
effectiveness.
Nobody at all.
*
'Would 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.
'Hello?' 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
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 man it belongs to is gone. It's a scalp. I'm holding a dead
man's scalp.
That was when Dinah Bellman opened her mouth and began to give voice to the
shrieks which pulled Brian Engle from his dream.
THE END
ϟ «The Little Blind Girl»
is an excerpt of the novella
THE LANGOLIERS
(caps 3 e 5)
by Stephen King
12.Fev.2017
Publicado por
MJA
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