Again, nothing happened. She felt no fresh air rush into her lungs, felt no relief from the terror that gripped her.
Panic closed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to die.
She tried to cry out again, tried to scream for help, but once more nothing happened.
Words formed in her mind, but she couldn’t feel her tongue move to shape the sounds, feel her mouth open to emit the words.
Once again she tried to breathe, and once again felt nothing as her body refused to respond to the orders her mind sent forth.
Paralyzed.
She was paralyzed!
But how had it happened?
Her mind reeled as she tried to follow a logical line of thought through the panic that was pouring at her from every direction, rolling in on her from the darkness, pressing her down.
Dying!
That’s what was happening to her!
She was alone, and she was dying, and nobody knew about it and nobody could help her.
She tried to open her eyes, sure now that whatever was happening to her could only be a nightmare and that when she opened her eyes and let in the light, the horrible darkness around her would lift and she would once again be a part of the world.
She blinked.
Except that yet again nothing happened. She blinked again, trying to feel the faint sensation of her eyelids reacting to the command from her mind.
Nothing!
It felt as if her eyes no longer existed!
Now she tried to move her body, tried to roll over, to shake herself loose from the unseen, unfelt bonds that held her in their grip.
Her body failed to respond.
Like her eyes, it no longer seemed to be there at all!
Another scream welled up out of the black abyss, another scream that echoed only in her mind, quickly dying away in the strange blackness around her.
Her panic threatened to overwhelm her now, but just before she succumbed to it, just an instant before it would have shattered her terrified mind, she staved it off once more, certain that if she gave in to the panic, she would never emerge from it again.
The panic was like a living thing now, lurking around her, a black, unseeable Hell filled with unknowable terrors that wanted to consume her, wanted to envelop her, drowning her forever in her own fear.
The panic was like a precipice, a towering cliff upon whose edge she teetered, part of her being drawn downward, wanting to give herself to the long final plunge, while another part of her insisted that she back away, that she retreat from the brink, pull back before it was too late.
Slowly, imperceptibly, she drove the fear back.
There was a reason for what was happening to her, an explanation for the terrible feeling of being mired alone in boundless darkness.
She wanted to cry out for her mother, to scream in the night for her mother to help her, but already she knew it would do no good.
Her mother wouldn’t hear her, for she couldn’t even hear herself.
And her mother was home. Home in Los Angeles. While she was at the Academy. But she’d been going home.
She’d told Hildie she wanted to go home, and Hildie had taken her to call her parents.
But she hadn’t talked to her parents. She’d been in Hildie’s office, and …
She strained her memory, searching for an image of what had happened.
An image came to her.
A glass of water.
Hildie had handed her a glass of water, and she’d drunk it down. And then everything was blank, until she’d awakened in the horrible blackness.
Drugged.
Hildie must have put something in the water.
What?
She began to think about it. A drug. Some kind of medicine. What kind?
Narcotics. Sleeping pills.
As she enunciated the words in her mind, new images took shape. The blackness was still there, surrounding her, but now lists of words began to formulate in her mind, almost as if she was visualizing them.
She concentrated, and the words came into sharper focus.
Thorazine.
Darvon.
Halcion.
Bercodan.
The words popped at her out of the darkness, words she hadn’t even known she knew. And yet she not only recognized the words, but knew the definitions of all of them.
They were drugs. Painkillers, and sleeping pills, and medicines to tranquilize you. As they flicked through her mind, she realized that she knew exactly what each of them was for and what each would do to someone, depending on how much was taken.
The sensation was strange. It was almost as if she were reading from some kind of book that existed only in her mind.
Like the way she solved complex mathematical problems by picturing the problem in her head, then working it out as if she held a pencil in her hand, the image never fading, her mind never releasing the proper position of a number until she’d found the solution.
Or when she took a history test, and answered the questions by summoning up an image of the text she’d studied, mentally flipping through the pages until she found the right one, then simply reading the answer off it.
The simple process of thinking seemed to make the panic recede a little, and Amy began focusing her mind on the problem of what had happened to her.
The darkness was still there, surrounding her, but she found she could force it back by imagining things, seeing things in her mind’s eye that she could no longer see with the eyes she had been born with.
She pictured a beach, a broad expanse of sand, with brilliant sunlight pouring down from a perfectly clear blue sky, and gentle surf lapping at the shore.
She put herself into the picture and imagined her feet buried in the sand, feeling its warmth between her toes.
Birds.
There should be seabirds in the image. But what kind?
Instantly, unbidden, images of birds came into her head, birds she’d never seen before, even in books. And yet they were there, all of them, and as she gazed first at one and then at another, information about each of them appeared in her mind.
Their size, their coloring, the parts of the world they were native to. Even images of their nests, complete with eggs.
But where was it coming from? It was almost as if—
Her mind froze as a concept suddenly took form, a concept she rejected in the instant it occurred to her.
And yet …
She remembered a computer she’d seen, not more than a month ago. A CD-ROM display, in which an entire encyclopedia had been put onto one disk, all of it digitized and cross-referenced, so all you had to do was bring up an index on the screen, then begin clicking a mouse, moving deeper and deeper into the volumes of information,
