Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  Jenkins had been watching Albert closely, and now he smiled. There wasn't much humor in that smile. "It's a tempting scenario," he said, "isn't it?"

  "We'll have to capture him as soon as we land," Albert said, scraping one hand feverishly up the side of his face. "You, me, Mr. Gaffney, and that British guy. He looks tough. Only ... what if the Brit's in on it, too? He could be Captain Engle's, you know, bodyguard. Just in case someone figured things out the way you did."

  Jenkins opened his mouth to reply, but Albert rushed on before he could.

  "We'll just have to put the arm on them both. Somehow." He offered Mr. Jenkins a narrow smile--an Ace Kaussner smile. Cool, tight, dangerous. The smile of a man who is faster than blue blazes, and knows it. "I may not be the world's smartest guy, Mr. Jenkins, but I'm nobody's lab rat."

  "But it doesn't stand up, you know," Jenkins said mildly.

  Albert blinked. "What?"

  "The scenario I just outlined for you. It doesn't stand up."

  "But--you said--"

  "I said if it were just the plane, I could come up with a scenario. And I did. A good one. If it was a book idea, I'll bet my agent could sell it. Unfortunately, it isn't just the plane. Denver might still have been down there, but all the lights were off if it was. I have been coordinating our route of travel with my wristwatch, and I can tell you now that it's not just Denver, either. Omaha, Des Moines--no sign of them down there in the dark, my boy. I have seen no lights at all, in fact. No farmhouses, no grain storage and shipping locations, no interstate turnpikes. Those things show up at night, you know--with the new high-intensity lighting, they show up very well, even when one is almost six miles up. The land is utterly dark. Now, I can believe that there might be a government agency unethical enough to drug us all in order to observe our reactions. Hypothetically, at least. What I cannot believe is that even The Shop could have persuaded everyone over our flight-path to turn off their lights in order to reinforce the illusion that we are all alone."

  "Well... maybe it's all a fake," Albert suggested. "Maybe we're really still on the ground and everything we can see outside the windows is, you know, projected. I saw a movie something like that once."

  Jenkins shook his head slowly, regretfully. "I'm sure it was an interesting film, but I don't believe it would work in real life. Unless our theoretical secret agency has perfected some sort of ultra-wide-screen 3-D projection, I think not. Whatever is happening is not just going on inside the plane, Albert, and that is where deduction breaks down."

  "But the pilot!" Albert said wildly. "What about him just happening to be here at the right place and time?"

  "Are you a baseball fan, Albert?"

  "Huh? No. I mean, sometimes I watch the Dodgers on TV, but not really."

  "Well, let me tell you what may be the most amazing statistic ever recorded in a game which thrives on statistics. In 1957, Ted Williams reached base on sixteen consecutive at-bats. This streak encompassed six baseball games. In 1941, Joe DiMaggio batted safely in fifty-six straight games, but the odds against what DiMaggio did pale next to the odds against Williams's accomplishment, which have been put somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion to one. Baseball fans like to say DiMaggio's streak will never be equaled. I disagree. But I'd be willing to bet that, if they're still playing baseball a thousand years from now, Williams's sixteen on-bases in a row will still stand."

  "All of which means what?"

  "It means that I believe Captain Engle's presence on board tonight is nothing more or less than an accident, like Ted Williams's sixteen consecutive on-bases. And, considering our circumstances, I'd say it's a very lucky accident indeed. If life was like a mystery novel, Albert, where coincidence is not allowed and the odds are never beaten for long, it would be a much tidier business. I've found, though, that in real life coincidence is not the exception but the rule."

  "Then what is happening?" Albert whispered.

  Jenkins uttered a long, uneasy sigh. "I'm the wrong person to ask, I'm afraid. It's too bad Larry Niven or John Varley isn't on board."

  "Who are those guys?"

  "Science-fiction writers," Jenkins said.

  3

  "I don't suppose you read science fiction, do you?" Nick Hopewell asked suddenly. Brian turned around to look at him. Nick had been sitting quietly in the navigator's seat since Brian had taken control of Flight 29, almost two hours ago now. He had listened wordlessly as Brian continued trying to reach someone--anyone--on the ground or in the air.

  "I was crazy about it as a kid," Brian said. "You?"

  Nick smiled. "Until I was eighteen or so, I firmly believed that the Holy Trinity consisted of Robert Heinlein, John Christopher, and John Wyndham. I've been sitting here and running all those old stories through my head, matey. And thinking about such exotic things as time-warps and space-warps and alien raiding parties."

  Brian nodded. He felt relieved; it was good to know he wasn't the only one who was thinking crazy thoughts.

  "I mean, we don't really have any way of knowing if anything is left down there, do we?"

  "No," Brian said. "We don't."

  Over Illinois, lowlying clouds had blotted out the dark bulk of the earth far below the plane. He was sure it still was the earth--the Rockies had looked reassuringly familiar, even from 36,000 feet--but beyond that he was sure of nothing. And the cloud cover might hold all the way to Bangor. With Air Traffic Control out of commission, he had no real way of knowing. Brian had been playing with a number of scenarios, and the most unpleasant of the lot was this: that they would come out of the clouds and discover that every sign of human life--including the airport where he hoped to land--was gone. Where would he put this bird down then?

  "I've always found waiting the hardest part," Nick said.

  The hardest part of what? Brian wondered, but he did not ask.

  "Suppose you took us down to 5,000 feet or so?" Nick proposed suddenly. "Just for a quick look-see. Perhaps the sight of a few small towns and interstate highways will set our minds at rest."

  Brian had already considered this idea. Had considered it with great longing. "It's tempting," he said, "but I can't do it."

  "Why not?"

  "The passengers are still my first responsibility, Nick. They'd probably panic, even if I explained what I was going to do in advance. I'm thinking of our loudmouth friend with the pressing appointment at the Pru in particular. The one whose nose you twisted."

  "I can handle him," Nick replied. "Any others who cut up rough, as well."

  "I'm sure you can," Brian said, "but I still see no need of scaring them unnecessarily. And we will find out, eventually. We can't stay up here forever, you know."

  "Too true, matey," Nick said dryly.

  "I might do it anyway, if I could be sure I could get under the cloud cover at 4,000 or 5,000 feet, but with no ATC and no other planes to talk to, I can't be sure. I don't even know for sure what the weather's like down there, and I'm not talking about normal stuff, either. You can laugh at me if you want to--"

  "I'm not laughing, matey. I'm not even close to laughing. Believe me."

  "Well, suppose we have gone through a time-warp, like in a science-fiction story? What if I took us down through the clouds and we got one quick look at a bunch of brontosauruses grazing in some Farmer John's field before we were torn apart by a cyclone or fried in an electrical storm?"

  "Do you really think that's possible?" Nick asked. Brian looked at him closely to see if the question was sarcastic. It didn't appear to be, but it was hard to tell. The British were famous for their dry sense of humor, weren't they?

  Brian started to tell him he had once seen something just like that on an old Twilight Zone episode and then decided it wouldn't help his credibility at all. "It's pretty unlikely, I suppose, but you get the idea--we just don't know what we're dealing with. We might hit a brand-new mountain in what used to be upstate New York. Or another plane. Hell--maybe even a rocket-shuttle. After all, if it's a time-warp, we c
ould as easily be in the future as in the past."

  Nick looked out through the window. "We seem to have the sky pretty much to ourselves."

  "Up here, that's true. Down there, who knows? And who knows is a very dicey situation for an airline pilot. I intend to overfly Bangor when we get there, if these clouds still hold. I'll take us out over the Atlantic and drop under the ceiling as we head back. Our odds will be better if we make our initial descent over water."

  "So for now, we just go on."

  "Right."

  "And wait."

  "Right again."

  Nick sighed. "Well, you're the captain."

  Brian smiled. "That's three in a row."

  4

  Deep in the trenches carved into the floors of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, there are fish which live and die without ever seeing or sensing the sun. These fabulous creatures cruise the depths like ghostly balloons, lit from within by their own radiance. Although they look delicate, they are actually marvels of biological design, built to withstand pressures that would squash a man as flat as a windowpane in the blink of an eye. Their great strength, however, is also their great weakness. Prisoners of their own alien bodies, they are locked forever in their dark depths. If they are captured and drawn toward the surface, toward the sun, they simply explode. It is not external pressure that destroys them, but its absence.

  Craig Toomy had been raised in his own dark trench, had lived in his own atmosphere of high pressure. His father had been an executive in the Bank of America, away from home for long stretches of time, a caricature type-A overachiever. He drove his only child as furiously and as unforgivingly as he drove himself. The bedtime stories he told Craig in Craig's early years terrified the boy. Nor was this surprising, because terror was exactly the emotion Roger Toomy meant to awaken in the boy's breast. These tales concerned themselves, for the most part, with a race of monstrous beings called the langoliers.

  Their job, their mission in life (in the world of Roger Toomy, everything had a job, everything had serious work to do), was to prey on lazy, time-wasting children. By the time he was seven, Craig was a dedicated type-A overachiever, just like Daddy. He had made up his mind: the langoliers were never going to get him.

  A report card which did not contain all A's was an unacceptable report card. An A--was the subject of a lecture fraught with dire warnings of what life would be like digging ditches or emptying garbage cans, and a B resulted in punishment--most commonly confinement to his room for a week. During that week, Craig was allowed out only for school and for meals. There was no time off for good behavior. On the other hand, extraordinary achievement--the time Craig won the tri-school decathlon, for instance--warranted no corresponding praise. When Craig showed his father the medal which had been awarded him on that occasion--in an assembly before the entire student body--his father glanced at it, grunted once, and went back to his newspaper. Craig was nine years old when his father died of a heart attack. He was actually sort of relieved that the Bank of America's answer to General Patton was gone.

  His mother was an alcoholic whose drinking had been controlled only by her fear of the man she had married. Once Roger Toomy was safely in the ground, where he could no longer search out her bottles and break them, or slap her and tell her to get hold of herself, for God's sake, Catherine Toomy began her life's work in earnest. She alternately smothered her son with affection and froze him with rejection, depending on how much gin was currently perking through her bloodstream. Her behavior was often odd and sometimes bizarre. On the day Craig turned ten, she placed a wooden kitchen match between two of his toes, lit it, and sang "Happy Birthday to You" while it burned slowly down toward his flesh. She told him that if he tried to shake it out or kick it loose, she would take him to THE ORPHAN'S HOME at once. The threat of THE ORPHAN'S HOME was a frequent one when Catherine Toomy was loaded. "I ought to, anyway," she told him as she lit the match which stuck up between her weeping son's toes like a skinny birthday candle. "You're just like your father. He didn't know how to have fun, and neither do you. You're a bore, Craiggy-weggy." She finished the song and blew out the match before the skin of Craig's second and third right toes was more than singed, but Craig never forgot the yellow flame, the curling, blackening stick of wood, and the growing heat as his mother warbled "Happy birthday, dear Craiggy-weggy, happy birthday to yoooou" in her droning, off-key drunk's voice.

  Pressure.

  Pressure in the trenches.

  Craig Toomy continued to get all A's, and he continued to spend a lot of time in his room. The place which had been his Coventry had become his refuge. Mostly he studied there, but sometimes--when things were going badly, when he felt pressed to the wall--he would take one piece of notepaper after another and tear them into narrow strips. He would let them flutter around his feet in a growing drift while his eyes stared out blankly into space. But these blank periods were not frequent. Not then.

  He graduated valedictorian from high school. His mother didn't come. She was drunk. He graduated ninth in his class from the UCLA Graduate School of Management. His mother didn't come. She was dead. In the dark trench which existed in the center of his own heart, Craig was quite sure that the langoliers had finally come for her.

  Craig went to work for the Desert Sun Banking Corporation of California as part of the executive training program. He did very well, which was not surprising; Craig Toomy had been built, after all, to get all A's, built to thrive under the pressures which exist in the deep fathoms. And sometimes, following some small reverse at work (and in those days, only five short years ago, all the reverses had been small ones), he would go back to his apartment in Westwood, less than half a mile from the condo Brian Engle would occupy following his divorce, and tear small strips of paper for hours at a time. The paper-tearing episodes were gradually becoming more frequent.

  During those five years, Craig ran the corporate fast track like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. Water-cooler gossips speculated that he might well become the youngest vice-president in Desert Sun's glorious forty-year history. But some fish are built to rise just so far and no farther; they explode if they transgress their built-in limits.

  Eight months ago, Craig Toomy had been put in sole charge of his first big project--the corporate equivalent of a master's thesis. This project was created by the bonds department. Bonds--foreign bonds and junk bonds (they were frequently the same)--were Craig's specialty. This project proposed buying a limited number of questionable South American bonds--sometimes called Bad Debt Bonds--on a carefully set schedule. The theory behind these buys was sound enough, given the limited insurance on them that was available, and the much larger tax-breaks available on turn-overs resulting in a profit (Uncle Sam was practically falling all over himself to keep the complex structure of South American indebtedness from collapsing like a house of cards). It just had to be done carefully.

  Craig Toomy had presented a daring plan which raised a good many eyebrows. It centered upon a large buy of various Argentinian bonds, generally considered to be the worst of a bad lot. Craig had argued forcefully and persuasively for his plan, producing facts, figures, and projections to prove his contention that Argentinian bonds were a good deal more solid than they looked. In one bold stroke, he argued, Desert Sun could become the most important--and richest--buyer of foreign bonds in the American West. The money they made, he said, would be a lot less important than the long-run credibility they would establish.

  After a good deal of discussion--some of it hot--Craig's take on the project got a green light. Tom Holby, a senior vice-president, had drawn Craig aside after the meeting to offer congratulations ... and a word of warning. "If this comes off the way you expect at the end of the fiscal year, you're going to be everyone's fair-haired boy. If it doesn't, you are going to find yourself in a very windy place, Craig. I'd suggest that the next few months might be a good time to build a storm-shelter."

  "I won't need a storm-shelter, Mr. Holby," Craig said con
fidently. "After this, what I'll need is a hang-glider. This is going to be the bond-buy of the century--like finding diamonds at a barn-sale. Just wait and see."

  He had gone home early that night, and as soon as his apartment door was closed and triple-locked behind him, the confident smile had slipped from his face. What replaced it was that unsettling look of blankness. He had bought the news magazines on the way home. He took them into the kitchen, squared them up neatly in front of him on the table, and began to rip them into long, narrow strips. He went on doing this for over six hours. He ripped until Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report lay in shreds on the floor all around him. His Gucci loafers were buried. He looked like the lone survivor of an explosion in a tickertape factory.

  The bonds he had proposed buying--the Argentinian bonds in particular--were a much higher risk than he had let on. He had pushed his proposal through by exaggerating some facts, suppressing others ... and even making some up out of whole cloth. Quite a few of these latter, actually. Then he had gone home, ripped strips of paper for hours, and wondered why he had done it. He did not know about the fish that exist in trenches, living their lives and dying their deaths without ever seeing the sun. He did not know that there are both fish and men whose bete noire is not pressure but the lack of it. He only knew that he had been under an unbreakable compulsion to buy those bonds, to paste a target on his own forehead.

  Now he was due to meet with bond representatives of five large banking corporations at the Prudential Center in Boston. There would be much comparing of notes, much speculation about the future of the world bond market, much discussion about the buys of the last sixteen months and the result of those buys. And before the first day of the three-day conference was over, they would all know what Craig Toomy had known for the last ninety days: the bonds he had purchased were now worth less than six cents on the dollar. And not long after that, the top brass at Desert Sun would discover the rest of the truth: that he had bought more than three times as much as he had been empowered to buy. He had also invested every penny of his personal savings ... not that they would care about that.