Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  "Aw, this is a fairy tale," Gaffney said.

  "I agree completely," Craig said from the floor.

  "Shut your cake-hole," Gaffney growled at him. Craig blinked, then lifted his upper lip in a feeble sneer.

  "It feels right," Bethany said in a low voice. "It feels as if we're out of step with ... with everything."

  "What happened to the crew and the passengers?" Albert asked. He sounded sick. "If the plane came through, and we came through, what happened to the rest of them?"

  His imagination provided him with an answer in the form of a sudden indelible image: hundreds of people falling out of the sky, ties and trousers rippling, dresses skating up to reveal garter-belts and underwear, shoes falling off, pens (the ones which weren't back on the plane, that was) shooting out of pockets; people waving their arms and legs and trying to scream in the thin air; people who had left wallets, purses, pocket-change, and, in at least one case, a pacemaker implant, behind. He saw them hitting the ground like dud bombs, squashing bushes flat, kicking up small clouds of stony dust, imprinting the desert floor with the shapes of their bodies.

  "My guess is that they were vaporized," Bob said. "Utterly discorporated."

  Dinah didn't understand at first; then she thought of Aunt Vicky's purse with the traveller's checks still inside and began to cry softly. Laurel crossed her arms over the little blind girl's shoulders and hugged her. Albert, meanwhile, was fervently thanking God that his mother had changed her mind at the last moment, deciding not to accompany him east after all.

  "In many cases their things went with them," the writer went on. "Those who left wallets and purses may have had them out at the time of The ... The Event. It's hard to say, though. What was taken and what was left behind--I suppose I'm thinking of the wig more than anything else--doesn't seem to have a lot of rhyme or reason to it."

  "You got that right," Albert said. "The surgical pins, for instance. I doubt if the guy they belonged to took them out of his shoulder or knee to play with because he got bored."

  "I agree," Rudy Warwick said. "It was too early in the flight to get that bored."

  Bethany looked at him, startled, then burst out laughing.

  "I'm originally from Kansas," Bob said, "and the element of caprice makes me think of the twisters we used to sometimes get in the summer. They'd totally obliterate a farmhouse and leave the privy standing, or they'd rip away a barn without pulling so much as a shingle from the silo standing right next to it."

  "Get to the bottom line, mate," Nick said. "Whatever time it is we're in, I can't help feeling that it's very late in the day."

  Brian thought of Craig Toomy, Old Mr. I've-Got-to-Get-to-Boston, standing at the head of the emergency slide and screaming: Time is short! Time is very fucking short!

  "All right," Bob said. "The bottom line. Let's suppose there are such things as time-rips, and we've gone through one. I think we've gone into the past and discovered the unlovely truth of time-travel: you can't appear in the Texas State School Book Depository on November 22, 1963, and put a stop to the Kennedy assassination; you can't watch the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome; you can't investigate the Age of the Dinosaurs at first hand."

  He raised his arms, hands outstretched, as if to encompass the whole silent world in which they found themselves.

  "Take a good look around you, fellow time-travellers. This is the past. It is empty; it is silent. It is a world--perhaps a universe-with all the sense and meaning of a discarded paint-can. I believe we may have hopped an absurdly short distance in time, perhaps as little as fifteen minutes--at least initially. But the world is clearly unwinding around us. Sensory input is disappearing. Electricity has already disappeared. The weather is what the weather was when we made the jump into the past. But it seems to me that as the world winds down, time itself is winding up in a kind of spiral ... crowding in on itself."

  "Couldn't this be the future?" Albert asked cautiously.

  Bob Jenkins shrugged. He suddenly looked very tired. "I don't know for sure, of course--how could I?-but I don't think so. This place we're in feels old and stupid and feeble and meaningless. It feels ... I don't know ..."

  Dinah spoke then. They all looked toward her.

  "It feels over," she said softly.

  "Yes," Bob said. "Thank you, dear. That's the word I was looking for."

  "Mr. Jenkins?"

  "Yes?"

  "The sound I told you about before? I can hear it again." She paused. "It's getting closer."

  8

  They all fell silent, their faces long and listening. Brian thought he heard something, then decided it was the sound of his own heart. Or simply imagination.

  "I want to go out by the windows again," Nick said abruptly. He stepped over Craig's prone body without so much as a glance down and strode from the restaurant without another word.

  "Hey!" Bethany cried. "Hey, I want to come, too!"

  Albert followed her; most of the others trailed after. "What about you two?" Brian asked Laurel and Dinah.

  "I don't want to go," Dinah said. "I can hear it as well as I want to from here." She paused and added: "But I'm going to hear it better, I think, if we don't get out of here soon."

  Brian glanced at Laurel Stevenson.

  "I'll stay here with Dinah," she said quietly.

  "All right," Brian said. "Keep away from Mr. Toomy."

  " 'Keep away from Mr. Toomy,' " Craig mimicked savagely from his place on the floor. He turned his head with an effort and rolled his eyes in their sockets to look at Brian. "You really can't get away with this, Captain Engle. I don't know what game you and your Limey friend think you're playing, but you can't get away with it. Your next piloting job will probably be running cocaine in from Colombia after dark. At least you won't be lying when you tell your friends all about what a crack pilot you are."

  Brian started to reply, then thought better of it. Nick said this man was at least temporarily insane, and Brian thought Nick was right. Trying to reason with a madman was both useless and time-consuming.

  "We'll keep our distance, don't worry," Laurel said. She drew Dinah over to one of the small tables and sat down with her. "And we'll be fine."

  "All right," Brian said. "Yell if he starts trying to get loose."

  Laurel smiled wanly. "You can count on it."

  Brian bent, checked the tablecloth with which Nick had bound Craig's hands, then walked across the waiting room to join the others, who were standing in a line at the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  9

  He began to hear it before he was halfway across the waiting room and by the time he had joined the others, it was impossible to believe it was an auditory hallucination.

  That girl's hearing is really remarkable, Brian thought.

  The sound was very faint--to him, at least--but it was there, and it did seem to be coming from the east. Dinah had said it sounded like Rice Krispies after you poured milk over them. To Brian it sounded more like radio static--the exceptionally rough static you got sometimes during periods of high sunspot activity. He agreed with Dinah about one thing, though; it sounded bad.

  He could feel the hairs on the nape of his neck stiffening in response to that sound. He looked at the others and saw identical expressions of frightened dismay on every face. Nick was controlling himself the best, and the young girl who had almost balked at using the slide--Bethany--looked the most deeply scared, but they all heard the same thing in the sound.

  Bad.

  Something bad on the way. Hurrying.

  Nick turned toward him. "What do you make of it, Brian? Any ideas?"

  "No," Brian said. "Not even a little one. All I know is that it's the only sound in town."

  "It's not in town yet," Don said, "but it's going to be, I think. I only wish I knew how long it was going to take."

  They were quiet again, listening to the steady hissing crackle from the east. And Brian thought: I almost know that sound, I think. Not cereal in milk, not radio st
atic, but ... what? If only it wasn't so faint ...

  But he didn't want to know. He suddenly realized that, and very strongly. He didn't want to know at all. The sound filled him with a bone-deep loathing.

  "We do have to get out of here!" Bethany said. Her voice was loud and wavery. Albert put an arm around her waist and she gripped his hand in both of hers. Gripped it with panicky tightness. "We have to get out of here right now!"

  "Yes," Bob Jenkins said. "She's right. That sound--I don't know what it is, but it's awful. We have to get out of here."

  They were all looking at Brian and he thought, It looks like I'm the captain again. But not for long. Because they didn't understand. Not even Jenkins understood, sharp as some of his other deductions might have been, that they weren't going anywhere.

  Whatever was making that sound was on its way, and it didn't matter, because they would still be here when it arrived. There was no way out of that. He understood the reason why it was so, even if none of the others did ... and Brian Engle suddenly understood how an animal caught in a trap must feel as it hears the steady thud of the hunter's approaching boots.

  CHAPTER SIX

  STRANDED. BETHANY'S MATCHES. TWO-WAY TRAFFIC AHEAD. ALBERT'S EXPERIMENT. NIGHTFALL. THE DARK AND THE BLADE.

  1

  Brian turned to look at the writer. "You say we have to get out of here, right?"

  "Yes. I think we must do that just as soon as we possibly--"

  "And where do you suggest we go? Atlantic City? Miami Beach? Club Med?"

  "You are suggesting, Captain Engle, that there's no place we can go. I think--I hope--that you're wrong about that. I have an idea."

  "Which is?"

  "In a moment. First, answer one question for me. Can you refuel the airplane? Can you do that even if there's no power?"

  "I think so, yes. Let's say that, with the help of a few able-bodied men, I could. Then what?"

  "Then we take off again," Bob said. Little beads of sweat stood out on his deeply lined face. They looked like droplets of clear oil. "That sound--that crunchy sound--is coming from the east. The time-rip was several thousand miles west of here. If we retraced our original course ... could you do that?"

  "Yes," Brian said. He had left the auxiliary power units running, and that meant the INS computer's program was still intact. That program was an exact log of the trip they had just made, from the moment Flight 29 had left the ground in southern California until the moment it had set down in central Maine. One touch of a button would instruct the computer to simply reverse that course; the touch of another button, once in the air, would put the autopilot to work flying it. The Teledyne inertial navigation system would re-create the trip down to the smallest degree deviations. "I could do that, but why?"

  "Because the rip may still be there. Don't you see? We might be able to fly back through it."

  Nick looked at Bob in sudden startled concentration, then turned to Brian. "He might have something there, mate. He just might."

  Albert Kaussner's mind was diverted onto an irrelevant but fascinating side-track: if the rip were still there, and if Flight 29 had been on a frequently used altitude and heading--a kind of east-west avenue in the sky--then perhaps other planes had gone through it between 1:07 this morning and now (whenever now was). Perhaps there were other planes landing or landed at other deserted American airports, other crews and passengers wandering around, stunned ...

  No, he thought. We happened to have a pilot on board. What are the chances of that happening twice?

  He thought of what Mr. Jenkins had said about Ted Williams's sixteen consecutive on-bases and shivered.

  "He might or he might not," Brian said. "It doesn't really matter, because we're not going anyplace in that plane."

  "Why not?" Rudy asked. "If you could refuel it, I don't see..."

  "Remember the matches? The ones from the bowl in the restaurant? The ones that wouldn't light?"

  Rudy looked blank, but an expression of huge dismay dawned on Bob Jenkins's face. He put his hand to his forehead and took a step backward. He actually seemed to shrink before them.

  "What?" Don asked. He was looking at Brian from beneath drawn-together brows. It was a look which conveyed both confusion and suspicion. "What does that have to--"

  But Nick knew.

  "Don't you see?" he asked quietly. "Don't you see, mate? If batteries don't work, if matches don't light--"

  "--then jet-fuel won't burn," Brian finished. "It will be as used up and worn out as everything else in this world." He looked at each one of them in turn. "I might as well fill up the fuel tanks with molasses."

  2

  "Have either of you fine young ladies ever heard of the langoliers?" Craig asked suddenly. His tone was light, almost vivacious.

  Laurel jumped and looked nervously toward the others, who were still standing by the windows and talking. Dinah only turned toward Craig's voice, apparently not surprised at all.

  "No," she said calmly. "What are those?"

  "Don't talk to him, Dinah," Laurel whispered.

  "I heard that," Craig said in the same pleasant tone of voice. "Dinah's not the only one with sharp ears, you know."

  Laurel felt her face grow warm.

  "I wouldn't hurt the child, anyway," Craig went on. "No more than I would have hurt that girl. I'm just frightened. Aren't you?"

  "Yes," Laurel snapped, "but I don't take hostages and then try to shoot teenage boys when I'm frightened."

  "You didn't have what looked like the whole front line of the Los Angeles Rams caving in on you at once," Craig said. "And that English fellow ..." He laughed. The sound of his laughter in this quiet place was disturbingly merry, disturbingly normal. "Well, all I can say is that if you think I'm crazy, you haven't been watching him at all. That man's got a chainsaw for a mind."

  Laurel didn't know what to say. She knew it hadn't been the way Craig Toomy was presenting it, but when he spoke it seemed as though it should have been that way ... and what he said about the Englishman was too close to the truth. The man's eyes ... and the kick he had chopped into Mr. Toomy's ribs after he had been tied up ... Laurel shivered.

  "What are the langoliers, Mr. Toomy?" Dinah asked.

  "Well, I always used to think they were just make-believe," Craig said in that same good-humored voice. "Now I'm beginning to wonder ... because I hear it, too, young lady. Yes I do."

  "The sound?" Dinah asked softly. "That sound is the langoliers?"

  Laurel put one hand on Dinah's shoulder. "I really wish you wouldn't talk to him anymore, honey. He makes me nervous."

  "Why? He's tied up, isn't he?"

  "Yes, but--"

  "And you could always call for the others, couldn't you?"

  "Well, I think--"

  "I want to know about the langoliers."

  With some effort, Craig turned his head to look at them ... and now Laurel felt some of the charm and force of personality which had kept Craig firmly on the fast track as he worked out the high-pressure script his parents had written for him. She felt this even though he was lying on the floor with his hands tied behind him and his own blood drying on his forehead and left cheek.

  "My father said the langoliers were little creatures that lived in closets and sewers and other dark places."

  "Like elves?" Dinah wanted to know.

  Craig laughed and shook his head. "Nothing so pleasant, I'm afraid. He said that all they really were was hair and teeth and fast little legs--their little legs were fast, he said, so they could catch up with bad boys and girls no matter how quickly they scampered."

  "Stop it," Laurel said coldly. "You're scaring the child."

  "No, he's not," Dinah said. "I know make-believe when I hear it. It's interesting, that's all." Her face said it was something more than interesting, however. She was intent, fascinated.

  "It is, isn't it?" Craig said, apparently pleased by her interest. "I think what Laurel means is that I'm scaring her. Do I win the cigar, Laurel? If so,
I'd like an El Producto, please. None of those cheap White Owls for me." He laughed again.

  Laurel didn't reply, and after a moment Craig resumed.

  "My dad said there were thousands of langoliers. He said there had to be, because there were millions of bad boys and girls scampering about the world. That's how he always put it. My father never saw a child run in his entire life. They always scampered. I think he liked that word because it implies senseless, directionless, nonproductive motion. But the langoliers ... they run. They have purpose. In fact, you could say that the langoliers are purpose personified."

  "What did the kids do that was so bad?" Dinah asked. "What did they do that was so bad the langoliers had to run after them?"

  "You know, I'm glad you asked that question," Craig said. "Because when my father said someone was bad, Dinah, what he meant was lazy. A lazy person couldn't be part of THE BIG PICTURE. No way. In my house, you were either part of THE BIG PICTURE or you were LYING DOWN ON THE JOB, and that was the worst kind of bad you could be. Throat-cutting was a venial sin compared to LYING DOWN ON THE JOB. He said that if you weren't part of THE BIG PICTURE, the langoliers would come and take you out of the picture completely. He said you'd be in your bed one night and then you'd hear them coming ... crunching and smacking their way toward you ... and even if you tried to scamper off, they'd get you. Because of their fast little--"

  "That's enough," Laurel said. Her voice was flat and dry.

  "The sound is out there, though," Craig said. His eyes regarded her brightly, almost roguishly. "You can't deny that. The sound really is out th--"

  "Stop it or I'll hit you with something myself."

  "Okay," Craig said. He rolled over on his back, grimaced, and then rolled further, onto his other side and away from them. "A man gets tired of being hit when he's down and hog-tied."

  Laurel's face grew not just warm but hot this time. She bit her lip and said nothing. She felt like crying. How was she supposed to handle someone like this? How? First the man seemed as crazy as a bedbug, and then he seemed as sane as could be. And meanwhile, the whole world--Mr. Toomy's BIG PICTURE--had gone to hell.