Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  No bugs, Albert thought, but wait till you see the balls. You're going to love those.

  "Buckle yourself in, mate," Nick said, "and shut u--"

  He broke off, staring down incredulously at the airport ... or where the airport had been. The main buildings were gone, and the National Guard base at the west end was going. Flight 29 overflew a growing abyss of darkness, an eternal cistern that seemed to have no end.

  "Oh dear Jesus, Nick," Laurel said unsteadily, and suddenly put her hands over her eyes.

  As they overflew Runway 33 at 1,500 feet, Nick saw sixty or a hundred parallel lines racing up the concrete, cutting the runway into long strips that sank into emptiness. The strips reminded him of Craig Toomy:

  Rii-ip.

  On the other side of the aisle, Bethany pulled down the windowshade beside Albert's seat with a bang.

  "Don't you dare open that!" she told him in a scolding, hysterical voice.

  "Don't worry," Albert said, and suddenly remembered that he had left his violin down there. Well . . . it was undoubtedly gone now. He abruptly put his hands over his own face.

  2

  Before Brian began to turn west again, he saw what lay east of Bangor. It was nothing. Nothing at all. A titanic river of blackness lay in a still sweep from horizon to horizon under the white dome of the sky. The trees were gone, the city was gone, the earth itself was gone.

  This is what it must be like to fly in outer space, he thought, and he felt his rationality slip a cog, as it had on the trip east. He held onto himself desperately and made himself concentrate on flying the plane.

  He brought them up quickly, wanting to be in the clouds, wanting that hellish vision to be blotted out. Then Flight 29 was pointed west again. In the moments before they entered the clouds, he saw the hills and woods and lakes which stretched to the west of the city, saw them being cut ruthlessly apart by thousands of black spiderweb lines. He saw huge swatches of reality go sliding soundlessly into the growing mouth of the abyss, and Brian did something he had never done before while in the cockpit of an airplane.

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were in the clouds.

  3

  There was almost no turbulence this time; as Bob Jenkins had suggested, the weather patterns appeared to be running down like an old clock. Ten minutes after entering the clouds, Flight 29 emerged into the bright-blue world which began at 18,000 feet. The remaining passengers looked around at each other nervously, then at the speakers as Brian came on the intercom.

  "We're up," he said simply. "You all know what happens now: we go back exactly the way we came, and hope that whatever doorway we came through is still there. If it is, we'll try going through."

  He paused for a moment, then resumed.

  "Our return flight is going to take somewhere between four and a half and six hours. I'd like to be more exact, but I can't. Under ordinary circumstances, the flight west usually takes longer than the flight east, because of prevailing wind conditions, but so far as I can tell from my cockpit instruments, there is no wind." Brian paused for a moment and then added, "There's nothing moving up here but us." For a moment the intercom stayed on, as if Brian meant to add something else, and then it clicked off.

  4

  "What in God's name is going on here?" the man with the black beard asked shakily.

  Albert looked at him for a moment and then said, "I don't think you want to know."

  "Am I in the hospital again?" The man with the black beard blinked at Albert fearfully, and Albert felt sudden sympathy for him.

  "Well, why don't you believe you are, if it will help?"

  The man with the black beard continued to stare at him for a moment in dreadful fascination and then announced, "I'm going back to sleep. Right now." He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. In less than a minute his chest was moving up and down with deep regularity and he was snoring under his breath.

  Albert envied him.

  5

  Nick gave Laurel a brief hug, then unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up. "I'm going forward," he said. "Want to come?"

  Laurel shook her head and pointed across the aisle at Dinah. "I'll stay with her."

  "There's nothing you can do, you know," Nick said. "It's in God's hands now, I'm afraid."

  "I do know that," she said, "but I want to stay."

  "All right, Laurel." He brushed at her hair gently with the palm of his hand. "It's such a pretty name. You deserve it."

  She glanced up at him and smiled. "Thank you."

  "We have a dinner date--you haven't forgotten, have you?"

  "No," she said, still smiling. "I haven't and I won't."

  He bent down and brushed a kiss lightly across her mouth. "Good, he said. "Neither will I."

  He went forward and she pressed her fingers lightly against her mouth, as if to hold his kiss there, where it belonged. Dinner with Nick Hopewett--a dark, mysterious stranger. Maybe with candles and a good bottle of wine. More kisses afterward--real kisses. It all seemed like something which might happen in one of the Harlequin romances she sometimes read. So what? They were pleasant stories, full of sweet and harmless dreams. It didn't hurt to dream a little, did it?

  Of course not. But why did she feel the dream was so unlikely to come true?

  She unbuckled her own seatbelt, crossed the aisle, and put her hand on the girl's forehead. The hectic heat she had felt before was gone; Dinah's skin was now waxy-cool.

  I think she's going, Rudy had said shortly before they started their headlong take-off charge. Now the words recurred to Laurel and rang in her head with sickening validity. Dinah was taking air in shallow sips, her chest barely rising and falling beneath the strap which cinched the tablecloth pad tight over her wound.

  Laurel brushed the girl's hair off her forehead with infinite tenderness and thought of that strange moment in the restaurant, when Dinah had reached out and grasped the cuff of Nick's jeans. Don't you kill him . . . we need him.

  Did you save us, Dinah? Did you do something to Mr. Toomy that saved us? Did you make him somehow trade his life for ours?

  She thought that perhaps something like that had happened ... and reflected that, if it was true, this little girl, blind and badly wounded, had made a dreadful decision inside her darkness.

  She leaned forward and kissed each of Dinah's cool, closed lids. "Hold on," she whispered. "Please hold on, Dinah."

  6

  Bethany turned to Albert, grasped both of his hands in hers, and asked: "What happens if the fuel goes bad?"

  Albert looked at her seriously and kindly. "You know the answer to that, Bethany."

  "You can call me Beth, if you want."

  "Okay."

  She fumbled out her cigarettes, looked up at the NO SMOKING light, and put them away again. "Yeah," she said. "I know. We crash. End of story. And do you know what?"

  He shook his head, smiling a little.

  "If we can't find that hole again, I hope Captain Engle won't even try to land the plane. I hope he just picks out a nice high mountain and crashes us into the top of it. Did you see what happened to that crazy guy? I don't want that to happen to me."

  She shuddered, and Albert put an arm around her. She looked up at him frankly. "Would you like to kiss me?"

  "Yes," Albert said.

  "Well, you better go ahead, then. The later it gets, the later it gets."

  Albert went ahead. It was only the third time in his life that the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi had kissed a girl, and it was great. He could spend the whole trip back in a lip-lock with this girl and never worry about a thing.

  "Thank you," she said, and put her head on his shoulder. "I needed that."

  "Well, if you need it again, just ask," Albert said.

  She looked up at him, amused. "Do you need me to ask, Albert?"

  "I reckon not," drawled The Arizona Jew, and went back to work.

  7

  Nick had stopped on his way to the cockpit to speak to Bob Jenkin
s--an extremely nasty idea had occurred to him, and he wanted to ask the writer about it.

  "Do you think there could be any of those things up here?"

  Bob thought it over for a moment. "Judging from what we saw back at Bangor, I would think not. But it's hard to tell, isn't it? In a thing like this, all bets are off."

  "Yes. I suppose so. All bets are off." Nick thought this over for a moment. "What about this time-rip of yours? Would you like to give odds on us finding it again?"

  Bob Jenkins slowly shook his head.

  Rudy Warwick spoke up from behind them, startling them both. "You didn't ask me, but I'll give you my opinion just the same. I put them at one in a thousand."

  Nick thought this over. After a moment a rare, radiant smile burst across his face. "Not bad odds at all," he said. "Not when you consider the alternative."

  8

  Less than forty minutes later, the blue sky through which Flight 29 moved began to deepen in color. It cycled slowly to indigo, and then to deep purple. Sitting in the cockpit, monitoring his instruments and wishing for a cup of coffee, Brian thought of an old song: When the deep purple falls . . . over sleepy garden walls ...

  No garden walls up here, but he could see the first ice-chip stars gleaming in the firmament. There was something reassuring and calming about the old constellations appearing, one by one, in their old places. He did not know how they could be the same when so many other things were so badly out of joint, but he was very glad they were.

  "It's going faster, isn't it?" Nick said from behind him.

  Brian turned in his seat to face him. "Yes. It is. After awhile the 'days' and 'nights' will be passing as fast as a camera shutter can click, I think."

  Nick sighed. "And now we do the hardest thing of all, don't we? We wait to see what happens. And pray a little bit, I suppose."

  "It couldn't hurt." Brian took a long, measuring look at Nick Hopewell. "I was on my way to Boston because my ex-wife died in a stupid fire. Dinah was going because a bunch of doctors promised her a new pair of eyes. Bob was going to a convention, Albert to music school, Laurel on vacation. Why were you going to Boston, Nick? 'Fess up. The hour groweth late."

  Nick looked at him thoughtfully for a long time and then laughed. "Well, why not?" he asked, but Brian was not so foolish as to believe this question was directed at him. "What does a Most Secret classification mean when you've just seen a bunch of killer fuzzballs rolling up the world like an old rug?"

  He laughed again.

  "The United States hasn't exactly cornered the market on dirty tricks and covert operations," he told Brian. "We Limeys have forgotten more nasty mischief than you johnnies ever knew. We've cut capers in India, South Africa, China, and the part of Palestine which became Israel. We certainly got into a pissing contest with the wrong fellows that time, didn't we? Nevertheless, we British are great believers in cloak and dagger, and the fabled MI5 isn't where it ends but only where it begins. I spent eighteen years in the armed services, Brian--the last five of them in Special Operations. Since then I've done various odd jobs, some innocuous, some fabulously nasty."

  It was full dark outside now, the stars gleaming like spangles on a woman's formal evening gown.

  "I was in Los Angeles--on vacation, actually--when I was contacted and told to fly to Boston. Extremely short notice, this was, and after four days spent backpacking in the San Gabriels, I was falling-down tired. That's why I happened to be sound asleep when Mr. Jenkins's Event happened.

  "There's a man in Boston, you see . . . or was . . . or will be (time-travel plays hell on the old verb tenses, doesn't it?) ... who is a politician of some note. The sort of fellow who moves and shakes with great vigor behind the scenes. This man--I'll call him Mr. O'Banion, for the sake of conversation--is very rich, Brian, and he is an enthusiastic supporter of the Irish Republican Army. He has channelled millions of dollars into what some like to call Boston's favorite charity, and there is a good deal of blood on his hands. Not just British soldiers but children in schoolyards, women in laundrettes, and babies blown out of their prams in pieces. He is an idealist of the most dangerous sort: one who never has to view the carnage at first hand, one who has never had to look at a severed leg lying in the gutter and been forced to reconsider his actions in light of that experience."

  "You were supposed to kill this man O'Banion?"

  "Not unless I had to," Nick said calmly. "He's very wealthy, but that's not the only problem. He's the total politician, you see, and he's got more fingers than the one he uses to stir the pot in Ireland. He has a great many powerful American friends, and some of his friends are our friends . . . that's the nature of politics; a cat's cradle woven by men who for the most part belong in rooms with rubber walls. Killing Mr. O'Banion would be a great political risk. But he keeps a little bit of fluff on the side. She was the one I was supposed to kill."

  "As a warning," Brian said in a low, fascinated voice.

  "Yes. As a warning."

  Almost a full minute passed as the two men sat in the cockpit, looking at each other. The only sound was the sleepy drone of the jet engines. Brian's eyes were shocked and somehow very young. Nick only looked weary.

  "If we get out of this," Brian said at last, "if we get back, will you carry through with it?"

  Nick shook his head. He did this slowly, but with great finality. "I believe I've had what the Adventist blokes like to call a soul conversion, old mate of mine. No more midnight creeps or extreme-prejudice jobs for Mrs. Hopewell's boy Nicholas. If we get out of this--a proposition I find rather shaky just now--I believe I'll retire."

  "And do what?"

  Nick looked at him thoughtfully for a moment or two and then said, "Well . . . I suppose I could take flying lessons."

  Brian burst out laughing. After a moment, Mrs. Hopewell's boy Nicholas joined him.

  9

  Thirty-five minutes later, daylight began to seep back into the main cabin of Flight 29. Three minutes later it might have been mid-morning; fifteen minutes after that it might have been noon.

  Laurel looked around and saw that Dinah's sightless eyes were open.

  Yet were they entirely sightless? There was something in them, something just beyond definition, which made Laurel wonder. She felt a sense of unknown awe creep into her, a feeling which almost touched upon fear.

  She reached out and gently grasped one of Dinah's hands. "Don't try to talk," she said quietly. "If you're awake, Dinah, don't try to talk--just listen. We're in the air. We're going back, and you're going to be all right--I promise you that."

  Dinah's hand tightened on hers, and after a moment Laurel realized the little girl was tugging her forward. She leaned over the secured stretcher. Dinah spoke in a tiny voice that seemed to Laurel a perfect scale model of her former voice.

  "Don't worry about me, Laurel. I got . . . what I wanted."

  "Dinah, you shouldn't--"

  The unseeing brown eyes moved toward the sound of Laurel's voice. A little smile touched Dinah's bloody mouth. "I saw," that tiny voice, frail as a glass reed, told her. "I saw through Mr. Toomy's eyes. At the beginning, and then again at the end. It was better at the end. At the start, everything looked mean and nasty to him. It was better at the end."

  Laurel looked at her with helpless wonder.

  The girl's hand let go of Laurel's and rose waveringly to touch her cheek. "He wasn't such a bad guy, you know." She coughed. Small flecks of blood flew from her mouth.

  "Please, Dinah," Laurel said. She had a sudden sensation that she could almost see through the little blind girl, and this brought a feeling of stifling, directionless panic. "Please don't try to talk anymore."

  Dinah smiled. "I saw you," she said. "You are beautiful, Laurel. Everything was beautiful . . . even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to ... you know . . . just to see."

  She drew in one of her tiny sips of air, let it out, and simply didn't take the next one. Her sightless eyes now seemed to be looking far beyond Lau
rel Stevenson.

  "Please breathe, Dinah," Laurel said. She took the girl's hands in hers and began to kiss them repeatedly, as if she could kiss life back into that which was now beyond it. It was not fair for Dinah to die after she had saved them all; no God could demand such a sacrifice, not even for people who had somehow stepped outside of time itself. "Please breathe, please, please, please breathe."

  But Dinah did not breathe. After a long time, Laurel returned the girl's hands to her lap and looked fixedly into her pale, still face. Laurel waited for her own eyes to fill up with tears, but no tears came. Yet her heart ached with fierce sorrow and her mind beat with its own deep and outraged protest: Oh, no! Oh, not fair! This is not fair! Take it back, God! Take it back, damn you, take it back, you just take it BACK!

  But God did not take it back. The jet engines throbbed steadily, the sun shone on the bloody sleeve of Dinah's good travelling dress in a bright oblong, and God did not take it back. Laurel looked across the aisle and saw Albert and Bethany kissing. Albert was touching one of the girl's breasts through her tee-shirt, lightly, delicately, almost religiously. They seemed to make a ritual shape, a symbolic representation of life and that stubborn, intangible spark which carries life on in the face of the most dreadful reversals and ludicrous turns of fate. Laurel looked hopefully from them to Dinah . . . and God had not taken it back.

  God had not taken it back.

  Laurel kissed the still slope of Dinah's cheek and then raised her hand to the little girl's face. Her fingers stopped only an inch from her eyelids.

  I saw through Mr. Toomy's eyes. Everything was beautiful ... even the things that were dead. It was so wonderful to see.

  "Yes," Laurel said. "I can live with that."

  She left Dinah's eyes open.

  10

  American Pride 29 flew west through the days and nights, going from light to darkness and light to darkness as if flying through a great, lazily shifting parade of fat clouds. Each cycle came slightly faster than the one before.