King, Stephen - Four Past Midnight

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STRAIGHT UP MIDNIGHT:

An Introductory Note

Well, look at this - we're all here. We made it back again. I hope you're half as happy to be here as I am just

saying that reminds me of a story, and since telling stories is what I do for a living (and to keep myself

sane), I'll pass this one along.

Earlier this year - I'm writing this in late July of 1989 - I was crashed out in front of the TV, watching the

Boston Red Sox play the Milwaukee Brewers. Robin Yount of the Brewers stepped to the plate, and the

Boston commentators began marvelling at the fact that Yount was still in his early thirties. 'Sometimes it

seems that Robin helped Abner Doubleday lay down the first set of foul lines,' Ned Martin said as Yount

stepped into the box to face Roger Clemens.

'Yep,' Joe Castiglione agreed. 'He came to the Brewers right out of high school, I think - he's been playing

for them since 1974.'

I sat up so fast I nearly spilled a can of Pepsi-Cola all over myself. Wait a minute! I was thinking. Wait just

a goddam minute! I published my first book in 1974! That wasn't so long ago! What's this shit about

helping Abner Doubleday Put down the first set of foul lines?

Then it occurred to me that the perception of how time passes - a subject which comes up again and again

in the stories which follow - is a highly individual thing. It's true that the publication of Carrie in the spring

of 1974 (it was published, in fact, just two days before the baseball season began and a teenager named

Robin Yount played his first game for the Milwaukee Brewers) doesn't seem like a long time ago to me

subjectively - just a quick glance back over the shoulder, in fact - but there are other ways to count the

years, and some of them suggest that fifteen years can be a long time, indeed.

In 1974 Gerald Ford was President and the Shah was still running the show in Iran. John Lennon was alive,

and so was Elvis Presley. Donny Osmond was singing with his brothers and sisters in a high, piping voice.

Home video cassette recorders had been invented but could be purchased in only a few test markets.

Insiders predicted that when they became widely available, Sony's Beta-format machines would quickly

stomp the rival format, known as VHS, into the ground. The idea that people might soon be renting popular

movies as they had once rented popular novels at lending libraries was still over the horizon. Gasoline

prices had risen to unthinkable highs: forty-eight cents a gallon for regular, fifty-five cents for unleaded.

The first white hairs had yet to make their appearance on my head and in my beard. My daughter, now a

college sophomore, was four. My oldest son, who is now taller than I am, plays the blues harp, and sports

luxuriant shoulder-length Sammy Hagar locks, had just been promoted to training pants. And my youngest

son, who now pitches and plays first base for a championship Little League team, would not be born for

another three years.

Time has this funny, plastic quality, and everything that goes around comes around. When you get on the

bus, you think it won't be taking you far - across town, maybe, no further than that - and all at once, holy

shit! You're halfway across the next continent. Do you find the metaphor a trifle naive? So do I, and the

hell of it is just this: it doesn't matter. The essential conundrum of time is so perfect that even such jejune

observations as the one I have just made retain an odd, plangent resonance.

One thing hasn't changed during those years - the major reason, I suppose, why it sometimes seems to me

(and probably to Robin Yount as well) that no time has passed at all. I'm still doing the same thing: writing

stories. And it is still a great deal more than what I know; it is still what I love. Oh, don't get me wrong - I

love my wife and I love my children, but it's still a pleasure to find these peculiar side roads, to go down

them, to see who lives there, to see what they're doing and who they're doing it to and maybe even why. I

still love the strangeness of it, and those gorgeous moments when the pictures come clear and the events

begin to make a pattern. There is always a tail to the tale. The beast is quick and I sometimes miss my grip,

but when I do get it, I hang on tight ... and it feels fine.

When this book is published, in 1990, I will have been sixteen years in the business of make-believe.

Halfway through those years, long after I had become, by some process I still do not fully understand,

America's literary boogeyman, I published a book called Different Seasons. It was a collection of four

previously unpublished novellas, three of which were not horror stories. The publisher accepted this book

in good heart but, I think, with some mental reservations as well. I know I had some. As it turned out,

neither of us had to worry. Sometimes a writer will publish a book which is just naturally lucky, and

Different Seasons was that way for me.

One of the stories, 'The Body,' became a movie (Stand By Me) which enjoyed a successful run ... the first

really successful film to be made from a work of mine since Carrie (a movie which came out back when

Abner Doubleday and you-know-who were laying down those foul lines). Rob Reiner, who made Stand By

Me, is one of the bravest, smartest filmmakers I have ever met, and I'm proud of my association with him. I

am also amused to note that the company Mr Reiner formed following the success of Stand By Me is Castle

Rock Productions ... a name with which many of my long-time readers will be familiar.

The critics, by and large, also liked Different Seasons. Almost all of them would napalm one particular

novella, but since each of them picked a different story to scorch, I felt I could disregard them all with

impunity ... and I did. Such behavior is not always possible; when most of the reviews of Christine

suggested it was a really dreadful piece of work, I came to the reluctant decision that it probably wasn't as

good as I had hoped (that, however, did not stop me from cashing the royalty checks). I know writers who

claim not to read their notices, or not to be hurt by the bad ones if they do, and I actually believe two of

these individuals. I'm one of the other kind - I obsess over the possibility of bad reviews and brood over

them when they come. But they don't get me down for long; I just kill a few children and old ladies, and

then I'm right as a trivet again.

Most important, the readers liked Different Seasons. I don't remember a single correspondent from that

time who scolded me for writing something that wasn't horror. Most readers, in fact, wanted to tell me that

one of the stories roused their emotions in some way, made them think, made them feel, and those letters

are the real payback for the days (and there are a lot of them) when the words come hard and inspiration

seems thin or even nonexistent. God bless and keep Constant Reader; the mouth can speak, but there is no

tale unless there is a sympathetic ear to listen.

1982, that was. The year the Milwaukee Brewers won their only American League pennant, led by - yes,

you got it - Robin Yount. Yount hit .3 3 1 that year, bashed twenty-nine home runs, and was named the

American League's Most Valuable Player.

It was a good year for both of us old geezers.

Different Seasons was not a planned book; it just happened. The four long stories in it came out at odd

intervals over a period of five years, stories which were too long to be published as short stories and just a

little too short to be books on their own. Like pitching a no-hitter or batting for the cycle (getting a single,

double, triple, and home run all in the same ball game), it was not so much a feat as a kind of statistical

oddity. I took great pleasure in its success and acceptance, but I also felt a clear sense of regret when the

manuscript was finally turned in to The Viking Press. I knew it was good; I also knew that I'd probably

never publish another book exactly like it in my life.

If you're expecting me to say Well, I was wrong, I must disappoint you.

The book you are holding is quite different from the earlier book. Different Seasons consisted of three

'mainstream' stories and one tale of the supernatural; all four of the tales in this book are tales of horror.

They are, by and large, a little longer than the stories in Different Seasons, and they were written for the

most part during the two years when I was supposedly retired. Perhaps they are different because they came

from a mind which found itself turning, at least temporarily, to darker subjects.

Time, for instance, and the corrosive effects it can have on the human heart. The past, and the shadows it

throws upon the present - shadows where unpleasant things sometimes grow and even more unpleasant

things hide ... and grow fat.

Yet not all of my concerns have changed, and most of my convictions have only grown stronger. I still

believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love; I still believe that connections

between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touch. I still believe that the

cost of those connections is horribly, outrageously high ... and I still believe that the value received far

outweighs the price which must be paid. I still believe, I suppose, in the coming of the White and in finding

a place to make a stand ... and defending that place to the death. They are old-fashioned concerns and

beliefs, but I would be a liar if I did not admit I still own them. And that they still own me.

I still love a good story, too. I love hearing one, and I love telling one. You may or may not know (or care)

that I was paid a great deal of money to publish this book and the two which will follow it, but if you do

know or care, you should also know that I wasn't paid a cent for writing the stories in the book. Like

anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have,

but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the

whole process.

The way I tell my stories has also changed a little, I suppose (I hope I've gotten better at it, but of course

that is something each reader should and will judge for himself), but that is only to be expected. When the

Brewers won the pennant in 1982, Robin Yount was playing shortstop. Now he's in center field. I suppose

that means he's slowed down a little ... but he still catches almost everything that's hit in his direction.

That will do for me. That will do just fine.

Because a great many readers seem curious about where stories come from, or wonder if they fit into a

wider scheme the writer may be pursuing, I have prefaced each of these with a little note about how it came

to be written. You may be amused by these notes, but you needn't read them if you don't want to; this is not

a school assignment, thank God, and there will be no pop quiz later.

Let me close by saying again how good it is to be here, alive and well and talking to you once more ... and

how good it is to know that you are still there, alive and well and waiting to go to some other place - a

place where, perhaps, the walls have eyes and the trees have ears and something really unpleasant is trying

to find its way out of the attic and downstairs, to where the people are. That thing still interests me . . . but I

think these days that the people who may or may not be listening for it interest me more.

Before I go, I ought to tell you how that baseball game turned out. The Brewers ended up beating the Red

Sox. Clemens struck Robin Yount out on Yount's first at-bat ... but the second time up, Yount (who helped

Abner Doubleday lay out the first foul lines, according to Ned Martin) banged a double high off the Green

Monster in left field and drove home two runs.

Robin isn't done playing the game just yet, I guess.

Me, either.

Bangor, Maine July, 1989

ONE PAST MIDNIGHT:

A note on 'The Langoliers'

Stories come at different times and places for me - in the car, in the shower, while walking, even while

standing around at parties. On a couple of occasions, stories have come to me in dreams. But it's very rare

for me to write one as soon as the idea comes, and I don't keep an 'idea notebook.' Not writing ideas down

is an exercise in self-preservation. I get a lot of them, but only a small percentage are any good, so I tuck

them all into a kind of mental file. The bad ones eventually self-destruct in there, like the tape from Control

at the beginning of every Mission: Impossible episode. The good ones don't do that. Every now and then,

when I open the file drawer to peek at what's left inside, this small handful of ideas looks up at me, each

with its own bright central image.

With 'The Langoliers,' that image was of a woman pressing her hand over a crack in the wall of a

commercial jetliner.

It did no good to tell myself I knew very little about commercial aircraft; I did exactly that, but the image

was there every time I opened the file cabinet to dump in another idea, nevertheless. It got so I could even

smell that woman's perfume (it was L'Envoi), see her green eyes, and hear her rapid, frightened breathing.

One night, while I was lying in bed, on the edge of sleep, I realized this woman was a ghost.

I remember sitting up, swinging my feet out onto the floor, and turning on the light. I sat that way for a

little while, not thinking about much of anything ... at least on top. Underneath, however, the guy who

really runs this job for me was busy clearing his work-space and getting ready to start up all his machines

again. The next day, I - or he - began writing this story. It took about a month, and it came the most easily

of all the stories in this book, layering itself sweetly and naturally as it went along. Once in awhile both

stories and babies arrive in the world almost without labor pains, and this story was like that. Because it had

an apocalyptic feel similar to an earlier novella of mine called 'The Mist,' I headed each chapter in the same

old-fashioned, rococo way. I came out of this one feeling almost as good about it as I did going in ... a rare

occurrence.

I'm a lazy researcher, but I tried very hard to do my homework this time. Three pilots - Michael Russo,

Frank Soares, and Douglas Damon - helped me to get my facts straight and keep them straight. They were

real sports, once I promised not to break anything.

Have I gotten everything right? I doubt it. Not even the great Daniel Defoe did that; in Robinson Crusoe,

our hero strips naked, swims out to the ship he has recently escaped ... and then fills up his pockets with

items he will need to stay alive on his desert island. And then there is the novel (title and author will be

mercifully omitted here) about the New York subway system where the writer apparently mistook the

motormen's cubicles for public toilets.

My standard caveat goes like this: for what I got right, thank Messrs Russo, Soares, and Damon. For what I

got wrong, blame me. Nor is the statement one of hollow politeness. Factual mistakes usually result from a

failure to ask the right question and not from erroneous information. I have taken a liberty or two with the

airplane you will shortly be entering; these liberties are small, and seemed necessary to the course of the

tale.

Well, that's enough out of me; step aboard.

Let's fly the unfriendly skies.

CHAPTER 1

Bad News for Captain Engle. The Little Blind

Girl. The Lady's Scent. The Dalton Gang

Arrives in Tombstone. The Strange

Plight of Flight 29.

Brian Engle rolled the American Pride LIOII to a stop at Gate 22 and flicked off the FASTEN SEATBELT

light at exactly 10:14 P.M. He let a long sigh hiss through his teeth and unfastened his shoulder harness.

He could not remember the last time he had been so relieved - and so tired - at the end of a flight. He had a

nasty, pounding headache, and his plans for the evening were firmly set. No drink in the pilots' lounge, no

dinner, not even a bath when he got back to Westwood. He intended to fall into bed and sleep for fourteen

hours.

American Pride's Flight 7 - Flagship Service from Tokyo to Los Angeles - had been delayed first by strong

headwinds and then by typical congestion at LAX ... which was, Engle thought, arguably America's worst

airport, if you left out Logan in Boston. To make matters worse, a pressurization problem had developed

during the latter part of the flight. Minor at first, it had gradually worsened until it was scary. It had almost

gotten to the point where a blowout and explosive decompression could have occurred ... and had

mercifully grown no worse. Sometimes such problems suddenly and mysteriously stabilized themselves,

and that was what had happened this time. The passengers now disembarking just behind the control cabin

had not the slightest idea how close they had come to being people pate on tonight's flight from Tokyo, but

Brian knew ... and it had given him a whammer of a headache.

'This bitch goes right into diagnostic from here,' he told his co-pilot. 'They know it's coming and what the

problem is, right?'

The co-pilot nodded. 'They don't like it, but they know.'

'I don't give a shit what they like and what they don't like, Danny. We came close tonight.'

Danny Keene nodded. He knew they had.

Brian sighed and rubbed a hand up and down the back of his neck. His head ached like a bad tooth. 'Maybe

I'm getting too old for this business.'

That was, of course, the sort of thing anyone said about his job from time to time, particularly at the end of

a bad shift, and Brian knew damned well he wasn't too old for the job - at forty-three, he was just entering

prime time for airline pilots. Nevertheless, tonight he almost believed it. God, he was tired.

There was a knock at the compartment door; Steve Searles, the navigator, turned in his seat and opened it

without standing up. A man in a green American Pride blazer was standing there. He looked like a gate

agent, but Brian knew he wasn't. It was John (or maybe it was James) Deegan, Deputy Chief of Operations

for American Pride at LAX.

'Captain Engle?'

'Yes?' An internal set of defenses went up, and his headache flared. His first thought, born not of logic but

of strain and weariness, was that they were going to try and pin responsibility for the leaky aircraft on him.

Paranoid, of course, but he was in a paranoid frame of mind.

'I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Captain.'

'Is this about the leak?' Brian's voice was too sharp, and a few of the disembarking passengers glanced

around, but it was too late to do anything about that now.

Deegan was shaking his head. 'It's your wife, Captain Engle.'

For a moment Brian didn't have the foggiest notion what the man was talking about and could only stand

there, gaping at him and feeling exquisitely stupid. Then the penny dropped. He meant Anne, of course.

'She's my ex-wife. We were divorced eighteen months ago. What about her?'

'There's been an accident,' Deegan said. 'Perhaps you'd better come up to the office.'

Brian looked at him curiously. After the last three long, tense hours, all of this seemed strangely unreal. He

resisted an urge to tell Deegan that if this was some sort of Candid Camera bullshit, he could go fuck

himself. But of course it wasn't. Airline brass weren't into pranks and games, especially at the expense of

pilots who had just come very close to having nasty midair mishaps.

'What about Anne?' Brian heard himself asking again, this time in a softer voice. He was aware that his co-

pilot was looking at him with cautious sympathy. 'Is she all right?'

Deegan looked down at his shiny shoes and Brian knew that the news was very bad indeed, that Anne was

a lot more than not all right. Knew, but found it impossible to believe. Anne was only thirty-four, healthy,

and careful in her habits. He had also thought on more than one occasion that she was the only completely

sane driver in the city of Boston ... perhaps in the whole state of Massachusetts.

Now he heard himself asking something else, and it was really like that - as if some stranger had stepped

into his brain and was using his mouth as a loudspeaker. 'Is she dead?'

John or James Deegan looked around, as if for support, but there was only a single flight attendant standing

by the hatch, wishing the deplaning passengers a pleasant evening in Los Angeles and glancing anxiously

toward the cockpit every now and then, probably worried about the same thing that had crossed Brian's

mind - that the crew was for some reason to be blamed for the slow leak which had made the last few hours

of the flight such a nightmare. Deegan was on his own. He looked at Brian again and nodded. 'Yes - I'm

afraid she is. Would you come with me, Captain Engle?'

At quarter past midnight, Brian Engle was settling into seat 5A of American Pride's Flight 29 - Flagship

Service from Los Angeles to Boston. In fifteen minutes or so, that flight known to transcontinental

travellers as the red-eye would be airborne. He remembered thinking earlier that if LAX wasn't the most

dangerous commercial airport in America, then Logan was. Through the most unpleasant of coincidences,

he would now have a chance to experience both places within an eight-hour span of time: into LAX as the

pilot, into Logan as a deadheading passenger.

His headache, now a good deal worse than it had been upon landing Flight 7, stepped up another notch.

A fire, he thought. A goddamned fire. What happened to the smoke-detectors, for Christ's sake? It was a

brand-new building.'

It occurred to him that he had hardly thought about Anne at all for the last four or five months. During the

first year of the divorce, she was all he had thought about, it seemed - what she was doing, what she was

wearing, and, of course, who she was seeing. When the healing finally began, it had happened very fast ...

as if he had been injected with some spirit-reviving antibiotic. He had read enough about divorce to know

what that reviving agent usually was: not an antibiotic but another woman. The rebound effect, in other

words.

There had been no other woman for Brian - at least not yet. A few dates and one cautious sexual encounter

(he had come to believe that all sexual encounters outside of marriage in the Age of AIDS were cautious),

but no other woman. He had simply ... healed.

Brian watched his fellow passengers come aboard. A young woman with blonde hair was walking with a

little girl in dark glasses. The little girl's hand was on the blonde's elbow. The woman murmured to her

charge, the girl looked immediately toward the sound of her voice, and Brian understood she was blind - it

was something in the gesture of the head. Funny, he thought, how such small gestures could tell so much.

Anne, he thought. Shouldn't you be thinking about Anne?

But his tired mind kept trying to slip away from the subject of Anne Anne -who had been his wife, Anne,

who was the only woman he had ever struck in anger, Anne who was now dead.

He supposed he could go on a lecture tour; he would talk to groups of divorced men. Hell, divorced women

as well, for that matter. His subject would be divorce and the art of forgetfulness.

Shortly after the fourth anniversary is the optimum time for divorce, he would tell them. Take my case, I

spent the following year in purgatory, wondering just how much of it was my fault and how much was hers,

wondering how right or wrong it was to keep pushing her on the subject of kids - that was the big thing

with us, nothing dramatic like drugs or adultery, just the old kids-versus-career thing - and then it was like

there was an express elevator inside my head, and Anne was in it, and down it went.

Yes. Down it had gone. And for the last several months, he hadn't really thought of Anne at all ... not even

when the monthly alimony check was due. It was a very reasonable, very civilized amount; Anne had been

making eighty thousand a year on her own before taxes. His lawyer paid it, and it was just another item on

the monthly statement Brian got, a little two thousand-dollar item tucked between the electricity bill and the

mortgage payment on the condo.

He watched a gangly teenaged boy with a violin case under his arm and a yarmulke on his head walk down

the aisle. The boy looked both nervous and excited, his eyes full of the future. Brian envied him.

There had been a lot of bitterness and anger between the two of them during the last year of the marriage,

and finally, about four months before the end, it had happened: his hand had said go before his brain could

say no. He didn't like to remember that. She'd had too much to drink at a party, and she had really torn into

him when they got home.

Leave me alone about it, Brian. Just leave me alone. No more talk about kids. If you want a sperm-test, go

to a doctor. My job is advertising, not baby-making. I'm so tired of all your macho bullsh-

That was when he had slapped her, hard, across the mouth. The blow had clipped the last word off with

brutal neatness. They had stood looking at each other in the apartment where she would later die, both of

them more shocked and frightened than they would ever admit (except maybe now, sitting here in seat 5A

and watching Flight 29'S passengers come on board, he was admitting it, finally admitting it to himself).

She had touched her mouth, which had started to bleed. She held out her fingers toward him.

You hit me, she said. It was not anger in her voice but wonder. He had an idea it might have been the first

time anyone had ever laid an angry hand upon any part of Anne Quinlan Engle's body.

Yes, he had said. You bet. And I'll do it again if you don't shut up. You're not going to whip me with that

tongue of yours anymore, sweetheart. You better put a padlock on it. I'm telling you for your own good.

Those days are over. If you want something to kick around the house, buy a dog.

The marriage had crutched along for another few months, but it had really ended in that moment when

Brian's palm made brisk contact with the side of Anne's mouth. He had been provoked - God knew he had

been provoked - but he still would have given a great deal to take that one wretched second back.

As the last passengers began to trickle on board, he found himself also thinking, almost obsessively, about

Anne's perfume. He could recall its fragrance exactly, but not the name. What had it been? Lissome?

Lithsome? Lithium, for God's sake? It danced just beyond his grasp. It was maddening.

I miss her, he thought dully. Now that she's gone forever, I miss her. Isn't that amazing?

Lawnboy? Something stupid like that?

Oh stop it, he told his weary mind. Put a cork in it.

Okay, his mind agreed. No problem; I can quit. I can quit anyttime I want. Was it maybe Lifebuoy? No -

that's soap. Sorry. Lovebite? Lovelorn?

Brian snapped his seatbelt shut, leaned back, closed his eyes, and smelled a perfume he could not quite

name.

That was when the flight attendant spoke to him. Of course: Brian Engle had a theory that they were taught

- in a highly secret post-graduate course, perhaps called Teasing the Geese - to wait until the passenger

closed his or her eyes before offering some not-quite-essential service. And, of course, they were to wait

until they were reasonably sure the passenger was asleep before waking them to ask if he would like a

blanket or a pillow.

'Pardon me . . .' she began, then stopped. Brian saw her eyes go from the epaulets on the shoulders of his

black jacket to the hat, with its meaningless squiggle of scrambled eggs, on the empty seat beside him.

She rethought herself and started again.

'Pardon me, Captain, would you like coffee or orange juice?' Brian was faintly amused to see he had

flustered her a little. She gestured toward the table at the front of the compartment, just below the small

rectangular movie screen. There were two ice-buckets on the table. The slender green neck of a wine bottle

poked out of each. 'Of course, I also have champagne.'

Engle considered

(Love Bo that's not it close but no cigar)

the champagne, but only briefly. 'Nothing, thanks,' he said. 'And no in-flight service. I think I'll sleep all the

way to Boston. How's the weather look?'

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STRAIGHTUPMIDNIGHT:AnIntroductoryNoteWell,lookatthis-we'reallhere.Wemadeitbackagain.Ihopeyou'rehalfashappytobehereasIamjustsayingthatremindsmeofastory,andsincetellingstoriesiswhatIdoforaliving(andtokeepmyselfsane),I'llpassthisonealong.Earlierthisyear-I'mwritingthisinlateJulyof1989-Iwascrashedoutinfr...

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King, Stephen - Four Past Midnight

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