午夜四点 (1990)

Four Past Midnight is a collection of novellas written by Stephen King in 1988 and 1989 and published in August 1990. It is his second book of this type, the first one being Different Seasons. The collection won the Bram Stoker Award in 1990 for Best Collection and was nominated for a Locus Award in 1991. In the introduction, King says that, while a collection of four novellas like Different Seasons, this book is more strictly horror with elements of the supernatural.

Novellas

Plot

Pilot Brian Engle, immediately after a difficult flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles, learns that his ex-wife Anne has died in an accident and boards a red-eye flight to Boston as a passenger. A flight attendant speaks of an unusual phenomenon over the Mojave Desert that resembles an aurora. Brian falls asleep during takeoff, having been awake throughout his previous flight. Dinah Bellman, a young blind girl with psychic abilities, also falls asleep, and awakes to find that her aunt and several other passengers have disappeared.

Dinah, mistaking a wig for a scalp, screams and awakes Brian and nine other passengers: teacher Laurel Stevenson, English diplomat Nick Hopewell, writer Bob Jenkins, violinist Albert Kaussner, recovering addict Bethany Simms, businessman Rudy Warwick, mechanic Don Gaffney, mentally ill bank manager Craig Toomy and an unknown heavily intoxicated passenger. The passengers find that the crew and the passengers who were awake have disappeared, leaving the airliner under the control of the autopilot. Brian takes control of the plane but is unable to make any outside contact, and the passengers can only see a dark void below. Brian manages to land in Bangor, Maine, despite furious protests from Toomy, who insists on reaching Boston for an important board meeting.

Upon arrival, the group finds the airport deserted. The clocks have stopped, there is no electricity and the environment seems generally lifeless. As all products and substances have lost their quality, fuel does not burn, thus preventing further flight. Dinah hears an approaching and threatening sound, and the group agrees to leave before it arrives. The unhinged Toomy considers the situation to be a conspiracy against him and takes Bethany hostage at gunpoint, but the environment has robbed the gun of its potency, and the passengers subdue Toomy.

Bob concludes that the aforementioned phenomenon was a "time rip" that has sent their plane into the past. As Dinah reports that the sound is growing closer, Toomy relates to Dinah and Laurel that the sound is emitted by the "Langoliers", which were said by his abusive father to hunt and devour negligent and unmotivated boys. Albert theorizes that time is still flowing inside the plane, which is proven when food brought on board is restored to its normal properties. With the realization that fuel pumped into the airliner will also return to normal, Brian has the plane refueled and manages to start the engines. Meanwhile, Toomy frees himself from his bonds and stabs Dinah, perceiving her to be a Langolier. Despite this, Dinah insists that Toomy must not be killed because the group needs him alive. As Albert and Don search for a stretcher for Dinah, Toomy kills Don before Albert subdues him. Dinah, while being transported onto the plane, telepathically leads Toomy to the runway, where he hallucinates his board meeting. The Langoliers appear in the form of toothed spherical creatures, and they are distracted from the departing plane as they devour Toomy and the surrounding reality.

Bob proposes that the Langoliers' purpose is to clean up what is left of the past by devouring it. Dinah succumbs to her injuries, and the plane approaches the time rip. Bob realizes that the passengers must be asleep when passing through the rip, otherwise they will disappear. Albert suggests lowering the cabin pressure to induce unconsciousness, which would require one passenger to sacrifice himself by remaining conscious to restore the pressure just before the plane passes through the rip. Nick volunteers, wishing to atone for mistakenly shooting and killing three Irish children, and asks Laurel to go to his father to ask forgiveness. Nick, wearing an emergency oxygen mask, flies the plane through the rip and disappears. Brian awakes and lands the plane at Los Angeles, but the passengers are again met with a deserted airport. Realizing that they are in the near future, the passengers take shelter against a wall to avoid the airport's human traffic and wait for the present to catch up to them. A wave of rising noise and motion hits them and they find themselves in the present again.

Adaptations

The Langoliers was adapted for a two-part TV movie in 1995. The TV movie stars Kate Maberly, Kimber Riddle, Patricia Wettig, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Frankie Faison, Baxter Harris, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, Christopher Collet, and Bronson Pinchot.

The movie version of The Langoliers, produced for broadcast on ABC-TV, was filmed almost exclusively in and around the Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine (where author Stephen King attended college) during the summer of 1994. King himself, echoing Alfred Hitchcock's famous numerous cameos, made a cameo appearance in the film as Craig Toomy's boss during Toomy's hallucination.

In 2021, Greek filmmaker Aristotelis Maragkos created an experimental film using footage from the miniseries of The Langoliers, titled The Timekeepers of Eternity. Maragkos re-edited the series to a single hour to focus more closely on Toomy’s deterioration, and printed each individual frame onto black and white copy paper in order to hand-animate each scene with stop-motion.

The audiobook of this story is read by actor Willem Dafoe.

Secret Window, Secret Garden

Secret Window, Secret Garden is similar to King's earlier novel The Dark Half. Both are about authors who are thinly veiled analogues of King himself—Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half and Mort Rainey in Secret Window, Secret Garden.