The Langoliers
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| Author | Stephen King |
|---|---|
| Country |  USA |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror, Science fiction novella |
| Released in | Four Past Midnight |
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Media Type | Print (Paperback) |
| Released | September 1990 |
The Langoliers is one of four novellas published in the Stephen King book Four Past Midnight in 1990.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
On a cross-country red-eye flight aboard American Pride Flight 29 from Los Angeles, California to Boston, Massachusetts, a sleeping passenger awakens to find that all of the other passengers have disappeared, except for those who were asleep. Their clothes and items like artificial hips, remain aboard the plane. As the sleepers regain consciousness, they are introduced to the reader: Dinah Bellman, a blind girl about age 10; fifth grade teacher Laurel Stevenson; Nick Hopewell, a mysterious Englishman; Don Gaffney, a retired tool and die engineer; Rudy Warwick, a perpetually hungry businessman; Albert Kaussner, a talented Jewish teen violinist from Texas; Bethany Simms, a teen girl with a drug problem; Bob Jenkins, a mystery author; Craig Toomy, a Type A personality investment banker in the midst of a psychotic break; and Brian Engle, an airline pilots who is a passenger on that particular flight, heading east to a funeral.
Upon awakening and discovering that most of the other passengers are gone, Brian breaks into the cockpit and assumes control of the plane. Although the autopilot has kept the plane aloft and on course, he finds himself unable to make radio contact with anyone. He goes so far as trying to contact nearby Air Force bases, but even they do not respond to his calls. Even stranger, after flying over Denver, Colorado, they find that the city does not appear to be where it should. All that is in the vicinity is pitch darkness. Brian decides to divert the flight to Bangor, Maine, reasoning that Bangor International Airport, with its extra-long runway and light traffic, is a safer landing site than the potentially crowded skies of Boston.
Once the plane is on the ground, the group makes some terrifying discoveries. It turns out that not only have most of the people on the plane disappeared, so has every other person in the world. Bangor Airport is a complete ghost town. Dinah begins to develop a type of "second sight," and Craig Toomy, hard-pressed to get to Boston to attend a meeting, begins sliding into profound madness. Part of his madness involves a vision given to him by his overbearing and abusive father: a vision of the "Langoliers", demon beasts that chase down the purposeless and lazy, and eat them alive.
The passengers also make other bizarre discoveries, such as a lack of electricity anywhere in the airport, abandoned automobiles on the airport's tarmac, bizarre time effects such as daylight lasting only a couple of hours before becoming night and vice versa, odd weather patterns such as a total lack of cloud movement despite the presence of wind, and a curious lack of echoes.
Trying to make sense of what is happening around them, the travellers decide to settle down in a snack bar. There, they find that the sandwiches have no taste, the soft drinks and beer are flat, and cigarette matches don't light.
As they search for the cause of their plight, first Dinah, and eventually the rest, hear a strange sound (not unlike radio static), slowly approaching their location. The passengers of American Pride Flight 29 quickly find that time is their problem. Bob Jenkins theorizes that while they were all asleep on their flight, the plane flew through a "time rip", a tear in the fabric of time. They have now ended up in the past, a dead, lifeless world that is slowly winding down, and the longer they stay there, the more likely the chance that they too will wind down with it. Time has moved on without them, and there is no real substance or essence in the past. They contemplate leaving Bangor, a plan Brian rejects when he points out it is impossible as their plane is extremely low on fuel. When asked why he cannot refuel the plane, Brian explains that since the drinks and food and everything else are winding down with time, chances are that so has the jet fuel, meaning that it will not burn. They begin to deal with the fact that they are stuck there, with the sound getting closer and closer each second.
Attempting to figure out how to escape before whatever is creating the sound arrives, Albert suddenly realizes something. He takes some sandwiches, soft drinks and matches from the snack bar and he, Brian, Bob and Nick, return to the airplane. To their surprise, the sandwiches suddenly regain flavor, the soft drink fizzles when poured into a glass, and the matches light and burn brightly. Albert explains that the airplane, though it has traveled into the past, still contains the present inside, which explains why everything that is dead outside the aircraft suddenly comes to life inside. They then embark on a plan of action to refuel the airplane as fast as possible now that they know the jet fuel will burn once it enters the engines. Complicating matters is the fact that the fuel must be pumped using the airliner's own engines, as the refueling trucks that normally serve that purpose are inoperative.
As they engage in these adventures, each member of the group goes through his own emotional journey. Nick is revealed to be some sort of spy or assassin, and he becomes attracted to staid Laurel and her kindness; she awakens a feeling of wanting to be a good person in him, while he awakens a feeling of excitement and danger in her, and makes her feel like an attractive woman. Bethany and Albert begin an unlikely romance. Bob Jenkins revitalizes his somewhat waning creative powers in figuring out the mystery. Craig's stress continues--before boarding the flight, he basically opted out of the busy lifestyle is father had sketched out for him, by losing his company millions of dollars, ensuring his firing and disgrace.
Once the refueling process is underway, Craig Toomey, now completely mad from fear of the approaching sound he believes to be the langoliers, stabs Dinah in the chest with a butcher knife, then stabs Don Gaffney in the back. Although Don is killed instantly, the other passengers carry the critically injured Dinah into the plane on a stretcher and wait for refuelling to be complete.
Just as the plane is set and ready to take off, the source of the sound finally appears. To the passengers' horror, they witness strange creatures emerging from the forests north of the airport. Spherical, with large mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth that spin around like chainsaws, they travel through the air with amazing agility and great speed, devouring everything in their way. Dinah telepathically convinces Toomey that his meeting is actually being held on the tarmac, using him to decoy the creatures away from the plane. Toomey participates only briefly in the hallucination before he realizes the danger, but is unable to flee the creatures and is consumed by them. The rest of the passengers witness the creatures consuming the airport and everything around it. As the plane lifts off, the group watches as all of Bangor is devoured, to be replaced by a cold, eternal nothingness.
Brian sets a course that will take them to where the time rip should be over the Mojave Desert. During the flight, Dinah succumbs to her injury. In the cockpit, Brian and Nick watch below them as the langoliers traverse the dead lands and continue to eat away at the world. After several hours of flying, they finally find the time rip. As Brian steadies the plane to fly through, Bob Jenkins screams erratically to turn away. He shouts that in order for them to fly through and come out alive on the other side, they must all be asleep just as they were the first time. Brian finds a way to put them all to sleep: he will reduce the cabin pressure just enough to render everyone unconscious from the low oxygen. Unfortunately, someone must remain awake using an oxygen mask in order to turn the pressure back up just before the plane flies through, ensuring that Brian will regain consciousness in time to land. This means that someone will not survive the trip through the time rip. Nick, seeking redemption for his unspecified violent acts of the past, volunteers and dons the mask. Just before the airliner enters the rip, he resets the cabin pressure, then ceases to exist.
Brian awakens minutes later to find Nick gone and the skies still empty. As the plane approaches Los Angeles, the passengers are devastated to find a city deserted and devoid of human life. They begin to think that all that they have sacrificed to get this far has been in vain. Brian decides to land at LAX anyway. Once on the ground, the passengers realize that something is different. The air smells different than it did in Bangor, and they can hear a new sound approaching. It is not the horrifying crunching sound of the creatures, but more of a soothing hum. Once inside the terminal, they find another snack bar. The sandwiches taste like sandwiches, the soft drinks and beer aren't flat, and the sound is continuously getting louder.
Bob then realizes that their passage back through the time rip has taken them a little bit into the future. As they watch all around them, people begin to appear, and colors dance in front of their eyes. The sound crescendoes, and they suddenly find themselves once again in sync with the present as the present catches up to them. As they celebrate, Bob suggests that they alert the air traffic controllers and inform them of the rip before another plane flies through it, but before doing so, they all step outside and get some fresh air.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
- Main article: The Langoliers (film)
The Langoliers was adapted for a two-part TV Movie in 1995. The TV movie starred Kate Maberly, Patricia Wettig, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, and Bronson Pinchot.
The movie version of "The Langoliers", produced for broadcast on ABC-TV, was filmed almost entirely in and around the Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine (author King's hometown) during the summer of 1995. King himself made a cameo appearance in the film as Craig Toomy's boss in a hallucination.
[edit] Trivia
The story (and movie) both open with the first reported appearance of the Aurora Borealis (or what they think is the aurora) over the Mojave Desert. This has only happened a few times in history, the most recent on October 29, 2003.
The device of a plane full of people vanishing, leaving behind all inorganic materials such as clothing and implants, is used again to begin the novel Left Behind, when the end times begins and all saved people are called bodily to heaven, and the damned are left behind.
[edit] External links
- The Langoliers publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Langoliers at the Internet Movie Database
