Four Past Midnight: The Sun Dog

Four Past Midnight is a collection of four horror novellas preceded by a brief introductory essay. King notes that all four tales are horror stories, unlike his earlier collection Different Seasons, and identifies their central concerns as time's corrosive effects and the shadows the past throws on the present.

"The Langoliers"

Captain Brian Engle, an American Pride pilot riding as an off-duty passenger on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston, falls asleep after learning his ex-wife has died. He wakes to screaming: ten-year-old Dinah Bellman, a blind girl traveling to Boston for eye surgery, has discovered her aunt and nearly all other passengers have vanished. Only ten remain, all of whom were asleep when the disappearances occurred. The missing left behind personal items but their bodies are gone. Brian finds the cockpit empty, the plane on autopilot, and every radio frequency dead.

The survivors include Bob Jenkins, an elderly mystery writer; Nick Hopewell, an Englishman; Albert Kaussner, a teenager; Laurel Stevenson, a woman traveling to meet a man from a personal ad; and Craig Toomy, a businessman consumed by childhood terrors of creatures called "the langoliers," which his father said devoured lazy children. Brian diverts to Bangor, Maine, and lands at a deserted airport where the air has no smell, food is tasteless, and sounds fall flat. Bob theorizes they have slipped through a "time-rip" into the past, a spent version of reality. Dinah hears a crunching sound approaching from the east.

Craig takes a hostage at gunpoint, but the bullet barely fires in this depleted world, and Albert subdues him. Later, Craig escapes and fatally stabs Dinah. Brian refuels the plane from a parked jet, discovering the fuel becomes usable inside their aircraft. The langoliers arrive: ball-shaped creatures with gnashing teeth that devour reality itself, leaving void. Craig, lured onto the tarmac by a dying vision Dinah projects into his mind, is consumed. Brian lifts off just in time.

Flying west toward the time-rip, Bob realizes everyone awake vanished when they first passed through, so all must be unconscious when crossing back. Brian can lower cabin pressure to knock everyone out, but someone must stay awake to restore it afterward, knowing that person will cease to exist. Nick volunteers, asking Laurel to deliver a message to his estranged father in England. Dinah dies quietly during the flight. As the plane enters the rip, Nick restores cabin pressure and vanishes; only his dental fillings remain. Brian wakes at a dark LAX to find they have arrived slightly ahead of the present. The present soon catches up in a rush of light, sound, and materializing people, and the survivors walk out into a world reborn.

"Secret Window, Secret Garden"

Morton Rainey, a novelist living alone at his Maine lake house after divorcing his wife Amy, is confronted by a gaunt stranger in a black hat who calls himself John Shooter. Shooter accuses Mort of plagiarizing his story. Mort discovers the manuscript is nearly identical to his own story, "Sowing Season," published in 1980, two years before Shooter claims to have written his. When Mort tries to obtain the original magazine as proof, his house in Derry burns down, destroying his copy. His cat is killed, and threatening notes appear.

Mort arranges for a replacement copy from the magazine's publisher, but when it arrives, the relevant pages have been cut out. His caretaker and a local man are found murdered with Mort's tools after Mort arranged to meet them. Through nightmares and recovered memories, Mort confronts the truth: There is no John Shooter. The name combines "John" from John Kintner, a college classmate whose story Mort plagiarized, and "Shooter" from Shooter's Knob, Tennessee, the hometown of Amy's boyfriend, Ted Milner. Mort has been dissociating into a violent alternate personality that committed the arson, the murders, and the destruction of evidence.

Amy arrives at the lake house to find it covered in the word "SHOOTER." Mort, overtaken by the Shooter personality, attacks her. She fights free but is wounded. Fred Evans, an insurance investigator who followed her, shoots and kills Mort. In an epilogue, Amy finds a note in Shooter's hat, written in handwriting not Mort's, claiming the story has been recovered. Whether Shooter achieved independent existence remains an unsettling question.

"The Library Policeman"

Sam Peebles, a real-estate agent in Junction City, Iowa, borrows two books from the public library for a Rotary Club speech. The librarian, Ardelia Lortz, warns him to return them on time. The speech succeeds, but Sam forgets the books, which are accidentally recycled.

Returning to confess, Sam finds the library transformed: modern ceiling, different staff, no record of Ardelia. The Library Policeman then appears at Sam's door, a towering figure with silver eyes and a scarred face, demanding the books by midnight. Sam collapses in terror. Afterward, his secretary, Naomi Higgins, tells Sam that Ardelia has been dead for thirty years.

With help from Naomi and Dave Duncan, a local man with an alcohol addiction whom Ardelia once enslaved, Sam learns she was not human but a parasitic creature that fed on children's fear. During story hours, she told horrifying fairy tales, then drained liquefied terror from children's eyes through a fleshy proboscis. When a deputy sheriff investigated, she killed him and two children, then entered a dormant state resembling death.

Sam recovers a buried memory: As a child, he was sexually assaulted outside a library by a man who called himself a policeman. The Library Policeman terrorizing him is Ardelia's projection, shaped from his deepest trauma. Sam buys replacement books and packages of red licorice, the candy associated with his assault, intuiting it can serve as a weapon against Ardelia. At the library that night, Ardelia manifests in her true insectile form. Sam plugs her proboscis with the licorice, and the creature swells and explodes. Dave dies from injuries sustained in the confrontation. Sam later discovers Ardelia left a parasitic growth on Naomi's neck, removes it, and destroys it. The two walk away together, free.

"The Sun Dog"

In Castle Rock, Maine, fifteen-year-old Kevin Delevan receives a Polaroid Sun 660 camera for his birthday. Every photograph shows the same scene regardless of subject: a menacing black dog before a white picket fence. Each successive photo reveals the dog turning toward the camera with increasing hostility. Kevin takes the camera to Pop Merrill, the shrewd owner of the Emporium Galorium, a cluttered junk shop. Pop has the photos transferred to videotape, revealing the dog's gradual, murderous turn toward the photographer.

Kevin decides to destroy the camera, but Pop secretly switches it with a broken duplicate, hoping to sell the real one to collectors of the paranormal. No buyer will take it, yet Pop cannot stop photographing. The dog grows more monstrous in each picture, and Pop begins sleepwalking and shooting compulsively.

Kevin, plagued by nightmares, realizes the camera he smashed was a fake. He and his father race to Pop's shop, where Pop stands in a dissociative trance, firing the camera as it melts and fuses with his hands. The final photograph bulges outward, and the dog tears through into reality, a massive creature trailing smoke and fire that kills Pop as it emerges. Kevin loads a new Polaroid and fires. The flash freezes the dog in mid-lunge, and it slides back through the closing hole between worlds. In an epilogue, Kevin's new word processor prints an unbidden message: The dog is loose again, and it is coming for him.