Only this morning just after I started watching the DVD for the racketeering production the 1995 television miniseries Stephen King's "The Langoliers" did I think consciously about how all that loose change on the deck of the L-1011 commercial jet aircraft was a detail that reminded me of when I saw those coins, which I noted earlier and just after waking up from the dream as seeming to be rare coins, in my dream with the obscured watch face and the red folder. I thought about that a short while ago when I was watching the DVD and the blind girl flips open the cover to her wristwatch so she can feel the position of the hands on the watch face.
I thought about making a note about that back then a short while ago but because I have been wondering if there was a reason I would today decide to watch for the first time DVD for that racketeering production the 1995 television miniseries Stephen King's "The Langoliers." So as I was watching it, I thought, with some doubt about the notion, that the dream of seeing the rare coins is what prompted me to watch this morning the DVD. I watched that rebroadcast on television here in this apartment a while ago and I think I published an official statement about that racketeering production but I didn't reference the television listing and trying to find the exact date I last watched it will take more time than I want to consume right now while I have the DVD paused to make this official statement about that racketeering production.
I decided to make this note now because I just suddenly saw the scene at one hour eleven minutes of "Craig Toomey" finding the big revolver handgun in the locker in the airport security office. The lock on the locker has an obscured face. It appears to be a combination lock but that is not obvious from the scene because only the back of the lock is shown. The shape of the lock is similar to the combination lock I wrote about from my recent dream. The lock seemed to be already open when he opened the door and took the revolver out from behind the locker door.
I didn't even know the name for the actor portraying "Nick Hopewell" until I just looked it up a few minutes ago to make this report.
1995 television miniseries "The Langoliers" DVD video: [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
00:01:38
Nick Hopewell: She's just an innocent bystander.
Driver: So, what's new?
Nick Hopewell: Tell them I won't do it.
Driver: It has to be done by next Thursday, Nick. And make sure it happens in Boston where he lives. I'll see you in London on Saturday. We'll have a pint to celebrate.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/97924/King_-_The_Langoliers.html
Stephen King
The Langoliers [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
One after the other they climbed onto the conveyor belt and crawled after him through the hanging rubber strips.
Dinah paused just outside the entrance hole and turned her head back toward Laurel. Hazy light flashed across her dark glasses, turning them to momentary mirrors.
“It’s really wrong here,” she repeated, and pushed through to the other side.
9
One by one they emerged into the main terminal of Bangor International Airport, exotic baggage crawling along a stalled conveyor belt. Albert helped Dinah off and then they all stood there, looking around in silent wonder.
The shocked amazement at waking to a plane which had been magically emptied of people had worn off; now dislocation had taken the place of wonder. None of them had ever been in an airport terminal which was utterly empty. The rental-car stalls were deserted. The ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES monitors were dark and dead. No one stood at the bank of counters serving Delta, United, Northwest Air-Link, or Mid-Coast Airways. The huge tank in the middle of the floor with the BUY MAINE LOBSTERS banner stretched over it was full of water, but there were no lobsters in it. The overhead fluorescents were off, and the small amount of light entering through the doors on the far side of the large room petered out halfway across the floor, leaving the little group from Flight 29 huddled together in an unpleasant nest of shadows.
“Right, then,” Nick said, trying for briskness and managing only unease. “Let’s try the telephones, shall we?”
While he went to the bank of telephones, Albert wandered over to the Budget Rent A Car desk. In the slots on the rear wall he saw folders for BRIGGS, HANDLEFORD, MARCHANT, FENWICK, and PESTLEMAN. There was, no doubt, a rental agreement inside each one, along with a map of the central Maine area, and on each map there would be an arrow with the legend You ARE HERE on it, pointing at the city of Bangor.
But where are we really? Albert wondered. And where are Briggs, Handleford, Marchant, Fenwick, and Pestleman? Have they been transported to another dimension? Maybe it’s the Grateful Dead. Maybe the Dead’s playing somewhere downstate and everybody left for the show.
There was a dry scratching noise just behind him. Albert nearly jumped out of his skin and whirled around fast, holding his violin case up like a cudgel. Bethany was standing there, just touching a match to the tip of her cigarette.
She raised her eyebrows. “Scare you?”
“A little,” Albert said, lowering the case and offering her a small, embarrassed smile.
“Sorry.” She shook out the match, dropped it on the floor, and drew deeply on her cigarette. “There. At least that’s better. I didn’t dare to on the plane. I was afraid something might blow up.”
Bob Jenkins strolled over. “You know, I quit those about ten years ago.”
“No lectures, please,” Bethany said. “I’ve got a feeling that if we get out of this alive and sane, I’m in for about a month of lectures. Solid. Wall-to-wall.”
Jenkins raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask for an explanation. “Actually,” he said, “I was going to ask you if I could have one. This seems like an excellent time to renew acquaintances with old habits.”
Bethany smiled and offered him a Marlboro. Jenkins took it and she lit it for him. He inhaled, then coughed out a series of smoke-signal puffs.
“You have been away,” she observed matter-of-factly.
Jenkins agreed. “But I’ll get used to it again in a hurry. That’s the real horror of the habit, I’m afraid. Did you two notice the clock?”
“No,” Albert said.
Jenkins pointed to the wall above the doors of the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The clock mounted there had stopped at 4:07.
“It fits,” he said. “We knew we had been in the air for awhile when — let’s call it The Event, for want of a better term — when The Event took place. 4:07 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time is 1:07 A.M. PDT. So now we know the when.”
“Gee, that’s great,” Bethany said.
“Yes,” Jenkins said, either not noticing or preferring to ignore the light overlay of sarcasm in her voice. “But there’s something wrong with it. I only wish the sun was out. Then I could be sure.”
“What do you mean?” Albert asked.
“The clocks — the electric ones, anyway — are no good. There’s no juice. But if the sun was out, we could get at least a rough idea of what time it is by the length and direction of our shadows. My watch says it’s going on quarter of nine, but I don’t trust it. It feels later to me than that. I have no proof for it, and I can’t explain it, but it does.”
Albert thought about it. Looked around. Looked back at Jenkins. “You know,” he said, “it does. It feels like it’s almost lunchtime. Isn’t that nuts?”
“It’s not nuts,” Bethany said, “it’s just jetlag.”
“I disagree,” Jenkins said. “We travelled west to east, young lady. Any temporal dislocation west-east travellers feel goes the other way. They feel it’s earlier than it should be.”
“I want to ask you about something you said on the plane,” Albert said. “When the captain told us that there must be some other people here, you said ‘false logic.’ In fact, you said it twice. But it seems straight enough to me. We were all asleep, and we’re here. And if this thing happened at—” Albert glanced toward the clock, “at 4:07, Bangor time, almost everyone in town must have been asleep.”
“Yes,” Jenkins said blandly. “So where are they?”
https://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-28005/episodes/1065030897
TVRAGE
The Langoliers: Part 1
Episode number: 1x1
Airdate: Sunday May 14th, 1995
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112040/releaseinfo
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Release dates for
The Langoliers (1995) (TV)
Country Date
USA 14 May 1995
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039187/releaseinfo
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Big Town After Dark (1947)
Country Date
USA 12 December 1947
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232
United Airlines Flight 232
United Airlines Flight 232 was a scheduled flight from Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/97924/King_-_The_Langoliers.html
Stephen King
The Langoliers [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
He flicked back to the FAA emergency band. “Denver, come in! Come in right now! This is AP Flight 29, you answer me, goddammit!”
Nick touched his shoulder. “Easy, mate.”
“The dog won’t bark!” Brian said frantically. “That’s impossible, but that’s what’s happening! Christ, what did they do, have a fucking nuclear war?”
“Easy,” Nick repeated. “Steady down, Brian, and tell me what you mean, the dog won’t bark.”
“I mean Denver Control!” Brian said. “That dog! I mean FAA Emergency! That dog! UNICOM, that dog, too! I’ve never—”
He flicked another switch. “Here,” he said, “this is the medium shortwave band. They should be jumping all over each other like frogs on a hot sidewalk, but I can’t pick up jack shit.”
He flicked another switch, then looked up at Nick and Albert Kaussner, who had crowded in close. “There’s no VOR beacon out of Denver,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I have no radio, I have no Denver navigation beacon, and my board says everything is just peachy keen. Which is crap. Got to be.”
A terrible idea began to surface in his mind, coming up like a bloated corpse rising to the top of a river.
“Hey, kid — look out the window. Left side of the plane. Tell me what you see.”
Albert Kaussner looked out. He looked out for a long time. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Just the last of the Rockies and the beginning of the plains.”
“No lights?”
“No.”
Brian got up on legs which felt weak and watery. He stood looking down for a long time.
At last Nick Hopewell said quietly, “Denver’s gone, isn’t it?”
Brian knew from the navigator’s charts and his on-board navigational equipment that they should now be flying less than fifty miles south of Denver... but below them he saw only the dark, featureless landscape that marked the beginning of the Great Plains.
“Yes,” he said. “Denver’s gone.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langoliers
Wikipedia
The Langoliers
"The Langoliers" is one of four novellas published in the Stephen King book Four Past Midnight in 1990.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/97924/King_-_The_Langoliers.html
Stephen King
The Langoliers [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
Then inspiration struck. He switched to the military-aircraft band, although regulations expressly forbade his doing so. The Strategic Air Command practically owned Omaha. They would not be off the air. They might tell him to get the fuck off their frequency, would probably threaten to report him to the FAA, but Brian would accept all this cheerfully. Perhaps he would be the first to tell them that the city of Denver had apparently gone on vacation.
“Air Force Control, Air Force Control, this is American Pride Flight 29 and we have a problem here, a big problem here, do you read me? Over.”
No dog barked there, either.
That was when Brian felt something — something like a bolt — starting to give way deep inside his mind. That was when he felt his entire structure of organized thought begin to slide slowly toward some dark abyss.
9
Nick Hopewell clamped a hand on him then, high up on his shoulder, near the neck. Brian jumped in his seat and almost cried out aloud. He turned his head and found Nick’s face less than three inches from his own.
Now he’ll grab my nose and start to twist it, Brian thought.
Nick did not grab his nose. He spoke with quiet intensity, his eyes fixed unflinchingly on Brian’s. “I see a look in your eyes, my friend... but I didn’t need to see your eyes to know it was there. I can hear it in your voice and see it in the way you’re sitting in your seat. Now listen to me, and listen well: panic is not allowed.”
Brian stared at him, frozen by that blue gaze.
“Do you understand me?”
He spoke with great effort. “They don’t let guys do what I do for a living if they panic, Nick.”
“I know that,” Nick said, “but this is a unique situation. You need to remember, however, that there are a dozen or more people on this plane, and your job is the same as it ever was: to bring them down in one piece.”
“You don’t need to tell me what my job is!” Brian snapped.
“I’m afraid I did,” Nick said, “but you’re looking a hundred per cent better now, I’m relieved to say.”
Brian was doing more than looking better; he was starting to feel better again. Nick had stuck a pin into the most sensitive place — his sense of responsibility. Just where he meant to stick me, he thought.
“What do you do for a living, Nick?” he asked a trifle shakily.
Nick threw back his head and laughed. “Junior attache, British embassy, old man.”
“My aunt’s hat.”
Nick shrugged. “Well... that’s what it says on my papers, and I reckon that’s good enough. If they said anything else, I suppose it would be Her Majesty’s Mechanic. I fix things that need fixing
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Memorable quotes for
Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Scotty: Finding retirement a little lonely, are we?
Kirk: You know, I'm glad you're an engineer. With tact like that, you'd make a lousy psychiatrist.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/97924/King_-_The_Langoliers.html
Stephen King
The Langoliers [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
“There,” she said in a low, dreaming voice, and Laurel felt terror begin to stroke at her heart with chilly fingers. Nor was she alone. Bethany was crowding close to her on one side, and Don Gaffney moved in against her other side. “There — I can feel the light. They said that’s how they know I can see again. I can always feel the light. It’s like heat inside my head.”
“Dinah, what—” Brian began.
Nick elbowed him. The Englishman’s face was long and drawn, his forehead ribbed with lines. “Be quiet, mate.”
“The fight is... here.”
She walked slowly away from them, her hands still fanned out by her ears, her elbows held out before her to encounter any object which might stand in her way. She advanced until she was less than two feet from the window. Then she slowly reached out until her fingers touched the glass. They looked like black starfish outlined against the white sky. She let out a small, unhappy murmur.
“The glass is wrong, too,” she said in that dreaming voice.
“Dinah—” Laurel began.
“Shhh...” she whispered without turning round. She stood at the window like a little girl waiting for her father to come home from work. “I hear something.”
These whispered words sent a wordless, thoughtless horror through Albert Kaussner’s mind. He felt pressure on his shoulders and looked down to see he had crossed his arms across his chest and was clutching himself hard.
Brian listened with all his concentration. He heard his own breathing, and the breathing of the others... but he heard nothing else. It’s her imagination, he thought. That’s all it is.
But he wondered.
“What?” Laurel asked urgently. “What do you hear, Dinah?”
“I don’t know,” she said without turning from the window. “It’s very faint. I thought I heard it when we got off the airplane, and then I decided it was just my imagination. Now I can hear it better. I can hear it even through the glass. It sounds... a little like Rice Krispies after you pour in the milk.”
Brian turned to Nick and spoke in a low voice. “Do you hear anything?”
“Not a bloody thing,” Nick said, matching Brian’s tone. “But she’s blind. She’s used to making her ears do double duty.”
“I think it’s hysteria,” Brian said. He was whispering now, his lips almost touching Nick’s ear.
Dinah turned from the window.
“Do you hear anything?” she mimicked. “Not a bloody thing. But she’s blind. She’s used to making her ears do double duty.” She paused, then added: “I think it’s hysteria.”
“Dinah, what are you talking about?” Laurel asked, perplexed and frightened. She had not heard Brian and Nick’s muttered conversation, although she had been standing much closer to them than Dinah was.
“Ask them,” Dinah said. Her voice was trembling. “I’m not crazy! I’m blind, but I’m not crazy!”
“All right,” Brian said, shaken. “All right, Dinah.” And to Laurel he said: “I was talking to Nick. She heard us. From over there by the windows, she heard us.”
“You’ve got great ears, hon,” Bethany said.
“I hear what I hear,” Dinah said. “And I hear something out there. In that direction.” She pointed due east through the glass. Her unseeing eyes swept them. “And it’s bad. It’s an awful sound, a scary sound.”
Don Gaffney said hesitantly: “If you knew what it was, little miss, that would help, maybe.”
“I don’t,” Dinah said. “But I know that it’s closer than it was.” She put her dark glasses back on with a hand that was trembling. “We have to get out of here. And we have to get out soon. Because something is coming. The bad something making the cereal noise.”
“Dinah,” Brian said, “the plane we came in is almost out of fuel.”
“Then you have to put some more in it!” Dinah screamed shrilly at him. “It’s coming, don’t you understand? It’s coming, and if we haven’t gone when it gets here, we’re going to die! We’re all going to die!”
Her voice cracked and she began to sob. She was not a sibyl or a medium but only a little girl forced to live her terror in a darkness which was almost complete. She staggered toward them, her self-possession utterly gone. Laurel grabbed her before she could stumble over one of the guide-ropes which marked the way to the security checkpoint and hugged her tight. She tried to soothe the girl, but those last words echoed and rang in Laurel’s confused, shocked mind: If we haven’t gone when it gets here, we’re going to die.
We’re all going to die.
12
Craig Toomy heard the brat begin to caterwaul back there someplace and ignored it. He had found what he was looking for in the third locker he opened, the one with the name MARKEY Dymotaped to the front. Mr Markey’s lunch — a sub sandwich poking out of a brown paper bag — was on the top shelf. Mr Markey’s street shoes were placed neatly side by side on the bottom shelf. Hanging in between, from the same hook, were a plain white shirt and a gunbelt. Protruding from the holster was the butt of Mr Markey’s service revolver.
Craig unsnapped the safety strap and took the gun out. He didn’t know much about guns — this could have been a .32, a .38, or even a .45, for all of him — but he was not stupid, and after a few moments of fumbling he was able to roll the cylinder. All six chambers were loaded. He pushed the cylinder back in, nodding slightly when he heard it click home, and then inspected the hammer area and both sides of the grip. He was looking for a safety catch, but there didn’t appear to be one. He put his finger on the trigger and tightened until he saw both the hammer and the cylinder move slightly. Craig nodded, satisfied.
He turned around and without warning the most intense loneliness of his adult life struck him. The gun seemed to take on weight and the hand holding it sagged. Now he stood with his shoulders slumped, the briefcase dangling from his right hand, the security guard’s pistol dangling from his left. On his face was an expression of utter, abject misery. And suddenly a memory recurred to him, something he hadn’t thought of in years: Craig Toomy, twelve years old, lying in bed and shivering as hot tears ran down his face. In the other room the stereo was turned up loud and his mother was singing along with Merrilee Rush in her droning off-key drunk’s voice: “Just call me angel... of the morn-ing, bay-bee... just touch my cheek... before you leave me, bay-bee...”
Lying there in bed. Shaking. Crying. Not making a sound. And thinking: Why can’t you love me and leave me alone, Momma? Why can’t you just love me and leave me alone?
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Craig Toomy muttered through his tears. “I don’t want to, but this... this is intolerable.”
Across the room was a bank of TV monitors, all blank. For a moment, as he looked at them, the truth of what had happened, what was still happening, tried to crowd in on him. For a moment it almost broke through his complex system of neurotic shields and into the air-raid shelter where he lived his life.
Everyone is gone, Craiggy-weggy. The whole world is gone except for you and the people who were on that plane.
“No,” he moaned, and collapsed into one of the chairs standing around the Formica-topped kitchen table in the center of the room. “No, that’s not so. That’s just not so. I refute that idea. I refute it utterly.”
The langoliers were here, and they will be back, his father said. It overrode the voice of his mother, as it always had. You better be gone when they get here... or you know what will happen.
He knew, all right. They would eat him. The langoliers would eat him up.
“But I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he repeated in a dreary, distraught voice. There was a mimeographed duty roster lying on the table. Craig let go of his briefcase and laid the gun on the table beside him. Then he picked up the duty roster, looked at it for a moment with unseeing eyes, and began to tear a long strip from the lefthand side.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/97924/King_-_The_Langoliers.html
Stephen King
The Langoliers [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
The LED readout for the left tank began to slow down when it reached 21,000 pounds, and by the time it topped 22,000 it had almost stopped. Brian understood what was happening and quickly flicked two switches, shutting down the hydraulic pumps. The 727–400 had given them what she had to give: a little over 46,000 pounds of jet-fuel. It would have to be enough.
“All right,” he said, standing up.
“All right what?” Nick asked, also standing.
“We’re uncoupling and getting the fuck out of here.”
The approaching noise had reached deafening levels. Mixed into the crunching smacking sound and the transmission squeal were falling trees and the dull crump of collapsing buildings, just before shutting the pumps down he had heard a number of crackling thuds followed by a series of deep splashes. A bridge falling into the river Nick had seen, he imagined.
“Mr Toomy!” Bethany screamed suddenly. “It’s Mr Toomy!”
Nick beat Brian out the door and into first class, but they were both in time to see Craig go shambling and lurching across the taxiway. He ignored the plane completely. His destination appeared to be an empty triangle of grass bounded by a pair of crisscrossing taxiways.
“What’s he doing?” Rudy breathed.
“Never mind him,” Brian said. “We’re all out of time. Nick? Go down the ladder ahead of me. Hold me while I uncouple the hose.” Brian felt like a man standing naked on a beach as a tidal wave humps up on the horizon and rushes toward the shore.
Nick followed him down and laid hold of Brian’s belt again as Brian leaned out and twisted the nozzle of the hose, unlocking it. A moment later he yanked the hose free and dropped it to the cement, where the nozzle-ring clanged dully. Brian slammed the fuel-port door shut.
“Come on,” he said after Nick had pulled him back. His face was dirty gray. “Let’s get out of here.”
But Nick did not move. He was frozen in place, staring to the east. His skin had gone the color of paper. On his face was an expression of dreamlike horror. His upper lip trembled, and in that moment he looked like a dog that is too frightened to snarl.
Brian turned his head slowly in that direction, hearing the tendons in his neck creak like a rusty spring on an old screen door as he did so. He turned his head and watched as the langoliers finally entered stage left.
18
“So you see,” Craig said, approaching the empty chair at the head of the table and standing before the men seated around it, “the brokers with whom I did business were not only unscrupulous; many of them were actually CIA plants whose job it was to contact and fake out just such bankers as myself — men looking to fill up skinny portfolios in a hurry. As far as they are concerned, the end — keeping communism out of South America — justifies any available means.”
“What procedures did you follow to check these fellows out?” a fat man in an expensive blue suit asked. “Did you use a bond-insurance company, or does your bank retain a specific investigation firm in such cases?” Blue Suit’s round, jowly face was perfectly shaved; his cheeks glowed either with good health or forty years of Scotch and sodas; his eyes were merciless chips of blue ice. They were wonderful eyes; they were father-eyes.
Somewhere, far away from this boardroom two floors below the top of the Prudential Center, Craig could hear a hell of a racket going on. Road construction, he supposed. There was always road construction going on in Boston, and he suspected that most of it was unnecessary, that in most cases it was just the old, old story — the unscrupulous taking cheerful advantage of the unwary. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing whatever. His job was to deal with the man in the blue suit, and he couldn’t wait to get started.
“We’re waiting, Craig,” the president of his own banking institution said. Craig felt momentary surprise — Mr Parker hadn’t been scheduled to attend this meeting — and then the feeling was overwhelmed by happiness.
“No procedures at all!” he screamed joyfully into their shocked faces. “I just bought and bought and bought! I followed No... PROCEDURES... AT ALL!”
He was about to go on, to elaborate on this theme, to really expound on it, when a sound stopped him. This sound was not miles away; this sound was close, very close, perhaps in the boardroom itself.
A whickering chopping sound, like dry hungry teeth.
Suddenly Craig felt a deep need to tear some paper — any paper would do. He reached for the legal pad in front of his place at the table, but the pad was gone. So was the table. So were the bankers. So was Boston.
“Where am I?” he asked in a small, perplexed voice, and looked around. Suddenly he realized... and suddenly he saw them.
The langoliers had come.
They had come for him.
Craig Toomy began to scream.
