Sorry, Right Number is a teleplay written by author Stephen King

Stephen King

Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...

 for an episode of the horror anthology series Tales From The Darkside

Tales from the Darkside

Tales from the Darkside is an anthology horror TV series produced by George A. Romero; it originally aired from 1983 to 1988. Similar to Amazing Stories, The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, The Outer Limits, and Tales From The Crypt, each episode was an individual short story that ended with a plot...

. It was later in King's short story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and is the only such work that King has included in any of his anthologies. It appears in script format in which it begins with an authors' note guide for screenplay and abbreviations.

The plot follows Katie Weiderman. Her childern are included in the sub-plot with a significance later on in the story.

This story was produced as a short film in 2005, directed and adapted by Brian Berkowitz. The cast included Darrin Stevens, Karla Droege, Michael Brady, Kimberly D'Armond, Karoline Striplin, and Barbara Weetman. The original short film, which aired on Tales From The Darkside in 1987, starred Deborah Harmon and Arthur Taxier as Katie and Bill Weiderman, and Rhonda Dotson as Katie's sister Dawn, with Katherine Britton, Brandon Stewart and Nicole Huntington as the Weiderman children.

The name is a takeoff of the radio play and movie Sorry, Wrong Number

Sorry, Wrong Number

Sorry, Wrong Number is a 1948 American suspense film noir directed by Anatole Litvak. It tells the story of a woman who overhears a plot for murder. It stars Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, Ed Begley, Leif Erickson and William Conrad.The film was adapted by Lucille...

wherein a bedridden woman overhears two men plotting a murder.

Plot summary

One night, the children are arguing about whether or not to watch Ghost's Kiss, the gory TV adaptation of Katie's husband Bill's novel,there is a weird phone call in which the caller says, "Take... please take... t-t-," before the line goes blank. She at first thinks it's her daughter Polly, away at boarding school, then thinks it's her mother, then her sister Dawn. She discovers that none of them were the mysterious caller. She then tosses the incident aside. Later, she finds her husband in his chair, dead from a heart attack. The story then goes forward in time to Polly's wedding day, five years exactly after Bill's death. Katie is in Bill's old office when she finds an old recorded tape of Ghost's Kiss and puts it into the TV. She is crazy with grief over the death of her husband and accidentally dials the old house number. She is startled when it rings and is answered by herself five years previously. She tries to warn herself of the tragedy that is about to happen but is unable to speak her intended message of "Take him to the hospital! If you want him to live, take him to the hospital!" In her state of shock, she is only able to get out "Take... please take..." before the line goes dead. It's then that she realizes the truth of what happened that night. The story ends with Katie crying over her lost chance to save her husband and a close-up shot of the ominous looking telephone. This ending displays an example of a predestination paradox

Predestination paradox

A predestination paradox is a paradox of time travel that is often used as a convention in science fiction. It exists when a time traveller is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" or "predates" them to travel back in time...

.