In the Tall Grass

bug, or maybe a small worm. Well, so what? It was protein, right?

“I’ll never find her,” Cal said. He stared at the darkening, waving grass. “Because you won’t let me, will you? You keep the people who love each other apart, don’t you? That’s Job One, right? We’ll just circle around and around, calling to each other, until we go insane.”

Except Becky had stopped calling. Like Mom, Becky had gone dar-

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” a small clear voice said.

Cal’s head jerked around. A little boy in mud-spattered clothes was standing there. His face was pinched and filthy. In one hand he held a dead crow by one yellow leg.

“Tobin?” Cal whispered.

“That’s me.” The boy raised the crow to his mouth and buried his face in its belly. Feathers crackled. The crow nodded its dead head as if to say That’s right, get right in there, get to the meat of the thing.

Cal would have said he was too tired to spring after his latest jump, but horror has its own imperatives, and he sprang anyway. He tore the crow out of the boy’s muddy hands, barely registering the guts unraveling from its open belly. Although he did see the feather stuck to the side of the boy’s mouth. He saw that very well, even in the gathering gloom.

“You can’t eat that! Jesus, kid! What are you, crazy?”

“Not crazy, Captain Cal, just hungry. And the crows aren’t bad. I couldn’t eat any of Freddy. I loved him, see. Dad ate some, but I didn’t. Course, I hadn’t touched the rock then. When you touch the rock-hug it, like-you can see. You just know a lot more. It makes you hungrier, though. And like my dad says, a man’s meat and a man’s gotta eat. After we went to the rock we separated, but he said we could find each other again anytime we wanted.”

Cal was still one turn back. “Freddy?”

“He was our golden. Did great Frisbee catches. Just like a dog on TV. It’s easier to find things in here once they’re dead. The field doesn’t move dead things around.” His eyes gleamed in the fading light, and he looked at the mangled crow, which Cal was still holding. “I think most birds steer clear of the grass. I think they know, and tell each other. But some don’t listen. Crows don’t listen the most, I guess, because there are quite a few dead ones in here. Wander around for a while and you find them.”

Cal said, “Tobin, did you lure us in here? Tell me. I won’t be mad. Your father made you do it, I bet.”

“We heard someone yelling. A little girl. She said she was lost. That’s how we got in. That’s how it works.” He paused. “My dad killed your sister, I bet.”

“How do you know she’s my sister?”

“The rock,” he said simply. “The rock teaches you to hear the grass, and the tall grass knows everything.”

“Then you must know if she’s dead or not.”

“I could find out for you,” Tobin said. “No. I can do better than that. I can show you. Do you want to go see? Do you want to check on her? Come on. Follow me.”

Without waiting for a reply, the kid turned and walked into the grass. Cal dropped the dead crow and bolted after him, not wanting to lose sight of him even for a second. If he did, he might wander around forever without finding him again. I won’t be mad, he’d told Tobin, but he was mad. Really mad. Not mad enough to kill a kid, of course not (probably of course not), but he wasn’t going to let the little Judas-goat out of his sight, either.

Only he did, because the moon rose above the grass, bloated and orange. It looks pregnant, he thought, and when he looked back down, Tobin was gone. He forced his tired legs to run, shoving through the grass, filling his lungs to call. Then there was no more grass to shove. He was in a clearing-a real clearing, not just beaten-down grass. In the middle of it, a huge black rock jutted out of the ground. It was the size of a pickup truck and inscribed all over with tiny dancing stick men. They were white, and seemed to float. They seemed to move.

Tobin stood beside it, then put out one hand and touched it. He shivered-not in fear, Cal thought, but in pleasure. “Boy, that feels good. Come on, Captain Cal. Try it.” He beckoned.

Cal walked toward the rock.

There was a car alarm for a bit, then it stopped. The sound went in Becky’s ears but made no connection to her brain. She crawled. She did it without thinking. Each time a fresh cramp struck her, she stopped with her forehead pressed against the muck and her bottom in the air, like one of the faithful saluting Allah. When the cramp passed, she crawled some more. Her mud-smeared hair was stuck to her face. Her legs were wet with whatever was running out of her. She felt it running out of her but didn’t think about it any more than she had thought about the car alarm. She licked water off the grass as she crawled, turning her head this way and that, flicking her tongue like a snake, snoop-sloop. She did it without thinking.

The moon came up, huge and orange. She twisted her head to look at it and when she did, the worst cramp yet hit her. This one didn’t pass. She flopped over on her back and clawed her shorts and panties down. Both were soaked dark. At last a clear and coherent thought came, forking through her mind like a stroke of heat lightning: The baby!

She lay on her back in the grass with her bloody clothes around her ankles and her knees spread and her hands in her crotch. Snotty stuff squelched through her fingers. Then came a paralyzing cramp, and with it something round and hard. A skull. Its curve fit her hands with sweet perfection. It was Justine (if a girl), or Brady (if a boy). She had been lying to all of them about not having made up her mind; she had known from the first that this baby was going to be a keeper.

She tried to shriek and nothing came out but a whispery hhhhaaaahhh sound. The moon peered at her, a bloodshot dragon’s eye. She pushed as hard as she could, her belly like a board, her ass screwed down into the mucky ground. Something tore. Something slid. Something arrived in her hands. Suddenly she was empty down there, so empty, but at least her hands were full.

Into the red-orange moonlight she raised the child of her body, thinking, It’s all right, women all over the world give birth in fields.

It was Justine.

“Hey, baby girl,” she croaked. “Oooh, you’re so small.”

And so silent.

Close up, it was easy to see the rock wasn’t from Kansas. It had the black glassy quality of volcanic stone. The moonlight cast an iridescent sheen on its angled surfaces, creating slicks of light in tones of jade and pearl.

The stick men and the stick women held hands as they danced into curving waves of grass.

From eight steps back, they seemed to float just slightly above the surface of that great chunk of what-was- probably-not-obsidian.

From six steps back, they seemed to hang suspended just beneath the black glassy surface, objects sculpted from light, hologramlike. It was impossible to keep them in focus. It was impossible to look away.

Four steps away from the rock, he could hear it. The rock emitted a discreet buzz, like the electrified filament in a tungsten lamp. He could not feel it, however-he was not aware of the left side of his face beginning to pink, as if from sunburn. He had no sensation of heat at all.

Get away from it, he thought, but found it curiously difficult to step backward. His feet didn’t seem to move in that direction anymore.

“I thought you were going to take me to Becky.”

“I said we were going to check on her. We are. We’ll check with the stone.”

“I don’t care about your goddamn-I just want Becky.”

“If you touch the rock you won’t be lost anymore,” Tobin said. “You won’t ever be lost again. You’ll be redeemed. Isn’t that nice?” He absentmindedly removed the black feather that had been stuck to the corner of his mouth.