His balance is screwy. He reels halfway across the little dirt drive and then catches himself against the hood of Connor’s sweet ’71 Road Runner, the car he’s always wanted. Well. It’s his now. He can’t have Connor’s cool carbon-fiber leg, and he doesn’t yearn for Beth anymore, but the car is all his. He may only be thirteen, but he’s tall enough to reach the pedals and is already a perfectly competent driver.

Jack steers the Road Runner down the drive and onto the lane, away from the collapsing farmhouse and the ruin of the barn. The barn isn’t a barn at all anymore. It’s a crater: a dish filled with flames. Shingles are still falling, along with sparks.

He rolls down his window and swings out onto the highway. Warm air rushes in, carrying a blast of the fresh, fragrant summer, every tree in full green flourish. Sunlight embraces him, as warm and gentle and kind as a mother’s touch.

Jack McCourt has not been behind the wheel long, though, when he sees a woman in a wide-brimmed green straw hat standing at the side of the road, holding a suitcase in one hand. As the car rushes by her, she lifts her head and shows him a wide, toothy grin, the smile of someone who’s been poisoned by the Joker. She stands in profile to him. It is like looking at the face on a dollar bill.

He whisks by her but lifts his foot from the gas, begins to slow, steers himself onto the gravel margin of the road. It occurs to him that he is still unconscious, never came fully awake after he was flattened by the explosion that took the barn, and this is one of his waking dreams, no different from those half-recalled fantasies of talking plants. His great-great-great-grandmother is older than TV, too old to have traveled all this way. And yet he thinks this might be the very woman herself and believes she’s been waiting all morning for him to finish his business at the farm and come get her. She walks toward the car, smiling to herself as she approaches. Whatever she is—a figment of madness or his own true blood—he welcomes the company. Better, he believes, than traveling alone.

In the Tall Grass

with Stephen King

⟵ ⟶

He wanted quiet for a while instead of the radio, so you could say what happened was his fault. She wanted fresh air instead of the A/C for a while, so you could say it was hers. But since they never would have heard the kid without both of those things, you’d really have to say it was a combination, which made it perfect Cal-and-Becky, because they had run in tandem all their lives. Cal and Becky DeMuth, born nineteen months apart. Their parents called them the Irish Twins.