In the Tall Grass (7 page)

Just lately the twenty-first-century Pranksters had been in Cawker City, paying homage to the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. Since leaving, they had busted mega-amounts of dope, and all of them were hungry.

It was Twista, the youngest of them, who spotted the Black Rock of the Redeemer, with its soaring white steeple and oh-so-convenient parking lot. “Church picnic!” he shouted from his seat beside Pa Cool, who was driving. Twista bounced up and down, the buckles on his bib overalls jingling. “Church picnic! Church picnic!”

The others took it up. Pa looked at Ma in the rearview. When she shrugged and nodded, he pulled FURTHER into the lot and parked beside a dusty Mazda with New
Hampshire license plates.

The Pranksters (all wearing Ball of Twine souvenir T-shirts and all smelling of superbud) piled out. Pa and Ma, as the eldest, were the captain and first mate of the good ship
FURTHER,
and the other five—MaryKat, Jeepster, Eleanor Rigby, Frankie the Wiz, and Twista—were perfectly willing to follow orders, pulling out the barbecue, the cooler of meat, and—of course—the beer. Jeepster and the Wiz were just setting up the grill when they heard the first faint voice.

“Help!
Help!
Somebody help me!”

“That sounds like a woman,” Eleanor said.

“Help! Somebody please! I’m lost!”

“
That’s
not a woman,” Twista said. “That’s a little kid.”

“Far out,” MaryKat said. She was cataclysmically stoned, and it was all she could think to say.

Pa looked at Ma. Ma looked at Pa. They were pushing sixty now and had been together a long time—long enough to have couples’ telepathy.

“Kid wandered into the grass,” Ma Cool said.

“Mom heard him yelling and went after him,” Pa Cool said.

“Maybe too short to see their way back to the road,” Ma said. “And now—”

“—they’re both lost,” Pa finished.

“Jeez, that sucks,” Jeepster said. “
I
got lost once. It was in a mall.”

“Far out,” MaryKat said.

“Help! Anybody!”
That was the woman.

“Let’s go get them,” Pa said. “We’ll bring ’em out and feed ’em up.”

“Good idea,” the Wiz said. “Human kindness, man. I’m all about the human fuckin’ kindness.”

Ma Cool hadn’t owned a watch in years, but was good at telling time by the sun. She squinted at it now, measuring the distance between the reddening ball and the field of grass, which seemed to stretch to the horizon.
I bet all of Kansas looked that way before the people came and spoiled it all,
she thought.

“It
is
a good idea,” she said. “It’s going on for five thirty, and I bet they’re really hungry. Who’s going to stay and set up the barbecue?”

There were no volunteers. Everyone had the munchies, but none of them wanted to miss the mercy mission. In the end, all of them trooped across Route 400 and entered into the tall grass.

FURTHER.

Read on for a sneak peak preview from

by Stephen King

Coming from Scribner
September 2013

On the second day of December, in the year of 1977, one of Colorado’s great resort hotels burned to the ground. The Overlook was declared a total loss. After an investigation, the fire marshal of Jicarilla County ruled the cause had been a defective boiler. The hotel was closed for the winter when the accident occurred, and only four people were present. Three survived. The hotel’s off-season caretaker, John Torrance, was killed during an unsuccessful (and heroic) effort to dump the boiler’s steam pressure, which had mounted to a disastrously high level due to an inoperative relief valve.

Two of the survivors were the caretaker’s wife and young son. The third was the Overlook’s chef, Richard Hallorann, who had left his seasonal job in Florida and come to check on the Torrances because of what he called “a powerful hunch” that the family was in trouble. Both surviving adults had
been quite badly injured in the explosion. Only the child was unhurt.

Physically, at least.

Wendy Torrance and her son received a settlement from the corporation that owned the Overlook. It wasn’t huge, but enough to get them by for the three years she was unable to work because of back injuries. A lawyer she consulted told her that if she were willing to hold out and play tough, she would get more. Perhaps a great deal more, because the corporation was anxious to avoid a court case. But she, like the corporation, wanted only to put that disastrous winter in Colorado behind her. She would convalesce, she said, and she did, although her back injuries plagued her until the end of her life. Shattered vertebrae may heal, and broken ribs, but they never cease crying out.

Winifred and Daniel Torrance lived in Maryland for a while, then drifted down to Tampa. Sometimes Dick Hallorann (he of the powerful hunches) came up from Key West to visit with them. To visit with young Danny especially. They shared a bond.

One early morning in March of 1981, Wendy called Dick and asked if he could come. Danny, she said, had awakened her in the night and told her not to go in the bathroom.

After that, he refused to talk at all.

He woke up needing to pee. Outside, a strong wind was blowing. It was warm—in Florida it was almost always warm—but he did not like that sound, and supposed he never would. It reminded him of the Overlook, where the defective boiler had been the very least of the dangers.

He and his mother lived in a cramped second-floor tenement apartment. Danny left the little room next to his mother’s and crossed the hall. The wind gusted and a dying palm tree beside the building clattered its leaves. The sound was skeletal. They always left the bathroom door open when no one was using it, because the lock was broken. Now it was closed. Not because his mother was in there, however. Thanks to facial injuries she’d suffered at the Overlook, she now snored—a soft
queep-queep
sound—and he could hear it coming from her bedroom.

Well,
he thought,
she closed it by accident, that’s all
.

He knew better, even then (he was a boy of powerful hunches and intuitions himself), but sometimes you had to know. Sometimes you had to
see
. This was something he had found out at the Overlook, in a room on the second floor.

Reaching with an arm that seemed too long, too stretchy, too
boneless,
he turned the knob and opened the door.

The woman from Room 217 was there, as he had known she would be. She was sitting naked on the toilet with her legs spread and her pallid thighs bulging. Her peeling breasts hung down like deflated balloons. The patch of hair below her stomach was gray. Her eyes were also gray, like steel mirrors. She saw him, and her decayed lips stretched back in a grin.

Close your eyes,
Dick Hallorann had told him once upon a time.
If you see something bad, close your eyes and tell yourself it’s not there and when you open them again, it will be gone
.

But it hadn’t worked in Room 217 when he was five, and it wouldn’t work now. He knew it. He could
smell
her. She was decaying.

The woman—he knew her name, it was Mrs. Massey—lumbered to her purple feet, holding out her hands to him. The flesh on her arms hung down, almost dripping. She was smiling the way you do when you see an old friend. Or, perhaps, something good to eat.

With an expression that could have been mistaken for calmness, Danny closed the door softly and stepped back. He watched as the knob turned right . . . left . . . right again . . . then stilled.

He was eight now, and capable of at least some rational thought even in his horror. Partly because, in some deep part of his mind, he had been expecting this. Although he had always thought it would be Horace Derwent who would eventually show up. Or perhaps the bartender, the one his father had called Lloyd. He supposed he should have known
it would be Mrs. Massey, though, even before it finally happened. Because, of all the undead things in the Overlook, she had been the worst.

The rational part of his mind told him she was just a fragment of unremembered bad dream that had followed him out of sleep and across the hall to the bathroom. That part insisted that if he opened the door again, there would be nothing there. Surely there wouldn’t be, now that he was awake. But another part of him, a part that
shone,
knew better. The Overlook wasn’t done with him, even yet. At least one of its vengeful spirits had followed him all the way to Florida. Once he had come upon that woman sprawled in a bathtub. She had gotten out and tried to choke him with her fishy (but terribly strong) fingers. If he opened the bathroom door now, she would finish the job. He compromised by putting his ear against the door. At first there was nothing. Then he heard a faint sound.

Dead fingernails scratching on wood.

Danny walked into the kitchen on not-there legs, stood on a chair, and peed into the sink. Then he woke his mother and told her not to go into the bathroom because there was a bad thing there. Once that was done, he went back to bed and sank deep beneath the covers. He wanted to stay there forever, only getting up to pee in the sink. Now that he had warned his mother, he had no interest in talking to her.

His mother knew about the no-talking thing. It had happened before, after Danny had ventured into Room 217
at the Overlook.

“Will you talk to Dick?”

Lying in his bed, looking up at her, he nodded. His mother called, even though it was four in the morning.

Late the next day, Dick came. He brought something with him. A present.

After Wendy called Dick—she made sure Danny heard her doing it—Danny went back to sleep. Although he was now eight and in the third grade, he was sucking his thumb. It hurt her to see it. She went to the bathroom door and stood looking at it. She was afraid—Danny had made her afraid—but she had to go, and she had no intention of going in the sink. The image of how she would look, teetering on the edge of the counter with her butt hanging over the porcelain (even if there was no one there to see) made her wrinkle her nose.

In one hand she had the hammer from her little box of tools. As she turned the knob and pushed the bathroom door open, she raised it. The bathroom was empty, of course, but the ring of the toilet seat was down. She never left it that way before going to bed, because she knew if Danny wandered in, only ten per cent awake, he was apt to forget to put it up and piss all over it. Also, there was a smell. A bad one. As if a rat had died in the walls.

She took a step in, then two. She saw movement and whirled, hammer upraised, to hit whoever

(
whatever
)

was hiding behind the door. But it was only her shadow. Scared of his or her own shadow, people sometimes sneered, but who had a better right than Wendy Torrance? After the things she had seen and been through, she knew that shadows could be dangerous. They could have teeth.

No one was in the bathroom, but there was a discolored smear on the toilet seat ring and another on the shower curtain. Excrement was her first thought, but shit wasn’t yellowish-purple. She looked more closely and saw bits of flesh and decayed skin. More of it was on the bathmat. There it formed the shape of footprints. She thought them too small—too
dainty
—to be a man’s.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

She ended up using the sink, after all.

Wendy nagged Danny out of bed at noon. She managed to get a little soup and half a peanut butter sandwich into him, but then he went back to bed. He still wouldn’t speak. Hallorann arrived shortly after five in the afternoon, behind the wheel of his now ancient (but perfectly maintained and blindingly polished) red Cadillac. Wendy had been standing
at the window, waiting and watching as she had once waited and watched for her husband, hoping Jack would come home in a good mood. And sober.

She rushed down the stairs and opened the door just as Dick was about to ring the bell marked TORRANCE 2A. He held out his arms and she went into them at once, wishing she could be enfolded there for at least an hour. Maybe even two.

He let go and held her at arm’s length by her shoulders. “You’re lookin fine, Wendy. How’s the little man? He talkin again?”

“No, but he’ll talk to you. Even if he won’t do it out loud to start with, you can—” Instead of finishing, she made a finger-gun and pointed it at his forehead.

“Not necessarily,” Dick said. His smile revealed a bright new pair of false teeth. The Overlook had taken most of the last set on the night the boiler blew. Jack Torrance swung the mallet that took Dick’s dentures and Wendy’s ability to walk without a slight hitch in her stride, but they both understood it had really been the Overlook. “He’s very powerful, Wendy. If he wants to block me out, he will. I know from my own experience. Besides, it’d be better if we talk with our mouths. Better for him. Now tell me everything that happened.”

After she did that, Wendy took him into the bathroom. She had left the stains for him to see, like a beat cop preserving the scene of a crime for the forensic team. And there
had
been a crime. One against her son.

Dick looked for a long time, not touching, then nodded. “Let’s see if Danny’s up and in the doins.”

He wasn’t, but Wendy’s heart was lightened by the look of gladness that came into Danny’s face when he saw who was sitting beside him on the bed and shaking his shoulder.

(
hey Danny I brought you a present
)

(
it’s not my birthday
)

Wendy watched them, knowing they were speaking but not knowing what it was about.

Dick said, “You get up, honey. We’re gonna take a walk on the beach.”

(
Dick she came back Mrs. Massey from Room 217 came back
)

Dick gave his shoulder another shake. “Talk out loud, Dan. You’re scarin your ma.”

Danny said, “What’s my present?”