Janet had not been paying much attention to the conversation. Now she turned to look at her son. "A ghost?" she asked, her voice incredulous. "What on earth are you talking about?"

Michael shifted uncomfortably. "Damon Hollings says Mr. Findley's farm is haunted."

"Oh, for heaven's sake. You didn't believe him, did you, honey?" When Michael hesitated, Janet's voice lost some of its lightness. "There's no such thing as ghosts, Michael, and there never have been." She turned to Amos and Anna, expecting them to support her, but Amos seemed lost in thought, while Anna had turned away and was slowly pushing her chair toward the car. "Amos, tell him there's no such thing as ghosts."

"I'm not going to tell him something I don't know about, Janet," he said at last.

Janet stared at him. "Something you don't know about?" she repeated. "Amos, you aren't going to tell me you believe in ghosts!"

"All I can tell you is that there've been stories," Amos said at last. "So I guess I'll just have to say I don't know."

"What kind of stories?" Michael demanded.

"Things," Amos told him after a long silence. Then he smiled grimly. "Maybe, if you're good, I'll tell you all about them, just before you go to bed tonight."

Michael tried to keep his excitement from showing, tried to keep his expression disinterested. He failed completely.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The prairie was different then; the grass was tall, and in the summer you couldn't even see where you were going. It would grow five, maybe six feet high, and it was like a great sea, green at first, during the spring, and then, in the summer, it would turn brown, and as far as you could see, there it was, waving in the wind just like in the song. Then the cattle came, and the grass started getting more like it is now -still thick, and still tall in the spring, but cut down as the summer goes on. It never used to get cut at all. It would just stand, bloom, go to seed, and die.

And in the winter, the prairie would turn white, and the snow would be so thick no one could go out in it. No one except the Indians, with their travois. And even they didn't travel much in the winter. They'd pitch their tepees, and huddle together, and somehow they'd get through it.

That was what the white people didn't know. They didn't understand the prairie, didn't have any idea of what it could be like. The thing of the prairie is that it just seems to go on and on forever. And there's nothing to measure it by. So what used to happen is that people would lose track out on the prairie. Not of where they were -they always knew that. But they'd lose track of who they were, and what they were.

It would happen slowly, so slowly that most people ever knew it was happening to them. They'd come out here from the east, and they'd be looking for land. A lot of them were city people, and what they wanted was to be out of the city. So at first they didn't even have towns. Instead, they'd claim tracts of land-big tracts -and they'd build their houses right in the middle of it, and everything they could see was theirs. And they didn't have any neighbors, not to speak of. Oh, there were other people, but they lived miles away, and the only time you saw your neighbors was during a house-raising or a wedding, a birth or a death. For the rest of the time, you were by yourself, with no one but your family. And sometimes you'd be snowbound for months on end.

It seems like it was the women it got to the most. They'd go on for years, raising their children and taking care of their husbands, and everything would seem to be fine. But inside, they'd start losing their sense of themselves. They'd start feeling like they were disappearing into the prairie. Every day, little by little, getting smaller and smaller, until they'd start to feel like one morning they just wouldn't be there anymore. And then it would happen. One day something would just sort of snap inside their heads.

That's what happened in Prairie Bend. Except that it wasn't called Prairie Bend then, and there was no town yet. Just a few big farms, and the bend in the river. And there was a woman. A woman named Abby Randolph. Her husband had died that fall, and even though she was pregnant, she stayed on, trying to take care of the farm and raise the children.

She seemed fine, the last time anyone saw her, which was in the fall, just before the first snow. And then the snow came, and it kept on coming. The drifts built up, covering everything, and a lot of people died, right in their own houses.

That's not what happened to Abby, though.

Abby started hearing things. At first, she didn't pay any attention to it. She'd wake up in the night, and she'd hear something downstairs, like someone moving around. So she'd get out of bed and go downstairs, but there wouldn't be anyone there. Then she'd check on the children, thinking maybe one of them was playing a joke on her. But they'd be in their beds, sound asleep.

Then one night Abby heard the sound downstairs. It didn't go away. It got louder and louder. Finally, Abby went downstairs.

The noise was coming from the front door. Three knocks, and then a long silence, and then three more knocks. For a long time, Abby just stared at the door, knowing it wasn't possible that anyone could be outside. It was February, and the drifts were ten feet deep, and there was no one else for miles around. But the knocking didn't stop. And then Abby opened the door.

There was a huge man looming in the doorframe, covered with snow, with ice forming on his beard and his eyebrows. Abby stared at him for a long time, and then the man took a step forward and his eyes seemed to flash at Abby. And he spoke.

"I've come for my boy."

The first time it happened, Abby just shut the door, but after that, it happened every night. Every night, she'd wake up and hear the pounding on the door, and every night the man would be there, and every night he'd say the same thing.

"I've come for my boy."

Then one morning, after the man had come the night before, and Abby had shut the door, one of the children was gone. And that night, the man didn't come back. But then, a week later, he came back again, and when Abby opened the door, he smiled at her. "You can have him back in the summer," he said. "You can have him back when the grass is high."

And one by one, that winter, Abby Randolph's children disappeared until there was only one left.

Then spring came, and the snow melted, and people started visiting each other again. When they first came to see Abby, she was sitting on her front porch, with a very strange look in her eyes. And they found one child upstairs - her oldest son-crouched in the corner of his room. They tried to talk to him, but all he'd do was scream whenever anyone went near him. And the rest of the children were gone.

They tried to talk to Abby, but she wouldn't say much. All she'd say was that the children's father had come for them, and that he'd bring them back when the grass was high.

The spring passed, and then the summer came, and one day some neighbors went to visit Abby and found her out in the field, digging. When they asked her what she was looking for, she said she was looking for her children.

"The grass is high," she said. "The grass is high, and it's time for them to come back."

The next day, they found Abby. She was in the barn, pinned up against the wall with a pitchfork. Her son was with her, crouched down on the floor of the barn, watching his mother bleed to death. They didn't talk to the boy, didn't bother to give him anything like a trial. They just hanged him, right there in the barn. They say he died even before his mother did. Abby didn't die for hours. She hung on, trying to save her baby. And in the end, she did. The baby was born just before she died. And later on, in Abby's cyclone cellar, they found some bones. They were the bones of children, and it looked like they'd been boiled.