Mrs Kersh looked around from the stove, where she was placing a teapot. 'You grew up here?'

'Yes,' Beverly said. 'But it's very different now . . . so trim and tidy . . . wonderful!'

'How kind you are,' Mrs Kersh said, and her smile made her younger. It was radiant. 'I have a little money, you see. Not much, but with my Social Security I am comfortable. Once I was a girl in Sweden. I came to this country in 1920, a girl of fourteen with no money — which is the best way to learn the value of money, would you agree?'

'Yes,' Bev said.

'At the hospital I worked,' Mrs Kersh said. 'Many years — from 1925 I worked there. I rose to the position of head housekeeper. All the keys I had. My husband invested our money quite well. Now I have reached a little harbor. Look around, miss, while the water boils!'

'No, I couldn't — '

'Please . . . still I feel guilty. Look, if you like!'

And so she did look. Her parents' bedroom was now Mrs Kersh's bedroom, and the difference was profound. The room seemed brighter and airier now. A large cedar chest, the initials RG inlaid into it, breathed its gentle aroma into the air. A gigantic surprise-quilt lay on the bed. On it she could see women drawing water, boys driving cattle, men building haystacks. A wonderful quilt.

Her room had become a sewing room. A black Singer machine stood on a wrought-iron table under a pair of starkly efficient Tensor lamps. A picture of Jesus hung on one wall, a picture of John F. Kennedy on another. A beautiful breakfront stood below the picture of JFK — it was filled with books ins tead of china, but seemed none the worse for that.

She went into the bathroom last.

It had been redone in a rose color that was too low and pleasant to seem gaudy. All of the fixtures were new, and yet she approached the basin feeling that the old nightmare had gripped her again; she would peer down into that black and lidless eye, the whispering would begin, and then the blood —

She leaned over the sink, catching a glimpse of her pallid face and dark eyes in the mirror over the basin, and then she stared into that eye, waiting for the voices, the laughter, the groans, the blood.

How long might she have stood there, bent over the sink, waiting for the sights and sounds twenty-seven years gone, she didn't know; it was Mrs Kersh's voice that bi d her return: 'Tea, miss!'

She jerked back, the semi-hypnosis broken, and left the bathroom. If there had been dark magic somewhere down in that drain, it was gone now . . . or was sleeping.

'Oh, you shouldn't have!'

Mrs Kersh looked up at her brightly, smiling a little. 'O miss, if you knew how seldom company calls these days, you'd not say so. Why, I put on more than this for the man from the Bangor Hydro who comes to read my meter! I'm making him fat!'

Delicate cups and saucers stood on the round kitchen table, a clean bone-white edged with blue. There was a plate of small cakes and cookies. Beside the sweets a pewter teapot chuffed mild steam and pleasant fragrance. Bemused, Bev thought that the only things missing were the tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off: auntsandwiches, she'd thought them, always one word. Three main types of auntsandwiches — cream cheese and olive, watercress, and egg salad.

'Sit down,' said Mrs Kersh. 'Sit down, miss, and I'll pour out.'

'I'm not a mis s,' Beverly said, and raised her left hand so that her ring would show.

Mrs Kersh smiled and pushed a hand through the air — pshaw! the gesture said. 'I call all the pretty young girls miss,' she said. 'Just a habit. Don't take offense.'

'No,' Beve rly said, 'not at all.' But for some reason she felt a feather-touch of unease: there was something in the old woman's smile that had seemed a little . . . what? Unpleasant? False? Knowing? But that was ridiculous, wasn't it?

'I love what you've done to the place.'

'Do you?' Mrs Kersh said, and poured out. The tea looked dark, muddy. Beverly wasn't sure she wanted to drink it . . . and suddenly she wasn't sure she wanted to be here at all.

It did say Marsh under the doorbell, her mind whispered suddenly, and she was frightened.

Mrs Kersh passed her tea.

Thank you,' Beverly said. The look of it might have been muddy; the aroma, however, was wonderful. She tasted. It was fine. Stop jumping at shadows, she told herself. That cedar chest in particular is a wonderful piece.'

'An antique, that one!' Mrs Kersh said, and laughed. Beverly noticed that the old woman's beauty was flawed on only one score, and that was common enough here in the northlands. Her teeth were very bad — strong-looking, but bad all the same. They were yellow, and the front two had crossed each other. The canines seemed very long, almost like tusks.

They were white . . . when she came to the door she smiled and you thought to yourself how white they were.

Suddenly she was not just a little frightened. Suddenly she wanted — needed — to be away from here.

'Very old, oh yes!' Mrs Kersh exclaimed, and drank her cup of tea off at a single gulp, with a sudden, shocking slurping sound. She smiled at Beverly — grinned at her — and Beverly saw that the woman's eyes had changed, too. The corneas were now yellow, ancient, threaded with bleary stitches of red. Her hair was thinner; the braid looked malnourished, no longer silver shot with bright yellow but a dull gray.

'Very old,' Mrs Kersh reminisced over her empty cup, looking slyly at Beverly from her yellowed eyes. Her snaggle teeth showed in that repulsive, almost leering grin. 'From home with me it came. The RG carved into it? You noticed?'

'Yes.' Her voice came from far away, and a part of her brain yammered If she doesn't knowyou've seen the change perhaps you're still all right, if she doesn't know, doesn't see —

'My father,' she said, pronouncing it fodder, and Beverly saw that her dress had also changed. It had become a scabrous, peeling black. The cameo was a skull, its jaw hung in a diseased gape. 'His name was Robert Gray, better known as Bob Gray, better known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Although that was not his name, either. But he did love hi s joke, my fadder.'

She laughed again. Some of her teeth had turned as black as her dress. The wrinkles in her skin now cut deep. Her milk-rose skin had gone a sickly yellow. Her ringers were claws. She grinned at Beverly. 'Have something to eat, dear.' Her voice had risen half an octave, but the octave was cracked in this register, and her voice was the sound of a crypt door swinging mindlessly on hinges clogged with black earth.

'No, thank you,' Beverly heard her mouth say in a child's high oh-I-must-be-going voice. The words did not seem to originate in her brain; rather they came out of her mouth and then had to travel around to her ears before she was aware of what she had said.

'No?' the witch asked, and grinned. Her claws scrabbled on the plate and she began to cram thin molasses cookies and delicate frosted slices of cake into her mouth with both hands. Her horrid teeth plunged and reared, plunged and reared; her fingernails, long and dirty, dug into the sweets; crumbs tumbled down the bony slab of her chin. Her breath was the smell of long-dead things burst wide open by the gases of their own decay. Her laugh was now a dead cackle. Her hair was thinner. Scaly scalp showed in patches.

'Oh, he loved his joke, my fadder! This is a joke, miss, if you enjoy them: my fadder bore me rather than my mutter. He shat me from his asshole! Hee! Hee! Hee!'

'I ought to go,' Beverly heard herself say in that same high wounded voice — the voice of a small girl who has been viciously embarrassed at her first party. There was no strength in her legs. She was dimly aware that it was not tea in her cup but shit, liquid shit, a little party-favor from the sewers under the city. She had drunk some of that, not much but a sip, oh God,oh God, oh blessed Jesus, please, please —