This is how Maw Maw died: She sat on the john and pottied her spine. That's what Hilda said, but Buddy disputed it. No, when she sat down, she fell in. And Mrs. Forbus went to clean the bathroom, and flushed her away without noticing. Hilda shook her head. No, you numbskull, she was too big, she would have clogged the pipe. Her spine went first, then maybe her organs, and Maw Maw flushed the toilet herself, thinking she had done her business. By then she was nothing but a skin-bag of stuff, and she collapsed into the bowl like a popped balloon.

Little T-Ray, their cousin and another of Maw Maw's grandchildren, alternately envisioned her dying either death, but supposed that Hilda, being seven, knew the truth. Whenever he sat on the toilet, he wondered if he would lose his insides, and what Maw Maw had been thinking when she lost hers. Had she been ready to die? Did she push hard on purpose to kill herself? Or was it an accident, like the astonishing, humiliating release he still sometimes awoke to in bed, only her mistake was to let loose the scariest bowel movement possible?

It never occurred to him that the story was made up, that Maw Maw might have died peacefully in her sleep. It never occurred to him because he knew life had been waiting to escape her, to flush from her the moment it had had the chance. Maw Maw had known it, too.

For as long as T-Ray could remember, Hilda and Buddy had wished that their parents would put Maw Maw to sleep, like they had Chipper, their collie, after the old boy couldn't stand up anymore. No matter now: The source of their embarrassment and shame, the sole reason they couldn't invite unrelated friends over to play, Maw Maw had finally been hidden for good. They impatiently awaited the transformation of her downstairs bedroom into the TV room their parents had promised.

They had not been allowed to go into her room unaccompanied by an adult (not that they had had the courage to enter it), so they had spied on her: Hilda and Buddy, T-Ray and his older brother, David, and their cousin Libby. They would kneel on the back porch and peer through her bedroom window, watching her like the TV show she should have been. Maw Maw was small, not much taller than Hilda, and amazingly limber for her age. She usually sat on the floor and rarely sat still. She would rock back and forth, wring her hands, rub her arms, tweak her fleshy earlobes, tick her head back and forth like a batted shuttlecock, or bend over and sweep the faded Persian rug with her wild, white hair, then lift her head into the sunlight and shake it violently, dust motes flying from her like sparks. Her face was the most frightening T-Ray had ever seen, uglier even than that of Mr. Trent, who lived on Cedar Street at the bottom of the hill and peeked at them from his living room window, whose chin and cheek were still flying off his face, even though his suicide attempt was old news. Maw Maw's head was too big for her body, and her sagging face was a spider's web of wrinkles that rippled with every passing emotion. But what immortalized her ugliness, what made her an after-image when T-Ray blinked, what kept her vivid in his nightmares and always surfacing between his thoughts, was the contrast between her quivering, expressive face and her round, bright blue eyes, eyes rinsed clear, he could tell, by craziness.

No matter how quiet or cautious they were when they watched her, Maw Maw quickly sensed them and burst into demonic life. "Monsters!" she would yell before getting up to chase them. It didn't matter that she never left her room - they never thought of that when they scampered off the back porch, stifling shrieks lest Mrs. Forbus hear them over her chores, and ran through the Hostler backyard and into the woods beyond. There, safely out of earshot, they would scream off their terror and fascination.

Once, Mrs. Forbus did catch them spying. That afternoon, Uncle Charlie, Hilda and Buddy's father, rounded all five of them up in the backyard and threatened to whip their heinies off if they ever did it again. He even whacked T-Ray on the rump to punctuate his warning, but mercifully didn't report the crime to his parents. Leniency had no effect; even a round of whippings might not have been edifying: Maw Maw's grotesqueness had charmed them. A few days later they were back at her window.

In T-Ray's nightmares, Maw Maw danced in slow motion with the astronauts on the moon, or hid in the vine-cave and pounced on him the moment he entered. The cave was in his backyard, a tangle of morning glory and trumpet vine smothering a small, ancient dogwood bent nearly in two by the vines' weight. He would crawl in, noticing a skein of leaves shivering in the darkness, and Maw Maw would leap out and clutch him with talons like those of the American Eagle in his book of birds. He would throw himself out of bed thrashing to escape.

Or he would dream that Maw Maw chased him around the Hostler house and followed him into the crawlspace under the front porch. Trying to cry out for help, his mouth paralyzed, he would scamper across the dusty, hard-packed earth to the far corner. She would crawl toward him, past the yellow metal go-cart, past stilts and stray lumber, cobwebs catching in her troll doll hair, the wooden slats fronting the crawlspace casting checkerboard shadows over her grimacing face. She would grab his ankle, drag him closer and utter a threat that he never stayed asleep long enough to hear.

When Maw Maw died, T-Ray's nightmares subsided, but not his terror. He grew afraid of the bathroom, resisting the need to potty for fear he would grunt himself to death. He would prance around the toilet in ever tightening arcs, desperate to hold it in a bit longer, certain that after he sat down and went, he would discover in his bowel movement a kidney or his heart. As the light dimmed and death approached, whatever he had lost would tumble free and bob to the surface like a little pink balloon.

One summer evening before Maw Maw died, they sat in the vine cave and used her to scare one another.

"Lizard skin," Hilda offered.

"I bet when she grabs your arm," Libby suggested, "her claws cut you down to the bone." T-Ray wondered if Libby shared his nightmare about Maw Maw. He thought of Libby's other grandma—the mean, always disapproving Granny Moodispaw, who lived with Libby's family. He felt both lucky and jealous that Libby had Granny, and Hilda and Buddy had Maw Maw, but he and his brother David had no ogre of their own.

"When Mom takes you in to say 'goodnight' to her, if she's not mental, she hugs you and pinches your cheek," Buddy whispered. T-Ray stared at him, wanting more. "Momma makes us kiss her!"

"Ewwww!"

"That's right!" Hilda said.

A werewolf growled behind them; Libby and Buddy shrieked.

"Peanut!" the others screamed.

Their older friend, Peanut, didn't bully them as cruelly as he did his age-mates, possibly because he shared their interests, more likely because he was too much older to consider them worthy of a serious work-over. Once, in fearful awe, they watched him beat up a new neighborhood boy his own age, hit him until he fell down, let him get up only to knock him down again, until the boy ran home, wailing and bloody. As frightened of Peanut as they were, they sensed he would never do that to them, if they were careful. But some days he was moody and easily angered and at the least little provocation, he would call them losers or pussies. He would methodically chase each one of them down and give him a pink belly: pin the child, lift his shirt and slap his abdomen until it burned and gave off a rosy glow. Whenever he pink-bellied T-Ray, the pain never lasted as long as the humiliation, and the desire for some unformulated sort of revenge.

Watching Peanut badger the older kids in the neighborhood, T-Ray learned that he was about to attack whenever he balled his sunburnt hands into fists. These were scarred, with large knuckles and long, muscular, nail-bitten fingers. Those nights Peanut sat in the vine-cave and started a ghost story but lost his way and started to insult them instead, T-Ray would watch his fingers. Once they folded, he would jump up and sprint away, knowing that the first punch or pink belly was typically awarded to whomever was closest, and that he could delay his punishment for at least a day if he hid well enough.

T-Ray and Hilda were both clever name-callers, and sometimes too caught up in the excitement of bantering with Peanut to fear him. They would go so far as to call him "water baby," mocking him for his fear of it, or one of them would sing the peanut butter jingle: "Choosy mothers choose JIF!" T-Ray might point at the trash cans set out along the Hostler front yard and yell, "smells more like fresh Peanut!" Hilda would look at the ground and exclaim, "Dog doo! Tastes more like fresh Peanut!" Whoever wasn't tackled would run from the resulting wrestling match, although sometimes they could be begged to return. One time they ganged up on him: David sat on his right arm, Libby the other, little Buddy and T-Ray each took a leg, and Hilda stepped on either side of his head and crouched to sit on his face. Peanut's eyes betrayed a terror as intense as in those of the new neighborhood boy he had beaten up. He wrenched free, eventually ran each of them down and planted on T-Ray's thigh the most painful Charlie Horse he'd ever received.

Whenever Peanut could sail above his moods, he gave them a treasure trove of ghost stories. With vine leaves whispering in the humid, summer wind, they would sit in the cave and watch as their oracle's ceaselessly moving mouth described all the monsters that roamed the earth. One evening, T-Ray—turning from a particularly fearful horror that knotted his stomach—caught his parents staring at them through the kitchen window, hugging one another and smiling. They could see the entrance of the cave and the faces of wide-eyed children lit by flashlights tied to overhanging vines. They thought it sweet of the older boy to sit with the young ones and tell them stories. When they moved away from the window, T-Ray felt his stomach tighten with a sort of finality, as if a horizon had been pinched into place for the rest of his life. Short of breath, he looked at his storyteller and wondered if Peanut were a sort of wizard, an old, wise man in a young body, someone who would understand Maw Maw if he ever heard her speak. T-Ray watched his glittering, chestnut eyes and moving lips and reluctantly returned to the tale of the Boogeyman:

Next full moon, Boogeyman climbed Elephant Mountain and looked down at the town. He laid eyes on the boy he wanted, and that boy flew from his bed into the night and next thing you know, he was lying in front of Boogeyman, who pink-bellied him and then tied copperheads and cotton mouths to his arms and legs and neck. And Boogeyman made hisself a crab apple switch and whipped those snakes to a fury and laughed while they struck and bit that screaming boy to death.

Peanut need only snap his teeth for them to see Crocodile Man. Not only did he prowl the Maury and South rivers, but every creek and gully, too. T-Ray suspected that Peanut didn't know how to swim and was more frightened of Croc Man than the other ghouls that haunted the Shenandoah Valley. Croc Man was always just below the water's surface, waiting for the chance to pull you in and hold you under. You could be jumping over what you thought was just a mud puddle, Croc Man would rise up, snag your ankle and pull you into a narrow, cold water hole as deep as the granite quarry outside Lexington.

Clock-man looks and ticks just like a grandfather clock, and walks the streets at night. When the clock strikes midnight, he freezes. If he faces exactly in your direction and you ain't good enough, he sees you. Next moment he's standing right behind you, invisible, but you can hear him ticking like a clock. He picks you up by the neck and lifts you high in the air. Kick and scream all you want—your parents can run into your bedroom and grab your feet and pull with all their might—but he'll still smash your face against the ceiling. And with his free hand, he reaches up, takes the golden hour hand off his clock face and slices you down your back. Your organs slip out, splash on the floor and flop around gasping for life like fishes out of water.

"That's what really happened to that Southern Seminary girl," he added. "She didn't jump out a window and roll down the Seminary steps. Clock-man saw her, and saw she wasn't good enough."

"Not good enough for what?" Hilda asked.

"Just not good enough."

Buddy's face welled up. "I'm a good Christian!" he yelled.

"Hell's bells," Peanut snarled, "None of y'all is good enough."

As soon as Buddy let slip that the Hostlers had their own monster, Peanut took them to spy on Maw Maw, honoring and frightening them at the same time. Hilda and Buddy were thrilled at the sudden prestige Maw Maw accorded their household, but T-Ray could tell they were afraid Peanut might do something to get them in trouble. When Peanut peeked over the window sill, he started at the sight of Maw Maw, who preternaturally raised her head and glared around the room. They all ducked. Hilda and Buddy grinned at Peanut and then at one another, and T-Ray felt another twinge of jealousy.

The second time Peanut lifted his head to look at Maw Maw, T-Ray, behind him, pushed him toward the window.

"Boo!"

Peanut gasped. Furious at having revealed fear, he grabbed T-Ray and twisted his ear back and forth as if he were trying to unscrew it from T-Ray's head but unable to figure out which direction loosened it.

"How'd she know we was gonna peek at her?" Peanut asked, while working away at the ear.

"E.S.P.," David assured him.

T-Ray had to whine "uncle" a dozen times, his eyes welling with tears, before Peanut released him.

"But she's not as good at it when you're outside her door," Hilda said. "Sometimes when I go with Mom to bring her her meal, she doesn't hear us coming and jumps out of her skin." The way Peanut stared at Hilda made her change her tone.

"We're not allowed near Maw Maw's room without a parent," she added.

"But sometimes we listen outside her door on Thursday afternoons, when Mrs. Forbus runs errands," Buddy said.

"Is Maw Maw as scary as Croc Man?" David asked Peanut, who took one last glimpse of her before they all slunk off the porch.

"Almost," Peanut whispered over his shoulder.

Thursday afternoon, while they were playing freeze tag, Peanut appeared on the path that led out of the woods and into the Hostler's backyard. T-Ray was in a bad mood: David was "it" and had tagged him first. Buddy, the slowest runner, was the only one unfrozen and now—just as David was chasing Buddy down—for the first time, Peanut said he wanted to play, too. Since he was twice as fast as T-Ray, T-Ray knew he would be "it" for as long as they continued to play, a stifling humiliation. Deciding that he'd rather have Indian rope burns all over his body, he bet Peanut a quarter he was too frightened to jump into Hawthorne Pool.

"If I had a sissy club membership like you, I'd do it no sweat."

"Today's 'Guest Day,' I can bring you as my guest and it won't cost you a thing," T-Ray said.

"No, yesterday was Guest Day," Buddy corrected him. Peanut immediately gave chase. Soon T-Ray was squirming and mumbling for help while Peanut scrubbed the grass with his face. Libby and Buddy squealed excitedly from the Scurlocks' yard next door. Hilda ran up behind Peanut and yelled:

"Peanut's too chicken to go in the wading pool!" She ran off.

Peanut leapt up and started after her.

"Too chicken for the baby pool!" Libby echoed.

David, who had the most to lose—only two years younger than Peanut, he had grown almost within fighting size— rallied and followed their cue: "He'd wet his diapers if he had to go in. Just like the other babies!"

"Baby! Baby!" Libby and Buddy chorused from the Scurlocks' yard. Peanut slowed down to look at them and they instinctively ran off in opposite directions.

"You mother fuckers!" he screamed, a livid red blooming instantly on his face, but he chose Hilda as his prey since she was closest to him, and tackled her.

"Peanut Hinson, come here!" an adult voice thundered. Everyone froze but Hilda, who slithered out of Peanut's grip, ran to the shed and scrambled up its doorway to the roof.

Mrs. Forbus sauntered down the back porch steps and strode past T-Ray toward Peanut.

"You're not ever comin' back into this yard if you talk like that again, you hear me?" Mrs. Forbus glared at Peanut until he hung his head. This was not the first time she had reprimanded him for cussing.

"Do you hear me?" she sternly repeated.

"Yes, ma'am," Peanut answered, still looking down.

Mrs. Forbus kept glaring at him, as if expecting her gaze to shrink him to nothing. Then she turned and strode back toward the porch.

"You kids shouldn't tease Peanut like that, you hear? When y'all was babies, y'all used to be afraid of water, too." She grinned at T-Ray, "Even you, you troublemaker." She bounded up the steps.

The porch door slammed behind her, throwing them into electrical silence. Peanut didn't raise his head. T-Ray and Hilda looked at one another. They had gone too far—they had shamed him in front of an adult! And if Peanut would break a boy's nose just for imagining the boy had slighted him....

Buddy began to moan eerily as he scooted up the gigantic pine in the Scurlocks' backyard, a tree with branches so closely clustered at the top that only little kids could squirm to the pinnacle. David and Libby raced around the Scurlocks' side yard and disappeared. Hilda, closest to Peanut but on the roof, crouched down to make herself less visible. T-Ray's impulse was to run into the house just as Peanut looked up at him, freezing him.

"I know you're not really afraid of water," T-Ray finally blurted.

Peanut clenched his fists, but he turned and cooly trotted out of the yard like a football player at the end of a scrimmage. T-Ray watched the back of his tawny neck and legs as he jogged through the Scurlocks' yard—pine limbs waving more wildly, Buddy keening more frantically as Peanut passed the tree, and not stopping until Peanut was well into Libby's yard next door.

That very afternoon, Peanut appeared again. Moments after Mrs. Forbus warned the kids to stay out of the house and trouble and drove off in Uncle Charlie's old station wagon, he ran out of the woods and into the backyard.

"Let's go watch Maw Maw!" he yelled.

They were so grateful he bore no grudge that they cheered. In no time, they were leaning against Maw Maw's door, giggling hysterically, shushing one another until an otherworldly voice spoke on the other side of it:

"Phoebe, let's jump! 'Please be deep,' says Matthew Fontaine Maury!"

Libby whispered that the Maury River was named after Matthew Fontaine Maury, who had discovered it.

"Phoebe, now!" Maw Maw shouted. She cleared her throat and T-Ray imagined her swallowing cobwebs.

"Who's she talking to?" Peanut asked.

"Phoebe was her sister," Hilda said.

"Huh. She probably murdered her," he concluded.

"Oh, Peanut," Hilda said, giggling with embarrassment. They all knew he was wrong.

"Maybe not her sister, but I can tell by the voice, that ole witch is a murderer."

They listened with renewed interest, but now Maw Maw was quiet. Just as T-Ray began to wonder if Maw Maw were listening to them, the bedroom door flew open. Someone shoved T-Ray into the room; bodies tumbled onto him. He looked back at the door and saw Peanut on the hall side of it, holding the doorknob. He shouted for help but was drowned out by the others' shrieks. A scampering sound in the far corner of the room tightened his scalp. Libby and David crawled to the door, Libby scampered out and Peanut, grinning wickedly, grabbed David by the nape of his neck and pulled him through the doorway. Hilda dashed past David, and Buddy stepped on T-Ray's hand in his haste to sprint out. The door closed.

No! T-Ray tried to whisper.

He could hear struggling behind the door, which opened a crack and jerked shut. On his hands and knees, panting, T-Ray stared at the doorknob, willing it to turn. And behind him, a rustling sound.

He was paralyzed as if in a nightmare and felt himself disappearing. Eventually, his scalp tingled so painfully, his hair standing on end, that he came back, but everything he looked at quivered. He turned his head, slowly, the effort feeling as if it would snap his neck.

There was the bed in the corner with its ornately carved, dark-wood headboard and then there was Maw Maw, peeking out from behind it.

"She's gonna eat you!" Peanut yelled from behind the door.

"Let go of it! Let go of it!" Hilda screamed.

Cautiously, T-Ray stood up. The frizzy white head sank behind the headboard, but it bobbed back. All the wrinkles in her face were screwed into concentric circles radiating from her blue eyes.

"Get!" Maw Maw bellowed. T-Ray jumped and pulled the doorknob.

"C'mon Peanut!" David yelled.

Behind the door they renewed their tussling, but T-Ray could barely budge the knob. Swallowing, he looked at Maw Maw.

"I can't," he whispered. "Peanut won't let me."

"What?" Maw Maw came out from behind the bed.

"Peanut won't let me!" he shouted, hoping that if he yelled it she would come no closer.

"Bull manure," Maw Maw said, but at least she stopped. "What's your name?"

"T-Ray."

Another step toward him. T-Ray pounded on the door, watching her over his shoulder, and heard Peanut laugh nastily.

"You play with Hilda and Buddy, don't you?"

"Yes, sir," he answered. "I mean, ma'am. I'm their cousin, one of your grandsons."

"You Louella's boy, or...Ann's?" She stretched out the second name as if in slow motion, pulling it into three syllables, making it sound as queasily strange to him as the name "Maw Maw" always had. His Daddy, aunts and uncles called his mother "Ann."

"Ann's."

She smiled. "Ha, that Hilda is the spitting image of her. That little monkey. I love to watch her climbing the trees."

T-Ray stared at her. She had a bright pink blotch on her neck with a dark scab island floating in its center. She was looking out the window, he assumed, in the direction of the maple trees they all climbed. Suddenly she lowered her eyes and the blue in them sparkled with hatred.

"Little monsters, be off with you!"

Libby and Buddy squealed and jumped off the porch. T-Ray twisted the knob with both hands and the door opened a crack.

"Peanut, I'm gonna tell Mom!" Hilda was crying. He could hear David grunting as he wrestled with Peanut, who must have thrown his own or David's weight against the door because it slammed shut.

T-Ray turned to Maw Maw, who was now sitting calmly on the bed watching him. Her scaly hands were folded primly in her lap, her little forearms bone thin.

"T-Ray," she announced.

"Yes sir, 'T-Ray.' For 'Thomas Raymond,' but people call Daddy 'Tom.' To make it clear who's who. We live up the street."

"I know," Maw Maw said. Her hands lifted from her lap, parted and shot up and out in different directions as if they were autonomous creatures, but she caught them, bundled them up again and laid them back in her lap.

"Ann's littlest one," she announced, meaning him.

He felt she was less frightening here, in her room, than seen through the window. Her ugliness, her scary hands, these were more repulsive up close, but for the first time, she was merely regarding him, not glaring at him hatefully or invading his nightmares, just sitting and looking at him as if she were as curious about him as he was of her. Her blue eyes weren't even blank.

"Why do you stay in here all day long?" he blurted. It was the question he had always wanted to ask her.

Maw Maw started as if she had been slapped, as if she had been caught doing something awful. She began to wring her hands, kneading them back and forth in her lap. His stomach cramped.

"I take it back," he whispered.

She worked her hands fiercely, and it felt like they were squeezing his stomach. She looked at him and then at her hands, thrusting them deep in her lap, squeezing and twisting them as if she were working some special, magical dough. Back and forth she glanced, from him to her hands, and each time she looked down at them, her raw, blue eyes would knot in pain at the sight of the object forming in her lap. Now she glanced around the room and back at her hands, then to each of the windows, as if one of them might offer escape, but the thing was there in her lap when she looked back. Water seemed to be welling within her, inflating her face.

"I take it back!" T-Ray yelled, but Maw Maw didn't hear him.

Her blue eyes discharged huge tears, one of which disappeared into a deep wrinkle between her nose and cheek.

"Boy," she sputtered. She wiped her cheek with her shoulder, not daring to spare a busy pink hand to wipe it for her.

"Please don't cry!" he begged.

He himself began to cry. They had been mean to her, they had worn her down. She wasn't a witch who would slice open his back, she was just an old lady. No, it was the thing in her hands, the horrible thing she was shaping, that was monstrous.

T-Ray began to believe he saw it, too, and the hair rose on his neck. He tried the doorknob again. It turned.

He looked over his shoulder at her through milky tears, at her trembling, red face which looked from him to her hands, bobbing from and to the terror she kept discovering anew, her relentlessly ticking head forcing her to find it time after time, so that she would never stop finding it, there, in her lap, forever and ever.

"Bye bye," he whispered, but Maw Maw thrust out her hands to show it to him.

"I'm no good," she cried.

He ran out of the room, out of the house and down the back porch steps, sensing or catching in tear-gelled peripheral vision Libby and Buddy watching him as he dashed across the backyard, the Scurlocks', Libby's, his own, into the side yard where he threw himself down behind the forsythia bush—his favorite hiding place—and retched. After he caught his breath and wiped his tears, he inspected the mess to make sure it was expendable. Tossing dirt on it, waiting for his shivering to stop, he tried not to think of Maw Maw or anything else.

When the episode was separated by enough time and dissociation, T-Ray went into his house. He never hid behind the forsythia bush again, nor did he ever again look at Maw Maw. Before the end of summer, she flushed herself down the toilet.

When he walked past her coffin during the viewing, he knew she wasn't really inside, but he was afraid to look in nevertheless. His parents and Uncle Charlie didn't insist. Uncle Charlie had already made the mistake of lifting Buddy up to the coffin while asking him if he wanted to say goodbye. Buddy had hollered and flailed as if he were being taken off to be spanked.

Later, beyond the Hostler backyard, crouched at the entrance to the path in the woods, Hilda told them what the coffin held: A moth-ball-smelling, dark blue dress with sparkles on it, too pretty and big for Maw Maw, stuffed with something, her other clothes maybe, to make it look like her. The bodice was all plump and curvy, like a lady scarecrow napping before the Halloween dance. Where her head should have been there was a hat that matched the dress, with a double veil to hide that she wasn't there. Mom said it was her favorite dress for big occasions, and whenever she wore it, she would shimmer when she moved.