like an old, stinking wax candle. Her eyes drooped in her face, lackluster and dead. Her chest was not moving. Her nightie had pulled up, exposing elephantine thighs. The coverlet of her deathbed was thrown back.
Gramma held her huge arms out to him.
'I
George cringed back, trying to resist that almost insurmountable pull. Outside, the wind shrieked and roared. George's face was long and twisted with the extremity of his fright; the face of a woodcut caught and shut up in an ancient book.
George began to walk toward her. He couldn't help himself. Step by dragging step toward those outstretched arms.
He was almost within the circle of her arms when the window to his left crashed inward and suddenly a wind-blown branch was in the room with them, autumn leaves still clinging to it. The river of wind flooded the room, blowing over Gramma's pictures, whipping her nightgown and her hair.
Now George could scream. He stumbled backward out of her grip and Gramma made a cheated hissing sound, her lips pulling back over smooth old gums; her thick, wrinkled hands clapped uselessly together on moving air.
George's feet tangled together and he fell down. Gramma began to rise from the white vinyl chair, a tottering pile of flesh; she began to stagger toward him. George found he couldn't get up; the strength had deserted his legs. He began to crawl backward, whimpering. Gramma came on, slowly but relentlessly, dead and yet alive, and suddenly George understood what the hug would mean; the puzzle was complete in his mind and somehow he found his feet just as Gramma's hand closed on his shirt. It ripped up the side, and for one moment he felt her cold flesh against his skin before fleeing into the kitchen again.
He would run into the night. Anything other than being hugged by the witch, his Gramma. Because when his mother came back she would find Gramma dead and George alive, oh yes... but George would have developed a sudden taste for herbal tea.
He looked back over his shoulder and saw Gramma's grotesque, misshapen shadow rising on the wall as she came through the entry way.
And at that moment the telephone rang, shrilly and stridently.
George seized it without even thinking and screamed into it; screamed for someone to come, to please come. He screamed these things silently; not a sound escaped his locked throat.
Gramma tottered into the kitchen in her pink nightie. Her whitish-yellow hair blew wildly around her face, and one of her hom combs hung askew against her wrinkled neck.
Gramma was grinning.
'Ruth?' It was Aunt Flo's voice, almost lost in the whistling windtunnel of a bad long-distance connection. 'Ruth, are you there?' It was Aunt Flo in Minnesota, over two thousand miles away.
Gramma tottered across the linoleum, holding her arms out for him. Her hands snapped shut and then open and then shut again. Gramma wanted her hug; she had been waiting for that hug for five years.
'Ruth, can you hear me? It's been storming here, it just started, and I... I got scared. Ruth, I can't hear you -- '
'Gramma,' George moaned into the telephone. Now she was almost upon him.
'George?' Aunt Flo's voice suddenly sharpened; became almost a shriek. 'George, is that
He began to back away from Gramma, and suddenly realized that he had stupidly backed away from the door and into the corner formed by the kitchen cabinets and the sink. The horror was complete. As her shadow fell over him, the paralysis broke and he screamed into the phone, screamed it over and over again: '
Gramma's cold hands touched his throat. Her muddy, ancient eyes locked on his, draining his will.
Faintly, dimly, as if across many years as well as many miles, he heard Aunt Flo say: 'Tell her to lie down, George, tell her to lie down and be still. Tell her she must do it in your name and the name of her father. The name
