It

my fadder and I are one,’ she said, ‘just me, just him, and dear, if you are wise you will run, run back to where you came from, run quickly, because to stay will mean worse than your death. No one who dies in Derry really dies. You knew that before; believe it now.’
In slow motion Bever ly gathered her legs under her. As if from outside she saw herself gaining her feet and backing away from the table and from the witch in an agony of horror and disbelief, disbelief because she realized for the first time that the neat little dining– room table was not dark oak but fudge. Even as she watched, the witch, still giggling, her ancient yellow eyes slanted slyly off into the corner of the room, broke a piece of it off and stuffed it avidly into the black-ringed trap that was her mouth.
The cups, she saw, were white bark that had been carefully looped with blue-dyed frosting. The pictures of Jesus and John Kennedy were creations of nearly transparent spun sugar, and as she looked at them, Jesus stuck out His tongue and Kennedy dropped a stinky wink.
‘We’re all waiting for you!’ the witch screamed, and her fingernails scrabbled over the surface of the fudge table, drawing deep scars in its shining surface. ‘Oh yes! Oh yes!’
The overhead lights were globes of hard candy. The wainscotting was caramel taffy. She looked down and saw that her shoes were leaving prints on the floorboards, which were not boards at all but slices of chocolate. The smell of candy was cloying.
Oh God it’s Hansel and Gretel it’s the witch the one that always scared me the worst because she ate the children —
‘You and your friends!’ the witch screamed, laughing.’ You and your friends! In the cage! In the cage until the oven’s hot!’ She screamed laughter, and Beverly ran for the door, but she ran as if in slow motion. The witch’s laughter beat and swirled around her head, a cloud of bats. Beverly shrieked. The hall stank of sugar and nougat and toffee and sickening synthetic strawberries. The doorknob, mock crystal when she came in, was now a monstrous sugar diamond.
‘I worry about you, Bevvie . . . I worry a LOT!’
She turned, swirls of red hair floating around her face, to see her father staggering toward her down the hallway, wearing the witch’s black dress and skull cameo; her father’s face hung with doughy, running flesh, his eyes as black as obsidian, his hands clenching and unclenching, his mouth grinning with soupy fervor.
‘I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that’s all I wanted to do, I wanted to FUCK you, I wanted to EAT you, I wanted to eat your PUSSY, I wanted to SUCK your CLIT up between my teeth, YUM-YUM, Bevvie, oooohhhhh, YUMMY IN MY TUMMY, I wanted to put you in the cage . . . and get the oven hot . . . and feel your CUNT . . . your plump CUNT . . . and when it was plump enough to eat . . . to eat . . . EAT . . . ‘
Screaming, she grasped the sticky doorknob and bolted out onto a porch that was decorated with praline doodads and floored with fudge. Far away, dim, seeming to swim in her vision, she saw cars passing back and forth, and a woman pushing a cartful of groceries back from Costello’s.
I have to get out there, she thought, just barely coherent. That’s reality out there, if I can only get out to the sidewalk —
‘Won’t do you any good to run, Bevvie,’ her father
(my fadder)
told her, laughing. ‘We’ve waited a long time for this. This is going to be fun. This is going to be YUMMY in our TUMMIES.’
She looked back again and now her dead father was not wearing the witch’s black dress but the clown suit with the big orange buttons. There was a 1958-style coonskin cap, the kind