She paid for the sleepless hours, as usual. In the morning, she looked hagged-out. She always checked herself in the mirror when she woke up, searching for the dry skin and branching wrinkles that Jeffrey was bound to remark on someday.

Not yet, though.

She crawled back into bed and stayed there while he made himself breakfast, so that he wouldn't see her without the repairs of makeup. She knew she looked awful, sagging and bruised around the eyes.

To her gratification, the overnight chill seemed to have killed some of the damned mushrooms. Four of the six had withered so that their caps hung upside-down from stalks that looked as if they had been pinched hard in the middle.

The flattened caps drooped inside-out, the blue-black slits of their undersides exposed to the sky. She thought of the gills of strange fish, dead and decaying in the cool morning air, fossil remains of ancient forms from prehistoric seas.

On the other hand, several new growths had come up.

It hadn't rained for two nights. The grass looked a little dry, but she didn't use the sprinklers.

That afternoon Fran took a welcome break from unpacking books and organizing them on the glowing, polished shelves that Jeff's father had built into the walls flanking the front room fireplace. She stepped outside on the porch for a breath of the nippy, sea-scented air, and observed the crazy lady in what seemed at last like civilized conversation with a man out in front of her place.

He was a heavy guy in gray work clothes, and he stood with his head bent, listening to her. Then he would crouch down and examine something in the grass, and stand up and talk, and listen some more, and then they would move over a little and do it all again. For a moment Fran thought, my God, she's got mushrooms too. She felt a tilt of vertigo (evil thoughts, out on show-hers? Or mine, on some kind of northward mushroom-migration? The Thoughts That Ate North Hill Park).

Then she realized that the man was examining the heads of the crazy lady's sprinkler system. You would never have guessed this from the way Mrs. Deaken minced and preened and waved her cigarette. Her voice, if not her words, carried: a high, artificial, mewling tone like the voice of Betty Boop, while her red mouth twisted in a parody of a fetching smile.

She was positively grotesque. Fran watched from her own porch, fascinated and repelled, until the crazy lady sashayed back up to her front steps, trilling over her shoulder in an impossibly arch manner, and opened her screen door. Then came a flurry of screams, presumably at the little dog which must be trying to get out, and finally the customary door-slam.

The man in gray headed for a truck parked in front of Betsy's house.

"Excuse me!" Fran waved.

He ambled over.

"You're a lawn expert, right?" she said. God, he was mas-sive as a steer and she caught a whiff of stale tobacco and beer on his breath. This was what the crazy lady had been flirting with?

She felt a sudden stab of deep, embarrassed pity. After all, mad Mrs. Deaken couldn't be all that much older than Fran was herself, and Fran only had Jeffrey by sheer, wild, un-deserved, and unpredictable chance.

"Maybe you could advise me about this mess that keeps coming up over here." She showed the man the mushrooms.

He squatted and stared at them. "I only do sprinklers," he said. "Don't know much about grass. But it's been wet this fall, and it look like you got a dead root running along under here. Mushrooms like to grow on old dead wood."

Strange: the mushroom cluster had changed again. There was a grayish round one, a small gourd, trailing a snaky little stalk like a withered umbilical cord. She preferred the silvery ones with their inky hems, which by comparison at least had a sort of gleaming style about them, the polished perfection of bullets aimed up at her out of the crookedelbow of the exposed root.

"That's a dead root?" she said uncertainly. "I thought all these roots belonged to the big tree, there."

He shook his head and looked around. "Nope. This one's dead, that root there looks dead too. Must have been another tree here once that got took out."

"Oh," she said. "I've never had a lawn before, I don't know a thing about this. The mushrooms aren't likely to spread, then, and crowd out the grass?"

"What, these fellers?" he said, drawing a fingertip along the edge of one of the silvery ones. "Heck, no, they're real fragile. Soon as it gets a little colder you won't see no more of them."

Fran suddenly saw the similarity of the silver mushrooms to penises, polished metal phalluses with veins etched under their skins in delicate black. The lawn man's heavy finger touching one of them made her skin prickle.

"Oh right, sure, I noticed that myself," she stammered, staightening up quickly. "They only last a day or two, and then they just sort of wilt and shrivel up-"

Like an old man's cock, she thought, though the words didn't escape her. Worse and worse. She stood there smiling sickly and thinking, I'm as moronic a spectacle as the crazy lady herself, in my own way.

As the sprinkler man drove off, Fran saw smoke from a cigarette curling up from the shadows under the porch of the Deaken place.

Jeffrey only had time for a short stroll that night, up to and around the park where a couple of dogs were chasing each other, no owners in sight. He remarked that people didn't take care of their pets around here, letting them run loose like that. Fran thought about having seen the crazy lady's other dog and not saying anything to her. She drew Jeffrey home along a parallel street off the park two blocks away, so as not to pass the Deaken house.

"Too bad we can't eat those mushrooms," Jeffrey said as they walked back up toward their front door. "We've sure got a lot of them."

The uplifted caps shone like old silver in the lofty radiance of the corner street light. Fran found herself oddly relieved that Jeffrey noticed them too, that he saw them. What would he say if she told him he was seeing her evil thoughts?

"What are you smiling about?" he said.

"Nothing," she said. "A secret joke too dumb to say out loud." She dug her keys out of her pocket and let them into the house. "I hate those damned mushrooms. I think I'll see if I can buy something somewhere, some kind of poison I can use to get rid of them once and for all."

Jeffrey laughed. "You want to poison some mushrooms? That's cute. Speaking of food, by the way, my aunt wants us to come for Thanksgiving."

"What, already?" Fran said. They stood in the dark little hall. "It's still September, for God's sake."

Jeff held her hand, thumbing the knuckles with sensuous pleasure. "She just wants to make sure we don't make other plans first."

"But I want to make other plans," Fran said, shrinking from the prospect of an evening of being delicately put down by Jeff's blue-haired and protective aunt for being an "older woman" instead of some fresh young thing. Jeff's aunt lived higher up on North Hill, in a much bigger house, and it was plain that she didn't think much of people from out of town.

"She's not going to be around forever, you know," Jeffrey said, "and I've only gotten to be, well, friends with her in the past year." He turned on the light, and they trailed through the house getting ready for bed and quarreling in fits and starts.

I look like shit, Fran thought, staring despairingly at her haggard reflection in the cabinet mirror as she brushed her teeth and got ready for bed. He's getting fed up with me.

Had that vein been there before, a bluish-gray pathway under the thin skin of her neck? Just wait till Aunty sees that!In a wave of guilt and self-disgust Fran pushed him away when he touched her breast. They slept with their backs to each other that night.

Two more of the rounded, gourd-like things lay among the dangling corpses of the silver bullets next morning. Fran in-terrupted her work several times that day to go look at them, sullenly walking around and around the small, cursed spot in the lawn.

Last night she had dreamed of Jeffrey sleeping splayed on his back, a bullet-shaped metallic mushroom growing be-tween his legs.

And these roundish ones, moored to their twisted scrap of vine and showing faint tracery designs under their pale, greenish skin: were they her evil thoughts about Jeffrey's aunt?

The crazy lady must see the mushrooms when she minced down the street with her one dog from time to time, smoking and throwing her hips from side to side like a cartoon whore. No doubt she looks and tells herself, goodness me, look at that-my new neighbor has some very evil thoughts.

"What's the matter?" Jeffrey said at dinner. "I've got res-taurant accounts to work on from the hotel, and you're pacing around like a panther. I can't concentrate."

"Carmella returned some of my work today," Fran said bitterly. "Too sloppy, the doc said. Do it better! He should try making out all that slurred garbage he talks!"

"Why don't you go watch TV for a little while?" Jeffrey said.

"Thanks," she snapped, "have you looked at what's on? Just because I didn't finish college, that doesn't mean I'm an idiot, you know, to sit glazed-out in front of an endless pa-rade of sit-coms and cop shows."

"Jeez, I never said-" He stared up at her, open-mouthed, and for a second she stared back in blazing contempt!

God, what a whiny, moon-faced kid he was! No wonder he clung so hard to his aunty's apron strings!

Then the hurt in his expression melted her into a shudder-ing confusion of fear and contrition-what in the world was wrong with her?-and she hugged him and apologized. They ended up in front of the TV together, murmuring and kissing on the couch and neither of them watching the screen.

"I think moving here was harder on you than you realize," he said. "You look tired. I wish I could have been around more, to help you with the details."

She wished he hadn't noticed the marks of strain in her face, the ones she noticed every morning.

Age, real age, so soon? She was only thirty-four, for Christ's sake! It had to be just strain. And he was so sweet about it, how could she resent his remark? But she did.

It turned really cold that night. Leaves covered much of the lawn in the morning, and all of the mushrooms had with-ered and vanished, except for one of the ovoid ones. Its sib-ling on the same dessicated vine had shrunk to a wrinkled brown nut, but the other one was now the size of a tennis ball and shone a glassy, livid white.

Like an egg, Fran thought uneasily, studying it. A giant, monstrous egg-a bad egg (naturally). Already a dark veining of decay was visible, like crazing in old porcelain.

No other growths had appeared. Pretty soon the frost would kill this one too, and Fran's evil thoughts would be private again, invisible even to the greedy, burning gaze of the crazy lady up the street.

Fran asked Betsy and her housemates to a Thanksgiving party, and Carmella. Jeffrey said he didn't know what Fran was doing, but he meant to go to his aunt's house on Thanksgiving. Fran had a lot of evil thoughts about that, but no more mushrooms came up.

The next time she looked, the one remaining fungus was as big and white as a baseball, and marbled all over with black. There was a delicacy as of great age about it now, an almost ethereal look, as if the bluish-white and shining shell glowed coldly from within, silhouetting the dark design that veined it.

"I've had enough of this," she muttered and she gave the thing a sharp kick.

The pale shell disintegrated without a sound, releasing a puff of thick black dust. In the instant wreckage stood a sooty stub, a carbonized yoke, which yielded, moist and pulpy, when she kicked at it frantically in a rush of horror anddis-gust.

The shrunken black knob emitted another breath of inky powder under the impact of her shoe, but clung to its twist of vine. She had to trample it for long moments before she was able to flatten the whole mess into a dark stain on the earth, through which splinters of the rotten root beneath pro-truded palely like shards of bone.

She gasped and realized that she had been holding her breath to keep from inhaling the spores, or whatever the black dust was that had been packed between the decayed center and the shell.

Who was watching, who had seen her mad dance?

No one. Betsy's house was quiet, the people across the street were doing whatever they did, and the crazy lady's driveway was empty, her old gray Pontiac absent.

How ridiculous, that a person as crazy as that was allowed to drive!

No more mushrooms sprouted.

"It's too cold for them," Jeffrey said. "Don't tell me you miss the ugly things! A while ago you wanted to poison them."

No, Fran didn't miss them. But she found herself wonder-ing, in a nagging, anxious way, where her evil thoughts were growing now that they weren't showing up on the lawn.

After all, the thoughts didn't stop.

Like when she saw Jeffrey chatting with Betsy one evening while he was setting out the bagged garbage that the new trucks were too wide to pick up in the lanes behind the houses. The two of them stood chatting on the curb, and Fran saw a spark of easy warmth between them and she cursed it.

He said, "Maybe we should drive south somewhere over the Thanksgiving break, to hell with your party and dinner at my aunt's and the whole thing. Things are a little hairy in the hotel right now, with this drain on the restaurant income that nobody can explain. I'm frazzled. You don't seem to be in the best of shape yourself, Frannie. Look in the mirror. I'm afraid you're getting sick."

She did look, and she knew it wasn't that she was getting sick. She was worrying too much.

She was becoming more sensitive to noise, too. She woke up at night now. She would get up alone, careful not to dis-turb Jeffrey, and go look at herself in the bathroom mirror, sipping wine from a glass until she'd drunk enough to put her back to sleep.

Carmella said, "You better pull yourself together, Fran. I'm getting complaints from the docs you type for."

The docs who mumbled, the docs who paid too little out of their immense incomes, the docs who rattled along about burned kids and dying old people and all the rest as if the sufferers were sides of meat. The docs should feel the pain their patients felt.

That was an evil thought, wasn't it?

Fran ordered a turkey at the supermarket, for the Thanks-giving party. Jeffrey wasn't going to his aunt's for Thanks-giving dinner. His aunt had had a fall and was in Bay Memorial with a broken hip. Jeffrey spent a lot of time at the hospital with her now, which Fran resented, with dark imag-inings of death and endings between Jeffrey and his aunt, once and for all.

But where were these evil thoughts? The dead roots in the lawn stayed bare, like bones worked to the surface of an old battlefield.

The turkey was ready to pick up. She hoped it would fit; she had only the freezer compartment of the mid-sized fridge that had come with the house.

On the way back from the supermarket, Fran pulled up in the street. The crazy lady was on the steps of her porch, screeching dementedly, "Get back here, you hear me? You get right in here this minute!"

The little dog was down at the edge of the ragged brown lawn, alternately turning its rear to the questing nose of a brisk gray poodle, and sitting down to avoid being sniffed. The poodle pranced and wagged with delight, its back legsbowed. It darted at the smaller dog with stiffened front legs, trying to pin it, mount it, hump it there in the gutter.

"Get away, get away from her!" shrieked the crazy lady, waving her hands wildly, but apparently she was afraid to run down and chase the poodle away. She thrust her head forward and screamed at the poodle from a rage-distended mouth, "Don't even think about it!"

Fran knew she would explode if she had to hear that raw, mad voice for another second. She leaned out of the window of the Volks and yelled, "For Christ's sake, lady, will you shut up? Let them screw if they want to screw, they're just dogs, that's what they do!"

The crazy lady stood still and lifted one bony hand to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight. Her other hand stayed at her hip, cocked at an angle, a butt smoking between the bony fingers.

Fran recoiled from the unseen glare of those shadowed eyes. She drove quickly on to her own carport, where she sat afraid to move. She watched in her rear-view mirror until the crazy lady, trailed by the little dog (in whom the poodle had lost interest), withdrew into her own house without another word.

Jeffrey said, "We got the accounts straightened out. One of the under-chefs was stealing stuff, meat, lobsters, it's amazing! I finally found the point where the figures were being faked by his boyfriend in the administration office.

You've brought me luck. I love you."

They were up late, kissing and sighing and stretching against each other's warm skins. A steady breeze blew all night, hissing and seething like surf. Fran listened and drowsed, lulled by the sound.

Jeff left early for work, bouncing with energy. Fran lay in bed late, luxuriating in the languor of their long loving and heartened by the shimmer of pale sunshine glowing through the drapes. No fog, at last, a clear, bright morning!

After a steamy shower, she stationed herself in front of the mirror to rub moisturizer into her dampened skin. And stopped, staring, frozen by the hammering recognition of something that could not be.

Her skin was an unearthly pearly color, moist and shining, like the skin of a soprano made up to die in Act Three of consumption, like the skin of a delicate Victorian lady vam-pire, like the skin of a guest made up for a Halloween party.

But Halloween was past.

The lines and smudges the mirror had been showing her for days had spread and joined each other in a flowing net-work of tributaries that covered her features from her throat upward and spread away past her hairline, into her scalp. The lines were mauve and blue and gray, and when she turned her agonized face so that daylight fell on her cheek, there was a slightly greenish tinge of iridescence to these shadows under the thin, thin surface of her porcelain-pale skin.

She ran to the mirror in the bedroom, and the one in the little bathroom near the kitchen, her eyes glaring in disbelief and horror out of smoky pits in the mask. Her voice creaked and wheezed desperate protests in her throat, her hands flut-tered helplessly-her own pink-knuckled, flesh-tinted, youth-ful hands that didn't dare touch the ancient marbled pallor of her face.

This was where the evil thoughts had been growing, in their home, their seat, their place of origin. Nothing lay ahead but inevitable disintegration of the outer shell, exposing the blackened, shrunken ruin of the brain still damp and clinging with feeble persistence to the quivering stem, the living body.

On the wild winds of her panic she tossed to and fro in the sunlit rooms of the house, screams dammed in her throat by her own terror of what the force of them would do to her fragile shell of a face.

Stifling, she flung open the front door and plunged outside into the chill, bright morning. She stumbled across the lawns, past the big tree, and flung herself down at the dead root on which her evil thoughts had first appeared.

As soon as her forehead touched the bleached bare wood, she felt the eggshell of her face soundlessly break and fall away. A swirl of sooty powder choked her breath as darkness broke in her and from her and bore her down into bottomless night.

BLOOD LILIES