his appetite than they did when freshly cooked. But Blaine Adams was a frugal man, and he hated to let anything go to waste.
A manuscript entitled Wire Edge awaited Adams the next morning. The opening chapters of the novel bore some minimal resemblance to House of the Hungry Dead. The manuscript for the latter had been neatly torn into quarters—all 372 pages at once—and dumped into the wastebasket. There were stains of barbecue sauce on the torn pages. Adams sniffed cautiously. There was also the faint odor of dirt and ancient decay. Of mildew and mould.
Of a neglected graveyard.
Blaine Adams remembered his walks through the forest preserve, with its tumbled-down farmhouses and forgotten family cemeteries. His mind refused to accept it, but his writers imagination whispered mad thoughts that he could not flee from.
Adams drank gin-laced coffee all afternoon. That evening he filled Buford’s bowl with rancid collard greens, a stone-hard chunk of pound cake, the scrapings of a container of jalapeno and bean dip, half a bag of stale corn chips, and the smoldering last of another ill-fated pot of chili. Then he waited quietly.
The wind began to stir about midnight. Adams kept the television blasting as usual, and pretended to sleep through the Val Lewton flick on AMC. He could see the screen door from his chair, and, despite the wind and the television, he could hear the sound of the crockery food dish being pushed about on the porch. He remembered how Buford used to push the bowl across the floor in a feeding frenzy, rasping his teeth to chew the last crumbs from the edges.
Silence, then the lapping of water. Adams thought he heard a soft belch.
The screen was securely latched, but the hook flipped open as a small hand reached through the torn screen. The hand that touched the door was about the size of a child’s hand, but thickfingered and with spadelike stubby claws.
It entered the kitchen confidently, gazing briefly at Adams in his chair. Adams had kept his eyes lowered, and now he clamped them shut.
It was somewhere between a toad and a dwarf. As a writer, Adams had read too much about elves and fairies and trolls and goblins. His guest was a hobbit from Hell. It was just over four feet in height, and it was almost human in shape, but the coarse scales interspersed with tufts of grey fur that covered its body were proof it wasn’t human—even without looking at its face. Large, toad-like eyes, yellow and slit-pupiled, peered from above flattened nostrils and a wide, wide mouth with thin lips and very many pointed yellow teeth. Pointed ears poked through the long tufts of fur that hung down from its scaly scalp, and a short pair of crooked horns grew out of the top of its skull. Its arms were too long, its legs were too short, and its feet were narrow and taloned. A pronounced pot-belly hung out over a dirty pair of cut-off houndstooth check slacks-these last missing from Adams’ clothesline many weeks back.
It’s a gremlin—that was all Adams could think. My God, I’ve got a gremlin. He cracked open his eyelids.
The gremlin had opened his refrigerator. Pleased, it nodded and ran a long black tongue over its thin lips. Then, moving almost noiselessly, it quickly entered Adams’ study and sat down at his desk. For a moment it shuffled papers about, then it stretched its stubby fingers, cracked its knuckles. Leaning forward, it began to type.
The clawed fingers seemed to rush across the keyboard too fast to follow as page after page spun out like magic. The gremlin was composing final copy faster than a word processor could print out. And the only noise from the typewriter was a soft strumming sound.
Adams was right: it was magic.
After about an hour, the gremlin stopped typing. It read through the new chapters of Wire Edge, nodded and placed them in a neat stack— then stretched languidly and got up. Rubbing its belly happily, it beamed a horrible smile at Adams in his chair, and let itself out by the kitchen door.
Adams did not fall asleep until dawn.
He remembered the fairy tale about the elves and the shoemaker. And in his fumbling efforts at research, he had read about the little people in the myths of many cultures. Sometimes friendly, sometimes mischievous, sometimes inimical. In days gone by, peasants would leave out bowls of milk or meal as offerings to win their favor. Sometimes the little people would