For service rendered

By J. F. BONE
Illustrated by COYE
Are you dissatisfied with the programs that come through your television set? Don't complain too much. Look what came through Miss Twilley's!
Television made Miss Enid Twilley's life endurable by providing the romance which life had withheld. So when the picture tube in her old-fashioned set blew out, it was a major crisis. But Ed Jacklin's phone didn't ring. The spare twenty-eight inch tube in Jacklin's T.V. shop remained undisturbed on the shelf. And the drawn shades of Miss Twilley's living room gave no hint of what was happening behind them. The town of Ellenburg went its suburban way unaware of the crisis in its residential district.
Which was probably just as well.
Frozen with terror, Miss Twilley sat in spastic rigidity, her horrified eyes riveted on the thing in front of her. One moment she had been suffering emphatic pangs of unrequited love with a bosomy T.V. blonde, the next she was staring into a rectangular hole of Cimmerian blackness that writhed, twisted and disgorged a shape that made her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth and her throat constrict against the scream that fought for release.
It wasn't a large shape but it was enormously impressive despite the lime green shorts and cloak that partially covered it. It was obviously reptilian. The red skin with its faint reticulated pattern of ancestral scales, the horns, the lidless eyes, the tapering flexible tail, the sinuous grace and Mephistophelean face were enough to identify it beyond doubt.
Her television set had disgorged the devil!
Silence draped the room in smothering folds as Miss Twilley's frozen eyeballs were caught and held for a moment by the devil's limpid green eyes whose depths swirled for an instant with uncontrolled surprise. The devil looked around the room, at the closed drapes, the dim lights, the shabby furniture and the plate of cookies and the teapot on the tray beside Miss Twilley's chair. He shook his head.