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!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories April 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
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.