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.
"No pentacle, no candles or incense, no altar, no sacrifice. Not even a crystal ball," he murmured in an impeccable Savile Row accent. "My dear young woman—just how in Eblis' name did you do it? There isn't a single sixth order focus in this room."
"Do what?" Miss Twilley managed to croak.
"Construct a gateway," the devil said impatiently. "A bridge between your world and mine."
"I didn't," Miss Twilley said. "You came crawling out of the picture tube of my T.V. set—or what was the picture tube," she amended as her eyes strayed to the rectangle of darkness.
The devil turned and eyed the T.V. curiously, giving Miss Twilley an excellent view of his tail which protruded through a slit in his cloak. She eyed it with apprehension and distaste.
"Ah—I see," the devil murmured, "a third order electronic communicator transformed to a sixth order generator by an accidental short circuit. Most interesting. The statistical chances of this happening are about 1.75 to the 25th power, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. You are an extremely fortunate human."
"That's not what I would call it," Miss Twilley said.