“But the quality of the light that evening was eerie. The sunset had filled the room with a red glow.
Furnace light. Empty, the room seemed too big. My heels made flat echoes on the hardwood floor.
“The typewriter sat in the middle of the floor, and I was just going around it when I saw there was a ragged scrap of paper stuck under the roller — that gave me a start, because I knew there had been no paper in the machine when I went out for the last time to get the fresh bottle.
“I looked around, wondering if there was someone — some intruder — in the place with me. Except it wasn’t really intruders, or burglars, or junkies, I was thinking of… it was ghosts.
“I saw a ragged blank place on the wall to the left of the bedroom door. I at least understood where the paper in the typewriter had come from. Someone had simply torn off a ragged piece of the old wallpaper.
“I was still looking at this when I heard a single small clear noise — clack! — from behind me. I jumped and whirled around with my heart knocking in my throat. I was terrified, but I knew what that sound was just the same — there was no question at all. You work with words all your life and you know the sound of a typewriter platen hitting paper, even in a deserted room at dusk, where there is no one to strike the key.”
They looked at him in the dark, their faces blurred white circles, saying nothing, slightly huddled together now. The writer’s wife was holding one of the writer’s hands tightly in both of her own.
“I felt… outside myself. Unreal. Perhaps this is always the way one feels when one arrives at the point of the inexplicable. I walked slowly over to the typewriter. My heart was pounding madly up there in my throat, but I felt mentally calm… icy, even.
“Clack! Another platen popped up. I saw it this time — the key was in the third row from the top, on the left.
“I got down on my knees very slowly, and then all the muscles in my legs seemed to go slack and I half-swooned the rest of the way down until 1 was sitting there in front of the typewriter with my dirty London Fog topcoat spread around me like the skirt of a girl who has made her very deepest curtsy. The typewriter clacked twice more, fast, paused, then clacked again. Each clack made the same kind of flat echo my footfalls had made on the floor.
“The wallpaper had been rolled into the machine so that the side with the dried glue on it was facing out.
The letters were ripply and bumpy, but I could read them: rackn, it said. Then it clacked again and the word was rackne.
“Then — ” He cleared his throat and grinned a little. “Even all these years later this is hard to tell… to just say right out. Okay. The simple fact, with no icing on it, is this. I saw a hand come out of the typewriter. An incredibly tiny hand. It came out from between the keys B and N in the bottom row, curled itself into a fist, and hammered down on the space bar. The machine jumped a space — very fast, like a hiccough — and the hand drew back down inside.”
The agent’s wife giggled shrilly.
“Can it, Marsha,” the agent said softly, and she did.
“The clacks began to come a little faster,” the editor went on, “and after a while I fancied I could hear the creature that was shoving the key arms up gasping, the way anyone will gasp when he is working hard, coming closer and closer to his physical limit. After a while the machine was hardly printing at all, and most of the keys were filled with that old gluey stuff, but I could read the impressions. It got out rackne is d and then the y key stuck to the glue. I looked at it for a moment and then I reached out one finger and freed it. I don’t know if it — Bellis — could have freed it himself. I think not. But I didn’t want to see it… him… try. Just the fist was enough to have me tottering on the brink. If I saw the elf entire, so to speak, I think I really would have gone crazy. And there was no question of getting up to run. All the strength had gone out of my legs.