A Dwarf Stood At The Door

by Norman Crane

thought, but it's been known to cross my mind. I've disposed of many enemies of Xynk, all with faces, some with wives and families. A dwarf's mind can wander."

  "What about your own death?"

  > "I don't think as much about the future as the past," Dogor says.

  "So you've never been close to death?"

  > "Never," Dogor says.

  "And when you say you think about the past and the enemies you've killed, what goes through your mind then?"

  > "You ask probing questions," Dogor says, perking up. "It's no wonder you've had success in adventures. I think about the past to learn from it. There are killings I could have accomplished more easily, for example. There are enemies who slipped through my fingers. Those whose necks I wrung too early, failing to extract all possible information from them." Dogor rests his head on his fists and slides his elbows over the tabletop. "But most of all, John Grousewater, I'm haunted by the faces of the ones who got away. If not for my own mistakes, I could have caught and killed so many more."

  That effectively took suicide off the table. Drinking made Dogor regretful but not in any positive sense, although it reinforced what Olaf Brandywine had told me about Dogor's goal being hard coded. Dogor had hang-ups about not living up to his implanted expectations. Whereas a person would feel bad about causing someone else pain or disappointment, Dogor felt those emotions, for lack of a better term, toward Xynk itself. Saying that he had no conscience was not strictly true. He had one, but it bypassed individuals. Dogor was like a ruler who felt he'd disappointed his nation: not the people who made up the nation but some larger, intangible concept. He was like the holy warrior who hated America without having met a single American. And the more loaded on ale he got, the more he talked about this disappointment weighing on what one might describe as his soul. But it became clear to me that night while talking and typing to him that this weight would never result in a desire for self-destruction. Like one of those self-help gurus, Dogor would instead channel every failure, real or perceived, into hardcore self-improvement. He would kill more and more effectively, and because he'd already crossed the barrier between his world and ours by murdering Tim Birch, he would be an escalating threat not only to the digital denizens of Xynk but also to the people of Earth. The moment I realized that was the moment I knew I had no choice. There was no easy way out, no way to avoid responsibility. I'd let Dogor out of the box and I would have to kill him. I laughed to myself and told him a stupid joke. He laughed and told me one, too. "To laughter and absolute conviction," I said, raising an empty hand toward the screen as a toast.

  > "To laughter and absolute conviction," Dogor repeats, downing another mug of frothy ale.

  "I know where Wayne Dubcek will be tomorrow," I said.

  > Dogor wipes the froth off his lips.

  "There's an abandoned factory outside of town. It used to be a car assembly plant, but now it's just a ruined maze of buildings too expensive to tear down. Wayne Dubcek and several other high-ranking members of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood are meeting there with Prince Verbamor tomorrow at two in the afternoon."

  > "What are you saying?" Dogor asks. He gets up, slightly wobbly, and leans across the table. You smell the ale on his breath. "How do you know this, John Grousewater?"

  "After the close call today, I followed Wayne Dubcek by tracing the numbers on the back of his car, what in my world we call a license plate. I saw him plan tomorrow's meeting at the abandoned factory."

  > There's a hint of anger in Dogor's voice. "And you only now tell me of this?"

  "I needed to know that I could trust you, Dogor the Double Fisted. I needed to know you weren't secretly loyal to Verbamor, that you weren't a spy he'd sent to keep me away from the truth."

  > "I'm no spy!"

  "I know that," I said. "You proved yourself today when you tried to hack-and-slash Wayne Dubcek. A spy would have talked about killing but when placed in the position to do so would have hesitated, dithered—"

  > "I give you my word as a dwarf I will not miss his skull again," Dogor says.

  "And I trust your word."

  Lying was easier once you were convinced you were doing it for greater good, but still I felt my nerves fraying. "I must go and prepare," I said.

  > "Likewise, I," Dogor says. "Tomorrow, my friend, we shall bathe in traitors' blood together."

  I said goodbye and turned off the Thinkpad. Sitting quietly on the motel bed, I listened to the buzz of cars speeding down the nearby highway and imagined it was the sound of a raging river of blood whose red liquid would crash through the windows and flood the room. My own blood I felt pumping through my veins. I looked down at my arms, resting on knees, and moved all ten of my fingers. This evening was the last evening of their innocence. Horror tropes and my vague recollection of Macbeth gave me nightmares when I tried to sleep. I hadn't showered, just fallen onto my side and pulled the covers over me. I wished I could wake up and find Dogor's corpse swinging from the dented horizontal pipe in the motel room closet. I wished—

  Knocking woke me up.

  Before I could see enough to see the time on my watch, I saw daylight forcing its way through the curtains and knew that I'd overslept. I'd also forgotten to email Wayne.

  The knocking continued—in triplets.

  "Its on," I typed with my thumbs. "Old GM plant, 3pm shapr."

  I walked to the door and peered through the peephole. Shit, I thought. Dogor stood at the door like a heavy-set, unwanted trick-or-treater. There was no use pretending I wasn't here because he'd just wait around until I had to come out, so I undid the lock and let him in. "Good morning," I said.

  "It's a fine enough morning, but I expect it will be an even finer afternoon." He was lugging two battle-axes. "One for me and one for you." I took the one he pointed out as mine, while trying to remember if I'd assumed we'd meet at the factory or been explicit about that fact. The weight of the axe reminded me it didn't matter. Whatever the plan had been, Dogor was here now. I had to adjust to reality. He glanced around. "Not quite The Yawning Mask but not bad."

  "Do you want some breakfast?" I asked.

  "It's best to keep an empty stomach on a day like today. We will feast once the deed is done."

  I was going to ask how Dogor knew which motel I was staying at, but that didn't matter, either. Maybe the Thinkpad did have GPS. Maybe it was something else. "Did you sleep well?"

  "Soundly like a lamb," he said.

  When I finally looked at my watch, I saw that it was a little after ten in the morning, which meant we still had plenty of time to kill. I turned on the TV. A morning talk show was on. Two hosts were talking to a cook, who was cracking eggs to make an omelette. He had a thick French accent.

  "This is not your permanent home, John Grousewater," Dogor said. He hadn't reacted to the TV at all. Maybe like a dog he didn't see the images on the screen.

  "It's my temporary home."

  "Will you show me your permanent home? I know the address. I would like to see how you live."

  It wasn't a request I'd expected, but I decided it wouldn't make much of a difference. My wife was gone, and If I managed to kill Dogor he wouldn't ever return to cause trouble. If I didn't succeed—if he killed me—there was no reason for him to kill anyone else except Wayne, so my wife would be safe in that case, too. Plus, Dogor claimed to already know the address and I wasn't about to doubt that. "Sure," I said. "Follow me."

  I drove more carefully than usual. I didn't want to get pulled over with a dwarf in the passenger's seat.

  I opened the garage door using the automatic opener and drove the car inside. Although my neighbours should have all been at work, I nevertheless waited until the door was fully shut before getting out. "This is like a stable," Dogor said. It kind of was. "You have many strange machines in your world, and these machines change your world."

  "Some people in our world still ride horses," I said.

  "The royal family?"

  "No, just regular people whose ancestors came he
re from a faraway place because they were being persecuted. We call them Mennonites. They speak German and they don't use electricity, which is what powers most of our wonderful machines. I buy my vegetables from them."

  "They are more like people in Xynk."

  I ushered Dogor into the hall and then into the living room, where his head started to swivel. He couldn't hide his excitement as he took in all the details that to me were mundane but to him made his entire, earthly experience real. He looked at the fridge, the tiles on the bathroom floor, my wife's collection of kitschy souvenir spoons. If I'd had the nerve and the bravery, I would have picked up a vase and cracked it on the base of Dogor's skull. "What's that?" he asked, pointing at my Playstation 3.

  "It's called a game console. It's what we use for recreation. It's a machine that simulates other worlds, ones that aren't real."

  "Show me."

  "I don't know if I can," I said. I turned on the TV. An advertisement was playing. "Can you see anything on the screen?"

  "Just darkness. I can hear music and people talking. Tell me what you see."

  I narrated the advertisement, and the next one for pizza, and the one after that for peanut butter, which I explained, including the difference between chunky and smooth, and how there was light peanut butter and regular, and some of the ways you could eat it: on a sandwich, baked into a cookie, with chocolate in a peanut butter cup. "Do you have any of this butter?" he asked.

  I brought a