For Service Rendered

Miss Enid Twilley's lonely, romance-starved life is shattered when her television set opens a gateway and a horned, reptilian being steps into her living room. The creature, Lyf, insists he is not a devil but a Devi from the advanced world of Hel, and his telepathic bluntness quickly turns terror into uneasy revelation. He reads her mind, diagnoses her bitterness, financial decline, and terminal pancreatic cancer, then offers a cure through Devi technology that can alter cells and restore life. What follows is a darkly comic, unsettling negotiation over salvation itself. Lyf presents a contract: ten years of health, beauty, wealth, and talent in exchange for ownership of her body, with happiness never guaranteed. Suspicious of hidden cruelty, Miss Twilley probes the terms, only to find the bargain disturbingly fair by human standards. When her diagnosis is confirmed, she returns to accept the deal, signs away her body, and awakens transformed—young, radiant, and beyond her wildest fantasies. But Lyf's gifts are not romance; they are professional service. As he explains the logic of Devi society and its strange economy of need, Miss Twilley discovers that she has been valued as a resource, not cherished as a person, in a sly science-fiction satire about loneliness, vanity, mortality, and the cost of getting exactly what you want. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.