A Dwarf Stood At The Door
Copyright 2014 Norman Crane
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A Paunch Full of Pesos
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I'm a nervous person. I took up smoking to stop biting my nails. It didn't work, and now I have two bad habits. Usually I don't even have a reason for the biting, I just get anxious and chewing off bits of myself calms me down. It's vaguely cannibalistic. My wife hates it. She used to check my hands before bed and then refuse to have sex with me if I didn't pass the inspection. I can live without sex, but not without biting my nails or smoking. She thinks I cheated on her. She also thinks I'm a coward, but in her defence she has no idea that I saved her life. Right now she's asleep because it's three in the morning, and I'm out on the balcony having a cigarette and trying to figure out the best way to confess to a crime. The thing that keeps distracting me is the moon. It's as yellow as my dentist says my teeth are going to be if I don't stop with the cigarettes. Frankly I think drinking coffee is worse for discolourations than smoking, but whatever. My thesis sponsor says I pepper my casual writing with slang to balance the rigidity of my academic prose. She calls it my "learned" prose. I call it my thecal style. Anyway, I'm getting off topic. I was describing the yellowness of the moon. Tom Waits has a good line about it being the colour of a coffee stain, and that's about right. The night's bright as far as nights go but that moon keeps staring at me like a jaundiced eyeball. I should have had a drink before coming out here. I'd go in and get one but I'm afraid I'll wake my wife, and she'll blink and her hair will look like a leafless winter tree surrounding a Grumpy Cat face. That's a proper noun, Grumpy Cat. It has its own Wikipedia page, like Napoleon and Georg Hegel. The article starts: "Grumpy Cat (born April 4, 2012), real name Tardar Sauce, is a cat and Internet celebrity known for her grumpy facial expression." Keep that in mind when you read my confession because it's a crazy fucking world we live in. My thesis sponsor says I never make sufficiently elegant segues. She says my paragraphs are too long and that my conclusions come at the reader out of nowhere like argumental hyenas. I'm surrounded by difficult women. I'm reconsidering my confession, but that moon keeps reflecting its piss coloured light at me and I'm sick of just writing my thesis, sentence by footnoted sentence. Theses. It even sounds vile. If any of my neighbours are watching they probably think I'm ridiculous sitting out here in my boxers and bathrobe, smoking cigarette after cigarette and typing on a laptop, but in my defence it's the twenty-first century and this is how twenty-first century murderers let it all out. I used to think it ridiculous that anyone could say the moon is made of cheese, but now I kind of get it. I'm hungry and I have a heavy heart. Two days ago I overpowered a level twenty-six dwarf, stabbed it in the neck, beat it with a shovel and sliced open its throat before transferring what remained of its body to a 3.5" diskette that Wayne and I secretly uploaded to a computer in the library.
Wayne's my best friend and accomplice. He owns a little computer repair shop in town that I spend time in whenever my wife gets her Grumpy Cat face, and that's where I'll start my confession.
It was a Monday afternoon and some guy came in with an old IBM Thinkpad that he'd bought off Ebay and that he wanted Wayne to fix. "What's the problem?" Wayne asked.
"BIOS doesn't work," the guy said.
Wayne booted the laptop and the BIOS was password protected. "What's the password?"
"How should I know? That's why I came here," the guy said.
"What am I supposed to do?" Wayne asked.
"Hack that shit."
Wayne traded him a newer, shittier used Dell for it and the guy signed a contract and walked out happy.
I asked Wayne what he was going to do with the Thinkpad.
"Sell it," he said. "To someone who doesn't know what a BIOS is, for more than I paid for that Dell."
Wayne could do that, make money while making two people happy. I didn't have that kind of business sense. My wife said it was because nobody took me seriously the way they took Wayne seriously. I asked her why. She said it was because Wayne had dark, curly hair whereas I had blonde hair that was so thick and straight it made me look boyish and perpetually out of date. "Would you want to be with a guy like Wayne instead of a guy like me?" I asked. "If I could be with a guy like Wayne I never would have married you," she said.
"Hey, Wayne," I called out. He was sorting invoices and I was sitting behind a table in the far corner of the store, working on my thesis. He turned around holding a bunch of papers. "Have you ever slept with Annie?"
"No, man."
"But would you?"
"I might," he said. "Are you offering?"
I said I wasn't. He went back to sorting invoices.
My laptop screen flickered.
Wayne started humming the main theme from Super Mario Bros.
My laptop died.
"Hey, Wayne," I said. "How much do you want for that Thinkpad?"
He read an invoice. "One hundred sixty."
"I know what a BIOS is," I said.
"Is yours dead?"
"Yeah."
He took the Thinkpad off the counter, walked over to the table I was sitting behind and set the Thinkpad down. "On the house, buddy."
I picked up my dead laptop. "At least take mine for parts."
"It's cool. I did sleep with Annie once. It was before you got married but it's still probably worth a Thinkpad," he said.
Wayne's a pretty good guy and I didn't care about the BIOS. I just wanted something with metal hinges that I could write on. I didn't even need a hard drive because I ran Puppy Linux off a USB stick and saved all my files to Dropbox. My thesis sponsor didn't think that was possible. When I plugged my USB stick into her desktop's USB port and booted entirely into her RAM, she said, "Why did you make my Windows lose its pleasant appearance?"
I never should have booted that Thinkpad.
It had a USB port but the boot order was apparently hard drive first, so I booted into Windows XP and explored the file structure for a while because it was a form of procrastination that didn't weigh on my conscience. There wasn't much installed.
"You should wipe the drive before you do anything," Wayne said.
I went down the list of directories in Windows Explorer. It looked pretty much like a fresh install. Other than the operating system, the laptop also had an old version of Office and an anti-virus suite installed. I changed the views options in Explorer to what I liked: detailed view and show hidden files checked on. "By the way, what are the specs on that thing?" Wayne asked.
"Hang on," I said. Something had caught my eye. There was a hidden directory in root filled with text documents numbered from one to sixty-four. I opened the first. It held a single character. e. I opened the next. 8. I opened a few more at random and the contents of those were single characters, too. "Wayne," I said.
"Yo?"
"There's a hidden folder in C: and it has sixty-four text files with a number or letter in each."
Wayne put down his invoices. "Exactly sixty-four?"
"Yeah," I said. I noticed something else. "And it's strange, because the creation dates of the files are all exactly two months apart."
"That's like a span of ten years."
Nothing else on the hard drive caught my eye.
"It could be the BIOS password," Wayne said. "Those get up to sixty-four charac
ters long." He scratched his chin. "But before you check that, do a search for jpegs. Sometimes people leave naked pics of their wives and girlfriends sitting around."
"There's plenty of those online."
"But those are public, buddy. These would be private, known by only a few people and us."
There weren't any photos.
I took out my phone, opened a fresh document and typed in the characters from the numbered files on the Thinkpad hard drive. Then I rebooted and pressed the key to get into the BIOS. A password prompt came up. I entered the sixty-four characters staring at me from my phone screen and hit Enter. Bingo. Wayne was waiting for a response. "We're in," I said.
Except we weren't in.
The screen had become a black command prompt. "Wait, I think the BIOS is broken," I said.
Wayne came over to take a look.
He hit a button.
> Welcome, adventurer. What is your name?
"The fuck?"
Wayne hit another key.
> Error. Name cannot be blank.
> Welcome, adventurer. What is your name?
"It looks like some kind of role-playing game," I said, stating the obvious.
"Reboot again," Wayne said.
I did. The text disappeared, the hard drive whirred, and when the Thinkpad returned to life it booted straight to the same command prompt and the same line of text without even asking for the password.
"Does it boot off a USB?" Wayne asked.
"It didn't before," I said. But I tried it anyway. No luck. The screen turned off, turned on and then we were back at:
> Welcome, adventurer. What is your name?
We tried booting off a CD.
> Welcome, adventurer. What is your name?
"Well, that's a