They’d become so wrapped up in their own sick world of misery and ugliness, no longer could they see anything of beauty outside so they’d taken themselves off in a fit of sulks to live underground, live life as they wanted, complaining and grumbling all the time.      Grozzies still looked like Humanfolk after a fashion. They’d two long, hairy arms and short, bandy legs. Their bodies were covered with long black hair and they wore skins of animals, mainly silly rabbits that had blundered into their caverns and got caught.
     The most strange -- and most terrible -- thing about them was their eye, their one, solitary eye stuck right in the middle of their foreheads. It glowed dully in the perpetual dark of their caverns and was the only means of light down there. This terrible eye sent out a beam that paralyzed anyone it fell upon. It made you a stage worse than groggy. It made you grozzy -- hence their name. Once you’d been grozzified, you were carted off senseless back to their lairs, put into cold storage, then micro-waved by that same terrible eye when the Grozzies felt hungry. Need I say more?
     All this was hearsay, though it must have been based on fact. Most rumors are. But for

generations no one had seen a Grozzy in Mellowmark, not distinctly; though there were several, elderly Mellowmarkians, whose families lived near the Mystery Marshes in the old cottages there, who swore on oath they’d seen creatures very like Grozzies. They’d seen them on dark nights, wandering about in the marsh fogs, beaming their deadly beams this way and that as they prowled around.