In the lightman's perch, Pertos locked the door behind himself and laid his pistol within easy reach.
He sat behind the spotlight and swung the control console to his side, looked at all the buttons and toggles that controlled the stage, the curtain and the scenery which would rise out of the boards or descend from the ceiling on wires whenever he gave the electronic command.
He fingered the topmost row of toggles. -
Let there be light! he thought.
He flipped the switches with quick fingers. The footlights popped on all across the stage, the dullest of the white set, barely casting any illumination.
Pertos laughed, though he was not at all happy.
Let there be life ! he thought.
The curtains opened, and the puppets frolicked forward. The last show of the night had begun, playing to a capacity house. In the front row, in one of the most expensive seats, the devil sat biding his time, disguised as a merchant named Alvon Rudi . . . .
Pertos Godelhausser sat in a comfortable form-fitting chair that hugged the contours of his body, holding the Holistian Pearl in his right hand, staring at nothing, his mouth somewhat slack and his face far too pale. The jewel was a brilliant white that almost seemed to radiate heat, and as he rolled it back and forth in his fingers it seemed to cling to his flesh with a will, like a magnet seeking out his bones through the insulating cushion of his flesh.
Sebastian sat on the floor, lacquering a newly painted prop to keep the colors rich and vibrant as Pertos wanted them. He could never have been trusted to apply the many colors themselves, but he could work the self-feeding lacquer brush without much problem. It was something he usually looked forward to, for it made him feel more a part of the show. He was always plagued with fear deep inside that he would one day be useless and that Pertos would reject him for someone else. But tonight being useful was not bringing him the sense of contentment and worth that it usually did.
He thought of Bitty Belina.
Pertos had said that she was putting on a special show for the merchant Alvon Rudi. It was a new show, a new story, privately enacted. And he and Pertos were to wait here, perhaps sleep here, in Pertos' case, if the play should take an hour or all night. They were at the far end of the corridor from Pertos' room where Rudi enjoyed the new play.
He wished he could watch.
Not being permitted to watch made him feel excluded. It was as if they all knew what the play was about, except him. And that made him miserable. He felt childish and unneeded.
Pertos slept. The Pearl glowed. And no one was watching the idiot at the moment.
Sebastian knew from experience that the puppet master would be tranced for a long while yet. It had only been moments since the strange sleep had taken him, and he never severed himself from a Pearl-vision in less than an hour. Sometimes he stayed under for most of a day, not eating or drinking, frightening Sebastian who thought he might be dead, though he never was.
Sebastian put the lacquer brush down, and after the bristles had registered inactivity for twenty seconds, the tool ceased to secrete its transparent, odoriferous shellac. On the paper laid down to protect the floor, a wet circle seeped outwards from the bristles.
It had come to him that tonight was the last night that Bitty Belina would be alive, at least for a while, until they moved on to another town and her story could be enacted before fresh audiences. Two days of any single story at a time was the limit. Then the puppets in that show would be returned to the Furnace to call forth another batch. They died.
He felt an indescribable panic seize him as he realized the full impact of what he had just been thinking. He wanted to leap up and run and kick things and shout, work off this feeling of bursting apart. But he knew that all of that would not keep the blond-haired puppet alive another minute. Did the rain stop if you asked it to?
Bitty Belina would die.
Yet tonight she performed a new play, in private, and one longer than any in the puppet master's catalogue. That hardly seemed fair when he was a part of the show. He should get to see the new story.
She was in a new story. For the first time he understood the import of that concept. What had happened to Bitty
Belina's prince? Was he in the new life she was living? And her three suitors? And the good angel? And what of Wissa, the evil stepmother? Would Belina die in this new life rather than be saved for her prince, by her prince, as she always had been before?
A new life? How was that possible? He, Sebastian, was the assistant. It could never happen that he would wake up one morning as the puppet master with Pertos having taken his placel A person was what he was, and nothing changed about that. You lived your life, over and over, and you accepted and enjoyed it. Bitty Belina played out her story, was almost killed by the evil stepmother, was saved. Over and over again. And he, Sebastian, moved from town to town with Pertos and unloaded the truck and watched creation and waited behind the curtain before each performance and drank some wine and ate and packed the truck and rode on with Pertos and unloaded the truck and watched creation . . . .
You couldn't change your life!
The prince wouldn't be there and the stepmother would succeed and she would die. Yet how could she die when she had lived her life so often and always triumphed. How could she want to change her life and maybe die?
And would she be so dead . . . so dead that the Furnace would not be able to bring her back again?
He was whimpering.
He knew something was awfully wrong. The world seemed to have become unstable, the floor like jelly, the walls shimmering and threatening to change shape and be something different.
If she did not perform the script, her original life, the machine wouldn't revive her when she died. She had never been meant to die outside of the Furnace. It was written that way. Just as he had not been meant to be puppet master. Or a tree, for that matter. We are what we are. We aren't what we aren't. And anyone who changes it, they die. They must die, or nothing would be solid and real any longer. Belina with a sword through her neck, bubbling blood through her lips while the prince runs away with Wissa . . .
Belina with a knife in her belly, bleeding all over his hands and screaming and begging for help and making him afraid.
Blood, blood, blood on his hands, as before, once, then . . .
He looked at his hands.
No blood.
He stood up and looked at Pertos.
Pertos dreamed.
Sebastian staggered from the room, his legs unexplainar bly weak, his shoulders aching, his arms tired, as if he had dragged some burden across a long and rugged terrain. He was not certain what must be done, but he was determined to do it to save Bitty Belina.
Blood on his hands.
Would they think he killed jenny, stabbed her, or would they believe his story?
He stopped there in the middle of the long corridor behind the stage in the Grande Theater of Springsun, wondering who Jenny was. He could not remember anyone by that name, although he did think of golden hair when he heard it. It scared him when he did not understand himself. It was as if someone else had entered his head and was thinking for him, but their own memories were intruding and he kept confusing them with things and places and people he knew.
He heard puppet laughter.
He started down the hall again.
His head seemed to balloon, swell enormously, until it was larger than all the rest of him. He held his hands to his ears, as if to keep himself from exploding.
Perhaps it was a hundred years, perhaps a minute, before he reached the door of Pertos' room where Bitty Belina was performing her new life, her dangerous new life. He stood outside, breathing hard and wanting to charge inside and save her. But he didn't dare because of two quick memories that darted through his clouded mind: First, Pertos had told him that Bitty Belina would be awkward in her new role and wouldn't want Sebastian to see her until she had gotten it all down as well as she could; second, he remembered the
sharp, ugly way Belina had spoken to him the previous day, how she had laughed with the others when he had had his "accident." But, too, he had laughed. And he couldn't be angry with himself, could he?
To counteract the memories that stalled him, he told himself that Pertos would thank him for keeping Bitty Belina from harm. Pertos would say, "Why didn't I see the danger? Sebastian, you're a herol" And even though Pertos had said there were no more heroes, Sebastian would be a hero. Too, it was easy to convince himself that Bitty Belina's sharpness had not been disgust at all, but a sort of sympathy.
He touched the door handle and found that it had not been locked.
Puppets laughed.
Belina laughed.
Cautiously he slid the portal open until he could see most of the room. And it was then that the balloon of his head exploded in all directions.
Bitty Belina was naked, standing between the mammoth thighs of Alvon Rudi, caressing him there, laughing as he laughed, the object of her attention every bit a third as large in length and diameter as she was.
Sebastian had only once ever seen a man with desire, and that once had traumatized him for life, had scored into his brain like a lightning bolt scarring the trunk of a gnarled elm. His mother and father had left their bedroom door open, and he had wandered in on some imagined quest or other, discovering them in sex. He had thought that his father had been hurting her, had been stabbing her. He had leaped on the bed, screaming, and flailing at his father with both small hands, biting, kicking. And even hours later, when they had finally calmed him and his mother had assured him, again and again, that his father had not been hurting her, he believed what he chose to believe. From then on, he had been ashamed that he possessed the same flesh knife as his father. And the years since then, devoid of a single erection since his sense of the sexual was all but nonexistent, had been a blessing. He knew that he could never ever harm anybody, because there was no steel in his knife.
And now, seeing Alvon Rudi, seeing Belina there touching the knife that could kill her, he was plagued with visions of Belina dead, bloody, ruined. And over the visions, as if several pictures had been printed on one plate, he saw jenny with the knife in her gut, spouting blood. And for the first time he understood, deep in himself where something of the human mind survived, that the knife in jenny's gut was his response to his father's penis in his mother. And he gagged and screamed and stumbled into the room toward Alvon Rudi, attacking himself as well as the enemy.
There were white faces.
Puppets screamed.
He felt Belina beating at his hands, then at his shins, as he knocked her to the floor.
He remembered Rudi's face, purple and inhuman.
He remembered bloodshot eyes watching him, terrified.
He felt the prince's sword driven into the calf of his leg.
He kicked, smashing the prince into the wall. The simulacrum's neck snapped, and it writhed a moment before death was complete, blood running from its ears and nose, its face ashen and painfully contorted, for it had never known the violent death it had so often dealt to Wissa.
Alvon Rudi clawed at his face.
He felt his cheeks running with blood.
He laced his fingers tighter around the merchant's throat.
The naked man convulsed, pitching to and fro on the bed, his lips almost blue now.
"No! No! You stupid bastardl" Bitty Belina was screaming. She had climbed onto his back now and was clawing her small hands at his clothes trying to reach his neck where she could swing an arm around and go for his eyes.
Alvon Rudi managed to drive a knee into Sebastian's crotch, making the brute gag and double over, forcing him to break his deathlike grip.
"Help!" Belina yelled.
The golden-winged angel flew at Sebastian, tried for his eyes. But Sebastian batted the simulacrum away with a large hand, sent it crashing against the front of the sutodoc where it broke its left wing and tumbled to the floor, crying and cursing.
Wissa stood in the doorway between rooms, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.
Belina bit his neck, drew blood with her fine teeth.
Alvon Rudi was trying to get off the bed, but his throat was heavily bruised, and he was dizzy from the lack of blood to his brain. Slowly, he was gaining equilibrium, but too slowly. Much too slowly.
Sebastian reached for him, grabbed him again.
Rudi's hands locked on the idiot's fingers, trying -to pry them off his neck. He dug nails into Sebastian's flesh.
Belina gained the idiot's neck, reached round him, clawed at his left eye with her tiny fingers.
Sebastian howled, shook her like a horse trying to throw a bronco buster. She fell, striking the floor hard, and lay there whimpering, her hip crushed.
Despite the fact that one eye was blurry with blood and tears, Sebastian continued to choke the merchant, shaking the man with each furious pulsing squeeze of the fingers.
He shook and squeezed for a long while after Alvon Rudi was dead, then turned and left that place, walking in pure blackness, unknowing and uncertain, merely terrified and filled with a need to escape the blood from the puppets . . . .
Pertos Godelhausser had been awakened from his Pearlvisions by Wissa. She had been hysterical, and she had had to repeat her hurried story several times before he had even an inkling of what had transpired while he had been tranced. When he did discover that Alvon Rudi was dead, he was not angry or frightened. Merely sad. It seemed like a logical tragedy to unroll in his life, the final act with no denouement for the lead character, the hero.
He picked up the dead prince and the wounded puppets, fed them to the furnace to be broken down into synthetic flesh liquid. He collected the healthy puppets next and did the same with them. There were no protests this time. They even seemed anxious to go.
Back in his room he found a large blanket in a closet and wrapped Alvon Rudi's corpse and clothes in that, tied the bundle around with four lengths of cord, as if it were nothing more than a rug. He had found two thousand postals in the man's wallet, and he added that to the twenty-five thousand he had gotten for renting Bitty Belina for the night. It never occurred to him to call the authorities, for that would have caused had business in future cities, at least. It could very well lead to the suspension of his entertainer's license, leaving him more stranded than ever, preyed on him in darkness and woke him ten times between first sleep and dawn. But they were gone this time, not even evident in the distance of his unconsciousness, not even lurking in the shadows. When he woke, it was more refreshed and excited than he had been in years, with a sense of the future that he had never before felt so strongly.
He got up and sonic showered and dressed in clean clothes.
He ate quite well, though he punched for random foods through the delivery system and ate a somewhat hodgepodge breakfast. Even if he had been able to identify the words on the menu he would have preferred this mixed-up meal of sweets and meats and cereals and liquors.
By the time he left his room he was feeling very well indeed. He hurried down the corridor to find out what Pertos might want of him this morning. It was a day when he felt sure he could accomplish a great deal. He wanted to prove himself.
The door to Pertos' room was open.
He went inside.
Pertos was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, one side of his head slewed crooked. His light yellow shirt was sodden with blood, and there was a fragment of bone lying next to his right ear.
And then it all came back to Sebastian, and be left that room and vomited in the hallway at the disgust he felt at what he had done.
He had been all over the theater, looking into all of the rooms, touching everything he saw, though he did not know what it was that he was after. In time, it became dear to him that he felt better in those rooms where the old puppet master had been. He spent a long time in the lightman's perch, tracing his blunt fingers over the grips of the spotlight, around and around the buttons and the knob-h
eaded toggles of the console that controlled the stage effects. He stood a full hour on the stairs leading from the perch that Pertos had trod before and after each performance. It was almost as if he could feel the places the old man's shoes had worn in the concrete. Once, he fancied he felt the vibrations of other feet on those stairs, though there was no one else about, and that thought suddenly terrified him so much that he ran from that dark, back area to the stage where he sat by the footlights he had turned on, trying to imagine there was an audience this morning. But when he forced a shimmering vision of people, they were all Pertos Godelhausser, and he had to run again, crying and frightened.
He spent a while with the newly painted props that he had been lacquering the night before, hunting Pertos' emanations on them, the sign that the puppeteer had been here, had worked here, had lived.
Then he went back to be certain Pertos was dead, for it had occurred to him that Pertos had never died before, that his life story didn't permit death. Had Pertos been living another story, then, too?
Pertos was dead. Blood. Bone. Staring eyes.
He carried the corpse to the Furnace and attempted to feed it inside, with the notion that he could then have Pertos re-created. All. he would have to do was read the nobs, learn to use the knobs. And find out which of the identity wafers would reproduce Pertos. But the Furnace refused to accept the human meat.
Sebastian spilled all the identity wafers out and looked for something he might recognize as Pertos' name. He had no luck. Then he thought he could look for his own identity wafer, and maybe there would be something about it that would help him find Pertos. Only he and Pertos were big, while Bitty Belina and the others were small. That might mean that he and Pertos had different identity discs. He looked through the wafers four times before he was willing to admit that there was no disc for him. And probably none for Pertos either.
And then he felt sadder than ever.
Just before noon, while Sebastian was outside examining the truck, feeling for the past and finding mostly cold vinyl and icy metal, Trimkin came with two men. They were a different pair, though Sebastian could not be expected to notice that Trimkin seemed always to be accompanied by different men each time, all of them bland.
Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0) Page 4