Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0)

by Flesh In The Furnace(Lit)

  "Is your master about?" Trimkin asked the idiot.

  Sebastian almost said yes, the master is inside, before he realized that no one should ever see Petros now. If anyone saw what he had done to Pertos, they would lock him away, like they would have done over jenny, and then he would be dead himself, chained up in darkness.

  "Lose your tongue?" Trimkin asked, smiling. He seemed a pleasant man. Pertos, however, could have told Sebastian that Trimkin had seemed pleasant even while he had super­vised the beating his men had dealt the puppet master.

  "No," Sebastian said.

  It was not a cold day really, but he was freezing. He wanted to go back into the theater, but he didn't dare lead them there.

  "No what? No, your master isn't about? Or, no, you still have your tongue?"

  Sebastian looked around the cab of the truck where he was sitting, back through the open door at Trimkin.

  "I guess he's inside," Trimkin said.

  "No!" The idiot gasped as the men turned to walk toward the theater.

  "No?"

  "No."

  "Where then, boy? You wouldn't lie to us, would you?"

  Sebastian shook his head.

  "That's good. Now, if he truly isn't in the theater, where is he?"

  Sebastian could not think of anything to say, and for the thousandth time in his life, he damned his slow-wittedness.

  "We don't want to harm him," Trimkin said. "We just came to tell him that he might want to come out here, in back, and watch his truck burn."

  For the first time, Sebastian saw the hand torch and the cans of liquid in the hands of the men with Trimkin.

  "Inside I guess," Trimkin said, turning.

  "Leaving!" Sebastian gasped. "Going away!"

  Trimkin turned again, slowly, smiling broadly. "You wouldn't kid me about that, would you, son?" He laughed, as if anticipating the joke, though there was a great deal in that laughter that was not humorous.

  "Leaving," Sebastian said.

  Trimkin considered that. "There weren't any handbills about the new play tonight," he said, speaking to himself as much as to the brute in the truck. "So old Godelhausser has gotten some sense, eh?"

  "Some," Sebastian agreed.

  Trimkin exploded with genuine laughter then, and the men with him joined in. His face grew red, and his thin body seemed to tremble all over, as if he had a disease of some sort.

  Sebastian smiled nervously.

  Trimkin placed a hand on Sebastian's knee. "You tell your master that we congratulate his good sense"

  Sebastian nodded.

  Talking animatedly about their triumph, the Heritage Leaguers turned and left the back wing of the plaza. where the truck was parked, entered the white immaculate silent city that was their dead world. Sebastian watched them go, listened until there was no echo of excitement and laughter. Then he slid out of the truck, slammed the door shut and ran inside. He saw now that he must dispose of the corpse or face discovery when Trimkin returned the next day, angry that he had been lied to.

  First, he took out the sections of the Furnace, which he knew how to dismantle, having done that so often in these last five years. He packed them in their niches in the cargo hold of the truck, and the shape-changing contour pads slithered around them in warm, live embrace. Next, he removed all the props and then all their personal belongings from the rooms. He went over each chamber again and again, to make certain everything had been taken. He noticed the rug last, and he was not certain that it belonged to Pertos. Then he found it was not a rug, but a blanket rolled about something. He broke the twine and unwrapped the bloated, blackened body of Alvon Rudi, and it was only then that he remembered the night in full and realized that he would have to dispose of two corpses if he were to keep out of the grasp of the authorities and out of the small rooms where they would put him for the rest of his life, the small rooms his uncle had always drunkenly referred to in long, terrifying tales when he had been sadistically trying to get a rise out of young Sebastian.

  There seemed to be nowhere in the theater to hide the corpses until he went, reluctantly, into the basement. He took the wide steps carefully, his heart beating abnormally fast. The ceiling lights had burned out in most of the grids above, leaving three quarters of the way in shadow, some of it brown, some purple, some pure pitch in hue. Though the

  theater had been used in its two hundred and fifty years, it had not been frequented more than three or four weeks a year, and the cellar had not been maintained in the splen­dor lavished upon the upper regions.

  Once, he came to a place where the way was blocked almost entirely by a wispy spider web, and he quaked at going on. There were two spiders in the strings, shuffling quickly back and forth, as if sizing him up as possible prey, each as large as his thumb. Here and there, lumps of white silk bristled with the thrusting limbs and wings of dead insects encased by the spiders against the sparseness of winter.

  He tried reaching out and touching the web, but drew back instantly as he felt the somewhat sticky, humming fibers. It was almost as if he had felt Pertos in that web, as he had felt him other places. But he no longer wished to seek out the puppet master's emanations.

  That was over.

  He went back up the stairs to the theater, found a length of wood in the prop room and came back, shredding the web ahead of himself.

  He stomped one of the spiders. It made a wet mess on the concrete.

  He looked for the other.

  It skittered along the edge of the steps, dropped over the side and was gone.

  He felt a desperate need , to know where that spider was, but when he reached the end of the steps and ran along the side of them to look for it, it had escaped.

  Now he wanted to return more than ever. And perhaps he would have if he had not heard the gushing roar farther back in the semi-dark rooms of the basement. It sounded like a river.

  Jenny . ..

  He followed the noise of the water until he found the large, round drainage pit in the floor. It was sunken a foot below the floor level, and there was a heavy metal hatch that fit into that depression. He wrestled the hatch open and looked down. The dim light was just enough to give him a view of swiftly moving water four feet below, black water that now and then held a whirling cluster of paper, leaves or wood. There was the smell of human wastes, and he understood that this must serve as the sewer for the city, emptying its burdens in some underground repository or in the sea.

  jenny ..

  He could dump both corpses into the sewer, and they would never be found. Or, if they were, he would be gone for a long time and no one would know where to look for him to put him in the little rooms where they tortured people like him.

  He turned to go back upstairs, to bring the corpses down, when he saw the thing in the middle of the floor a dozen feet away, and all his strength went out of him like water draining out through the open faucet in a barrel.

  The spider.

  It poised on six legs, two legs waving in the air, as if pointing at him.

  The strange light caused it to form a shadow almost a foot in length.

  He screamed.

  The spider moved toward him.

  He could not move. It felt as if every bone in his body had fused itself to the next bone, as if every muscle had ceased to exhibit effect upon his skeleton.

  The spider danced closer.

  He thought he could hear its hairy legs brushing along the concrete, and he ground his teeth and cried and whimpered and begged it to go away.

  And when it was inches from him, it veered and skittered into the darkness, leaving him exhausted and drenched with perspiration.

  "Pertos . . . Jenny . . . please," he said.

  And when the spider did not come back for twenty minutes, he felt his strength returning and knew he could go on with it.

  He tilted the blanket containing the clothes and corpse of the merchant, Alvon Rudi, into the hole. It pulled free of his hands and fell into the black water, unwrapping
some­what so that just as it sank down the rigor-mortised bare arm of the man slipped through, the fingers curled as if grasping toward the edge of the drain to save itself. Then it bobbed to the surface, was caught in the current and swept into the tunnel, out of sight.

  Sebastian lifted Pertos' body, hesitated, then shoved it after the first corpse.

  And as he watched it go, time seemed to slow, to run like syrup, so that he had time to watch two events at the same time, one of the past, the other of the present:

  Jenny hanging on the edge of the rocky cliff, head-down toward the large, smooth boulders and the surging white of the river;

  Pertos sliding gently, gently toward the boiling blackness of the sewer, toward the litter and the defecation;

  Jenny gone, sliding like an arrow at first, then turning, tumbling, over and over as if she were doing acrobatics;

  Pertos twisting slightly;

  Jenny striking the water, catching her head against a boulder, bursting and rushing away;

  Pertos splashing into the sewer, spraying water over the idiot, sinking and rising and whirling away forever;

  Silence;

  Silence . . .

  He closed the hatch on the drain because he was afraid of the two corpses trying to crawl out again. That was why he had brought them both down before throwing either one in. He would not have wanted to come back with the second body to discover that the first had worked its way from its watery grave and was perched upon the lip of the hole, drying itself.

  He left the basement.

  Twice as he went up the stairs he was certain he could hear the brushing noise of the spider's legs upon the con­crete. But every time he turned abruptly, trying to catch sight of it, there was nothing to see.

  But that didn't mean, he knew, that there was nothing there.

  Before he left, he made a last inspection of the rooms and found the Holistian Pearl, which he placed in his pocket. For a moment he considered taking it down to the basement and tossing it into the waters after Pertos' corpse, but he was certain if he went down there he would never come upstairs again and he gave up that idea.

  He waited until night to leave Springsun, for he didn't want anyone to notice that it was only the assistant in the cab of the truck and that the puppet master himself was not in evidence. He did not know what anyone might make of that, but he was certain they would be suspicious. Too, he knew how badly he had handled the great air-cushion truck in the past. Pertos had called him a "demon" behind the wheel, and he had almost wrecked twice in the space of a single block. Perhaps he would wreck tonight, and then it would all be finished and he would be dead or they would catch him. But he couldn't allow that fear to keep him from leaving. If he stayed, there was a far greater terror: that of the rooms where they supposedly tortured young boys who were stupid-and that was one fear that he could not bear at all.

  He started the vehicle easy enough, and as the engine whuffed and the huge blades began beating, the other steps of the driver's procedure came back to him, bits and pieces of memories from all the hours he had watched Pertos at this task.

  He held the craft down until the blades beat steadily, then released the clutch. The truck rose two feet above the pavement, shuddering with power, waiting for the signal to progress.

  His mouth was very dry.

  He sent the truck forward too fast. In the last rushing seconds before impact with the pink wall of the opera house, he managed to bring the wheel tight around. The side of the truck brushed the opera house with its slip­stream but didn't sustain any damage of direct contact. But before he could feel excitement over this initial triumph, there was a towering elm looming directly ahead of him, and he was forced to tear the wheel around the opposite direction, hard, his fingers slicked with sweat. The truck brushed the side of the tree. Metal protested noisily, but nothing tore loose. Autumn leaves sprinkled down across the windscreen, stuck to the glass so that he had to squint between them. He went on.

  He soon learned to hit the acceleration pedal with the utmost care, though he now and then forgot and came within inches of killing himself by ramming buildings and, occasionally, other vehicles.

  For a long while, he wandered the streets, searching for some way out of the city. He passed the signs for the superhighway many times but could not read them.

  On a backstreet where a park sided the road, he lost control and destroyed six saplings before stopping and cautiously working back toward the pavement.

  The city seemed mostly deserted. It was this lack of witnesses which kept him from being apprehended and detained by the police. His vehicle moved quietly, and after any small collision, he was soon gone, whispering down an alleyway in search of exit.

  In the morning, it would appear to some that a gremlin had been about wreaking havoc on those who had somehow engaged its anger.

  In time, he found a ramp and took it. The truck left the city for the wide, featureless plains of the little-used super­highways which he and Pertos had traveled so much in these last five years. The sight of that uniform gray without the sharp clutter of buildings on either side was almost a religious experience. He turned right, tramped the accelera­tor. The truck swept down the road, whined under the widely spaced arclights. Ten miles later, the city limits passed and there was no illumination but what the head­lamps provided.

  He didn't get sleepy, for a change. He could not remem= ber another night when he had not been sleepy earlier in the evening. There was that ballooning excitement in him now, and it crowded out his exhaustion.

  The wind picked up eventually, and lightning snapped along the undersides of the clouds.

  "Tell me about . . . 'bout them," he said.

  He waited.

  Only the thunder answered.

  "About stars," he explained.

  He could only see two or three stars through the blanket of the storm clouds. They were lovely.

  "Stars?" he repeated.

  When he received no answer, he turned to look at Pertos. It all came back again, and he almost lost control of the truck.

  He didn't speak again. Or look to his right as he drove.

  Sometime toward morning, when the first light broke along the horizon and sent glassy, bright fingers higher into the sky, piercing the balloons of the clouds, he realized that he had no idea where he was going. This depressed him, perhaps more than it should have, for early morning on an empty highway can be a miserably lonely time.

  It was raining now. His wipers thumped rhythmically back and forth, sloshing the water into the drain-channels below the glass.

  He listened to the drumming pellets of water beating furiously on the roof of the cab.

  He didn't know where he was going, might as well face that. Worse yet, he did not know of any place he could go. He tried to think of the names of other cities, but his mind refused to spit up that information. He thought of pulling over at one of the regularly spaced rest stops to allow himself to think things through, but panic took him every time he considered such a thing. Somehow, he was certain that, once he had stopped, he would never start again. And so he drove, the rotars beating steadily beneath him, their noise consolation of a sort.

  He had changed his story, he realized. He was not living the same life that he had always lived before. He had gone against the script. And it became painfully evident as the scenery flashed by in a monotonous gray-green monocolor, that he was not a puppet master, not capable of taking Pertos' place.

  What then?

  He was very much afraid. And he was somehow certain that the spider had found its way out of the cellar and onto the truck-and that he was carrying the spider with him and that it was spinning its web somewhere nearby and that it was waiting, waiting . . . .

  October and November

  It was a beautiful land, restored to what it had been centuries ago, clean and untainted. The pines were tall and sturdy, and the floor of the earth beneath them was car­peted with brown needles. Because of the dense shadow the
y threw, there was not much that grew beneath them. All day, the sky seemed like a roof over the earth, low and blue, almost within reach; at night, there were more stars than Sebastian had ever seen in his life. They dazzled him, and they held him for hours, his neck growing stiff as he watched them, until he nodded and fell easily into untrou­bled sleep.

  Sometimes Noname would wake him shortly after and urge him to bed, much as Pertos might have done. Other times Noname would be there in the morning, sitting at the idiot's feet, watching him, silent, admonitory in his expres­sions, waiting for the day to begin. Sebastian would focus on the too-large head of the creature, on the eyes skewed out of their proper position, and for a long while he would have no idea where the thing had come from. Slowly, though, he would remember. He called the creature Noname because he had not known what to call it, since he could not read the identity wafers, and since it was not really what it was supposed to be anyway.

  Sometimes they would have breakfast, sometimes not. Noname seemed as cavalier about the necessities of life as Sebastian, though his attitude was not engendered by a low intelligence. Apathy came, instead, from being uncertain of life, from being a mistake, from being without a concrete identity and a past and future.

  The truck was parked in a copse of trees two hundred yards from the highway. The rolling land and the thrusting masses of pines protected it from observation by anyone but old Ben Samuels who lived in a cabin two thousand feet farther back in the woods. Perhaps such an isolated position was not necessary, for there had been no police cars on the road for the entire journey northwest from Springsun. There had been no search aircraft, and the radio in the truck had never mentioned the disappearance of Alvon Rudi, so far as the idiot could remember.. Still, he felt better sheltered from sight by trees and by the land, and he remained. He did not particularly intend to remain here forever, but neither did he make plans to leave within the foreseeable future. It was as if this pocket of Canadian wilderness was a bubble in which time did not progress even though those wrapped in it lived and aged.