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

by Flesh In The Furnace(Lit)

  The black spider ran for the cover of the idiot's boot, only inches from him. Its long, wiry legs pumped in and out, up and down, flailed at the carpet and propelled it onward.

  "No!" he whispered.

  He seemed to hear a giggling noise nearby. He looked around but could not see anyone.

  The spider came closer.

  Sebastian turned and ran.

  It seemed to require an eternity for him to open the door into the corridor. The knob weighed at least a thousand pounds and turned as if it had never been oiled. The door itself weighed more than a ton as he shouldered it open. When he was in the hall at last, the door seemed to cling to him as if it were alive and had chosen to side with the spiders. Either his hand would not leave the knob-or could not.

  When he had freed himself and run twenty feet down the hall, he remembered that he should have shut the door to prevent them from following him. He turned and went back, just in time to encounter a brown spider at the sill.

  Jenny?

  He screamed, turned and tripped as his feet locked. He fell and struck the cold, tile floor with his chin, jarring his teeth. He tasted blood, and he was dizzy. He had cut his tongue, and he could feel it swelling in his mouth. Still, he managed to get to his feet again.

  He looked behind and saw the spider still on the carpet, as if it were not sure whether it should follow.

  He ran.

  He almost did not see the other spiders. He was no more than four running steps from them when they caught his eye. Fifty spiders in all, of different sizes and colors, though most were brown and as large as his thumb, barred his flight. Here and there, members of competitive species did battle with each other. Some of them milled from one wall to the other, displaced and confused. For the most part, however, they advanced on Sebastian in a maddeningly quiet run.

  In his muddled, terrified condition, with everything sud­denly more than itself, suddenly symbolic, he saw that advance as having a greater degree of purpose than it really did. The spiders seemed to march forcefully ahead, almost in unison.

  He stepped to the wall and opened the door to Bitty Belina's apartment. It was possible that he could take sanctuary there; such ugliness would never dare invade the place she lived. Yet it already had . . . . Spiders skittered over the beige carpet just as they did in his own apartment. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to slam the door before any of them could gain the corridor.

  He saw, somewhere deep inside himself: two bodies dropped through a round kole, caught up in dark water and swept away; a blond girl with a knife in her belly, bleeding while birds sang nearby ....

  He watched the wave of scrambling arachnids closing on him, and he thought he could hear the feather soft thump of their hundreds of tiny feet on the tile.

  He turned and hurried the other way. His labored breathing was so loud that it smothered the other sounds that he thought he could hear. The sound of his strained lungs reassured him, much the way a jungle animal's roar makes it feel secure.

  "Please . . . please . . . please . . " he begged as he ran, though he was not at all certain to whom he was pleading. For a moment it seemed as if the walls dissolved around him and were replaced by the cold, white stars that Pertos had told so many tales about.

  He had gone only a hundred yards before he saw that spiders waited for him this way too. More than a hundred of the leggy creatures skittered towards him. They were mostly brown and thumb-sized, quick and determined. There were so many of them at places that the floor was obscured.

  Sebastian turned.

  Behind, the spiders had come out of his apartment and were blending with the onrushing line that hemmed him in.

  "Pertos ! "

  The incantation failed. "Pertos ! Pertos !" No matter how often he invoked the name, his condition remained the same. The spiders came on. The white-haired, ancient puppet master did not appear to offer the idiot his help.

  To his left, across the wide corridor, a booktape store offered the only possible route of escape. He ran there, flung open the glass door and stepped inside. There was a glass latch, which he fixed in place. Now, at least, there was a barrier between himself and the spiders.

  The two lines of spiders converged, crawled over each other. Black bodies fell, were torn apart by the larger brown species. Mating dances were danced. Death rituals were observed. Soon a common mass of a hundred and forty brown spiders milled about before the booktape store.

  Sebastian had expected them to leave. (he, rather, he had desperately hoped they would leave and forget about him. Instead, they tried to crawl up the smooth glass door, fell down, tried again. They swarmed up the walls of the store, filled the windowsills, looked in at him.

  He was safe for the moment.

  He was certain, though, that they would find a way through the glass before much time passed . . .

  Teams of puppets worked toward each other down the corridor, moving behind the spiders with insecticide, sealing off the way. They wore cloths across their noses and mouths. The spiders retreated before them and were soon forced to congregate before the store where Sebastian cow­ered.

  The prince cornered Belina in a side duct of the ventilation system while she was on her way to the booktape store. He had taken her by surprise, flung her against the thin metal wall, his arm across her throat as if he would crush her windpipe. At first, she thought he had finally gotten up the nerve to kill her. Instead, it turned out that he was aroused and that he wanted her but was afraid she would say no.

  "Now isn't the time," she said.

  Now is the perfect time, and you know it!" he coun­tered. His face was flushed, his breathing harsh. His free hand roamed across her small body as if it were a separate entity with designs of its own aside from his. It touched her round breasts, squeezed them. It slid across her flat stom­ach, dug fingers into her nicely padded hips, cupped one of her firm buttocks.

  "I don't know what you mean," she said.

  "You do. Now, with him out there, trapped in the store. Just before we get him. It'll be best now, better than ever"

  She knew what he meant, of course. There was definitely something sensual about the chase and the kill. When they had murdered that gypsy, she had felt the same thing. When she had watched the prince and the angel lower the van onto the struggling driver, when she had seen the blades bite into him, she had responded to the blood and the screams. Afterwards, she had gone away with Wissa. They had smeared each other with blood and made love. Later, when Wissa was exhausted, Belina had gone to the prince and to the angel. In each case, sex had never been so full, so satisfying. It was all sharp edges and long slides, rising and rising and never falling, ballooning full of he­lium.

  "There's no time," she argued, trying to push away from him.

  He slapped her. His fingers left red welts across her smooth, freckled cheek. The moment he saw those, he realized what a horrible mistake he had made. Stepping away from her, he tried to find something to say that would appease her. But he knew there was nothing she would listen to.

  She said nothing at all. She gave him one, long searching look which turned his blood cold, then stalked off on her way to the booktape store and the final chapter in Sebas­tian's story.

  Sebastian realized that he could not remain in the store indefinitely. Before long, he would grow both hungry and thirsty. There was neither food nor water to be had here. Yet he barricaded the front of the store as if he intended to endure a long seige. He moved display racks before the glass door. He took crates of booktape cartridges from the storeroom and lined them from one wall to the other. The spiders would climb them, but they would be delayed a bit in the process.

  At the moment, every second of freedom from the hairy touch of those spindly-legged monstrosities was a blessing.

  Soon there was nothing else he could use to form an obstacle between himself and the spirit-analogues of Pertos, Jenny, Rudi and Ben (as he imagined the spiders were). He stood at the back of the main room, his spine
pressed against the wall, watching the arachnids swarming at the corners of the glass, hunting cracks and crevices.

  What would they do to him if they got him?

  Make him die? Take him to some place where there were no windows, where he would be chained and tortured and punished for being such a stupid boy? Would they torture Bitty Belina and make him watch that spectacle while he was also confined in manacles?

  A truly terrifying notion: did they already have Bitty Belina and were they already torturing her?

  On the top of a display rack, by the front door, a spider appeared. It was silhouetted against the lighted window. Though he could not tell the head from the behind, he felt that it was watching him, gauging him for the final attack.

  Somehow, it had gotten through the storefront, the scout for the main pack, and it signaled his defeat by its very presence.

  He was perspiring. His throat was dry. He wished he were a boy again, at home in the woods, looking for cen­tipedes under the rocks. Swimming in the hole in the creek. Hunting berries. Playing with jenny ....

  He choked, pushed away from the wall.

  The spider was still watching him.

  He hurried into the storeroom and shut the heavy door behind. It made a tight seal on all sides. He did not see how they could possibly follow him in here.

  They didn't. They came from behind.

  He was watching the door for signs of activity on the other side, almost as if he expected the spiders to force the panel inward, to tear it from its hinges. Something scurried by his left foot, inches away, dark against the light gray concrete. It reached the wall and ran along it toward the far corner. A spider. Brown. Thumb-sized.

  When he turned, there were more of them, spilling out of a duct in the wall.

  "No, no, no, no," he chanted. He was no longer attempt­ing to dissuade them from their attack. He was, instead, trying to force a change in the fabric of reality itself. He wanted to unmake the spiders, to uncreate them as he had uncreated puppets in the past.

  The spiders had not, for the most part, crossed the floor in his direction. Except for the one that had run past his foot, they clung to the baseboard, looking for shelter. They were not nearly as aggressive as the ones in the corridor had been, for they were not driven by the deadly fumes of insecticide behind them.

  Sebastian did not notice this difference, however. As far as he was concerned, the spiders had come around behind him and where there had once been a modicum of safety there was now only danger. He bolted across the room to a door that gave on a small office only large enough for one desk. He closed the door behind. It did not fit tight and would not keep the spiders out. Quickly, he crossed the room, knocking things over in his haste. He entered the half-bath attached to the office, closed and bolted that door.

  He imagined he could hear spiders pouring into the office, thumping toward the wooden washroom door.

  He examined the bathroom several times before he real­ized the ventilation grill, if pried loose, concealed a duct quite large enough to admit him if he crawled. Frantic, he hooked fingers through the heavy wire mesh and strained every muscle fiber in his thick biceps. The screen creaked, ripped loose with such suddenness that he fell with it in his hands.

  Hurryl he thought. Jenny and Pertos and Ruth and Ben are coming to take you to the room without windows l

  It was dark in the shaft. There might be spiders lurking about. He decided to risk that, for he knew there were spiders behind.

  He almost blundered into the whirling fans of the intake apparatus, avoided them with only inches to spare. Cau­tiously, he felt around in the pitch darkness and discovered the tunnels breaking to the right and left. He chose the one on the right and squirmed into it.

  It was necessary to lay on his belly now, for the pipe was no longer even high enough to accept his crouched form. He tore his fingers on seams in the metal and quickly wore holes in the knees of his trousers. He was as oblivious to the damage done his flesh as he was to that done his clothes. The only thing that concerned him was escape.

  Ahead, there was dim light. He worked harder than ever, reached a bend in the shaft. When he worked his head and shoulders around the angle, he found the light came from a flashlight laid on the floor of the pipe. It was focused upon a human head that had been severed from the shoulders at a point immediately below the base of the skull. It was deathly pale. The only blood was what clung to the tattered pieces of neck that remained. The eyes were rolled back until little but the whites showed. They were turning a sickly yellow. The mouth was open, slack and lifeless, showing well-cared-for teeth.

  It was the gypsy's head which the puppets had salvaged from the avenue beneath the cargo van. Sebastian could not know this. They had shaved the hair on the head into a widow's peak, and they had died the hair a crisp, stark white. It was this one clever touch that elicited the re­sponse from Sebastian which they had intended.

  "Pertos," he hissed. And there, in the bad light, the gypsy's features changed by cosmology and aged by death, the head did look much like that of the puppet master.

  "Pertos?"

  The head said nothing.

  The flashlight shone steadily.

  The walls whispered, carried echoes of distant, hissing voices.

  "Pe-Pe-Pertos?"

  A spider, fat and dark green in color, crawled out of the dead mouth, hung on the slack, bloodless lower lip.

  He screamed and screamed and screamed. Even as he thrust himself backwards, gouging his knees horribly on the ill-fit sections of the pipes, he wailed without interruption. He felt as if his body was swelling and swelling and that it would soon burst like a ripe fruit. The ululating scream seemed to let some of this unbearable pressure loose.

  He made his way past the whirling intake fans that he had almost blundered into before. He entered the left-hand tunnel, which he had originally decided to forego, wriggled furiously forward. He made excellent time for such cramped conditions.

  As he moved, he had no idea whether or not the puppet master's head was following him, though he expected as much. Now and then he experienced a vision in which the spider had hold of his one foot and the head had its teeth sunk into his other. They were holding him until the main body of spiders could reach him. When the vision passed, he crawled even faster than before . . . .

  The prince was sulking. He did it well, for he had had much practice in the past few weeks. Every time he had been forced to relent and give in to Bitty Belina, he had gone away to pout. Though it did little for his standing with the others, it never failed to make him feel better. Now he was refusing to go with the others to watch the last stages of Belina's plan for killing the idiot. The scheme was a success, and that-on top of her recent rejection of his affections-only made him more furious than ever. He sat at the end of a long horizontal pipe, by the edge of a vertical shaft that connected the system on this level with the system of the level below.

  It was there that Scratch came to him.

  "What do you want?" the prince asked. He was as surly with Scratch as he was with all the other puppets. The fact that the horned simulacrum was the symbol of evil and corruption and played Satan on stage did not impress the prince at all. There was no real superstition among the puppets, save that connected with the Furnace. And now that they had begun to control the Furnace, even that bit of religious nonsense was waning.

  "She sent me," Scratch said.

  In the darkness, despite the feeble light of the prince's penlight, Scratch's black flesh blended perfectly with the shadows. His teeth shone pearly bright. His eyes glittered, speckled with red flame. His fingernails gleamed. As did his hooves. Those were the only signs that he was there.

  "She?"

  "Bitty Belina."

  "So even you are her messenger boy," the prince said.

  "Her aide."

  The prince laughed until he was hoarse.

  "I fail to see the humor," Scratch said, scuffing his hooves against the floor of the shaft. />
  "Belina doesn't need an aide or aid. If the euphemisms make you feel better, so be it. But all Belina needs are servants, willing to play infantrymen to her general."

  "That's enough," Scratch said. He sounded especially mean. His eyes contained more red than they usually did.

  "Okay," the prince said. "What does she want?"

  "Nothing. Not from you, anyway. She sent me to kill you:'

  The prince rolled quickly to his feet, for he had been made for the role of a fighter. The sword that never left his hip now left it-for the tight grip of his fingers.

  "If a death's her wish," the prince said, "she'll have it. Though it won't be mine."

  "Perhaps."

  The prince held the sword to the side, tipped up and forward. "I would say there is little doubt about it. Your role is stealing souls of heroines and heroes and putting a fright into your audiences. My role is killing. I am equipped for a marvelous performance."

  Scratch applauded, grinning. His teeth positively sparkled. "A wonderful soliloquy " he enthused. "You're a fine actor." This reaction, more than any other could, unsettled the prince.

  "I am not acting," the prince replied. His temper was beginning to get the better of him. He could not afford to give in to it. He had to be cool and calculating. Scratch would be beaten, but he would offer a good battle first. The prince weaved on the balls of his feet, looking for an opening to make his first lunge.

  "Neither am I acting," Scratch said. "Have you ever seen my play, `The Nicksboro Curse'?"

  "Of course not."

  "Let me assure you, then, that I did more than steal souls and frighten the audiences. There is one scene, for in­stance, in which I tackle and defeat a hound my own size. He has fierce teeth and great claws. But I cripple him and dismember him in center stage."

  The prince sneered. "Dismember him? With the help of how many visual deceptions?"