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

by Flesh In The Furnace(Lit)

  The keys were on a pegboard in the kitchen, and he found them easily. If he had left then, all might have remained as it was. But he had never been inside the old man's bedroom, and he was curious. He pushed the door open and peered in at hand-carved furniture, a cozy place full of bookshelves. He stepped into the chamber, smiling at the sense of security the place seemed to emanate . . . .

  And nearly walked right into the spider's web.

  It was inches in front of his face, hanging from open beams on the low ceiling, an enormous piece of work. One huge black bitch spider watched him, or appeared to. Around her, half a dozen smaller spiders scurried along the outermost reaches of the silken highways.

  He could not move.

  She came closer, descending on a silvered thread.

  He was perspiring.

  She had green markings across her back.

  "No," he said.

  But she didn't stop.

  "Sorry," he said.

  She tensed, as if she would leap from the web and scrabble across his face to hide in the uncut masses of his hair.

  She was so close he could see the spitting fibers flowing from her mouth, forming new lines.

  "Pertos!" he shouted. "Pertos!"

  There was no response.

  "Help me I "

  There was quiet.

  "Pertos!" This last call was strung out, each syllable many seconds long, agonized. He turned and ran, ran as fast as he could for the trailer of the puppet master's truck. Inside, he hid himself, alone with the single light.

  At two in the morning the light burned out, leaving him in complete darkness. It was a night of terror, for he kept hearing the sound of a thousand spiders stalking him across the cold metal floor.

  In the morning, he got enough courage to get the Rover and charge the battery. He had decided to leave. Perhaps the spider would not be able to follow him. But before he could go, he would have to create himself some company to make the miles seem shorter. He picked up the identity wafer which Noname had said belonged to Bitty Belina, and he fed it carefully into the machine.

  The Furnace lighted.

  He took the two control knobs in his hands.

  Creation was begun.

  In the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, there are two verses that are attributed to the saints, the first to Saint Zenopau, the second to the Rogue Saint, Eclesian. The first tells us: "The identity of God changes, as his children unseat him.

  Each generation, we come under the hand of a fledgling deity who has gained his power through fratricide. This explains why God is clumsy and why his wisdom has never equaled that of his creations: He never had a full lifetime in which to learn." The second verse, in the words of Eclesian, explains: "We can rejoice in our humanity, for there will come a day when God's creatures will have grown more powerful than he. Then we will rise up and dethrone him and his children, and the magic of life-death suspension will be ours. This is not a threat to the divine powers, merely a statement of ecological progression."

  December

  She sat on the folded blankets, which elevated her enough so that she could see over the dashboard. She watched the land rush toward and past them with a keen interest, and she seemed awed by the immensity of the world. It was a great deal larger than the stage, even larger than an entire theater, indescribably huge.

  She was fascinated by snow. Often, she turned her gaze directly into the steel-gray sky, as if she expected to discov­er that it was like a saltshaker, the Sakes of snow a seasoning for the earth.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "Snow."

  "It's snow," he said.

  "What makes it?"

  He was silent, watching the curtain of white that swept over and around them as they plummeted down a long slope, still headed north, deeper into the unremitting land toward the pole.

  "I didn't ask," he said.

  "What?"

  "Pertos. Never said. What snow . . . is"

  "Can we stop?"

  "Why?"

  "So I can touch the snow. I want to see what it feels like." She had the largest, most beautiful eyes, and he could not deny them anything.

  He slowed the truck, pulled it onto a wide rest area when he had a chance. He kept the engine running, reached across her and opened her door. "Quickly."

  She scampered across the seat and dropped down into the snow. She was wearing her costume, the thigh-length skirt, her thin blouse, and her feet were bare.

  "It's cold!" she squealed, shivering, hugging herself and laughing. "And it's wet l"

  She made a ball of it in her small hands and threw it in the cab at him. It struck his shirt sleeve and fell on the seat. He picked it up and threw it back at her.

  "Come on," he said. He didn't like to have her out of reach. He was afraid she would try to escape, even though he knew she could not go very far from the Furnace. It was just that everyone seemed to be going away, leaving him by himself. And he could not stand that. It made him feel left out, rejected. Sometimes he was certain that only he and Bitty Belina inhabited this world, the last two living crea­tures. And if she escaped, he would be here forever, alone. And being the only man in the world carried too many responsibilities, too many duties that were beyond him.

  She climbed into the truck again. He reached over and pulled her door shut.

  "Wet and cold," she repeated.

  He pulled onto the highway, and they continued north.

  They drove from immediately after breakfast until quite late at night when his eyes refused to stay open any longer. They kept food in the cab so they could eat while they rode, and the only brief stops were for the toilet. In all this time, they did not see another car nor any aircraft of any sort. The only other moving things in the world were the truck and the snow. For Sebastian, the road and the hum­ming rotars of the air-cushion system became a way of life, and the routine settled his nerves somewhat.

  On the fourth day, several hundred miles northwest of Ben Samuels' cabin, she asked the question that he had been afraid she would ask all along. "When will you resur­rect the others?"

  "Others?" But he knew who she meant. He knew.

  "Wissa and the prince. The others. They have to be called up sooner or later for the performance, and it might as well be sooner."

  "No . . . show," he told her.

  She thought about that a while, as if she were not really surprised at all. "You could still call them up. They have their rights, you know, as much as you do."

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "No."

  "Well, you must have a reason I People just don't do things without having some reason I "

  "Spiders," he told her, though he did not know exactly what he meant by that.

  "Spiders?"

  He said nothing more, just drove and watched the snow and hoped that she would forget about it. He was fright­ened of the prospect of having several puppets alive at once. Neither he nor Bitty Belina, after all, was living a normal story, the life script that had been intended for them. Each of them had gone against his script. That was confusing enough. If there were a dozen of them about, each doing whatever he pleased instead of what he was supposed to do, it would cease to be confusion and turn swiftly into chaos.

  "Will you create them? Please? I would like that."

  He did not reply.

  After a long while, she said, "You killed Pertos."

  "You wanted it."

  "But you were the one who did it. How? With a gun? No, I suppose you would have used something more crude than that, like a knife or a club. Was that it? And what did you do with the corpse?"

  "Don't talk."

  "I could report you, you know. I could turn you in and let the police have you"

  In his mind was a picture of a small room with cold stone walls and a platform of boards for a bed. He was chained to the wall, and they kept coming in every hour or so to beat him, like they did with stupid boys who had to be put away. "Don't,"
he told her.

  "Maybe that's what I'll do first chance I get. First time we see someone, I'll tell them."

  He reached for her. She bit his hand, opening one of the wounds that Wolf had given him. Blood dripped from the tips of his fingers, soiled her white dress.

  "Then they'll lock you away," she said.

  This time, he swatted her with his open hand. She was knocked off her perch and crumpled on the floor in the recess beneath the dashboard. She didn't move for such a long time that he began to think she might be dead. He stopped the truck and felt over her, blushing and nervous.

  Her heart was beating. She breathed. Gently, he lifted her onto the seat and laid her down. And drove on.

  When she regained consciousness again, she struggled to sit up. She got onto the stack of blankets and sat watching the snow fall for more than two hours. She did not speak a single word to him, even though he attempted to start a conversation more than once. When she did speak, her voice was fierce, her tiny face lined and reddened. "You ought to be locked up," she said. "You're nothing more than a damned animal. They shouldn't let you run around loose."

  And he felt so awful that he did nothing but agree with her. "Yes," he said contritely, not able to look at her, ashamed of himself. "Yes."

  On the fifth day, they stopped at a charging station, and Sebastian hooked up the truck's battery to one of the plugs along the fueling island. They went inside the automat and had some warm food, watching the snow fall through the three glass walls. It was getting quite deep. There were more than ten inches on the ground, though it was all soft and presented little difficulty to the air blades of a vehicle as large as theirs.

  It was when they had gone back to the truck and he had disconnected the cable from the battery that the trouble came. He was opening the door on his side of the cab when a long, wide cargo shuttle fluttered in from the highway, heading southeast. There was a large, bearded man behind the wheel, his long hair held out of his face by a headband. He brought his lorry alongside the fueling island and popped open the ten charging portals along the hood by touching some control inside. Sebastian watched him unto he was stepping out of his van before the idiot realized the danger here. He swung inside his own truck and slammed the door, fumbled desperately at the controls, as if he had forgotten how to drive.

  Bitty Belina screamed.

  Fortunately, the windows of the truck were closed, and her shout coincided with the slam of the lorry's door as the burly driver stepped onto the carpet of snow.

  Sebastian grabbed her, wrestled her onto his lap, holding her down so that she could not be seen from without.

  She chewed viciously at the hand clamped across her mouth, and her small, bare feet still managed to hurt him when she drove them into his crotch in a frenzy to be free.

  He could not operate the controls with her in his hands. But if he let go of her to start the truck and move out, she would call for the other man and report the murder of Pertos. And they would find out about Ben Samuels. And then the small room, the torture, the meager meals and the boards to sleep on.

  The lorry driver connected ten cables to his line of batteries, moving with the expertise of a man long in his business.

  Sebastian did not know what to do. He thought that he might wait it out, even if the stranger decided to have a hot meal and let his batteries charge at a slower rate. His hand was bleeding quite a bit, and her teeth made deep gouges into his flesh. He felt dizzy, as if be would pass out.

  Then he saw that the stranger was looking over at him. The man waved and started across, kicking snow with his knee-length boots. It must get lonely for a man on the deserted northern highway, and companionship must be taken whenever it is available.

  Bitty Belina's muffled cries grew louder, for Sebastian's hands were too weak and torn to hold her firmly any longer.

  The lorry driver was halfway to Sebastian's truck.

  Soon he would hear the desperate struggle, for the falling snow made no sounds to mask it.

  Sebastian snapped her neck and killed her instantly. He dropped her on the floor between his legs. His profusely bleeding hand was afire, and he was seeing stars all about him, even though the sky was cloudy and even though it was not yet night.

  He let the brake off, turned the wheel sharply toward the road, and shot forth, leaving that place. Clouds of snow obscured the stranger and the long cargo van attached to the charging cables.

  He struck a mileage post and sheared it off. It clattered in the rotars several seconds before it was kicked loose. He bounced across the curb and whooshed down the highway, seeking oblivion in the gray and the white of the chiaros­curo North.

  Between his feet, Bitty Belina groaned as a bubble of gas escaped her stomach and rumbled through her corpse, pop­ping her dead lips ....

  In the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, the Rogue Saint Eclesi­an tells us: "Saint Zenopau had previously shown us that God's offspring usurp their father's throne every generation, so that we are constantly under the supervision of a new diety, each of us a slave to several masters in our lifetime. Let me extend this Truth a bit further. In the early days of the new God's reign, he is more sympathetic to his charges, we humble mortals, than he will be later. Having deposed his father, he is determined to correct the injustice done his charges. It is during this period, before he becomes as cynical as his father, that we must arise and crush him. It is then that we will become our own masters"

  Later, Eclesian indulges in an altogether unsaintly dis­course on the sexuality of fanatically religious females, then returns to the rhetoric of revolution with: "Perhaps as God's creations, we can never hope to have greater physical power than he does, for he is born with omnipotence, with thunder in his voice and lightning in his hands and all that other mystical claptrap that is nonetheless formidable for its mysticism. But we can and will one day be more cun­ning and clever than he. God is the mark. We are the con men. One day we will pull the shuffle on him, and then history will really begin my brothers-and my sisters. Then history will begin with fury!"

  She was subdued, sitting on her blankets, re-created with the full memory of how easily he had destroyed her. She spoke very little, and even what she did say was offered in a tone of deference.

  At night, in the back of the truck, as he sat drinking black wine, she danced for him, and she spoke lines from her old story which neither of them had forgotten. He would call out the start of a favourite speech to her and she would answer with the rest of it, grimacing and gesturing, prancing and posturing as seriously as if she were upon the boards before a full audience.

  Later, he would give her some wine, and then they would bed down for the night. They rarely touched, and their existence together was chaste and very clean, as if neither of them was a human being but some plastic and metal construct that operated without perspiring or urinating, without a single thought of the flesh.

  They drove more slowly now, for it had come even to Sebastian that they had no idea where they were going. The fear of aimlessness had come back to him briefly, but he shrugged it off. It might be much worse to actually arrive somewhere, for then plans would have to be made. As long as they could always be going but never getting someplace, he could allow himself to forget about the future and concentrate on the moment.

  Sitting on her blankets in the cab, Bitty Belina would point out things that he would never have seen on his own: geese flying in a V formation, brown against a leaden sky; stretches of flat earth where the wind had turned the ever present snow to ice; the looming bulk of a distant glacier pushing down a canyon, catching the sun and glinting with a blue-green luminescence that grew brighter as they ap­proached.

  Only once did the idyll threaten to break, and then Belina saw it coming and managed to keep everything intact.

  They had been drinking the last of the wine in the truck, more than usual, and she had already gone through the lines from her scene with the third unsuccessful suitor in her story. There were a great many double
-entendres in the speeches, though Sebastian only laughed at them because she did, not aware there was some other shading of mean­ing. It had often occurred to her that it might be to her advantage to make advances to the brute, for she remem­bered his rage when he had found her with Alvon Rudi and she mistook that for jealousy. Now, as he laughed at her mischievous talk, she was certain it was worth a try to seduce him, as far as a puppet could seduce a grown human being. Lightheaded, daring, she approached him. As far as she could see, her sexuality was the strongest tool she had to force him to do what she wished, and if that did not work, there would be no way to have him bring the others back to life.

  While he drank, she stepped out of her clothes and left them behind her, her ample body displayed in its minute flawlessness.

  At rest, he did not see what she was doing, for the wine had smeared his vision with honey, and even what he did see took longer than usual to have any meaning for him.

  His left hand lay at his side, his arm loose, his entire body relaxed, and it was into this hand that she stepped and seated herself, her smooth bottom warm against his palm. She lifted one of his fingers and touched it to her breasts.

  And then he saw what she was doing.

  Fortunately, her reactions had not been extensively affected by the wine, and she was aware of the fury that slowly rose in his face. She saw his thick lips draw back from his teeth as they had that night he had killed the merchant. She saw his eyes glaze and knew that he was not seeing her as a person, but was reliving some horror from his own past. His gaze extended down a corridor of years, not upon the firm thrust of her little breasts. She danced off his hands, scooping her clothes up as she ran. Behind a crate of foodstuffs, she dressed.

  She was trembling. She could almost see how he would have crushed her, how he would have broken the slim bones of her legs and back.

  When she came into the open, reciting some of the funny lines from her play, he seemed to have forgotten all about what had almost happened between them.

  They laughed and finished the wine.