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

by Flesh In The Furnace(Lit)

  She did not bring the spiders into the open immediately. It was more fun to conceal them, to feel the glass grow warm against her body and to know that this power lay so close at hand. She permitted him to eat his sandwiches. When they returned to the cargo hold to spend the night, she ate some canned fruit with him and enjoyed some bottled vegetable juice. She spoke some lines for him, relishing his joy all the more for knowing how swiftly she could change that joy into terror.

  She danced for him.

  The spiders in the saltshaker waited where she had hid­den them behind the food crates.

  She read to him from a book.

  He asked for parts to be repeated.

  She read them over as often as he wished.

  The feeling of superiority was so strong, so exciting, that she could barely keep herself from rushing to the saltshak­er, grabbing them out of it and waving the eight-legged little beasts in his face, laughing at his horrified fascination.

  But she restrained herself, aware that once the bottle had been shown to him, this sweet anticipation would be over and the thrill of holding an axe above his head would diminish when he knew that axe was there.

  In time, his head nodded against his chest.

  His breath came out as a long sigh.

  He slept.

  She watched him for a while, then went and got the spiders. She stood beside him, looking up at his wide face, and kicked him in the thigh until he woke.

  "I have something for you, Sebastian," she said, holding the bottle behind her.

  He looked groggy, and she wanted to be certain he was wide awake when she presented him with her gift.

  "Do you hear me, Sebastian?"

  He sat up straighter and yawned. "What?"

  "I have something for you."

  He grinned. The poor, trusting son of a bitch, she thought. And she could hardly keep her laughter down.

  "Hold your hand out," she said.

  He held it out.

  She moved swiftly, bringing the bottle around and hold­ing it only inches from his fingertips. The spiders were trying to climb the glass walls with little success.

  He looked at it a moment before he saw that the bottle itself was not being offered, that it was the contents that should interest him. And then he blanched and tried to shove himself backwards, through the wall of the truck.

  "No!"

  Do you want them?"

  He drew his hand swiftly to his chest, clutched himself. "I'll take them out and give them to you."

  "No!"

  She made as if to unscrew the top of the shaker, though she had no such intention at all.

  "Perrrtooosss . . ." he moaned, beating at himself, as if a hundred spiders crawled on him and he was trying to knock them loose.

  "Do you want me to keep Pertos bottled up?" she asked. He could not take his eyes from the spiders.

  "Sebastian !" she shouted.

  He looked at her.

  "You want me to keep them bottled?"

  He nodded, his head moving quickly up and down. He didn't stop nodding even when she spoke again.

  "Then you'll do something for me," she said. "You'll take the amoeba off the Furnace. You'll resurrect the others and bring them to life in the nutrient trays."

  He said nothing.

  She moved closer with the bottle. "Won't you?" she insisted.

  "Y-Y-Yes," he agreed.

  "Get up," she said.

  He obeyed.

  "Get the Furnace ready."

  He did this too.

  "Wissa first," she said.

  He fed the disc to the machine.

  He worked the nobs, formed a whole and lovely villain­ness.

  "She'll . . . hurt . . . y-you," he said mournfully.

  "The prince," Bitty Belina said. The spiders were still in evidence.

  The prince was born.

  Wissa had already begun to stir. She sat up, groggy, and brushed at her skin as if she were dusty.

  As the body of the first unsuccessful suitor jelled inside the womb, Belina stood on the brink of the viewplate, head thrown back as she laughed. Her golden hair was very golden, her eyes very bright indeed.

  Even as she turned and looked at him, brandishing the spiders and taunting him, he could not help but think how beautiful she was. Lovely, lovely child-woman. He was glad, now, that he could snake her happy by raising her compan­ions from the dead.

  January

  Saint Eclesian, in the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, warns us against a chauvanistic-jineoistic view of man's final war with God. He tells us: "There does not necessarily always have to be a hero and a villain in a conflict. Indeed, most times, there is no hero at all. And when one considers the ways of God and the attitudes of men, there can be little doubt that both factions would share in the villainy. When the war comes, it will be every man's duty, however, to make his own decision whether man or God is the least villainous. This may not be a noble manner in which to choose sides, but it is surely a fair one."

  Later, in one of his letters to the citizens of the city of Pocadion, the Rogue Saint expands this warning: "You have heard me say that neither man nor God will be the hero in such a conflict. Yet, if man should win, he must reject the memory of his villainy and proclaim his virtue. Otherwise, victory will be hollow. No one raises huzzahs when evil overcomes good. If man wins, there must be parties and singing, awards and medals and eulogies. This can best be insured if men make certain that God dies in a most unnoble way, debased and groveling. We all know that a true hero dies proudly, and our self-confidence will be bolstered by watching God expire without dignity and with­out hope."

  In the cargo hold of the truck, the walls and the floor had not been well soundproofed against the incessant clatter of the rotars suspended in the vehicle's under-carriage, for the designer had never intended for anyone to ride back there. Even so, grown men would have found it only slightly annoying. The puppets, on the other hand, were forced to sit closely and to shout if they wished to be heard as the truck resumed its journey northwest. And, being volatile, hyperactive creatures, they could not be satisfied with sit­ting alone or reading.

  Besides, they were busy plotting Sebastian's death, and they wanted to give the problem every consideration they could. When the time came, it must be one long entertain­ment. He must not die quickly.

  If they were to plot, it was necessary that they be away from the idiot. Though they had little respect for his mental capacities, they did not kid themselves that he could not understand them. Too, he was a formidable physical antagonist, even if he might not be quick. Each day, they broke the ten hours of driving into two-hour shifts, and each of them took turns riding in the cab as a guard against the idiot's whirrs and plans. The bottle of spiders was given to the guard and remained in the cab with Sebastian at all times. That left most of them free to put together some enjoyable sort of murder scheme.

  "But when?" the prince asked, his small voice rather shrill as he raised it to compete with the shuttle system under them.

  "When the time comes, we'll know," Bitty Belina said. For some reason her whispered sensuality seemed to carry better than their shouts.

  "That's easy enough to say," the prince said. "But we've been planning now for three days. We have all sorts of good ideas. Why not take him out tonight? If we wait, hard to tell what might happen."

  "Nothing will happen," Belina said.

  "The spiders might die," the prince said.

  "We feed them well enough."

  "But who knows about the needs of wild creatures like that?"

  "They aren't wild creatures, just spiders," Wissa said.

  "You're agreeing with her, then?"

  "Yes," Wissa told him.

  "Look," the first suitor said, running small fingers through his bright red hair, "we need him to drive. So why fight about it? We can't get rid of him until we get someplace."

  "Your answer to that?" Belina asked the prince.

  "I'll drive!" the prince sai
d.

  The others broke into cackling laughter, like a batch of chicks, pleased with the hatchery.

  "I mean it!" the prince said. His handsome face was furiously strained, red and lined and angry. "I can handle

  the wheel myself. I know I can! I'm strong enough. Some­one else could sit on the floor and push the brake and the accelerator whenever I told them to."

  "It might work," the third suitor said. He was the fair, shy, chubby one who in the play was stricken deaf and dumb by Wissa..

  Belina cast a harsh look at the chubby one. "And it might not. And if it doesn't and we've already killed the idiot, where are we?"

  "I agree with Belina," the winged puppet said.

  "Me too," said Wissa.

  "Yeah," agreed the first suitor.

  "She knows what she's doing, I guess," added the third suitor.

  That left only the prince and the second suitor who was presently on guard duty in the cab of the truck. Even if he chose to disagree with the blond star of their play, it would be five to two in her favor. And there was little likelihood that he would disagree with Bitty Belina.

  "Who ever made you the boss?" the prince wanted to know. He had his chin thrust out and his hand on the hilt of his sword.

  "Fate," she said.

  Wissa giggled.

  The prince blushed, turned to confront Belina more di­rectly. "That's not a good enough answer for me. You're a woman. You're weak. I'm the strongest one here, with the most muscles. I was built that way, meant to be the leader."

  "You're getting reality confused with the script," Bitty Belina told him. She smiled sweetly, the very same smile she always gave him in the last act of their story, the smile from the script.

  "Besides," he said, ignoring her sarcasm, "I have the sword, the only weapon here."

  "Was that directed at me . . . or Sebastian?" she asked.

  "You figure it out," he said, looking to the others to see if they were, perhaps, having doubts about their original vows of allegiance to Bitty Belina.

  That was a mistake. He should have kept his eyes on the blond, his lover from the stage. The moment his gaze was elsewhere, she danced forward on her small toes, kicked upward, and delivered a solid blow between the prince's legs. He gagged, fell over, his sword useless now that he needed all his strength to get breath into his lungs.

  Wissa was laughing out loud now. She jumped up and embraced Belina, and while the prince watched, unable to move or defend his honor, the two women kissed. It was not the sort of kiss he liked to see them exchange. When he did see it, he understood that it was a challenge to his man­hood, to the manhood of every one of the male puppets. The suitors and the winged angel didn't seem to care. But he had been given too much pride, and the sight of them together almost gave him the courage to plot their deaths.

  Almost.

  But there was always something in Bitty Belina's eyes that made him abandon such considerations before he car­ried them very far.

  The long hours behind the wheel gave Sebastian much time to think, and he let his mind range across the spectrum of his life, through black moments and light moments, through happiness and defeat, never following any single avenue of memory to its end. Mostly, he remembered small triumphs and tragedies. Indeed, he had had no large triumphs to speak of-and the tragedies on the scale of jenny and Pertos and Ben Samuels were too huge for his investigation.

  The land was endlessly white and the sky perpetually overcast. There was always falling snow, sometimes only a few flakes and other times impenetrable sheets that ob­scured the way and forced him to pull over and stop for the duration.

  He came to know the puppets as well as he could know anyone, and he had his favorites among them. He liked the angel very much, though they said little to each other. Even in the dim light of the northern winter, those golden wings glinted and shone. They reminded Sebastian of peo­ple he had loved, though he could no longer summon forward any name but Bitty Belina's to fit a golden image. He disliked the prince quite a bit. He was a snide, harsh­speaking little fellow. He liked to tease Sebastian with the spiders, and when he had tired of that, he enjoyed jabbing his sword into the idoit's thigh and simultaneously warn­ing him against losing control of the truck. Sebastian's leg was dotted with little gashes and tiny holes as large as the place where a nail might go in the hands of a martyr. He found that he liked Wissa, though that surprised him. She was the evil stepmother, and she should never be trusted. But when she spoke, it was softly, and she never taunted him like most of the others did. He didn't Me either the first or the second suitor, for they treated him nastily, though not quite so crudely as the prince. The third suitor, the chubby one, was just the opposite. He spoke to Sebas­tian more than any of the others, though the idiot had noticed that the third suitor was the quietest among his comrades. They talked about the stars if the clouds parted, about the snow, about the Furnace and the others.

  Belina, of course, he loved.

  He had created her in the Furnace, forged her with his own hands and without anyone's aid. It was as if this single act atoned for everything else that he had done wrong. In creating Bitty Belina, he had simultaneously erased his sin for killing Alvon Rudi and Pertos, for permitting Wolf to escape and murder Ben Samuels. And he had all but forgot­ten a girl named jenny and the recurring guilt that had chased him down the years of his life. Both because she was his creation and because she brought him this contentment without knowing it, he loved her. He was enchanted by her golden hair and her sparkling eyes, unaware that his creation might have other traits beyond the physical.

  He had even begun to think that there was a certain. scriptlike quality to their new lives. Every day they drove down the windswept, snow-hidden highway, keeping be­tween the markers on either berm, bucking the air currents. Every night he sat and watched the puppets talk and laugh in the rear of the truck where they had made their home. Every day it snowed, either hard or gently. Every night it snowed in his dreams too. There was a quality of sameness, of routine, that made life more stable and endurable. As far as Sebastian could see, the rest of their lives would consist of the northern highway, the cold and the snow and the sky like ashes and the occasional birds streaking across the flat bottom of the clouds.

  It would have been enough for him.

  Though he had not forgotten what Bitty Belina had done with the spiders, how she had threatened him with them

  and laughed at his terror, how she had forced him to create the other puppets, he no longer held any of that against her. She was too beautiful to hate. Besides, his fear of the spiders had quieted a bit and would remain in the back of his mind so long as the many-legged creatures were kept in the empty saltshaker. It was almost as if Belina had done him a great favor by putting the spiders where they were. As long as he knew they were in the bottle and that the metal cap was on it tight, he could rest easier, knowing they were not hiding nearby, ready to pounce on him. The enemy is always less impressive when he can be seen and placed. So, as the days passed, he looked even more kindly upon Bitty Belina and did as she asked.

  Had he been able to read, and had he ever come across a copy of the sayings of the Rogue Saint, he might have been interested in Eclesian's letter to the Tolemedons which states, in part: "Man's greatest advantage in the coming war against the deity is, perhaps, his sense of history and his taste for revenge. We forget nothing. We crawl away to lick our wounds, delivered us by the Fates, but the mental wound remains open and bleeding after the flesh has healed, only to be soothed by revenge. God, on the other hand, has so much to consider, so many tasks to handle, that he does not retain the minor events of our sub-cosmic world as fully as we do. When we kill him, he may very well die confused, wondering just what it is we have rebelled against."

  The fourth day of their renewed leg of the journey, it snowed again. That night, in his dreams, the world was white and old. .

  The sixth day, they found the city.

  It was snowing, and the shifti
ng masses of clouds, fleeing across the low sky, threatened blizzards. The wind had grown in fury through the long hours of the day until now it whipped about the truck like a huge bellows, sent the vehicle from side to side of the highway. It was a test of the driving skill that Sebastian had acquired, but he kept the truck moving. One of the puppets had said that, sitting still, they would surely be rolled over. Moving, knifing diagonally into the wind and using a little of its force to propel them, they were not quite so vulnerable. He didn't like it, but he continued to drive, even when the threatened blizzard became a reality and the world was a dizzying display of flakes.

  Twice, he struck the berm markers, tore them loose, swerved back onto safe territory as the clattering sound died away. He did not have to be warned by the puppets to know that if anything got tangled in the blades below them, they would stay here forever, freezing to death when the battery died and could no longer warm them.

  Belina and the angel both rode in the front with him, while the others curled in bundled blankets in the rear, trying to keep from being bruised as they were jounced back and forth between the walls.

  Then they passed through some invisible barrier which toned the wind down, held back three quarters of the snow and provided a haven. As the thumping windshield wipers brushed away the last flakes, they saw the city ahead of them and stopped the truck with a mixture of relief and dread.

  Many times in the past two months, running with Belina, Sebastian had driven by exit ramps that were marked with the names of small towns, hamlets, minor cities. But this was something altogether different. It rose out of the ice plain as if it were made of ice itself. Its fantastic spires tipped the bottoms of the clouds. Its walls were a brilliant, translucent blue that shone with an inner light, a beacon of welcome. The land immediately around the city was un­touched by the gale and the worst of the snow. Though the ground was not bare, but hard ice, there was a less wintry feeling to the place. On the walls and towers there was no snow or ice. The severe weather seemed not to have pitted the city's grandeur.