The flesh in the furnace

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