The flesh in the furnace

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