The flesh in the furnace

balloons of the clouds, he realized that he had no idea where he was going. This depressed him, perhaps more than it should have, for early morning on an empty highway can be a miserably lonely time.
        It was raining now. His wipers thumped rhythmically back and forth, sloshing the water into the drain-channels below the glass.
        He listened to the drumming pellets of water beating furiously on the roof of the cab.
        He didn't know where he was going, might as well face that. Worse yet, he did not know of any place he could go. He tried to think of the names of other cities, but his mind refused to spit up that information. He thought of pulling over at one of the regularly spaced rest stops to allow himself to think things through, but panic took him every time he considered such a thing. Somehow, he was certain that, once he had stopped, he would never start again. And so he drove, the rotars beating steadily beneath him, their noise consolation of a sort.
        He had changed his story, he realized. He was not living the same life that he had always lived before. He had gone against the script. And it became painfully evident as the scenery flashed by in a monotonous gray-green monocolor, that he was not a puppet master, not capable of taking Pertos' place.
        What then?
        He was very much afraid. And he was somehow certain that the spider had found its way out of the cellar and onto the truck-and that he was carrying the spider with him and that it was spinning its web somewhere nearby and that it was waiting, waiting…

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    October and November
        
        It was a beautiful land, restored to what it had been centuries ago, clean and untainted. The pines were tall and sturdy, and the floor of the earth beneath them was carpeted with brown needles. Because of the dense shadow they threw, there was not much that grew beneath them. All day, the sky seemed like a roof over the earth, low and blue, almost within reach; at night, there were more stars than Sebastian had ever seen in his life. They dazzled him, and they held him for hours, his neck growing stiff as he watched them, until he nodded and fell easily into untroubled sleep.
        Sometimes Noname would wake him shortly after and urge him to bed, much as Pertos might have done. Other times Noname would be there in the morning, sitting at the idiot's feet, watching him, silent, admonitory in his expressions, waiting for the day to begin. Sebastian would focus on the too-large head of the creature, on the eyes skewed out of their proper position, and for a long while he would have no idea where the thing had come from. Slowly, though, he would remember. He called the creature Noname because he had not known what to call it, since he could not read the identity wafers, and since it was not really what it was supposed to be anyway.
        Sometimes they would have breakfast, sometimes not. Noname seemed as cavalier about the necessities of life as Sebastian, though his attitude was not engendered by a low intelligence. Apathy came, instead, from being uncertain of life, from being a mistake, from being without a concrete identity and a past and future.
        The truck was parked in a copse of trees two hundred yards from the highway. The rolling land and the thrusting masses of pines protected it from observation by anyone but old Ben Samuels who lived in a cabin two thousand feet farther back in the woods. Perhaps such an isolated position was not necessary, for there had been no police cars on the road for the entire journey northwest from Springsun. There had been no search aircraft, and the radio in the truck had never mentioned the disappearance of Alvon Rudi, so far as the idiot could remember.. Still, he felt better sheltered from sight by trees and by the land, and he remained. He did not particularly intend to remain here forever, but neither did he make plans to leave within the foreseeable future. It was as if this pocket of Canadian wilderness was a bubble in which time did not progress even though those wrapped in it lived and aged.
        During the course of the day, they might wander into the trees, away from the cabin and from the truck, examining moss and ferns, looking for fossils in rocks, which Sebastian could find but could not explain. They might take up post on a log or a flat rock, there to wait the coming of the animals and birds. Sebastian was able to remain perfectly still for