The flesh in the furnace

and the puppet warmer than the cabin kept him. He had ceased to be so adamant about the necessity for a cabin, but he still mentioned it whenever he could.
        Now, when Sebastian did not respond, he launched into a story about the deepest snow he had seen in all the years he had lived here, and both the idiot and the puppet grinned and settled down to listen. Ben Samuels told fine stories, even if all parts of them weren't told on a level you could understand.
        Toward evening, if they did not stay to eat with Samuels, Sebastian and Noname would return to the truck, where the idiot would switch on the single light against the growing darkness. Every time, as the yellow glow appeared, he would remember that without the old woodsman they would have no light or heat. Very likely, they would have been apprehended by now, or died of exposure. Samuels had found them a mile down the highway from here, the battery dead. Sebastian knew nothing of that, and had sat stubbornly in the driver's seat some four hours before the old man found them, waiting for the truck to want to start again. Samuels had charged them from his own Rover and led them back to the trees and his cabin. Now he charged the battery every four or five days, whenever it got low again.
        Every time he turned on the light, the idiot repeated to himself the importance of charging the battery. If he ever left this place, he would have to learn that an electric vehicle must be filled with electricity at regular intervals, even when its batteries are, as Samuels said, the best man had ever devised.
        There, at night, with the single overhead light, he would go to work with the Furnace. Weeks earlier, parked in another forest a couple of hundred miles away from here, he had puzzled out the way the wafer was put into the machine, and he had started creating. But because the use of the two knobs confused him, the results had been distressing. The puppets had been deformed, monsters with melted faces and without eyes, with legs that seemed to have no bones, with arms that did not end in hands, but lumps of protoplasm instead. The only halfway decent result was Noname, but even he was disfigured. And despite the fact he had been formed with an identity wafer, he did not know who he was or remember any of his past periods of consciousness as should have been imprinted on the wafer. Sebastian had worked diligently after Noname, but the puppet had not signaled that the idiot was on the correct course. He had been an accident, and the puppets made after him seemed more grotesque and horrid than those which had come before. The idiot closed down the Furnace, angry and confused. He kept Noname out of the flesh bank to provide company, and together they drove north, without purpose.
        Then the dead battery.
        Then Ben Samuels.
        And now, for three weeks, the woods and the long nights, the listening to stories and watching the old man draw. But Sebastian was restless.
        He hungered for company, for the special companionship he had known with Pertos in the old days. Noname, of course, was company of sorts, though not the kind he sought. Noname was too much like himself to really compliment his personality: floundering, lost, seeking signposts of one sort or another. Samuels did not provide what he required, for the old man was careful not to meddle, careful not to make his suggestions into commands. He could not know that, in fact, part of what the idiot required eras commanding. The world seemed increasingly unreliable and fluid, and he longed for someone like Pertos to tell him what to do with his time.
        For some reason, Bitty Belina was on his mind constantly. She represented a touch with the old script, the life he had stopped leading. If he could only resurrect her, all would be well. He was sure of that. He had forgotten the way in which she had spoken to him, the way -she had laughed with the others, the way she had pleaded with him to kill Pertos.
        She was a pretty puppet.
        He remembered that he liked her laugh.
        And her smile.
        And her yellow hair.
        If Bitty Belina could be returned to him, whole and safe, then all would be well. And perhaps, if she was here with him, he would stop having nightmares about a blond girl named jenny with a knife in her belly… If there was a panacea for all bad memories, it was Belina.
        Near the end of October, he put the pieces