The flesh in the furnace

him. He turned and went back, just in time to encounter a brown spider at the sill.
        
        Jenny?
        He screamed, turned and tripped as his feet locked. He fell and struck the cold, tile floor with his chin, jarring his teeth. He tasted blood, and he was dizzy. He had cut his tongue, and he could feel it swelling in his mouth. Still, he managed to get to his feet again.
        He looked behind and saw the spider still on the carpet, as if it were not sure whether it should follow.
        He ran.
        He almost did not see the other spiders. He was no more than four running steps from them when they caught his eye. Fifty spiders in all, of different sizes and colors, though most were brown and as large as his thumb, barred his flight. Here and there, members of competitive species did battle with each other. Some of them milled from one wall to the other, displaced and confused. For the most part, however, they advanced on Sebastian in a maddeningly quiet run.
        In his muddled, terrified condition, with everything suddenly more than itself, suddenly symbolic, he saw that advance as having a greater degree of purpose than it really did. The spiders seemed to march forcefully ahead, almost in unison.
        He stepped to the wall and opened the door to Bitty Belina's apartment. It was possible that he could take sanctuary there; such ugliness would never dare invade the place she lived. Yet it already had… Spiders skittered over the beige carpet just as they did in his own apartment. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to slam the door before any of them could gain the corridor.
        He saw, somewhere deep inside himself: two bodies dropped through a round kole, caught up in dark water and swept away; a blond girl with a knife in her belly, bleeding while birds sang nearby…
        
        He watched the wave of scrambling arachnids closing on him, and he thought he could hear the feather soft thump of their hundreds of tiny feet on the tile.
        He turned and hurried the other way. His labored breathing was so loud that it smothered the other sounds that he thought he could hear. The sound of his strained lungs reassured him, much the way a jungle animal's roar makes it feel secure.
        "Please… please… please.. " he begged as he ran, though he was not at all certain to whom he was pleading. For a moment it seemed as if the walls dissolved around him and were replaced by the cold, white stars that Pertos had told so many tales about.
        He had gone only a hundred yards before he saw that spiders waited for him this way too. More than a hundred of the leggy creatures skittered towards him. They were mostly brown and thumb-sized, quick and determined. There were so many of them at places that the floor was obscured.
        Sebastian turned.
        Behind, the spiders had come out of his apartment and were blending with the onrushing line that hemmed him in.
        "Pertos! "
        The incantation failed. "Pertos! Pertos!" No matter how often he invoked the name, his condition remained the same. The spiders came on. The white-haired, ancient puppet master did not appear to offer the idiot his help.
        To his left, across the wide corridor, a booktape store offered the only possible route of escape. He ran there, flung open the glass door and stepped inside. There was a glass latch, which he fixed in place. Now, at least, there was a barrier between himself and the spiders.
        The two lines of spiders converged, crawled over each other. Black bodies fell, were torn apart by the larger brown species. Mating dances were danced. Death rituals were observed. Soon a common mass of a hundred and forty brown spiders milled about before the booktape store.
        Sebastian had expected them to leave. (he, rather, he had desperately hoped they would leave and forget about him. Instead, they tried to crawl up the smooth glass door, fell down, tried again. They swarmed up the walls of the store, filled the windowsills, looked in at him.
        He was safe for the moment.
        He was certain, though, that they would find a way through the glass before much time passed…
        
        Teams of puppets worked toward each other down the corridor, moving behind the spiders with insecticide, sealing off the way. They wore cloths across their noses and mouths. The spiders retreated before them and were soon forced to congregate before the