The flesh in the furnace

did not see how they could possibly follow him in here. They didn't. They came from behind.
        He was watching the door for signs of activity on the other side, almost as if he expected the spiders to force the panel inward, to tear it from its hinges. Something scurried by his left foot, inches away, dark against the light gray concrete. It reached the wall and ran along it toward the far corner. A spider. Brown. Thumb-sized. When he turned, there were more of them, spilling out of a duct in the wall.
        "No, no, no, no," he chanted. He was no longer attempting to dissuade them from their attack. He was, instead, trying to force a change in the fabric of reality itself. He wanted to unmake the spiders, to uncreate them as he had uncreated puppets in the past.
        The spiders had not, for the most part, crossed the floor in his direction. Except for the one that had run past his foot, they clung to the baseboard, looking for shelter. They were not nearly as aggressive as the ones in the corridor had been, for they were not driven by the deadly fumes of insecticide behind them.
        Sebastian did not notice this difference, however. As far as he was concerned, the spiders had come around behind him and where there had once been a modicum of safety there was now only danger. He bolted across the room to a door that gave on a small office only large enough for one desk. He closed the door behind. It did not fit tight and would not keep the spiders out. Quickly, he crossed the room, knocking things over in his haste. He entered the half-bath attached to the office, closed and bolted that door.
        
        He imagined he could hear spiders pouring into the office, thumping toward the wooden washroom door.
        He examined the bathroom several times before he realized the ventilation grill, if pried loose, concealed a duct quite large enough to admit him if he crawled. Frantic, he hooked fingers through the heavy wire mesh and strained every muscle fiber in his thick biceps. The screen creaked, ripped loose with such suddenness that he fell with it in his hands. Hurryl he thought. Jenny and Pertos and Ruth and Ben are coming to take you to the room without windows l It was dark in the shaft. There might be spiders lurking about. He decided to risk that, for he knew there were spiders behind.
        He almost blundered into the whirling fans of the intake apparatus, avoided them with only inches to spare. Cautiously, he felt around in the pitch darkness and discovered the tunnels breaking to the right and left. He chose the one on the right and squirmed into it.
        It was necessary to lay on his belly now, for the pipe was no longer even high enough to accept his crouched form. He tore his fingers on seams in the metal and quickly wore holes in the knees of his trousers. He was as oblivious to the damage done his flesh as he was to that done his clothes. The only thing that concerned him was escape.
        Ahead, there was dim light. He worked harder than ever, reached a bend in the shaft. When he worked his head and shoulders around the angle, he found the light came from a flashlight laid on the floor of the pipe. It was focused upon a human head that had been severed from the shoulders at a point immediately below the base of the skull. It was deathly pale. The only blood was what clung to the tattered pieces of neck that remained. The eyes were rolled back until little but the whites showed. They were turning a sickly yellow. The mouth was open, slack and lifeless, showing well-cared-for teeth.
        It was the gypsy's head which the puppets had salvaged from the avenue beneath the cargo van. Sebastian could not know this. They had shaved the hair on the head into a widow's peak, and they had died the hair a crisp, stark white. It was this one clever touch that elicited the response from Sebastian which they had intended.
        "Pertos," he hissed. And there, in the bad light, the gypsy's features changed by cosmology and aged by death, the head did look much like that of the puppet master.
        "Pertos?"
        The head said nothing.
        The flashlight shone steadily.
        The walls whispered, carried echoes of distant, hissing voices.
        "Pe-Pe-Pertos?"
        
        A spider, fat and dark green in color, crawled out of the dead mouth, hung on the slack, bloodless lower lip. He screamed and screamed and screamed. Even as he thrust himself