The flesh in the furnace

then it was necessary to put the head down and rest, for the weight prohibited one long dash to the grill. It was during one of these breathers that the first suitor, elbows propped on the head, told the second suitor about the prince. "The prince is dead," he said.
        "Who said?"
        "Scratch."
        "That malcontent? And you're going to believe what he says? How could he know if we don't."
        "He killed him."
        "So? On whose orders?"
        "Hers. Who else's orders are there?" The second suitor smiled, scratched at the back of his neck. "I never did like the way he always got the girl after we failed. Even if it was in the script." He laughed at some thought. "Though I suppose I couldn't have handled her very well if I had won, eh?"
        "Nor me I" the first suitor agreed, shivering. "Not even as well as he managed her. Still, I would have liked to hear him when old Scratch came on the scene. They say the devil tears a monstrous hound limb-from-limb in his own play, without the aid of mirrors. I would have given a great deal to listen to the prince under similar punishment."
        "Yes," the second suitor agreed. "Oh, my, yesl just to listen would have been enough I"
        
        Nothing was real any longer. None of it had ever seemed real, actually, though now it was even more like the stuff of dreams, bits and pieces of illusions that swam at him through the soft blue haze that sheathed the world. Time had no meaning for him. The spirits of the dead were as solid and interesting as the capering puppets who ringed his bound form. Now and again he caught sight of Bitty Belina in her golden aura, laughing with her bright teeth and her seawater eyes. Just as often, the blond was not Belina at all, but his sister jenny who teased him and comforted him, angered and pleased him. Sometimes jenny was alive and well, speaking in her soft voice, watching him with heavily lidded eyes. Other times she was dead, falling away from the edge of a cliff with a knife in her belly, coming up hard on smooth boulders, washing away in a strong current, the knife ripped free of the hole in her flesh… He tried to hold onto her when she was alive. But his fingers slipped through her and in a moment she would return, dead again.
        The puppets taunted him with the bloodless head of Pertos. They pushed the grizzly thing directly before his face and demanded that he confront it. This, they seemed to say, is the head of your father whom you dethroned to gain your godhood. This is your handiwork. Are you proud of it?
        The dead eyes stared, yellow and sightless.
        
        "Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS.• The puppets sang until the name ceased to be a name and became just another word. The world was full of words, and none of them could hurt as much as a name.
        
    "PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS…"
        
        The word was no longer a word, but merely two syllables of two harmonic notes, each separated from the other by one tone, rising and falling, over and over.
        
    "PERTOSPERTOSPERTOS…: '
        
        Then the syllables were only sounds with no phonetic relationship to language. The sounds degenerated into noises, and the noises became nothing more than a barely audible hum, like the unseen mechanisms of the universe toiling to maintain stasis in the scheme of things. He gave himself over to that hum, went up with it when it crested, down when it ebbed, like a piece of cork in the middle of some vast, lonely and uncharted sea.
        
    "PERTOSPERTOSPERTOSPERTOS…:'
        
        The icy lips of the corpse's head brushed against his own lips. Their flesh seemed to stick together. And when they were separated, the idiot was sure his lips had been seared away.
        "Tell old Pertos that you're sorry for what you did," a small, feminine voice ordered. "He came here after an apology from you. Come on now. Say it."
        "Forgive… forgive them," he asked the head.
        "Not us l" Her voice was shrill. Her good humor had abruptly become bitter anger. "You need his forgiveness!" But he could only repeat that which he had said. He only made them angrier.
        They brought in the spiders and dropped them on him, one at a time. The tiny creatures crawled over his sweatslicked face, hung on his lips and drank beads of his saliva. They tentatively explored the caverns