Sebastian nodded.
Talking animatedly about their triumph, the Heritage Leaguers turned and left the back wing of the plaza. where the truck was parked, entered the white immaculate silent city that was their dead world. Sebastian watched them go, listened until there was no echo of excitement and laughter. Then he slid out of the truck, slammed the door shut and ran inside. He saw now that he must dispose of the corpse or face discovery when Trimkin returned the next day, angry that he had been lied to.
First, he took out the sections of the Furnace, which he knew how to dismantle, having done that so often in these last five years. He packed them in their niches in the cargo hold of the truck, and the shape-changing contour pads slithered around them in warm, live embrace. Next, he removed all the props and then all their personal belongings from the rooms. He went over each chamber again and again, to make certain everything had been taken. He noticed the rug last, and he was not certain that it belonged to Pertos. Then he found it was not a rug, but a blanket rolled about something. He broke the twine and unwrapped the bloated, blackened body of Alvon Rudi, and it was only then that he remembered the night in full and realized that he would have to dispose of two corpses if he were to keep out of the grasp of the authorities and out of the small rooms where they would put him for the rest of his life, the small rooms his uncle had always drunkenly referred to in long, terrifying tales when he had been sadistically trying to get a rise out of young Sebastian.
There seemed to be nowhere in the theater to hide the corpses until he went, reluctantly, into the basement. He took the wide steps carefully, his heart beating abnormally fast. The ceiling lights had burned out in most of the grids above, leaving three quarters of the way in shadow, some of it brown, some purple, some pure pitch in hue. Though the
theater had been used in its two hundred and fifty years, it had not been frequented more than three or four weeks a year, and the cellar had not been maintained in the splendor lavished upon the upper regions.
Once, he came to a place where the way was blocked almost entirely by a wispy spider web, and he quaked at going on. There were two spiders in the strings, shuffling quickly back and forth, as if sizing him up as possible prey, each as large as his thumb. Here and there, lumps of white silk bristled with the thrusting limbs and wings of dead insects encased by the spiders against the sparseness of winter.
He tried reaching out and touching the web, but drew back instantly as he felt the somewhat sticky, humming fibers. It was almost as if he had felt Pertos in that web, as he had felt him other places. But he no longer wished to seek out the puppet master’s emanations.
That was over.
He went back up the stairs to the theater, found a length of wood in the prop room and came back, shredding the web ahead of himself.
He stomped one of the spiders. It made a wet mess on the concrete.
He looked for the other.
It skittered along the edge of the steps, dropped over the side and was gone.
He felt a desperate need , to know where that spider was, but when he reached the end of the steps and ran along the side of them to look for it, it had escaped.
Now he wanted to return more than ever. And perhaps he would have if he had not heard the gushing roar farther back in the semi-dark rooms of the basement. It sounded like a river.
Jenny . ..
He followed the noise of the water until he found the large, round drainage pit in the floor. It was sunken a foot below the floor level, and there was a heavy metal hatch that fit into that depression. He wrestled the hatch open and looked down. The dim light was just enough to give him a view of swiftly moving water four feet below, black water that now and then held a whirling cluster of paper, leaves or wood. There was the smell of human wastes, and he understood that this must serve as the sewer for the city, emptying its burdens in some underground repository or in the sea.