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 backwards, gouging his knees horribly on the ill-fit sections of the pipes, he wailed without interruption. He felt as if his body was swelling and swelling and that it would soon burst like a ripe fruit. The ululating scream seemed to let some of this unbearable pressure loose.
He made his way past the whirling intake fans that he had almost blundered into before. He entered the left-hand tunnel, which he had originally decided to forego, wriggled furiously forward. He made excellent time for such cramped conditions.
As he moved, he had no idea whether or not the puppet master’s head was following him, though he expected as much. Now and then he experienced a vision in which the spider had hold of his one foot and the head had its teeth sunk into his other. They were holding him until the main body of spiders could reach him. When the vision passed, he crawled even faster than before . . . .
The prince was sulking. He did it well, for he had had much practice in the past few weeks. Every time he had been forced to relent and give in to Bitty Belina, he had gone away to pout. Though it did little for his standing with the others, it never failed to make him feel better. Now he was refusing to go with the others to watch the last stages of Belina’s plan for killing the idiot. The scheme was a success, and that-on top of her recent rejection of his affections-only made him more furious than ever. He sat at the end of a long horizontal pipe, by the edge of a vertical shaft that connected the system on this level with the system of the level below.
It was there that Scratch came to him.
“What do you want?” the prince asked. He was as surly with Scratch as he was with all the other puppets. The fact that the horned simulacrum was the symbol of evil and corruption and played Satan on stage did not impress the prince at all. There was no real superstition among the puppets, save that connected with the Furnace. And now that they had begun to control the Furnace, even that bit of religious nonsense was waning.