Read Online Little Doors by Paul di Filippo - Free Book Online Page A

when I’m asked a question. Do I now? Have a choice?”
    “Kid, you got bad chemicals, I know that. Are you still following your doctor’s orders?”
    “You sound like my wife.”
    “Yeah, yeah, but are you?”
    “Sure.”
    “Let me see ’em.”
    Andy fished inside a pocket, took out his prescription bottle and exhibited it to the rep.
    “Okay. Put ’em away.”
    Andy did so.
    “Now listen up close. You know it’s impossible for the furnace to be talking to you, don’t you?”
    “The Lord spoke to Moses out of a burning bush …”
    “That was then, for Christ’s sake, in prehistoric times. This is now. Jesus Christ, I’m a good Catholic myself, but the Lord don’t make no more personal appearances nowadays. Maybe the Virgin, once in a while, but not God Hisself.”
    The rep paused for thought. “It ain’t the Virgin, is it?”
    “No, I don’t think so …”
    The rep seemed disappointed at this foreclosure. “I should just give you your notice now, Stiles. But I know you got a family, and I don’t feel like training someone new. So I’m giving you one more shot. You got a week left before I gotta make my report. If I don’t hear no more about this crazy stuff, we’ll just forget you ever done it.”
    The rep stood. Andy stood. The rep conducted him to the door. On the point of stepping out, the rep said, “And Stiles—maybe you should see your priest about this too. It couldn’t hurt.”
    “I don’t have one.”
    “Well, find one then.”
    Andy went back to his post and relieved Jerry. The twenty-minute blow was just ending, completing the forty-five-minute cycle. The watercooled oxygen lance was withdrawn, prior to the tilting of the furnace and the decanting of the molten steel through a tap hole in the top of the furnace.
    As the liquid metal began to flow, the furnace spoke. Its voice was as supple, rich and thick as the river of smelted ore.
    “You did not listen to Ptakcek, did you, Andrew?”
    The thing that startled Andy most was that the furnace knew the rep’s name. It was the first time it had exhibited such knowledge. Looking to left and right, Andy whispered, “No, I didn’t.”
    “Good. He is ignorant, an idolater. It is wrong to heed such men.”
    “I won’t,” Andy said. “I won’t, Moloch. I promise.”
     
    4
     
    The house of the Very Reverend Wade Demure sat in a hollow down by the tracks. It was a three-story structure clad in asphalt siding which simulated bricks. Porches scabbed to each level sagged dangerously, seeming to compress the columns that held them up almost beyond their tensile strength.
    The structure sat on a lot full of used car parts. Engines and transmissions, air filters and wheel rims, brake shoes and mufflers, axles and batteries, all were threaded with weeds, goldenrod poking through machined casings, Queen Anne’s lace dancing above spark plugs scattered like dragon’s teeth.
    Every Wednesday night there was a midweek assembly of the reverend’s small and eclectic congregation. The members of the informal church met in Reverend Demure’s parlor. The parlor was furnished with a dozen chairs, no two of which were alike. Straight-backed and cane-bottomed, sag-cushioned with threadbare armrests. Wooden folding chairs stenciled with the names of previous institutional owners, aluminum dinette chairs with ripped padded seats. In their variety, the chairs mimicked the parishioners.
    The chairs rested along three walls atop several overlapping carpets which served to hide the worn floorboards, but which were themselves almost as disreputable in their aged condition. In the middle of the room was positioned a long table whose veneer was incised with meaningless scratches.
    Andy sat between a fat black woman and a thin neurasthenic fellow. The fat black woman had a face whose left side was collapsed, from surgery, accident or stroke. The eye on that side was missing, gummed permanently shut with an exudation that resembled pine resin. Her cheek