Free Honey is Sweeter than Blood by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

wakes to a clock radio that blares annoying snatches of music between lengthy discourses by smarmy D.J.s.  He opens his eyes to a gray and wordless despair, as he does every day, his only comfort being that he can hit the snooze alarm and sleep another half hour before waking again to a gray and wordless despair.
    In its world, John’s doppleganger sits in a corner with its great head resting on its knees, its spindly arms wrapped around its shins.  Pain awakens it, and it scrambles out of the corner on hands and knees, glancing back over its shoulder at the long black nails which continue to extend from the walls where they meet.  The being trails the shroud of cobwebs which has formed like a cocoon around its body while it slept, the stuff of its own dreaming exhalations.  Standing, it brushes more of the webs off its arms and sides.  With jerky darting motions like those of a bird, its facial appendages clicking, the creature moves to a cracked and slanted mirror.  When it sees its reflection, it wails in a high shrieking voice, just as it does every day.
    John drinks an instant coffee, showers, drives thirty minutes to work.  As he steps out of his car and looks across the lot at the squat, sprawling building bleak against the blue winter sky, he has the irrational impulse to duck back inside his car and drive away, drive anywhere, without direction, without money, to just escape in a blind and numbing panic.  Instead, he starts across the parking lot to the building’s metal side door.
    Top hat on, Scorpion Face emerges from its series of small dusty rooms into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor formed from rotting planks of wood, stretching off in either direction into seemingly limitless gloom.  As it makes its way, a walk of several hours by John’s reckoning of time, it passes off-branching hallways, and metal hatches in the ceiling and floor with ladders to other levels.  The walls change from wood into riveted plates of black metal scabbed with rust, covered in cables and hoses, turning gears and churning pistons, grease and dripping slime, and Scorpion Face has to tear its way through veils of web at times.  Finally, for the last stretch of its walk, the corridor becomes chiseled from rock, slick with mold and trickling with water, lit with far-spaced bare bulbs.  It stops at last at a door labeled with fifteen black nails driven into the wood in a circle, with a huge white moth pinned in the middle of the circle by those spikes.  The moth twitches, still alive.  The being turns the knob and lets itself into its work place.  At no time since leaving its apartment has it seen another of its kind.
    John sits in a cubicle with padded partitions upon which are pinned a few snapshots of his two daughters, whom his wife has custody of.  He speaks on the phone for much of the day, but seldom to the people in the other cubicles.  Just these disembodied voices, usually angry at him because to them he is the company personified, he is that bleak sprawling building, and he tries to soothe them.  He will run a UPS trace to find out why they haven’t received their package.  He will have them credited.  He will do his best.  He logs each call he makes onto a sheet.  Usually a hundred unhappy voices a day.  He feels like a medium who can only channel the voices of furious ghosts.
    Scorpion Face stands in a tiny chamber that shakes like a rickety elevator, great unseen machinery clanking and thrumming behind the metal walls.  Glass tubes criss-cross before its gaze, and it watches hordes of tiny insects crawl through these, each insect carrying a glowing orange nugget of matter like a hot glob of metal.  The little entity throws switches that close off one tube, open another, direct the insect stream here instead of there.  Occasionally steam bursts from a vent in the wall.  Once in a while a sound of rushing liquid passes beneath its feet.  Its top hat hangs from a nail in the wall, the only other