And a dozen yards the other direction was a building that looked like a farmhouse. An abandoned farmhouse, judging from its state of disrepair and the high grass and weeds about it. There was a dim light in one room that seemed to be the kitchen.
I took Ellen’s arm and whispered, “The driveway to the road leads back past the house. Shall we risk that—or try the other way?”
“You decide. But let’s— Isn’t that the way the cats are?” She pointed away from the house, out past the dark barn; and the distant caterwauling did seem to come from that direction.
As far as danger was concerned, it seemed a toss-up. Past the house was probably the direction of the nearest road. But if we made a sound as we went by the house, we’d never reach safety. And, too, if they came to the truck and found us gone, that’s the direction they’d figure we took.
“This way,” I said, and led around the truck and past the barn. It would be farther, that way, to the next road. But we’d have a better chance of making it.
We went around the side of the barn farthest from the house, and on the farther side we came upon a dimly defined path, one that we could barely follow.
We found that the feline serenade grew louder as we progressed. The path led through a brief patch of woods, and then, quite suddenly, started downhill.
It was there that we saw the man without a face. I was in the lead, and I heard footsteps. They seemed to come toward us from the direction in which we were heading. I stopped walking so abruptly that Ellen ran into me, but I grabbed her before she could make a sound.
“Back, and step carefully,” I whispered. “Somebody’s coming.”
We were only a few steps out of the woods through which the path had run, and I led her back to it and then off the path among the trees.
And then, peering from the edge of the woods well to one side of the path, we watched in the direction in which we’d been walking.
There was a moment of comparatively bright moonlight, and in it we saw a man—or something—coming along the path toward us. He was about twenty yards away when we saw him. The figure was tall and thin and seemed to be that of a man, but—well, there just didn’t seem to be any face where a face should have been. A blank area with two huge blanked circles that were too large for eyes.
I felt Ellen’s fingers constrict suddenly about my arm. And then that damn sliver of moon slid behind clouds again, and we were staring into gray nothingness.
The footsteps paused. There was a faint click and a circle of yellow leaped out on the path. The faceless man had turned on a flashlight, and its beam danced ahead of him as he came on into the woods and passed us. But there wasn’t enough reflected light from it to give us another look at whoever held it.
We waited several minutes, not quite daring to whisper, until we were sure that he was well past us back toward the house. Then I said, “Come on, let’s get this over with. Unless you’d rather try back the other way?”
She whispered, “No, I’d rather go on this way. Even if it wasn’t for Cinder being this way—”
We groped our way back to the path and out of the woods again into the downhill stretch of the path.
We were quite close to the source of the caterwauling now, and I noticed something puzzling. Fewer cats seemed to be making the noise.
Then, quite suddenly, the sliver of moon came out brightly from behind the clouds and, with our eyes accustomed to a greater darkness, we could see comparatively well.
The path leveled off and we were standing on a flat area at the bottom of a valley. Quite near it was a wooden box, an ordinary small crate from a grocery. There were slats nailed across one side to make it into a crude cage. And—if my ears told me aright—there was a cat inside it.
Five feet ahead was another such box, and five feet beyond that—yes, a whole row of crude soap-box cages, each five feet from the next. Nine of them.
The reappearance of the moon left us standing in the open, and my first impulse was to duck for cover—but there wasn’t any in sight. There wasn’t any human being in sight, either—fortunately, or we’d have been seen right away.
I heard Ellen gasp, and then she ran past me to the nearest wooden cage. She bent down, and then turned as I joined her. “It isn’t Cinder,” she said. “But let it out, anyway. I don’t know what on earth—”
I didn’t know, either. Ellen was going on to the next cage. If we’d used our common sense, we’d have run like hell and come back later, with the police, to rescue the cats. But—well, there we were, and we didn’t. I reached down and pulled loose one of the carelessly nailed slats of the box, and a gray streak went past me and vanished.
From the second cage, Ellen said, “Here he is!” and she herself was tearing a slat loose from the box, eagerly. When I got there she was cuddling a small gray cat in her arms, and it snuggled up to her, purring.
“Swell,” I said. “Let’s get going. We’ll come to a farm or a road or something, and— But wait!”
“Phil, those other cats—”
“You’re darn right,” I told her. “I’m going to let them out first. I don’t know why, but—”
It wasn’t even a hunch; as yet I hadn’t made a guess what it was all about. But it was instinctive; I love animals and I wasn’t going to run off and leave seven more cats in those cages. It was quixotic, maybe, to risk sticking around to let them go, but it wouldn’t take more than two minutes to do it, and we’d been there longer than that already and nobody had challenged us.
I ran to the next cage and released the cat that was in it. And the next.
Then the fifth of the nine. Nothing ran out of that one, and I reached a hand in and said, “What the hell—” The cat in it was dead.
I felt a little dizzy from bending over. I straightened up, and still felt dizzy. But I went to the sixth cage. It was harder to pull apart than the others, took me almost a minute. And the cat in it was dead, too. I looked toward the others, wondering if I was going to find all dead cats from there on; four live cats in a row and then the rest of the row of nine—
And quite suddenly I felt absurdly silly, as one feels in a dream sometimes, and wondered what I was doing here finding live cats and dead cats—and my mind was going around in dizzy circles, and when I stood up body swayed dizzily, too, and I couldn’t get my balance.
Yes, I got it, then, and I tried to run. But too late. My feet wouldn’t mind what I wanted them to do, and my knees went rubber and I didn’t even feel pain from the impact of the ground hitting me as I went down.
As though from a great distance I heard a voice call, “Phil,” and saw Ellen running toward me. I tried to motion her back and to call out to her to run away—but then things slipped away from under me, and I wasn’t there any more. My last sensation before I completely lost consciousness was a tugging at my shoulders, as though someone was trying to drag me back to safety.
Then a steady light hurt my eyes, and I found I was lying on a wooden floor, so I knew that I had been unconscious for a while and was just coming to. There were voices.
Workus’ voice and that of another man, an uninflected, monotonous voice. It was saying: “Yes, it is satisfactory. Reached to the cats in the first five cages; that’s twenty-five feet. And only half a pound I put in the water pail. Think of half a ton!”
“But this guy and girl,” I heard Workus saying. “It didn’t kill them like it ought to. The girl’s O.K. and Evans is coming to, already. So—”
“Naturally, fool. I was on the way back and pulled them out in time. He couldn’t have been in it more than three minutes, probably much less. And less than that for her, which is why she came out first. If it’d been five—”