The Collection

by Fredric Brown

  After an hour or so the truck hit a rough driveway again, went along it what seemed quite a distance, and stopped. From the time we'd been traveling, I judged that we were well out in the country somewhere; but I couldn't have made the wildest guess as to our direction from town.

  Then the ignition went off, and the truck stopped and stood still. I heard the doors on either side of the truck cab slam, but Miss Weyburn was spelling out something by nudging my elbow and I concentrated on that and got: R U A-L-L R-I-T-E, and answered Y-E-S, and then it occurred to me that spelling out that question and answer had taken quite a bit of time, and why hadn't Workus and the other chap opened the back of the truck to take us out?

  But maybe they weren't going to. Maybe they intended merely to leave us here in the truck while they accomplished their business---whatever it was---in this place, and they'd get rid of us later.

  And that meant that we might have quite a bit of time here.

  There was one possible way of our getting loose from those all-too-efficiently tied cords around our wrists. A way I'd thought of, but which hadn't been practicable in the back room of Workus' pet shop, with him looking back at us frequently. But now---

  As quickly as I could, I spelled out: L-I-E O-N S-I-D-E W-I-L-L T-R-Y U-N-T-I-E.

  She got the idea, for instead of trying to answer, she immediately rolled over with her back toward me and held out her bound wrists.

  My fingers were almost numb from lack of proper circulation, but I started right in on the knotted cord about her wrists, and the effort of trying to untie it gradually restored my hands to normal.

  It was a tough knot; we'd been tied with ordinary heavy wrapping twine, I found. Several turns of it, and then a knot that was made up of four square knots, well tied; each had been pulled as tight as possible before the next one was made.

  But one at a time, they gave way. It was slow business, because my own wrists were tied crosswise and I could reach the knots of the girl's bindings with the fingers of only one hand at a time. It must have taken me nearly half an hour before the inner knot gave way and I felt the cord itself slip as she pulled her wrists apart.

  A moment later she took off my gag and blindfold and then whispered, “I'll have you loose in a minute, Mr. Evans.”

  “Phil, now,” I whispered back, as she started work on the cords on my wrists. “What's your name?”

  “Ellen.” With both her hands free, she could make faster progress than I had on her bindings. “Got any idea where we are?”

  “No, but it must be way out in the country. No street lights or anything. And listen; isn't that frogs?”

  It was dark inside that truck, but when my wrists came free and I sat up to start on the knots at my ankles---while Ellen did the same with hers---I could see a dim, gray square that was the back window of the truck.

  “Listen,” Ellen said. “Did you hear---”

  It was the distant yowling of a cat. Of several cats. Once my ears were attuned to the sound, I could hear it quite plainly.

  I whispered, “Is it Cinder? Can you recognize his . . . uh . . . voice?”

  “I think so. I'm almost sure. There---my ankles are---”

  The cords on my own ankles came loose at the same moment, and I crawled to the back of the truck. The twin doors were latched from the outside, and I reached through the barred window, but I couldn't get enough of my arm through to reach down and turn the handle.

  Ellen joined me, and her more slender arm solved the problem.

  We stepped down, cautiously, into the unknown. We stood there, listening.

  Frogs. Crickets. And cats.

  There was a thin sliver of new moon playing hide and seek among high cumulus clouds, fast drifting, although down on the ground there didn't seem to be a breath of wind.

  We were standing on grass between two wheel ruts that were a crude sort of driveway. It led, ahead past the front of the truck, to what looked like a big, ramshackle barn.

  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 si
ght, 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---”

  Workus growled. “I still don't see why you didn't just leave them there that long.”

  “You see nothing. The bodies, of course. I want to keep on living here, even if an agent comes nosing around later. You are giving up your shop to go south, but I stay here. Nor would we want those bodies found dead anywhere else, dead of the gas.”

  I opened my eyes in time to see Workus nod assent. He said, “We shoot them, then? Sure, we've got their car. The bodies can be found in it, on the road miles from here.”

  “Yes,” said the monotonous voice, and I turned my head to look toward the man who'd spoken.

  I'd never seen him before, but he was worth looking at. He was tall and almost ridiculously thin, but his face was what drew my eyes. The skin was stretched so tightly over the bones that his head looked almost like a skull.

  Pasty-white skin, and across the forehead was a vivid red scar that looked like a saber wound. It ran down into one empty eye socket uncovered by any patch or effort at concealment. The other eye turned upon me piercingly. “Our friend has come back,” he said. “Peter, you take care of them.”

  The automatic was in Workus' hand. He said, “Here? But---”

  “Here, yes,” said the man with one eye. “They escaped once. We'll take no chances again.” He grinned mirthlessly at me. “And if you hadn't escaped, you would have been freed---probably. But now, no.”

  I was able, for the first time since I'd seen him, to wrench my gaze away from his face enough to notice other things about him. First, that there was a gas mask slung about his neck, a type of mask which, when worn, covered all of the face except the eyes---which were huge circles of glass. He, then, had been the “faceless” man we'd seen on the path. He'd worn the mask, then.

  Out of a corner of my eye, I saw Ellen sitting on a chair against the wall. The little gray cat was still in her arms, and her head was bent down over it, gently rubbing its fur with her chin. She smiled at me, a tremulous little smile that took real courage to produce. She said, “Well, Phil, we did find my cat.”

  Workus said, “Stand up, if you want, Evans. If you'd rather not take it lying down.”

  And I found, surprisingly, that I didn't want to take it lying down. Sounds funny that you'd feel that way when you're going to be shot, anyway. You'd think it doesn't matter how, but, somehow, it does.

  I got up slowly, first to one knee, trying to take in as much of the room as I could in a quick glance around. Not that I expected to find a weapon in reach, or to see the United States marines coming through the doorway, or anything like that. But just in case.

  If there was any way out of death for Ellen and myself, it would have to be tried within the next dozen seconds, and it wasn't going to cost anything to try. Maybe if I lunged for Workus before I got completely to my feet---

  But it wouldn't have worked. He was six feet away; he'd be able to fire twice at point-blank range before I could get there. And he was ready for it.

  There didn't seem to be anything that offered a chance of succeeding. There wasn't any furniture within reach. There were several chairs; the nearest was the one Ellen was sitting on. A kitchen table and a cupboard, but on the other side of the room. The back door was closed, and the one-eyed man stood beside it, as though ready to leave as soon as Workus had obeyed his orders.

  The light was from an electric bulb in the center of the ceiling, out of reach overhead. And there was a telephone---somehow it gave the impression of being newly installed---on the table. Also out of reach. Two windows, the bottom sash of one of them was raised.

  Nothing within reach. Not a chance that I could see. Nothing remotely resembling a weapon. Except---

  I started talking before I'd quite reached my feet. Workus had no reason to be in a hurry to shoot us; he'd probably let me finish whatever I started to say, as long as I didn't move closer to him.

  “O.K., Workus,” I said. “But we shouldn't have to die in vain, should we? After we went to all this trouble to get Miss Weyburn's cat, does it have to die, too?”

  He was staring at me as though he thought I was crazy---and maybe I was crazy to think I could get away with this, but I figured that as long as I had him puzzled, he'd hold the trigger. I didn't, of course, wait for him to answer. I kept right on: “Look, if I'm giving up my life for a cat, you ought to be sport enough to let the cat go. And anyway, you can't shoot Miss Weyburn while she's holding---” She wasn't
holding the cat any more, though, because I'd just turned around and taken it from her, and I was turning with it in my hands toward the open window.

  As though I were going to drop the cat out the window; but I didn't. I'd timed my turn and synchronized the motion of my arms for the throw, and even before the man with one eye yelled, “Hey!” and the automatic in Workus' hands went off, the cat was sailing through the air at Workus' face.

  He pulled the trigger all right, but he ducked while he was doing it, and the bullet missed me by inches. It's not easy to shoot straight when there's a cat hurtling at one's face, its claws out ready to grab the first available object to stop its flight.

  And I was going in toward Workus behind the cat, and almost as fast. Swinging a roundhouse right as I went; aiming at his stomach as the biggest and hardest to miss target for a blow I couldn't take time to aim carefully.

  The cat caught its claws in the shoulder of his coat and then jumped on down to the floor just as my fist made connections. The blow had all my weight and the force of my run behind it. He didn't pull the trigger a second time, and I heard the automatic clatter to the floor as he started to fall.

  I didn't take time to go after that gun; I whirled toward the man standing by the door and I was starting toward him almost before I'd finished my blow at Workus.

  The one-eyed man was bringing a pistol---which had been, apparently, in his hip pocket---around and up. But things had happened too fast, and he hadn't reached for it soon enough. Or maybe he'd fumbled in getting it out of his pocket. Anyway, I got there before he could lift and aim it. I didn't take time to swing at him; I simply ran smack into him with a straight arm that caught him full in the face and smacked his head against the door behind him so hard that I thought, from the sound of it, that I'd killed him.

  I whirled back to see if Workus was going for the gun he'd dropped, but he was sitting on the floor, doubled up and groaning in pain, and Ellen had the gun.