who they had captured for him.
Judging from what Radcliffe was able to overhear, one or two of the Master's devotees had never actually seen him yet, but they knew every detail of a largely fictitious reputation that had grown up around him. And they were looking forward to meeting him, as to the high point of their lives.
So far Phil had encountered only about half a dozen members of this gang. But judging from certain clues dropped in their conversation, more were coming when the Master did, and they might well have the band of Mr. Graves outnumbered. These people gave the impression of being less competent than the rubber-masked league of the Radcliffes' original kidnappers, but far more dangerous.
On the heels of that thought followed the discouraging one that maybe Graves's people weren't really as competent as they seemed. Otherwise they wouldn't have let him get away.
'What do we do with him?' one of the more frightening men asked another, nodding at Philip.
'Do with him? Nothing.' The speaker seemed vaguely horrified at the thought. Then he seized on the one idea that had evidently been firmly impressed upon him. 'We keep him safe until the Master comes back.'
'How soon is he coming?'
Two or three of the gang were ready to offer their opinions on that subject, but it soon developed that no one really knew. Obviously they were a little worried about the Master, whom they all feared, whoever he might be. The possibility of his quick return seemed in a way as disturbing as that of his continued absence.
One of them asked Philip, in an offhand way, where he had been for the last few days.
He gave the first answer that came into his head. 'Resting up.'
'That's good, 'cause you're gonna need it. We were looking for you on the road a couple days ago, sonny. We was driving all over hell, sniffin' round after you, but you didn't show up. Where were you, anyway?'
Still it seemed that none of them really cared about the answer. Philip got away with letting the question slide.
'The Master sure wants to see you.'
'We been looking for you a long time already.'
'Where've you been the last few days?' This was a different questioner, who seemed not to have heard what the first one had just said.
This time Phil didn't bother answering.
'Cat got your tongue? No, not yet. Soon, though, soon.' That evoked a widespread tittering of laughter.
* * *
This house, with its two floors plus attic and basement, was obviously much older and several times larger than the mobile home from which Radcliffe had escaped. This habitat of Radu's servants was also dirtier, grimmer, and much less hospitable. Grease-stained pizza boxes still holding decayed remnants of last week's meals lay scattered about, along with an extensive menu of paper wrappers, attracting energetic flies. The whole fast-food litter suggested that some place where a lot of people lived was not that many hours away. A frightened and dazed-looking cat went wandering from room to room, ignoring the garbage as if it had smelled it all before.
The kitchen sink gave evidence of a contest among inmates to see who could go longest without washing dishes. At least one wall in each room had been defaced with obscene pictures and scribblings, some of which Radcliffe took to be gang symbols.
The one class of objects the group did not seem to be careless with was their collection of firearms and knives.
At the sink he helped himself to water, taking a long drink directly from the faucet. He expected at any moment to be stopped, but no one tried to do so, or even seemed to notice.
Philip, listening to a renewed debate as to whether to tie him up, found some abandoned detergent and a scrubber under the sink and adopted the job of washing dishes. Under the circumstances he had no objection to making himself useful.
There was no hot water from the faucet, but he soon had a pot heating on the propane stove. Meanwhile Philip was thinking that if these people could be persuaded to let their prisoner cook, he might have some hope of poisoning everybody. But there didn't seem to be any rat poison available, and mighty little detergent.
Two gang members, a man-woman couple who had been sent to town to buy supplies shortly after Phil's arrival, came back after an absence of four or five hours with a weird variety of canned goods, beer and wine, boxes of crackers, and a greasy bagful of Big Macs.
'Anybody follow you?'
'No way.' The couple gave contemptuous reassurance.
The incoming cargo included a couple of heads of lettuce, looking incongruous among the other stuff. Philip had no suspicion at this point of the reason for their purchase.
Scattered here and there through the big house was considerable evidence of drug use: discarded syringes, a smell in the air—actually, in certain rooms, a clinging haze. Half of the inhabitants were coughers, smoking tobacco cigarettes.
Rock music, alternating with rap records of a particularly debased kind, was playing more or less constantly in the hideout. The prisoner listened dazedly to one performer after another declare at great length what he was going to do to the next ho and bitch that he encountered. Certainly there were at least two radios; no one ever listened to them or turned them off.
Half a dozen cans, containing substances more or less edible, and brought in by the recent shoppers, were opened—the litter on the floor testified that a great many had been emptied over the past week or two—and food of a kind offered to Philip when some of the others sat down to eat. He settled for a bag of Pop Tarts. The cat, with the air of a gourmet, was sorting through the garbage in a corner.
At this point someone had the idea of searching Radcliffe all over again. Naturally enough the results this time were disappointing. His money had already disappeared casually into people's pockets. And the argument over what to do with his credit cards had evidently been settled somehow; certainly the bits of plastic had vanished also. His watch was taken.
The Master won't be interested in this. We can have it.
* * *
They left him his recently acquired wedding ring, because even in a few months it had become a very tight fit, and it soon became obvious that they didn't want to risk spilling any of Philip Radcliffe's blood, even scraping the skin of his finger, without the Master's permission.
'
He didn't argue the point.
The discussion as to whether to tie Radcliffe up, or lock him in the cellar, or both, rambled on inconclusively.
While the crew were still waiting for the Master to come back—though no one seemed really to expect his awesome presence until after dark—someone suggested that they show their unwilling guest the guillotine. Immediately the others cried approval.
They were sadistically eager to observe Radcliffe's reaction to the machine, and dragged him out of the house, across a yard where he was beset by snarling dogs, and into the barn.
Most of the space inside the barn formed one large room, as big as the interior of a small house, with a few disused animal stalls at the farther end and a dangerous-looking built-in ladder ascending to an open hayloft above. There was a lot of space available, and the bulk of it had been converted into a kind of workshop. There was one electric wire, a long shop cord strung carelessly over ground and floor, but it had probably been used only for power tools. After-dark illumination was going to be provided by two or three self-fueled Coleman lanterns.
Bats, small motionless dark pods, small bulges suggesting the shapes of folded wings, were hanging by their feet under the high, peaked roof. A couple of pigeons cooed sleepily.
There in the center of the open space, on a floor of decades-old concrete, stood what was undoubtedly a guillotine. The unique shape, immediately recognizable, stood some fifteen feet tall, and most of it, at least up to
