tia's lifeless lips Had been almost more than he could bear. But the following realization that the sound was actual—and coming from the damned creature he had inadvertently locked in with the corpse—had been almost as unnerving.
He moved his hands so that they covered his distorted mouth, and gnawed at his knuckles. The cat—in there—with the doubled-up bundle. . . .
"Oh God!" he whispered.
What was he to do? He couldn't drive along all day, passing through towns, stopping for gas and oil, with that half-dead animal mewling and whimpering in the trunk.
The tinkle of the trunk key as it fell down the sewer grating rang mockingly in his ears.
He'd thought he had been so clever when he threw the key away. In some totally unforeseen emergency in which he might be stopped and a demand made that he open the trunk, he could say, and a search would prove, that he had lost the key. That had been his idea. He would throw the trunk, still locked and with the key unrecoverable, into the swamp muck.
But now, in the trunk, was that horrible half-dead thing, whining and whimpering, locked in and with the key thrown away. . . .
What was he to do?
Drawing a long, uncertain breath, Opper got out of the car and lifted the front seat to get at his tool kit. There was only one thing he could think of to do.
That was to break the trunk open, free the cat, and then flee along his way to the concealing swamp.
The bottomless muck. Thought of it was like a tonic. If only he were beside it now!
The tools in the kit were ridiculously inadequate, as are tools in most automobile kits nowadays. There was a screw-driver with a cracked wooden handle, a pair of pliers, some wrenches too light to be used as hammers, and a jack with a separate round of wood for a handle.
He took the meager array to the back of the car. He listened. The whimper was not sounding at the moment. Maybe the cat was dead.
But he couldn't entertain that comforting hope, much as he'd have liked to. Enough air filtered into the trunk to keep the animal from smothering. It could live in there for days.
Opper gripped the screw-driver till his knuckles showed white. He inserted the flat edge under the lock and pried up. The screw-driver bent a little, that was all. Under a harder tug, the handle cracked entirely apart under his straining fingers. He cursed wildly as the wooden bits fell to the ground. Lock and trunk were scarcely marred by the pressure.
He had paid especial attention to the strength of this trunk when he bought the car. The lock he'd had put on it was more impregnable than the metal panels of the trunk itself. Well, he'd gotten the thing strong enough, all right!
But he had to get in there. He had to free that cat before it betrayed him.
He set his jaws hard as he thought of the animal. By God, it would be a pleasure to kill the thing. He'd have had to kill it in any event. Couldn't have it roaming loose. He'd have to kill it and hide it. A pleasure. . . .
He attacked the heavy lock with the pliers.
The whimper was sounding again, half animal, half human in its anguish, like a faint echo of all humanity's cries of terror, so like Martia's whimper be-
