Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [111]
They had merely shoved her out of the truck and watched her land sprawling in the brush, and then Justin had raised his rifle and fired a single shot into the air.
The rifle dipped, targeting the girl. No speeches were necessary. She understood.
And she ran.
By silent agreement Cray and Justin lingered near the truck for fifteen minutes, allowing the girl a head start. Then Justin said, Let’s go.
Simple words. But packed tight with meaning, as richly crammed with all the potentialities of an unknown future as a bridegroom’s utterance of I do.
What had followed was the greatest experience of Cray’s life. He had always been staid, aloof, safely cerebral in his habits and predispositions. Even murder had come to him largely as an act of intellectual daring, the last link in a chain of propositions carried to their logical terminus.
But that night with Justin, the two of them racing in pursuit of the girl, Justin advancing with practiced confidence, Cray slower and less sure, stumbling on loose rocks, snagging his trouser legs on thorny brush, gasping to keep up—that night, when he and Justin hunted in tandem, a team of human predators, hot for blood, hungry for the kill—that night was Cray’s awakening.
He remembered the chase as a dream of fury and need, and high-pitched animal howling that was around him and above and below and inside him too, howling that was his own, because in his extremity of excitement he could not contain the instinctive impulse to bay the moon.
Later, Cray marveled at the changes that had come over him, the inexplicable madness that had consumed and redefined him. He could not understand it, but he knew it was real, and he knew there was no going back.
He had unleashed something in himself that would not be caged or killed. From his Apollonian torpor he had emerged into a Dionysiac frenzy, shedding inhibition, yielding to instinct, mad as a Bacchal reveler in the high hills of ancient Macedonia, wild as a lion. He returned from the hunt like Zarathustra descending from the mountaintop, like Rousseau’s unspoiled savage. The mummy wrappings of intellect and culture had been peeled away, and there was only the predatory ape, living for the thrill of hot flesh and crunched bone.
When the time had come to kill the girl, Justin had let Cray do it. Go ahead, Doc, he’d said in his calm way. She’s yours.
Cray had never heard an offer so tender. And then Justin had handed over his knife, and Cray, his hand trembling only slightly, had cut the girl’s pale throat.
He had not meant to take her face. His first trophy was a product of pure accident. In cutting his victim’s throat, he loosened the flap of skin over her skull, and remembering an autopsy he had witnessed, he had simply lifted the skin flap, peeling the face from its substructure of bone.
Justin had laughed in rare delight. Man, that’s a beauty, he’d said. You could hang that on the damn wall next to a four-point buck.
Cray had given Justin this prize. It was only right that the younger man should keep the trophy, after Cray had been honored with the kill.
A generous gesture, but in retrospect—calamitous. Had Cray kept the trophy, Kaylie never would have found it. Justin need not have died by her hand.
And Cray need not have mourned the man who meant most to him, the one man who had mattered.
Well, there was no point in pondering such things. The past was fixed and final. Justin was gone, but Cray, alone, had continued their work. And he used Justin’s knife—the sharp knife in its leather sheath—a knife for hunting, and better still for flaying the quarry when caught.
If events had worked out differently, he would have used that knife on Kaylie. Now that option was foreclosed. Her face would not be added to his wall.
A disappointment, surely. But he could live without that particular trophy. It was her life he wanted most, and her life he meant to take.
He patted the vest pocket of his jacket, reassuring himself that its secret contents were still in place.