Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [31]
And Cray, on his knees, stared up at Billy, chanting and cavorting, swinging his loose arms, an ape in triumph, and he knew suddenly that Billy Curtis was quite literally an ape—an animal, mindless and savage.
Hating Billy, Cray conceived his revenge.
The next evening he climbed the fence to the Curtises’ backyard, where he stole Billy’s dog, a half-blind, arthritic schnauzer named Shoe. Cray took the dog into the woods, carrying it bundled in his arms. He would always remember the dog shivering in confusion and fear, yet staying quiet—too old, it seemed, to present any resistance.
In the woods he tied a leash around Shoe’s neck, and then with cold intent he pulled the leash tight and slowly, very slowly, he strangled the dog to death.
Shoe took a long time to die, wheezing and pawing at the damp, clotted earth. Finally a shudder of surrender hurried through the small body, and the schnauzer was dead.
In that moment Johnnie Cray’s anger left him, and he was just a little boy, poking at the dog, both fascinated and horrified by the simple phenomenon of its lifelessness.
He had meant to throw the dead dog over the fence into Billy’s backyard, but he found he couldn’t do it. Abruptly he was stunned by his own savagery, ashamed, unwilling to advertise the act. Instead he dug a shallow grave near an oak tree and buried Shoe in secret, crying as he filled in the hole.
He did not sleep that night. He lay awake in the great darkness which seemed so unnaturally still, and he thought about the thing he had done and the reasons for it.
Billy Curtis was an animal, yes. But Johnnie Cray was no better, was he? He too was nothing but an ape, driven by anger to an act of violence he could not justify.
Strangely, this thought, when it finally formed itself in words, eased his distress. If he was only an animal, then he couldn’t be blamed for what he’d done. He might be no better than Billy Curtis, but at least he was no worse. No worse than anyone, because they were all like that, everybody on earth. All of them were animals, even the grownups in their business suits and cars and offices. All of them, at heart, were no different from Johnnie Cray.
He was not an outcast, then ... or if he was, it was only because he saw a truth that others didn’t. Saw it and acted on it.
All this he had understood at the age of nine. In the thirty-seven years since, he had not wavered in his fundamental faith.
By degrees, year after year, Cray had pursued a higher understanding of this truth, peeling away humanity’s pretensions to greatness, sloughing off any notion of human dignity as a mere antique curiosity. He had explored the deepest dimensions of his bestial inheritance, confronting it even though it scared him, even though at times he felt he couldn’t bear the truth he faced—until finally he had broken through to a new, exhilarated self-acceptance, the end of denial, full and grateful surrender to the predator within, a surrender so complete that in its throes he would crane his neck and bay the moon like a mad animal.
Few had traveled so far. Few had stared into the depths of the well of darkness, the abyss as Nietzsche called it, and had stayed true to what they’d seen.
He was a pioneer—yet not the only one. Today there were others exploring territories close to the land he had mapped. There were geneticists who ascribed all human action to an instinct of reproduction mysteriously encoded in DNA. There were anthropologists who sought the origins of morality in the social instincts of lower primates. There were psychologists who dispensed with both the conscious mind and the subconscious, focusing instead on reflexes trained through operant conditioning.
Different paths, but they led in the same direction. They led to the new millennium just dawning in all its bright but alien promise.
Cray saw the future sometimes. It would be a world stripped of illusions, a world where no outdated ethical precepts would hold sway, where no one