Stealing Faces

49

The director’s residence at the Hawk Ridge Institute predated the rest of the complex. It had been a farmhouse once, surrounded by fields of barley. The orchard beside the house had provided oranges and lemons, which the farmer’s wife had put up as preserves in a small, tidy fruit cellar.

It was in this cellar that Cray now kept his trophies.

The stone walls were crowded with faces, all of them female, all beautiful in their various ways, and all embedded in rectangles of solid plastic, protected from decomposition.

Cray had developed the method of preservation himself, inspired by the phenomenon of insects in amber. He purchased thermosetting polyester resin — liquid plastic — from a biological supply outfit on the East Coast. When blended with a peroxide catalyst, the resin would gel into a hard, transparent mass.

He kept each victim’s face preserved in a jar of formalin, like any wet specimen, until he was ready to make a permanent mount. A ceramic mold, lightly lubricated with kerosene, was used to contain the plastic. Cray put down a bottom layer of liquid resin and let it harden, then cleaned the face under running water, dried it, and centered it carefully in the mold. Then he filled the mold with plastic, pouring it on like syrup until the face was entirely covered.

Over a week’s time, the plastic would polymerize at room temperature, sealing the face inside. Decay could not touch it. Its beauty was saved forever.

Finally the mold was removed — an easy task owing to the lubricant he’d applied and the slight, natural shrinkage of the resin as it set — and his prize was ready for display.

A woman’s face, afloat in a crystalline block of plastic, a thing of eerie loveliness.

Cray had become an expert in this technique over the years, as his collection grew. There were fourteen faces now. Every one of them, even those harvested a decade earlier, remained as fresh and vibrant as young life.

Cray stood admiring them now, in the sharp light of a ceiling bulb. He was still in his business suit, having descended to the cellar immediately upon arriving home from the office. There would be time to change clothes soon enough. First he needed a few moments with his trove of lovelies.

“Sweet,” Cray whispered, scanning the eyeless faces, the smooth skin and parted lips. “Sweet.”

He had known each victim’s name when he acquired her, but such details were quick to fade from his memory. Now only Sharon Andrews remained real to him as a distinct person, and even her identity was gradually losing its sharp outlines in his mind. Soon he would know her only as the latest one, the blonde. He would recall nothing of her name or place of business. Already he had all but forgotten the news accounts that told of a young son she’d left behind.

But the hunt itself he would remember. His liberation from the ordinary, his mad steeplechase under the moon.

Those memories would not fade. Not ever. The first hunt, twelve years ago, remained as vivid in his thoughts as the most recent.

But on the first hunt, he had not hunted alone.

Justin had been with him. Leading him.

His guide. His mentor, in some ways. Most of all, his partner and soul mate, the only human being who had ever understood Cray, and the only human being Cray had loved.

Justin had loved him too. They had shared something — no, it was not sexual — something of the spirit, or if that word was too anachronistic for a new millennium, then something instinctual, a common inheritance in the blood.

Whatever satisfaction Justin had found in his brief marriage to Kaylie, it could not compare with what he and Cray had known together, on the one night when they ran free as wolves, chasing their prey through the White Mountains until they brought her down.

They had made a perfect team. Justin was a natural hunter, cruel and patient and starved for blood. A natural sociopath as well — Cray knew the type. The combination of an outdoorsman’s skills and a killer’s instincts had made Justin McMillan the ideal partner for John Cray — Cray, who had never killed anything other than the schnauzer, Shoe, which he’d strangled and secretly buried in the woods.

Except for that one incident, Cray’s nearest encounter with death had been the dissection of corpses in medical school. But he had come to realize that he would have to widen his horizons if he were ever to grasp the full reality of his essential nature. Observation and analysis were useful within limits, but some things must be experienced firsthand.

Aware of the need to take this next step in his evolution, he had sought out Justin, befriended him, and persuaded the younger man that they could do great things together.

And so one night they’d gone cruising, venturing miles afield, until Cray spotted a female hitchhiker on a dark highway.

There’s one.

Cray still remembered the tremor of exhilaration in his voice, and how he’d leaned forward in the passenger seat of Justin’s pickup truck to point to the girl on the shoulder of the road. A girl disheveled, forlorn in the night, and utterly alone.

Justin had slowed the truck. You’re sure? he asked, the question coming slowly but without the least quaver of fear.

Cray nodded. She’s perfect. She’ll never be missed.

The girl, still a teenager, had been wary of the two men who’d stopped for her. But preferring their company to the nocturnal desolation of the highway, she’d accepted the ride.

Later, when she realized her mistake, she had put up a fight, scratching and pummeling until Cray subdued her with an ampoule of sedative.

She awoke in the White Mountains, beyond the reach of help. The moon was high and nearly full, the ridgeline shiny in the light.

Cray hadn’t made any sort of speech to her. On later occasions it would become his practice to inform the victim fully of the lethal sport that was about to be played, but on that first night he and Justin had exchanged no words with the girl, had not even acknowledged her confused questions and pleas.

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