by Bavo Dhooge
Styx knew he had to keep the madman talking. They were at the far end of the beach, but sooner or later someone would come along. An old man with a metal detector, a dad coming back for a beach ball or kite his kid had left behind.
Through the space between the cabanas, he saw people walking along the dike in the distance. He could shout and attract their attention, but he had a feeling the Stuffer would pull the trigger if he did.
“I don’t mean why did you get me out here,” he said. “I mean, why the whole thing? The murders. The sand sculptures.”
“Sand sculptures?” the Stuffer chuckled. Styx saw the gun barrel bob up and down. “I like that. You mind if I use it?”
“Be my guest,” said Styx. “But your exhibition is just about over.”
“You think so? I beg to differ. I’ve got at least twenty more projects in mind. It’s going to be a really big show.”
“What’s the point?” Styx demanded.
“What are you, an art critic? What’s the point of your life, Chief Inspector Styx?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, this is the point of mine. It reminds me that I’m alive. It makes my life interesting. What have you got?”
Styx shrugged. In principle, he could draw his own gun in one swift motion, and then they’d be on equal ground. But there was a problem: his hip. He wasn’t a cowboy, it wouldn’t let him get away with a quick draw.
“What keeps my life interesting?” he said.
“Right—and stop stalling for time.”
His first thought was: my wife, my son, my family. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He wanted it to be the truth, but he knew that it wasn’t.
“My job,” he said. “That’s all I have. My job, and my body.”
“I figured. And your body’s not looking too good. The body’s a machine, Styx, like a car. How many years have you got on your odometer? Forty?”
Shit, how did the fucker know so much about him?
“You need to look at yourself in the mirror from time to time,” said the Stuffer, “compare today’s you with the you that you used to be. That’s what I want to show the world with my, I like the way you put it, my ‘sand sculptures.’ Each one of them’s a mirror. We’re all works of art, Styx, every single one of us. We’re each unique, but, you know what? We’re better looking when we’re dead. Only after death does our true beauty really—”
“If I want an art lesson,” said Styx, “I’ll go to a museum.”
He knew he was taking a huge risk, but the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.
Suddenly, Styx felt very strange. He was paralyzed, but not, for once, because of his hip.
He knew that something very bad was about to happen, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it.
He was intensely aware of his surroundings. It was as if he’d grown a pair of antennae, as if his perceptive ability had suddenly tripled. He could hear a cruise ship’s foghorn miles out at sea. He could taste the salt in the air. He could feel each individual grain of sand pressing against the soles of his bare feet.
He realized he was still holding his shoes and socks in his hand. He let them fall, as if he was throwing in the towel. He hardly dared to look at the shadow between the cabanas.
“What good is killing me going to do?” he said softly.
“Who says I’m going to kill you? You can just turn around and walk away.”
This was exactly what he’d wanted to hear, that the Stuffer wasn’t going to shoot him. Of course he wouldn’t. Why should he? Without Styx to pursue him, the game wouldn’t be any fun.
But then he heard the Stuffer cock the hammer of his revolver.
Raphael Styx had heard that sound many times before, but he was almost always the one doing the cocking. Now the tables were turned, and, for the first time in his life, he felt afraid.
His feet were made of lead.
“They say life begins at forty,” the Stuffer said lightly.
“You can’t—”
“I’m doing you a favor, you stupid fuck.”
Styx heard the shot as if in a dream, hollow, echoing. At the same moment came the blast of an air horn, the sort of thing you’d hear at the Arena when the Ostend basketball team sank a three-pointer.
The air horn swallowed the sound of the shot, and no one passing by on the dike paid any attention.
Styx didn’t sink immediately to his knees. No, this once his hip supported him. When he looked down, though, he could see the bullet hole in his belly. He tasted blood in his mouth and knew that he was in trouble.
“You can’t fucking kill me,” he said.
The second shot hit him in the chest, just missing his heart. The bullet punctured a lung and brought him down to one knee. He dropped a hand to the surface of the sand to hold himself up, and now the blood wasn’t just in his mouth. It was everywhere, dripping from his body like wax from a burning candle. His eyes focused on a broken mussel shell that lay beside his knee. There were thousands of them on the beach. Millions. This stupid shell wouldn’t be the last thing he ever saw, would it?
“I can do whatever I want,” the Stuffer told him, stepping out of the shadows. When Styx raised his head, his vision was blurred. He felt very sleepy. His life was leaking from the holes in his stomach and chest. He felt light, like a kite waiting for the wind to pick it up and carry it into the sky.
His vision cleared for a moment, and he saw that the Stuffer was wearing a plastic mask of the painter James Ensor.
“You’ll thank me for this,” the mask said. “I’m saving you from hell. It’s only halftime, Styx, but the game’s over and you lose. I promise you, though: I’m going to give you a beautiful send-off. You’ll be the star of the show.”
Styx toppled over onto his back.
He thought of Isabelle, of his son, Victor, and wondered what would become of them. And Shelley? What had happened to him? Would he be able to find his way home?
His eyelids were so heavy. He couldn’t keep them open any longer. He let them close, and, in the darkness, everything was peaceful and quiet.
There was no tunnel, no white light, no cinematic montage of scenes from his life, no spirit soaring free of his shattered body.
There was nothing. It was all blown away by the Stuffer’s third shot, the coup de grâce, which drilled straight through his heart and blew it to pieces.
Raphael Styx sighed out his final breath.
The Stuffer knew he didn’t have much time. His air horn had drowned out the sound of the first shot, but the second and third shots had surely not gone unnoticed.
He whipped off his mask and dragged Styx’s body into the darkness between two cabanas. He hadn’t meant to kill the cop. Well, not yet. Eventually, it would have come to that, but not so soon. He felt like he’d lost his only worthy adversary.
Poor bastard, he thought, gazing down at the motionless, empty face in the sand. Your life was shitty enough as it was, and then I had to come along.
With the butt of his revolver, he knocked the lock off one of the cabana’s doors. These wooden shacks that looked so quaint on postcards were so cheaply made it was hardly worthwhile locking them in the first place. A child of eight could huff and puff and practically blow the house down.
On the inside, this one was the same as all the rest. A couple of folded beach chairs. An assortment of plastic buckets and shovels and sieves. In the corner, a crab net, a grown-up shovel, and an air mattress. Everything you needed to survive a day on the Ostend beach.
“Sorry, Styx,” said the Stuffer, half-aloud, half to himself, “but you’ll have to hang out here for a while. I’ll fetch my equipment and come back. And when I’m done with you I’ll find someplace extra special to put you, so everyone can see just how handsome I’ve made you.”
He dragged the body into the cabana. A lock of Styx’s hair caught on a nailhead that had popped up a bit from the floor, and he had to yank hard to pull the policeman free.
“Right smack on the dike, I think, with a lovely view of the sea. Won’t that be nice?”
He sighed with excitement and examined the body, which lay there splayed across the wooden floorboards. The cop’s black hair was dotted with sand, his trouser legs and feet dark red with blood. That last shot had taken the poor fuck right in the heart.
Just to be safe, he wrestled the body into a corner and lay the air mattress over it.
“Oh, before I forget!”
He fished his iPhone from a trouser pocket.
“Say ‘cheese,’ ” he smiled, and took two photos of the dead policeman, one showing his full body and then a close-up of the lifeless face.
He left the cabana and pulled the door shut as if nothing whatsoever had happened and he’d merely been changing into his swimsuit for a little late-night dip in the sea.
Before anything else, he had to pick out the perfect spot for the display. The final resting place for Raphael Styx, Untitled #4 (2014).
To make sure he’d recognize the cabana later, he left a little rock propped against the door.
When Raphael Styx opened his eyes, he figured he was dead. He had to be. He’d been shot, three times, twice in the chest, and everything was dark.
At best, he was balanced precariously on the borderline between life and death, at that crucial tipping point where the soul crosses from this world to the next. But shouldn’t he be floating up in the sky, looking down at his lifeless body on the beach?
Wait, he wasn’t on the beach anymore. He could feel a hard floor beneath him and, strangest of all, the usual pain in his hip.
He closed his eyes again and decided it was pointless to try to figure it out. Whatever would be, would be.
But ten seconds later he opened them again. He couldn’t just lie there. He was breathing, and that was bizarre. He felt pins and needles in his fingers. His muscles were sore, and he still had the taste of blood in his mouth, although it was dried blood now.
He wasn’t about to lie there waiting for death. Might as well give it a shot, he thought, and tried to get up, assuming there wasn’t the slightest chance he could make it.
And yet he did.
It was still pitch-dark, but he managed to work himself into a half-sitting position and, despite his hip, bend forward far enough to touch his toes.
What the fuck was going on? On hands and knees he felt his way around the enclosed space, searching for something he could use to hoist himself to his feet. In the dark he was like an animal trapped in a cage.
He bumped into something soft and heard it flop lightly to the floor. He explored it with his fingertips and identified it as an air mattress. He moved past it and came to a wooden wall. He pushed at it and discovered that it was a door. He pushed harder and it creaked open.
Outside it was still dark, but this was the darkness of night, not the grave. From the sound of the surf on the shore and the smell of the salt, he knew exactly where he was, still on the Ostend beach.
He was inside a cabana.
Okay.
He struggled to his feet, holding on to the door for support. It was hard work, but he made it. He stood bent slightly at the waist to reduce the strain on his hip. He could see moonlight dancing on the water and the running lights of ships in the distance.
“What the—?”
He searched for an explanation but came up empty. Was this the Great Beyond? If it was, it looked remarkably like the Ordinary Here and Now. But why, if he could feel his hip, couldn’t he feel the agony of the Stuffer’s three bullets?
“That shitbag,” he said aloud.
Apparently he wasn’t dead. Au contraire, the killer had chosen to let him live. But why?
There’s no thrill of the chase if there’s nobody chasing you.
It sure as hell wasn’t the bulletproof vest he’d left at the police station. Styx refused to wear one after he’d fired in a shoot-out near the market square three years ago. A round had ricocheted and wounded an innocent bystander, a six-year-old girl. The girl had lain in a coma for a month before her family had pulled the plug, and Styx had never once had the guts or the common decency to visit the girl or her family. Both Internal Affairs and the department psychologist had stood ready to help him through it, but he’d shaken off their repeated offers of emotional support. Shit happens, and this was about as shitty as it got, but all he’d done was his job, and the little girl’s death was neither his responsibility nor his fault.
What nobody knew was that, since the day of the accident, he’d refused to put on the Kevlar. If he was going to have to pay for what he’d done, then let him pay.
Had the Stuffer fired blanks? Possible. The Stuffer had been hiding in the shadows, and Styx had only caught a glimpse of his revolver.
Sure, it was possible.
But why would the Stuffer run the risk of shooting Chief Inspector Raphael Styx, a cop—and why in the world would he carry a gun loaded with blanks?
“The sick fuck,” Styx said, and coughed up a laugh.
He realized that he’d pissed his pants, but, fine, anything was better than a meeting with the Grim Reaper. For those last few seconds, he’d really thought that this was the end of the line.
He remembered the broken mussel shell. It seemed ridiculous now to think that he’d knelt there, practically worshiping it, thinking it would be the last thing he’d ever see. It was a shell. There’d be thousands more of them in the years to come.
Yet he’d been ready to give up, to roll over and play dead.
Was that what the Stuffer wanted? To humiliate him? To put him eyeball-to-eyeball with Death and terrify him into giving up the hunt, maybe even turn in his badge and leave the force?
“If you think I’m falling for that shit,” he muttered, “you can think again.”
He staggered out of the cabana, moving even more slowly and woodenly than usual. Spend a couple hours flat on your forty-year-old ass, though, and who wouldn’t pay a price?
He pulled an old pocket watch from his breast pocket, wondering if that might have been what saved him, but there wasn’t a scratch on it. It had belonged to his father-in-law, an antique from La Belle Époque—and, like so much in Styx’s life, it was broken. He’d taken it from Grandpa Marc’s house with the intention of selling it at the flea market, but for one reason or another he’d held on to it and begun carrying it around. A sort of rabbit’s foot.
But what about the blood? Imagination? No, he’d really seen blood. Or had he? He’d tasted it in his mouth, sweet as honey, thick as molasses. Had he simply bitten his tongue out of fear? But then what about the bloodstains on his clothes? He couldn’t see it now in the dark, but when the first bullet had hit him, a dark-red flower had blossomed on his shirt front.
Hadn’t it?
You heard about people hallucinating in extreme situations, like when they were staring the Man with the Scythe in the eyes.
He patted his shirt and trousers experimentally. His clothes felt wet and heavy, but then it had been damp in the wooden cabana, and he’d apparently been dragged there through the rain.
Oh, fuck it, he thought.
The important thing was that he wasn’t dead.
And that feeling, man, there was nothing like it. He wouldn’t recommend it, but thinking you’d breathed your last breath and then realizing it had all just been one giant sick joke . . . priceless.
The adrenaline coursed through his body, and he understood how race-car drivers must feel, putting their lives on the line and living out there on the edge.
He felt reborn. He’d been given a second chance. The Stuffer had been wrong: his second half was still to be played, and, now that he’d seen how quickly it could all come to an end, he was going to play it to win.
The shock of his resurrection—and it was a shock, that was undeniable—almost nailed him to the ground. A full-grown man with a full-blown midlife crisis, a chief inspector with the Ostend police who’d peed his pants with terror, and here he
was, stumbling toward a new horizon on bare feet.
Isabelle, he thought. Victor.
He felt for his phone to call them and tell them he was okay. They didn’t have to worry about him. He wasn’t dead. He was coming home.
But then he remembered that he’d left it at home, remembered what had happened, remembered the pursuit across the sand.
God, Ostend’s beautiful when you’re not dead, he thought.
He turned his back on the sea and wondered how he would explain it all to Isabelle. The feelings, the sensations of his near-death experience. It was as if he’d survived a horrible car crash or been rescued at the last second from an attempted suicide.
Isabelle would understand. As the chief of nursing of the geriatrics ward at Damiaan Hospital, she saw it every day. How many times had she told him of bringing a patient back from death’s door? How many times had she wished she could do the same for their dying marriage?
His hip twinged painfully, and Styx—to his surprise—was glad.
It took Styx an eternity to climb the steps to the dike. He had to stop twice to catch his breath, and, by the time he reached the top, his limbs were aching. He couldn’t lift his right leg from the ground but had to drag it along behind him. At least he could still feel it.
From the dike, he looked out across Ostend, the queen of the Belgian seaside resorts, out past the stately buildings and empty streets shrouded in darkness to the Maria Hendrika Park in the distance.
He felt free, free—now that he wasn’t dead—from the fear of death. He felt like the monarch of all he surveyed. He stood there, admiring the night and the moon, much as, a few hours earlier, he’d stood at the Stuffer’s window and marveled at the beauty of the setting sun.
Halfway down the street, he saw three figures approaching. They wove drunkenly left and right, bumped into one another and bounced off in opposite directions, on their way from Pub A to Pub B—or, by now, from Pub X to Pub Y. They laughed unselfconsciously, exuberantly, at each collision.