by Bavo Dhooge
As he came down the last few steps, he tried to avoid them, but in the dim glow of the streetlights they drifted closer.
“Jesus, get a load of this guy,” one of them giggled.
“What happened to you, man?” said another.
The third one only stared. Styx stared back at him. Under other circumstances, he would have arrested them for public drunkenness, but not tonight.
“What hole did you crawl out of, you ugly fuck?” the first one challenged him.
Styx didn’t respond. His tongue felt heavy, his mouth still clogged with dried blood.
“Lay off,” said the third man, breaking his silence. “Can’t you see the guy’s hurt?”
The third man’s hand clamped down on his shoulder. “You okay, buddy?” he asked, his mouth so close to Styx’s ear that he could feel his breath.
His shoulder jerked upward involuntarily, as if the drunk had touched a raw nerve.
“Calm down,” the man said. “I just wanna know if you need us to get you to the hops—the hospital.”
“Leave ’im be,” the first man slurred. “He jus’ had hisself a rough night, like us. Right, buddy?”
Styx looked the three caballeros up and down.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“Say, whyn’t you join us for a li’l nightcap?” the first one proposed. “One more drink before beddy-byes.”
But the other two demurred. They were done for the day.
“You sure we can’t drop you someplace?”
“I’m just heading home,” said Styx.
They were eyeballing him like he’d been marinating in a bucket of tar. The third one seemed reluctant to abandon him. He staggered right up to Styx and held up a hand and waved it in little circles, as if trying to decide what part of him to pet. His cheek? His lips? His hair?
“Somebody really did a number on you, huh? Lemme guess. The new bouncer in the Cocoon Club, right? He’s a real prick.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Styx.
“We got nothin’ against you, man. We’re jus’ sym . . . pathetic.”
Styx turned away and walked off—or shuffled off. His right leg was deadweight, but Dr. Vrancken had promised him that a little exercise would be the ticket. One step at a time.
“. . . oughta take a look in a mirror,” he heard one of the drunkards say.
He passed the darkened shop windows of the Kapellestraat and saw his silhouette reflected in the glass. Behind him, the tipsy trio turned a corner and, with a howl that could have come from a wolf in the lost forest of Gistel, disappeared into the night.
Styx pulled up before a clothing store. The display window was populated with mannequins dressed in the latest fashions. Coincidentally, his own reflection almost perfectly lined up with one of the dummies, and it seemed for a moment as if he was wearing the colorful suit. Bright colors were in this year, and he looked more like Joachim Delacroix than himself.
It was hard to make out his facial features in the dark, but everything seemed normal: his head was the right shape, no obvious bumps or lumps or contusions. Which made sense, since, as best he could recall, the Stuffer hadn’t done anything to his face.
But then what was that about a mirror?
Styx shrugged.
But he hadn’t meant to shrug. It had happened all by itself.
It had happened without volition. A sort of tic or reflex.
What the hell was going on?
On his way home Styx considered detouring past the Stuffer’s apartment in the Hofstraat but decided to check in with the squad first. He felt tired and empty and wasn’t in the mood to take unnecessary chances. His best bet was to talk with John Crevits as soon as possible.
But, no, even that would have to wait. First home to his family, who were probably worried sick by now. First to Isabelle and Victor, to reassure them that everything was fine, that he’d met the serial killer and survived. He could see the scene play out: he’d stumble across the threshold, switch on the hall light, drag himself up the stairs . . . and there would be Isabelle, who would take him in her arms and hold him close.
I thought something must have happened to you, he could hear her whisper.
Isabelle in her low-cut black nightgown. Even if he was all drenched in blood, she wouldn’t mind.
I thought something awful must have happened to you.
“I’m okay,” he heard himself rumble.
How many times have I begged you to take your phone with you?
“It wouldn’t have made much difference. Anyway, I’m home now.”
And then Victor would be there. He would keep his distance, at first, until Styx gathered him into a group hug.
I’m sorry, Dad, Styx heard. I’m sorry I’ve been so weird.
“Shhh, now, it’s okay,” he would reassure the boy. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is we’re all together.”
That’s how it would go. Maybe not exactly in that order, but—
But was that how it would go?
He and Isabelle had grown apart—but she would still worry about him, right? Maybe he’d find patrol cars in the driveway when he turned onto their street. Maybe Crevits and Delacroix would be there, waiting for him, ready to drape a blanket around his shivering shoulders before questioning him about his encounter with the Stuffer. He was a witness now.
Looking like a lost tourist, he came to the Ostend train station, which was on his path toward home. He heard himself growl, like a dog, a clear sign that he needed to rest. The taste in his mouth was so awful he had to rinse it away.
“Like I drank a bucket of shit,” he muttered.
He limped into the cavernous station hall and saw that the arrivals and departures board was completely blank. The ticket windows, kiosks, and bistros were all deserted. Here and there, a hobo lay stretched out on a wooden bench, sleeping.
Styx shuffled into the men’s room. He thought of Shelley’s awful morning breath. This, he thought, was worse. Where was Shelley, anyway?
He leaned on one of the white porcelain sinks, his eyes adjusting to the glare of the neon lighting. He squinted, then cracked open the taps to wash his hands. The water was cold. He scrubbed off the dried blood and stuck his head under the tap. He gulped greedily and swallowed. He almost choked and found himself coughing.
Blood splattered the porcelain. He was coughing up blood. Was that bad? Was he bleeding internally? He ducked his head back into the stream of water and cleaned himself as best he could.
When he stood up and got a good look at himself in the mirror, his heart stood still.
“Jesus God!”
What the fuck was wrong with him? His healthy complexion had taken on a greenish tint, the color of withered weeds. His pupils were unnaturally large, like a cat’s, but the whites of his eyes had gone yellow and were crisscrossed with ominous red veins.
Styx had spent an unusual amount of time examining himself in mirrors these last few months. Ever since he turned forty, there was always something new to worry about. A wrinkle here, a liver spot there. And his eyes seemed to be receding into his skull. But the years, he felt, were adding character to his face. Some men were lucky that way, and he was apparently one of them.
But now, in the middle of the night in the station lavatory, Raphael Styx couldn’t believe what he saw.
It didn’t make any sense. The dark circles ringing his eyes, the red and purple sores, the bruises, the scar tissue. His lips were black, like some Gothic rock star. He grimaced at the mirror and saw that his teeth were yellow and plastered with patches of dried blood.
This is insane, he thought.
He rinsed his mouth, but couldn’t get rid of the gunk. It was baked on, ineradicable.
He backed away from the mirror in horror, and now, beneath the bright artificial lights, got his first clear look at the rest of himself. There was blood all over his shirt, his jacket, his pants.
Okay, so not blanks, he thought.
He tried to unbu
tton his shirt—no simple task, since he found that he had little control of his fingers. They were unsteady, almost impossible to manage. Like his shoulder.
At last he ripped the shirt open, and his breath caught in his throat.
The wounds.
Real bullet wounds. He saw the holes where the three shots had hit him. Stomach, chest, and heart.
I just wanna know if you need us to get you to the hops—the hospital.
Styx touched the gaping wounds with trembling fingers.
I thought something awful must have happened to you.
He half closed his eyes against the monstrousness of what he was about to do and pushed the tip of his index finger into one of the holes. He could feel his finger slide deep inside his body.
I’m sorry, Dad. I thought you were dead.
He pulled his finger free. It made a sickening sucking sound as it emerged from his body. The bullets must still be inside him, he realized. What the fuck was going on? Was he somehow immune to hot lead, like some people were immune to AIDS?
This is nuts. I must be dreaming.
He looked at his wristwatch. It was 2:13 AM. He unclasped it from his wrist so he could wash his arm, but stood there watching the seconds tick by.
Tick, tick, tick . . .
His shoulder spasmed. Another kind of tic, he thought.
He laughed hysterically.
He didn’t want to believe what he was thinking, but knew there was a way to find out for sure.
He pressed the index and middle fingers of his right hand to his left wrist and held them there.
“Come on,” he urged himself. “Come on!”
It always took a while to find it. He was never sure exactly where he was supposed to feel it.
He moved his fingers side to side, up and down the inside of his wrist.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
At the police academy they’d made the recruits check their pulses every day—after every twelve-minute Cooper test, after each scuba lesson, during the damn first-aid lectures—but he never did get the hang of it.
“Come on, dammit!”
He let go of his wrist and pressed his fingertips to the side of his neck, feeling for the external carotid artery.
Nothing.
There had to be something, dammit. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be standing here. Where the fuck was his pulse?
He still had a heart, didn’t he? After all, he’d taken a bullet to it!
And then he realized what that meant, what it implied, and his wristwatch slipped from his fingers and fell into the sink.
His legs gave out from under him and, for the second time that night, he lost consciousness.
But this time he knew as he dropped that he would wake up again. Not as the old Raphael Styx, an Ostend policeman with a beautiful wife and son, but as a new man, a new kind of man.
There was a word for what he had become, but he cracked his head on the washroom floor and his blackened lips fell still and silent.
When Styx awoke, he found himself on the floor of the train station men’s room. It wasn’t a cabana on the beach, but it wasn’t much of an improvement. Shrouded in darkness, his superstition and fear gave way to certainty.
Raphael Styx is dead, he thought. But he lives again, a revenant.
A zombie.
He clawed his way to his feet but didn’t dare return to the mirror. Nothing had changed, and he didn’t need a mirror to be sure.
He shuffled out of the public toilets and heard the first train of the new day rumble into the station. He felt for his father-in-law’s pocket watch and looked around for a trash barrel, convinced it had brought him only bad luck. But then he noticed something strange.
The watch was a half-hunter, with a small crystal circle set into its hinged lid to allow its hands to be seen even when the lid was shut. Through the crystal he saw that the second hand was moving.
He stared at the watch, clicked it open for a better view of the hands. And, yes, the second hand was slowly circling the dial.
“How—?”
The entry hall was still deserted. Even the bums had moved on from their benches. Styx stood in the shadow of an alcove, bewildered by this bizarre new turn his life had taken, when the voices of the day’s first travelers echoed through the enormous hall. Footsteps sounded on the marble flooring. And then he saw them.
“This way, Your Majesty, s’il vous plaît. Our program for today begins with a visit to the first asphalt roadway connecting Ostend with Wenduine. After we enjoy a buffet luncheon at the Nouveau Theatre Royal, we shall proceed to the new port of Ostend, and then to the casino.”
Styx stared at the small procession of partygoers, open-mouthed. There were men in three-piece suits, wearing top hats and carrying canes. The women wore hoop skirts, narrow boots, and wide hats, and carried fans. They all spoke French. In the middle of the cortege was a tall man with an immense squared-off white beard and a sharp nose.
What was this? A theater troupe, just arrived from France, here for a performance at the Theater Aan Zee? Styx watched the parade draw nearer, the women giggling, the men talking rapidly and gesticulating broadly. The man with the beard only nodded, and occasionally pointed out a feature of the station hall’s construction with the tip of his parasol.
“And if we have time, perhaps we can take in the Promenade and the Parc Léopold . . .”
The atmosphere was genial, the conversations of the men rebounded through the hall and fell on the ear like song. Styx stood in his corner, watching all the girls go by. He was so riveted by the spectacle that, for a moment, he forgot who he was. Or what he was, what he had become.
It was odd: the mood, the people, their clothing, the ambiance; it all reminded him of another Ostend, an Ostend that was as dead as he was. The Ostend of La Belle Époque, when Leopold II ruled the land from his Royal Palace. The train station was the same as always, but it was bathed in the glow of an earlier time.
I’m going nuts, Styx thought. I haven’t just gone beyond the pale—I’ve gone around the bend. This has to be some kind of nightmare.
He was so preoccupied with his own situation that he barely looked up when the procession moved past him. The men gave him polite nods, but two of the women in the company edged away from him.
“Here, you poor man,” another woman said, holding out a coin. She didn’t dare risk brushing his hand, though, and dropped her offering at his feet. It tinkled to the ground, and the sound reverberated through the hall like wind chimes in a summer breeze.
“Ostende doit devenir la capitale de la côte Belgique et la plus belle ville,” the king said.
“Mais bien sûr, Monsieur Le Roi,” a member of the entourage replied. “Ça c’est certain.”
They remained gathered around him, and Styx couldn’t understand their nonchalance. Weren’t they horrified by his appearance? Or were they so caught up in their roles that they saw him as just an ordinary beggar instead of the decrepit syphilitic horror he had become?
“Mais maintenant on va quand même fêter?” said the king, a little louder now. “C’est pour ca que je ne vais jamais au Congo. Pourquoi visiter le Congo si il y a des pauvres imbeciles à Ostende?”
They moved on, and their laughter disappeared around a corner. Styx bent down and picked up the coin. It was heavier than a euro and seemed made of gold. A profile of Leopold II’s head and neck faced to the right. When this group played a part, they played to win.
He dropped the coin in his pocket and left his niche. Just before stepping out of the station into the bright sunshine, he turned back to the arrivals and departures board. The letters and numbers weren’t clacking electronically, as they always did. Instead, the destinations and times were painted onto wooden slats and hung from pins attached to the board, just like in the olden days.
Styx did some math in his head.
More than two hours from Ostend to Brussels?
That trip wouldn’t take two hours unless y
ou traveled by steam engine.
Styx wasn’t sure what to do next. He ought to go straight to the police station. Even before heading home, he ought to fill Crevits in on the events of the previous evening. He could report his face-to-face encounter with the Stuffer. He could report that he’d taken three bullets. He could report—
Report what? That he no longer had a pulse? That his flesh was beginning to rot away, that he was starting to stink like the walking dead? What good would that do? And besides, he was no longer sure Crevits could be trusted.
Styx thought back to his previous life, the life he’d already begun to ruin when he still had one to live. John Crevits had twice betrayed him. The first time, Crevits was forced to call in Internal Affairs after a complaint that Styx had used excessive force on a suspect. The second betrayal had been more personal, when Crevits—whether on purpose or accidentally—had let Isabelle know about his affair with Amanda. He’d tried to make it seem like he’d done it for Styx’s own good and the good of his family. Crevits, the guardian angel, that was the idea—but Styx knew better. From that day forward, things between the chief inspector and the commissioner had never been the same.
No, maybe he’d better not bring Crevits up to speed. What if, the minute his boss saw the new Styx, he notified his superiors of the situation? Crevits was a company man, always had been, and he’d relish the fame this incredible revelation would bring him.
No, he finally decided, John Crevits—like everything else—belonged to the life he’d left behind.
Styx clapped Grandpa Marc’s watch shut and shuffled out into the streets of Ostend. It was a smallish city, which would make it harder for him to hide. From time to time, he saw people looking at him. Two kids on the way to school with their mother stood stock-still in the middle of a crosswalk and pointed at the funny man limping along the pavement.
It didn’t take him long to come to a decision. The sun was up, and in his condition, he couldn’t go on wandering around in the open. That would attract more attention than he felt he could handle.
But where could he hide?