Styx

by Bavo Dhooge

  “Sure,” said Delacroix.

  He pressed the button for the elevator, and Tobias Ornelis stood and waited with him. He wanted to question the doctor further about the scar on his wrist, which couldn’t possibly have been caused by ordinary surgical thread. Certainly not in the case of a man who used the stuff every day at work.

  “I’ll let you know if I remember, Inspector.”

  The door slid open at the lobby level and Delacroix stepped in, but the pathologist stayed where he was. As the door began to close, the cop put out a hand and stopped it.

  “I thought you were going out for breakfast?”

  “No, I bring something from home. And I prefer to eat alone, so, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  “Of course,” said Delacroix. “I appreciate your time. See you soon.”

  “Not too soon, I hope.”

  It took Delacroix a moment to get the joke.

  “Yeah, right. I’m not in any hurry.”

  Ornelis returned to his lab and closed the door behind him.

  Delacroix stepped back off the elevator and put his ear to the lab door, listening to see if the rumors were true, if the doctor would begin talking to his corpses. But the only sound that came through the door was soft piano music. Debussy, Delacroix thought.

  “See you soon, Ornelis,” Delacroix whispered. He pressed the button to recall the elevator, and, while he waited for it, took out his phone to call John Crevits.

  It was pouring yet again in Ostend, and—especially at this time of year—that was bad for business along the coast. Styx was listening to the rain batter his father-in-law’s windowpanes when the doorbell rang. He had just finished smearing himself with a tube of Nivea gel moisturizer, not so much to protect his skin as to mask the stench. His H&M suit was already ripe with his new brand of body odor, and he’d had to change into an old one he’d found in one of Marc Gerard’s closets. With its wide lapels and sharply pointed collar, it had possibly been in style back in the seventies, and it was at least two sizes too small for him, but it was better than being naked. Though not by much.

  He got slowly and painfully to his feet, grabbed his walking stick and dragged himself over to the window. He drew the heavy curtains aside to see who was at the door, but all that was visible through the rain was a dark cap and coat. Whoever it was stood with his back to the house, watching the street.

  “Shit,” said Styx.

  Who knew he was hiding here? The house hadn’t yet been put up for sale. Was it some city functionary checking the place out? That didn’t seem likely at this time of night.

  Could it be the Stuffer, here to finish what he’d begun? No, there wasn’t a chance in a thousand he could have linked this address to Raphael Styx. Was there? Anyway, though the color of the unexpected visitor’s cap and coat were difficult to determine in the dark, they certainly weren’t a yellow sou’wester and oilskin. But Styx clutched his walking stick a bit more firmly, just in case.

  Styx thought of his plunge into the chilly waters of the North Sea and decided it couldn’t hurt to see who it was. At this point, he had nothing left to lose.

  When he eased the door open, a familiar voice said, “Styx. Finally.”

  Beneath the cap stood Joachim Delacroix, wrapped in an old-fashioned dark-gray three-quarter-length English overcoat. The two men eyed each other for a full half minute, as if neither could believe what he saw.

  “I thought I’d never find you.”

  “Delacroix? How did you find me?”

  “I’m a cop, Styx. We have ways. Your wife told me you’d been clearing this place out the last few days before you died. Or were supposed to be, anyway. I didn’t get the address out of her, but I’ve got a realtor friend, and I asked him if he knew of any interesting properties that were likely to come on the market soon.”

  “Solid detective work,” said Styx grudgingly. “I couldn’t have done better myself.”

  “You going to let me in or make me stand out here until I drown?”

  “Why should I let you in?”

  “Because it was a whole lot of trouble finding you.”

  “Why should I care? And how do I know you won’t just turn me in again?” He peered out past Delacroix’s shoulder, but there was no one lurking in the street.

  “You think I’d pull that twice?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the fact you’re still standing here proves you weren’t lying. You’re the real deal, aren’t you? I mean, you’re exactly what you said you are.”

  “You can’t say the word, can you?” said Styx.

  He took a step back to make room for Delacroix to come in. The young cop whipped off his overcoat, which he’d been wearing draped around his shoulders like an aristocrat, and scoped out the foyer, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell.

  “Come on,” said Styx, and led him into the interior of the house.

  Marc Gerard’s living room was divided into two distinct areas, a front parlor used only for Sunday company and a second, less formal sitting room. Styx had closed the metal shutters, and the only illumination came from a single table lamp beside the threadbare old armchair in which Styx’s father-in-law had passed his lonely evenings watching war documentaries on the National Geographic channel.

  “I can’t say the situation’s gotten any better,” Styx said. “You can see that for yourself.”

  “I can see it and smell it,” said Delacroix.

  “I’m falling apart.”

  “Why don’t you open a window?”

  “What’s the use?”

  “What happened, Styx? I mean, one minute we were standing there talking, and the next minute you’re off like a bat out of hell.”

  “What happened? You ratted me out is what happened.”

  “I did what I thought was right,” said Delacroix. “I’m still working for Crevits, you know.” He waited for an invitation to sit, but Styx dropped into the armchair without a word. “What would you have done?”

  “I would have heard you out, cop to cop.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m convinced now, and I’m sorry. And you’re right about not telling Crevits. The fewer people who know about this, the better.”

  “That’s nice,” Styx said, “but it doesn’t do me any good. And it doesn’t help bring down the Stuffer, either.”

  Delacroix bent to switch on another lamp, but the bulb was burned out. It was just an empty glass shell. “I can’t get over it,” he said. “But I guess I have to, eh?”

  “I can tell you,” said Styx, “it’s no picnic.”

  “What I don’t understand is, where’s the rest of them? I mean, you’re undead, I get it, but you can’t be the only one. In the movies, there’s always dozens of them, hundreds, thousands, crawling out of their graves and staggering around looking for people to kill. Is that you now? You don’t look like you’re getting ready to take a bite out of me.”

  “No,” said Styx. “I’m not. And I have no idea if there are more like me out there. I haven’t seen any, but I don’t know.”

  “How did it happen, then? You didn’t get bit?”

  The rain on the roof was the only sound in the room.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Styx thought back to the moment when he’d awoken from the dead in the cabana. He was so preoccupied with the three gunshot wounds and his rotting body that he’d never stopped to think about a possible bite. Delacroix was right: that’s the way the legends said it happened. If the stories were true, then he probably wasn’t the only zombie out there. “I didn’t see anybody. But I was out of it for a while.”

  “Then how?”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know. It is what it is. I didn’t come crawling out of some graveyard. I don’t clomp around with my arms all stretched out, moaning gibberish. And I’m not sitting here hungry for a nice, juicy manchop. Not yet. All I can think is that the shit they show in the movies and on TV is bullshit. What’s real is me. Christ, I’m real, Del
acroix. I’m a fucking zombie.”

  “I have so many questions.”

  “You think I don’t?” He saw Delacroix studying him, so he shied away from the light. In the dark, his cracking skin, his rotting teeth, his split lips and suppurating wounds were no longer visible.

  He knew they were there, though. He could feel them. He could feel himself decomposing.

  “You’re living like a rat here,” said Delacroix. He jumped to his feet and began to straighten up the room. The cardboard box that had held last night’s pizza, the empty beer cans and chip bags and Kleenex boxes, the dirty towels—he shoved all of it into a trash bag he found beneath the kitchen sink.

  “What do you want me to do?” Styx groused. “Take a bath? I tried. The scrubbing makes my skin peel off; it’s disgusting. I tried to take a shower, and I wound up ankle-deep in my own pus.”

  “I get the point,” said Delacroix. “But you can’t just give up.”

  Give up? Styx wanted to stand up, but he couldn’t summon the strength. He tapped the tip of his walking stick on the floor.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “This isn’t the fucking Odd Couple.”

  “I just want to make things a little nicer for you,” said Delacroix. He disappeared back into the kitchen and reemerged pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He picked up Styx’s discarded clothes, from socks to necktie, and stuffed them in the plastic trash bag.

  “This all goes to the dump,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’ll bring you a couple of my old suits. I bought two that are too big for me. They’re from overseas, so I can’t return them. They ought to fit you.”

  “Why are you doing all this?” asked Styx, his chin resting on the copper fish that formed the walking stick’s handle.

  “I told you, they don’t fit me. And they’re not your cheap H&M suits either. Not that it makes any difference, but—”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. I mean, all this. Why did you even come here?”

  Delacroix paused, hands on his hips.

  “I don’t know,” he sighed. “Honest, I don’t know.”

  “A couple of days ago,” said Styx, “I hated you.”

  “That I know.”

  “Because you—well, I don’t even know why.”

  “Just as well.”

  “I mean, because I—”

  “I know what you mean. You don’t have to say it.”

  “So why, then?”

  “Look, Inspector, you turn on one more lamp, I’ll probably run right out of here and never look back. But I keep hearing this voice in my head saying, He doesn’t have anybody else.”

  “That’s my voice,” said Styx softly. “You’re all I’ve got.”

  “Yeah, and, as far as the Stuffer case goes, you’re all I’ve got. You’re right: there’s still a case to solve. A serial killer who thinks he’s some kind of Rodin is on the loose in Ostend. And he won’t stop killing until we stop him.”

  Styx had no response. There was a murderer to find, and the death of the investigation’s lead detective was just a footnote.

  “You making any progress?” Styx asked.

  “Well, that’s the other reason I’m here. I mean, I’m happy to help you, but there is something I need to show you.”

  Like an eager little boy, he hunkered down by Styx’s side. In the dim light of the room, he could see the horror that was Styx’s face, see the sunken eyes glisten as he took the photograph from his pocket and handed it over.

  “You know who this is?” he asked. It was a studio portrait of a man posing against a bright white background and gazing uncomfortably into the camera’s lens. “I found it on a website.”

  “Of course I know him. It’s Ornelis.”

  “Tobias Ornelis, chief pathologist at our forensics lab.”

  “Right. Did he tell you something about the Stuffer?”

  “He—”

  “He found something?”

  “No,” said Delacroix. “But—”

  “But what, dammit!”

  “I think Ornelis is more than just a pathologist.”

  “Such as?”

  “A serial killer.”

  Styx gaped at the portrait. Ornelis? They’d met countless times, but hadn’t exchanged more than ten sentences over the years of their acquaintance.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” said Delacroix.

  “That’s crazy,” he said, handing back the picture, ignoring the greasy stain his fingers had left on the glossy paper.

  “He’s got a yellow oilskin rain jacket.”

  “Who doesn’t? It’s not him, Delacroix.”

  “He’s obsessed with James Ensor. He knew the last victim.”

  “So what? Ensor was a great artist. And Ostend is a small city, why wouldn’t he know her?”

  “He acted really strange when I talked with him.”

  “Ornelis always acts strange. He is strange. The day Tobias Ornelis doesn’t act strange, that’ll be strange. No, I don’t believe it. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Styx,” sighed Delacroix impatiently. “He was talking in riddles, nothing he said hung together. And he had a cut on his hand. I think he got it from that fishing line when he was sewing Madeleine Bohy’s body back together after he stuffed her full of sand.”

  “I’m not gonna listen to any more of this,” said Styx. “It’s total BS. I’ve known Ornelis for years. Why would the man suddenly go psycho?”

  “Why not? He talks to the dead.”

  “He hasn’t said a word to me,” Styx said drily.

  “You know what I mean. You’ve heard the stories.”

  “We’ve all got our little idiosyncracies. He talks to the dead, I am dead.”

  “Ha ha,” said Delacroix.

  He put the photo back in his inside jacket pocket, and now at last he dared to look Styx in the eye.

  “I’m telling you, he almost gave himself away today. He’s the closest thing we’ve got to a viable suspect. And he fits your description.”

  “You shouldn’t take what I said too seriously.”

  “Why? Because you’re a zombie?”

  “Because it was dark when I saw the Stuffer. And he was wearing a mask.”

  “The description matches, Styx.”

  “Fine, so what’s your plan? You going to arrest him? Interrogate him until he confesses?”

  “We already have,” said Delacroix. “Arrested him, anyway. They’re questioning him now.”

  Earlier that day, Joachim Delacroix had returned to the pathology department. A few other officers—including Martens or Maertens—accompanied him into the subterranean recesses of the police building to arrest Tobias Ornelis on suspicion of murder. He knew they didn’t have a lot to go on, but they had to do something with the Stuffer still on the loose, and the first thing he wanted to do was interrogate Ornelis. They came out of the elevator soundlessly and approached the door to the morgue.

  Delacroix put a finger to his lips.

  He wanted the other cops to hear it, the lugubrious whisper of Ornelis’s ongoing conversation with the corpses in his charge.

  “On three,” Delacroix mouthed. “One, two, . . .”

  They could have waited for Ornelis to lock up his abattoir and head for home, but why delay the inevitable? Either way, arresting a man who worked so closely with the Ostend detective squad would be big, and Delacroix didn’t want to risk Ornelis somehow hearing about what was coming.

  “Three!”

  Delacroix rapped sharply on the door and pushed it open without waiting for a response. The team swarmed inside.

  They found Ornelis bent over the body of Madeleine Bohy. He was fully dressed, thank God, and put up no resistance.

  “Inspector Delacroix?”

  “Doctor Ornelis, you’re under arrest on suspicion of murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford t
o hire an attorney, one will be . . .”

  It was Martens or Maertens who shoved the pathologist up against a cabinet to handcuff him. Ornelis struggled to free himself. He pushed off an evidence table and raced out of the lab.

  Delacroix went after him and caught up to him halfway down the corridor.

  “Don’t make it worse than it already is, Doctor. You don’t want to make a scene.”

  But he fought again to get loose, and Delacroix had to wrestle him to the tiled floor. With his cheek pressed into the linoleum, the doctor groaned, “Let me go! Don’t make me leave her!”

  “You’re coming with us, Doc.”

  “You can’t leave her here alone! She needs me! I’m the only one who can help her!”

  “You’re the one who needs help, you sick bastard.” Delacroix hauled him to his feet, threw him up against the wall, pulled his arms behind him, and slapped on the cuffs.

  “She doesn’t have anyone else. I can’t abandon her.”

  Delacroix described the arrest to Raphael Styx, described the ghastly look he’d seen in the pathologist’s eyes as the elevator door slid closed.

  “I’m telling you,” said Styx, “it’s not Ornelis. Has he said anything?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Maybe you ought to bring in one of his dead bodies, if he only talks to them.”

  “Good idea,” said Delacroix. “You busy tomorrow?”

  “Funny. Look, Ornelis is not the Stuffer. He’s not going to say anything helpful, because he doesn’t have anything helpful to say. The man’s a loser. Yes, I get it, he sees dead people—and talks to them—but that doesn’t mean anything. The Stuffer’s not a loser. He knows what he’s doing, he’s smart. He’s got good taste, artistic sensibilities, he’s distinguished.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Delacroix.

  “I’ve been after him for more than half a year, remember?”

  “Yeah, but what makes you so sure Ornelis doesn’t fit that profile?”

  Styx tried to pull himself out of the armchair without barking in pain. He leaned on his walking stick and hobbled over to the low table Marc Gerard had used as a makeshift bar. The bottles of gin and vodka and whiskey were old, but age had been kind to them.