by Bavo Dhooge
“Styx, don’t do this to yourself.”
“I’m not doing anything to myself. It’s just the truth. Maybe I can see into the past because that’s all I have left.” He turned back to the window and watched the people moving to and fro in what looked like a perfectly re-created film set. “I wish you could see it, Delacroix. You’d love it: the style, the clothes, the flair. That’s when you should have been around. Me, if I could have picked a time to live, I’d’ve picked the Wild West.”
“You should have been a writer,” said Delacroix. “The way you describe it all.”
“Maybe so. Who knows?”
Delacroix laid a gentle hand on Styx’s shoulder and pulled him back to the present. “I have to tell you something,” he said.
“What?”
“I didn’t leave your note for Isabelle.”
Styx nodded. “I figured.”
“I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t. I’m not even sure why. You said it yourself, it wasn’t going to help her. Was I wrong?”
“I’m not sure what ‘wrong’ means anymore.”
“Really, Styx, I—”
“Let me ask you something.”
Delacroix took his hand from the zombie’s shoulder.
“What do you think of her?” asked Styx.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You ever look in a mirror, Delacroix? You’re the opposite of me. A real gentleman. A ladies’ man.”
“Hey, you’re the one who sent me over there.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one who went.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not—”
“I’ve seen the light in your eyes, these last couple days. It’s her, isn’t it?”
“I said don’t—”
“You can’t hide it, man.” He turned away. “And I don’t blame you. She deserves better than me. I had my chance, and I fucked it up.”
“It’s not what you think,” said Delacroix.
“I think it is. You just don’t know it yet.”
In the café three women in bright-red dresses were on the small stage, high-kicking their ruffled skirts and petticoats in unison as, off to the side, a man in a striped shirt and sleeve garters banged on a piano. Someone spotted Styx looking in and came over to shut the heavy drapes.
“You think it over while I go in,” he said. “When I come out, maybe we’ll both be a little wiser—you about her, and me about the Stuffer.”
Delacroix didn’t argue. “What are you going to ask him?”
“Ensor?” Styx put a hand to the door. Where Delacroix had seen and felt a bank’s modern metal handle, Styx saw and felt an old-fashioned glass knob. “That’s the weird thing. I don’t really need to ask him anything. The way it seems to work, he’ll tell me what I need to know. They don’t need any small talk. They just get straight to the point.”
“Good luck,” said Delacroix.
When Styx stepped into the café the scene came fully to life. He could hear the music from the out-of-tune piano now, an energetic can-can.
He looked around for the enigmatic James Ensor, but couldn’t see him. Was he too late? Had the painter left during his conversation with Delacroix?
He felt himself drawn to the table closest to the little stage and saw a figure concealed behind a mask, a caricature of a creature out of Hieronymus Bosch: an inhumanly ugly bald man with a sharply pointed chin, bulbous nose, and huge ears. Styx stared into the eyes behind the mask. They reminded him of those eyes he’d seen once before, on a lonely beach beneath a yellow sou’wester. The eyes of the Stuffer.
“Mr. Ensor?”
A gloved hand pulled the mask away, revealing the condescending face of James Ensor. His fame lay years in the future; at this time of his life, he was just on the verge of breaking through to success.
“I thought perhaps you recognized me, cher ami,” said Ensor. “I saw you glancing my way from the street.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but—”
“No matter,” said the painter, laying the mask beside him on the table. “You’re a journalist, desirous of an interview? If so, you can find me every day in my salon above the shop of ma maman. No appointment necessary. I often receive visitors and friends who wish to consult with me.”
“If you don’t mind,” said Styx, “I’d like to consult you here and now on an urgent matter.”
“And who are you? A reporter, yes?”
“Something like that.”
At that moment Styx understood why Delvaux and Marvin Gaye and all the others he’d encountered in the Ostends of the past had failed to be horrified by the goatish, noisome wreck he had become.
In a mirror behind the painter, Styx saw himself. There sat not Raphael Styx the zombie, but Raphael Styx the man. The old Styx, with his smooth, healthy skin, his strong chin, intelligent eyes, and human energy. The deathly pallor, the sloughing of the skin, the bloodstained fluid that leaked from his mouth and nostrils, all that was gone.
“Are you quite all right?” asked Ensor with concern. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The irony of that remark struck home. Styx’s first thought was that he’d seen the very opposite of a ghost, but then he realized that the healthy, normal face in the mirror was in fact the ghost of a man who now existed only in the past.
“I’m fine,” he said, and turned his attention from the man in the mirror to the man across the table from him.
“Then what can I tell you, worthy sir?” Ensor snapped his fingers and murmured an order to the waiter who materialized by his side. “Beauty? Truth? The meaning of life?”
“I’m not interested in the meaning of life,” he said. “I want to know about death.”
“Interesting,” said Ensor. “Today, coincidentally, I began work on a new canvas. It’s rather promising, I think, inspired by that old master Bosch’s crucifixion of Christ.”
Two glasses of absinthe arrived. Ensor pushed one across the table toward Styx and took a sip of the other. “I’m thinking of calling it Masks Mocking Death,” he continued. “An hommage, perhaps, to Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ Have you read it?”
“No,” Styx admitted.
“Or perhaps Masks Confronting Death. I haven’t decided yet if the maskers or Death himself will play the principal role.”
“What’s your fascination with masks?” asked Styx, feeling that he was on the cusp of discovering something vital.
“Masks, my good man, are used for concealment. But I turn that convention on its head. I paint masks that reveal the hidden truths of those who wear them. The paradox appeals to me: my masks unmask the emotions that lie beneath our middle-class façades.”
“But what does that have to do with death?”
“It is only when we look Death in the eye that our masks fall away. What is it, after all, that we hide ourselves from, if not the inevitability of collapse, dissolution, and decay? When the masks are gone, what remains is the ultimate truth, our terrified plunge into the Abyss.”
“When we look Death in the eye,” said Styx, “what exactly do we see?”
The painter laughed enigmatically. “We see ourselves,” he said. “Death is a mirror, my friend. Oscar Wilde had it right in his Picture of Dorian Gray. Death cannot be cheated. Man wasn’t made to be immortal. We age, we sicken, we die. We fight against it—think of the medical profession—but the battle has never, will never, can never be won.” Ensor sipped again from his glass. He cocked his head and examined Styx thoughtfully. “But I have the impression that my answer has not satisfied you.”
“I’d like to know more,” said Styx. “I’m looking for—”
He searched for the right word, and the painter tried to help him: “Inspiration?”
“A man. He sees himself as an artist. Not a painter, but a sculptor who wears the mask of Death.”
James Ensor stroked his beard. “Death, of course, is ineffable, but there are some who believe themsel
ves capable of assisting Him in His work. They don the appearance of Death—but make no mistake, my friend, even Death’s own appearance is just another mask.”
“But who are they?”
“The only advice I can give you is to take nothing at face value. The ultimate truth lies behind all the masks, beneath the surface. Truth is figurative, not literal. It is in the way the facts are presented, not the facts themselves. Why is it that some cannibalistic peoples wear wooden masks when they cook their prey? Partly to frighten their prisoners, surely, but also to hide their own primal fears.”
“So you’re saying that those who do Death’s work are scared?”
“Of course. And that explains why they mask themselves—as we all mask ourselves to conceal our terror. But you won’t learn the true identity of the man you seek by tearing his mask from his face. You must see through the mask to the man who hides beneath it.”
Styx was still unsatisfied. He took a small sip of absinthe, which was strong and tasted of black licorice. He could see the café window from where he sat, but Delacroix wasn’t there. Delacroix waited a hundred years in the future.
“I’m sorry to harp on this,” Styx said, “but the man I’m looking for literally wears a mask.”
“If he veils himself from the world’s eyes, then he clearly has something to hide. A fear, a regret, a memory—who can say?”
For the first time, Styx considered the possibility that the Stuffer might be operating not out of madness, but for some explainable reason. Perhaps the mask he’d chosen to wear was there to shroud some personal lack or weakness.
“I think I’m beginning to understand,” he said, and he raised his glass in a toast. He was celebrating not only a step taken in the direction of the truth, but also a glimpse of the old Styx.
“Who is this person you wish to find?” asked Ensor.
“A man without a conscience, a sacrificer of innocent lives. He not only kills his victims, but he removes their organs and fills their bodies with sand or clay.”
The painter considered this as if he thought he might try to capture such a scene on canvas.
“It sounds gruesome.”
“It is.”
“It makes me think of the ancient Egyptians, who buried their dead surrounded by their personal possessions. I have several Egyptian funeral masks in my studio. The high priests would wash a dead pharaoh’s body and remove his organs—except for the heart, which would be needed in the afterlife. The body would be filled with herbs and spices, sawdust and salt, then sewn up and wrapped in linen for the journey to the Other Side.”
“Yes, I’ve read those stories,” said Styx.
“I hope you find your man,” said Ensor.
Styx stood and tossed off the rest of his absinthe.
In an earlier life, it would have dulled the pain that even now still radiated from his hip.
“One final piece of advice,” Ensor said. “Be careful. Watch your back. The next mask this man wears may so nearly resemble his true appearance that you won’t even realize it is a mask.”
Styx wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he knew it would become clear to him in time. He thanked the painter in the feathered cap and headed for the door. Before he left, he turned around for one last look and saw that Ensor’s own mask was back in place.
He pushed open the door and stepped outside. When he clapped the pocket watch shut, he felt his hip break and his body gnarl and molder.
The next morning, it took Styx almost an hour to drag himself the mile from Marc Gerard’s house southwest to the office of Dr. S. Vrancken, his orthopedist, in the Dorpstraat in Mariakerke, just across the street from the historic Our Lady of the Dunes Church.
Ever since his encounter with Gino Tersago the previous evening, Styx felt his physical condition improving. He wasn’t exactly reborn, not that, but he certainly felt better. Except for his hip, which continued to plague him.
Could gnawing on Gino have had some kind of restorative effect on him? That seemed a logical explanation—if it wasn’t absurd to use the word logic under these conditions.
But then what about his hip?
He hesitated before the security camera’s electronic eye, asking himself for the third time in as many minutes if he could really go through with this.
Unlike some doctors, Dr. Vrancken didn’t have open consulting hours; he was available by appointment only. Styx didn’t have an appointment, but Vrancken would hopefully agree to see him without one. He chose his moment carefully, avoiding the doctor’s usual hours.
Without some relief for his hip, he didn’t see how he could possibly go on. Emergency surgery and an artificial hip were probably out of the question, but he remembered what Vrancken had told him the last time they’d met:
“With a little luck, you might be able to hold out for a couple of years. I can prescribe painkillers, if you need them, and, if it gets really bad, I can give you a shot of cortisone, which takes effect within a couple of days and can help reduce the irritability of the joint. But we’ll have to follow up. I want you to get an X-ray, just to be sure.”
Thanks to Gino Tersago, he now knew a handy home remedy for most of the thousand natural shocks that zombie flesh turns out to be heir to, but all the long pig in the world apparently wasn’t going to mend a broken hip. This puzzled him.
Cortisone, he thought. That’s the ticket.
It was worth a shot, anyway.
Shot. Cortisone. Ha.
He pulled off the ski mask, leaned close enough to the camera lens to blur the image, and rang the bell. If the doctor didn’t faint at the sight of him, maybe he’d be willing to help. If not, he’d have to force him to cooperate.
How would that work, exactly? Would he be able to overpower him? He was about ten years younger than Vrancken, and the old Raphael Styx could have taken the doctor with one hand tied behind his back. But he wasn’t sure how well the new Styx would fare in a fight.
“Can I help you?” a disembodied male voice said.
“Good morning,” he said carefully. “I’d like to see the doctor.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, I don’t, but it’s an emergency.”
He waited for what seemed like an unusually long time, and was about to give up and walk away when the door clicked open.
A moment later Styx found himself in Dr. Vrancken’s small waiting room. Whenever he had visited in the past, there were always other patients on the sofa and in the row of wooden chairs, flipping half attentively through old issues of boring magazines, and a receptionist behind the desk’s sliding glass windows, but today the waiting room was completely empty.
Styx took a seat on the couch. Soft Muzak trickled through speakers. A tall cactus stood in an earthenware pot on the marble floor. The fringe on the Persian throw rug was unraveling in spots. Three rectangles on the wall were darker than the wallpaper around them, suggesting that some redecoration was in progress.
Several minutes crawled by, and Styx amused himself thinking how the expression “time stood still” takes on new meaning when you’re dead. What would he do, he wondered, if Vrancken decided to call the police? There weren’t really all that many options open to him.
He decided to call the police himself, fished out his phone, and punched in Delacroix’s number.
“Styx?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened last night? I waited for you, but you never came out of the bank.”
“The café. I wasn’t in there that long.”
“I waited for over an hour.”
“Only seemed like a couple minutes to me. I guess time works differently in the past.”
“Whatever. I finally gave up and went home,” said Delacroix. “I hope you’re not mad.”
“Uh-uh. Want to know where I am now?”
“At Ensor’s house?”
“I’m in my orthopedist’s waiting room.”
“Jesus Christ. What are you doing there?”
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“Hoping he’ll give me an injection for my hip. I can’t take the pain anymore.”
“What’s wrong with your hip? It’s in worse shape than the rest of you?”
“Gotta start somewhere. An ounce of prevention’s worth—”
“Prevention?” scoffed Delacroix. “You’re way past that point, Inspector. There’s no cure for what you’ve got.”
“What’s your problem? Get out on the wrong side of bed?”
“I’ve been thinking about our little adventure last night. You painted a lovely picture of what you say you saw, but I didn’t see a thing.”
“I’m not lying, Delacroix.”
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean what you’re saying is true. I saw you walk into a bank, and that’s all I saw. Maybe you had a spare key?”
“You think I just imagined it?”
“I’m a cop. I need facts, not stories.”
“How much help have the facts been in this investigation so far?”
“About as much as your cozy little chats with dead painters. You really think they’re going to help us take down the Stuffer?”
“Ensor said some things that made sense,” said Styx. “But I still haven’t figured it all out. The key to the whole case is right in front of me. I just can’t quite get a handle on it.”
“You’re letting all this romantic, melancholy shit from the past distract you. But I’m keeping my eyes on the here and now, Inspector. I’m not dead. I have to go with my brains, not some spooky ‘sixth sense.’ Interrogations, alibis, motives, witnesses. That’s the key to this case.”
There was a confidence in Delacroix’s voice that Styx hadn’t heard before. “I’m getting back to actual police work today,” said Delacroix. “We’re bringing Paul Delvaux in for further questioning.”
“Paul Delvaux’s got nothing to do with it,” Styx told him. “Not your Paul Delvaux.”
“Don’t be so sure. He’s got no alibi for the Pignot murder. And he’s on the board of trustees of the art school where she was killed, so he could have had easy access to the building.”