Styx (27 page)

“Yes?”

“It's me,” a voice said.

The monitor showed a figure with its back to the surveillance camera.

“Me who?”

“Who the fuck do you think?”

The face remained invisible. All he could make out was a black ski mask and a pair of dark eyes.

“Styx?” he said.

“No, it's the fucking Stuffer.” The voice was disgusted. “Let me in.”

Delacroix hesitated. For a second he thought about the last two words Styx had muttered last night over the phone.
Bon appétit
. Could it be the zombie knew he'd had dinner with his widow?
Nah
, thought Delacroix. Anyway, he wouldn't mention it to Styx. The ex-cop had other things on his mind.

Delacroix had grown acclimated to the sepulchral sight of Raphael Styx's discolored face, but now that the monster was hidden behind a tenebrous mask, he seemed somehow more pestilential and horrific.

“Goddammit, would you let me in?” Styx growled. He leaned closer to the camera and his bloodshot eyes filled the screen.

Delacroix pressed the buzzer.

A minute later Styx dragged himself through the door. “I know,” he said, “I look like shit. I thought about buying one of those masks
from the gift shop at the Ensor house, but they won't be open for hours. You checked, right, to see who
has
bought them the last couple months?”

“Of course I checked. I'm not an—”

“Well?”

“They sell dozens of them every day. Way too many to track.”

“Pity.”

Delacroix shook his head. “You look like a bank robber.”

“If I could get into the hospital, I could get one of those burn masks they put on patients who've survived—”

“I'm not talking about the ski mask,” said Delacroix. “The ski mask isn't bad. I'm talking about your clothes.”

Styx looked down at the torn jeans and black shirt he'd substituted for Delacroix's grotesque sapeur rig. “Oh, these.”

“Those,” said Delacroix. “What happened to—?”

“Relax, your shit's at the house. I'll get it all dry-cleaned tomorrow.”

“Why'd you change?”

“These are
my
kind of clothes, Delacroix. I'm sick of hiding out in yours.”

It must be broiling hot under that mask
, Delacroix thought, then realized Styx must be long past the point where such things mattered.

“What are you going to do? Why are you here?”

“I'm ready to show myself,” said Styx.

“To who?”

“To you. To him. To the world.”

“You mean the Stuffer?”

“I'm not going to go on hiding from that fuck.”

Delacroix saw him balancing his weight on his left leg, struggling to stay erect. “What happened to your hip?”

“I threw it out. Don't worry about it.”

Something was different about the man. Styx seemed calmer, more at peace with his condition. It was like he'd taken a Valium—or a couple of belts of good scotch.

“What's that on your shirt?”

“That's another story.”

“Tell me.”

“You don't want to know,” said Styx, thinking back to what had happened an hour ago.

“Is that dried blood? Is that the shirt you were wearing when he shot you?”

“No,” Styx sighed. “This is a different one.”

“For God's sake, man, what happened?”

An hour ago, at the
port, after a quick stop at Marc Gerard's house to change, Styx had hobbled into the container where Gino Tersago maintained his “office,” his stomach rumbling with a hunger unlike anything he'd ever felt before in his life, a hunger for—he fought back a wave of nausea at the very thought of it—for human flesh. At the bar, he'd been able to fight against it, but the more time passed, the more insistent the sick craving became. It was a cliché, he knew, an overdone trope straight out of every zombie movie he'd ever seen, but there it was. He needed to feed, needed it far more desperately than he'd needed liquor, drugs, and women in his previous life. To slake this new and horrible demon inside him, he'd decided to pay a little call on Terry Tersago, a bastard if ever there was one, a lowlife who only just barely qualified as “human.”

And who knows? Perhaps, if Tersago was lucky, he'd wind up receiving the same second chance at a fresh start Styx himself had been granted. Tersago, ready to close up shop for the night, was deep in
conversation with two stolid men who could have been twins. He was gesticulating broadly and didn't notice Styx come in.

“Terry,” one of them said sharply, but Tersago seemed not to hear him. “Terry! You got company.”

The gangster didn't bother to turn around. He raised a warning hand and said, “Tell him I'm busy.”

“What with?” Styx growled. “Stolen cars from the East Bloc?”

Now the man spun around. The container was almost as dark as the night, and Tersago could see only a tall, dark figure silhouetted in the doorway.

“Who the fuck—?”

“Terry,” said Styx calmly, “it's me.”

He limped closer. No ski mask, no shame. Before Tersago could make another sound, the twins hurried past Styx and fled into the night, like untied balloons released by a child.

Tersago gabbled wordlessly, and Styx grabbed the man's cheeks between the four nailless fingers of his rotting right hand and massaged them.

“Say it, Terry. Say my name.”

But Gino Tersago was struck dumb. He quaked with terror, stared into the blighted eyes, the ruined face that steamed with miasmal vapors.

“Styx?” he croaked at last. “But you're . . . dead?”

“Don't believe everything you hear,” said Styx.

Styx wanted to have a nice cozy chat about the good old days—the deals, the bribes, the corruption, the meetings in unused containers at harborside—but there were two problems.

One: there was no way his hip would let him get cozy.

And two: the hunger was getting worse.

Styx felt like a predator operating on pure instinct.

He was so achingly hungry.

“Well, what the fuck happened?”

“It's none of your business, Terry.”

As if Gino Tersago dealt with stinking, moldering gargoyles every night of his life, he seemed satisfied with Styx's nonanswer.

“Okay by me,” he said. “I got my own problems.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don't know where you been these last days, but I sure coulda used you around here.”

Styx stood riveted to the ground, not by his hip for once but by simple astonishment. “I'm sorry my personal situation interfered with your plans,” he said.

“What interfered? You think you can't be replaced, Styxie? Trust me,
nobody
is irreplaceable. But your fuckin' guys almost nabbed me. Some cop got wind of what was goin' down, and if I was as stupid as he thought I was, I would have walked right smack into a trap, and this minute I'd be schmoozing with that fuck Crevits instead of you.”

“So what happened?”

“I must have some kind of sixth sense. I just felt like somethin' wasn't kosher, so I blew off the deal in the nick a time. That didn't make me too popular with my business associates, though.” He tugged at his upper lip with his bottom teeth. “And that's
your
fault, Styxie, for not bein' here when I needed you.”

“Aw, shucks,” Styx said. Somewhere inside him it was nice to think that
someone
still needed him.

“I mean, what do you think I was doin', playin' charades with Tweedledum and Tweedledumber just now? Those guys don't speak Flemish, Dutch, English, French, nothing. You don't talk Commie, do you? Maybe you can explain 'em the fuckup was your fault, not mine.”

“I told you I was changing my ways, Terry.”

“You think I'm not onto you?” the gangster continued. “You got
everybody thinkin' the fuckin' Stuffer took you down, but you just been hidin' out from him, you coward. Is that why I haven't seen you? You know that schmuck Crevits gave me the third degree for like two hours? He thought
I
was the fuckin' Stuffer!”

“You still don't understand,” Styx interrupted him, “do you?”

“I oughta beat the crap outa you just for that, Styx. You got any idea what it's like to spend two hours cooped up with a sweat bucket like that Crevits?”

“You don't understand,” Styx repeated slowly, shaking his head.

“Don't understand
what
?”

“This,” said Styx. “Me. It's real, Terry, not a game.”

“What's real? You? You're not real, man, you're a fuckin' joke.”

“I don't hear anyone laughing.”

Tersago turned away from him, looking for his associates, but they were long gone. He returned his attention to Styx. “Are you tellin' me you're really
dead
? You expect me to believe that shit?”

Styx took a step closer and leaned in as far as his hip allowed. “You want proof, Terry?” he whispered into Tersago's ear. He was so close he could smell the man's blood, sweet and coppery. The hunger he'd felt earlier was growing louder.

Tersago pulled back. “Jesus! You go to hell, buddy. I'm—”

“I just came from there,” said Styx, and without warning he lunged forward and bit off the gangster's ear.

Tersago screamed. But Styx grabbed him with both arms and bit into the side of his head, gouging down to the bone. He tasted flesh and blood and heard Tersago shrieking in a voice that was no longer human, “Jesus fucking Christ! Get the fuck
off
me!”

But there was no one around to help him.

Styx wrestled with the gangster and fell on top of him, gnawing greedily at his cheeks and nose and chin until his ravenous hunger was finally stilled.

Gino Tersago twitched spastically on the floor, not quite dead. Blood poured from a hundred face wounds.

Styx got to his knees, panting.

The metal floor of the container was drenched with blood.

“What do you say, Terry?” he gasped. “You believe me now?”

He wondered how much time would pass before a new Gino Tersago staggered to his feet and lurched off into the night. That was how it happened in the movies, but Styx had no idea what the rules were out here in the real world. Maybe, once Tersago bled out, he'd be gone for good.

He didn't have time to stick around and find out.

It wasn't until later, on his way to Delacroix's apartment, that he realized his midnight meal had not only quieted his hunger but given him a measure of new strength.

And, under the light of a streetlamp, he saw that a new index finger was beginning to sprout from the blackened stump between his thumb and middle finger.

Well, well
, he thought.
Fancy that.

Styx took Delacroix out to show him the city's past. With Grandpa Marc's pocket watch open in his hand like a dowsing rod, the zombie led the sapeur through the streets of Ostend.

The artists of a century ago, the colorful figures of beachcombers and shrimp fishers, the bourgeoisie who commanded the best seats in the theater and literally looked down on the ordinary citizens, wandered the streets around them.

But Delacroix saw none of it.

When Styx, still hidden behind the black woolen ski mask, peered through a café window, elbowed his young partner, and pointed out the painter James Ensor, there was no response. Even in the vicinity of the pocket watch, Delacroix was denied Styx's second sight. Where Styx saw the gay tumult of a gaslit evening among the elite of La Belle
Époque, all Delacroix, still imprisoned in the land of the living, saw—all he
could
see—was the dark loneliness of a modern-day bank's lobby.

“You don't see them?” insisted Styx.

“See who?”

“Them.”

“Who are you talking about? There's no one in there.”

“Strange,” said Styx, frowning. He wanted to laugh, but couldn't find the right sound.

Maybe the pocket watch only worked for him.

“You're serious about this?” Delacroix said skeptically.

“I see a completely different world,” said Styx. “I can move around in it, interact with it. That door's probably locked for you, but I can open it and go inside.”

Delacroix tugged on the bank's front door. Sure enough, it was locked tight. “Show me,” he said.

Styx nodded slowly. “I don't think we stopped here just randomly. Every time this happens, there seems to be a reason.”

“The Stuffer?”

“I think I'm getting closer.” He looked through the plateglass window and found it almost unimaginable that Delacroix
couldn't
see what he saw.

On the other side of the window, the café was brightly lit and bustling with life. Cigarette and cigar smoke danced around the tophats of the men who ringed the wooden tables playing cards. The walls were hung with posters and drawings in the style of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.