Styx (31 page)

She gently pulled back the sheet and saw, instead of a body, two pillows plumped into humanesque shape. She spun around, suddenly frightened.

Many times in her career as a nurse she'd found an empty bed where she'd expected a patient. Sometimes a disoriented elderly soul had simply gone for a nighttime constitutional, sometimes he was playing peekaboo behind the door. Once or twice the callboard had simply gone haywire, the wrong room's light had flashed, and the room she entered was empty, its previous occupant discharged or deceased.

But why the pillows? And why did she have the feeling that the room was not as empty as it seemed?

“Looking for me?” came a voice from the darkness.

Isabelle grabbed the bed's side rail. Someone was sitting in one of the two visitors' chairs, silhouetted against the curtained window.

“I'm sorry I startled you,” said the man.

“Who are you?”

She wanted to reach for the nearest light switch, to give the stranger a face, but he stood up slowly, almost nonchalantly, and wagged a finger at her as if he'd read her thoughts. He took a step closer, and now she could make out the surgical mask that concealed his nose, mouth, and chin from sight.

What happened next happened without warning. In one sudden movement the man's right arm wrapped around her throat and cut off her breath. With his other hand, he clapped something to her mouth. Another mask?

The stink of chloroform filled her nostrils. She struggled against the drug, but resistance was futile.

“Shhh,” the voice said. “You don't want to bother the others, do you?”

She felt consciousness drain from her body.

Her last thought was of Victor. Without her to wake him up, he would lose precious hours of study time.

“Sleep tight, Isabelle,” the voice whispered. “Sweet dreams.”

Transporting the unconscious Isabelle Gerard
from the fourth floor of the Damiaan Hospital down to his waiting car was simple. It was the middle of the night, and all the Stuffer had to do was wait a few minutes for the other nurse, with her fake smile and her high voice, to get out of the way. He lay Isabelle on room fourteen's wheeled bed, covered her with the top sheet, rolled her down the corridor to the elevator, and pressed the button for the underground garage. Conveniently, it was Isabelle's job to keep an eye on the ward in case of after-hours trouble.

When he stretched her out on the backseat of the Santa Fe, snoring peacefully, and was on his way home—his
real
home, not the Hofstraat apartment he'd rented under Léon Spilliaert's name—he decided that Isabelle Gerard would have to be dealt with differently. It was pointless to kill her and stuff her, like the others. What purpose would that serve? No, she was a means to an end, not the end itself. He didn't like deviating from his original plan, but sometimes a creative artist has to take detours in order to reach his destination.

No, he wouldn't harm a hair on her pretty little head. All he had to do was lock her up and keep her where he put her.

An hour later, seated at his computer, he was still wearing the surgical mask. He no longer needed to conceal his identity, but in all the excitement, he'd simply forgotten to remove it.

He created a brand-new Gmail address—
[email protected]—
then went to Facebook. When prompted to select a category for
his new page, he studied the options on the drop-down menu and, chuckling, selected “News Personality.”

The Stuffer
, he typed, and hesitated, his fingers poised above the keyboard, searching for the right words to update his status.

The Stuffer will present his fifth and most important sculpture, Isabelle Gerard, to the world within the next 24 hours unless the remains of Raphael Styx are turned over to him for his sole and exclusive use.

He read the paragraph three times. A nice little teaser, a preview of coming attractions. They'd certainly have to acknowledge that he was sticking to his principles.

He clicked
Post
 .

Styx sat alone in Marc
Gerard's room. After watching a throng of people who, frankly, hadn't much liked him gather to wish him Godspeed on his journey to Valhalla, Styx wished he could sleep. The boring thing about being dead was that you didn't need to sleep. That had seemed like a blessing at first, but by now he was sick of it. There was nothing to distract him from his growing hunger.

Styx had always relished his dreams. Some people resented the idea of sleeping away a third of their lives, but he wasn't one of them. He missed the nightly opportunity to set aside the weight of the world and lose himself in another reality, a dreamworld in which he might be reunited with Isabelle and Victor and the fucking Stuffer had been stuffed into a prison cell once and for all. Or, better yet, a world in which the serial killer had never existed in the first place.

But now he'd settled in at Marc Gerard's old computer to see what the real world had to say about his memorial. Like a voyeur spying on
his own existence, he visited Victor's Facebook page and read his son's latest status update:

Victor Styx

History is deathly boring!

The comment had already garnered ten Likes, mostly from classmates who were themselves wrestling with the ancient Greeks and Romans. For once he had to agree with his son: history
was
boring, as boring as death.

He clicked over to Isabelle's page and saw that she hadn't posted anything since his disappearance. Not surprising. Isabelle was a private person. She was always ready to help others through their trying times, but she believed in keeping her own miseries to herself. A typical nurse.

He was about to shut down the computer and pick up a book when a new message appeared on Isabelle's page.

It wasn't Isabelle doing the typing, though.

Her account had been hacked by the Stuffer.

And the words that unspooled across the screen were so horrifying that Styx thought at first he must have misread them.

The Stuffer's next masterpiece will be displayed under the title “Isabelle Gerard.”

“No,” Styx heard himself whisper. “Oh, Jesus, no.”

He read it again and again, but the words didn't change.

He pushed away from the computer and grabbed his stick and headed painfully for the door.

An old, familiar sensation burned within him.

It wasn't hunger this time, but it would lead to the same result.

For the second time in thirty-six hours Styx turned into the Dorpstraat in Mariakerke and headed for S. Vrancken's office, right across the street from Our Lady of the Dunes Church, where James Ensor was buried.

It was a little after four
AM
, but this time he didn't hesitate to ring the bell. It echoed hollowly on the other side of the door, and Styx felt again that same sense of déjà vu, though this time he doubted the doctor was peering out at him through his security cam. As he waited for a response, his eye came to rest on the brass plaque mounted beside the door above a close-cropped boxwood hedge:

D
R
. S. V
RANCKEN
, O
RTHOPEDICS

Styx realized he had no idea what the S stood for. Simon? Sander?
In all the months he'd known the doctor, he'd never heard the man's first name mentioned.

Stefan? Samuel?

He must have seen it when he'd done his online research, but he couldn't for the life of him—shit, strike that. He couldn't remember what the hell it
was
.

He hadn't heard footsteps, but suddenly the door was thrown open.

The last few weeks had aged S. Vrancken. He was thinner, more sinewy, less kempt. The gray beard stubble failed to make him look distinguished. Instead, it gave him the air of a hobo. He looked at Styx and could not utter a word.

“Surprised to see me, are you?”

“It—it's impossible!”

“And yet it's true.”

“My God, I never could have imagined this,” Vrancken said. “Even if I'd dared to imagine it, I never could have believed it.”

“And yet,” said Styx.

“And yet, indeed. Is it really you, Chief Inspector?”

“In the rotting flesh.”

“My God,” the doctor breathed again.

“I'm not sure He had anything to do with it.”

“But—how?”

“Not important,” said Styx. “I'm here for answers, not questions.”

He wanted to grab the man by the throat and choke Isabelle's whereabouts out of him, but he wasn't sure he was strong enough to prevail in a physical fight and figured his best chance of saving her was to outmaneuver Vrancken, rather than outman him.

“What happened the other day?” he asked. “I heard you back there, but you didn't come out.”

“I couldn't,” said the Stuffer.

“Why not?”

“I killed you, Styx. I shot you. You were
dead
. When I saw you through the videophone, I thought my mind must be playing tricks on me. You looked like something out of a horror film.” He stared at the gruesome specter that faced him. “I must still be hallucinating.”

“ 'Fraid not.”

“You're supposed to be dead.”

“But here we are,” said Styx.

“Indeed. You look awful.”

“What can I say? Whatever I am, you made me, Doc.”

“I don't under—”

“Cut the bullshit.” Talking was taking too long. He might not be able to fight Vrancken, but he could surprise him. He found a well of untapped strength within himself and shoved Vrancken against the wall, and the putrescence that rose from his body swirled around them. “Where is she?”

“I haven't hurt her,” said the doctor. “She's fine.”

“Where is she!” Styx screamed. He clenched Marc Gerard's walking stick in his arborescent hands and pressed the wood deep into the flesh of Vrancken's neck, cutting off his air.

“I'm a doctor,” Vrancken gasped. “I
help
people.”

“Sure you do,” Styx growled, putting all his weight onto the cane.

“Like I helped you . . .”

“Ask Reinhilde Debels and Elisa Wouters and Madeleine Bohy and Heloise Pignot what they thought of your help. You cut their throats and sawed off their heads and stabbed them to death and ripped out their organs and stuffed them full of sand. I bet they were thrilled to have your help.”

“Or clay,” Vrancken gagged, barely able to form the words. “I used clay for the last one.”

As if he realized the absurdity of this remark, he looked at Styx
again in hopeless silence. And as the horror sank in, he let out an inhuman scream, like an animal on its way to the slaughterhouse.

“Why?” Styx demanded. “What did any of them do to you? Were they patients? Were they filing more complaints against you?”

The doctor tried to respond, but the pressure on his neck made speech impossible. Styx backed off a fraction of an inch, and Vrancken coughed weakly. “They were on my list,” he wheezed, “waiting for surgery. One of them needed spinal fusion, two needed knee replacements, and one a hip, just like you.”

“And the model?”

“I was making a statement. I couldn't let that toad in the newspapers take my place.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. I never touched them. I couldn't—the medical board pulled my license. I was a surgeon for twenty-five years. I helped hundreds of people—and then I made two little mistakes, and those pompous bastards told me I couldn't help any more.”

“So you killed them instead?”

“Their lives were over. Just like yours was over, Styx. Without me, all they had left to look forward to was pain. Pain, and the pity of others. I saved them from that. I
saved
them!”

“They could have found another doctor,” Styx snarled.

But Vrancken didn't seem to hear him. “We've become a throwaway society,” he explained hoarsely, earnestly, his hands fisted on the walking stick now, pushing back against Styx's pressure. “We build computers and cars and appliances
not
to last, so every five years you need the newest model. Even if they were healed, they would have died eventually. Five years from now, fifty years from now. It's all the same. Forgotten by society. But I gave them new life, I turned them into works of art this city will remember forever.”

“You're insane,” said Styx. “You're worse than me, you sick monster.
There are plenty of surgeons. Those people didn't have to die.” And then he remembered. “
I
didn't have to die!”

“You did! You were . . .”

Styx looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“You didn't get my message on your voice mail?”

“The police have my phone.”

“Then you don't know,” Vrancken breathed. “You poor son of a bitch, you have no idea.”