Styx (26 page)

“Okay,” Styx sighed. “Bon appétit.”

They broke the connection simultaneously, and Styx wondered if he'd heard those last two words.

It was time to go.

As he struggled to his feet, a light winked on upstairs, in Victor's room.

The curtains were shoved aside, and there stood his son in the window, looking out. Had the boy spotted him, out in the dunes, hunched over his cane like a crippled leper? It would be so easy to raise a hand and wave to him, give him a sign that his dad was still looking out for him.

Still?

When had he
ever
put his son's interests before his own?

Not for years.

I'm sorry, Victor
, he thought.
I'm so sorry.

He stood there, motionless as a scarecrow.

He didn't see me. He doesn't see me
.

Victor turned away and disappeared from the window, and another character made his entrance: Shelley, who propped his forepaws on the windowsill and howled. The dog's reflection in the pane turned him into Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound.

No sound reached Styx through the thick glass, but he could see his old friend barking wildly. Was it possible that Shelley had smelled him?

Isabelle rose from the table and went upstairs. He saw her at Victor's window, trying to calm Shelley down. When that didn't work, she pulled him downstairs by his collar and closed him up in the kitchen.

Styx had had enough.

He'd already died once over the last few days, and now he died yet again.

This second death was even more painful than the first.

Styx couldn't stand the thought of going back to his father-in-law's deserted house, so he decided to walk a while. He half expected to be transported back to La Belle Époque, but the city remained as it was. The locals were asleep in their beds. Tomorrow was a workday. The tourists were tucked in at their hotels and B&Bs.

He wandered through the entertainment district, where a bit of life still ebbed and flowed. He came to a halt before the entrance to a club whose bright-red neon sign identified it as The Groove. The front door was open, and a soulful voice wafted out on the breeze over a hypnotic backbeat.

“I want you the right way, baby . . .”

It was the voice of Marvin Gaye, the doomed soul singer who'd washed up in Ostend a few short years before he was shot to death by
his own father. Whoever was deejaying tonight had excellent taste, Styx thought, and he shambled through the door, along a narrow entry hall with velour walls and into the main room, which—luckily for him—was almost completely dark. A disco ball hanging from the ceiling spun slowly, and the four pinpoint spotlights that hit it turned the dance floor into a swirling galaxy of stars.

The place was packed. Styx pushed through the crowd to the bar.

“Whiskey,” he said, raising his voice above the music and the din of a hundred shouted conversations. “Rocks.”

The bartender, a ponytailed giant with a snake tattooed on his right arm, looked at him strangely.

“Please,” said Styx. “I'm dying here.”

He'd given up feeling embarrassed about the way he looked. When he got his drink, he tossed it off in a single swallow. The place was mobbed, and he wanted to turn around and leave, but the crowd somehow absorbed him, swallowed him whole, enfolded him in a whirling mass of strangers, drunkards, and crazies, the freaks of the night.

Surrounded, Styx felt his palsied, creaky body begin—almost against his will—to sway in time to the Marvin Gaye song. As he dipped and twirled, the others backed off and gave him room, until he was dancing solo in the middle of the floor, ringed by a throng of intoxicated spectators who clapped in time to the music and cheered him on.

A girl who'd been standing alone against the wall wormed her way through the crowd and joined him. She was young and blond, but her hair was stringy, her teeth were yellowed by nicotine, and she stank of sweat. Her short skirt was stained and she wore tattered espadrilles on her feet.

“You come here often?” she asked, eyes half-closed, fully under the spell of the music.

“No,” said Styx, bobbing his head.

“Why not?”

“I'm a zombie.”

He waited for her scream, but what he heard was a peal of delighted laughter. “Who isn't, man?”

Before he knew what was happening, her arms were around him and they were slow dancing. He couldn't understand it. Didn't she see how ghastly he was? Wasn't she repelled by his unholy stench? Or could she actually be attracted to his degenerate flesh, as Eros was drawn insatiably to Thanatos?

“Shhh,” she soothed him, her hand on the back of his neck.

“You have no idea who I am,” Styx whispered in her ear.

“It doesn't matter.”

“It
does
matter.”

Her hands dropped to his backside and pulled him closer. She ground her crotch against him. Styx felt his bones about to shatter, but at the same time he felt the old hunger stir within him. His body had been stiff with death for days, but now, that one last limp organ—his penis, his dick, his cock, his tool—was stiffening with life. He wondered how that was even possible.

“If you're a zombie,” the girl laughed, grabbing him, “how come
this
thing's not dead?”

“Maybe it's like hair and nails,” Styx moaned. “They keep growing after you die, don't they?”

“No, they don't. They just
look
like they're growing, because the rest of the body starts shrinking after death.”

One hand holding him tightly, the other crushing his mouth to hers. Her tongue flickered across his crusted lips. Styx tasted the sweetness of lust through the toxicity of his own fetid breath.

It's gonna fall right off
, he thought,
like my finger.

But before he could do anything about it, the girl released him and pushed him off her.

“What the fuck is
this
?”

She stuck out her tongue and plucked a rotted tooth from the tip of it, held it up to catch the sparkle from the disco ball and stared at it in horror. Styx thought she might faint or scream, but she simply dropped the tooth to the dance floor and slapped him, as if she were punishing him for having having told her the truth. He actually
was
a zombie, the bastard. She turned away and disappeared into the crowd.

Probably a good thing she split
, thought Styx. For just a moment there he had felt the glimmer of deep desire, and not for sex. No, this was a more primal, more unquenchable hunger.

Tongue to tongue, teeth to skin. However unappetizing her appearance, he had
wanted
her. What would have happened if she hadn't fled? Would he have sunk his teeth into the soft flesh of her neck? No, that was vampires, they were after the blood. Her brains, then? But, Jesus, she was such a skank! And yet, to him, she had looked . . . delicious, that was the only word for it.

Was it possible that death was not an ending but a beginning, a gateway to new experiences Styx would much rather avoid?

He checked Marc Gerard's pocket
watch, found it still running, then shut his eyes and went into a trance, barely feeling his uncontrollable tics and twitches melt seamlessly into dance moves. Eyes still closed tightly, a frown spread across his battered face, an expression of both physical and spiritual pain that stretched into a grimace as he reached skyward like a sleeper awakening from a century's slumber. He rose on his toes and grabbed for the ceiling, jerking spasmodically within an imaginary prison of regret, self-pity, pain.

“Hey,” a deep male voice whispered in his ear. “What's goin' on, brother?”

He opened his eyes and saw that he was almost alone in the club. A knot of stragglers lingered at the bar, but he and the stranger were the only two people left on the dance floor.

“When did she stop lovin' you?” the deep voice asked.

In the dark Styx saw that the bearded man was none other than Marvin Gaye himself. He was wearing the Adidas tracksuit and Jamaican knit cap Styx knew he'd worn every morning to jog through the Ostend dunes as he fought his way free from his drug addiction. He was probably on his way to the dunes now for his morning run.

Except.

Except that was more than thirty years ago, and the soul legend had been dead since the mid-eighties.

Had Styx been transported to yet
another
Ostend, segued through time by some inexplicable enchantment the way a DJ segued between songs?

For the first time Styx wondered if it might have been more than mere chance that had pushed him in pursuit of the Stuffer on the beach that night, just as some felt that Marvin Gaye had manipulated his father, a minister of the House of God, into firing the shots that had killed him. In police parlance, they called it “suicide by cop” when an individual with a death wish provokes a law-enforcement officer into killing him. In the troubled singer's life, it could perhaps have been suicide by parent. In Styx's case, could it have been suicide by serial killer, a way to free himself from the ruin he'd made of his own life?

“Let me give you a bit of free advice, my friend,” the angelic voice went on. “It's never too late to change.”

Styx wanted answers. His tortured relationship with Isabelle, the Stuffer investigation. He
needed
some free advice, but he didn't know what to ask, or how.

“It's time to make things right. To stand up, my man.”

With these last words, the Prince of Soul faded away, and Styx felt a firm hand on his shoulder. He never knew if it was the bartender or a bouncer. All he knew was that he was dragged off the dance floor and shoved through the narrow entryway and out into the street.

“And don't come back!” an angry voice yelled after him.

Styx wasn't sure what happened next, but when he regained his senses, he lay in the gutter, curled up in the fetal position, in agony, humiliated, gathering his strength.

It was time to stand up.

It was time to make things right.

It was time to rise from the dead, once and for all.

He found his stick in the street beside him and scrabbled painfully to his feet. There was something very wrong with his body. He felt like he'd been sawn in half and the pieces glued together out of alignment.

My hip
, he thought. Throughout his decay, the pain in his hip had stayed with him, like a tether to the old world, but now it felt different. It had finally happened. He'd made it this far, but now there was no doubt.

I broke my fucking hip.

He staggered off toward his father-in-law's house like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

But his face was set in grim determination.

He was down, but he wasn't out.

He could handle the pain.

He could handle whatever shit they threw at him.

And he had work to do.

Joachim Delacroix always had the same dream. He was in an endless corridor lined with doors that all opened into bathrooms. In each room someone had committed suicide. Some of the victims had overdosed on pills, some had jumped out of the narrow bathroom window, some had slit their wrists in the tub.

In the corridor dreams his mission was to find his half-sister Celine. He proceeded down the line, opening unlocked doors and battering down the locked ones, sometimes surprising the living in the act of self-destruction but more often arriving on the scene mere moments too late.

The corridor always seemed infinite, but he always came eventually to one final door. It was always locked, and he always heard Celine's muffled voice pleading for help on the other side. And as he
was about to kick it in or put his shoulder to it or shoot out the lock, he would jerk awake.

It was no different tonight—except that, as he sat upright in his bed, shaking with frustration at yet another failure, his doorbell rang.

He plodded down the finite hall of his apartment in midnight-blue silk Peter Hahn pajamas and a wine-red velvet Hugh Hefner smoking jacket to the videophone beside his front door.