The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

“Wha...?”

  Somehow Scott had graduated to the front of the line. Now he stood facing an irate Puerto Rican woman in a trim blue uniform. Her gloved hand was extended, palm up. The nearest passenger ahead of Scott was just turning the corner at the end of the on ramp, then vanishing. Grumbles of annoyance came from behind him.

  He handed over his boarding pass.

  “End of the ramp and then left,” the attendant said. “Would you like some assistance, sir?”

  “No fff-anks.” Cripes, he wasn’t that bad...was he?

  Scott started carefully down the ramp. Through the long, semi-transparent side window, he noticed the conical snout of the aircraft. A large red dot had been painted on its tip. It made him think of a huge breast—the rolling, man-engulfing breast in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)—then he thought of all that icy brew (how many had it been since the airport in Ottawa? Who knew?), and that pathetic, sagging whore in the lounge.

  He smiled.

  Faithful to instruction, Scott turned left at the end of the boarding ramp. Cool air, reeking of jet fuel, funneled in from over the tarmac. He could feel it riffling his hair, drying the sweat on his brow. He stepped on-board, flashed his boarding pass at the flight attendant, then squeezed his way down the aisle to his seat.

  * * *

  “Would you like a drink, sir?”

  Half-asleep, Scott lay slouched in a window seat near the tail of the aircraft. Lulled by the gentle vibration of the Rolls-Royce turbines, he had promptly and peacefully drifted off. Next to him, reading a thick paperback and smelling like a locker room, sat a woman so chubby she spilled over into the aisle.

  “No, thanks,” Scott said. “I believe I’ve had enough.”

  The stewardess proceeded along the aisle, smiling and offering beverages from the clinking portable bar.

  Angling her girth toward Scott, the fat woman dropped the paperback into her lap and smiled. Swiftly (and, he feared, a little rudely) Scott turned to face the porthole window. Glancing at his watch, it dawned on him that somehow they’d managed to get airborne and halfway to Boston without his noticing.

  Beyond the window a clear indigo sky sloped away to the gentle arc of the horizon. A single cloud, black against the star-flecked heavens, raftered reposefully along in the middle distance. Its upper edge, screening the moon, glowed dully. Gazing dreamily at that edge, Scott was reminded of a boyhood fascination with the night sky...he and a chum used to scale the back fence, crawl up onto the garage roof and gaze into the cosmos, pretending to be astronauts, alert for shooting stars.

  Gradually, as he watched it now, the moon drifted free of that screening cloud. First a jagged crescent, then the full pocked disk, bright, round and perfect.

  Scott’s eyes widened as panic skidded into him. There it was, sailing the dome of night sky—the final piece in the irksome puzzle of the drawings, the source of the harping doubt he’d been juggling around in his mind since early that morning.

  The moon.

  God’s midnight eye.

  Like a junkie remembering where he’d hidden his stash, Scott grabbed his flightbag and dug out the drawings. His gaze scanned rapidly to the third frame, to the tombstone in the foreground and the shambling corpse, to the naked tree traced black against an oversized moon.

  A full moon.

  20

  WHILE SCOTT WAS SITTING IN the Outbound Lounge at the Montreal airport, ordering his second beer, Krista was finally pulling away from Thurston’s Texaco in Fryeburg. Ernie had been right—the process consumed the entire day. The bill was an equally unpleasant surprise: four hundred and thirty-six dollars and eighty-eight cents—American. As she anteed up, Krista remembered her very first car, a 1965 Vauxhall Victor; she had paid less than half that amount for the whole damned car.

  They were still about three hours out of Boston, two and a half if she booted it, then she’d have to find Logan International, a prospect inspiring little joy on the heels of the day she’d already had. Earlier that afternoon she’d called Caroline and warned her not to expect them until after they’d retrieved Scott from the airport, probably around midnight or so. Afterward, she and Kath had caught a matinee at Fryeburg’s single cinema, the Magic Lantern. The feature was a rerun of Spielberg’s Gremlins. Skeptical at first, Krista wound up enjoying herself. The theater’s air-conditioning was a blessing after the sticky August heat, and the movie provided just the right blend of humor and gore to abate both the hysterical and urge-to-kill facets of her frustration.

  By the time they reached 1-95 southbound, dusk had already begun to settle. While Kath snoozed, Krista stuck like a squatter to the left-hand lane, cruising at a comfortable, if illegal, seventy-five. When dark did fall, and the irksome details of the past two days commenced a slow retreat from her mind, Krista recalled Scott’s peculiar request, the one he’d made over the phone that morning: “Don’t drive after dark...”

  But what she remembered more clearly than the words was her husband’s tone while speaking them. He had been pleading with her—not manifestly, but she’d sensed it nonetheless. Behind the slight break in his voice, behind his efforts to conceal it, Scott had been begging her.

  But why? she puzzled now, as the center line unreeled ahead of her. She wanted to chalk it off to Scott’s worry-wart nature or to her own imagination, but none of that would cut.

  Well, she had no choice now, did she. It was either drive till she got there or wind up in another Nomad’s Notch. And there was no way she was going to suffer through that crap again, thank you very kindly.

  She placed a hand on Kath’s thigh, burrowed back in her seat, and nudged the needle up to eighty.

  * * *

  The temperature gauge started to glow again—dull and winking at first, then that same solid red—a mile or two from a service-exit sign reading Byfield. Too exhausted to muster even a vague pique, Krista slowed and exited. It was three miles to Byfield.

  The grease monkey at the service station there looked suspiciously like Ernie Thurston, only younger. Something in the eyes, Krista thought as she related the tribulations of her day to the distracted mechanic. When she mentioned the radiator, his eyes seemed to shine, like Ernie’s had.

  “New rad today,” the mechanic said, one eye glued to the color portable on the desk in front of him. A Red Sox game was blaring. “Pro’ly just a loose clamp.” He peeked out at the steaming Volvo. “Been bootin’ ’er, have ya?”

  “Yes,” Krista admitted. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  Following the man’s gaze, she squinted through the bug-spattered front window. She could see Kath out there, her drowsing face angled toward the garage. Looking at her, Krista felt an unexpected, almost dizzying rush of love for her child.

  “Yep,” the mechanic said, pleased with himself. The diagnosis was made and he wouldn’t have to miss too much of the inning putting it right. “Drive her up to the first bay there, ma’am, and we’ll have us a look-see."

  While the mechanic tinkered under the hood, Krista took a badly needed pee, then strolled out into the starlight. The August moon was full, a strange coppery color, like a shiny new penny. Mingled with the smells of grease and gasoline, Krista noticed the faintly putrescent odor of an unseen swamp. The air was filled with the chirring of its denizens.

  Suddenly chilled—and oddly sickened by that faint odor of decay—Krista hurried back inside. Wrapped in her arms, she stood watching the mechanic and reflecting over the trials of the past twenty-four hours. Something about this whole sorry disaster bothered her in an obscure yet disquieting way. And that was the feeling—the absurd, gut-level feeling—that she had been led, and was still being led. It was a crock, of course, just the fatigue working on her mind.

  But...

  But what had taken her down the wrong road back there in New Hampshire?

  Hadn’t it been just an impulse?

  Yes—a sudden and thoroughly uncharacteristic impulse.

&n
bsp; Or had it been something more than that—

  (turn here)

  An inner voice? An inner command?

  (turn)

  And hadn’t it sounded like someone else’s voice?

  (here)

  Jesus, no, Krista reproached herself, shutting off this frankly lunatic train of thought. That’s nuts, kiddo. It was nothing more than your basic snafu: situation normal...all fucked up.

  The crack of the closing hood jerked her back to the present and the drab reality of the garage. Behind her, the baseball game droned hectically toward the top of the inning. In the car Kath startled awake. She gazed half-lidded around the dimly lit bay, then nestled comfortably back to sleep.

  “Loose clamp, all right,” the mechanic said as he hurried back inside, his quick eyes darting to the screen as the commentator’s voice went wild over a play. “Needed some antifreeze, though.”

  “Anything,” Krista said. “Just so long as I can drive.”

  Five minutes later they were back on the road, the temperature gauge a lifeless black square in the dash. Following the mechanic’s instructions, Krista turned south instead of backtracking north and then east to I-95. He said she would find a link-up with the Interstate about three miles from the station...and there it was.

  The left turn gave onto a little-used road reminiscent of the ones they’d traveled in New Hampshire the day before. All at once the countryside was cloaked in an almost unearthly dark, the high beams reflecting back as if from a solid thing. Here and there yellow oblongs of light glowed faintly in the pitch, farmhouses set well back from the road. There was no traffic.

  “Are we there yet?”

  Absorbed in her own musings, Krista jumped at the sound of Kath’s voice. “Close, hon,” she said. “Real close now. Why don’t you sleep some more?”

  “Not tired.”

  Kath had been a princess through it all, Krista thought now, through this whole botched-up odyssey. She could have fussed and complained and made things a whole lot worse than they were. But she hadn’t. That precocity again, Krista decided. A small tantrum might even have been fun. They could have had one together.

  There was a groundhog dead in the road, near the ghostly center line. A large black bird, a crow or a raven, took a last quick tug at a rope of intestine before winging up out of the way. Krista hadn’t thought birds did anything at night but sleep. The demolished groundhog glowed for a moment, then faded to black behind the car.

  Doing a passable impersonation of Mr. Rogers, Kath said, “Poor Mister Groundhog,” and craned her neck to watch it vanish into the night.

  Krista glanced at the dash clock, then wedged her foot more firmly against the accelerator. Ahead of them the road banked hard to the left. The dark maw of the ditch opened briefly, then closed again as Krista corrected the car’s trajectory.

  “Grrr-reat green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts...” Kath, in her worst singing voice.

  “Kath,” Krista said, laughing. “That’s rude.” It was a song she’d sung herself as a girl. Hearing it now brought back memories of campfires and late-night ghost stories.

  “I know.” Kath giggled. “Come on, Mom. Join in. Grrrrreat green gobs of...”

  Krista picked up the chorus: “...greasy grimy gopher guts, simulated monkey’s feet, constipated birdie’s tweet...”

  The car shot over one of those stomach-dropping humps in the road. “Whoooh,” Krista said, accelerating in time with the limerick. Inclining upward now, the road banked steeply to the left.

  “...all wrapped up in poison purple platypus and I forgot my spooooon...”

  Beyond the incline the road jigged hard to the right, more sharply than Krista had anticipated. She was going much too fast to stop.

  Only gradually understanding the change in her mother’s face, Kath finished the song with a sort of vaudeville slide: “I’ll—use—a—strawww...sluuuurp!” Then she shifted her gaze out through the windshield.

  There was someone standing in the middle of the road, weaving drunkenly.

  In the span of milliseconds that passed before the inevitable collision, several thoughts surged through Krista’s mind. None of them, however, had anything to do with her past life. During none of that brief, surreal interval did she imagine any harm might come to Kath or herself. She wondered what a drunk was doing in the middle of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of no place. A part of her decided, quite coldly, that no way was she taking the ditch to avoid hitting this misfit (probably some retarded product of barnyard inbreeding), ruining the car—

  (is something wrong with his face?)

  risking her daughter’s life—

  (his clothes?)

  and her own. She realized fleetingly that Kath’s seat belt was fastened and that her own was not. She wondered how much (more) damage would be done to the car and would the man be killed? and what was Scott going to say?

  (is he grinning?)

  Instinct or reflex or simple humanity took control of Krista’s hands then, and she jerked the wheel hard to the right, trying to avoid this doomed man—

  (is it a child??)

  —in the road.

  Like a dumb animal, the figure lurch-stumbled in the same direction as the car. Krista cranked the wheel hard to the right.

  Kath screamed.

  There followed a blunt metallic crunch—then the windshield shattered, became a swarm of angry, needling shards. The figure came through the glass headfirst, directly in front of Kath, and for a split second—the space of a discharging flashbulb—Krista saw its face in the dashlights. Most of one side of it had been torn away, and the jaw hung loosely agape, unhinged and drooling black blood.

  Then something solid loomed up before them, brightened, and Krista was out of her seat, impacting the roof with her skull, grappling through numbness with the macabre idea—the wholly insane idea—that the face bursting through the windshield had already seen death, which followed her down an airless shaft into that most unforgiving darkness.

  The car came abruptly to rest against a low fieldstone fence. Steam escaped the crumpled hood. The horn, jammed into life, bleat a constant, ululating note into the unheeding night.

  Nothing moved.

  21

  SCOTT DECIDED TO HAVE THAT drink after all. He told the stewardess to make it a stiff one. As he sipped it, he forced his mind into a more positive frame.

  His girls would be there. Both of them. Standing at the top of the debarking ramp or huddled together near the baggage carousels, Bowman’s harem in full regalia, all smiles and warm hugs. Sure, tonight was the full moon—he’d checked it against his wallet calendar—but that was merely a detail, part of the horror-comic veneer. Any good graveyard scene had to have a full moon. It was a given. Krista and Kath were in Boston, they had to be. They’d probably arrived there in the forenoon. They would be at the airport and he would greet them, pull Krista close and squeeze her until he heard ribs snap. Kath would kiss him and then wrap his thumb in her hand, swinging his arm as they ambled out to the car. And Krista would tell him the whole sad tale all over again, her Newfie upbringing making it impossible for her to skip the part about the cow shitting itself on the hood.

  It would all be all right.

  These thoughts followed him down into a restless stupor born of exhaustion, too much booze and that gnawing, unappeasable fear.

  The dream came instantly.

  A tombstone like the stump of an amputated limb poked through the ground-mist of his imagination. In the stark realism of this dream Scott could see the stone’s Gothic inscription, but was unable to spirit his dream-eye close enough to decipher the words. A sudden wet tearing sound issued from the soil fronting the marker and then rot-blackened fingers groped into the frosty night air. An eyeless head followed, black tongue hideously lolling, yellow teeth glinting in the moonlight. Then came the hunched and creaking shoulders, slowly excavating themselves from the tomb with a sick sucking sound....

  Scott awoke
in a lather of sweat. A stewardess was standing over him, one hand on his shoulder, the smile gone from her pretty face.

  The seat beside him was vacant. The jet was on the tarmac in front of Logan International.

  Gathering his things, Scott hurried down the aisle to the exit.

  * * *

  There was no one waiting for him at the top of the debarking ramp. No one at the baggage claim, either.

  A weight like a millstone settled on Scott’s shoulders. He called Caroline from a pay phone to ask if his girls were there.

  “No, not yet,” Caroline said. “Krista called this afternoon...said they had some trouble with the car. A hole in the radiator, I think. She said she’d pick you up at the airport before coming out here.”

  Fear, now a familiar companion, doubled the weight on Scott’s shoulders. He stood there with his ear pressed to the receiver.

  “Should I drive out and pick you up?” Caroline said, filling the void of Scott’s silence.

  “No,” Scott said, his voice nearly failing him. “You’d better stay there in case she calls or shows up. I’ll wait here. I can see the Delta off-ramp from where I’m standing. Get a pencil, I’ll give you the number of this booth. Call me if you hear anything.”

  Scott read off the seven digits and hung up. Then he sat in a plastic contour chair by the phone and began to wait, powerless to block the horrible certainty that spawned in his heart. He spent the next forty minutes searching every face that passed. Once, he was right out of his chair, jostling past glares of annoyance, lurching toward an auburn-haired woman in a blue windbreaker, and a child...but the woman was twenty and the child was a boy.

  When the phone rang forty minutes later and Caroline’s sobbing voice told him Krista was dead, Scott closed his eyes and collapsed into a dead faint on the concourse floor. The darkness came quickly, like a summer storm. His head struck the ceramic tiles like a flung melon, opening a gash in his scalp. Two things followed him down: one thought—

  (What about Kath?)

  —and a voice, Caroline’s voice, high, singsong, childlike, growing tauntingly louder and louder...