The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  With the scrapbook open across his knees, Scott squinted in the ill light at the photograph glued to the first page. It was a time-faded Polaroid taken in the yard out back, the swing and hunched willow acting as backdrops. A pale, silver-haired girl stood at the hip of a tall, grinning man who was easily in his seventies, a man with the most striking dark eyes, eyes that were more like buttons....

  The words scribbled below in blue fountain ink were barely legible, as if time and putrescence had suspended their business just long enough for this corpse-guarded bundle to be found. The carefully written caption read: “Grandpa and Marissa Rowe. Missy’s tenth, July 11, 1972."

  The Cartoonist...the old man was the child’s grandfather.

  Feeling as if his skin had begun to tease lightly away from his body, Scott turned the page and tried to decipher the faded letter he found glued there. It was dated January 3, 1970. The script was scrawled and unsteady, created by a tremulous hand, and the text was riddled with errors, most of the words spelled out phonetically. To Scott, it translated into something like this....

  Dear Daddy:

  I’m all better now. The doctors at the san say I’m ready to take up a normal life again. I haven’t had nothing to drink in two years, and for the drugs it’s been even longer. I want my Marissa back. I know you are the father, and I told the doctors at the san, but she needs her mama now, so please don’t give me no trouble on this. The doctors say she is still legally mine. It’s been nine long years. I don’t want you doing the same things to her that you done to me. I’ll be up there in a week. Please have my little girl ready. Tell her we’re going to live in Boston, in a nice apartment near the water.

  Your daughter,

  Marietta

  Not her grandfather...her father...

  Scott turned the page. Glued there he found a child’s crayon drawing. In it, a crude stick-child cowered behind the leg of a tall stick-man with a knife in his hand. Standing before them was an ugly stick-witch, with a long warty nose and a bottle in her hand. The caption below, in childish script with some of the letters flipped backwards, read: Please don’t let her take me.

  On the next page was an old newspaper article, dated January 30, 1970.

  Reported missing by her father is Marietta Rowe, thirty-six, mother of Marissa Rowe. Miss Rowe had recently been released from a Boston rehab center and had been on her way home to reclaim her child when she vanished. Her father, Nicholas Rowe, has had custody of the child since shortly following its birth. No leads...

  Along with the clipping was a photograph, also badly faded. A plain pallid face, hardened by alcohol and pain, peered out at Scott like a ghost.

  Marissa’s mother. Sullen, mean, cheated-looking. Around her neck hung a garish medallion, a peace sign looped in a silver oval.

  Scott struck a match and tipped it into the hole. The yellow teardrop of light quivered, creating depthless black shadows.

  Coiled in the area of the skeleton’s throat were the chain and corroded medallion.

  The old man had murdered his own daughter in order to keep Marissa with him. What a strange and terrible love....

  Barely breathing, Scott turned the page.

  And found drawings.

  Once again unreality washed silkily over him.

  The drawings depicted that long ago accident...but from the child’s point of view.

  In the first frame a small white hand reached out for the playfully fleeing kitten. The kitten’s tail stood straight up, its tiny legs taking quick, bounding strides. In the next frame the tall grass parted as the chase wore on, the kitten always one reach ahead, ducking, feinting, darting away.

  Then came the road and the glare of the headlights, and that still, endless moment. Slopes of metal, glints of chrome, a wall of glass, a demon face that was his own...

  And a white-haired child in a halo of blood.

  How does he know? How is he doing this to me?

  Embracing madness, Scott turned the page.

  And found drawings...

  A house on fire. A mansion. Tall and proud, like his father had been. Dancing, licking flames. A long shot from the mouth of the sweeping entryway, down by the pillared gates. The number forty-seven fashioned in brass, inlaid and polished to a gleam.

  It was the house Scott had grown up in.

  The house his parents fried in.

  Shaking so violently he could barely breathe, Scott turned to the last rotting page. There, he found a message in neat Gothic script. It said simply: An Eye for an Eye.

  Fury slipped into Scott’s horror, a streak of red in a funnel of blinding white.

  Droplets of blood spattered the page in small beaded circlets. Scott lifted a hand to his chin and found that the old, pea-sized scar there had opened and started to bleed.

  Now the book’s cover seemed to move, to squirm against his supporting hand....

  A clot of slugs and shiny-black beetles oozed from the cover and slithered over Scott’s bare forearm. Screaming like a banshee, Scott flung the book to the floor and swiped at his arm in wild, scything arcs. He clambered to his feet and took to his heel, but in the dark he tripped on a bottle and fell. Something sharp buried itself into the meat of his thigh. Ignoring the pain he rose again, moving quickly but more carefully now.

  He had to get out of here. Had to get back to Kath.

  She would never be safe alone again.

  31

  AS HE BURST INTO the lobby and heard the Code Blue call for the ICU, a single overmastering thought broke through: Got to reach Kath. Got to reach my little girl. It was this thought, more than any deliberate pattern of command, that carried him forward. He had no recollection of the drive in from the cemetery, nor would he ever have. He had become a creature of reflex, functioning on autopilot, drawing unconsciously on the previously learned skills of walking, running and driving. The voice calling the Code over the PA boosted his run to a precarious sprint. Wide, unbelieving eyes tracked his progress through the lobby and down the hall to the unit.

  Not Kath, please don’t let it be Kath....

  The unit’s heavy doors yielded to Scott’s straight-arm, the racket they made barely contributing to the controlled frenzy of movement already converging on Kath’s corner room. A nurse with harried blue eyes thrust a stainless steel crash cart ahead of her. A bearded technologist burst through a narrow back door, dragging a robotic ventilator behind him. An intern bolted from her chair in front the console, nipping into Kath’s room just ahead of the nurse with the cart.

  And they were all in on it. Every last one of them.

  Scott flew across the gray-tiled floor, catching the nurse by the elbow as she aimed the cart into the room, shoving past her with enough force to almost topple the cart. He flung the curtains aside... and froze in fearful bewilderment.

  It wasn’t Kath in the bed but an elderly woman with tubes running out of every visible orifice. A nurse was kneeling on the edge of the bed administering CPR, counting the rhythm outloud, her words rising above the clamor of equipment and voices like some dark incantation:

  “One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand...”

  The intern touched Scott’s elbow, and he whirled to face her. “Your daughter has been transferred to the Telemetry Unit,” she said in a high, carrying voice. “We needed her bed. Telemetry’s through that door.” She pointed to the far wall, at the back of the ICU. “Please, Dr. Bowman, we need all the room we can get.”

  “Is she...?”

  The intern flicked a glance at the resuscitation in progress, then nodded. “Your daughter is fine. Now, please...”

  Grinning despite the chaos around him, Scott dashed out of the room and into the Telemetry Unit, relief glowing in his face like the radiance of a stone hearth.

  Terry Deans, the nurse in charge of the Telemetry Unit, glanced up from her charting and smiled. But the smile faltered when her eyes met Scott’s. Whoever this guy was, she didn’t want him in her unit. She knew that immediately.
And unless he had a legitimate reason for being here, she would usher him right back out again. He was unshaven and bloodied, his clothes were a mess, and there was something...maniacal in his eyes.

  She got to her feet and said, “Can I help you, sir?”

  I’m looking for my daughter,” Scott said, his bloodshot gaze darting from room to room.

  “Her name?” Terry said, finding it hard to believe a man in this condition could have a daughter. She wondered if he was the father of the child-abuse case in 2C.

  “Kath...Kathleen Bowman. She’s ten. She was in the ICU until earlier this morning.”

  Terry felt something loosen in her chest. This was the poor sot whose wife had been killed in that MVA the other night. Still, it didn’t explain why he looked as if he’d been out brawling in the rain.

  “Your daughter’s in 2F, Mr. Bowman. Down this hall, third door on your right.”

  “Is anyone with her? Her aunt...?”

  Terry shook her head. “Her aunt left a few minutes ago. Said she was going to scout up some magazines—”

  Scott spun away. He didn’t want Kath left alone for another minute. It had already occurred to him to call the police...but what would he tell them? That somebody was trying to even the score for a hit-and-run murder committed sixteen years ago?

  God, that infernal noise in his head. It had changed subtly in quality since he got back to the hospital. Now it sounded like rats foraging behind plaster, or...or...

  (or what?)

  2F.

  Kath was asleep, lying on her back, Jinnie on the pillow beside her. The doll, its eyes perpetually open, grinned at Scott with benign imbecility.

  Scott stepped into the room—this one even smaller than the one in ICU, but unencumbered by all of that bulky equipment—and sat on the foot of the bed. Heaving a sigh, he placed a hand on Kath’s ankle, which felt warm and vital to his touch. Without startling, Kath opened her eyes and looked at him.

  But she wasn’t really looking at him, Scott realized. No. She wasn’t really looking at anything. Her eyes were open and aimed at her father, but they were as unseeing as the eyes of her doll.

  Alarmed, Scott whispered Kath’s name. Now there was a light in her eyes that had never been there before, a luster that was more incandescence than reflection, and for a moment it seemed to intensify to an unnatural brightness, making Scott think of the evil offspring in Village of the Damned—and of Jake Laking’s eyes on that night years ago.

  Then it went out, leaving Kath’s eyes as vacant and black as a shark’s.

  Scott stopped breathing and listened.

  That noise! What was that Christless noise? It wasn’t inside his head anymore, it was right in this room, all around him...

  scratch,scratch,scratch...scratch...

  Kath sat up in bed, sprang up, like a tin target in a carnival shooting gallery. Her hands clutched fiercely at her neck, and she began making grotesque gurgling noises in her throat, as if trying to dislodge an inhaled chunk of food. Her face, now almost totally bleached of its summer color, darkened to the hue of a stormcloud. Her eyes remained dark and wide—and suddenly, Scott understood why. Her pupils were dilated, so widely dilated that the blue of her irises was completely swallowed up.

  Brain damage, he thought in sudden, icy panic. She’s been lying here alone in this fucking Telemetry Unit and convulsing herself into permanent brain damage...

  Scott opened his mouth to scream.

  “Daddy...” Kath said, striking him mute. “Make it stop...” She raked at her throat, spittle flying from the twisted slit of her mouth. “He’s...trying to kill me...Daddeeeeeee...”

  scratch,scratch,scratch,scratch...

  Scott looked on in paralyzed horror, the clamor in his head threatening to blow him apart. He watched as his baby choked and could not lift a finger to help her.

  “Oh my God...” It was Caroline, standing in the doorway, her face the color of old wax. An armload of magazines fell to the floor. “Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “For God’s sake, somebody, help!”

  Kath’s hands left her throat and reached for her father. “Daaaa...” she croaked, her eyes doing a hideous backroll. “Make it ssssss...”

  Scott clapped his hands to his ears.

  Scratchscratchscratchscratchscratchscra

  “No,” he roared, slamming his eyes shut. “NO!”

  And then it stopped. All of it. Kath’s strangling, Scott’s shocky paralysis, the noise in his head...a noise that was so much like—

  Kath flung her arms around her father’s neck and held on like a drowning child. He could hear her breathing next to his ear, short, fitful gasps, and was reminded of his own choking horror beneath the dock.

  Thudding footfalls materialized into Terry Deans, the unit’s head nurse. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “Make it stop it, Daddy,” Kath pleaded breathlessly. “Make him go away...”

  “Who, baby,” Scott said. “Make who go away?”

  Noticing Kath’s labored breathing, and the angry red marks on her neck, Terry Deans stepped closer, her expression drawn with concern. “Let me look,” she said, and then pulled back as if stung when Scott jerked Kath away.

  “No,” Scott shouted, all control gone now. “Just stay away!”

  A lanky orderly appeared in the doorway.

  “Ken,” Terry said. “Go get help. Hurry.”

  The orderly vanished at a run.

  “Caroline,” Scott said, clutching Kath to his chest. “Find Kath’s clothes. We’re getting out of here. Someone’s trying to hurt my baby—”

  “No,” Kath choked. “He’s...Daddeeeee!”

  The hackles rising on his neck, Scott pushed back from Kath and stared at her face. It was purpling again, and her eyes...

  scratchscratchscratch...

  A tall black physician jogged into the room, stethoscope bouncing at his neck like a jaunty scarf. When he saw Kath’s condition he rushed to her side, barking orders as he moved.

  “Get a crash cart in here, and a ventilator, and get some help from the ICU. I want an IV of—”

  “Is that him, baby?” Scott said. “Is he the one you mean?”

  “Please, sir,” the doctor said. “Clear the way. If this is your child she’s in grave danger. I must treat her now.”

  “Get away!” Scott roared.

  Then an orderly was on him, dragging him back, and Kath was choking, mauling her throat, gaping at Scott with those soulless black eyes. People began filling the room—the intern from ICU, the round-eyed nurse with the clattering cart, the bearded technician with the mechanical lung. Another nurse tried to restrain Kath’s arms while the doctor administered oxygen. Kath thrashed savagely, her throat bloating like a toad’s, each effort to breathe diminished to a feeble, crowing stridor.

  “Get away from her!” Scott bellowed, throwing off the orderly as if he possessed no more substance than a pillow. “Leave my daughter alone! It wasn’t her fault, can’t you see that?”

  Hands closed like manacles around his wrists. A powerful forearm encircled his chest. Scott thrust back an elbow and felt it hammer someone’s jaw.

  “Get him out of here,” the doctor said. Then, to the nurse with the cart: “Give me a number six E-tube. I’m going to have to intubate her.”

  The room was tilting, spinning, bleeding darkness. Hands and arms were all over him, forcing him back through the doorway.

  That damned noise!

  And once again Scott was standing in the doorway to another room in another hospital, thrumming with adrenaline, needing every ounce of control he could muster to avoid fleeing a harmless old man in a wheelchair.

  A harmless old man and his ceaselessly scratching pencil.

  And then he knew, in a dark and ancient part of his soul, what that noise in his head really was.

  Kath’s struggling had ceased. Now she lay utterly still. The doctor was attempting to insert a tube in her throat. At the foot of the bed, a nurse wa
s unwrapping a sterile surgical tray. Sharp, stainless-steel instruments winked in the cold fluorescent glare. Hopeless resignation dulled all eyes in the room.

  The curtains were drawn.

  And the noise in Scott’s head abated.

  In one clean motion he twisted his body free—and in a dozen quick strides he was out of the unit, down the main hall and bolting into the family room. He stopped by the bed and grabbed the phone, his breath coming in sharp, shallow rushes.

  “I’m at extension two-five-zero,” he said, recalling the instructions the nurse had given him the day before. “Give me an outside line.”

  In the pause that followed, Scott removed a tiny telephone directory from his wallet. He flipped it open to L and scanned to the middle of the page. It was a number he’d recorded years ago, but never used.

  There was the chatter of shifting circuits, then a dial tone.

  He pressed out eleven musical digits. It rang three times.

  “Yes.” It was a woman’s voice, dull, congested, drugged-sounding.

  “This is Scott Bowman. I’m an old friend of Jake’s and it’s urgent that I speak with him. Is—”

  A bitter chuckle arrested Scott’s words. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “What—”

  “This is Jake’s sister. Jake killed himself, Mr. Bowman. Himself, his wife, and his two sweet babies. We buried the lot of them four days ago.”

  Oh, God. “How did he—” But the dial tone cut him short.

  Numb, he fingered a new set of digits, this time from memory, fumbling once and starting again.

  “Eastern Ontario Health Sciences Centre.”

  “Two Link. It’s Dr. Bowman. Hurry, please.”

  A series of clicks. Ringing.

  “Two Link, Mavis MacDonald, RN.”

  “Mavis,” Scott said, feeling something like relief. He knew this crusty old Grad and liked her. “I need a favor—”

  “Dr. Bowman?” the nurse interrupted. “Is that you?”

  “Yes. Listen, Mavis, this is terribly important.” As he spoke he felt a shred of self-control returning. However incredible, the madness had a focus now. It no longer possessed that awful, free-floating quality. “I want you to run down to the old man’s room, the Cartoonist, and I want you to take his clipboard and bring it back to the phone.” He remembered trying to pry the pencil from that arthritic claw. “If he gives you a fight, have someone help you. Do it quickly!”