The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  There was an uncertain pause. Then, as if to dismiss the ravings of a grief-stricken man, Mavis said: “I was very sorry to hear about your family, Doctor. We all—”

  “Do it now, Mavis. Please!”

  The distant thunk of the hold button cast Scott’s waiting ear into a sea of hissing interference, a sound somehow more maddening than the vanished scratching.

  Now Caroline was standing beside him, clutching his arm, shaking him. “Scott? What’s happening? Who are you calling?”

  Scott raised a staying hand, startling when Mavis came back on the line. “Did you get it?” he blurted before the nurse had an opportunity to speak.

  “Yes. No trouble at all. He was sleeping like a baby—”

  “Tell me what you see. What has he drawn?”

  “Nothing. There’s just a blank sheet...”

  “Look underneath.”

  Paper being shuffled. “Weird,” Mavis said into the phone. “It looks like some sort of ghoulish cartoon creature strangling the life out of a child...a girl, I think, in her bed.”

  “Oh, dear Jesus,” Scott murmured, his body suddenly clammy and slack. “How can it be...how can...?”

  But he had known. Deep down he had known since the abandoned cottage, when he’d seen that musty old Polaroid, those loathsome, bullet-hole eyes.

  “Doctor? Dr. Bowman, are you still there?”

  Scott pressed the receiver to his ear. “Mavis,” he said shakily. “I want you to take down an order. I’ll countersign it when I get there tonight. I want you to give him seventy-five milligrams of chlorpromazine IM every three hours, without fail. I want—”

  “Seventy-five milligrams,” Mavis said. “I don’t mean to tell you your business, Doctor, but seventy-five milligrams will knock that old boy right on his ass. He’s already asleep, for goodness’ sake, why—”

  “Just do it, Mavis. You don’t want to ignore this order. I mean it. I want him flat out, unconscious. He’s dangerous, Mavis, he’s—” Scott cut off his words. He’d said too much already. “Just do it. Please. It’s important...more important than you can know.”

  “All right, Doctor,” Mavis said, already knowing what she would do. “You’ll sign that order tonight?”

  “I guarantee it. Do it now, Mavis, please.” He hung up.

  “Stay right here,” he told Caroline, ignoring her questions. Then he rushed back to the unit.

  As Scott hurried in, the physician who’d been working on Kath rose from behind the desk, his grim expression confirming Scott’s darkest expectations.

  “She’s had some sort of catastrophic respiratory embarrassment,” he told Scott, his coffee-colored eyes defeated but unwavering. “I’ve never seen anything like it. There was no foreign body there, but when I tried to admit the tube, it was as if the tissues were being compressed from the outside. I just couldn’t get it past. I had to do a tracheostomy—”

  “You mean she’s alive?” Scott said, and a grin that was perilously close to mad creased his face.

  For the first time the older doctor’s eyes fell away from Scott’s. “She’s alive, Dr. Bowman...” Words seemed momentarily to escape him. “But I’m afraid there’s a strong chance she’s sustained some damage to her brain. It’s impossible at this early stage to determine exactly how much....”

  Still grinning, Scott brushed past the doctor as he might an inanimate obstruction and headed for room 2F.

  But as he stepped inside, the glimmer of self-control he’d recovered while on the phone extinguished like a dying star. How many times as an intern had he witnessed a similar scene? A hundred, two hundred times? A respiratory tech, fiddling with the dials on a ventilator like a kid glued body-and-soul to a video game. A nurse, grimly gathering the blood-stained utensils employed in the emergency tracheostomy, hunched over her tray like a waitress wearily approaching the end of a double shift. And a patient, motionless in a clean white bed, each breath fed into her lungs by a relentless rubber bellows.

  But this time the patient was his own little girl.

  This time the patient was Kath.

  The respirator was connected to a plastic adapter at her throat. A drop of blood, thinned to a wash-pink by disrupted tissue fluids, leaked out of the incision and coursed down her neck like a bloody tear.

  Swaying like a drunk, Scott imagined all the life-support apparatus away—and was left with an image of Kath in a mahogany casket. The lid was open, and the cloying reek of flowers was sickening, unendurable; he could feel his stomach doing a slow, deliberate rollover...

  He closed his eyes and the image vanished. When he opened them again he was alone in the room with his daughter.

  He noticed Jinnie on the floor beneath the bed. The doll had been knocked over during the save-a-life frenzy that had taken place in this room only minutes before. The doll’s bloated face was all that was showing, and its unblinking eyes seemed to accuse him. He picked it up and set it back on Kath’s pillow.

  Kath’s eyes were closed.

  Sleeping, he thought, finding comfort in the self-delusion. Just having a nap. He placed a hand on her forehead.

  Then, in a reflex action learned in medical school, he lifted her eyelids and examined the globes underneath.

  Nothing. Blackness. Dark pools of stagnant, cold water.

  Scott’s first instinct was to try to waken her, to reach inside and scoop her up from the drowning pools of her eyes. It was the doctor in him that spared him the horror of attempting to do so.

  He backed away.

  And then an idea so utterly implausible and yet so irresistible struck him he began to tremble at its very possibility. Whatever it was he was up against, he had no sane idea...but none of this was sane, was it? Had he come nose to nose with Satan himself, personified in that wretched old man? Or was it some bitter, avenging Angel of God? Four days ago (was it really only four days?), had someone told him that within a matter of hours he would believe unquestioningly in psychic phenomena, he would have uttered a hearty laugh. Had the same individual suggested that within a week he’d be contemplating a deal with the devil, he would have had the fellow forcibly incarcerated.

  But if the old man could make these things happen simply by drawing them—and wasn’t that exactly what he was doing?—then maybe he could undo them, too. Maybe he could be persuaded to restore Kath to her normal self, retrieve her soul and spill it back into those vacant eyes.

  At that moment the possibility he’d gone totally insane flickered through Scott’s mind and was summarily dismissed.

  He went to a phone and called the airport. They could have him on a direct flight at three o’clock, which would put him in Ottawa at ten past four. It was now two-twenty.

  Returning to the room and grabbing his flight bag, Scott took a last look at Kath before whirling away.

  He collided with Caroline in the doorway.

  “Scott. Where are you going?”

  He seized her arm, causing pain. “Stay with her,” he said with crazed intensity. “Protect her.”

  “Sco—”

  As he brushed past her, his flight bag snagged on the door latch and jerked from his grip. Clothes spilled out, a toothbrush, and the envelope filled with Christmas photos. The pictures skidded free, fanning in an arc like a gambler’s deck. Scott scooped up the bag and stuffed his clothing back inside. Bewildered, Caroline bent to retrieve the photographs.

  When she looked up again Scott was gone.

  The pictures of Krista were the hardest, but she flipped through them compulsively, her expression switching from anguish to pleasure back to anguish again.

  Her baby sister, dead. It was inconceivable...

  Tears filming her eyes, Caroline came upon the underwater photo of the dock. She gazed at it wonderingly, feeling suddenly cold, then shuffled it to the bottom of the pile.

  The next print was blank...

  Or was it?

  Caroline watched in disbelief as the quality of the unexposed print changed, ever so subtl
y. At first she thought it was just her imagination, conjuring illusions in her overwrought mind.

  But no...the thing was changing, developing, like a Polaroid, only slower. There was a face beginning to appear, or part of a face... and a pair of hands, reaching up.

  My God, Caroline thought in fearful astonishment, that expression...

  The face in the photo, appearing now as if a wreath of dirty smoke were being slowly sucked away, was hideously contorted, as if screaming its last. And it seemed mired in something...below the chin, around the ears, framing the forehead...

  Quicksand?

  Yes, it was the face of a man sinking in quicksand.

  But not just a man...

  Scott?

  The nerves fled Caroline’s fingers and the picture twirled to the floor. The same gradual unmisting occurred in the next print, also a blank. Baleful red eyes appeared, snaggle teeth, huge sprays of blood.

  Caroline screamed, and this time all of the pictures fell, scattering over the floor like the fragments of a shattered dream.

  32

  “WHERE IS HE?”

  Janet Brown, the ward clerk on Two Link, took an involuntary step backward, quietly thanking God there was a desk between her and the man on the opposite side. She had been chatting on the phone with her boyfriend when Scott came up behind her and began digging frantically through the chart rack.

  “Where is who?” Janet said. She had never seen a doctor look such a mess. Drunks or accident victims maybe, but never a doctor. And there was something wrong with his eyes. Red-rimmed and too shiny, they shifted almost constantly, as if he feared the building might suddenly collapse or that some savage beast might pounce out and devour him. Hunted. That was the word she wanted. The man looked hunted.

  Scott planted his fists on the desktop and leaned toward her. “The old man. The Cartoonist. Where is he?”

  Janet took another step backward and stumbled into her chair. She realized her boyfriend was still on hold. She glanced along the hallway in both directions, damning its dinner-hour emptiness, then looked back at Scott.

  “Transferred,” she said, almost shouting the word. “They moved him to Psychiatry about an hour ago. Is there anything I can do...?”

  But Scott had already turned away, heading at a run for the stairwell. The clerk waited until he’d slipped through the doorway, then dialed zero and had the nursing supervisor paged from her supper.

  Bateman, Scott thought as he flew down the stairs to the main floor. He’d forgotten about the department head’s interest in the old man. Of course Mavis MacDonald would have called Bateman to verify Scott’s wholly inappropriate order, and of course Bateman would have vetoed it.

  He pushed through to the main floor and darted into the nursing station, which at the moment was abandoned. He went to the desktop Rolodex and began flipping through it, scanning for the old man’s new room number.

  “Can I help you?” a wary voice asked from behind him.

  Scott ignored it and kept fingering through the files, cursing his trembling clumsiness.

  “Dr. Bowman?” the voice said uncertainly. “Is that you?”

  “What room is the Cartoonist in?” Scott said, turning his crazed green eyes on the nurse.

  The woman flinched back, as the clerk on Two Link had done. She answered by snatching a chart from the rack and thrusting it at him. Scott flung the chart open and scanned to the telephone order he’d given Mavis MacDonald. Following protocol, Mavis had written in Scott’s order and signed it. But in the section below was another order, this one inscribed in neat, fountain-ink script: Cancel above, it read simply. Transfer patient to psychiatry. It was signed V. Bateman, MD.

  The Cartoonist was in 117, a private room at the end of the hall.

  Scott moved quickly into the corridor—then fear ran its finger down his belly and he slowed, overcome once again by that drifting sensation of unreality. Breathing deeply, he fought to reorient himself. The corridor was familiar. He had walked it almost daily since the hospital opened more than eight years ago. His office was at the end of a similar corridor just one flight down. He made his living in this building. It was a good place, a safe place, a sane place.

  But was it real? Was any of it real? The flight up from Boston, even the drive into the city from the airport, had already faded from concrete recall, now seeming more dreamlike than real...except that he remembered climbing into Krista’s Chevette in the airport parking lot. That he remembered with awful clarity. The lingering scent of her perfume. The objects, now meaningless, that had once lived through her personality: the punky, rhinestone-studded sunglasses she’d forgotten to take with her to Boston; the unopened packet of Trident bubble gum on the dash; the pair of sheer nylon pantyhose still in its package on the seat...

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

  Scott started forward, then froze outside the doorway to 117, his flesh going cold with apprehension. He took the last few steps with his back pressed firmly to the wall.

  The artist was in his wheelchair by the shaded window. His back was to Scott and he was drawing, the sound of the pencil seeming to fill the room.

  And suddenly Scott knew he couldn’t face the old man. Maybe he really was an agent of an angered God...because Scott really was guilty. He had slaughtered a helpless child and then fled like a sniveling coward.

  He’s killing me, Daddy...

  No. It had to end. It had to end now. God or demon or one-eyed alien. He would have to face it.

  Breathless, Scott bolted into the room and seized the clipboard from those murdering hands. The Cartoonist—Nicholas Rowe—didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. He only drooled, his black eyes aimed unblinking into space. Scott’s gaze ran to the two completed frames—but, as the graveyard sequence had at first glance, these sketches seemed connected to nothing real, nothing meaningful to Scott. Shown was a grim-visaged judge hearing the pleas of a man clad in old-style prison fatigues. In the second frame two guards restrained the prisoner while the judge, delivering his verdict, brought the gavel down with a crash. The next few frames, though neatly squared off, remained ominously blank.

  Scott wadded the unfinished sequence into a ball and tossed it to the floor. He flipped the clipboard onto the bed and stepped in behind the wheelchair.

  Then, abruptly, he took hold of the hand grips and swung the wheelchair around. A rope of drool whipped back from the old man’s chin and plastered itself to his cheek.

  “You can cut the act, Rowe,” Scott said, unable to disguise the raw fear in his voice. “I know all about you now.”

  The old man didn’t respond—but that odor was on him again, the alleycat reek Scott had smelled when he tried to pry the pencil from that knotted fist four days before.

  Scott took hold of Rowe’s seamed yellow face and twisted it up toward his own, trying to see something—anything—in the pits of those eyes, eyes that were so much like Kath’s had been the last time Scott had seen her.

  “Please,” he said, verging on tears at the wan, empty image of Kath his mind had thrown up. “Please stop this.” His grip tightened on the slack flesh of the old man’s face, puckering his lips like the mouth of a carp. “It wasn’t her fault...”

  The old man leaned away, freeing himself from Scott’s grip, reaching for the clipboard on the bed. Scott grabbed the arm of the wheelchair, preventing him by bare inches from reaching his target. The artist persisted, stretching, grunting, his deformed fingers clutching at the air like the fingers of a drowning man, oh, yes, a drowning man, Scott knew that feeling...and suddenly the terror beneath the dock came flooding back with the abrupt and frightful clarity of a nightmare. He could feel the water at his neck like powerful hands, choking, suffocating...

  Scott released the wheelchair and staggered back, clutching his throat, his body faint and tingling with airhunger.

  With an effort he managed a breath.

  scratch,scratch,scratch...

  “Stop it!” Scott roared,
one hand sweeping down like a sword, cutting the clipboard from the old man’s grip and sending it clattering to the floor. “Stop it!” He buried his fists into Nicholas Rowe’s nightshirt and hauled him up to the limit of his restraints. “Krista’s dead!” he bellowed at the unheeding skeleton in his grip. “Krista’s dead and I want my daughter back!”

  His face livid, Scott bent and retrieved the clipboard. He jabbed it roughly into the old man’s ribs.

  “Here you son of a bitch. Draw!” He sounded absurdly like a gunslinger, calling out the town marshal. “Draw my girl normal or I’ll kill you!”

  The Cartoonist broke wet, rancid, old-man’s wind.

  And for the first time since Scott had set eyes on him, he seemed to grin.

  Scott struck him a whistling backhand. He lifted his hand to strike again, but then something had him by the wrist. He snapped his arm free and whirled to face Jane Copeland, the nursing supervisor.

  “Have you gone mad?” Copeland said, her face an almost comic mask of shock and disbelief.

  “Out!” Scott bellowed. “Get out of here now!” He steamed toward her like an engine of destruction.

  Copeland backed away. “What is going on in here, Doctor? My God, he’s just an old man...?”

  “Out,” Scott said, clenching his fists in front of him. “He killed my wife.” Part of him knew how crazy that sounded, but he was beyond caring. “He killed my wife and now he’s trying to kill my daughter.”

  “What?” The supervisor stumbled through the doorway into the hall. “I’m going to get Security, damn you. You leave that old man al—”

  The slamming door cut off her words. Scott twisted the lock, then dragged the bed across it as a barricade. He turned back to the old man and felt his legs turn to rubber.