The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  His curiosity trebling with each passing minute, Scott paid the attendant and left promptly for the hospital.

  * * *

  He went directly to the old man’s room, but found no sign of him there. The bed was neatly made up and his wheelchair was missing. He checked the lounge next and, finding it vacant, went to the nearby nursing station.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the nurse in charge. “Where’s the patient in 209C?”

  “The Cartoonist?” the nurse said, chuckling. “Out with his pals doing the Sunshine Bus tour. Mandatory crock airing, once a week whether they realize it or not.” She folded beefy arms across an ample bosom. “Why, have you got students today?”

  “No,” Scott said. “It’s not important...thanks. I’ll see him later.”

  Disappointed, he went to a phone to put in a page for Steve Franklin, the orthopedic surgeon...but as he lifted the receiver, an idea interrupted him. He replaced the handset and hurried back to the old man’s room.

  After a quick search he found the handbag portfolio tucked out of sight in the old man’s closet. There was only one other patient and his two visitors in the room, and they paid Scott little heed as he fished carefully through the portfolio.

  When Scott found what he was looking for, the blood drained from his face. The single drawing he’d seen on Friday was now just the first of an incredible series of drawings covering two full pages. His hands shook like a drunk’s as he studied them.

  There could no longer be any doubt that the drawing represented his dock—he could see that plainly, without the need for comparison with the photo. The first sketch was as it had been before—the ribbed barrels, the white-rose decals, the distorted cedar slats—except that now the rippled reflection of a diver hung suspended over the water. In the second frame, which covered the middle third of the page, the cartoon diver dropped feet-first toward the bottom. In the third, surrounded by head-high weeds, and with great rushes of air boiling out of his mouth, the figure gaped in horror at his rock-ensnared leg....

  Sweat beaded Scott’s forehead as he flutter-flipped to the next page. The diver looked nothing like him; of course not, it was only a cartoon...but the circumstances were unmistakable.

  The next frame showed the swimmer hopelessly entangled in weeds, doll eyes rolled back to reveal the whites, mouth a water-clogged clarion of terror. Above him loomed the hull and wake of a boat. In the foreground hung a rope and shiny anchor. In the background, leering up from a great and cloudy depth, were two blood-red, demon eyes. Poking up from between the rocks, a veined, reptilian claw clutched the diver’s ankle.

  The last frame, the one Scott viewed through a darkening tunnel, was a close-up of one groping, weed-entwined hand, reaching out for that rope...

  And missing it.

  “Mister?” a voice behind him said. “You all right?”

  Scott tasted bile in his throat. Someone pressed a hand into the damp hollow of his back.

  “Hey, fella, you’d better sit over here. You look sorta pasty.”

  Hands guiding him to the edge of the old man’s bed. “Betty,” another voice murmured. “Go find a nurse.” Scott followed passively, his eyes still glued to that last frame.

  * * *

  Bateman sat hunched in his office chair, the drawings on the desk in front of him, his quick hazel eyes switching with interest from one frame to the next. Scott, feeling better now, sat on the opposite side of Bateman’s imposing teak desk. He’d come close to fainting back there in the old man’s room.

  In his office, surrounded by neatness and knowledge, Bateman was in his element. His desk, flanked on all sides by literal walls of textbooks and publications, supported a blotter, an extension lamp and an empty in-out tray. The balance of its vast polished surface was vacant. A small chalkboard, spotless and black, stood like a henchman beside it. From behind that desk, Bateman presided over his department like a baron with a shiny new guillotine.

  As much as Scott disliked Bateman’s professional snobbery, his overbearing manner and neatness neurosis, he had to concede the man’s brilliance. A cum laude Harvard graduate, Bateman was peerless in his knowledge of clinical psychiatry—in this respect he was a veritable phenomenon. In addition, Bateman had a special interest in the paranormal: in things, events and individuals unusual. It was an avocation he’d cleverly wangled into his research budget—and it was one of the main reasons his colleagues considered him somewhat of an oddity. On a shelf above his head, two books on the subject fronted a series of ten or twelve other leather-bound texts of Bateman’s own authorship. Scott had already related to the department head the incident in the lake, and how he had made the connection between himself and the Cartoonist’s initial drawing.

  “This is a real find,” Bateman said with genuine, almost boyish enthusiasm. “With your corroboration, Scott, this makes a nearly irrefutable case for precognition.” He stroked thoughtfully at his reed-thin mustache.

  Scott pushed another few sheets across the desk. Bateman took these and spread them out on the blotter, his manicured fingers automatically adjusting their edges, lining them up perfectly as he studied them.

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” Scott said, indicating the first of the new series of sketches, “this represents the Air Canada jet that crashed at Uplands a few weeks ago. If you recall, the plane exploded at the end of the runway during takeoff.”

  “Yes,” Bateman agreed. “Hell of a mess. More than three hundred dead. These are amazing.”

  “And this one,” Scott said, pointing shakily to another sheet. “This is that restaurant on Sussex Drive...remember? The terrorist bombing last month?”

  “Tremendous,” Bateman said with an exaggerated nod. “All along this old guy has been trying to tell us something.”

  “It sure looks that way,” Scott said, frankly awed. “Here we’ve been assuming he’d heard about these things on his radio, then drawn the pictures. Pretty incredible to think that he’s actually been foreseeing them. Jesus. I wish I’d known about this before I went swimming.”

  Scott paused thoughtfully. Like Krista, he was a realist. He’d always been skeptical of things like clairvoyance, ESP, telekinesis, that whole mumbo-jumbo grab bag. But this...this was too fantastic to ignore. He recalled once again his Friday afternoon encounter with the artist, how he had seemed to speed up when the nurse arrived to tell Scott that Krista was waiting on the line. The old guy had actually been trying to warn him against diving in the lake.

  Scott pointed to the second-last frame of the series relating to his accident, those sinister red eyes peering up from the depths, that clutching reptilian claw.

  “What about this?” he said. “Why do you think he’s suggesting the existence of some aquatic monster in the lake?”

  “My guess is that it relates to what you theorized earlier about this man. He probably was a professional artist at one time, and I’d bet dimes-to-doughnuts he drew for a horror comic or magazine.” Bateman’s fingers stroked his mustache. “Assuming this to be true, then the suggestion that some monstrous force resides in your lake is merely an embellishment, comic book icing left over from his career. The simple message he’s trying to relate—hey, Doc, you’re going to drown down there—is dressed up in the man’s inbred sense of dime-novel drama. You have only to look past the lurid gilding of the horror comic, however, to find that simple message.”

  Scott nodded. Given the old man’s “wild talent,” it seemed a sound interpretation. “Have you ever come across anything like this before?”

  “The literature abounds,” the older psychiatrist said, indicating with a grand gesture the bookshelf behind him. “Countless claims and unproven examples of everything from precognition to phenomena as weird and wonderful as telepathetic mind control and pyrokinesis. But personally, no, I’ve never had the good fortune of witnessing something like this first-hand.

  “In view of his apparent psychic ability,” Bateman went on professorially, “the fact that your man is clin
ically senile makes this all the more interesting. Back in the seventies, the French did an experiment in which, based on a number selected randomly by a computer, they sacrificed rats, one each day, observing the survivors for signs of aberrant behavior. What they were able to demonstrate with statistically significant reproducibility was that small groups of the rats, five or six at a time, did develop erratic behavior—and, more often than not, the rat whose turn was up next was a member of that group.

  “As well, also in the seventies, a team of Russian researchers studied rabbits whose offspring were sacrificed at a preappointed time and at some distance from the parent. Here, too, they were able to demonstrate some low-grade psychic perception, as many of the animals became noticeably agitated at or near the time their offspring were to be slain.

  “My point is this: the human being, who seems to have the greatest difficulty getting in touch with that especially perceptive part of his mind, has this skeptical chunk of neocortex stuck right up here”—he tapped his forehead with a slender finger—“which refuses to buy into the messages it receives from its baser levels. But this cartoonist, with his shrunken, disconnected cortex...chances are he’s functioning at roughly the same level as those French rats and Russian rabbits.” Bateman grinned sagely.

  His gaze still on the drawings, Scott nodded his agreement. But he wasn’t interested in explanations. He had the evidence and that was enough.

  “What should we do with him?” Scott said.

  “Study him,” Bateman said, as if addressing a moron. “Isolate him. First thing tomorrow I’ll arrange for a private room and assign a nurse to keep him under close observation.” He grinned and something flickered in his eyes that Scott didn’t like. “We may have our own little fortune-teller here,” Bateman said, his thin lips curling into a humorless grin. “And wouldn’t that be something. If he bears out, he’ll make an excellent case presentation for the annual parapsychology meeting in New Orleans this fall. Thanks for letting me in on this one, Scott. I owe you.” He stood.

  “No worries,” Scott said. “It just really struck me...these damned drawings.” He hesitated, glancing again at those menacing red eyes. This was the only one of the artist’s drawings in which Scott had seen color. He picked up the page and handed it back to Bateman. “What do you make of the pigment he used for the eyes?”

  Bateman held the sheet up to the cone of his extension lamp, then scratched at the flaky red pigment with a thumbnail. Handing the sheet back, he shrugged.

  “It looks like blood,” he said.

  11

  “CAN YOU DO IT?”

  The lab technician scratched his bearded chin. “I don’t know, Dr. Bowman, it’s an awfully small sample.”

  After leaving Bateman’s office, Scott had gone directly to the hematology lab in the hospital’s sub-basement. Bateman’s suggestion that the pigment might be blood had sent a chill through him. He wanted to verify it now in case the old man was into some form of pathological self-mutilation, although there was no physical evidence to suggest that he was.

  “Can’t you dissolve it into solution or something?” Scott said. “It’s important.”

  “I can try,” the technician said, scraping the pigment into a shallow dish. “But it’ll take some time. Where can you be reached?”

  “Have me paged,” Scott said. “I’ll be around the hospital most of the afternoon.”

  He went next to his office, where he told his secretary he was technically unavailable, and locked himself inside. There, he sat with his feet on a chair and studied the drawings.

  When he’d first seen the sketches in the old man’s room, it had been like living the experience all over again. Closing his eyes, he’d actually been able to feel the weeds licking his skin, the water clutching at his throat. It had taken several shocked seconds for the only remotely acceptable conclusion that existed to sift into his mind, the same conclusion he’d reached on the morning of his mishap under the dock—that this was all just some bizarre and elaborate coincidence. His mind had lunged naturally for this safe old standby, an explanation still not unattractive, simply because of its sanity.

  But what a huge and improbable coincidence it would have to be. The only major discrepancy between the drawings and reality—apart from the aquatic monster, of course—was the cartoon hand missing the rope.

  Had the old man been incorrect on this point? Scott wondered now, believing in him despite his mind’s desire to reject the whole crazy deal. Or had Scott somehow beaten his own fate?

  He shook his head. He was wading into a sea of questions that defied logic. He released the drawings, allowing them to drift to the surface of his desk; and as he so often did during quiet moments in his office, he turned to look at the family photo on the bookcase behind him.

  But the photo wasn’t there.

  Scott pushed to his feet too quickly, straining the muscles around his injured hip. After a moment’s quiet cursing, he scanned the office for the photo. Then he buzzed his secretary.

  Claire’s voice drifted pleasantly out of the intercom. “Yes, Dr. Bowman?”

  “Claire,” Scott said, his irritation immediately obvious to his secretary of four years. “There’s a photograph missing from in here, the one of my family. Is anything missing on your side?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, Doctor, but I’ll have a closer look.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind. And Claire, find out who’s been cleaning up in here. Maybe they just broke it and got scared. That picture was my favorite, and there’s no negative around to make a new print.”

  “Will do,” Claire said and signed off.

  Puzzled, Scott sat again, his hand moving unconsciously to his hip. In the recent past, the hospital had had some trouble with petty thefts: money lifted out of unattended purses, articles of clothing snatched from open racks. The pilfering had continued until two members of the cleaning staff were caught with some of the missing items in their lockers. What Scott couldn’t understand was why anyone would want a photograph—although, he reminded himself, the brass frame was an expensive antique.

  But why would nothing else be missing?

  Giving them a final, incredulous glance, Scott slipped the drawings into a top drawer. Then he made his call to Steve Franklin.

  12

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE SCOTT was dictating the last of a pile of past-due discharge summaries, his secretary buzzed him from the outer office.

  “There’s a call for you, Doctor. Hematology.”

  Before picking it up Scott paused a moment, adjusting his legs into a more comfortable position. Earlier, Steve Franklin had X-rayed and examined his hip. He told Scott that he had done some structural damage to the joint capsule, nothing serious, but, as Scott had already judged for himself, he could expect it to grumble on and off for years—and quite possibly for the rest of his life. Steve gave him a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, which Scott filled at the hospital pharmacy, and a few potent analgesics. Afterward, Scott returned to his office and began clearing away some of the dry, uninteresting stuff he rarely got a chance to tackle during the course of a normal week, stuff he usually ended up doing on his own time.

  Now, as he picked up the receiver and said hello, he fished out the drawings and spread them open on the desk in front of him. The underwater eyes were white and vacant where the technician had scraped away the coloring.

  “Hi, Dr. Bowman. It’s Mike from Hematology. It’s blood all right.”

  “Human?”

  “Human,” the technician said. “A-negative.”

  “Thanks,” Scott said. “I appreciate it.”

  His heart loped uneasily as he hung up the phone. The old man’s blood type was O-negative; he’d checked it on his chart before meeting with Steve Franklin.

  If it isn’t his own blood, then where did he get it?

  Scott touched the still-bandaged tip of his right index finger...and then he knew.

  He groped in his hip pocket and dug o
ut his wallet. Opening it, he fished clumsily through the plastic sleeves, letting the collection of cards contained there drop one by one to the desktop—medical license, CMPA membership, VISA, American Express—until he found the one he was looking for. A powder-blue card, slightly dog-eared. The Red Cross had given it to him the one time he donated blood. On it were his name, address, and blood type: A-negative.

  * * *

  It was weird—almost too weird—but after a while Scott thought he had it figured out. He’d done some reading on the paranormal—with the amused interest of the skeptic, granted, but he was familiar with most of the ground rules—and had seen a couple of the better-made motion pictures with talents like clairvoyance as their themes. Characteristically, some sort of physical contact had to be made between the psychic and his subject, often something as simple as the touching of hands. If this was true, then surely blood would work the same way. Evidently, after he cut his finger on a sheet of the old man’s paper, the artist had retrieved some of the blood—which had served as the physical connection between them—and used it to stain the eyes in the sketch. The blood explained why the old man had tuned into Scott that day and not one of the students.

  Sitting at his desk, trying to reason this stuff through, it occurred to Scott with something like shock that he had become an instant believer in precognition. All of his thoughts regarding the old man were meaningless now without this phenomenon as a given. In the wake of this realization, he found himself quietly reexamining everything he’d previously cherished as truth. Indeed, he began to question his entire concept of reality. If precognition was possible—and he was firmly convinced now that it was—then what other wonders—and horrors—existed out there, just beyond the range of normal human perception? How many dozens of the other things he’d laughed off during his lifetime might actually be real? The whole thing made him feel odd, offtrack somehow, as if he’d stumbled off the globe and landed on a new planet, identical to Earth in every detail...and yet deeply and fundamentally different.