The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  Scott felt a thick clot of panic massing in his throat. Some decrepit old crone using his blood to peer into his future—that was bad enough. But why the perverse use of the blood as part of the drawing? That was the bit that crawled under his skin and festered there.

  Over it all, though, one question continued to burn. Was he just a mindless crone? Could he be as far gone as he appeared and still tap into whatever psychic stream he panned his visions from? Wasn’t it entirely possible that if someone were to give it an honest try, perhaps using hypnotic suggestion, the old man could be reached? As far as Scott knew, no one had yet made such an effort. It was a lamentable truth in medicine’s dealings with those labeled as senile: the label was readily handed out—and once it was, no one paid its victims much further heed.

  Darkly excited now, Scott pocketed the drawings and hobbled out from behind his desk. He was going to try to get through to the weird old artist who could see where no man was meant to see. He was going to give it his best shot.

  And if he succeeded...then by God, did he have some questions to ask.

  * * *

  He was alone in the ill-lit hospital room, strapped to his wheelchair by the curtained window, dressed as before in an undershirt and pale blue pajama bottoms, an old man’s uniform that seemed to swallow him whole. His eyes were aimed at the radiator, the clipboard balanced on the slope of his folded knees.

  And he was drawing. Scott could hear the pencil from the hallway.

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

  Scott took a step through the doorway—then stopped short. It hadn’t been a conscious thing; he hadn’t willed his body to stop. It just had. He froze there, framed in the doorway, allowing reign to whatever instinct or reflex had prevented him from entering the room. His senses had keened, he realized. He could feel the adrenaline surging through him, making the blood bound in his neck and his breath steeply quicken.

  Oddly, Scott’s basic physiology came to mind. He was having a rather profound sympathetic reaction here, something the layman referred to as a ‘fight or flight’ response. It was an automatic reaction to danger or to fear, one that was common to all higher forms of life. And it was urging him to fight...or flee.

  But why? Where was the danger?

  Lightheaded, Scott leaned against the door frame, the nausea of unspent adrenaline having its way with him. He looked again at the elderly man in the wheelchair, sizing him up, weighing him in a rational light.

  Oh rationality, he thought, feeling a suddenly lunatic surge, that most deluding of all human faculties. He’s a ninety-eight-pound weakling. You could snap his neck as easily as you could snap that pencil....

  Now the pencil moved faster—as it had the last time Scott was nearby—the sound a harsh, erratic whisper against the page. Spurred by that sound, Scott took another step forward, then almost bolted into the room, his eyes scanning the page on the clipboard as he reached the wheelchair and leaned over it.

  But it was nothing, just two or three macabre-looking graveyard scenes...weird but meaningless.

  Scott’s body went slack with relief. Sighing, he pulled up a chair and sat between the old man and the radiator, trying to intrude on the artist’s sightline. Unmindful, the Cartoonist continued to draw, his radio droning raspily beside him.

  “Hello,” Scott said, adjusting his voice to a lulling monotone—but the hot, spitless flavor of fear was loose in his mouth, gluing his words. “Can you hear me?”

  In the dim evening light the old man’s gaze shifted almost imperceptibly and Scott shuddered. Again he found himself sizing the man up, as he might an adversary with whom a physical confrontation seemed inevitable.

  Physically the old man was harmless. His precognition was an uncanny ability, but at best it was only a tenuous window onto the future, uncommon but not unknown. Uncontrollable, unmalicious.

  Then why this mindless fear? Why do I feel I’d be safer scaling the north face of the Eiger without a rope?

  Scott tried again.

  “I want you to stop drawing and speak to me,” he said as evenly as he was able. “I want you to talk to me. I know you can do it. Yes, I do. Won’t you stop drawing for a moment and talk to me? I mean you no harm. You can trust me.”

  Scott spoke on in that same gently probing monotone, searching in the spare light of dusk for some sign of perception in that ancient face: a flicker of eyelashes, a betraying twitch at the corner of the mouth, some subtle admission of understanding.

  Or deception, Scott thought, and the possibility jarred him. His mind cast back to the night of his birthday, to the dinner table at home and how he’d been searching the faces of his girls in exactly this manner; but for signs of deception, not understanding.

  Could he be malingering? Scott wondered now. It was an attractive, if inexplicable possibility, one he could not too casually dismiss.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said softly, although he sensed no fear in this eldritch little man—none at all. “I’m here to help you. We are all professionals here: doctors, nurses...to help you. But we need your cooperation. We need you to talk to us, let us in.”

  Scott stopped then, sliding his chair back to the radiator with a thunk. Twin blond girls of about fourteen had just appeared in the doorway, giggling and helping a bowlegged old gent with a walker into the room. One of them called the man Gramps. The other flicked on the light over his bedstead, and the thin yellow glow reached the Cartoonist’s face.

  In the improved light Scott looked again at the artist, who sat drawing and drooling, and wondered how he could ever have imagined him malingering. He supposed he’d gotten himself spooked, sitting here alone with him in the near dark. Looking at him now, he thought it might be easier to coax one of Kath’s goldfish into talking.

  The twins turned their backs on Scott to help their grandfather into bed. On an impulse Scott seized the steadily scratching pencil, hoping to catch the artist unawares, perhaps startle him into speaking—but the Cartoonist held on with surprising strength, his bandy fingers closing like a steel trap. Uncertain why, Scott persisted, tugging harder.

  The old man’s eyes, typically so aimless and empty, fixed Scott with sudden fury. His lips folded back and a dull lowing sound issued from deep in his chest, a savage animal sound that pitched steadily upward, until it became a menacing snarl in his throat.

  As if releasing a hot ember, Scott’s fingers sprang apart. He tried to swallow but couldn’t. Now there was an odor about the old man, an acrid reek that sheared through the perpetual fecal and ammoniacal rancidness of the chronic ward. It was a smell Scott had encountered before, but only on brawling tomcats—wild, foul, primeval.

  Scott rose to his feet, staggering slightly. The twins, flanking their grandfather, looked on with alarm and wonder. A nurse who’d been passing by in the hall stood dumbstruck in the doorway.

  The old man was gazing at that invisible point again, between his clipboard and the radiator. And he was drawing, as if Scott were not there. As if he’d never been there.

  * * *

  “Hello, it’s Dr. Bowman. Let me have Dr. Bateman, would you, please?”

  He was calling the psychiatry conference room from the nursing station down the hall. The seven o’clock meeting was due to begin in ten minutes.

  Bateman came on the line and said hello.

  “Vince, it’s Scott. Listen, something’s come up. I’m not going to be able to make the meeting.”

  “What?” Bateman said, his voice rising to a piqued, childish timbre. “Oh, come on, Scott. You’re chairing the damned thing. Don’t leave me hanging.”

  Scott felt a pang of guilt—as department head, Bateman would be expected to take over the chairmanship of the meeting—but he felt compelled to keep trying with the Cartoonist. The tug-of-war he’d had with the old man had made a stunning impression on him. He had been incredibly strong. Not so long ago Scott could bench press more than two hundred pounds, yet he had not been able to pry
the pencil from that knotted fist.

  And that face, that twisted, hissing snarl.

  Those eyes...

  “Sorry, Vince. Sandra Dunphy from Admin will be doing most of the talking anyway. All I’d planned to do was review the minutes and turn the meeting over to her.”

  Pause. Heavy sigh. “I hate being unprepared, Bowman. Hate it.”

  The line went dead.

  Still a little dazed, Scott returned to the old man’s room. The twins were just leaving, and they regarded him warily as he passed them in the hallway.

  The old spook was asleep in his wheelchair now, the clipboard wedged between his skinny thighs. The pencil, which only minutes before he’d fought for like a petulant child, leaned free in one slack hand. His eyes, deep-socketed in sleep, were only half-closed, the exposed crescents gleaming like pewter in the twilight. His breathing was a quiet, shifting wheeze. On the opposite side of the room Gramps lay motionless in his bed, snoring contentedly. The other two beds were vacant.

  Scott walked into the room, undergoing no more gut reaction this time than could be ascribed to simple curiosity. Watching the old man’s face, he reached for the pencil, half-expecting that thin, cadaverous hand to clamp tightly around it again...but the artist didn’t budge.

  Scott took the pencil and examined it with a certain awe. But it was only a pencil—HB, with an eraser on one end and Castell inscribed in blue script along one hexagonal edge. He reached next for the clipboard—and this time the old man twitched, but that was all. He picked it up and took a hasty step back.

  The artist had tucked his most recent illustrations beneath a stack of blank pages. Scott removed these, then replaced the clipboard and pencil where he’d found them. He took the drawings into the hallway, where he began a careful inspection of each frame. At first, in the stuttering glare of the overhead fluorescents, the sketches seemed connected to nothing real...

  Until the last few frames. Then, as it had at the bottom of the lake, the hand of terror rose from its bath of ice and gripped Scott’s heart.

  * * *

  The entire sequence was set at night.

  The first frame was an overview of a tree-studded graveyard. The second showed a distinctive-looking tombstone, two truncated tiers supporting a pyramidal shaft crested by a crucifix. The crucifix was damaged, missing an arm and a small wedge of headpiece. The inscription, indecipherable save for three or four letters, appeared on the lower of the two marble tiers. In the foreground, hideous in the moonlight, a rotted, shaggy hand poked up like a claw through the cartoon earth. In the third frame, a decaying, cyclopic corpse shouldered its way up from the confines of the grave. It was a classic horror-comic scene, yet so chillingly rendered that for a moment Scott imagined he could almost smell the black earth and moldering decay.

  In the next frame Scott was presented with the following: the tombstone leaning in the foreground; the corpse, shambling toward a low flagstone fence and the roadway beyond; a gnarled, leafless tree on a hilltop, silhouetted against an oversized moon; and at the extreme left of the frame, some distance away on the winding roadway, the twinkling eyes of a car.

  The fifth illustration showed the corpse in the middle of the moonlit roadway, arms extended like the Frankenstein monster; and the car, just cresting the rise before the cemetery, only the halo-glow of its headlights visible. In the following frame the point of view was from the back seat. Shown were the backs of two heads—the driver’s, a woman with curly hair; and a passenger’s, a child, probably female. The driver had one arm angled across her face and, just beyond the windshield, stark in the glare of the high beams, the corpse stood weaving in the instant before impact.

  The next and most dramatic scene was portrayed from just beside the driver, the angle of view including the passenger seat and the inner aspect of the windshield. In it the zombie burst through the safety glass, its jaw ripped partially away, its single dead eye dangling against a worm-ridden cheek. The child, now unmistakably a girl, cried out in perfect terror, her mouth wide open in a silent scream, her face just inches from the dead thing that came through the windshield in a blizzard of glittering shards.

  The last frame, the one that tore into Scott like shrapnel, showed the car in the foreground, crumpled nose-first against the flagstone fence; and the corpse, one arm unhinged and dangling at an impossible angle, dragging itself back into the depths of the boneyard. The interior of the car was pitch, neither of its occupants visible. Steam hissed almost audibly from beneath the hood.

  The car was a Volvo.

  Jesus, no, not them. Please, not my girls...

  Scott braced himself against the wall as Bateman’s words came reverberating back to him: You have only to look past the gilding of the horror comic to find that simple message....

  * * *

  “Wake up! Wake up, damn you!”

  Scott was back in the artist’s room, prodding him, shaking him, trying desperately to awaken him. But the old man remained slack and unresponsive. Were it not for that scarcely audible wheeze of breath, Scott would have believed him dead.

  “Come on,” he pleaded, his voice escalating from a controlled whisper to a hysterical shout. “Open your eyes.”

  He shook the man harder, deliberately digging stiff fingers into his bony shoulders in an effort to rouse him. But the Cartoonist’s head only lolled round and round, as if his neck had been broken.

  “Talk to me,” Scott bellowed. “What does this shit mean? Is this my wife? My daughter? What is going to happen?”

  A nurse raced into the room, her complexion flushed with surprise. “Dr. Bowman,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  Scott ignored her, shaking the old man so hard now his remaining teeth clacked brittlely together.

  The nurse grabbed Scott’s arm. “Dr. Bowman,” She wasn’t shouting now. She was screaming.

  Scott released the mute artist and staggered back—and it dawned on him then, in a wave of lightheadedness, that he might have killed the old man.

  Behind him, Gramps moaned in his sleep. The nurse withdrew her hand from Scott’s arm and the two of them stood there in stricken silence, staring down at the Cartoonist. His bald, peeling head hung limply forward. Drool strung like a rope from the corner of his mouth, creating a dark spot where it pooled on the leg of his pajama bottoms.

  The drawings balled in his fist, Scott turned and fled the room. He could still hear Grampa’s lonesome moan as he pushed his way through the exit doors, heading for his office on the second floor.

  13

  THE PHONE WAS ON ITS sixth ring when Krista’s sister Klara picked it up.

  “Klara, it’s Scott.”

  “Hi, Sco—”

  “Listen, have Krista and Kath left yet?” He knew they had, but prayed that for some unforeseen reason they hadn’t. The digital timepiece on his desk read 7:12 p.m.

  “Yes, early this morning. Your wife was in her usual snarky mood, too. Little miss know-it-all...is anything wrong? You sound pretty strung out.”

  “I’m sorry, Klara, I can’t talk now.”

  He thumbed the cut-off button and dialed Caroline’s number in Boston. Caroline answered on the first ring.

  “Scott? Hi.”

  “Are they there yet?” Scott said, blurting the words. “Krista and Kath?”

  “No,” Caroline said, responding to the urgency in Scott’s voice. “Not yet...what’s—?”

  "Damn.”

  “Scott, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?”

  Scott remained silent for a moment, breathing rapidly, struggling to get a grip on himself. He couldn’t tell Caroline about all of this—not yet, anyway. There was no sense in alarming her further. The whole thing might be totally unrelated to his girls. He might simply be overreacting. His wasn’t the only Volvo in the country, not by a long shot.

  But he was spooked. The old man’s drawings had become hard to ignore. After those underwater scenes, the cartoon Volvo struck yards too close to be dismissed as coinc
idence. The trouble was, there was no way of knowing without getting through to the Cartoonist... and so far that had proved impossible.

  “I’m sorry, Caroline,” he said. “Yes, everything’s fine. I’m just a bit edgy, is all. I wanted to talk to Krista. We had a spat before she left,” he lied. “Just wanted to apologize.”

  “Are you worried about them on the highway?”

  “Yes...a little.” This, too, was a lie. He was petrified.

  “Well, don’t be. Krista’s a good driver. They probably spent the afternoon haunting all those New England antique shops. Busting your billfold. Anyway, it’s too early to expect them even if they’d driven right through. I’m sure they’ll be here soon enough.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” Caroline’s words sounded soothing and good and he wanted to believe them...but he couldn’t. “Thanks,” he said. “Have her call me as soon as she gets in, will you? I’ll be at home.”

  “I will,” Caroline said. “And how are you? The way I hear it, you gave your gals quite a scare the other morning.”

  “Myself, too,” Scott said. “I’m all right now, though... Good-bye, Caroline.” Knowing it was rude but beyond caring, he hung up.

  His gaze returned to the drawings; to the woman and child in the car and the exaggerated mask of horror that was the little girl’s face; to the rotting ghoul bursting through the windshield; to the crippled car and its secretive interior. He thought of the icy channel at the bottom of the lake, and the weeds entangling him like the cerements of Atlantis....

  Then he grabbed the phone and dialed information in Massachusetts. The operator was male, his voice clipped and nasal.

  “Information. For what city, please?”

  “Boston. The police department.”

  “Emergency?”

  “Yes.”

  A brief electrical hum. Then a recorded voice, this one female, recited the number, repeating it as Scott broke the connection.

  He had the digits partially dialed when he jammed his thumb on the cut-off button and thought: What in hell do I tell these guys?