The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  It wasn’t just the tree. The drawing matched the whole dreary scene in every detail. It was as if the old man had been sitting right here when he drew this sequence and not two-days’ drive away in Ottawa.

  The angle was still a touch off, though....

  Back, Scott’s mind coached. Back and to the right.

  There. That’s it. Perfect.

  Something hard met Scott’s leading heel. Slowly, and with a dreadful certainty spawning in his heart, he turned to face it.

  It was the same stone, just as he’d feared and at some deeper level had known it would be, and instinctively he shrank away from it, skittering off that sunken, six-by-three rectangle of turf like a child whose worst nightmare has suddenly come true.

  Shaking his head to dislodge the gray, he read the weather-worn verse carved into the upper tier of the monument.

  Time was I stood as you do now,

  And view the dead as thou dost me,

  E’er long you’ll lay as low as I,

  And others stand and gaze on thee.

  Inclining his eyes, Scott read the name of the deceased: Marissa Rowe. And when he compared the two, he found that the letters legible in the drawing matched those on the monument in front of him, matched them exactly...the M and the i, the double s and the R.

  But who was Marissa Rowe? The name meant nothing to him....

  Standing hunched against the rain, puzzling over a meaningless name carved in stone, Scott’s eyes ran almost absently to the dates.

  And when he read them, when his mind made that final cross-connection, a fear so elemental, so utterly unmanning blazed its way through him that he twisted around to flee, to run until continents folded in behind him. But his feet wouldn’t let him, they were glued there, nailed there, and he only stood, gaping and making whimpering noises deep in his throat.

  Because Marissa Rowe, who was ten years old when they buried her, had died on July 12, 1972. The same day Scott and his friends struck down and killed a child with Scott’s Volkswagen Beetle.

  A little girl who couldn’t have been much older than ten...

  Kath’s age.

  no

  Scott’s legs dissolved and he sat down hard on Marissa Rowe’s grave plot, his teeth digging painfully into his lip as his chin struck one bent knee. He felt himself slipping, sliding closer to the stone as if dragged, and now there was something wet dripping from his chin, droplets of it spattering the back of one clammy hand...blood?

  Yes, it was blood, and—

  glass was flying stinging like furious yellowjackets and the child was shattering the windshield with her face and when we got out of the car she was already dead but there was no one around and so much to lose our careers our futures we all knew that—

  so we ran...

  Still on his backside on the ground, Scott crabbed away from the plot on the heels of his hands and feet, trying to escape his own backlashing memory.

  They had been lost that night, they could have been anywhere, even someplace close to here....

  Someone must have seen us, he thought wildly, bringing a finger to his split lip. Someone saw us and now they’re getting even.

  Insane, the remaining flicker of his reasoning mind objected, utterly irrational...how could they (and who were they?) have enticed Krista into driving down this particular road? And why such an elaborate and long-delayed vendetta? How could such wild and disconnected events have been so artfully orchestrated?

  Despite his reasoning, Scott’s mind insisted on creating a most sinister scene. Maybe, he thought senselessly, someone had been following his girls since they left home, had kidnapped them when they stopped for gas or lunch, and then forced them to drive down here, releasing them without explanation at the other end of this sideroad. Maybe they had even been depraved enough to disinter Marissa Rowe’s rotting corpse and prop it up in the road. In the dark it might have looked to Krista like a living person, especially if they stood it at the base of that sharp, humpbacked hill. Clayton had said he ignored the blare of the horn for ten or fifteen minutes before going out there, and the walk would have taken him another ten, plenty of time to remove the evidence. And they could have reburied the remains later on...

  Was that what I smelled on Krista? In the car?

  Scott climbed unsteadily to his feet, his thoughts all aswirl. And in the rain that exploded into a bracing downpour as he stood there, he looked again at the drawings before a gust snatched them from his grip and bore them away.

  It had to be. Sixteen years ago someone had been crouched at the roadside and had seen them, had memorized the Volkswagen’s license number, and then waited, waited long and with imperturbable patience, as Scott himself might have done had the same thing happened to Kath....

  Scott found his legs and started back to the car. If someone was after Kath, then she wasn’t safe by herself, not even in the hospital. But then he turned and hurried back for the drawings, suddenly unable to imagine going on without them. They were his only tangible link with the lunacy he’d uncovered, the only thing distinguishing it all from the workings of a demented mind.

  He found them plastered against the stonework fence at the back of the cemetery, tattered and soaked through. Beyond the fence, just visible through breaks in the overhanging trees, he noticed a road, paved but unused, probably for years. Sprays of milkweed and crabgrass poked up through fissures in the sun-bleached asphalt. There was a sign back there, leaning, faded, pocked by.22 shells. OLD BURWASH ROAD, that sign said...

  And again his mind was reeling back across the years, braking at the rim of hell, where—

  they were in the car and peeling away, drunkenness vanished, weariness erased by a hideous shared alertness, and in the back seat Jake was fumbling with the map, tearing it in an effort to unfold it, his voice as he struggled crazed and high: Where are we? What road is this? Old Burwash, Scott bellowed back at him...the Old Burwash Road...

  Scott stumbled and nearly fell.

  And all at once it was as if he had pitched through that fragile membrane between sanity and its darker sister. The hum in his head grew abruptly deafening, absorbing into itself and amplifying the sounds around him: the low-pitched moan of the wind; the beating pulse of the rain; the hammering of his heart against the cage of his chest. And when he bent to retrieve the drawings, the frames seemed for an instant to come to life, moldering corpses shouldering their way one by one through the sleepless soil, he imagined he could hear them, smell them...and in that instant of total unreality he whirled to gape at the grave plots behind him....

  But the earth was undisturbed, its mortal weight matted beneath dying grass and deepening puddles of rain.

  Scott leaned against the fieldstone fence, pressing his temples with rigid fingers, waiting for the din in his head to subside. When it had diminished to a tolerable roar, he stepped over the fence and strode stiff with trepidation along the Old Burwash Road, the late-summer rain chilling him to the core.

  “Is she dead?”

  Scott stopped in the road about five hundred yards west of where he’d stepped over the fence. He looked down at his feet and thought he could make out a faint, roughly circular stain in the asphalt.

  Then Brian Horner was standing behind him, repeating over and over “Is she dead? Is she dead?” in a voice that was shrill with terror.

  “Is she dead?”

  In the lambent haze of predawn they stood in horrified tableau over the unmoving body of the child, watching as the pool of red that haloed her head crept steadily wider and wider. Dressed in white, all frilly-lace and summer-pretty, she lay crumpled on her side, one leg wrenched back at an angle it had never been meant to assume. Her arms lay slung out in front of her, as if she had tried to grab hold of something to stop her as she sailed dying through the damp morning air. On her feet were snow-white bobby socks, the one on the foot that was twisted behind her hanging half-on, half-off. The impact had knocked her clean out of her freshly polished Sunday-best shoes (it wa
s Sunday, Scott had realized then, and she was already dressed for church).

  Is she dead?

  The kitten she’d been chasing came out of the shadows at a gallop, mewling like the tiniest lost soul in the universe. When the wind caught the child’s silken hair, the kitten sprang jauntily forward, swiping playfully at the riffling, silver-white strands.

  Feeling as though his head might explode, Scott knelt at her side and placed a finger over the carotid artery in her neck. He concentrated into the tip of that finger every ounce of sensitivity he had left, adding to that prayers he hadn’t uttered in too many years....

  But his finger felt nothing, nothing but a soft ebbing warmth, and when he turned to look at his friends, still little more than faceless silhouettes behind him (Ringwraiths, he remembered thinking later, they look like ringwraiths), there were tears in his eyes.

  He turned back to the child—an albino, he realized in a queerly detached, clinical way—and the world went abruptly aslant, its margins beginning to darken.

  Then there were powerful fingers gouging into the flesh of his shoulder, and a lunatic voice spouting harsh, hissing words.

  “Don’t you pass out on me, you fucker. We’ve got to get out of here, man, and it’s got to be now. You know that, don’t you?” Jake Laking. “There’s a light back there in the trees, a porch light, I bet, but I don’t think anyone saw us.” His eyes were a glowing amber, predatory and keen. “If we stay here, we’ve had it. Come on, get up. Get up now!”

  “He’s right, Scott.” Brian’s voice, a faltering echo. “Oh, dear Jesus, he’s right...please...”

  And he was right...wasn’t he? To stay was to court unimaginable ruin. The kid was dead (Scott pressed a finger to her neck again, just to be certain; maybe he’d missed that precious pulse of life the first time; after all, he wasn’t a doctor, not yet, he’d only seen this on the goddam tube, they always did this on TV, even in the westerns...but there was nothing, no pulse, and even the warmth he’d felt earlier had diminished), and there was nothing anyone could do for the dead. They had to think of themselves now.

  They had to run.

  The kitten was lapping, it was lapping at the slick creeping blood, its purr like a motor...a Volkswagen motor, and Scott realized he was kneeling alone with his crime. The others had fled to the car, Jake rigid behind the wheel, Brian hunched low in the back.

  Scott stood, weaving, unable to drag his eyes from the dead thing he had created in the road.

  Then he ran, too.

  He tripped in a sprawl over a tiny scuffed shoe, gathered himself up again, and piled into the car like a thief.

  But not before he saw that twinkling yellow light in the trees...

  Scott looked up from the ghostly stain in the road and into the rain-spattered woods.

  There was a building back there. From where he stood he could see a section of its black-shingled roof.

  ——

  Squat, swaybacked, with a single rotted gable and a screened-in porch, it was more a cottage than a house. And when Scott stepped soaked and shivering into the weed-infested clearing it occupied, he realized the place was abandoned. Once, years ago, the building had been jacked up onto stilts to avoid spring floods...but one of the stilts had long since shifted, and now the structure listed badly to one side.

  Scott stood at the edge of what had once been the backyard. To his left, the rusted skeleton of a child’s swing stood aslant in a puddle of water, and a staved-in doghouse hunched rotting beneath a droopy willow. On the stoop by the back door were an ancient ringer-type washing machine, an old wooden stool, and the corroded remains of a tricycle. The door itself, with a naked bulb miraculously intact in the ceiling above it, stood slightly ajar, its dark mouth crosshatched in cobwebs.

  Had it really been the Old “Burwash” Road? Scott wondered now, soaking his shoes in a scum of rancid water. Couldn’t it have been the Old “Anything” Road? Wasn’t his imagination working on a strung-out sort of overtime right now?

  Is this the same place?

  Badly shaken, Scott crossed the yard in rapid strides, shifting his glance from side to side in the nervous darts of a man who believes himself watched. When he got to the door, he set his shoulder to it—and then stopped, his unease suddenly doubling.

  What did he hope to find here? What possible good could any of this do? He should clear out of here right now, get back to Danvers, to the hospital and his only child.

  Compelled, Scott looked again at the door. It had swollen over the years, and its frame had shifted in the direction of the overall list. It was meant to open inward, but when he tried it the foot uttered an abrasive shriek of wood against wood and then jammed. He had to suck in his belly to do it, but he managed to squeeze in through the gap.

  He found himself in a dusty kitchen, dim, almost dark, the only light a diffuse gray cast from beyond the adjoining hallway. At one time the floor had been surfaced in checkered linoleum, but now most of that was gone and planks showed baldly through. Empty whiskey bottles tented in dusty spider webs lay scattered about like extracted teeth. In a corner next to a wood-burning stove, a chrome-and-Formica table lay on its side. There was a single window, above the sink, but that had been boarded over.

  Leave, his mind insisted. Get out of here. Go.

  The narrow hallway was dark and festooned with cobwebs. Head down, Scott stepped unsteadily into it. The imperfect angles jarred his already muddled perspective, giving the place a bizarre, funhouse feel of unreality, and Scott moved with a hunted man’s caution. Loose boards creaked beneath his feet. Broken glass gritted. Things skittered behind cracked-plaster walls, perhaps fleeing, perhaps not. Partway along the hall Scott raked his hands out in front of him, and they came away clotted in webbing, each gray mass specked with the desicated corpses of insects.

  He edged toward the lazy square of light that lay ahead, where the hallway widened into the staircase and the living room took its entrance. He swung left into the archway and his toe caught something rigid. There followed a brief but clamorous chain reaction: a warped plank that had swept across the archway like a turnpike tumbled into a leaning beam, and both of them came crashing to the floor in a dusty clap of thunder.

  Then there was only silence, save for the steady spit of rain against broken window panes.

  The dust was slow to settle. Thick and ancient, it swirled like mist on a midnight moor. Gradually the light filtering in through the rank of multipaned windows began to penetrate, lending a blue-white cast to the objects in its radius. Beyond the swirls, nearly invisible in the center of the room’s back wall, a low arch like the mouth of a Venetian bridge yawned blackly open. At first Scott figured it was just a fluky symmetrical defect in the wall.

  But as he drew nearer, he saw that it wasn’t just a chance defect. It was a mouth, but the mouth of a huge fireplace, which in turn was the maw of a stone-carved lion, King of Beasts, with massive, arching jaws that seemed frozen in the act of swallowing the room whole.

  And Scott had seen it before.

  The room, the lion, all of it.

  But where?

  Then it struck him. The Cartoonist. The series of drawings the old man had let slip—almost deliberately, it had seemed at the time—to the floor on Friday afternoon, the first time Scott had laid eyes on him.

  That fireplace, this room, and...

  The floorboards. In that sequence of drawings there had been a man ripping up floorboards.

  And discovering...

  Weak with dread, Scott stumbled back through the slanted hallway, lacy swatches of cobweb teasing away and clinging to his arms and face. As he rounded the corner into the kitchen, his elbow clipped a shelf stocked with Mason jars and sent the whole lot shattering to the floor. Squinting in the dim, he searched the cluttered room from corner to corner, knocking things over, pitching things aside. By the woodbox next to the stove he found what he was after.

  An ax.

  Scott raced back to the front room and hoisted
the ax over his head, a compelling sort of fever suffusing him as he commenced his first violent swing.

  And when the floorboards splintered beneath the force of that blow, he felt the final fragments of his coherent mind slip away. With his next swing a primitive roar escaped him.

  As he bent to his wild work, dust rose in choking motes, swirling into the bars of light from the windows like blood in cold water. The floor became his anguish, his loss, his rage, and he pummeled it with the corroded wedge of steel. His breathing took on a harsh, machine-like whistle and his throat became so parched with dust it was painful.

  Old and tired, the boards came away.

  At one point Scott stumbled and the ax thunked into the tomblike rent in the floor. When he bent to retrieve it, a bat, disturbed from its slumber, whickered out and wheeled past him, stitching through the dust like a malign darning needle. Unheeding, Scott pummeled the boards, tears tracking his face in dusty streams.

  When the air had cleared and dim light found the room again, half the floor had been torn away. Now, with his toes wedged against something brittle and dry, Scott remembered the last few frames of that macabre cartoon sequence.

  The figure had discovered a mummified corpse, with a butcher knife through its heart and something flat clutched to its breast...

  And there it was at his feet.

  Scott reached down and loosened away the bundle from the dry, enfolding arms. The corpse, its gaunt skull-eyes like ice cream scoops out of bone, put Scott in mind of Dr. Holley, the county coroner.

  Is this her? Is this your wife?

  The bundle was a blanket enshrouding a book, a big soft scrapbook of the type Scott had used to paste in projects in public school. As he unraveled the fabric it crumbled in his hands, leaving moldy fragments that reeked of mildew and decay.

  He shifted his body so that his back faced the windows, and sat on the rim of the hole. As he settled, his eye caught a faint metallic glint in the depths of the eviscerated chest cavity. When he leaned closer he saw the stainless-steel butcher knife, lodged in the corpse’s spine. Impaled on its blade was a prunelike knot of tissue that had once been a human heart.