The Cartoonist (11 page)

“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.

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 out 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.

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.