The Cartoonist (25 page)

“Make it stop it, Daddy,” Kath pleaded breathlessly. “Make him go away...”

“Who, baby,” Scott said. “Make
who
go away?”

Noticing Kath’s labored breathing, and the angry red marks on her neck, Terry Deans stepped closer, her expression drawn with concern. “Let me look,” she said, and then pulled back as if stung when Scott jerked Kath away.

“
No
,” Scott shouted, all control gone now. “Just stay away!”

A lanky orderly appeared in the doorway.

“Ken,” Terry said. “Go get help.
Hurry
.”

The orderly vanished at a run.

“Caroline,” Scott said, clutching Kath to his chest. “Find Kath’s clothes. We’re getting out of here. Someone’s trying to hurt my baby—”

“No,” Kath choked. “He’s...Daddeeeee!”

The hackles rising on his neck, Scott pushed back from Kath and stared at her face. It was purpling again, and her eyes...

scratchscratchscratch...

A tall black physician jogged into the room, stethoscope bouncing at his neck like a jaunty scarf. When he saw Kath’s condition he rushed to her side, barking orders as he moved.

“Get a crash cart in here, and a ventilator, and get some help from the ICU. I want an IV of—”

“Is that him, baby?” Scott said. “Is he the one you mean?”

“Please, sir,” the doctor said. “Clear the way. If this is your child she’s in grave danger. I must treat her now.”

“Get
away!
” Scott roared.

Then an orderly was on him, dragging him back, and Kath was choking, mauling her throat, gaping at Scott with those soulless black eyes. People began filling the room—the intern from ICU, the round-eyed nurse with the clattering cart, the bearded technician with the mechanical lung. Another nurse tried to restrain Kath’s arms while the doctor administered oxygen. Kath thrashed savagely, her throat bloating like a toad’s, each effort to breathe diminished to a feeble, crowing stridor.

“Get away from her!” Scott bellowed, throwing off the orderly as if he possessed no more substance than a pillow. “Leave my daughter alone! It wasn’t her fault, can’t you see that?”

Hands closed like manacles around his wrists. A powerful forearm encircled his chest. Scott thrust back an elbow and felt it hammer someone’s jaw.

“Get him out of here,” the doctor said. Then, to the nurse with the cart: “Give me a number six E-tube. I’m going to have to intubate her.”

The room was tilting, spinning, bleeding darkness. Hands and arms were all over him, forcing him back through the doorway.

That damned noise!

And once again Scott was standing in the doorway to another room in another hospital, thrumming with adrenaline, needing every ounce of control he could muster to avoid fleeing a harmless old man in a wheelchair.

A harmless old man and his ceaselessly scratching pencil.

And then he knew, in a dark and ancient part of his soul, what that noise in his head really was.

Kath’s struggling had ceased. Now she lay utterly still. The doctor was attempting to insert a tube in her throat. At the foot of the bed, a nurse was unwrapping a sterile surgical tray. Sharp, stainless-steel instruments winked in the cold fluorescent glare. Hopeless resignation dulled all eyes in the room.

The curtains were drawn.

And the noise in Scott’s head abated.

In one clean motion he twisted his body free—and in a dozen quick strides he was out of the unit, down the main hall and bolting into the family room. He stopped by the bed and grabbed the phone, his breath coming in sharp, shallow rushes.

“I’m at extension two-five-zero,” he said, recalling the instructions the nurse had given him the day before. “Give me an outside line.”

In the pause that followed, Scott removed a tiny telephone directory from his wallet. He flipped it open to L and scanned to the middle of the page. It was a number he’d recorded years ago, but never used.

There was the chatter of shifting circuits, then a dial tone.

He pressed out eleven musical digits. It rang three times.

“Yes.” It was a woman’s voice, dull, congested, drugged-sounding.

“This is Scott Bowman. I’m an old friend of Jake’s and it’s urgent that I speak with him. Is—”

A bitter chuckle arrested Scott’s words. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What—”

“This is Jake’s sister. Jake killed himself, Mr. Bowman. Himself, his wife, and his two sweet babies. We buried the lot of them four days ago.”

Oh, God.
“How did he—” But the dial tone cut him short.

Numb, he fingered a new set of digits, this time from memory, fumbling once and starting again.

“Eastern Ontario Health Sciences Centre.”

“Two Link. It’s Dr. Bowman. Hurry, please.”

A series of clicks. Ringing.

“Two Link, Mavis MacDonald, RN.”

“Mavis,” Scott said, feeling something like relief. He knew this crusty old Grad and liked her. “I need a favor—”

“Dr. Bowman?” the nurse interrupted. “Is that you?”

“Yes. Listen, Mavis, this is terribly important.” As he spoke he felt a shred of self-control returning. However incredible, the madness had a focus now. It no longer possessed that awful, free-floating quality. “I want you to run down to the old man’s room, the Cartoonist, and I want you to take his clipboard and bring it back to the phone.” He remembered trying to pry the pencil from that arthritic claw. “If he gives you a fight, have someone help you. Do it quickly!”

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 subtly. 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.