The Cartoonist (26 page)

Caroline screamed, and this time all of the pictures fell, scattering over the floor like the fragments of a shattered dream.

32

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“WHERE IS HE?”

Janet Brown, the ward clerk on Two Link, took an involuntary step backward, quietly thanking God there was a desk between her and the man on the opposite side. She had been chatting on the phone with her boyfriend when Scott came up behind her and began digging frantically through the chart rack.

“Where is who?” Janet said. She had never seen a doctor look such a mess. Drunks or accident victims maybe, but never a doctor. And there was something wrong with his eyes. Red-rimmed and too shiny, they shifted almost constantly, as if he feared the building might suddenly collapse or that some savage beast might pounce out and devour him.
Hunted.
That was the word she wanted. The man looked hunted.

Scott planted his fists on the desktop and leaned toward her. “The old man. The Cartoonist. Where is he?”

Janet took another step backward and stumbled into her chair. She realized her boyfriend was still on hold. She glanced along the hallway in both directions, damning its dinner-hour emptiness, then looked back at Scott.

“Transferred,” she said, almost shouting the word. “They moved him to Psychiatry about an hour ago. Is there anything I can do...?”

But Scott had already turned away, heading at a run for the stairwell. The clerk waited until he’d slipped through the doorway, then dialed zero and had the nursing supervisor paged from her supper.

Bateman, Scott thought as he flew down the stairs to the main floor. He’d forgotten about the department head’s interest in the old man. Of course Mavis MacDonald would have called Bateman to verify Scott’s wholly inappropriate order, and of course Bateman would have vetoed it.

He pushed through to the main floor and darted into the nursing station, which at the moment was abandoned. He went to the desktop Rolodex and began flipping through it, scanning for the old man’s new room number.

“Can I help you?” a wary voice asked from behind him.

Scott ignored it and kept fingering through the files, cursing his trembling clumsiness.

“Dr. Bowman?” the voice said uncertainly. “Is that you?”

“What room is the Cartoonist in?” Scott said, turning his crazed green eyes on the nurse.

The woman flinched back, as the clerk on Two Link had done. She answered by snatching a chart from the rack and thrusting it at him. Scott flung the chart open and scanned to the telephone order he’d given Mavis MacDonald. Following protocol, Mavis had written in Scott’s order and signed it. But in the section below was another order, this one inscribed in neat, fountain-ink script:
Cancel above
, it read simply.
Transfer patient to psychiatry
. It was signed
V. Bateman, MD
.

The Cartoonist was in 117, a private room at the end of the hall.

Scott moved quickly into the corridor—then fear ran its finger down his belly and he slowed, overcome once again by that drifting sensation of unreality. Breathing deeply, he fought to reorient himself. The corridor was familiar. He had walked it almost daily since the hospital opened more than eight years ago. His office was at the end of a similar corridor just one flight down. He made his living in this building. It was a good place, a safe place, a sane place.

But was it real? Was any of it
real
? The flight up from Boston, even the drive into the city from the airport, had already faded from concrete recall, now seeming more dreamlike than real...except that he remembered climbing into Krista’s Chevette in the airport parking lot. That he remembered with awful clarity. The lingering scent of her perfume. The objects, now meaningless, that had once lived through her personality: the punky, rhinestone-studded sunglasses she’d forgotten to take with her to Boston; the unopened packet of Trident bubble gum on the dash; the pair of sheer nylon pantyhose still in its package on the seat...

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

Scott started forward, then froze outside the doorway to 117, his flesh going cold with apprehension. He took the last few steps with his back pressed firmly to the wall.

The artist was in his wheelchair by the shaded window. His back was to Scott and he was drawing, the sound of the pencil seeming to fill the room.

And suddenly Scott knew he couldn’t face the old man. Maybe he really was an agent of an angered God...because Scott really was guilty. He had slaughtered a helpless child and then fled like a sniveling coward.

He’s killing me, Daddy...

No. It had to end. It had to end now. God or demon or one-eyed alien. He would have to face it.

Breathless, Scott bolted into the room and seized the clipboard from those murdering hands. The Cartoonist—Nicholas Rowe—didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. He only drooled, his black eyes aimed unblinking into space. Scott’s gaze ran to the two completed frames—but, as the graveyard sequence had at first glance, these sketches seemed connected to nothing real, nothing meaningful to Scott. Shown was a grim-visaged judge hearing the pleas of a man clad in old-style prison fatigues. In the second frame two guards restrained the prisoner while the judge, delivering his verdict, brought the gavel down with a crash. The next few frames, though neatly squared off, remained ominously blank.

Scott wadded the unfinished sequence into a ball and tossed it to the floor. He flipped the clipboard onto the bed and stepped in behind the wheelchair.

Then, abruptly, he took hold of the hand grips and swung the wheelchair around. A rope of drool whipped back from the old man’s chin and plastered itself to his cheek.

“You can cut the act, Rowe,” Scott said, unable to disguise the raw fear in his voice. “I know all about you now.”

The old man didn’t respond—but that odor was on him again, the alleycat reek Scott had smelled when he tried to pry the pencil from that knotted fist four days before.

Scott took hold of Rowe’s seamed yellow face and twisted it up toward his own, trying to see something—anything—in the pits of those eyes, eyes that were so much like Kath’s had been the last time Scott had seen her.

“Please,” he said, verging on tears at the wan, empty image of Kath his mind had thrown up. “Please stop this.” His grip tightened on the slack flesh of the old man’s face, puckering his lips like the mouth of a carp. “It wasn’t her fault...”

The old man leaned away, freeing himself from Scott’s grip,  reaching for the clipboard on the bed. Scott grabbed the arm of the wheelchair, preventing him by bare inches from reaching his target. The artist persisted, stretching, grunting, his deformed fingers clutching at the air like the fingers of a drowning man, oh, yes, a drowning man, Scott knew
that
feeling...and suddenly the terror beneath the dock came flooding back with the abrupt and frightful clarity of a nightmare. He could feel the water at his neck like powerful hands, choking, suffocating...

Scott released the wheelchair and staggered back, clutching his throat, his body faint and tingling with airhunger.

With an effort he managed a breath.

scratch,scratch,scratch...

“Stop it!” Scott roared, one hand sweeping down like a sword, cutting the clipboard from the old man’s grip and sending it clattering to the floor.
“Stop it!”
He buried his fists into Nicholas Rowe’s nightshirt and hauled him up to the limit of his restraints. “Krista’s dead!” he bellowed at the unheeding skeleton in his grip. “Krista’s
dead
and I want my daughter back!”

His face livid, Scott bent and retrieved the clipboard. He jabbed it roughly into the old man’s ribs.

“Here you son of a bitch
.
Draw!” He sounded absurdly like a gunslinger, calling out the town marshal. “Draw my girl normal or I’ll kill you!”

The Cartoonist broke wet, rancid, old-man’s wind.

And for the first time since Scott had set eyes on him, he seemed to grin.

Scott struck him a whistling backhand. He lifted his hand to strike again, but then something had him by the wrist. He snapped his arm free and whirled to face Jane Copeland, the nursing supervisor.

“Have you gone mad?” Copeland said, her face an almost comic mask of shock and disbelief.

“Out!” Scott bellowed. “Get out of here now!” He steamed toward her like an engine of destruction.

Copeland backed away. “What is going on in here, Doctor? My God, he’s just an old man...?”

“Out,” Scott said, clenching his fists in front of him. “He killed my wife.” Part of him knew how crazy that sounded, but he was beyond caring. “He killed my wife and now he’s trying to kill my daughter.”

“What?” The supervisor stumbled through the doorway into the hall. “I’m going to get Security, damn you. You leave that old man al—”

The slamming door cut off her words. Scott twisted the lock, then dragged the bed across it as a barricade. He turned back to the old man and felt his legs turn to rubber.

The artist gawked vacantly into space, blood-streaked drool oozing from his mouth, the pencil in his hand a twitching blur against the page. Teeth bared viciously, Scott lurched forward to see what the old man was drawing—and fell in a heap to the floor, his legs disconnected from his brain. His chin struck the tiles and that old wound started to bleed again.

There was no doubt about it now.

The old man was grinning.

Scott began dragging himself toward the loathsome wretch in the wheelchair. The pencil was moving at incredible speed now, whispering like the faraway voices of the damned.

“What are you drawing? Why don’t you speak?”

The pencil whispered cunningly.

“It was an accident,” Scott pleaded. ”We were just kids...scared kids. We didn’t mean...”

Nicholas Rowe, lashed to his wheelchair like some dark and terrible lord, stopped drawing and stared into Scott’s lunatic eyes. And for a terrible instant, Scott felt certain the old man would speak. Instead, he withdrew a single sheet from the clipboard and let it drift to the floor. It landed before Scott’s eyes.

On it was a series of drawings...

An old man lying on his back on a stretcher, his toothless mouth agape in an oval of death. Above him, a portly doctor in a white lab coat preparing to apply defib paddles to his chest. In the final frame, the paddles backfiring, electrocuting the doctor in twin, cartoon flashes of fire.

Brian Horner.

Another sheet floated to the floor, the sketches gruesomely detailed.

Jake Laking.

Taking a repeating rifle down from its rack and bringing it upstairs, to where his family sat watching TV. Using it first on his wife, then his two kids, and lastly on himself....

Finally, torn from its brass frame, the family photo from Scott’s office drifted to the floor in the lazy arcs of an autumn leaf. Thumbed across it was a big bloody X.

The pencil resumed its doom-etching.

Scott, weeping like a child, crawled to the old man’s feet. “Stop,” he begged through his tears. “Stop...it’s not her fault. Please, can’t you see that?” He dragged himself to his knees, using the chair’s spoked wheels for leverage.

Slowly, deliberately, the old man angled the clipboard toward Scott, allowing him a tangential view of the developing drawings. The pencil never faltered. It flashed across the page with superhuman speed, creating shapes so rapidly, they seemed almost to move.

A child in a bed.
Kath.
Respirator tubes hooked to her neck. Jinnie lying limp on her chest, lifeless doll eyes peering out at him as they’d done earlier that day, from beneath Kath’s hospital bed.

Scott ordered his hands to move, to grab that clipboard and snap it across his knee, take those murdering drawings and rip them into so many fat December snowflakes. But his hands ignored the command. They were cold, numb, someone else’s hands.

The Cartoonist’s pencil blurred. Frame by hellish frame, Jinnie began to shift. Off the bed, onto the floor, behind the respirator. One fingerless hand reaching for the wall plug...

“No!” Scott screamed, fighting the slushy numbness in his muscles
. “No!”

Jinnie’s hand inched tormentingly closer to the plug. Scott could see it past the blur of the old man’s pencil. It folded around the power cord...and then stopped.

Nicholas Rowe stared into Scott’s eyes and laughed, a clipped, mirthless laugh that chilled him to the marrow. Then that old and cheated face twisted into a scowl and a gob of spittle flew into Scott’s eyes. Reflexively, Scott shut his eyes....

And there was Kath, in the nightmarish twilight of his mind. Sitting up in bed. Huge black pupils swallowing her eyes. Tracheostomy tube jutting like the blunt haft of a knife from her neck. Hands raised beseechingly. “He’s killing me, Daddy,” she was whispering dreamily, without passion or fear. “He’s killing me.”

The artist’s hand resumed moving.

And so did the doll’s.

Fury flowed into Scott Bowman like molten lava, replacing his fear, scorching it into meaningless cinders. He pushed to his feet and the old man paused once again, his expression of triumphant rage faltering into one of stunned surprise.

That pause was all Scott needed.

He drove his fist into the old man’s face and felt the splay of fossil flesh, the snap of brittle bone. With his free hand he grabbed the clipboard and yanked with everything he had—but Rowe held on, hissing like a cat through his stubby black teeth.

Outside the room someone thumped on the door.

“Open up!” said a muffled voice. “Scott, it’s Vince Bateman. Open this door now!”

Scott and the old man battled for the clipboard, tugging it to and fro like lumbermen sawing timber. Vaguely, Scott heard the clunk of tumblers turning over. He lifted his foot and kicked the old man in the chest, almost losing his balance. Ribs snapped.

The door opened a wedge, the obstructing bed scraping heavily across the tiles. Bateman’s shrill voice shrieked through the crack.

“Scott. What in hell is going on in there? Open this damned door.”

Scott’s legs were slackening to rubber again. He looked away from those dark, hypnotic eyes and pulled, beginning to hiss himself with the effort. The old man growled like a wildcat.