The Cartoonist (2 page)

And in that instant Scott knew his friend’s thoughts, clearly and absolutely. Because they were his own thoughts, too.

Brian Horner, his huge frame weaving against the indigo sky, stared dumbly at the child and started to blubber. For him, what had happened was only now beginning to sink in.

Scott turned again to the child and realized she was an albino. It explained the ghostly pallor, the snow-white hair...and those eyes, devoid of pigment, reflecting red in the glare of the headlights.

Her blood was red, too. It was on his hand, tacky and warm, and a pool of it was spreading around her ruined head like some terrible satanic halo.

The world tilted, the darkness that had been so rapidly receding returning, spilling into Scott’s vision like fountain ink. There was a voice now, harsh and reproachful—Jake’s voice—and clawed fingers gouging into his shoulder...but the voice seemed far away and hollow, reaching him from the bottom of a dark, dry well.

Now he was falling into that well...down...down...spiraling down.

At the bottom was the child’s white face.

And its eyes were on fire.

August 15, 1988

ON THE MORNING OF HIS thirty-seventh birthday, Scott Bowman awoke with a muffled cry. He sat bolt upright in bed, tugging the sheets in clenched fists and exposing his wife’s naked back. There was a panicky feeling in the pit of his stomach, and to his bewilderment, tears were coursing down his stubbled cheeks. As he sat there, disoriented and damp with sweat, a single tear found its way over his lip and into his mouth. It tasted salty on his tongue, a warm, private taste he had all but forgotten. There had been no call for tears in a very long time.

He realized then that he’d been dreaming, and immediately tried to call back the images, which only moments before had been so disturbingly vivid. But, as so often happened, other thoughts and perceptions funneled rapidly in, forcing the memory to the outer reaches of recall.

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. There had been a sterile white room, windowless and hot, and an oppressive feeling of being trapped, isolated, forgotten...but that was all he could recall.

He opened his eyes and gazed at his wife’s tanned back, the slow respirations of her slumber. Then, as if doubting her existence, he touched her. Krista stirred, moaning softly, then settled back into sleep. Scott smiled a little then, thinking that Krista could probably sleep through a bomb blast. She claimed it was because she had a clear conscience, nothing rattling around bothersomely in her head while she was supposed to be recharging life’s batteries.

Moving his hand away, it occurred to Scott that he had actually needed that tactile connection, like a firm pinch, as reassurance that this was the real part—Krista, the bedroom, their life together—and not the barren cubicle in his dream. Because in the dream, which had seemed so concrete, so horribly plausible, none of his normal life had existed anymore. Abruptly, cruelly, it had all been snatched away....

And in that instant the images came back to him with startling clarity. He swung his legs off the bed and sat rigidly, curled fists buried in the fabric of the mattress. A light morning breeze, damp after crossing the lake, whispered through the peach-colored sheers, making them caper like insubstantial ghosts. Looking out, Scott’s eyes swept the misty surface of the lake.

But he saw only the bleakness of the dream.

The white room, that was the key image; but it wasn’t just a room, it was a padded cell. That had been his single irrational fear as a psychiatrist-in-training: being sane, but ending up locked in a padded cell. There had been such a cell in the basement of the hospital he trained in, a hot, gloomy chamber with six-inch padding covering its every surface, the reek of stale sweat and spent rage oozing from its four grimy corners. It had smelled like an animal’s den, and on the few occasions Scott had been required to go down there alone, he had done so with the trepidation of a child approaching a closet from which only moments before he had heard scratching sounds, and a low, ravening growl.

In the dream he had been incarcerated inside such a cell—the images were very clear now—his arms lashed across his chest, his veins shot full of mind-numbing drugs. His family had abandoned him, led to believe he’d been stricken incurably mad, and the people outside, the people in charge, were faceless and aloof. Nothing he said was of any consequence, and everything he said was considered insane. But it
wasn’t
insane, and if he wasn’t allowed out soon, it was going to be too late for...for...

But that part of it remained solidly out of reach. And in the warm peach light of this mid-August dawn, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the rest. It had been only a dream, after all.

But the feeling it left in its wake—a dark tangle of fear, loneliness, and a very real sensation of physical illness—was on him like a wet blanket. It was a cold but not unfamiliar feeling, one he had last experienced ten years earlier, when the telephone woke him in the midnight quiet of his intern’s-wages apartment and a relative’s voice announced that his parents had been burned alive while they slept, their big old Rockliffe mansion reduced to coals.

Morbid
, Scott thought, shivering. Why had he awakened on such a dismal note?

He glanced again at the sleeping shape next to him, letting the warm reality of his wife and his home envelop him.
I’m in my own place with my own people
, he told himself. The empty feeling in his heart was absurd, born of a dream, and he decided to bury it.

He grabbed his bathrobe from its hook behind the door and pulled it on. The alarm was set for seven-thirty, but it was still only quarter of six. Not wanting to sleep anymore, he switched off the alarm and left the room. He padded along the hardwood hallway to the stairwell—then, responding to some nameless instinct, he stopped and took the few steps back to his daughter’s room. Silently, he pushed the door open and peeked inside.

Ghostbusters wallpaper assaulted his eyes, shade after grinning shade, each snow-white inside its slashed red circle. Kath’s brass bed gleamed richly in the morning light. The glass top of the vanity was littered in tiny plastic Smurfs and, in almost tragic counterpoint, the trappings of Kath’s approaching adulthood—mascara, eyeliner, costume jewelry—only toys now, but soon, too soon, very serious concerns indeed. Kath, ten, lay bundled on her side beneath her summer comforter, one tanned arm wrapped lovingly around Jinnie, her Cabbage Patch doll. From the doorway Scott could see the loose curls of her fine, sun-gilded hair.

He tiptoed into the room and leaned over his daughter’s bed. Kath’s mouth was open, a small dark oval edged in vermilion, and her turned-up nose was bent against her pillow. Her precious round face beamed with high summer color, and the love Scott felt for her at that moment was almost painful in its intensity. He placed a gentle, almost shy kiss on the swell of her cheek, then backed quietly away.

Pulling the door shut behind him, he was startled again by a nearly uncontainable rush of emotion. He had been unable to pass Kath’s room without checking...to make sure she was really there, he admitted to himself. It was weird—he was still caught up in the subtle dislocation of the dream.

Downstairs, Scott fixed himself a light toast-and-coffee breakfast, then thumped back upstairs to shower and shave, accomplishing all of this with considerably more noise than was necessary. He felt a small pang of disappointment when the ruckus of these ablutions failed to waken his wife or his daughter. For a delicious, delinquent moment he considered calling in sick, taking a French leave, crawling back into bed and waking Krista with Mister Happy. After all, it was his birthday.

But the voice of his conscience interjected with its usual stubborn intolerance. Today was a heavy clinic day until two, then he had a group of medical students to babysit. On this latter account he knew he deserved no sympathy. Every year he promised himself he would drop his university affiliation, and every year he smilingly accepted reappointment.

So he decided to buck up, meet his responsibilities. After all, there was tonight’s ‘surprise’ party to look forward to, and he took strength from that. Krista always arranged some sort of birthday bash for him, and he saw no reason for his thirty-seventh (
middle age
, an inner voice heckled) to be any different. It was a comfortable certainty, and Scott found himself grinning at the thought of it. This was not to suggest that Krista Bowman was predictable. In some ways she was—loving, caring, mothering, sexy—but for the most part there was just no second-guessing Mrs. Draper’s youngest gal, Krista Marie.

At the door before setting out on the twenty-minute drive to the Health Sciences Centre in Ottawa, Scott had the barely containable urge to shout and waken the entire household, maybe the whole damned lake. But he didn’t. He went out to the garage, climbed into the car and nudged a tape into the deck, trying as he motored up the unpaved hill to think about tonight’s party and the fun they would all have together.

But that dream-born feeling, dark and strangely prescient, refused to leave him. It remained like a low-grade fever throughout most of that day.

BY FOUR-THIRTY THAT AFTERNOON Scott had pretty much forgotten his early-morning dream and the funk it had kindled inside of him. In fact, as he stood in the hallway on Two Link and addressed his students, a growing part of his mind was already home, lounging on the deck, sipping a beer almost too cold to hold. It was hot, tacky, and the smell of the chronic ward was none-too-sweet. The students, six of them, each done up in a bleached-and-pressed intern’s jacket, stood attentively around him in a tight horseshoe. They had already seen and briefly reviewed five patients, and Scott felt that was more than enough. Mrs. Stopa would be the last. He loosened his tie and set about this final task.

“Mrs. Stopa is ninety-three,” Scott said, taking the hand of the stuporous old Pole seated on the commode in front of him. “She has garden-variety senility, or simple deterioration, as the textbooks call it.” The object of the afternoon’s exercise was to introduce the students to the wonders of aging, specifically, senescence. “As you can see, she’s totally vegged-out. Complete mental destitution.”

In truth, Mrs. Stopa was a study in apathy. She stared vacantly into her lap. She drooled. Her jaws worked continuously, but only rude chomping noises came out. There was really little else Scott could say about the old gal, and when she suddenly broke wind, the group edged discreetly away.

“Well, gang,” Scott said. “It’s Friday. Shall we call it a day—”

“Hey, everyone, come look at this.”

It was one of the students, an attractive young lady, calling to the group from across the hallway. She was staring excitedly over the shoulder of an elderly gentleman whose chest had been crisscrossed in canvas restraints to prevent him from toppling out of his wheelchair. At first glance, the old man appeared to have little more going for him than his ward-mate, Mrs. Stopa. His scrawny frame was clad in the accustomed attire of the senile—sleeveless undershirt, hospital-blue pajama bottoms, fuzzy brown slippers—and there was the familiar reek of ammonia about him. His face was sharp and heavily lined, and drool trailed from his chin to his food-spotted bib. His eyes, small and so deeply brown they appeared black, punctuated his barren expression like the button eyes of a rag doll.

But as Scott drew closer, a light flickered in those eyes that hinted at something deeper. It was fleeting, gone so quickly it might not have even been there. But in the space of that single breath, Scott felt certain he’d seen something...lurking in those wrinkle-webbed eyes. What the old man was doing with his hands added to the feel of mystery. With his left he steadied a clipboard against his knees, and with the pencil in his right, he drew.

Scott had heard about this old boy, but had not yet seen him in person. His attending physician, Vince Bateman, who was also chief of psychiatry, had presented the old man at Wednesday morning rounds as a ‘diagnostic dilemma.’ Clinically, the patient satisfied most of the criteria needed for a diagnosis of senility; and yet, according to Bateman, his artistic ability approached the incredible. He had arrived by ambulance, unconscious and with no ID, and Bateman had christened him ‘The Cartoonist.’

“C’mere, you guys,” the student said. “Check this out. It’s amazing.

The rest of the group gathered round, gawking curiously at the pad and the brisk, apparently haphazard path of the pencil. With an impatient glance at the time, Scott joined them.

Unmindful of the intrusion, the old man continued his pencil scratching. As he drew, he rocked to the music coming from the radio on the wheelchair beside him. It was one of those old-fashioned transistor models that had been so popular some twenty years back, prior to the advent of the Walkman and the ghetto-blaster. Its cracked and battered casing was held together with strips of masking tape, grubby with age.

Scott glanced at the old man’s pad...and when he did, his impatience vanished. As a kid Scott had been an avid comic book fan, all of them, everything from Sergeant Rock to Richie Rich. But he had never seen anything like this.

The artist had created a series of action drawings, squared-off in classic comic book style, which depicted two men boxing. In the last of these, one man lay face-down on the mat. The other stood with his legs spread and his arms triumphantly upthrust. Lead-black blood trickled from the loser’s ear; the old man was just in the process of detailing his vanquished body. The pencil moved with remarkable accuracy and speed, and the drawings were of a professional quality.
No
, Scott thought, it was more than that. They seemed almost alive.

“Who is he, Dr. Bowman?” one of the students said.

“Well, no one knows for sure,” Scott said, switching back in his memory to Bateman’s presentation. “A nameless vagrant, found unconscious in the park bordering the QE Parkway. He’s not my patient, but if memory serves he’s shown none of the classic signs of alcoholism, which is the usual case with these unidentified derelicts.”