The Cartoonist (27 page)

And as Scott looked on, horror-struck, the figure of Kath’s Cabbage Patch doll came to life within its frame, like an animated character on a miniature, black and white screen. Its stubby hand tightened around the wall plug and pulled. Now Scott could see the metal prongs: halfway out, they gleamed in the light of unseen fluorescents.

Behind him voices grunted heftily, and the barricading bed slid again.

Without warning, Scott released the clipboard and reached for the old man’s throat. His scrawny neck felt spongy between Scott’s closing hands.

Spongy and good.

Choke, you bastard, he thought with idiot glee. Choke like I did, like my little girl...

Gagging, black eyes bulging, the artist stabbed out with his pencil, driving its tip into Scott’s left shoulder. Scott cried out but held his grip firm, tightening it by torturing degrees.

Die, he thought, and the thought became a chant: “Die, die, die...”

The old man swung the pencil again, this time catching Scott in the face. Blood spurted from a lead-blackened hole in his cheek.

Die

The door scraped open enough to admit Bateman’s head.

“Scott!”

Again the pencil gouged—but now Scott had the old man’s wrist and he was turning it inward, leaning his full weight and all of his strength against that wasted arm.

There followed a grotesque popping sound and a gurgling rattle of death, and when the security guards yanked Scott away from Nicholas Rowe’s body, the pencil was buried in the old man’s throat to the eraser. Blood erupted from the puncture site in an astonishing red jet, spraying Bateman’s impeccable gray suit and expensive Italian shoes, spotting his ashen face.

For a moment everyone in the room stood in stunned and silent ranks, Scott and Vince Bateman and Jane Copeland, the three security guards and the two young orderlies.

Then the old man began to howl with laughter, shrill dry cackles that rose and fell in maniacal cycles, seeming to echo from the slag pits of hell. He laughed and blood spurted and Vince Bateman made no effort to step out of its path. The old man laughed and blood drenched his clipboard, that odious slate of his abysmal rage. He laughed and his life ran out on the floor.

And suddenly, behind his laughter, like a far and distant echo, rose the tinkling laughter of a child. Scott heard it and knew that everyone else had heard it, too. But he saw them shove it from their minds as quickly and efficiently as he had pushed the truth from his own.

Slowly the laughter died.

The Cartoonist slumped forward in his chair, the canvas restraints preventing him from toppling to the gore-puddled floor.

Kath!

Elbows bladed like a charging lineman, Scott whirled toward the door. And he almost made it, so deep was the spell that bound the others.

But then Bateman cried “Stop him!” and five men converged on Scott in a tightening pack-dog circle, a strange kind of awe in their eyes.

Then they were on him, all over him. A huge forearm closed around his neck, cutting off his air. Scott bit into it until he tasted blood and the arm was withdrawn. There was a shriek of anger and pain. Then other arms had him, and they were wrangling him down. A fist plowed into his sternum, collapsing his lungs, graying his vision. Now the orderly he’d bitten was back on top of him, his massive arms clamped around Scott’s upper legs. They were lifting him, lifting him right up in the air...

He barely felt the needle when it punctured the flesh of his hip.

Ketamine
, he thought.
Fast-acting stuff
.

Pure volcanic power surged into Scott Bowman then and he wheeled, kicked, convulsed and flailed until he was free. He vaulted over the bed and out through the door in a single agile movement. But even as he lurched down the hall and locked the door to the nursing office behind him, the drug began to work on him. The dial on the phone seemed to warp and sag like a clockface in a Dali painting, and the cramped little room seemed to ooze around him like toffee.

He shook his head and found the right numbers and dialed the General Hospital in Danvers.

“Let me speak...” he said before anyone answered.

Then he collapsed, his forehead striking the blotter on the desk with a soft, unheard thud.

Epilogue

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MARIA FALSETTO STOPPED HER cart outside room 117 and murmured a prayer in her native Italian. She’d heard about the murder through the preshift grapevine, and had known even then that she would end up responsible for the mess. Maria was a cleaning lady. She worked permanent nightshift so she could hold down a day job at the high school—and room 117 was in her quadrant on the main floor.

Marshaling her courage, Maria rolled her cart into the room. The smell struck her first. Back in Italy, her father had worked in the village slaughterhouse. This same smell had been on his clothes when he came home at night. As a girl, Maria had imagined the beasts her father slayed pouring out that stink in an effort to ward off the inevitable steel. It was a combination of odors really: urine, bowels, the sour taint of blood, and something else...something not visceral, and very old.

It was the blood that got to her next, and she swooned as her eyes widened to their normal size, then stretched-out round as china saucers. Bile puddled in the back of her throat and she uttered a small, sickened whine.

So much blood...she had never seen so much blood.

Deep religious fears pushed Maria back to the doorway with a frightened cry. Then she stopped and turned back. If she didn’t do this, she might lose her job. And she couldn’t afford that, not now, not with Gino starting college.

Breathing in hitches, Maria set about her grim task. She began by mopping the floor. It surprised and sickened her how difficult it was to scour the blood off the tiles. There was even blood on the ceiling.

Dio buono.

As she worked, Maria’s mind insisted on creating imaginary scenarios of the crime. God, she thought, she knew that Dr. Bowman. And he seemed like such a nice man, even took time to speak with the cleaning staff, made them feel like his equals. She would never have guessed he was insane. But to murder a helpless old man like that, and for what reason?

Her stout legs barely supporting her, Maria leaned over to do under the bed. On the third rapid stroke, her mop dragged out a wadded-up ball of paper. She nearly tossed it into the big industrial wastebag on her cart...then she paused and unfurled it, remembering the old man had been an artist.

She studied the drawings for a minute, her expression puzzled, then set them aside. She’d give them to the nurse later on, when she was done in here.

What a crime, she thought, hoisting her mop to the ceiling. A helpless, gifted old man...

The balding, birdlike man seated across from Vince Bateman leafed through the thick sheath of drawings with something like awe. The man’s name was Peter Lloyd. He was the psychiatric director at Penatanguishene, the provincial center for the criminally insane.

Bateman, decked out in a dapper houndstooth plaid, paced uneasily behind his desk. “I’ve interviewed Bowman a dozen times since he committed his crime, and still he insists his story is true. His delusions are deep-seated, Peter. At first I thought they might simply be reactional—he did lose his wife, and very nearly his only child. But he refuses to let go of the notion that the old man was some sort of evil magician, settling the score for the death of his grandchild...or child. He muttered some foul drivel about incest.”

Dr. Lloyd regarded Bateman over the half-moon glasses on his nose. “How did he make it into medical school with a criminal record?”

“He ran. He and his friends left the scene of the crime...at least, if you can believe even that part of his story.”

Lloyd shook his head with a weariness that lay deep in his eyes. “What happened to his daughter?”

“She’s recovered,” Bateman said. “Apparently, the team in Massachusetts hadn’t expected her to, not so completely anyway. She’s staying with relatives for now.”

“Has he been allowed to see her yet?”

“No, not yet. He still has episodes of extreme violence, even with all the medication he’s getting. Hallucinations and nightmares. He claims the old man is in there with him. I’ve assured him personally of his child’s well-being, but he refuses to believe it. It’ll be up to your people when best to allow the girl to visit.”

“Hmmm,” Lloyd mused, looking back at the drawings. “What’s this one?” He turned a badly creased sheet toward Bateman.

Refusing to believe what deep down Bateman knew these sketches to represent, he only shrugged. “A cleaning lady found them under the old man’s bed that night two weeks ago.”

In the first frame a grim-visaged judge heard the pleas of a man clad in old-style prison fatigues. In the second, two guards restrained the prisoner while the judge, delivering his verdict, brought the gavel down with a crash....

There were four more frames, and Peter Lloyd noticed absently that the texture of these was subtly different, more like faded Xerox copies than actual lead-pencil sketches...but he couldn’t make much of it, and he continued to review their content with interest.

The third frame showed the prisoner being dragged out of the courtroom, his twisted mouth uttering silent oaths. In the fourth the man was being forced into a padded cell. In the fifth, bound in a straitjacket, he crouched in a corner on the bare white floor, legs drawn up to his chest, head propped against folded knees.

In the final frame it was nighttime, the man a barely visible smudge in one corner. There was a tragically lonely feel to this frame that made Lloyd shudder a little.

And there was something else, something he almost missed, something which, when he saw it, caught the tag end of his shudder and converted it to a deep, convulsive spasm.

Through a small barred window set high in the wall of the cell, baleful red eyes peered watchfully in.

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Sean Costello is a practicing physician who lives and works in Sudbury, Ontario, his home since 1981.

For information on previous and upcoming titles, visit the author’s website at www.seancostello.net

Did you love
The Cartoonist
? Then you should read 
Here After
 by Sean Costello!

Following the death of his ten-year-old son, physician Peter Croft embarks on a desperate, seemingly random search for a missing child, risking his sanity, even his life in a grief-induced quest. His journey propels him into the darkest reaches of human suffering and pits him squarely against an adversary whose own obsession defies all reason.

Here After
is a story of love, loss, obsession and redemption, with gripping action sequences and a subtle paranormal underpinning. A compelling read from a seasoned storyteller, Costello’s sixth novel will keep you reading deep into the night.