The Cartoonist Read online

  The Cartoonist

  Sean Costello

  Red Tower Publishing

  Sudbury, Ontario

  Copyright © 2014 by Sean Costello

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Red Tower Publishing

  Sudbury, Ontario

  www.seancostello.net

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com

  The Cartoonist / Sean Costello—1st eBook edition.

  Print ISBN 978-0-973146-92-9

  Cover photo and design: Amy Bradley www.amalyn.net

  Author photo: Alfred Boyd

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  For my girls, | Carole and Candace | Special thanks to Amy Bradley for the wicked cover design, John Tkachuk for the dynamic cover art illustrations and Jack Dzilums for the use of his hand

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  PART TWO

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Further Reading: Here After

  Also By Sean Costello

  For my girls,

  Carole and Candace

  Special thanks to Amy Bradley for the wicked cover design, John Tkachuk for the dynamic cover art illustrations and Jack Dzilums for the use of his hand

  Prologue

  Sunday, July 12, 1972

  THERE WERE THREE OF THEM: Brian Horner and Scott Bowman in the front, Jake Laking in the back. Scott was driving. It was 5:35 a.m, and in the east a flat arc of crimson widened like a sleepy eye. The drivers’-side window was rolled all the way down, and from time to time Scott leaned his face into the cool rush of air. He was beginning to have some real difficulty concentrating on the road, which was slick from an earlier drizzle.

  “Come on, Jake,” Scott said. “I’m beat, half-pissed, and I sure as hell shouldn’t be driving. So where are we?”

  An inebriated cackle drifted from the back seat of the Volkswagen Beetle. The interior light was snapped on and a map of the southeastern New England states was wrestled noisily open.

  “I haven’t got a clue,” Jake said after a considering pause. Jake was in charge of navigation—or at least he was supposed to be. They had turned north off I-90 just outside of Boston in the hopes of finding a campground or a cheap motel, but that had been well over two hours ago.

  “Lost, I guess.” He cackled again.

  “That’s great,” Scott said, hammering the wheel with his fist. Beside him, Brian slouched in a drunken stupor. “That’s just great.”

  “Lighten up,” Jake said, the good humor gone from his voice. “Who gives a shit where we are? We’re boogyin’, right?” He reached into the hip pocket of his wash-faded Levi’s and produced a flattened plastic Baggie. “Besides, I’ve got a bit of a treat in store.” He wagged the thing in the air next to Scott’s ear.

  “What’s that?” Scott said, trying to see whatever it was in the rearview mirror. His eyes shifted back to the narrow roadway just in time to correct for a tight, unmarked turn.

  “I purchased this little number in that bar back in Boston,” Jake said. “A few toots of this particular herb, you won’t give a damn where you are.”

  “Dope?” Scott said. “That tears it, man. I thought you gave that up in high school. You know what color of shit we’d be in if we got caught with that stuff in the car? We’re in the States now, dickhead. This isn’t Canada. We’d lose our spots in medical school, and that would be the least of it.”

  Scott shook his head, partly in disgust, but mostly in an effort to clear his vision. He’d had more to drink than he was accustomed to, and now his alertness was dwindling dangerously. The interstate had been okay, the kind of wide, unbending strip you could navigate pretty much on autopilot. But wherever they were now, he needed every ounce of concentration he could muster. The road was unlit and winding, really treacherous in places.

  An awkward silence settled in the car. Only Brian, his hulking, linebacker’s body shifting slackly in the shotgun seat, was oblivious of its weight. Jake couldn’t see the harm in a little combustible cheer. They were getting it on, celebrating their acceptance into medical school. That had been the point of the trip in the first place—that and visiting the universities each of them had been admitted to.

  But it was Scott’s car, and Scott was the serious one.

  They rolled on. To Scott, the winding rural road seemed endless. There had been no signs of habitation in almost an hour now, and the only road sign had been so badly buckshot it was illegible. At this point all he wanted was stop someplace quiet and sleep it off.

  In the back seat Jake lit up. Scott could hear him inhaling, then stifling a cough. After a moment the joint’s glowing tip stitched like a firefly across the rearview mirror. Then it was under Scott’s nose.

  Scott pushed it away. “I’m driving,” he said, and the joint vanished into the back again.

  The weed made Scott nervous. He’d worked too hard and too long to lose it all over something as juvenile as a bag of grass. Banking into another curve, he marveled at the paradox that was Jake Laking. Moody, more brilliant than anyone Scott had ever met, Jake could regress without warning into the kind of redneck yo-yo you’d expect to find haunting the strip joints by night and the welfare lines by day.

  In the back seat Jake broke into a chorus of his old high school song.

  “Yellow and blue, yellow and blue, What we want we always do...”

  The road jagged hard to the left. As Scott eased into the curve, the headlights flickered off a badly canted road sign. “Old Burwash Road,” he said, reading the sign aloud. “See if you can find it on the map.”

  The happy minstrel in the back ignored him. Brian grunted awake from his stupor.

  “Rick-a-rack-a, rick-a-rack-a, Ziss-boom-bah...”

  Genuinely angry now, Scott glared into the rearview mirror. He was about to chew Jake out when Brian said, “Heads up,” and seized the wheel, cranking it hard to the right.

  Scott looked out in time to see a kitten dart onto the blacktop from the tall grass bordering the roadway. Tail straight up, eyes flicking back an eerie red reflex in the glare of the headlights, its tawny body froze in the middle of the lane and waited for the killing impact.

  Shoving Brian’s hand away, Scott continued the rightward veer, edging the starboard wheels into the loose dirt of the shoulder and just missing the terror-stricken animal. The dirt caught and held, tugging at the car like a giant hand.

  The child’s head appeared first, popping out through the curtain of grass like the head of the world’s tiniest vaudeville performer. Her body followed and then she was standing there, not a dozen feet away, rigid with fear as the kitten had been only a heartbeat before. She wore a frilly white dress and polished white shoes and she couldn’t have been much older than
ten. Her hair was like spun silver, and it riffled prettily in the breeze. Her eyes, round and terrified, locked on Scott’s in an unwavering death grip that burned with the same red fire as the kitten’s eyes had when it froze in the middle of the road. Pale in the glare of the headlights, she seemed somehow transparent, spectral, unreal.

  But the sound she made when the Volkswagen scooped her up, a sound like hailstones pelting tin, was more than real.

  It was mortal.

  It took only seconds, yet during that catastrophic interval Scott Bowman learned what an arbitrary concept Time really is. Somehow an eternity in the cruelest reaches of hell got crammed into those few seconds, and it never ended.

  It just went on and on and on.

  The Beetle’s low chrome bumper took her just above the knees, folding her onto the steeply sloping hood like a well-hit bowling pin. Her head struck the hood with a metallic thunk, a dull death-sound that would waken Scott from numberless future nightmares. Then she was rolling upward, her slender legs pitched bonelessly to the right, her arms pinwheeling in small, futile circles. Now her face was in front of Scott’s, bare inches away, her eyes glazed but still fixed on his even though she was almost certainly already dead.

  She’s looking at me, oh, dear God, she’s looking right at me...

  Then her face struck the windshield with a sharp, wet splintering sound and glass was rocketing inward, glittering shards that stung like angry hornets. There followed an instant when it seemed she would hang there forever, her lifeless eyes peering in at him accusingly. Then she was gone, over the side and down into the pale, receding night.

  The car fishtailed twice, first to the left, then to the right, then heeled back onto the blacktop before juddering to a halt across the faded center line. There was a jagged, fist-sized hole in the windshield. Next to it, running off thinly to the left, was a small, almost inconsequential smear of blood. Cool air found its way through that hole and struck Scott’s shock-whitened face.

  It smelled of slaughter.

  He closed his eyes and tried to wind back the clock—a few seconds was all he needed. He would return to the instant the kitten had appeared and run the witless creature over, drive on without sparing it even a single backward glance. Frantic phrases like prayers streaked through his mind, staccato verses directed at any god, pagan or otherwise, who might hear his pleas.

  o god let her live please I’ll do anything but please let her live i beg of you...

  Scott’s body trembled convulsively, its every fiber riddled with horror. His fingers went to his chin and found blood, his own blood, running in a rivulet from a pea-sized wound caused by a bullet of flying glass.

  a dream let it be a dream...

  Slowly he opened his eyes. He didn’t look at his friends. He looked instead at the windshield in the desperate hope that it would be intact, that the spiderweb fracture with the fist-sized hole would be gone, that the runny smear of blood would have vanished.

  But the hole was there...and the blood.

  Reality skewed.

  The harsh clunk of a car door.

  Low, shocky, overlapping voices.

  Then Scott was drifting out of the car, following the hunched figures of his friends, gliding toward that small, crumpled shape in the road. He fell to his knees beside her even as the others shrank away. He was no doctor, not yet, but he knew she was dead just as surely as he knew that a part of him had died along with her. He placed a hand behind her neck and her head lolled slackly toward him. Her eyes were still open, still gazing blankly into his.

  “Don’t touch her,” Brian said into the flat morning air. “You could damage her spinal cord.”

  “She’s dead, you asshole,” Jake said.

  At the sound of Jake’s voice Scott looked up—and his heart lurched into his throat.

  Jake’s eyes, usually a soft, pallid green, seemed to emit their own amber light as they swept the roadway in both directions, then shifted to the bordering woods. He stood with his shoulders hunched and his head cocked intently to one side, and for an instant Scott imagined a coiled, predatory cat, scenting danger and preparing to disembowel it.

  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.

  PART ONE

  1

  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 occ
asions 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.