The Cartoonist (6 page)

Shaking his head, Scott stood, his mind’s eye conjuring an image of the drooling, demented old man whose talent seemed so drastically out of place. He tried shifting his thoughts to firmer ground, to write it all off as a trick of the mind.

But it was no good. He was unable to reconcile the association his mind had made and had fixed on despite his best efforts to explain it away. Glancing back into the depths, he decided there was only one way to settle this thing once and for all.

He turned and hurried up the hill in uneasy strides.

In the rec room closet Scott rooted around in search of his waterproof Minolta. He found it still in its box behind a set of unused golf clubs. The compact, plastic-encased camera was a gift the girls had given him this Christmas past. He had used it on Christmas day, snapping off shots of the family around the tree, then had put it away. In fact, he hadn’t had the film developed yet. The partially used roll was still in its cartridge. That was good. It would save him a trip into town for a new one.

He tested the flash and found it operational. Then, after a cursory glance at the instructions, he hurried back outside. Kath joined him partway down the path.

“What are you gonna do with that?” she said, indicating the danger-yellow camera that dangled from his wrist.

“I have to check something under the dock.”

Kath frowned. “But you told me never to go under there, Dad. Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Only for little girls.”

Clutching the camera, Scott dove into the lake. After a few quick strokes toward bottom, he turned to examine the dock. From this depth, suspended above the rocks, he could make out the four crusty barrels and, just evident in the poor illumination, their tightly cropped ribs. And there were the white-rose decals, faded but still visible—old White Rose oil drums. It all looked damned similar to what he could remember of the drawing. But his angle wasn’t right for a photo. The point of view in the sketch had been from further out, and deeper.

Scott stroked back to the surface and filled his lungs with air. Kath was standing by the ladder, looking down at him, her tiny face pinched with worry.

“Don’t stay under so long, okay?”

“Okay, hon,” Scott said.

He climbed onto the dock and waved at an approaching motor boat. Bob Anderson and Fred Mills were just returning home from their early-morning trolling session. Grinning proudly, Bob held up a string of fat-looking pickerel. By now Scott knew their routine: fish from seven until eleven, back to Bob’s for sandwiches and beer, then head out again until four.

Camera in hand, Scott plunged like a human spear, feet-first into the lake. As he descended, he could hear the pinging knock of Anderson’s small outboard. In seconds he reached bottom, landing atop the same greasy cluster of boulders that Kath’s bracelet had lit upon a half-hour earlier. Chest-high weeds surrounded him. He tried to ignore their creepy texture and peered back up at the dock.

Yes, by God, there it was, the same pattern that had triggered his memory when he glanced at the drawing the day before. The four ribbed barrels, the faded roses, the wavy lines that were the cedar slats of the dock’s undersurface, distorted by the rippling lakewater.

Scott aimed the camera and shot. In the bright-white pulse of the flash, the dock flickered detail.

From behind him a freak undercurrent bore in a cold channel, sweeping several weedy tentacles onto his back. A long filament encircled his waist like a loose-fitting belt, and Scott shuddered, partly because of the icy undercurrent, but mostly because of the ghastly feel of those weeds on his skin. He crouched, preparing to thrust upward for the surface....

And that was when he slipped. His right foot skidded off the algae-scummed rock he was standing on, and the rock rolled back along the steep incline of the lakebed. It came to rest against the boulders behind it, pinning Scott’s lower leg.

Galvanized by a lightning bolt of panic, Scott gaped down at his leg. A precious portion of air escaped in an unheard shout and rose boiling to the surface.

He gave his leg a solid tug. Pain torched up through his ankle, but his leg did not move. He tried rolling the big rock away, first with his free foot, then with his hands, but the push was uphill and the rock was too heavy.

Scott froze in disbelief. Weeds wound his chest, his arms, his legs. The cold undercurrent grew even colder. He tugged again, still holding on to some kind of control, still unable to accept the gravity of his predicament. He tried planting his opposite foot, twisting and pulling, but it was no use. His leg wouldn’t budge.

Horror dawned like a sunless morning.

Jesus, I’m really stuck.

His hand released the camera and it bobbed end-over-end to the surface. Around him, tendrils of weed swayed like doomdancers in the undercurrent...touching, brushing, coiling.

Scott’s eyes widened behind his diving mask.
Sonofabitch,
his mind shrieked in pointless anger.
I’m stuck. God. Why didn’t I have someone standing by?

Airhunger tapped like an impatient finger at his throat. He went down on one knee, searching for leverage, wrapping his leg in his hands and heaving until his muscles cramped with the effort.

But he could not free his leg. It was rooted.

The rocks had him firm. He wrenched his leg again, until the sustained effort burned like brand-iron in his tendons. And this time, at the expense of twin strips of skin, he gained five or six inches, freeing his leg to mid-calf.

Relief swept over him—he would be out and away in one more tug...

But his next pull gained him nothing. Again the rock shifted, seating itself more firmly against the low wall of boulders.

The need for air was fast becoming a physical thing, an irresistible force, and Scott knew that soon he would unstopper his throat and draw in lakewater; he would be powerless to prevent it.

Darkness pressed in, fogging the rims of his vision. In the midst of that darkness, a terrible image crystallized—the gnawed-off limb of an animal twitching in a trap—and Scott lurched again, as much to escape that image as to liberate himself from the lake bed. He leaned back against the boulders, wedging his heel against the rock and pushing...but the rock was too slippery and his foot skidded off, goring the pulp of his heel. He tried again, and again his foot slipped away.

He hung there motionless, transfixed, terrified into momentary inaction. More air squeezed out and bubbled wasted to the surface.

This can’t be happening,
his mind screamed in the green-black silence.
How can I be stuck in the lake no this is insane no NO come on pull pull!! PULL!!

An inner dam lifted then and rage flooded in. Scott began a wild dancing struggle—flailing, pin-wheeling, digging his free foot into the grasping lakebed, creating blinding mud-swirls around him. In answer to his struggle, asphyxia spawned furiously in his chest. Every muscle demanded that he open his mouth, his lungs, suck in air. He looked up dizzily to the surface, to the light, the air...so damned close! And he fought, spending himself and his precious reserve of oxygen.

But it was pointless. He was stuck. And the rotations of his body as he thrashed frantically about were entangling him in weeds like a fish in a net.

Another gulp of air escaped the tightening vise of his chest.

Why doesn’t somebody come? Bob! Krista! Please! PLEASE!!

Scott Bowman thought about dying. He was twelve feet below his own dock and he was going to drown.

There was a greenstick
snap!
inside his head then, and his mind went white with something pure and primitive, beyond the simple images of fear. The need for air would no longer be denied. It was everything now, the center of a shrinking universe, and Scott’s body obeyed its bellowed command. Helpless, he opened his mouth and inhaled. Water found passageways it had never been meant to find.

Scott’s eyes bulged as suffocation roared like a brush fire through his brain. His chest clamped down furiously in an effort to expel the water from his lungs. Distantly he heard the mechanical clatter of Anderson’s outboard—or maybe it was the rattling bones of the Reaper, he no longer cared, was no longer capable of rational thought. Wholly desperate animal now, he lunged with a fierceness that flayed tendons from their bony tethers.

But his leg would not move.

His brain started to swell. Myriad bright-colored images capered crazily in. Water replaced air.

He was drowning.

Through darkening mists Scott saw the anchor, cutting the water like some macabre sea creature, all silver scales and spear-headed fins. Beyond understanding, edging on some oddly seductive and deadly euphoria, he watched its approach with idiot awe.

Then he saw the yellow nylon rope.

Bob Anderson’s boat was passing directly overhead. And it was dragging its anchor.

Spurred by that most compelling of instincts, Scott fixed an eye on the rope and lunged. And when he had it, when it grew taut in his grip, he planted his free foot against the pinning rock and pushed, one last time.

Topside, Anderson gunned the outboard.

And Scott’s leg came free.

RELEASING THE ROPE, SCOTT THRASHED blindly upward, seeking the light and the healing air. He surfaced beneath the dock, rapping his skull on a barrel, and thrust his face into the meager foot of air space. His fingers poked up between the cedar slats and dug in like gaffing hooks. Hacking and sputtering, he opened his mouth and sucked greedily at the air...the exquisite air, the living air. The sound of his daughter’s voice—high, hectic, shrieking his name in a pitch of terror—filled him with a strange kind of exultation. Hearing it meant he was alive. He hadn’t expected to be.

Now Kath was on her knees, squinting down between the dock slats, grasping Scott’s fingers. Then Krista was there, her voice escalating hysterically, echoing her daughter’s terror.

“Scott, Jesus Almighty, are you all right? Oh, sonofabitch, you scared me. Can you get out of there? Oh, God...oh,
God.
”

Then Bob Anderson and Fred Mills were above him, and Scott could see them all, peering down at him through the cracks with fish eye-lens faces. Lunatic laughter bubbled up in his throat and he coughed it out. He spluttered out mouthfuls of lake water, stared up with burning eyes between the dock slats...and breathed.

The panicky gallop of female voices was interrupted by Anderson’s booming command: “That’s enough. He’s okay. We got to get him out from under there, that’s all.”

“Oh, Scott...I thought you were...I...”

“Fred, take the missus up to the house—”

“No,” Krista said, clutching Anderson’s jacket sleeve. “I’m okay. I want to help.”

Bob went down on one knee and gazed at Scott with his calm brown eyes. “Can you get your ass out from under there, Scotty?”

Scott hacked violently as he tried to answer, the sound like an animal’s bray. “I don’t...can’t move...”

He was shivering helplessly, his muscles already seizing from the immense strain they had suffered. Agonizing cramps racked his arms, his legs, his belly. So tight was his grip on the dock, he felt as if the individual pads of his fingers had been nailed there. He didn’t think he could let go.

And, of course, there was the fear. The fear was still there, the terror, fresh as a bleeding wound. Getting out from under the dock meant that he would first have to submerge into that dark envelope of water again. And right now, he simply could not do that.

“No...” he sputtered, still gasping for air. “Stay here awhile...”

Dressed in her Danskin leotards, Krista dove into the lake. She came up under the dock and swam in next to her husband. She placed a hand on his forearm; the muscles were iron-stiff.

“Come on, honey,” she said. “Let’s get you out from under here.” There was a series of four partially submerged joists that had to be passed to reach the dock’s outer edge. “We’ll go one section at a time.”

Krista clasped his wrist and tugged, gently but firmly. She could see the fear in his eyes, a dull, winking shine, like headlights in a shrieking blizzard.

Reluctantly, Scott let go.

“Deep breath, babe, then let’s do it, okay?”

Gasping in air, Scott slowly nodded. Then, with Krista at his side, he submerged.

In a flash they were up on the opposite side of the joist, Scott lunging out so violently he struck his head again, this time on the edge of a metal joiner.

“Careful, sweetheart,” Krista said. “Everything’s gonna be fine. Three more to go, just three...oh, God, Scott, I thought you were...” Tears burned in her eyes. “Come on, babe, just three more.”

And one by one, they did it.

At the outer edge of the dock, Scott slapped up an arm and grabbed on. Utterly spent, he rested his cheek against the rough surface of the wood. Krista remained in the water beside him, stroking his hair, whispering. Bob and Fred crouched on the dock in front of him.

“Okay, chum,” Bob said. “Let her go and we’ll pull you up out of there.” He gripped Scott’s wrist. “C’mon, Doc. Leave her go. You’re okay now. C’mon.”

Slowly Scott’s fingers peeled away. Aided by Krista, the two old gentlemen lifted Scott’s stiff and shivering two hundred pounds out of the lake.

Scott flopped like a dead fish onto the water-slick surface of the dock. Shallow wounds like racing stripes branded his leg, but there were no obvious signs of a fracture. Krista knelt next to him, kissing his face, fingering his tangled hair. Temporarily forgotten, Kath stood on the shoreline away from the dock, two fingers poked into the curled-down corner of her mouth. After a while Scott noticed her there and felt his heart ache along with the rest of him.

Gradually that raw, mind-abrading panic abated, and he extended an open hand. Slowly, almost shyly, Kath came forward and took it.

They stayed that way awhile, Scott and his girls, Bob and Fred standing silently by. Then they all helped him to his feet and up the hill to the rec room, where you could still catch the faintest whiff of artist’s oils.

* * *

“I want to thank you guys,” Scott said, his face open and terribly vulnerable. He was still breathing too fast. “You saved my life out there. You really did.”