Free The Cartoonist by Sean Costello

like the eyes of a road animal caught in the dazzling deathglare of onrushing headlights.
    The quicksand sent cool tendrils up his nose. He dropped the camera and it bobbed away, into the green gray stuff overhead. Barely able to breathe, he lifted his chin from the ooze. It was seeping into his ears....
    Kath’s face was disembodied again, and now it was blurring toward him through the gloom, distorting, coming apart, spattering blood...
    But it couldn’t get to him. No. Because now the quicksand was covering his eyes.
    And he was drowning in it, drowning in it, drowning ...
    * * *
    Scott’s scream brought Krista awake with a frightened cry of her own. When she opened her eyes she found him tangled in the sheets, struggling to his knees in bed.
    “Scott,” she said, grabbing the rigid column of his arm. “Scott, what is it?”
    Wheezing like an engine, Scott opened his eyes and saw the billowing curtains, the familiar shapes of the bedroom furniture, Krista... then he slumped against the headboard in a sweat. Krista drew him down, kissed him, lay with her chest against his back, comforting, murmuring over the wind.
    Before sleeping again, this time dreamlessly, Scott asked her to close the window. She did this without question. As she returned to bed, Scott noticed the sheers behind her, hanging dead against the wall.
    It was better with the window closed. He couldn’t hear the waves.
    He slept.
    And later, when dawn spilled bleach into the heavens and Krista hurried out to Kath’s bedroom to comfort the child in the wake of her own nightmares, Scott didn’t notice she had gone.

8
    AFTER GETTING KATH SETTLED, KRISTA returned to bed. She drowsed fitfully for another hour, then got up. In spite of her poor night of sleep, she could remain in bed no longer.
    She stood naked in the gray morning light, looking down at her husband for what seemed like a long time. He lay on his side with his knees drawn up, one arm wrapped loosely around his pillow. His respirations were deep and the corners of his mouth twitched like the muzzle of a skittish horse. Krista noticed that his eyes darting crazily beneath their lids and wondered what he was dreaming.
    It dawned on her then, with the brute force of a hammer blow, that she might have awakened to an empty bed this morning...and every morning for the rest of her life. Another minute, maybe two, down there at the bottom of the lake, and they would have been dragging for her husband’s body instead of wrenching it to the surface to gasp and grapple and live.
    At this thought Krista shuddered, her skin bristling at every follicle. She grabbed her housecoat and pulled it on....
    And suddenly she wanted to wake him. Suddenly his stillness disturbed her to a degree that was as irrational as it was blackly terrifying. She recognized this irrationality immediately—but still, the urge to wake him, to hold him and to hear his voice, was almost overpowering.
    She glanced at the bedside digital as she stooped forward to rouse him, hesitated, then decided to let him sleep. It was still only a quarter of six.
    As if sensing Krista’s unease from the dreamscape of his slumber, Scott moaned and shifted onto his back, dragging his pillow along with him. Still shaky but somehow relieved, Krista turned and left him to his healing sleep.
    She was unsurprised when she found Kath’s comforter folded back and her bed empty. Stepping into the room, she touched the hollow where Kath’s body had been and found it cool. Concerned, she hurried downstairs and ran a systematic search of the house.
    But there were no signs of Kath anywhere. She hadn’t even had her ritual bowl of Cocoa Puffs. More than a little frightened now, Krista stepped out onto the deck, her eyes cutting through the fine morning mist to the lake.
    There, alone on the dock like some winsome figure in an oil painting, sat Kath.
    Wrapping herself in her housecoat, Krista walked barefoot through the dew toward her musing daughter. She