The Fates

by Thomas Tessier

  The Fates

  Thomas Tessier

  © Thomas Tessier 1978

  Thomas Tessier has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1978 by Futura Publications Limited

  This edition published in 2016 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To my parents

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  THE PRESENCE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART TWO

  THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART THREE

  THE FATES

  CHAPTER TEN

  EPILOGUE

  PART ONE

  THE PRESENCE

  ‘… and the earth shall rise up against him.’ – Job, XX, 27

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Improbable.’

  Dave Lutz, teacher of sophomore English at Millville High School, wrote the word on the blackboard. ‘Improbable. A nice easy one to start off with, okay?’ Several hands shot into the air. ‘Miss Fratesi.’

  ‘Improbable means like impossible… right?’

  ‘You’re on the right track, but you haven’t arrived at the station yet, I’m afraid.’ Lutz sat on the corner of his desk.

  ‘Really impossible?’ Janet Fratesi added quickly, her eyebrows arched hopefully.

  ‘No, not quite. Someone else? Is your hand up, Mr Nardello?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I didn’t think so, but it’s nice to know you’re still awake.’ Lutz pointed back to the written word. ‘Improbable. Improbable. Miss Evans.’

  ‘Improbable means something that is possible but highly unlikely.’

  ‘Thank you very much. Improbable is an adjective that means unlikely. We could have snow today, but since it’s the eighth of June and it’s very hot, we can say that a snowstorm is an improbable event. Unlikely. Got it?’ Lutz stepped behind his desk and erased the word from the blackboard. ‘Let’s try something a little harder this time. Aloof.’ Again he spelled the word out on the blackboard. Harder, he thought grimly. These kids are sixteen years old, and half of them don’t even know what improbable means. Still, if they graduate from high school illiterate it won’t be because I didn’t try. ‘Aloof. Come on, don’t any of you ever do the crossword-puzzle in the newspaper?’

  ‘Mr Lutz?’

  ‘Yes, McNamara?’

  ‘Is that related to a goof?’ Ronnie McNamara grinned broadly at the chorus of chuckles he had earned.

  ‘No, it isn’t related to you at all.’ The chuckles turned to laughter. ‘All right now, does anyone have any idea what aloof means?’ Jackie Evans raised her hand again and Lutz nodded to her.

  ‘Does it mean far away, distant, or something like that?’

  ‘It does mean something like that, Jackie. You must be the only person in this class who knows how to read. Aloof means distant or reserved as with someone who can’t be bothered to associate with other people; someone who keeps to himself, you would call that person aloof.’

  ‘Hey, Mr Lutz?’

  ‘Hey what, McNamara?’

  ‘Where does that word come from?’ The youth settled back into his seat with a smart smile on his face.

  ‘It comes from the dictionary, McNamara. Look it up. You do know what a dictionary is, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure.’

  ‘Good. Try opening it sometime.’

  ‘I just thought you might know.’

  ‘I hope you’re writing all these words down, McNamara, because I may quiz you on them soon.’

  ‘I can see them on the blackboard. I got a photographic memory.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t get the picture on the last exam. I hope you do between now and finals.’

  Lutz wiped the blackboard clean again. Sixteen years old and scarcely literate. What had he been like at that age? It was only a few years ago, nine to be exact, but it seemed far away. Probably just as silly and uncertain, overall, but he at least had known what improbable and aloof meant. Are kids getting by on less and less words? Is the every-day vocabulary people use shrinking? Maybe a subject for a nice smart little essay. Dazzle them in the teachers’ lounge. But he knew he’d never write it.

  ‘Let’s try another word.’ He began writing again. Chalk: there would be a lot of that in his future. Chalk and vodka tonics. ‘Tantamount. Anybody? Tantamount. Someone, try. Miss Marsh, what do you think it means?’

  Leslie Marsh frowned with annoyance. She hadn’t raised her hand, so why should Mr Lutz pick her out of the thirty students in the room? It was unfair. ‘I don’t know. Is it a special kind of horse?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Lutz replied curtly. Two hundred plus students in sophomore English, and I get the dogs.

  ‘Well I said I didn’t know,’ Leslie Marsh muttered with an edge of defiance.

  ‘Tantamount. Brooks, are you looking for something on the ceiling?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Well then, kindly join the rest of us down here. The word is tantamount and it refers to something that is essentially the same as some other thing. It implies an equality of value or effect. An example: it can be said of some of you people that to fail your final exams is tantamount to failing the whole year, because that is what would happen. Okay? Tantamount. Learn it.’

  A few students dutifully wrote down every word Dave Lutz spoke, but most made only a few brief notes and stared back at him. Proceed. It’s hard-going, but proceed. Only two more weeks and then summer break. This time he didn’t bother to erase the last word.

  ‘Intrepid. Miss Diorio.’

  ‘Brave.’

  ‘That’s right. Brave, fearless.’ He drew a line through tantamount and then another through intrepid. It was something new to do.,

  ‘Raze. R-A-Z-E. Raze. Yes, Perkins?’

  ‘Does it have something to do with demolition?’

  ‘Yes, it can. You’re close.’

  ‘Does it mean demolition?’

  ‘First of all, Mr Perkins, raze is a verb. Demolition is a noun. What does that tell you?’

  ‘Oh, uh raze means to demolish something?’

  ‘Good enough. Raze means to tear down something, like an old building, to demolish, to destroy, to level something to the ground. Raze, a nice short word. Watch the spelling.’ Lutz drew a line through the word and then glanced at the clock on the wall. Fifteen minutes to a cigarette.

  ‘Hey, Mr Lutz?’

  ‘Yes, Nardello?’ Lutz wasn’t quite able to disguise the sound of surprise in his voice. Bernie Nardello hardly ever had anything to say.

  ‘If the Leaning Tower of Pisa,’ Nardello pronounced it pizza, ‘fell over, would you say it was razed?’

  ‘I wouldn’t, no.’ Lutz paused for several seconds. ‘To raze is actively to tear down something not just something falling over by itself.’

  ‘Oh. I got ya now.’

  ‘Good for you. Now.’ Lutz turned to the blackboard. On second thought, it was time to erase the words again. With long sweeping strokes. Then he wrote. ‘Perspective.’ Lutz thought of his favourite passage from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus, with a few notes inscribed in his schoolbook, expanded his perspective from the classroom to the universe. ‘Perspective. Mr Farley?’

  ‘That’s like a view, isn’t it?’

  ‘All right. What kind of view?’

  ‘From far away?’

  ‘Can anybody be more precise?’

  ‘Mr Lutz?’


  ‘Deborah?’

  ‘Is it when you’re looking at paintings, like in a museum?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m looking for. Anyone else?’ No more hands were raised. Still, the response was better than he had expected. ‘Perspective. A kind of view. It’s when you look at one thing in relation to its surroundings, and not just in terms of that one thing. Listen. We’re in a classroom at the moment and while we’re here we tend to think in terms of this room, where we are and what we are doing here — those of us who aren’t daydreaming. But let’s put ourselves in perspective. Here is the classroom.’ Lutz drew a small square on the blackboard. ‘The classroom is in the school building.’ He drew a slightly larger square around the first one. ‘The school is in the town of Millville.’ Another, larger square. ‘Millville is in Connecticut.’ And another square. ‘…the United States… the planet Earth… the Solar System… the galaxy… it all depends on what your perspective is, or what kind of perspective you want to put on things… the relation of one object to another or several others… That is —’

  Various school papers and drawings pinned to the bulletin board mounted on the wall near the classroom door suddenly began to flag, as if in a steady wind. But there was no wind, nor even a breeze. The weather was hot, muggy and still. Yet the papers were definitely flapping loudly now, and some of the sheets tore loose from the cork and were blown to the floor. Everyone in the room stared with wonder, including Dave Lutz. He put down the piece of chalk and walked across the room to the bulletin board. The papers stopped moving as he reached the spot.

  Lutz noticed that the air seemed very cool.

  *

  Everything was in place.

  Jim Donner took pride in his own sense of order. He was the neatest person he knew. At the Millville Post Office where he had worked for the past seventeen years, his section of the sorting room was easily the best organized. And it was always immaculate when he left at the end of the day. He loathed sloppiness; it was an abomination, an attack on the natural order of things. Through the years, he had suffered a good deal of ribbing and practical joking from his fellow workers, but it never really bothered him. Work was, after all, only work, and these things were to be expected. Jim Donner wasn’t foolish enough to think he could change other people’s ways. Although the idea had a certain abstract appeal (a perfectly neat world: think of it!) reform didn’t interest him.

  Chess did. He had played the game since he was fourteen, with, like so many addicts, considerably more passion than ability. Chess was the ultimate game, the only game. With its deep, hidden beauties, and its remorseless logic, it was the closest thing to absolute purity that Donner knew, and he loved it He played at the local dub two nights a week, participated in six or eight large tournaments in the New England-New York area every year, and at home he studied chess, playing over the games of masters and grandmasters, for at least three hours each night. His chess library contained nearly 500 volumes, plus stacks of international magazines, journals, and bulletins all carefully catalogued according to his own special system.

  The living room of Donner’s small apartment had, many years ago, become his chess room. He had no family or relatives, and the few friends he occasionally had in were invariably fellow chess buffs. A table with a chess board and pieces stood in the centre of the room with two chairs. A synthetic leather couch against one wall was the only other seating provided. There were three unmatched bookcases, a cheap tape recorder and a small pile of tapes. The carpet was grey and worn, without an underpad.

  This evening Donner was home early. He had been in a club tourney and had lost his game in only seventeen moves. To a schoolboy — that made it worse. Snotty bastard. No manners. Why did kids think they had to be rude, nose-picking little monsters to be like Bobby Fischer? Donner threw his crumpled score-sheet on the table and went into the kitchen to pour a glass of iced tea. Calm down, play the game over, find the mistakes. He knew he had made several. Of course, he had started off at a slight disadvantage. The kid played a King’s Gambit against him, an opening Donner was not overly familiar with. The Closed Ruy Lopez or the Nimzovich — now, these openings he knew twenty-odd moves deep, and was comfortable with them. But the brat’s wide-open attacking play in a line Donner knew only superficially had completely unnerved him. It was an outdated gambit too, not worthy of a serious player, but obviously Donner would have to brush up on it. Didn’t Fischer write a refutation of the King’s Gambit years ago? He would have to dig it up.

  Donner put on a ninety-minute reel of Vivaldi; baroque music seemed to go well with chess and it had a soothing effect on him. The first time, he went through the game quickly, noting only that he was in trouble by the sixth move and was in a virtually lost position by the tenth. Should have castled, he thought, as he reset the pieces and started play again. My king is caught in the open, subject to constant attack. He stopped at move seven and stared at the position for a long time. I’m pushing too many pawns trying to prove his opening unsound. The right idea but the wrong method. Then suddenly it seems all his pieces are in play and I’m tied up. What does MCO say? Probably to resign. He went to the bookcase, and took down a hefty volume entitled Modem Chess Openings. He went back to the board and began flipping through the book for the relevant section. Donner looked at the board and then back to the page again. Christ, I was out of the book on the third move. Bad, bad.

  While he was studying the long grey column of figures in the book, the white king, on the far side of the board, fell over. Without thinking about it Donner picked up the piece and set it back on its proper square. Then he looked at it again. Odd. He was about to move ahead in the game a few moments later when the white king again fell over, this time rolling right off the table. Donner set the book down on the table, got up and retrieved the king from the floor. The pages of his MCO were flipping as if in a breeze and two other pieces fell over on the board and rolled back and forth on the squares. Donner put the white king back on the board and it fell over immediately.

  ‘What the —’

  Donner hadn’t felt any wind. He turned to the two windows which looked out on Hoadley Street. They were half open, but his linen curtains hung slackly. Donner went and shut both windows. He turned at the clattering sound. The pages were still flipping. His score-sheet had blown onto the floor. Chessmen were scattered all over the table. For a brief second Donner thought they all looked blue. One piece flew through the air and bounced off his chest.

  *

  Police Chief Alvin Sturdevent leaned back and swivelled slowly in his desk chair, idly poking the yellow blotter in front of him with his letter-opener.

  ‘I realise we have something of a problem at the Plaza,’ he intoned solemnly. ‘High-school kids cruising around, drinking beer, trying to find girlfriends. Makes life difficult sometimes for the folks who go there to do some shopping.’

  Martin Lasker, junior reporter for the Millville News, stared sombrely at the slowly rotating heads of his pocket cassette recorder. This interview was going to be very dull unless the Chief had more to say. From the files back at the office, he knew that the paper ran a story every June on what it called ‘the teenage problem’ and what was likely to happen with it during the coming summer months. The nearest thing to a teenage problem in Millville was the Pioneer Shopping Plaza out near the highway to Waterbury. It really wasn’t much of a problem, but a few people complained regularly and — well, Lasker had to write something. He was new at the paper, as everyone reminded him and it was his first job after college.

  ‘So what I’m going to do,’ Chief Sturdevent continued ponderously, ‘is to have a man there every night to keep an eye on things. Make sure the kids move along and don’t clutter up the place.’

  ‘What about the kids who go there for something, to get a hamburger? Kids that aren’t going to cause any trouble.’

  ‘That’s fine. No sweat. We aren’t going to bother them as long as they go about their business, have a good time and don’t
bother anybody else. We’ll be keeping an eye on the ones who haven’t got anything better to do with their time and just go to the Plaza to hang out. You get five or six loiterers and then maybe you got a little trouble.’

  ‘Chief —’

  ‘Let me also say this, Martin,’ the Chief added, holding up one hand as if he were still directing traffic. ‘The great majority, the overwhelming majority, of kids in our town are fine kids and we never have any trouble with them. They’re good kids in a good town and we’re all happy about that. I think we have a nice relationship with them, a kind of rapport almost, I guess you’d call it. But like any place else we have a few who get into trouble from time to time. Oh, nothing serious, but they can be a nuisance, and that’s the situation we have out at the Plaza. Just a few regulars who spoil it for everybody else, drag-racing in the parking lot and what have you.’

  Sturdevent lit up a menthol cigarette. He had never been interviewed by the local paper before — or by anyone outside of the Department, for that matter — and the idea had originally appealed to him. Now it seemed like just another thing. Why did they send practically the newest, lowest member of their staff?

  ‘We’ve had letters from some parents saying that the kids who cause trouble at the Plaza are from out of town — Waterbury, Torrington, Naugatuck. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Well… maybe there are some out-of-towners involved, but I doubt it. Kids move in groups, they like to be where their friends are. Over to Waterbury now, they got three or four big shopping plazas of their own, and I know for a fact that they have a much bigger problem with the kids hanging out there than we do here. Anyhow, as I said, we’ll be keeping a close watch on the situation and we’ll be checking drivers’ licences and so on. We’ll soon find out who’s who.’ Sturdevent stood up and stretched. ‘It’s a hot one today. Is that all?’

  Lasker wasn’t quite through, but he could see that the Chief wanted to leave now, so he switched off his cassette. ‘Yes, I think that’ll do, but I may come back to you tomorrow for a few more quotes, if I may.’