The Fates

by Thomas Tessier

  She turned her back to him and the sunlight streaming in through the bay window by the kitchen table shone through her thin summery caftan, making shadows of her long, slender legs. They’re good legs all right, Lasker thought. Then the light changed slightly and her legs disappeared behind the cloth and she turned to the cabinet for something.

  It took Lasker several seconds to realise that the light had changed before she had turned, ending his brief reverie. The light. As if a cloud had passed in front of the sun.

  Light.

  Cloud.

  He slowly got to his feet, turned and looked out the living room picture window. Greyish swirls. Like fog. At last the message reached his brain.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, hurrying to her. ‘Come on, now.’

  She looked at him blankly for a second and then at the window. ‘Oh my God. No, oh no.’

  Lasker grabbed her arm but he didn’t know where to go. The kitchen window, the dining room window — everywhere was the same greyish veil. A cloud was settling on the house. Then a painfully loud rending noise came from over their heads and the floor shuddered beneath their feet.

  ‘The cellar,’ he said. ‘Where is the cellar door?’

  Marge continued to look around, a horrified expression on her face.

  Lasker shook her. ‘Where’s the damn cellar? We have to get down there, now come on.’

  ‘Around there.’ She pointed and Lasker immediately pulled her along the hallway to the door. ‘It won’t do any good,’ she continued, her voice a high-pitched tremor.

  ‘Yes, it will,’ Lasker insisted.

  He shut the door behind them and flicked all the switches mounted on the wall. Lights came on. Four steps down. A typical shallow modern basement, he thought unhappily. The house in which he had grown up had a proper deep cellar, at least twelve steps down, well into the earth. Not one of these. This was almost as bad as being in one of the rooms upstairs.

  The noise from above increased. Some of the tools which Stuart Calder had put up on a plywood panel on one wall now slipped from their places and clanked on the concrete floor.

  Lasker stood looking around helplessly, still clutching Marge’s arm above the wrist tightly. He felt foolish and angry. Angry with himself. He had squandered his time and now he was trapped. Too much time thinking, dreaming, head in the — clouds.

  Marge was weeping silently as the din around them grew steadily worse. The lights flickered and held. But not for much longer, Lasker knew.

  He let go of her arm and rushed to the other cellar door, which led up into the back yard. He slid back the flimsy supermarket bolt and opened the door. The hatchway a few steps up was heavy metal. He didn’t believe it could withstand the force of the cloud but it was the only chance they had. The empty space, smaller than a closet, behind the open steps. If they could get in there they might just survive. Like worms caught in the bottom of a tin can, he thought bitterly. He tested the wooden planks. They were thick, solid and heavy. The entire stairway had been built right into the concrete of the foundation. If he could remove just one step they might slide in — and pray their wood and cement pocket didn’t become their coffin. He checked that the steel bolts on the hatchway were securely in place and then looked around Stuart’s workbench for something to break loose a step with.

  Marge backed against the wall. She wasn’t crying now. She seemed oblivious to Lasker, the infernal racket above and the first trembling of the basement as the Calder house shook in the grip of the monster.

  Gone.

  Her house.

  Gone.

  The word floated randomly like a bubble in her mind. Gone, all gone.

  Lasker took a hammer, the first potentially useful implement he came across, and began to pound on one of the steps, but immediately saw it wouldn’t work. The fat beams had been screwed down into the frame — of course — which meant he would have to swing the hammer upwards to knock the screws loose. An impossible task that close to the floor and with so little time.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought feverishly as he tossed the hammer aside and rummaged about for something else. The ceiling began to groan, then lit up slightly. The lights went out as cables, pipes and insulation were ripped loose. The only light reaching the basement now came from the tiny window at ground level above the workbench. Water sprayed from a broken copper pipe and feathery green tufts of fireproof insulating material sifted down through the air.

  Lasker found a small axe and he started chopping frenziedly at the bottom step. It was hard going. ‘Fucking boy scout axe,’ he said aloud. The air around him was now a blizzard of dust and insulation. Then one side of the step was done, hacked through crudely. Lasker didn’t bother to start chopping the other side. He threw the axe away and sat down on the floor beside the stairs, bracing his back against the concrete doorway. With both hands he pushed the loose end of the step up and away. It gave, grudgingly. As soon as there was room enough he propped his feet against the underside of the plank and pushed. A few good kicks and finally the beam tore loose, falling to the floor. Lasker quickly rolled under the second step — yes, they would fit. The stairway was maybe five feet wide and the same again in depth.

  The floorboards above were coming loose now, snapping and tearing with horrible shrieking noises. As if the cloud is showing me it can do the same thing with no effort at all, Lasker thought. Not necessary. I know.

  He got to his feet, shouting for Marge, but he could hardly hear his own words. Where the hell was she? He groped around awkwardly, half-blind with the dust and material that swirled everywhere and clogged his watery eyes. Then he saw her a few feet away, grabbed her arm and made for the stairwell. But she was resisting, shaking her head.

  ‘It’s our only chance,’ he screamed in her ear.

  ‘I don’t want to die in there like that,’ she answered.

  Neither do I, he thought. Neither in there nor out here. Six-and ten-foot floorboards now began to drop around them from above. Lasker didn’t bother to say anything more to her. He yanked her by the arm to the stairwell and was surprised to find that her resistance ended suddenly. He motioned with his hands and she got down on the floor and slid under the steps. He followed. Then he reached out through the open planks and pulled the inside cellar door shut. It was made of quarter-inch thick plywood slats; a healthy teenager, Lasker knew, could kick through it without any difficulty. But he wanted it closed so Marge wouldn’t have to see her home and possessions crashing down into the cellar.

  He couldn’t see her in the dark. He felt around with his hands, found her feet and placed them against the lower step. He found her ear and told her to brace her back against the concrete wall, keeping her feet firmly on the step. When she did so, he set himself in the same manner.

  Like we’re riding on a sled, he thought, in a dusty snow. Sliding into nowhere.

  That was no good. He had not to think. The Fates had come. For him. For her. For everyone. That was all. He didn’t want to die thinking of his childhood or of his family or friends, those already dead and those living for the present. He didn’t want to think of anything at all. There was nothing left to think of.

  All he could do was open his ears completely to the monstrous sounds that assaulted them, open his burning eyes to the dust and dim shapes, feel the nervous ungodly shiver of wood and cement and earth, taste the grit and hot choking air… Feel the lines of Marge’s body huddled against him in the dark… Inhale the rising fetor…

  No, she thought. That was the word: no. She could feel the vibration of the sound along her facial bones but not hear it.

  No.

  No.

  No.

  Her side ached sharply, the two ribs probably refractured, she realised. What an irrelevant thought. My house. My home. To die like slime.

  Even if it goes away.

  Even if we live.

  We’re dead.

  *

  The door rattled.

  EPILOGUE

  Joe
Garfield sat on his front porch.

  For the first time in weeks there was a breeze in the air. The kind of cool summer evening breeze that made the maple leaves sing gently in the trees and brought the smell of freshly-mown grass up the street. It was the first pleasant evening since that whole trouble started with Ernie Pachman’s car. Maybe it would even rain. That would be good.

  Joe had another sip of beer. Yes, it was finished — all that trouble. There hadn’t been any more appearances or attacks in town for ten days or so, maybe longer. It seemed to have ended. But the absence of the thing was only part of it. There was also a feeling in the air, a feeling as tangible as this lovely breeze. People were beginning to come out of hiding at last — those who had stayed in Millville — and those who had fled were drifting back cautiously. The patient was still sick but the fever had passed, the devastation ended.

  It still amazed Joe to think that he had been one of the first to witness the awful forces that had terrorized Millville. How could he have known what would follow? How could anybody? He had been that close — spitting distance, almost — and he was still alive. One of the lucky ones.

  There were many unlucky ones. Before full-scale evacuation got underway people died fast and frequently. Even then the exodus was only a partial success. A considerable number of people, like Joe and Annie, simply refused to leave their homes.

  If your number is up there’s nothing you can do about it, Joe figured. He would rather sit in his own home and die if it came to that, than to flee like some wretched creature. He was too old to run.

  As it happened, his neighbourhood was not much damaged by the visitations. After Pachman’s car was hit there were a few more attacks in nearby streets but nothing like the kind of trouble the rest of Millville had gone through. This was still a good old neighbourhood.

  What was the death toll? The amount of destruction in dollars? Joe had given up following the reports. Many and much, that was certain.

  What was the nature of the beast? When it really started breaking loose Joe knew it could be only one thing. A warning. A warning and a reprimand. An act of God. Or Nature. It came to the same thing. All that other crap people talked about in the news was meaningless. Now that it had died down, more and more people were coming to see it the same way. The scientists could talk about unique environmental warps, backlashes, aberrations in force flow or any damn thing they liked. Maybe they weren’t too far off, either, when it came to the nuts and bolts of the thing. But to Joe they were still missing the point. Would they learn? Not just about the terror, but about themselves too? That was what counted. Would they change or merely learn to cope?

  This time had been a warning all right, a rap on the knuckles. Next time — who knows? To Joe it was all too clear. The lessons of great plagues and natural disasters were down in black and white in the Bible.

  Maybe it was just as well, he thought. All things considered. He had seen a lot over the course of his life and as far as one man could tell the world was not getting any better. The trouble in Millville made him feel glad to be on the threshold of his old age. The golden years, they called them. Yeah, well… It seemed a pretty safe place to be.

  The neighbourhood was quiet this evening. Very few cars on the road. During the day people were wary enough, but at night even more so. Even the Italians across the way kept the television turned down low, as if too much noise might summon a reappearance of the terror. Who could tell? Give them credit anyhow, Joe thought. They stayed too.

  Annie came down the hallway and stood by the screen door.

  ‘You okay, Joe?’

  ‘I’m fine, Annie.’

  ‘They had the news on. Ten o’clock.’

  ‘Yeah, what do they say?’

  ‘Some people got killed in a building that was damaged out in Ohio. They don’t know if it was an explosion or —’

  ‘Like what we had?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. They think it might be.’

  ‘How about that,’ Joe said quietly.

  ‘Want anything? Another beer?’

  ‘No, I’m fine, Annie. I’ll be in a little later.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going in to watch TV.’

  ‘Okay.’

  His wife disappeared inside.

  So.

  Maybe it’s moved on, Joe thought. If that’s the case, too bad for them.

  Down the street a dog barked lazily.

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