"...And the book ends, but what Samuels is really talking about here is fate."
Mrs. Fredericks shut the book with a thump, then went to the blackboard and with the side of a piece of chalk wrote the word fate in large bold letters. She then wrote the name Rollins in smaller letters about three feet away from fate, and connected the two with four arrows going from Rollins to fate, one of them direct, the other three describing large arcs.
Laurie had not been paying much attention to the morning lessons, for her mind kept drifting to the image of a six-year-old boy with a gleaming butcher knife plunging it again and again into the softness of her body. Her legs were crossed and she squeezed her thighs tightly together to keep the imagined blade from making its most horrifying thrust of all.
She looked down at her notebook and realized the symbolism of the doodles she'd been making absently during the teacher's exposition of the novel: dagger-shaped arrows penetrating a Valentine-like heart. Perhaps that was why she sat up attentively when she noticed the arrows Mrs. Fredericks had drawn on the blackboard. They all extended from Rollins, and all went in different directions. Yet all ultimately arrived at fate.
"You see," Mrs. Fredericks amplified, "fate caught up with several lives here. No matter what course of action Rollins took, he was destined to meet his own fate, his own day of reckoning.
The idea is that destiny is a very real, concrete thing that every person has to deal with." She emphasized this by stabbing at the word fate five times in rapid succession with the chalk until it snapped. Two or three students giggled, but Laurie drew her breath in sharply.
She mused about fate. Suppose it was my fate to die like Judith Myers. No matter which way I ran, no matter what I tried, that blade would be waiting for me. Gosh, that couldn't be my fate.
I'm too young. I'm too, well, too nice. But Judith Myers was young, and probably no less nice than I. It was just her destiny, that's all. It had been determined by God a million years ago that on October 31, 1963, Judith Myers would be horribly murdered. But why would God do a thing like that to a nice girl? God wouldn't do anything evil like that, would He? We were taught in Sunday School...
As her mind wandered dreamily over these solemn questions, she noticed a station wagon parked on the street. Behind the wheel, gazing into her classroom, gazing it seemed directly at her, was a man. At least she thought it was a man. He was dressed as far as she could make out in dark kahki mechanics coveralls. His hair was black, but his face seemed pretematurally white, almost powdered.
In fact, the more she looked at the face, with its red lips and sunken purple eyes, she wondered if he weren't wearing a mask. He'd better be, because if that's his own face, that guy is in trouble. Wow, if he's looking at me, then I'm in trouble!
Hoping he would go away, she focused on Mrs. Fredericks, who had picked up her broken chalk and was putting some finishing touches on her rendering of Man against His Fate, underlining and circling fate several more times. As she'd had enough morbid thoughts for one day or for a lifetime, Laurie concentrated on the lesson. "Edwin," Mrs. Fredericks was asking, "how does Samuels's view of fate differ from that of Costain?"
I'm not going to look at that man, Laurie swore to herself as the boy two rows away muttered an answer. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, but I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of looking at him. Well, maybe just a bit to see if he's still...
She turned her head ever so slightly.
He was.
"Laurie?"
The pronunciation of her name came like a thunderclap, and she jumped as if a bolt had struck her seat. "Ma'am?"
"Perhaps you can answer the question."
She closed her eyes and brought the question to the forefront of her mind. Then she struggled for a moment to produce an answer.
"Uh... Costain wrote that fate was somehow related only to religion." The teacher's smile of approbation prompted Laurie to go on and gave her fortitude. "Whereas, Samuels felt that fate was like a natural element, like earth, air, fire and water."
"That's right," said Mrs. Fredericks. "Samuels definitely personified fate..."
He was gone.
She'd decided, even as she spoke to the class, that she was going to whip her head around when she finished and glare at him, whoever he was, until he dropped his eyes in embarrassment.
But he was gone.
He was back.
Several hours later, as school ended with a blaring bell, he sat in the stolen station wagon, watching the children burst out of the doors with a clamor. Many of them were dressed in Halloween costumes and bore black and orange paper cutouts made in school, witches and pumpkins, black cats and devils, skeletons and ghosts. One little girl pretended to be riding a broomstick with a cardboard black cat on it, another wore a jack-o'-lantern on his head like the famous Headless Horseman.
After a while, four boys emerged, one of them bearing a pumpkin so large he swayed from side to side like an overburdened burro. The other three were pushing him back and forth and taunting him. The boy they were bullying was the same one that had been talking to the pretty blond girl this morning.
"Leave me alone," the boy was pleading.
They wiggled their fingers in his face. "He's gonna getcha, he's gonna getcha, he's gonna
getcha!"
The boy slapped at the fingers. "Leave me alone."
"The Bogeyman is coming."
"No, he's not. Leave me alone."
"He doesn't believe us. Don't you know what happens on Halloween?" said the biggest one, putting his face close to Tommy's.
Tommy shrugged. "Yeah, we get candy."
They laughed and danced around him, waving their hands in his face. "Oooooh, the Bogeyman, the Bogeyman..."
Tommy clutched his pumpkin tightly to his chest and tried to push his way through them, but one of them stuck his foot out and tripped him. He fell on top of the pumpkin, which split open with a glupping sound, emitting a sour odor. Tommy had skinned his knee but there was no other damage done except to his pride. He fought back welling tears.
The sound of the boys' cruel laughter faded as they ran away, leaving Tommy to climb painfully to his feet. His jacket was covered with pumpkin pulp and seeds. Suddenly, as he began pulling these off with his fingers, he felt the sunlight eclipsed by a large shadowy figure. He looked up and there was a man in dark kahki coveralls standing there looking at him.
"Hi," said Tommy.
The man said nothing. Tommy could hear him breathing stertorously but the boy couldn't see his face clearly because it was positioned between himself and the sun. What Tommy could make out, however, left him in no mood to hang around. The man had dark red-stained lips and his eyes were rimmed in purple, like grossly overused eyeshadow. A livid scar zig-zagged down his cheek.
The weird thing was, Tommy couldn't imagine that that was the guy's own face. It looked rubbery and kind of mask-like. But if he was wearing a mask, shouldn't he take it off around about now and say "Boo!" and reveal who he was?
