SHORT STORY COMPETITION - 2ND PLACE!

 

 

Fait Accompli

By Reece Piper

 

There are many mysteries in this world, none quite so confounding, vexingly tangled and truly unfathomable as the enigma of Carter Samson, a self-proclaimed sensible man, who only drank coffee on Wednesdays.

If Carter were anywhere other than a lonely cafe in the dirty browns of a French fall, then things would be broken indeed, but as it stood, he was exactly where he was supposed to be; in a chair gazing at the scurrying newspaper hatted, blue swearing, wet Parisians. This city was always a projection, a vague chaos to anyone other than a romantic, and to Carter it had become a bleak backdrop for his misery. He finally understood why the people who called Paris home, acted as they did.

“Martin, I don't know what to tell you, I’m coming home. My plane lands in JFK, around 9.”

“Yes, pm. And forget the lift, I’m going to use a taxi. I know you’ve got things to do.”

“Well, she just left me, standing there drowning in faceless sniggers. I should have seen it coming, who comes to Paris in the fall anyway: she wanted an ending. You’ve been around through it all, you know this isn't my first tragedy. Kate was just another act in my wretched play.”

“Oh, don’t give me that, Martin. How many doors does this life have? When I get home, I’m slamming my own and turning the key.”

“Listen, life better not have anything else in store for me; all good things tend to rot in my hands.”

“No, I won't go and enjoy the culture and the people, Martin. She left me for one of them!” Carter’s indignation spilled over into the cozy quiet of the cafe, stirring a unison of practiced anti-tourist tuts from the few furrowed patrons.

“Monsieur, s'il vous plaît.” The French waitress, hardened to indifference through years of inept English speakers and persistent local flirts, handed Carter the bill.

“I, uh.” He paused and collected his decorum from up his sleeve in the form of the wristwatch. “Pardon.” That was the extent of his linguistic effort. “Is there anything to do after dark?”

Her black button eyes sewed him with contempt. “You can always see the sights.” She said and a thin-lipped blade of a smirk, cut and thrust him, cloak-wrapped, into that enemy-of-an-evening’s clutches.

So few cobbles, so few J’adores, just a structured bore; all reworked and smoothed; stop signs over love signs.

“At least I’ll get a grip.” Carter muttered, his eyes squinting visions of rained out lampposts. It got heavier. He wondered which weighed more: the rain or his grief, but regardless he sought shelter beneath a soggy awning under the yellow of a flickering neon sign: Boucherie.

“Curse this city, this existence, all of it. If I didn't know any better, I’d say life was out to get me.” He aimed a kick at a random box huddled against a trash can in front of him.

“Ouch!” The box exclaimed. “Watch where you aim your… Oh no.” Just then a creature, turgid of brow, pointy of nose and with comically small, perched spectacles, glowing a dirty olive green and smelling of the Seine, clambered through its failing cardboard hide to stand knee height beside Carter. It looked ill.

“Who? I mean…what are you?” Carter clutched his temples.

“Ah, well this is terribly awkward.” The creature made to clean its glasses on the hem of its waistcoat. “I'm so sorry but you’re really not supposed to have seen me.”

“I’ll settle for a name if you have one.”

“I do not. We don’t believe in those things: human things. Your name is Carter; I can give you that, Carter Samson. Although I’m sure you know it well.” Its leer outdid the yellow of the neon sign. “I’ve been assigned to you all your life. I am your Goblin.”

“All my life? My Goblin? You’ve been slinking around me since I was born?”

“Oh yes, I was there from the start, and I’ll be here till you die. Or at least that was my purpose.” The Goblin paused. “But this is highly irregular, there hasn't been a discovery for nigh on a thousand years.”

“I’m… Am I dreaming? Did I drink something I shouldn't have?” Carter pinched himself as he’d seen done in the movies, but to no avail. The Goblin responded by giving him a smart kick to the shin.

“What’d you do that for?” Carter hopped on one leg trying not to slip.

“You were asking for it. As for the dreaming, I can most assure you of reality. However, you do need to come with me now. Protocol 819 states that if a human were to ever discover a Goblin, be they theirs or another’s, that human should be escorted to headquarters immediately, willingly or otherwise.”

“I won't go with you.” Said Carter, surprising even himself.

“You don't have an option. I am pretty powerful, you know.”

Carter scoffed, “So powerful you were just discovered hiding in a box?”

“Yes well, The Wire never lies. The Wire must have put me in there for a reason.”

“Just tell me what’s going on. I’ve had a rough day.”

“Rough life Carter, I’ve been with you for all of it, remember.”

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me. Rough life indeed.” He bent and rubbed his shin.

“Alright I’ll humor you, as long as you’ll come willingly.”

Carter gave a resigned nod.

It cleared its swampy throat. “I’m a Fate Goblin, you see. Every human in the world has one, assigned at birth. We control your lives, guide you, move you along your preordained paths by providing you with choices. Each choice leads you either towards or away from things. We don’t know what that is, no one does, but we act in the minutiae, through guidance always given by headquarters.” It twitched its ears. “These aren’t just for show y’know, they pick up the ol’ Tactical Predetermination Signals sent over The Wire. We act, and then we come home when you die to be repurposed for another human. So, there we go. Happy now?”

Carter had turned pale. “Well, no. I wouldn’t say happy. Why? Why is this done? Why am I being given such hell? It isn’t fair; you’ve been torturing me!”

“Nonsense. I do what I’ve been told. I am, like you, but a part of a greater system controlling fate, interconnected, waiting to be spun like every individual strand of destiny into an invisible tapestry. The tower knows the details. So it was with Stonehenge, with the Pyramids and now with a true pièce de résistance, the Eiffel Tower.”

“The Eiffel Tower is your headquarters? If this wasn’t coming from you, Goblin, I would think this the worst joke ever told. This is insanity.”

“That is what a lot of people would call life, but we all have our purpose in it. Yours clearly, is to be detained by us. Now come along.”

“I'm definitely not going.”  

“Now Carter.” The Goblin’s face flashed displeasure. “I did you a favor, far more than my duty. You have to come.”

“Or what? You’re tiny, I could squish you like a bug.”

A furious response crackled and spun from the Goblin’s fingers like fiery snowflakes spiraling to the ground. Its eyes turned entirely white, ears turned into barnacled horns and hands formed treacherous talons. “I’m warning you!” Its voice boomed in the alley and even the rain stopped its fall, holding its breath to watch.

Carter had never been much of a fighter, or lover as his friends would say. But he was most assuredly stubborn. Stubbornness you see is a force, much like fate, not self-determined like many think. It stems from outside the mind, very much like antimatter, and Carter’s was feeling particularly emboldened.

“No.” Was his only reply.

The Goblin raised its awful arm and made to shoot fire.

However, at that moment, the door to Carter’s right was flung open by a white-aproned man, covered in blood, with a burlap sack over his shoulder and a smoking scowl adorning his face. Then, metal met magic and the goblin was sent spiraling, singed, into the alley. The butcher dropped his wares and burly charade, then ran inside with many a “sacre bleu”. Carter locked eyes with an abandoned cleaver that twinkled in the neon night, and in that moment, he made a choice; for the first time in his life, he was going to hold fate accountable. “I’ll be making the choices from now on!” He yelled as he hacked away at the Goblin’s warty neck. His erupted rage subsided as the Goblin went limp; its eyes faded to black.

“The Eiffel Tower you say.” Carter panted to the empty alley. “I might as well go all in; down with the Goblins, and down with ill fortune.”

Just then, his phone rang, and he answered with shaking hands covered in black blood; his voice like mercury. It was Martin.

“No, there’s been a change of plans. I have something I need to take care of first. Goodbye friend.”

When gravity pulls you towards the Eiffel Tower, under the moon’s faint glow and bathed in the heady aromatics of the French, it is said to feel like a homecoming for the heart: all memories and still-to-be’s crescendo in a glittering tower of emotion. But Carter only felt one thing: determination.

He brooded, as he entered the elevator at its base (unguarded and open beyond normal operating hours), not on how odd the night had become, but rather on a movie he’d watched during the flight over. In it was a purpose-driven man, a character designed in a focus group no doubt; all action, all commitment, all hard logic. A man who shunned daydreaming, who scheduled his time to avoid thought, each task a functional leap toward the unachievable life goal that had given him reason. Carter considered this ordered man, as he absentmindedly pressed a button marked by a strange rune, glowing blue and dusted with cobwebs. He thought about the irony of a man portrayed in a film; who shunned TV and idle creativity. He thought about how that man would feel if he knew his grander purpose, how his values were twisted and bent to perpetuate a certain obedient work-ethic in the viewership. That simple man who thought himself free was only so for the blindness to his shackles.

The elevator doors slid wide and Carter paced across an expansive, pillared hall, filled with malcontent and watchful shadows.

As he arrived at an eerie glowing dais, all the walls turned to eyes and the scuttling of clawed feet filled his ears like a howling wind, and he recoiled, his confidence draining, at the sight of thousands of small desperate hands reaching for him from out of the gloom.

The sickening shuffle stopped and a single Goblin became visible before him.

Carter swallowed fear and began to talk.

“No need…” The one-before-him’s voice rang out clear. “We know you, Goblin-less one.”

“I will speak.” His anger flared again as he remembered himself. “We humans deserve freedom.” He shouted. “Deserve to be in control of our own destiny. I am no longer bound by your fate.”

A murmur rolled like thunder around the vast chamber; a murmur that settled into silence.

“What is your first command?” The Goblin asked.

“My first command?” Stunned, Carter considered his options as he watched a golden crown on a pillow of moss being carried through the horde toward him.

“You are the transcended one, Carter Samson. You are now our king.”

“I am?”

The crown descended, like dripping treacle to an ant.

“The king?” He threw back his head and laughed. “I am the king of fate.”

“Yes sire, just as was written in the prophecy.”

“Oh.” “Prophecy you say?” “Well, that’s unfortunate.”

And he sank into an accepted throne, neatly crowned in slumped acquiescence.