Dead Letters Anthology (4 page)

Of course you did
, I thought. ‘What about…’

‘It’s nowhere in the house.’

‘Well, I guess it just got lost at some point,’ I said. ‘He figured maybe it’d turn up, and anyway no big deal, as he never used it.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Matt,’ she said, sounding relieved, as though what I’d said constituted a statement on the subject from a higher and more reliable authority than she felt herself to be. We spoke for another ten minutes, but I can’t remember what was said.

When I walked back into my study, the first thing I noticed was the smell.

The chess piece was standing on the desk.

I heard our car pulling into the drive, and reached into the drawer to get a breath mint.

* * *

Toward the end of the afternoon, Scott came in. Instead of heading straight to my desk, as he usually did, he lurked in the background. He seemed subdued.

‘Everything okay?’

‘I guess.’

‘I wanted to ask you something, actually,’ I said.

‘What?’

I nodded toward the chess piece. ‘Did you put that there?’

‘No. It was here when I came in yesterday. I asked you about it, remember?’

‘I know. I meant… did you put it there today? This morning? Before you went to the dentist?’

He looked confused. ‘No. It was already there, right?’

‘Right.’ I knew it had been extremely unlikely that he’d gone wandering into the woods, happened to find the piece where it had landed somewhere in the bracken and leaves, and brought it back. It was the best idea I’d been able to come up with, however. I’d spent a long time trying to produce a rational explanation for the piece’s reappearance. That had been my only shot.

Now I had nothing, except for the hollow feeling in my stomach.

‘Never mind. How’s the book report coming along?’

‘You’ve been coughing all afternoon,’ Scott said. ‘I can hear you from my room.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yes. It’s not that far.’

That wasn’t what I’d meant. I hadn’t been aware of coughing at all. ‘Sorry. Allergies.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

I turned to look at him. ‘What?’

‘You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You’re a liar. I know you have.’

‘Scott, I…’ I stopped. ‘Yes, okay. I’ve had a couple today. I’m sorry.’

He nodded distantly. This was far worse than his usual tactic of shouting. ‘I really am,’ I added.

‘So stop.’

‘It’s really not that easy.’

I expected him to launch into another iteration of his well-worn analysis of how incredibly simple it was to stop putting a dumb burning thing into your mouth, but instead he sniffed. ‘I don’t like that smell.’

‘What smell?’

He indicated the bishop. ‘From that thing.’

‘I don’t like it either.’

‘It smells like dying.’

I didn’t know what to say to this.

‘You should get rid of it,’ he said.

I’ve tried
, I thought.
It’s harder than you’d think.

Suddenly he came over and hugged me. ‘I love you,’ he said, very quietly, arms tight around my shoulders, face buried into my neck.

* * *

After dinner, when Scott was up in his room and in the downward spiral toward sleep, I told Karen that I was going to take a walk, maybe stop in next door, see how our neighbor was doing.

‘You’re nice,’ she said. ‘See you in bed.’

I stopped by the study, put something in my left and right trouser pockets, and left the house.

‘True to your word,’ Gerry said, gratefully, as I walked up his path. He was sitting out on his deck, a short line of empties on the side table. ‘’Fraid I’m done with the Boonts, though. Anchor Steam work for you?’

‘Plenty good enough.’

* * *

We sat and talked a while. I drank a beer slowly, and accepted a second. By then, Gerry must have been on his sixth or seventh.

‘So how come you never had kids?’

He shrugged. ‘Darlene never wanted any. Figure she looked at the mess her parents made of it, decided she didn’t want a part of that scene.’

‘Not such a great childhood?’

‘Kind of fucked up. And eventually her dad walked out. Darlene never forgave him for that, though from the few times I met her mom, I could kind of see his point. Family like that, I guess it was always a long shot she’d be able to make a marriage stick forever.’

I’d heard all this before. I’d just needed to hear it again. ‘I suppose it’s hard when a parent leaves you. Casts a long shadow.’

‘It does that. Another beer?’

‘One more, maybe.’

When the next bottle was opened, I reached in my pocket and pulled out my cigarettes. If you’re a smoker, you’ll know: they go together with beer far too well.

‘You mind?’

Gerry shook his head. When I put the pack on the table, I saw his eyes drift toward it.

We talked some more, about this and that. Halfway through the beer, I lit another cigarette. This time it was pretty clear that Gerry was looking at the pack.

‘I’m not going to offer,’ I said.

He held out until we started the next beer.

By then we were having a whale of a time, and it was a foregone conclusion.

* * *

A couple hours later, and by now pretty drunk, I finally stood.

‘I really better go.’

Gerry smiled blearily up at me, around his fifth or sixth cigarette. ‘Glad you dropped by, Matt. It’s been a blast.’

‘We’ll do it again soon.’

I put a hand out for the pack of cigarettes on the table, saw his eyes flick toward them.

‘Heck, keep ’em,’ I said.

‘You sure?’

‘Got more at home.’

‘Awesome.’

He pushed himself laboriously to his feet, we shook hands and clapped each other on the shoulder, like men, and I walked away up his path.

I glanced back as I turned the corner around the short section of fence that led onto my own property. Gerry was sitting in his chair on the porch, feet up, looking like king of the world.

Fresh bottle in one hand, cigarette in the other.

I’ve tried throwing my pack away before, putting it in the trash, brushing my hands of the whole sorry business and declaring I’m done with it. That doesn’t work. You can easily go buy more. You can’t just halt the journey, any journey. Dad becomes dead, son becomes dad. The path goes on. And what you can never do to a child is leave, especially via corridors that smell of disinfectant.

I stopped and pulled out the thing in my other pocket. The chess piece was back inside, rewrapped in the scrap of paper, resealed with tape. I’d used a Sharpie to write GONE AWAY across one corner of the envelope. I put it in my mailbox, then walked back up the path to our house.

Gerry glimpsed me through the trees, and raised a hand in cheery goodnight. The tip of his cigarette glowed in the dark.

I waved back.

‘Over to you,’ I said, quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

* * *

Next morning the envelope was gone.

I don’t smoke any more.

Michael Marshall Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published over eighty short stories, and four novels —
Only Forward, Spares, One of Us
and
The Servants
— winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth Awards, along with the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author.

Writing as MICHAEL MARSHALL he has published seven internationally bestselling thrillers including
The Straw Men
series,
The Intruders
— recently a BBC series starring John Simm and Mira Sorvino — and
Killer Move
. His most recent novel is
We Are Here
.

He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife, son, and two cats. For more information visit
www.michaelmarshallsmith.com

Imagine a warehouse in Belfast. Over five hundred miles of shelves, running from floor to ceiling. Red-draped yorks; plastic crates; sorting tables and boxes and bins all filled with weird ephemera.

This is the National Returns Centre for the UK – in other words, the dead letter office.

This is where Her Majesty washes her hands of the Royal Mail. Letters that have travelled across the world, and found no destination. Parcels returned, only to find that the sender has moved away, or died. Letters to fictional places, fictional people, or to the dead. In these cases, Her Majesty graciously allows us to open the mail; to seek out hidden identities; to divide the gold from the garbage.

I am a CEW. Customer Experience Worker. I’ve been here for twenty years, and I’ve seen it all, let me tell you. Two hundred million pieces of mail a year, give or take, pass through our hands. Begging letters, death threats, photographs of lost loves, keepsakes, unopened Christmas cards, undelivered manuscripts. There’s a forgotten Picasso in there, somewhere along the thirtieth stack, plus enough pieces of jewellery to send off a dead infanta in style. And still they keep coming, every day: the undelivered letters, the ones with no return address; the parcels with torn-off labels, inscriptions that are illegible; mail refused by the addressee, or sent to weedy, deserted plots and old abandoned buildings. There are letters here addressed to God, though He has never claimed them. Lots more addressed to Santa Claus, or Superman, or Wolverine. I sometimes wonder how many kids sat waiting for their heroes to call, until, one day, they realised that no one was coming to save them. Or how many desperate lovers, bottle of poison or dagger in hand, waited in vain for their loved one’s reply. So many dreams end up in here. So many everyday tragedies. Messages in bottles, sent in hope across the sea, only to wash up here at last, at the foot of a cliff of paper.

The paper-cuts are the worst thing. I get dozens of those a day. I even tried wearing gloves for a while, but it didn’t seem right, somehow. These letters have already been through so much. They deserve the touch of a human hand. They deserve to be read, and understood, and acknowledged, before we burn them. The black-edged notes of condolence; the tearful declarations of love; the dutiful letters from boarding school; the last words from the battlefield. It feels as if, by reading them, I can put them at rest, somehow; these strangers, whose words have travelled so far, and never been delivered. What I do is so much more than simply cataloguing mail. I am the one who lays them out; the one who delivers the last rites. I am the embalmer of memories; the custodian of the last word.

First I open, and read, and sort the letters containing valuables. Cheques and cash we return, if we can. Sometimes you can find an address if you open the envelope. Things of intermediate value – clothes, trinkets, toys, books – we keep for six months, then dispose of. Watches, jewellery, artwork, we tend to try to keep longer. Perishable items we get rid of at once. Birthday cakes; live bait; garden plants; groceries; and once a box of soft, pale moths, drowsy in their wrapping of banana leaves and rice paper, which, slipping through my fingers like dusty old transparencies, came back to life in the clear, cold air, and flew up into the overhead lights, where they remained until they died, dropping one by one to the floor in clusters of brownish blossom.

Who on earth sends moths through the post? What were they supposed to mean? Sometimes I still find their wings on the ground like torn-off pieces of paper. The fallen wings are intricate, patterned with tea-coloured hieroglyphs. If you laid them side by side, and looked at them from a great height, then perhaps they might spell out a message. I try not to think too hard about the messages I could have passed on, if only I’d known where to send them. It keeps me awake at night if I do. It’s too much responsibility.

I never, ever send letters myself. That may be something to do with the job. I read so many love letters here, so many messages of hate. I don’t want to put my thoughts on the page; to risk some stranger reading them. Maybe that’s also the reason that I never married. Maybe I know that world too well to dare to be a part of it.

But, last week, something happened. I was going through a load of undeliverable mail. Letters like spent tennis balls, bouncing back and forth for so long that all momentum has been lost. I was about to take a break, when for some reason, a letter at the edge of the pile caught my eye. The address was handwritten, in faded blue ink.

Carey Loewe
,

89 Manor Oaks Rd
,

Sheffield, S2 5ED

The name and address had been crossed out. On the back, in the same faded script, was the name of the sender:

Liesel Blau
,

29 Sevington Drive, Didsbury
,

Manchester, M20 5JJ

More recently, someone had added: NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS. It was postmarked Scarborough. The date stamp read 1st June, 1971.

Sometimes that happens. It isn’t so strange. A letter gets lost in transit. Perhaps it falls through the floorboards, or down the back of the sorting machine. With so many letters in the mail, that’s bound to happen sometimes. It’s no one’s fault. It’s not even all that unusual. But this time something was different. The letter was addressed to
me
.

Of course, it was a coincidence. Yes, we’d once lived in England. We’d had lots of different addresses. And after all, among so many names, I was bound to see mine one day. But it gave me a chill, nevertheless. Like seeing myself on a gravestone.

I opened up the envelope, taking care not to damage it, and looked inside.

It was empty. No, not quite – here was a square of red plastic, tipped with a nub of metal. A memory stick. And a photograph of two children on a beach. A little girl of five or six, with pigtails and a yellow dress. And a boy of about the same age, wearing a swimsuit and carrying a plastic bucket. His fringe was a little over-long, and he was squinting – not at the sun, but because he needed glasses. I knew this at once, just as I knew that the air had smelt of salt and fried fish; and that the sky had been mackerel-blue, all patterned with little scales of cloud. I knew all this, because I was the boy. I was the boy in the photograph.