Dead Letters Anthology (36 page)

Lucy.

What would it be like to be loved, to be wooed, by someone like Lucy?

Dangerous. Uncertain. Different. Oh, so exciting. There would be no ordinariness, nothing banal or commonplace – no status quo, only constant change. The idea threw a frisson down Eva’s spine that was part terror, part elation. What on earth was happening to her?

She examined the last page, with the red-brown dots – the reason, Eva was certain, the woman wanted the letter. Little stains that, when sniffed, touched to her tongue, smelled and tasted ever so faintly of old iron.

Blood.

Eva knew blood; there’d been so much when her mother had found her beneath her father, in the kitchen, on the table, when he’d thought Beth out of it. But his wife had used the sleeping pills for so long their effect wasn’t anywhere near as strong. Eva knew blood, how hard it was to clean up, how much bleach you needed to make it go away, or at least render it unidentifiable. Traces were still caught, she was sure, in the grooves of the cupboards, seeped beneath the linoleum. Her father died grunting over her, too busy to notice the knife being drawn across his throat before it was too late, before the red-black splashed across his daughter’s back, before he collapsed on top of her. Eva knew blood; she knew evidence when she saw it.

Then again, what would she do with it?

Eva booted up the ancient desktop in the corner of the dining room and googled ‘Jonathan Oaks, Branscombe’. She was utterly unsurprised to find that gentleman reported as deceased a few weeks ago, his killer uncaught. She searched for ‘Steph’ and ‘Murder’ together and found thirty-seven recent reports containing those words or fragments of them; none seemed quite right, yet none could really be dismissed.

How had Lucy tracked the pages? Had she panicked, overlooked things, when she’d killed their writer – Eva had no doubt the diarist was dead – then recalled only later that she’d left traces of her relationship? Had the victim’s flat or house been cleared out by family or friends or a landlord who’d shuffled as many unwanted possessions as they could to a junk shop? The death must have been cunningly disguised as a suicide otherwise she didn’t imagine the police would have let anything go. Perhaps it was someone like Eva’s own father, who’d drifted in and out of their lives as and when he wished, arriving and abandoning with the same rhythm as the ships he claimed to crew, so that the neighbours who’d long ceased to ask after him didn’t even notice when he was gone for good. Had Lucy gone back, traced whoever had cleared out the place, then gone to the shop, been told who’d bought that lot, then found Steph, and so on? Only Lucy knew for sure, but Eva could imagine the train of events.

She was pulled from her reverie by something hitting the window. Her flat looked out over the back garden. Standing in the moonlight so she could be seen, close to the stone wall that ran where, rumour had it, a corpse road once lay, was Lucy in her black and red. On the spot, almost, where Eva and Beth had buried their father and husband, deep, deep, deep, though it took them most of the night and all of their strength.

Lucy stood there and smiled. She stood there as if she knew what lay beneath. She stood there as if she’d never go away.

Eva remained at the window, palms pressed against the glass, for so long that she lost the feeling in them, either because the evening’s cold had crept through the double glazing or her circulation protested the angle of her arms. Lucy didn’t move either. Lucy stayed, never shifting, never fidgeting; she hardly even seemed to breathe.

At last, though, Eva drew away, a tiny act of defiance so hard won it almost hurt. She was filled with pride but regret, too, as if it might result in a loss. As if she might never see Lucy again.

Nevertheless, before she went to bed she took a paring knife from the magnetic strip above the kitchen sink, and slid it under her pillow. She kept the curtains closed so she wasn’t tempted to peek out at the garden and its inhabitant. And, surprisingly, she slept almost as soon as she was horizontal, one hand curled around the knife’s black plastic handle as if it were a favoured toy.

* * *

‘I don’t feel well,’ Eva said into the phone. ‘I don’t know, Alice, maybe something I ate, or just a tummy bug. Yes, yes, I’ll take care.’

When she woke she felt rested, no trace of the hangover she deserved; her slumber had been dreamless and deep. When she woke, Eva couldn’t have cared less if she never entered the old red brick building, if she never sat within its four grey walls, if she never saw her colleagues ever again.

When she woke she felt… energised. Different. She, who’d always clung to a sense of repeated order just as a drowning woman does to a scrap of floating debris. She, who never bought brand-new clothes because their difference was too much to take in. She who always shopped second-hand for things whose age gave them a familiarity so it seemed she was stepping into an old skin, not yet hers, but something she could redefine. Today, however, she felt change was brewing, coming, liable to break at any moment; she didn’t need to seek it, it would arrive all on its own. Even more strangely, it was something to be desired.

She spent the day wandering between couch and bed. She watched television shows she could feel numbing her brain as surely as a shard of ice. She read her mother’s beloved Dickens’ collected works. After five, the dark had already crept into the flat but she didn’t turn on any lights; when there was a knock at the door, and she wondered if she might ignore it, dared play dead. In spite of everything, she felt the old fear of change rear its head, threatening to overwhelm her.

But the knocking didn’t stop, and in the end she drew her dressing gown tightly around her, retying the frayed belt so it wouldn’t slip. She half-expected Lucy’s pale face and razor-sharp smile, but it was Mr Burstock, worse for wear, tie hanging loose and the top three shirt buttons undone. He swayed, the scent of stale hops wafting from him.

‘Evie,’ he half-sang.

‘Don’t call me that,’ she said, surprised by the firmness of tone, the determination.
Change.
Yes. Things were going to change. This was just the start: correcting people when they spoke to her in a way she didn’t like or appreciate. Showing that what she wanted counted for something. ‘Don’t
ever
call me that.’

He shouldered the door, and she was too small to give much resistance. She backed along the hall and he followed, one hand reaching for her. ‘Came to check on you. See if you’re all right.’ He leered and pressed on. ‘See if you were really ill or just pretending.’

He sniggered, staggered, sniggered again; tripped and almost fell, almost took them both down, but Eva slipped away, scampering on bare feet. Burstock caught himself, steadied, then nodded as if to say,
All right now, sotally tober.

‘I want you to leave now. Or I’ll report you.’

‘To who?’ he boomed and laughed.

‘To management,’ she said. ‘And the police.’

‘You won’t say anything, little mouse,’ he said, low-pitched. ‘We’re friends and I choose my friends very carefully – friends not brave enough to tattle.’

He closed in and began to croon, ‘Evie. Evie, Eeeeeevieeee.’

Eva stared at Mr Burstock, but she couldn’t see him. Not his face, any road. It had been replaced by her father’s, sing-songing ‘Eeeeeevieeee’ as he always did, trying to convince her to cooperate, before he gave up any hope of collusion and chose force instead.

And Eva surprised herself yet again, by not merely standing her ground, but meeting his onrush. By reaching into her pocket where she’d put the paring knife when she got out of bed. By bringing up the not terribly sharp but sharp enough blade, and slicing across Mr Burstock’s throat.

The spray of red was warm, its pressure surprisingly firm, at least on the first few spurts. The man’s fall was strangely slow, the noise of his landing strangely loud. His face was his own again with no trace of her father in it, except the stupid expression of surprise. At last he stopped moving, stopped moaning, stopped hissing air from the wound, stopped trying to pull himself onward, then Eva considered how to manage the mess. She should have waited, played it out, and led him into the kitchen. The linoleum and the paint were easier to wash down. The carpet would have to go.

The sticky hand that held the knife was rock steady. Eva began to make a mental list of the things she’d need: new carpet, spray cleanser, more bleach certainly, heavy-duty garbage bags. He’d be hard to get down the stairs, but the Franklins in the bottom flat were away for another three weeks. She could drag him to the lounge window and toss him out, then set about digging him a place beside her father on the corpse road.

She nodded:
yes
.

Now that she had a plan, her field of vision expanded beyond the remains of her supervisor and she noticed, at last, that the front door was still open, and Lucy stood there. They stared at each other for what seemed a long time until Lucy stepped inside and closed the door. That was when Eva’s hand – indeed all of Eva – began to shake, but it wasn’t fear.

It was excitement, the sense that change had arrived, for better or for worse. It had been summoned. It was not going away.

Lucy stepped across Mr Burstock until they were close enough to touch if they so chose. Her voice was gentle when she said, ‘Every hunter must be blooded, Eva,’ and Eva thought she’d been very careful not to say Evie. Then Lucy held out her hand, expectant, confident.

Eva didn’t hesitate; she laughed, a short snarl of a thing.

She ran one hand up Lucy’s neck, cupped her ear, caressed her crow’s-wing hair. She leaned forward and kissed Lucy, who seemed untroubled by the gouts of blood still adhering to the other’s skin and hair. Eva felt the firmness of lips that returned her own voracious demand. She tasted saliva and the sweetness of the lemon sherbet candy the other woman had been sucking on, and the iron that she kissed into Lucy’s mouth. Hands moved at her waist, her shoulder, her breasts.

The letter was safe, it was hidden. One day she might hand it over. One day, and she had no doubt she’d feel lighter for the loss. But for now everything was going to change: life would be about what
Eva
wanted, not what others demanded.

Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, five Aurealis Awards, and is the only Australian to win a British Fantasy Award. She’s published six story collections (including
Sourdough and Other Stories
and
The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings
), has a PhD, was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow, is a freelance editor, and occasionally teaches creative writing. Her novellas,
Of Sorrow and Such
(
Tor.com
) and
Ripper
(in
Horrorology
, Jo Fletcher Books), were published in 2015, and Jo Fletcher Books will publish her debut novel,
Vigil
, in 2016, with its sequel,
Corpselight
, coming in 2017. She blogs about shiny things that catch her eye here
www.angelaslatter.com
and she can be found on Twitter
@AngelaSlatter
.

“I must admit that when Conrad asked me if I’d contribute to
Dead Letters
he caught me at the perfect time. I’d just realised that a parcel containing a rather expensive pair of earrings that I’d sent as a gift to my best friend had not arrived, and indeed was never going to arrive. I was suitably enraged.
Yes
, I thought at the time,
I’ll bloody well write a story about lost mail. Bastards.
When I received my story-starter ‘dead letter’, I must also admit, I’d forgotten what I’d agreed to and it took a few moments to remember. But in the end the ideas that stuck with me were about identity, our own and the ones others impose on us; the things we cling to whether unhealthily or otherwise; how little things can have big and unexpected impacts; how the secrets people keep can be utterly unexpected and unsuspected; and also how love might occur in the strangest places. I’m not sure too much of my original rage made it into ‘Change Management’… although maybe it did and it just morphed from mine to Eva’s. She’s probably got more to be furious about, in all honesty.”

It’s mid-morning on this, the hundred and thirteenth day of my eighty-seventh year of employment at this shabby shitter of an office.

I wait patiently for Adam, the new and rather-too-inquisitive mail sorter, to nip off for tea. Then I busy myself at the forty-year shelves. I don’t even have to sigh or steel myself anymore. I’m inured. I just get on with it, pulling out the letter opener I keep with me, slicing open a few packets in quick succession, taking out what’s inside, and eating it. A rainbow decal in the shape of a peace sign; a damaged letter from a great uncle disowning a nameless great niece for bra-burning; six bent paper clips; a ten-pound note.

No results beyond the usual: ulcerous pangs and gastric distress.

I gobble a stale biscuit in an attempt to quiet my miserable stomach. Would I had any other means of comfort, but no, no – she’s taken them all from me. I knew when I met her that she was trouble, and yet I still fell for her, a foolish youth dropping from a rope swing and directly into a lake full of piranha.

To be clear, when I say I knew she was trouble, I don’t mean I had a bad feeling about this one. I mean I knew I’d end up here. I knew which shirt I’d be wearing. (It’s a grubby one.) I knew I’d be damaging my teeth on forgotten tchotchkes.

All too quickly, Adam’s back. He’s as chipper as a monk drunk on root tonic.

‘Here’s for you, Old Man,’ he says, and passes me a soggy cardboard cup with too much milk in. It’s time to drink my tea, then. I have the sharp point of a clip stuck in my craw, but I can ignore that. I’m well used to that sort of misery by now. The last time I found any part of what I’m hunting, it was 1989.

Am I miserable, though? Or is misery intrinsically pathological? Is it still misery if it’s the new normal? (I started ruminating on questions of qualia a few decades back, after I ate a philosophical pamphlet. Phenomenology and ontology are uniquely tangled in my own head, I suppose.)