Dead Letters Anthology (37 page)

Yes, I’d say I was miserable. I’d definitely say that. I give a few envelopes a shake as if my fingers might still be aerials, sensitive to contents. They aren’t. My belly hurts. More of the new normal. Gnaw. Nibble. Choke.

There’s official work to do too, technically, so when I need a break from painful swallowing I move things from one place to another, and scribble stuff in the log. My managers appreciate this little charade and it’s no skin off my business to indulge them. The log contains a journal of my years of woeful paperchase.

When Adam repairs to the loo, I swallow down a misaddressed love letter written in rhyming couplets, along with its accompanying plastic ring, a set of collectible Balinese stamps, and a tin knight on a warhorse. That’s the kind of joke I’m hopeful she might make, but it has nothing to do with her. The knight stabs at my oesophagus, and the horse’s hooves kick all the way down.

‘Fuck’s sake, Old Man, is that your stomach rumbling, then?’ says Adam. I didn’t hear him come back in. ‘Your gut’s legendary, mate.’

I was thrilled when he first called me this. I thought an acolyte had found me. Since then I have learned quite what a range of dull phenomena he describes as legendary, and the thrill has palled. He has not yet called me ‘ledge’, as he does other things, but it cannot be long.

I look at him without expression until he has to look away. I pull out the particular icy blue glare I use in such moments. Occasionally I coil my beard into a white knob, which discomfits everyone, including me. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror recently. What can I say? I never meant to get this old. It’s her fault.

Everyone has a lover they regret, and she is mine. She’d say I did this to myself. She’d say I gave her everything I now regret losing, indeed, that I gave it to her on bended knee.

She’s got a point. But still, what I say is, beware young women. They’re thieves.

I belch, tasting tin and what’s most likely lead paint. Adam looks at me in disgust. I know he’s cultivated a soft spot for me by now, but in his first days, I heard him asking management why I’m not removed.

As if management can manage me. I can exactly imagine the expression they wore when he asked: a sort of evasive queasiness. Give him enough time – if he lasts, which most of the staff here don’t – he’ll understand what the old-timers do: that I’m just here. That, as far as they’re concerned, I’ve always been here. Ancient when they turned up on their first day, still ancient now, poking about in the room of the misdirected, announcing myself with epically rumbling stomach. That no one quite knows what, officially, I do; that my records and paperwork have always been less than precise. That the line to my line manager always gets too tangled to unpick, so it’s not clear who’d have the power to give me the heave if they wanted to. They can just leave me be.

You wouldn’t ask a beefeater to sack a Tower of London raven, would you? I am an institution and institutions do not retire.

Of course, they would if they could. Indeed, they’d flee these premises with a hop and a skip and never look back. But at least two pieces of mail are still missing. Without them? I can accomplish nothing, and there’s a big something, coming fast, right at the centre of everything. It urgently needs accomplishing. I need the mail.

I use my last monogrammed hankie to clean the blade of my letter opener, besmirched by something sticky and pink. I try to keep it clean; it’s not ostentatious like some letter openers but it’s quality, I’ve had it a long time, and in the office of dead letters, there’s an astonishing quantity of muck.

I’ve been at this for centuries now. I’ve sorted through nonsense in a lot of places, done plenty of different jobs by way of searching, but this is about the worst of them. Time was I’d get wind of a clue, set off, and I’d end up fighting a monster, or rattling up a tower’s foundations. I even found a couple of my missing pieces that way, but there were a lot of fallow years of digesting little nugget traces of what I used to be, during which I chased after false trails and went artefact-hunting. The world did all manner of jiggery-pokery, changing into this peculiar shiny dirty thing through which I trudge, as I tracked the last few here.

Long story. A chain of informants, an overheard swaggering curse, and what I originally dismissed as sheer bloody silliness – with the swallowing of one la-la ripped from a scrunched-up envelope pilfered from its shelf in this tallying house of the lost, the swallowed la-la dissipating in a blissful spread of my own bloody quiddity up and down from my gut – turned out to be true. The rest of me was misdirected, stalled on its way to no-known-addresses.

Since then I’ve been on this dread postal quest, forced to chew my way through decades of lost mail, trying to get my teeth into the things that were stolen from me.

They’ve no outer indication of their character. The only way to find them is to chew. Dentistry, while vastly better than it was at my beginnings, is now the NHS, and my teeth are nubs. I’ve eaten sonnets and collection notices, pornographic Polaroids, political screeds. I’ve eaten a set of medieval illuminations, each panel depicting historical events inaccurately – I know from having been there at the time. I’ve gnawed comic books. Once, because I thought it would be like her to make me eat socks, I swallowed a set of lady’s woollen stockings patterned with clock faces, gagging them down.

And indeed, that was the meal, consumed in late 1989, with which I regained a significant portion of my abilities, and heard the faint echo of her laughter as well. With an edge of desperation: she could never fool me, even about how she’d go about fooling me. Since then the eating’s been in vain. And I despair. Because construction is well underway on the Crossrail, and London’s guts are being ransacked. I’ve seen the route, and I remember enough topography to deduce where things are heading; I know it’s a matter of time, and not a lot of it, before that wyrm-sized screw spinning under the city smashes into Albion’s soul. I must recover my belongings – by which I mean my me – before a platform opens onto that apple seed-strewn cavern. There must be no happy ending.

Adam – bless his curious soul – insists me into a pub after work. I can see management watching us, aghast, as he tries to persuade me. I’m vaguely charmed. I come with him to throw him off the scent of my oddity, and to scandalise them. We have a pint each.

‘Trouble with the missus?’ asks Adam. Lord but I feel grim.

‘She was a witch,’ I say. I don’t mention that I was a wizard.

‘Oh, mate!’ Adam laughs. ‘Bants! Don’t I know it! But you can’t let it keep ruining your digestion, man. What was your lady’s name?’

‘Viviane, or so some called her,’ I say. I can hear the note of the bloody balladeer in my voice, and try to banish it. It tempts.

‘Some did, did some? Yeah? But… what did you call her, mate?’ Adam reminds me of fools in my future, and in my past as well.

I twist my beard into a monkey’s paw, then out again. There’s a bit of a banned edition of
Ulysses
stuck in my gullet. My beloved always liked the transgressive texts. A few days ago, I choked down Episode 4, ‘Calypso’, and Episode 15, ‘Circe’, because I just knew she’d like to madden me by compacting all the last of my magic into the witches. Never into the Molly Bloom finale. My lover was no Penelope. She’d never kick her heels at home for anyone’s return; instead she Peneloped me and quested her way around England. Until her last overreach. There was nothing hidden in that tome, only ink and paper. My tongue is still smudged, and everything tastes of iodine.

‘Nimue,’ I say, and sigh. I still love her, of course, no matter the encyclopedia of wrongs she’s done me. I spent a century at the top of a pine tree convinced I was in a tower, another century wandering Rome dressed in a wolfskin. For a while, I was a lovely maiden, which was not as lovely as I’d thought it might be, and for another time I was napping in the middle of a public square for three hundred years, shat on by pigeons and sat on by everyone whose feet ached.

Soon as I started spooning after her I knew all this would happen. That’s prophecy for you: it’s an utter bugger. Point, of course, being you know it; as in, it’s a done deal. If you knew it might happen, you’d try to do something about it.

‘My sympathies, man,’ says Adam. He leans over and drinks the rest of my pint. I don’t mind terribly. Beer in this century is like water. I prefer water. Its ingredients are more interesting.

* * *

Her problem was that she had to get creative. I still don’t think it was in her nature to be a real shit, though she could be as petulant as the rest of us. When I eventually got out of the tower, or the tree, or whatever it was, the trower, where she’d ensconced me, I set off on her tail. She got wind of it, naturally; even depleted, she must’ve felt me coming. I could still pull a few rabbits out of a few hats then, as it were.

‘She’s fearful of your power,’ one soothsayer told me. ‘She cannot control nor kill you.’

‘Control the watcher of Albion’s protection?’ I said while he cowered. ‘She dares?’

I thundered my wrath. I did a fair bit of that at the time.

‘She seeks a spell,’ he said. ‘To disperse you, lord. To disperse your powers, exile them from the world. To impossible places, by lost ways. Also, she’s bent out of shape by your romantic perfidy. There’s something in the sooth about someone’s handmaiden, someone else’s fateweaver, and a passel of false promises.’

I gave him my blank look. He sprouted donkey ears, and a pig’s snout, though only briefly. I was merciful.

And I should be fair. I’ve never doubted that a bit of what she did, she did out of anxiety for England. Whatever her own questionable genealogy she never thought it was healthy for cambions, half-succubi, to walk the earth. Fair play. I’d say what she did was forty percent strategy to dissipate the most dangerous magic in that age of its ebbing, and sixty percent to annoy me.

She found her spell, too. A Ward of the Shattering and Scattering, and she let fly with it, aimed it foresquare at the target. I was in Wolverhampton. I heard it howling through the air at me.

And then it hit, and I was diminished.

Scores of aspects of my memories, my strength, my powers, were exiled from the world. Which turned out to mean that they were hidden, camouflaged in matter, in lost places, fabled gulleys, reachable only by impossible ways. Hence those years of monster-hunting.

You should never underestimate the magic of magic’s passing. The strength of the death of that strength. Eventually, I came to clock that the things I found – eggs and jewels and chains and trinkets that were, in part, me – I found in more and more quotidian places and forms. Protected by forces that would have raised fewer eyebrows, less high, among populace by now utterly sceptical of the sort of mythic shenanigans with which I used to divert myself. Each piece shifting with the epochs, each still some snide material joke, a pun or a prod from my missing ex, but now camouflaged not in the hearts of dragons, but in shapes and places appropriate to the age. All without breaching the terms of the spell.

I hunted them, and I hunted her too, but of my Nyneve, there was no word or sign. I was convinced that I couldn’t find her because I’d lost my powers.

It was early in the 20th century, with only a handful of bits of me left to scarf down, that I realised that the impossible place had become a storeroom for misdirected mail. That the last of me lay in that ever-refilling warehouse of packaged junk, those shelves and shelves of brown paper and misspent memories and lost chances.

I applied for the caretaker’s job.

I still can’t help feeling sorry for my lady, despite my years of rumbling guts. She underestimated herself.

* * *

A few days after that beer, I’m sorting painstakingly through the dead letters of the past three months – if anyone asks I’m scanning for powdered poisons – when among the handfuls of these accursed packages I happen upon a lumpy, semi-squashed parcel on which for no particular reason my hands linger.

It’s wrapped in that ubiquitous brown paper, marked ‘Fragile’, addressed to someone in Bristol. I have my superstitions on this search. At the moment I’m avoiding reading names. I cover the supposedly intended recipient with my hand and give the thing an unhelpful shake.

No sign of Adam. I slice it open and take out a little box from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Inside of which something’s wrapped in white paper and topped with a tiny typewritten (typewritten!) note.

‘Just a little reminder of what you come from… hahaha a ahah G.’

Hahaha?

I’ve eaten a comic book, so understand the aetiology, but I may never recover from the present moment’s tendency toward the ha, ha, ha. It causes severe indigestion.

Still. Adam’s back, so I put the box in my pocket and ply him with three cups of strong tea. Hahaha? Ha ha ha? Ha, ha, ha. However you render it, it doesn’t get any better. Ha-ha-ha.

When at last he departs for his morning micturition, I wield my letter opener and pour the box’s contents into my hand.

It’s a ring box. In the ring box is a tiny skull.

With those teeth it’s definitely rodent, mouse, I think, and I should know. It’s no longer than my thumbnail, which isn’t even that long today. It’s less enticing than the magical gemstone I’d briefly, excitedly imagined. The thing is, though, that this skull doesn’t feel like a skull. It doesn’t feel like what it seems to be. I couldn’t even tell you what that means. It has the right weight and heft, it looks like bone, which makes me imagine this is a skull carved from a bigger skull.

It reminds me of a gobstopper. With a nub of gum in the centre. I first tried gum in the 1950s – that was a humiliating education. At that time my beard was a luxuriant spiral stretching to my navel. Gum forced me to reveal my chin, and I have never forgiven it. It took years, sans spellcraft, to regrow my whiskers, and they were never the same.

I open my mouth wide and hold up the skull, just as Adam returns.

‘Snacks, bruv?’ he asks. And without warning, with the sort of laboured twinkle with which he accompanies what he likes to think of as horseplay and the braying idiocies he announces to be ‘banter’, that expression he imagines is winning, he reaches out, snatches what he thinks is a sweet, pops it into his own mouth, and chews.