Going Postal

letter U . It was still in use. When the postal service had collapsed, the coach part had survived, Groat had said. It was useful and established and, besides, it owned scores of horses. You couldn’t squash horses under the floor, or bag them up in the attic. They had to be fed. More or less seamlessly, the coachmen had taken it over and run it as passenger service.
    Moist watched a laden coach roll out of the yard, and then movement up above caught his eye.
    You got used to the clacks towers now. Sometimes it seemed as though every roof sprouted one. Most were the new shutter boxes installed by the Grand Trunk Company, but old-fashioned arm semaphores and even signal flags were still well in evidence. Those, though, only worked slowly and line-of-sight, and there was precious little space for that in the thrusting forest of towers. If you wanted more than that, you went to one of the little clacks companies and rented a small shutter tower with resident gargoyle to spot incoming messages, and access to the bounce towers, and, if you were really rich, a trained operator as well. And you paid . Moist had no grasp of, or interest in, technology, but as he understood it, the price was something like an arm or a leg or both.
    But these observations orbited his brain, as it were, like planetary thoughts around one central, solar thought: Why the hell have we got a tower?
    It was definitely on the roof. He could see it and he could hear the distant rattle of the shutters. And he was sure he’d seen a head, before it ducked out of sight.
    Why have we got a tower up there, and who is using it?
    He ran back inside. He’d never spotted a staircase to the roof, but then, who knew what was hidden behind some pile of letters at the end of some blocked corridor…
    He squeezed his way along yet another passage lined with mail sacks, and came out into a space where big, bolted double doors led back to the yard. There were stairs there, leading upwards. Little safety lamps bled little pools of light into the blackness above. That was the Post Office for you , Moist thought—the Regulations said the stairs must be lit and lit they were, decades after anyone ever used them, except for Stanley, the lamplighter.
    There was an old freight elevator here, too, one of those dangerous ones that worked by pumping water in and out of a big rainwater tank on the roof, but he couldn’t work out how to make it go and wouldn’t have trusted it if he could. Groat had said it was broken.
    At the foot of the stairs, scuffed but still recognizable, was a chalk outline. The arms and legs were not in comfortable positions.
    Moist swallowed, but gripped the banister.
    He climbed.
    There was a door on the first floor. It opened easily. It burst open at the mere touch of the handle, spilling pent-up mail out into the stairwell like some leaping monster. Moist swayed and whimpered as the letters slithered past him, shoal after shoal, and cascaded down the stairs.
    Woodenly, he climbed up another flight, and found another dimly lit door, but this time he stood to one side as he opened it. The force of the letters still rammed it against his legs, and the noise of the dead letters was a dry whispering as they poured away into the gloom. Like bats, perhaps. This whole building full of dead letters, whispering to one another in the dark as a man fell to his death—
    Any more of this and he’d end up like Groat, mad as a spoon. But there was more to this place. Somewhere there had to be a door—
    His head was all over the wall…
    Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.
    But, with its usual treachery, it went on working. He’d never, ever, laid a finger on anyone. He’d always run rather than fight. And murder, now, surely murder was an absolute? You couldn’t commit 0.021 of a murder, could you? But Pump seemed to think you could murder with a ruler. Okay, perhaps somewhere downstream people were…inconvenienced by a crime, but…what about bankers, landlords, even barmen? “Here’s your double brandy, sir, and I’ve 0.0003 killed you”? Everything everyone did affected everyone, sooner or later.
    Besides, a lot of his crimes weren’t even crimes. Take the ring trick, now. He never said it was a diamond ring. Besides, it was depressing how quickly honest citizens warmed to an opportunity to take advantage of a poor benighted traveler; it could ruin a man’s faith in human nature,