Going Postal

if he had one. Besides…
    The third floor yielded another avalanche of letters, but when they subsided there was still a wall of paper plugging the corridor beyond. One or two rustling envelopes fell out, threatening a further fall as Moist advanced.
    In fact it was retreat that was at the top of his mind, but the stairs were now layered with sliding envelopes and this was not the time to learn dry-slope skiing.
    Well, the fifth floor would have to be clear, wouldn’t it? How else could Sideburn have got to the stairs in order to meet his appointment with eternity? And yes, there was still a piece of black-and-yellow rope on the fourth-floor landing, on a drift of letters. The Watch had been here. Nevertheless, Moist opened the door with care, as a watchman must have done.
    One or two letters fell out, but the main slide had already taken place. A few feet beyond there was the familiar wall of letters, packed as tight as rock strata. A watchman had been in here, too. Someone had tried to break through the wordface, and Moist could see the hole. They’d put in their arm, full length, just like Moist was doing. Just like his, their fingertips had brushed against yet more compacted envelopes.
    No one had got onto the stairs here. They would have had to walk through a wall of envelopes at least six feet thick…
    There was one more flight. Moist climbed the stairs, cautiously, and was halfway up when he heard the slide begin, below him.
    He must have disturbed the wall of letters on the floor below, somehow. It was emerging from the corridor with the unstoppability of a glacier. As the leading edge reached the stairwell, chunks of mail broke off and plunged into the depths. Far below, wood creaked and snapped. The stairway shivered.
    Moist ran up the last few steps to the fifth floor, grabbed the door there, pulled it open, and hung on as another mailslide poured past him. Everything was shaking now. There was a sudden crack as the rest of the staircase gave way and left Moist swinging from the handle, letters brushing past.
    He swung there, eyes shut, until the noise and movement had more or less died away, although there was still the occasional creak from below.
    The stairs were gone.
    With great care, Moist brought his feet up until he could feel the edge of the new corridor. Without doing anything so provocative as breathing, he changed his grip on the door so that now he had a hold of the handle on both sides. Slowly, he walked his heels through the drift of letters on the corridor floor, thus pulling the door closed while at the same time getting both hands onto the inner handle.
    Then he took a deep breath of the stale, dry air, scrabbled madly with his feet, bent his body like a hooked salmon, and ended up with just enough of himself on the corridor floor to prevent a fall through sixty feet of letters and broken woodwork.
    Barely thinking, he unhooked the lamp from the doorpost and turned to survey the task ahead.
    The corridor was brightly lit, richly carpeted, and completely free of mail. Moist stared.
    There had been letters in there, wedged tight from floor to ceiling. He’d seen them, and felt them fall past him into the stairwell. They hadn’t been a hallucination; they’d been solid, musty, dusty, and real. To believe anything else now would be madness.
    He turned back to look at the wreckage of the stairs and saw no doorway, no stairs. The carpeted floor extended all the way to the far wall.
    Moist realized that there had to be an explanation for this, but the only one he could think of now was: It’s strange. He reached down gingerly to touch the carpet where the stairwell should be, and felt a chill on his fingertips as they passed through.
    And he wondered: Did one of the other new postmasters stand here, just where I am? And did he walk out over what looked like solid floor and end up rolling down five flights of pain?
    Moist inched his way along the corridor in the opposite direction, and sound began to grow. It was vague and generalized, the noise of a big building hard at work, shouts, conversations, the rattle of machinery, the crowded susurrus of a thousand voices and wheels and footfalls and stampings and scribblings and slammings all woven together in a huge space to become the pure, audible texture of commerce.
    The corridor opened out ahead of him, where it met a T-junction. The noise was coming from the brightly lit space beyond. Moist walked toward the shining brass railing of the