Going Postal

hints of sinus. You would not wish to know about the eyeballs.
    …face like a mask, sir, like he’d seen a ghost…
    Moist’s stomach heaved, and, as he turned with his hand over his mouth, he saw a young postman looking in his general direction with a look of horror that probably reflected the one on the unseen Moist’s face. Then the boy shivered and hurried away.
    So Mr. Ignavia had got this far, too. He’d been smart enough to work out the floor, but seeing someone’s head going through your own, well, that could take you the wrong way…
    Moist ran after the boy. Up here, he was lost; he must have toured less than a tenth of the building with Groat, the way constantly being blocked by glaciers of mail. There were other stairs, he knew, and they still existed in the present. Ground level, that was the goal, a floor you could rely on.
    The boy went through a door and into what looked like a room full of parcels, but Moist could see an open doorway at the far end, and a hint of banister.
    He speeded up, and the floor disappeared from under his feet.
    The light vanished. He was briefly and horribly aware of dry letters all around him, falling with him. He landed on more letters, choking as dry, ancient mail piled up. For a moment, through the rain of paper, he caught a glimpse of a dusty window half covered with letters, and then he was submerged again. The heap under him began to move, slipping down and sideways. There was the crack of what could have been a door being burst off its hinges, and the sideways flow increased noticeably. He struck out madly for the surface in time for his head to hit the top of a door jamb, and then the current dragged him under.
    Helpless now, tumbling in the river of paper, Moist dimly felt the jolt as a floor gave way. The mail poured through, taking him with it and slamming him into another drift of envelopes. The light disappeared as thousands of letters thudded down on top of him, and then sound died, too.
    Darkness and silence squeezed him in a fist.
    Moist von Lipwig knelt with his head resting on his arms. There was air here but it was warm and stale and wouldn’t last long. He couldn’t move more than a finger.
    He could die here. He would die here. There must be tons of mail around him.
    “I commend my soul to any god who can find it,” he mumbled in the stifling air.
    A line of blue danced across his inner vision.
    It was handwriting. But it spoke.
“ Dear Mother, I have arrived safely and found good lodgings at… ”
    The voice sounded like a country boy but it had a…a scritchy quality to it. If a letter could talk, it would sound like that. The words rambled on, the characters curving and slanting awkwardly under the pen of a reluctant writer—
    —and as it ran on, another line also began to write itself across the dark, crisply and neatly:
“ Dear Sir, I have the honor to inform you that I am the sole Executor of the estate of the late Sir Davie Thrills, of The Manor, Mixed Blessings, and it appears that you are the sole— ”
    The voice continued in words so clipped that you could hear the shelves full of legal books behind the desk, but a third line was beginning:
“ Dear Mrs. C. Clarke, I much regret to inform you that in an engagement with the enemy yesterday your husband, C. Clark, fought valiantly but was— ”
    And then they all wrote at once. Voices in their dozens, their hundreds, their thousands, filled his ears and squiggled across his inner vision. They didn’t shout, they just unrolled the words until his head was full of sound, which formed new words, just as all the instruments of an orchestra tinkle and scrape and blast to produce one crescendo—
    Moist tried to scream, but envelopes filled his mouth.
    And then a hand closed on his leg and he was in the air and upside down.
    “Ah, Mr. Lipvig!” boomed the voice of Mr. Pump. “You Have Been Exploring! Welcome To Your New Office!”
    Moist spat out paper and sucked air into stinging lungs.
    “They’re…alive!” he gasped. “They’re all alive ! And angry! They talk! It was not a hallucination! I’ve had hallucinations and they don’t hurt! I know how the others died!”
    “I Am Happy For You, Mr. Lipvig,” said Pump, turning him the right way up and wading waist-deep across the room, while behind them more mail trickled through a hole in the ceiling.
    “You don’t understand! They talk! They want…” Moist hesitated. He could still hear the whispering in his head. He