by Tim Lebbon
The dead man’s shoulders sagged and his face relaxed as though relieved of some great effort. “Well, he’s afraid now,” he said. “I don’t see what else I can do but wait.”
Scott’s vision throbbed with each terrified heartbeat. Between one blink and the next, the man vanished.
There was no way this letter could be good.
His first reaction was to burn it. He would hold the envelope and set it alight, perhaps catching an occasional teasing glimpse of the flaming words within, his grandfather’s final communication smoking away unread, unknown, unfulfilled. He would always wonder, but the threat of what it might contain—the potential for hurt, pain, and loss—was surely enough to dictate his course of action.
And it deserved to be burned. After all the nightmares it had given him through the years since Papa’s death, the probable contents of this letter were like a heart attack sure to happen, death wrapped in a stained, thirty-year-old envelope. One day I’m going to tell you, Papa had said. “Not today,” Scott whispered, and it was a plea.
“Scott,” his wife groaned from upstairs, waking slowly from her usual deep, peaceful sleep. She had no nightmares of dead old men springing at her from unseen shadows. “What’s in the post?”
“Nothing much,” he said, staring at the envelope. Nothing much? A letter sent by my grandfather before he died, finding me thirty years later. Finding me even though we’ve lived in half a dozen houses since then? Not much? “Well . . .” he said. And that single, hesitant word was the point where decisions were made, and everything changed forever.
“What?” Helen said. She appeared at the top of the stairs.
I should burn it. Even as Scott’s thumb slipped below the sealed flap—the paper was old and brittle, the edges yellowed by time—he knew that it should be destroyed. “Something strange,” he said, lifting the flap. The paper tore like only old paper could, shedding flakes of itself onto the hall carpet. Bits of Papa in here, Scott thought. Molecules of his skin. His dried spittle. I’m touching him right now.
A dog barked outside and Scott glanced up, expecting to see the mad old ghost staring in at him through the porch window.
“What is it, babe?” Helen came downstairs, night-dress creased and twisted around her, eyes still glazed from sleep.
Scott looked up at his wife of two decades and felt an intense rush of love. It struck him like this occasionally, a realization of just how lucky he’d been in life and how lucky he was still, but this time it ended with the deadening comprehension that all things ended. One day, both of them would be dead.
“A letter,” he said. He withdrew his thumb and thought of lying, but that was so strange to him. Their relationship was not built on lies. And even though the truth was so unreal, it came out in a rush. “A letter from my grandfather. He must have written it just before he died, posted it, and it’s been lost all these years. Stuck to the bottom of some sorting tray, maybe. Weird. You hear of things like this happening all the time.”
Helen stood three steps above him, frowning, running a hand through her long hair. “We’ve only lived here for ten years,” she said. “How did it get here?”
Scott looked down at the envelope. He did not show her that it had only his name on the front. “I suppose it’s followed us move for move,” he said.
“What does it say?” For the first time Helen’s voice contained the sense of wonder that this strange delivery warranted.
“I haven’t taken it out yet.”
“Well, are you going to?”
Scott stared at his wife. He shook his head. “Not just now. I . . . I’d like to open it alone. It’s weird. You know what I thought of Papa.”
“You loved him a lot.”
He nodded. And even though he was certain that the letter contained much more than grandfatherly chat, somehow he managed to hide that knowledge from her. He did not lie, as such . . . he simply omitted the truth. It felt bad. But he comforted himself by believing he did it for her.
He often dreamed of Lewis, Papa’s dead friend, and how he had sought Scott out two weeks after his own murder. Right now that dream seemed so close that it could be walking up his garden path.
“I’ll make some tea,” Helen said. “You go and read the letter. But if it’s a treasure map, you bloody well take me with you!” She smiled, kissed his cheek, and walked into the kitchen.
Scott took the envelope into his study and placed it carefully, squarely on his desk. He sat and looked at it for some time. He knew that he was not mistaken; it really was from Papa. Somewhere inside he had always known that this letter would arrive, or something like it. He knew this not only because his grandfather had left things unfinished between them, but because of the visit he’d received from the mad ghost of Papa’s dead friend.
Scott stood and pulled the window blinds aside, watching for shadows in the garden, shapes on the garage roof. And for a while, hating himself, hating whatever it was his grandfather had left unsaid, he listened for Helen’s cry of fear.
He knew he should burn the letter. But he also knew that Papa had guided him better than that.
By the time Helen came in fifteen minutes later with a mug of tea and a plate of toast, Scott had read the letter three times.
“I think it’s a set of directions.”
“Directions on a map, you mean?”
“Sort of. Instructions, but directions nonetheless. And there are some strange markings, some signs, shapes. I don’t know. Here, you read it.”
“Are you sure?” Helen’s eyes were wide, her brows raised, and she could see what an honor Scott was affording her. This was a personal letter, and it had traveled through the years to reach him here, now, where he sat only three decades younger than his grandfather had been at the time of his death.
Scott nodded. For a moment he considered the danger he might be placing Helen in from reading this, but only for an instant. Perhaps it was selfishness or fear, but he convinced himself it was love that made him wish her to be involved.
She took the letter and read it through, standing very still.
Scott stared from the window out into their garden. Was he out there now, that mad old thing? He had not seen him again since that first time just after the funeral, but there had often been a feeling that he was there, flitting across the background, still searching for whatever it was he claimed Scott’s grandfather had yet to reveal. Where is the Chord of Souls? he had asked. He had haunted Scott as surely as a ghost in any film he’d seen or book he’d read, stalking his mind if not actually appearing to him. He inhabited his nightmares. He had an influence over Scott’s whole life, and had probably changed it more than Scott dared admit.
On the worst of nights, he knew that he was destined to see that ghost again.
There was a slight breeze this morning, and the shrubs and trees at the foot of the garden swayed in a random dance, shuffling light and shadow to create a thousand visions in one. There could be anything out there. The human mind was a strange place, so full of trust: trust that there would not be a deep hole in the road around the next bend; trust that the sun would rise when one awoke after a night’s sleep; trust that there was not a madman hiding in the garden, staring, watching, biding his time until he visited once again.
“What the hell is this?” Helen said.
Scott blinked rapidly a few times, trying to dispel the ambiguous shapes he had started to see beyond the window. He looked up at his wife, not liking the uncertainty and nervousness in her expression. “I’ve read it three times,” he said. “And I think it’s nothing more and nothing less than what it says: the truth. A set of directions toward eternal life.”
“ ‘Everlasting’?” she quoted.
Scott shrugged. “That’s what it says.”
“You didn’t tell me your grandfather was religious.”
“He wasn’t.”
“But this is . . .”
Scott waited, but Helen could not say what it was. In her hands she h
eld a letter, and in that letter Scott’s dying grandfather had written instructions to what he claimed to be one of the great secrets of life and death. I know the truth, he had said. And eventually, after thirty years, he had kept his promise to tell Scott what that elusive goal might be.
“It’s what he believed,” Scott said. “It’s what made him happy, content, and unafraid at the end.”
“But he killed his friend,” Helen said. “And then himself. How could he have been happy or content? This letter reads to me as though he was scared. And these signs, these shapes, what are they? They make me feel . . .” She trailed off, dropped the letter on his desk, and walked to the window.
Scott had never told her about being attacked by Lewis’s ghost. He had not even told his parents. He always hoped that keeping it to himself would make it vanish, the memory rotting and fading. His secrecy had encouraged the opposite effect, but the more time passed by, the more difficult it had become to tell anyone.
Now, perhaps the time was right.
“I think maybe the two of them were looking for something,” Scott said. “And right at the end, Papa didn’t want it found.” He took the letter from the desk, folded it, and placed it back in the envelope. He looked from the window and made out crouched shapes in the bushes, an old man in the clouds. Helen seemed not to notice.
“Strange that a ghost from thirty years ago should convince me that this is true.” He told Helen everything.
Helen went to work that morning confused, and angry at her confusion. She had called Scott foolish, gullible, an old romantic, but he knew that it was because she was scared. She had seen something in his eyes that frightened her. After she left he looked in the mirror, and he saw it too.
Something had changed. The realization dawned that he was not seeing or feeling things quite the same as ever before. The memory of the attack in that field had stayed with him and somehow become one of the defining moments of his life. And receiving this letter had given that memory a brighter sheen of truth than ever before.
“Papa,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me sooner?” If he and Helen had been able to have children he may have well been a grandfather himself by now, but still he felt like a young boy when he even glanced at that letter. He felt like the teenager he’d been when his grandfather had died. It had opened up his mind and fogged his horizons, dimming truths he thought he relied upon and turning them into ambiguous things at best, ideas subject to pressures he still did not understand.
How the hell did that letter get here? Helen had asked. Scott had spoken of redirected mail, told her tales he had heard of letters stuck to the bottoms of sorting trays, finding their destination decades late, and mail that for unknown reasons just became lost. But he could not escape the fact that the envelope was old, original, and there was only his name on its front face. He had not shown her that, and he was thankful she had not asked to see.
Someone had hand-delivered this letter.
Perhaps it was best not to think about it too deeply.
The contents of the letter—twenty-two lines, that was all—echoed at him whatever he did around the house that morning. And those strange shapes and sigils were shouts within the echo. He had called in sick to work, needing time to digest and absorb what he thought this letter might mean. Time also to disabuse himself of the idea that he and Helen were now in danger.
The threat had hung like a shadow from the moment the letter arrived.
The truth, Papa had written, was simple, and easily found. And reading it was to experience it as well. The words made a spell, and the unknown symbols somehow added to its potency. Scott could not recall them without looking at the letter, and when he did look its contents imbued him with a different feeling every time. The first time he read it, he felt safe and warm and cosseted. The second time, a distance had opened up around him, pulling everything back so that there was nothing that could do him harm, but also nothing to touch or love. The third time he had slipped into a fugue; it must have lasted for mere seconds, but the dreams it contained had continued for hours, whole worlds in there, whole existences that screamed to be lived, and lived again. They faded away but left their mark.
Now, he was too afraid to read the letter again.
Helen read it too, he thought. What did she feel? What did she see? They should talk about it. But her concern had been for him, not the letter. That made him more afraid than ever. Had she felt anything other than confusion at an old man’s final words?
Scott walked into the garden and strolled around the perimeter. It was a fine spring day, clear skies promising to burn away the morning chill. A soft breeze blew into the garden through the boundary hedge, setting leaves shivering, fresh buds dipping and rising as if nodding in appreciation of their burgeoning life. He paused where he had imagined seeing a shape in the leaves and probed the bushes with his foot. There was nothing strange inside. He glanced up at the drifting clouds and saw no one watching him from there.
“Papa,” he said, “what have you given me?” He knew that he would have to read the letter again. It had changed him. His blood pumped differently; his heart was older by the length of time it had taken him to view those thirty-year-old words. And the most confusing aspect of this was that he did not know why.
As he entered his teens, Scott had become aware that Papa was more than just an old man waiting to die. Scott’s parents—his father in particular—viewed the old man as an eccentric, someone to smile at and humor, and sometimes to laugh at behind his back. He visited his friend Lewis regularly, and each time Scott asked about these meetings Papa would tap the side of his nose and wink, then stare off seriously into the distance.
In the weeks before he had taken Lewis’s life and his own, Papa had grown quiet and withdrawn. Scott saw him more than ever, and afterward he thought it must have been Papa trying to cram in as many visits with his only grandson as possible. He left no note, no clue as to why he did it. Lewis had been his good friend since they fought together during the war. Nobody understood why an old man would kill his friend and then himself. Most put it down to madness, and Papa’s name had become mud.
Scott had always known that there was more to it than that.
“You weren’t mad, Papa,” he said to his quiet garden. The small willow tree whispered in agreement.
He went back into the house, closed the back door, and made a cup of tea. The letter sat on the desk in his study. He’d half expected it to have vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived, but it was still there, inviting him to read it one more time. And what will I feel this time? he thought. What will Papa tell me when I next read the letter? Something different . . . or is it all the same, and I just have to find a way to accept it for what it is?
He left the room and went to run a bath.
The phone rang. It was Helen, just arrived at work and concerned about Scott.
“Really, I’m fine,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. But that letter creeped me out.”
“Why?”
“It’s just weird. Those signs. Don’t you think?”
Oh, very, Scott thought. “A bit strange, maybe,” he said. “So what did you think of it?”
“Just a bit of a ramble, really, wasn’t it? Maybe he wrote it when he decided to . . . do what he did. He wasn’t right in his mind, Scott.”
“Well—”
“Baby, don’t take that the wrong way. I know you loved your grandfather. But it’s just one of those weird things, that’s all. Put it away, forget about it.”
“But what I told you this morning. The ghost. Lewis.”
Helen was silent for some time, gathering her thoughts or waiting for a work colleague to move out of earshot.
“Helen?”
“Scott, that was a long time ago.”
“You’re saying I imagined it?”
“Not as such. Babe, it was so soon after his death.”
“You think I made it up.”
“No
. . .”
“Well, what then?”
Helen was silent again.
“I feel something when I read his letter,” Scott said.
“Of course you do.”
He gripped the phone tight, wishing he could force his conviction down the line to his wife. “Maybe we should talk about it when you get home,” he said.
“Yes, okay. Have a relaxing day, eh?”
“Yes, I’ll relax. Just running a bath.”
“Cool. See you later, babe. Ring me if you want to, though I’m in a meeting after lunch.”
“Bye.” Scott hung up. He stared at the phone for a few seconds, willing it to ring and willing his wife to blurt out her belief, her confusion, her fear at what she had read. I really want her to be afraid, he thought. At least then I’ll know it’s not just me.
The bath running upstairs, tea growing cold, Scott went into his study and sat down to read the letter one more time.
“You have to name every single bird,” Papa says. “If they come into your garden and take the food left out for them, it’s because they trust you. And trust always has a name.”
Scott stares wide-eyed at his grandfather. He’s nine years old, and even though he thinks he can see the truth from the games in the old man’s stories, still there’s always that element of doubt. That’s what he finds so magical about Papa: that element of doubt. It’s almost as if he’s from somewhere else.
“Are you from space, Papa?”
The old man does not laugh. He frowns. “Well, I have some memories of flying through the asteroid belt, but . . . they’re fading fast.” Then he smiles.
“Papa!” Scott says.
“So, the birds. That siskin over there I’ll call Cyril.”