“You’re sounding nuts, man!” Donny stated and took a step back; his leather jacket crinkled as he hugged himself.
Stig looked at him. It was a hard look.
Donny went on, “That doesn’t make a lick of sense. I mean, I don’t wanna grow up and sell out, any more than you. But you’re sounding a little, I don’t know, looney!”
Joanie just kept staring into the hole.
“Am I?” Stiggy had barely spoken the words when he charged and caught him by surprise, grabbing Donny around the arms and neck. “I can’t go like that . . . Can you?” he shouted as they scuffled.
Joanie covered her eyes.
Donny shrieked as Stig gained the advantage and footing. With little effort, he hurled the screaming boy into the pit. The giggles and laughter grew in pitch until they morphed into ragged howls and wet, ripping sounds. Stig looked at Joanie, a wormy smile taking over his face.
She shook her head and backed away. She was much easier to take than Donny was. She was lighter too.
Stig sat on the edge of the pit. Legs dangling, the hole’s slithering tongues caressed his calves with their spun-sugar stickiness. The flesh sizzled wherever they touched. He did not care. In his mind, it was summer. Girls were strutting and the park was alive. School was a hundred years away. He was seventeen again. Still. Always. He pushed off the edge like a swimmer into a pool.
The carnival below grew louder, yet at its loudest could not drown out his screams.
Dead Letter Office
Trent Zelazny & Brian Knight
We first read this one several years ago and found the central conceit so bizarre we immediately liked it even though we knew we couldn’t buy it—because it wasn’t yet a fully realized story. We challenged Trent to make it work and he sent us at least three or four iterations that never seemed to work. Then, in the fullness of time, we received this current version by Trent and his pal Brian. The alchemy of a collaborator and all our critiques and suggestions had worked its magic, allowing us to present you with what follows.
It started a few weeks ago when Leonard Perry received two pieces of mail that were not addressed to him. One was a letter to a Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio, the other a booklet of coupons for a Kenneth Hunt in Miami. Leonard lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, odd as it was, he didn’t think much of it at the time. He tossed the coupons into the trash and on the letter he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER”, then put the letter back into his mailbox, raised the mailbox’s flag, and forgot about it.
The next day when he arrived home from work he opened his mailbox and found five pieces of mail wrongly delivered to him. One of the pieces was the coupon book for Kenneth Hunt in Miami, Florida, another the letter to Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio. The Ohio letter was addressed in the exact same handwriting it had been the previous day; only, his own handwriting of “RETURN TO SENDER” was no longer there.
He did what he’d done the day before. Tossed the coupons into the trash and on the four letters—Mary F. Stodgel’s included—he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER”.
The next day there were seven pieces and nothing at all addressed to him. In these seven pieces of mail, the five he’d received the previous day were all included, his “RETURN TO SENDER” handwriting, once again, gone.
What he did this time, rather than writing “RETURN TO SENDER” on all six letters, was tear them twice in half and, along with Kenneth Hunt’s coupons, stuff the pieces into the garbage.
He finished up late at work the next day. His mind swam with numbers and sums, and every time he closed his eyes he was still crunching them. It had been Stress Central the entire day.
Just before he left his office, Julie knocked on the doorjamb and stepped in. Julie worked in accounting down the hall and had also just finished up for the night. She asked Leonard if he wanted to get a drink. It was no secret that Julie had liked him for a long time. And it was no secret that Heather, Leonard’s girlfriend, was out of town, visiting family in Upstate New York for the whole month. She’d only been gone a week at this time.
Leonard said “no, thank you”; he just wanted to go home and space out in front of the television.
With the day being what it was, when he got home he didn’t even think about what had been going on with his mail. He opened the box and found two glassy brown eyes staring at him, and a tiny set of white, glistening teeth.
He slammed the box and turned away as his heart picked up a pace and needles prickled the back of his neck. After a couple deep, steadying breaths, Leonard turned back to the box and tapped the side of it. Nothing stirred within. Slowly, he eased the mailbox open again. The eyes and teeth were really there. They were part of a rat. An unmoving though very real, very dead rat.
After a moment of incomprehension, he went back to his car and grabbed a short stack of fast-food napkins from his glove box. With a sick gurgling in his stomach, he removed the rat, and when he did, some of the mail fell to the ground. Faceup, the letter on top of the fallen stack was a letter to a Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio.
Leonard disposed of the rat, gathered up the mail, and took it all inside. He read the addresses over and over again. There were twelve pieces all together, seven of them being the mail he’d received yesterday. The mail he’d torn up and thrown into his trash. There was nothing at all addressed to him. He went to his trash can and dug through it. The letters he’d torn up and thrown away were not there.
He hadn’t done anything that he knew of to cause this. The mail just kept coming in. The same mail. The exact-same mail.
Could it be a joke?
Unlikely, he decided. None of his friends had this type of sense of humor. None of them were clever enough to execute such an elaborate scheme. And what would be the purpose of a joke like this, anyway? It didn’t make sense.
As a kid Leonard had found a thrill in knowing when the mail arrived. “The mail’s here!” he’d scream to his parents, a tingle of excitement oscillating through him. When he got old enough, he loved running down the driveway and opening the box. Every time he felt the remnants of magic as he withdrew things from all over the world sent to his family, like Santa Claus leaving presents.
As time went by, packages, letters, and junk mail came delivered to him. It didn’t really matter what it was. There was just something so cool and mysterious about having something come to him from far away.
As the years passed, the excitement vanished and the magic ceased. It slowly evolved into bills, the junk mail increased, and Leonard eventually came to regard it as yet another headache added to everyday life.
Now, however, it was more than just a headache. It was a downright pain in the ass, and a confusing one at that. Even in his growing concern, though, he couldn’t help finding some ironic amusement in the fact that, even if it wasn’t in the innocent childlike way it once was, the mail had become interesting again.
Leonard spent over an hour sitting at his kitchen table that night, looking over each piece. Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio; Kenneth Hunt in Miami, Florida; Liz Prince in Boston, Massachusetts; David Gwinn in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Martin Miller in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Jane Killinger in Bend, Oregon. He studied each one in turn, then restudied them. Each one that he had received the day before he took especial interest in, looking for traces of rips in the envelopes, or signs of where his writing—“RETURN TO SENDER”—had been erased. There was nothing. Each piece looked exactly how it had when he’d received it the day before. It wasn’t possible.
He considered opening them, reading them, then decided against it. A part of him was afraid to see what they’d say.
Why was he receiving this stuff? And how, when he ripped it all up and threw it away, did it come back? Why was it no longer in his trash? And why, when it came back this time, was there also a dead rat? Was that a threat of some kind? What was the threat? What was he supposed to do? Keep this mail? He wasn’t the damn post
office. This was some kind of intense, irrational dream.
His telephone rang. It was Heather. “You okay? You sound a little freaked out.”
Leonard looked at the twelve pieces of mail on his kitchen table, then turned his back on them. “I’m all right,” he said, “just a long day.”
Heather was having fun but missed him and wanted to say hello. They spoke for about twenty minutes. When he hung up he saw the mail still sitting there and wondered what the hell to do about it.
That night he dreamed about the dead rat.
The next day at work he flipped through the government pages of the phone book and found the number for the main office of the US Postal Service. He asked the woman what to do if he was receiving mail for other people. The woman said if he was getting mail for someone else at his address, to write “RETURN TO SENDER, NOT AT THIS ADDRESS” on it and put it back into his mailbox. Leonard then explained that the mail being delivered was not to his address at all. It was to Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin. The woman on the other end said, using a tone normally reserved for retarded children, that this wasn’t possible. She asked for his address, and when he gave it to her he heard her punching computer keys. Nothing seemed odd, she told him, and no one else in the neighborhood or the surrounding area had made any complaints. “You might want to ask your postman about it,” she said, again in her long-suffering, indulgent tone.
When he got home that night there were eight more pieces of mail, all addressed to different places. When he took them into his house, he found the other twelve pieces still sitting on his kitchen table.
He went through the new stuff. None of it was what he’d already received. This was all new mail for him to add to his collection. Still, he studied it all. There was nothing strange about it. It was just ordinary mail, as far as he could see. Why was he randomly receiving ordinary mail?
Curiosity now getting the better of him, he opened several pieces and examined them. There was nothing strange. Just letters, bills, pre-approved credit card offers, and other typical crap.
The next day—a Saturday—he was off work. He took his breakfast and coffee to the living room and sat in front of the window, watching his mailbox, waiting for the postman to show up. He propped open his front door in order to make it easier to hear the mail truck’s approach. Every now and then people walked by his house, couples hand in hand, people with their dogs or children or both. Nobody gave his mailbox so much as a glance.
Around lunchtime he saw his neighbor across the street, an attractive woman in her early thirties, walk outside to her mailbox. She opened it, removed a small stack of mail, and spent a moment going through it before she walked back inside.
But the mailman hadn’t shown up yet. He couldn’t have. Leonard had been watching since this morning and hadn’t seen him. Probably his neighbor hadn’t picked up her mail from the day before, he thought; though something inside him felt uneasy.
Confused, hesitant, and a little scared, he walked outside, down his short driveway, and opened his mailbox. It had sixteen pieces of mail in it.
None of them were for him.
The following week he tried different experiments. He ripped up two of the letters at random and threw them away. The next day they were back in his mailbox, along with several black-widow spiders. There was more mail too.
He sent both an empty envelope and a postcard to himself, one to his home and the other to his office. Neither one arrived.
One night he slipped down the street and put several letters in someone else’s mailbox. The next day they were back in his.
He took two sick days from work and watched for the mailman. He never saw him, but the mail was delivered both days.
Every other night he talked with Heather on the phone. He never mentioned anything about his strange new hobby. It was too bizarre to explain.
He was meant to receive this mail. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know why, but this mail was intended for him. He couldn’t doubt this, and with the tricks and threats he got whenever he destroyed any of it—whenever he committed a federal offense—he knew he was meant to do something with the mail.
But what? What was he supposed to do with it? Was he really just supposed to keep it? Like some kind of dead letter office?
Then he tried something that seemed to work. He took the letter for Mary F. Stodgel, opened it, skimmed over the message from her daughter, then put it into a fresh envelope, addressed it to Stow, Ohio, slapped a stamp on it, and mailed it off.
It did not come back the next day. Lots of other random mail arrived, but nothing for Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio. Not that day or the next.
He tried this with several other pieces. None of the letters returned until the third batch he sent. The letter to David Gwinn in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned with the message “RETURN TO SENDER, NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS”. This was not in his handwriting. Leonard stared at the envelope for a long time. It was definitely the same letter he’d sent off.
Jesus Christ, he was a post office. He put this letter back into his mailbox and flipped up the little flag. With all the other mail he received the next day, it was still in there, the handwriting of “RETURN TO SENDER, NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS” still on it. What the hell was he supposed to be figuring out here? What in the world was he supposed to be doing?
One more idea. Along with the batch of mail he opened, restuffed, readdressed, and stamped, he placed the letter to Michigan, still in its envelope, into another envelope, addressing it to the return address in Ketchum, Idaho.
It did not come back.
For the next few days Leonard spent his time—when he wasn’t crunching numbers at work—repackaging and resending letters. The cost was getting enormous, however. Every other day he was at the real post office, buying stamps and envelopes. The coupons and advertisements, such as the booklet for Kenneth Hunt, were easy to deal with. For whatever reason, all he had to do with those was take them to the post office and explain that he’d received them by accident. When he started getting suspicious looks, he began taking them in a postal bin and leaving it on the counter when no one was looking. This seemed to do the trick. When he received his mail the next day, the previous day’s coupons and advertisements were not there.
One day he managed to finally get every piece of mail in the house repackaged and sent off and, finally, his house looked sane again. Relief fell upon him, as well as an awkward sense of accomplishment.
The next day, a Friday, he received forty-five pieces, and with desperation sweeping and scraping all over and throughout him, he brought his hands to his face and cried. Jesus, was this ever going to end? Someone, something had to be behind this. But what? Who was doing this? And how were they doing it? He felt as though he were on a treadmill, going and going but never getting anywhere. For the love of God, what the hell was he supposed to do? How in the world could he make it go away?
A thought occurred to him just then. Such a simple thought too. He went outside with a screwdriver and removed his mailbox from its post. He put it on the kitchen table as the phone rang.
Only half paying attention when a woman’s voice said, “Hi, Leonard,” he replied, “Hey, sweetie.”
But it wasn’t Heather. It was Julie.
“I like that,” Julie said. “You can call me that anytime.”
“What’s up?” Leonard asked, rubbing his temples. A headache was coming on.
“I was just wondering if you were hungry. I made too much chicken and pasta salad. I could bring some over if you want.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Leonard looked around his kitchen, at the mailbox sitting on the table, and the forty-five letters and parcels he’d received that day.
“Come on,” Julie said. “I don’t think you’ve been eating. I see you at work. You’ve lost all kinds of weight and you look pale.”
“I’ve just been re
ally busy,” Leonard said.
“I bet you haven’t eaten today,” she countered.
That was true. He hadn’t had so much as a cup of coffee when he woke up this morning. In fact, now that he thought about it, Goddammit, he was famished. And he’d been too busy the past couple of weeks to do any grocery shopping, so there wasn’t anything in his cupboards or fridge. Now that he thought of it, other than obligatory exchanges at work and necessary phone calls with Heather, Leonard hadn’t really spoken with another human being in, what, nearly three weeks?
“All right,” he said. “Do you know where I live?”
Julie said she did and that she would be over soon.
While he waited for her, Leonard spent the next twenty minutes examining the mailbox. He found nothing unusual.
Julie came into his house without knocking, carrying two foil-covered oven trays in her hands and a bottle of red wine under her arm. Leonard followed her into the kitchen, where she set the trays down on the kitchen table and uncovered them. Looking around, Julie smiled, and with a quiet giggle she gestured to the counter next to the microwave. “Interesting place to keep your mailbox,” she said.
“It fell off,” he said. “Gonna put it back on in the morning.”
The mail was in a paper bag in his pantry.
As she prepared the food, Leonard opened the wine and poured two glasses. He handed her one, they clinked, and Leonard drained his without removing his lips.
“Whoa, slow down, boy.”
“Sorry,” Leonard said. “You just have no idea how badly I needed that.”
He poured himself another.
It wasn’t long before they were sitting at the table, eating. Leonard tried to pace himself but found it difficult. He kept shoveling more food into his mouth than he could chew.
“I knew you were hungry,” Julie told him.
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