Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  4. PROGRESSION

  Outcome: Number fours vanish within 60 seconds of circling this point, leaving a pile of whatever clothing they were wearing behind. Where they go is unknown, as no number four has ever been seen or heard from again. Whether this disappearance relates in some way to the word ‘progression’ or is as unrelated an outcome as most of the other numbers is unknown, but relatives have been known to find some comfort in this notion, and current protocol for field officers is not to dissuade them of it.

  5. MONEY

  Outcome: An illness manifests in number fives within three to six weeks. Often these are withering diseases, or diseases that cause a severe reduction in brain function.

  6. PRAISE

  Outcome: As far as we know, no recipient has ever circled number six. This would suggest either (a) an inactive portion of the List, (b) a positive outcome that 100% of recipients would wish to keep secret from the world at large, or (c) a negative outcome which would likewise cause 100% of recipients not to contact the authorities.

  7. Rewards for U

  Outcome: [REDACTED FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY]

  8. MUSIC

  Outcome: A rare instance of the selected word on the list having some relation to the outcome itself. Number eights develop a constant, melodic tinnitus which has been proven to accurately predict the next-but-one song on any tuned radio within thirteen metres. Research is ongoing, but early results suggest number eights are capable of developing some wider capacity for precognition if supplied with extensive training and favourable conditions.

  9. SECURITY

  Outcome: The next time a number nine returns home after an absence of over one hour, they will discover a pet, spouse or child living in the property who did not exist previously. The newcomer and other members of the family (if any) will believe that everything is as it has always been. Reported responses to this have been widespread, with many number nines submitting themselves for psychological evaluation in the weeks following the discovery. Some families split when the nine cannot accept the interloper, but in a few cases, the result is extremely positive. We have records of a female number nine who could not have children returning home to discover her husband and nine-year-old daughter cooking dinner. After a period of adjustment, the woman felt very happy with her altered circumstances. It may be supposed that more of these ‘happy outcomes’ occur, but few are reported.

  10.

  The blank. As you will see from the attached footage, Captain Wayne had been instructed to write ‘Are you trying to communicate with us?’ in this space. I repeat, I am fully prepared to submit to whatever reprimand you feel is appropriate for this experiment and the tragic loss of life, however I must state in closing – it is entirely possible that what happened to Captain Wayne might be considered to be some form of response.

  STEVEN HALL

  Steven Hall was born in Derbyshire in 1975. His first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, has been translated into twenty-eight languages, though it stubbornly refuses to be adapted for screen. In 2013, he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

  OVER TO YOU

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  I didn’t go to the mailbox in expectation of finding anything worth the trip. I never do these days. There will be bills from the utility company, of course, clothes catalogues for my wife, direct mail from Comcast excitably pimping some new cable TV/Internet/home security package in which I would have no interest even if I could comprehend how it differs from their previous offering. All more meaningful forms of communication now arrive on my computer or phone. Gone are the days when you made a choice over when to encounter a missive from the universe: now they get right up in your face and ping at you. Somebody — I can’t recall who — once said that each letter is an uninvited guest, turning up on your doorstep without warning, armed with the potential to make or ruin your day. Emails can certainly do that. The stuff in the mailbox, once an iconic symbol of community and far horizons? It’s just recycling waiting to happen.

  I didn’t even go to look for mail, if the truth be told. Walking down the path was cover for having a sneaky cigarette. Smoking is bad for you, it would appear. I long ago made an internal accommodation over this — by ignoring the fact — but my son, now ten, has different views. When I was his age, lots of people smoked. Now nobody does (at least amongst the middle classes) and the media and schools are full of dire warnings on the subject. Scott is extremely keen that I give up, and manifests this position in a strident campaign that includes destroying my packs whenever he finds them.

  I’m working on it, kind of. I smoke less than I want to, certainly. And in secret. An occasional walk to the mailbox has become a ruse for grabbing a morning nicotine hit in relative safety, during what was beginning to feel like a somewhat endless school summer vacation.

  I stubbed the butt out and rolled it into a discreet ball which I slipped in my pocket for later disposal. Then, because I might as well, I checked the mailbox. There wasn’t much inside, as I’d done the same a couple of days before. Supermarket coupons. Credit card companies urging me once again to consider getting further into debt. A small padded envelope.

  I shoved all the junk under my arm — remembering once again my idea of moving the recycling container so it was right next to the mailbox, a notion I’d again forget as soon as I started walking back to the house — and examined the envelope. It was four inches by six, a buff color. The most notable thing about it was the NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS scrawled across the front. It’d been sent to someone called Patrick Brice, who lived — or was supposed to live — in Rockford, Illinois.

  My name is Matt, and I live in California.

  I flipped it over. Someone had written ‘Return to sender’ on the reverse, in a different hand and colour. In a third hue — and different handwriting once again — someone else had further written ‘NO FORWARDING ADDRESS’.

  None of which explained what it was doing in my mailbox. I considered putting it back, but realised it’d likely been sitting there a couple of days already, and the mail person hadn’t taken it away, having discovered their error. So instead I carried it and the other stuff back to the house, where I dropped the whole bundle on the kitchen table and forgot about it.

  * * *

  Late morning found me back in the kitchen, making coffee. Karen had taken Scott out for a few hours, giving me an opportunity to work in peace and, coincidentally, have a smoke or two without being given a hard time. As I headed toward the back door, coffee in hand, I noticed the envelope on the table and grabbed it in passing.

  Outside, I looked at the package again for a few minutes without learning anything new. The only way to do that would be, of course, to open it. It wasn’t for me, self-evidently. It was to this Patrick Brice person. But — equally obviously — it wasn’t going to get to him. I could put it back in the box or take it down to the post office, but it had clearly done the rounds already without finding a home. So what should I do? Drop it in the trash? That felt wrong. Someone had sent something to somebody else. An engagement had been commenced, a baton proffered. To simply dispose of it, be a stranger summarily curtailing that journey, didn’t seem right.

  I could at least find out what was inside, and make a judgment as to how important it was. If it seemed like some big deal, there might be something I could do. Plus if I took my time over the process, I’d be outside long enough to legitimate having another cigarette.

  Sounded good.

  The envelope had been securely sealed with brown duct tape. I circumvented this by tearing it open at the other end, fairly neatly. Inside was an object wrapped in a small piece of white paper, secured in place with a piece of scotch tape. I used my thumbnail to slice through this — again, fairly neatly — and unwrapped something that was immediately recognizable.

  A chess piece. A bishop, to be precise, about an inch and a half high, quite nicely made out of a darkish wood. On the base was a thin pad of dark red/brown
felt. The piece was in good condition, but a little worn, as if it had been used many times.

  So?

  Realizing that there was something on the paper wrapping, I took a closer look. A short sentence, three words, ending with a period — all of it in Courier, or some near equivalent, as if produced on a typewriter.

  ‘Over to you.’

  ‘Huh,’ I said. I lit my second cigarette, and tried to make a mystery out of what I’d found. Most likely there wasn’t one. Two guys playing long distance, I guessed, and this a notification of a move, presumably one in which the bishop had been taken. Though… instead of ‘Over to you’, or even ‘Your move’, shouldn’t the message have been ‘Knight to King 4 x Bishop’, or however it was they indicated those things? I’d never been a player, finding the game both hard and boring, and couldn’t remember the exact terms. Plus you wouldn’t actually send someone a piece, would you, even if you’d taken it? You both needed to retain full sets in order to keep playing the game.

  Whatever. I could imagine it’d be annoying for the move to have gone astray, but if the guy was no longer at that address, and had left no forwarding information, there wasn’t a lot that could be done about it.

  At that moment I heard the sound of a car turning in off the street, and swore, and rapidly stubbed out my cigarette, and scurried inside.

  * * *

  ‘What’s this?’

  I was sitting at my desk, Scott standing beside me. He was bored, and had come in to say hi, hang out, and generally avoid doing the book report that was supposed to be his mission for the afternoon/week/summer.

  ‘Chess piece,’ I said. I’d put it and the other bits on my desk when I hurried back in. He picked it up.

  ‘Why’s it here?’

  ‘I found it,’ I said, to avoid explaining at length. I was in the middle of working, he wasn’t supposed to come in while I was busy, and though it made me feel a heel to be distant toward him, Karen would be pissed at me if I wasn’t, as it made her job of keeping him out of my hair during the summer days even harder.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘A bishop.’

  ‘Is that the type that…’

  ‘Diagonally,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, okay. What’s the smell?’

  I stiffened, thinking he’d caught a hint of cigarette smoke on me from earlier. He raised the chess piece to his face, however, and sniffed. ‘It’s on this.’

  I took it from him. The odour was faint, but Scott has a keen nose. ‘Don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Smells like disinfectant. The kind they use in big buildings.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Could be something like that.’

  ‘Why’s it wet?’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘Yes it is. The base.’

  I turned it upside down and gently touched the felt. It was a little damp. ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t earlier. I mean, before.’

  I looked at the part of the desk where the piece had been, but Scott was ahead of me, wiping his finger across it. ‘It’s not wet here.’

  At that moment his mother hollered from the kitchen, expressing a hope that Scott wasn’t bugging his father and how was he doing with that book report, hey? Scott made a face like a frightened frog.

  ‘You’re fine,’ I said, winking. ‘But go.’

  He smiled, and slipped out of the room.

  * * *

  Just before bedtime I wandered down the path toward the road. Our neighborhood is on the edge of town, in fact a little past it, and the houses are widely spread on heavily wooded lots. It’s kind of like being out in the country, except you’re not, which is my preferred combination.

  ‘Still on the old cancer sticks, huh.’

  Our neighbor, Gerry, was standing at the head of his own path. He’s in his mid-sixties and the previous year, in the aftermath of his wife leaving him for some guy, had laboriously curtailed his own two-pack-a-day habit, on the grounds life couldn’t feel any worse.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, annoyed at having been caught, especially as Scott was asleep and so I’d believed myself safe from censure. ‘Cutting down, though.’

  ‘Don’t work,’ Gerry said. ‘You’ll still be cutting down when those things cut you down. Clean break. Only way to get that job done.’

  ‘Worked for you, I guess.’

  ‘Sure did. Hurt like crap for a couple months, but I stuck with it. And you should, too. You’ve got a son. And that kid loves you.’

  ‘I know.’ Gerry and his wife never had children, a fact he has spoken of with regret several times.

  ‘Just saying.’

  He nodded goodnight, and ambled back toward his own house, where he now lived alone, and drank.

  * * *

  I went for a run the following morning, but cut it short after 5k. Our area is home to just about every variety of tree known to man, which makes it very attractive but something of an allergy motherlode. There are few months of the year when something airborne isn’t wafting out of the branches to irritate the membranes.

  I came out of the shower still coughing and sniffing.

  ‘The regime’s evidently doing you a power of good,’ Karen said.

  ‘And you last exercised… when?’

  ‘I exercise restraint on a daily basis, darling. Be grateful for that.’

  Thus bested, I went to my study.

  * * *

  As anyone who works at home, and alone, knows, there are times when your focus drops. You can either beat yourself up over this — as I used to — or accept it as part of the ebb and flow of the creative process.

  Put another way, mid-afternoon I found myself sitting staring into space. I long ago set up a system on my computer that disbars any interaction with the Internet during working hours, except for email, so that wasn’t a temptation. It would, of course, have been an ideal moment for a contemplative and focus-recharging cigarette, except Scott was home, up in his room, ostensibly doing his book report but more likely involved in covert work on his Minecraft empire. I could probably get away with it, as he’d be keeping his head down in case his mother checked on progress, but I don’t actually enjoy misleading my son. I could last out a couple more hours.

  I could — and possibly should — call my mother. It had been a few days. I like my mother, and since my father died a couple years ago we’ve spoken twice a week. It’s a serious undertaking, however. My dad’s passing revealed my mother to be a more anxiety-prone person than I’d realised, something he’d been adept — consciously or otherwise — at diffusing. Without his buffer her energy coursed in scattershot directions, especially over the phone, an hour of which could derail my work mojo for the rest of the afternoon.

  Eventually my eye happened upon the chess piece, still in position near the base of my computer monitor. I picked up my phone — not subject to the same Internet sanctions as the desktop machine — and googled ‘Patrick Brice’. The first several pages of results related to some up-and-coming movie director of that name. It seemed unlikely he’d be the intended recipient, or that he lived or had lived in Illinois. Wikipedia indicated he’d been born in California. After this were screeds of other randomers who happened to have the name, all doubtless leading perfectly decent albeit unremarkable lives. None were self-evidently long-distance chess players.

  I put the phone down and picked up the bishop. As with any small object whose purpose inherently involves being touched, it was hard not to roll it around in the fingers, and to wonder who else had done so. What with me not being psychic, no answers were forthcoming.

  When I touched my finger to the base, it was at least as damp as the day before. Which seemed odd, as the ambient temperature was reasonably high. I raised it to my nose, and thought the smell was a little stronger, too.

  I closed my eyes and tried to get closer than Scott’s pretty decent summation. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to me to have something of hospital corridors about it. Disinfectant of a type both fusty and clinical
, designed to do its job reliably rather than beguile the senses. This made me wonder whether one of the chess players — still assuming that’s what was going on — was mired in some kind of long-term hospital sojourn.

  If so, there was all the more reason to try to get it back on its journey. I still had no way of doing this, however. Unless…

  I opened the drawer where I’d stuffed the envelope, and took another look. This showed me something I should have noticed before. No stamps on it. No franking. To judge from the number of times it had failed to find a home, it should have had two or three pieces of evidence of passing through the mail system.

  It had none.

  * * *

  That evening, when Scott was in bed and Karen was sleepily scrolling through Facebook on her phone, I took a walk down the path again. I enjoyed a cigarette in peace, though actually I’d been semi-hoping Gerry would be around, and when I’d finished, I stood at the road for a moment, making a decision.

  It took a couple minutes for him to answer his doorbell. He was wearing old sweats and a T-shirt that had seen better days, probably the late 1970s.

  ‘Hey.’

  He stood aside. I shook my head regretfully. ‘Just wanted to check something.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I found something in my mailbox yesterday. Small envelope, looks like it’s been around the block a few times — and addressed to someone in Illinois.’

  He frowned. ‘Okay.’

  There were a few empty beer bottles on the table in the room behind him. ‘Weird thing, there’s no postmark. I just wondered… you didn’t put it there, right?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  I smiled. ‘No idea. Just trying to solve a minor mystery.’

  He nodded affably. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you, Matt? Got a box of Boont Amber open. Nice and cold.’