Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  That was a week ago. What now? The moths – the moths are everywhere. The sound of their wings is like the sound of flames against the window. I haven’t been to work all week. I know the moths will be there too; clustering in the overhead lights; casting their giant shadows. Their acrid dust is on everything: my skin, my clothes, my possessions. Their plump and furry bodies hang from the ceiling in luxy swags; the sound of them is the grazing of sheep in a field of white noise.

  Moths come out at night, she said. In this case, they are hungry for more than the contents of my wardrobe. They crawl into my ears; my hair; they spill from drawers and suitcases. I have tried to run. But the moths always manage to follow me. Even in this boarding house, the moths are already everywhere; teeming with those memories that only dare come out at night.

  I’d thought myself safe in the mail room. It was quiet and peaceful there. There I laid the dead to rest, away from the ghost of my mother. But mothers, like moths, come out at night; and now my mother is everywhere. In my bed, my clothes, my head – eating me from the inside.

  Imagine a warehouse in Belfast. Imagine the dead letter office. Miles and miles of memories, safely cocooned in envelopes. Continents of paper, waiting to be discovered. And those moths are in them all; pressed between the pages; hungry for more than just revenge. Cut me open after this and there will be nothing but dust inside me; dust, and the wings of a million moths, a million vanished memories. Imagine setting a match to it all, in the dark, at midnight. Imagine typing in the code; coming in through a side door. Imagine the silence of the place, like a mausoleum. Imagine my mother standing there, all in dust and velvet. Moths come out at night, she says. But the night is endless.

  As I strike the match, she comes towards me like a cumulus. As I try to turn and run, the moths descend upon me. And as we fly towards the flame, she holds me in her soft embrace, and whispers:

  Darling. Mother’s here.

  JOANNE HARRIS

  Joanne Harris is the best-selling author of fifteen novels, three cookbooks, two collections of short stories, two short musicals and a Doctor Who novella. She has judged a number of literary awards, including the Orange and the Whitbread Prizes, and in 2014 was awarded an MBE by the Queen. In spite of this thin veneer of sophistication, she also tweets compulsively as @joannechocolat, plays regularly with the #Storytime band – which was formed when its members were still at school – and dreams of being marooned on the Lost island.

  AUSLAND

  ALISON MOORE

  “The past is a foreign country”

  L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

  Karla had known Lukas when they were children. Lukas had wanted to be an inventor, to make things with buttons to press and levers to pull, machines fizzing with electricity. They were still very young when they lost touch. She thought of him often over the years, and always imagined him building something in a garden shed or working at an experiment in a laboratory or standing in front of a blackboard that was covered in almost impossible mathematics, though Lukas himself, in her imagination, was always a boy, frozen in time, in the 1940s.

  Anyone whistling or cracking their knuckles made her think of Lukas, as did cap guns and fireworks, whose sulphurous smell lingered in the cold air.

  She supposed that he was still in Germany, while she had moved to London with her English mother. One summer, in her teens, she had sent him a postcard, but she never received a reply. Nowadays, she could have typed ‘Lukas Birchler’ into a search engine and let it find him for her, but in those days there was no such thing. By the time computers were replacing the typewriters in the office in which she worked, she was retiring.

  She was in her seventies before she saw Lukas again, in the lobby of a Spanish hotel. She was there on holiday, and had noticed the arrival of this elderly man wearing a trilby and walking with a stick. Despite his age, when he put down his suitcase and cracked his knuckles, Karla was sure that it was him, even before she heard him say ‘Birchler’ to the receptionist.

  Over dinner, Karla told Lukas about her life in London, her secretarial career and her late husband, and Lukas told Karla about his work as a physicist, the research he had done, the papers he had published in scientific journals. ‘I knew it!’ she said. ‘Please tell me you have an inventing shed!’ and he told her that he did. ‘I remember all the things you wanted to invent,’ she said. ‘You wanted to make a robot that would do your homework for you.’ Lukas laughed, nodding. ‘You had plans to build all sorts of machines.’

  ‘I’ve had some success,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘My goodness, it sounds like you’ve done very well for yourself. We have so much catching up to do. How long are you here for?’

  ‘For two weeks,’ said Lukas. ‘I’ve been told I have to take it easy.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Karla, patting his hand. She suspected that Lukas was one of those people who never quite manage a holiday even when they’ve made it as far as the beach; his head, she thought, would still be back in the lab or the inventing shed.

  They talked about their home town. It turned out that Lukas and his mother had left there not long after Karla and her mother. Both their fathers had already gone missing by then.

  ‘I found some curious old photographs,’ said Karla, ‘in amongst my mother’s effects, after she died. There are half a dozen of them, black and white, in an envelope marked “Lucerne, 1941”.’ One, she said, showed some men outside the Hotel Schlüssel in Lucerne. In another, there were men and cars gathered on a mountain road, and on the back of this one, someone had written, ‘WHERE IT WAS DECIDED’. ‘I assume that my father took the photographs, and I wondered if one of the men might be your father, but I didn’t remember him well enough to be sure. Now I’ve seen you, though, I swear that one of them must be either your father or your grandfather. There is a man – seen walking away from the Hotel Schlüssel, and in the gathering on the mountain road – who is the spit of you, right down to the trilby and the walking stick.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Lukas. ‘That’s very interesting.’

  ‘The photographs are at my house in London,’ said Karla. ‘I could send you a copy when I get home, but I’d very much like to look at them with you. Are you ever in England?’

  Lukas said that he had no plans to come to England in the foreseeable future.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Karla. ‘I’ll send them in the post.’

  Lukas came to Karla’s room that night. Sitting on the edge of her bed in the lamplight, he asked her about the photographs. Having studied them many times, she could tell him all manner of details, such as, outside the hotel and on the mountain road, it was raining – the men were wearing overcoats and carrying big black umbrellas; and one picture showed an incoming ferry whose name was Rigi; and it was possible to read the time on the clock at the ferry terminal, and the name of a street, Löwengraben, and the number plate of one of the Volkswagen Beetles on the mountain road.

  When Karla had told him everything she could, Lukas said goodnight and returned to his room.

  In the morning, Karla phoned her daughter, told her where she might find these photographs and asked her to send them to the hotel so that she and Lukas could look at them together. The post should only take a few days.

  Karla looked for Lukas in the breakfast room, so that she could tell him, but he wasn’t there; she didn’t see him anywhere that day, or the next. By the time the photographs arrived – found and posted promptly, with a note on the envelope to say ‘They were where you said they would be’ – Karla had discovered that Lukas had gone. His luggage, she had learnt from the reception desk, had been sent on to the Hotel Schlüssel in Lucerne.

  Karla asked the receptionist to find and dial the number of the hotel. Lukas could not at first be reached – he did not appear to have arrived – but some hours later the Hotel Schlüssel returned her call, putting Lukas on the line. Karla said to him, ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘I looked online,’
he said, ‘and saw that the hotel was still here. It has a good rating on TripAdvisor.’

  Karla could hear some commotion going on around him. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s my luggage coming in,’ he said. ‘I’ve only just got here. I went via home to collect a few things. I have rather a lot of luggage, including a few awkward items.’

  ‘Well, I’ve just received the photos. I asked my daughter to send them here. Are you coming back?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Lukas.

  ‘Well, how long will you be in Lucerne for?’

  ‘Indefinitely,’ he said.

  He was exasperating. Karla put the phone down and looked at the packet of photographs in her hand. She would send them on to him.

  In her room, she made use of the hotel stationery, addressing an envelope to Lukas at the Hotel Schlüssel and enclosing the packet of photographs. She went to the post office before lunch.

  When she did not hear from Lukas, she called the Hotel Schlüssel again and was told that Mr Birchler had gone.

  ‘Gone?’ she said. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ the receptionist said, ‘but he said that you might call. I didn’t personally see him leave but he has gone, although he left behind many of his belongings.’ Amongst these abandoned belongings were some unwieldy items of equipment and some books: Germans Against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under the Third Reich and The Plots to Kill Hitler: The Account of Fabian von Schlabrendorff. For now, the hotel had put these things into their lost property.

  ‘And you’ve no idea where he went?’ asked Karla.

  ‘I think somewhere far from here,’ said the receptionist. ‘I think somewhere he knew when he was small.’

  ‘Perhaps Germany, then,’ said Karla. ‘Was he expecting to return?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say,’ said the receptionist. ‘But we won’t keep his things in lost property forever.’

  Karla asked about the photographs, whether they had arrived in time for Mr Birchler to see them, but the receptionist could not be sure what Mr Birchler had or had not received before leaving. Karla left her contact details with the receptionist and with the desk of her own hotel in Spain so that Lukas would be able to get in touch and so that she might get the photographs back at some point.

  In fact, this package had not yet been delivered to the Hotel Schlüssel; it was still in transit. When it did arrive, the receptionist, seeing that Lukas Birchler was not a guest of the hotel, wrote on the envelope ‘Unbekannt!’ and ‘NACHSENDEN’, before recognising the name, remembering him and adding ‘INS AUSLAND VERZOGEN’. She put it back in the post, to be returned to the Spanish hotel whose address was printed on the envelope.

  Karla, meanwhile, was aboard the aeroplane that would take her back to London. She had not heard from Lukas again, but she was very pleased to have encountered him after so many years and to have had the chance to catch up. She had been so tickled to discover that he really did have an inventing shed in which to build those machines he had always talked about – everything from the homework robot to what he had always called his big project: a machine that could travel through time. He used to talk about that a lot. Karla had said that if she could go back in time she would like to be Jean Harlow kissing Clark Gable but Lukas had said it would not work like that. What he had been interested in was whether one could go back and change the past. And if not, he had said, at least one might learn something by being there.

  Karla, strapping herself into her seat on the plane, recalled hearing someone say on the radio that most people, if they could travel back in time, would want to go and kill Hitler. She pictured Lukas, with his trilby and his walking stick, leaving the Hotel Schlüssel, looking precisely like the man in the photograph. She wondered whether she would ever see Lukas again and it occurred to her that she would not.

  ALISON MOORE

  Alison Moore’s short fiction has been included in various anthologies including Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror and The Spectral Book of Horror Stories. A selection from her debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and the title story won the New Writer Novella Prize. Her first novel, The Lighthouse, was published in 2012 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Her second novel, He Wants, was published in 2014. Both The Lighthouse and He Wants were Observer Books of the Year. Her third novel, Death and the Seaside, will be published in August 2016. www.alison-moore.com

  WONDERS TO COME

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  Roy Brook spent his life in meetings.

  For this one he sat in the seventeenth-floor boardroom of the Atlantica Hotel and shook with air-conditioned cold. With him were five senior engineers, seated around the walnut conference table, clutching dead Starbucks cups. The session had been called to determine why the hotel construction had missed its deadline. A Skype link had been set up with the consortium heads in Guangzhou.

  ‘Let’s put this problem in perspective,’ said McEvoy, a soft-featured engineer from Leicester whose soporific tone slowed any urgent meeting to a crawl. ‘In the past three months we’ve had over thirteen hundred fails. Mostly circuit breaks, burn-outs, shorts and blown transformers. Our margin for error is set at four hundred a month. I’m trying to explain the shortfall, and the best I can come up with is human error.’

  ‘It’s an electrical problem, pure and simple,’ said Jim Davenport, one of the hotel’s most senior engineers. ‘Something big is shorting. That means it’s either in the main substation, which is unlikely, or wrongly installed wiring below ground level.’

  It was the worst news he could possibly have delivered; close to a million pounds’ worth of marble flooring had been laid over the electrical circuits and fibre-optic lines, which had been buried deep on the supposition that no one would have to touch them for at least a decade.

  The arguments ran back and forth for over an hour. Roy rarely spoke, but when he did everyone listened. ‘You aren’t going to increase staff and you won’t delay the launch, so we have to take everything up, and that’ll mean imposing longer working periods. Do you think you can drive that through?’

  McEvoy looked at the calculations on his tablet. ‘It’ll play right into the hands of the unions.’

  Finally it was suggested that they break for more coffee. His back aching with cold from the air-con units, Roy rose and walked over to the vast windows that looked onto the site. He thought about the resort’s launch tomorrow night, and how much they could hide from public view. The smaller cosmetic elements like the exterior lights and the planting could be carried out hours before the opening, even though the big stuff would have to wait. The innovative wall-wash techniques involved geo-mapping the buildings, and the arboculturalists would require notice to airlift fully mature date palms into the humidity-controlled plant beds.

  Yet he could still imagine these events roughly dovetailing. There would be further panics and slipped deadlines, but it was feasible that they might get everything locked down a week after the launch, providing there were no more outages.

  ‘Hey, Roy,’ Davenport called from the doorway. His grey, cadaverous appearance made him the living embodiment of deadline-stress. ‘The boys ran a pressure test on a section of pipe three millimetres thicker than the ones we’ve installed,’ he said, ‘blasted it the whole weekend and nothing, not so much as a hairline fracture. The trouble has to be somewhere else.’

  ‘Suppose it’s not a pipe at all?’ said Roy.

  ‘Then how would the sewage have reached the outfall?’

  ‘The tests showed it was untreated, right? That means it hadn’t passed through the primary or secondary clarifiers, the aeration tanks or the dryers, so the fault has to be way back, before contaminant removal even starts. The only junction there is the separator between the runoff and domestic channels.’

  The Atlantica’s sew
age control system was designed to be one of the most efficient in the world, with eight separate treatment processes in place, including solar-powered microfiltration and aerobic procedures in which bacteria and protozoa consumed biodegradable material. Ultimately, they would use an ultraviolet peroxide process to break down organic contaminants and destroy microbes. It meant that the hotel would be able to recycle previously used water with virtually no wastage. A model for all resorts to follow, not that the guests would ever know. When you sell people a dream, he thought, they don’t want to know how the dream works.

  ‘Have you got time to come down to the treatment station?’ Roy asked.

  Davenport looked reluctant. ‘You know I mostly firefight PR these days, Roy. I’m not even cleared for that part of the installation.’ Davenport had trained as a structural engineer, but had found the job’s responsibilities too much to bear. ‘I could get into trouble just being there.’

  ‘I didn’t think of that. I guess I’ll have to figure this out for myself.’ Roy watched as Davenport loped off along the breezeblock service corridor, then aimed for the basement control room, descending the fire stairs and pushing open a steel door in the building’s first icy sub-level.

  Raj Jayaraman was sitting alone in the gloom with a leaky taco in his left hand, tapping out code with his right. His plaited pigtail hung down over the back of his chair, and ended in a cluster of coloured wooden beads. ‘Hey, Roy. Pull up a chair if you can find one. Welcome to the downsized unit.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘They were let go.’ The heavyset young environmentalist had trained in ecological resource management at Bangkok University, but now found himself staring at computer screens monitoring hotel waste all day. ‘You missed a couple of our friends from Guangzhou. They brought an efficiency team with them and decided we were overstaffed.’