Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  The path of the Winterbourne from which the village took its name was obvious. The houses on the left-hand side were separated from the road by a narrow ditch – dry at the moment, and filled with grass and weeds. A small bridge of stone led across the ditch to the front door of each house. The last building before the jetty was actually a village hall – a single-storey structure that covered about as much ground as six or seven of the houses. In front of it was a gravelled car park with several cars in it – quite expensive ones as well: I saw a Range Rover and a Lexus as well as something that was either a Jaguar or a Rover 75. They seemed a trifle out of character for the area. The sign in front of the hall was covered with old ribbons of paper that had peeled off the board and now hung down like creepers – the sole remnants of generations of parish notices, I presumed.

  I wondered if the track I was on was actually Vicarage Close – I couldn’t see a vicarage, let alone a church – but I suddenly realised that what I had taken to be a gap between two of the houses was in fact a narrow road heading off at right angles. I hauled my scooter around to navigate down it.

  The houses were smaller and darker along this narrow road, and I couldn’t see any numbers. At the far end was a church set in a small graveyard of crooked gravestones. More of the knobbly cauliflower-things sprouted in the angle between the graveyard wall and the ground, and even on the graves themselves. The church was constructed from a dark stone which was darkened even more by age and speckled with orange mould. It was set with several dark stained-glass windows, and the walls between the windows were covered with a regular array of metal spikes that had been hammered into the stone until only their ends were visible. The lead tiles on the roof were half-hidden by the low-hanging mist, as was the church’s bell tower. I could immediately see that Pevsner was right – this was an interesting church.

  I parked my scooter just outside the drystone wall surrounding the cemetery. As the engine died a thick silence rolled in – no birds, no sounds of movement, just the distant sound of the unenthusiastic waves. I could see that the church door – a massive wooden affair, painted green and also covered with those metal bosses – was partially open. I wanted an excuse to look inside anyway, and the idea that someone in there might direct me to number seven was as good an excuse as I was going to get.

  It took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the low light inside. The stained-glass windows were dirty, and the glass seemed to be mainly green and blue, which meant that the old wooden pews and the uneven stone floor were cast in a strange watery light. Just past the transept, in front of the choir stalls, was a stone pulpit. It was several steps up from the church floor so that its occupant could look down on the parishioners as they preached their sermons. Standing in the pulpit was the church’s vicar.

  Her head was bowed over a thick book on the lectern in front of her, and it took a few moments for her to register my presence. She looked up slowly. She was probably middle-aged, with red hair that had dulled and was streaked with grey. Her blue eyes glistened in the meagre illumination.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

  She hesitated for a few moments. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘It’s wrong.’

  I assumed that she meant either that I was interrupting her prayers or that this was an isolated church run by religious zealots who didn’t want unbelievers contaminating their ceremonies. That meant I wavered between wanting to feel apologetic and wanting to be irritated. I pulled the envelope out from my jacket pocket. ‘I was sent this by mistake,’ I said. ‘It should have come here, to number seven Vicarage Close. I don’t live too far away, so I thought I’d just drop it off and take a look around the village.’

  She frowned. ‘Number seven? That’s… Ben and Maureen Cheadler. They won’t be in at the moment. Nobody’s in, I’m afraid. They’ll all be at the village hall for the bring-and-buy.’

  ‘Bring-and-buy’ is one of those phrases, along with ‘jumble sale’, ‘flea market’, ‘garage sale’, and ‘boot sale’, which gets me excited. I’ve found so many old books in those settings that I knew I had to take a look. Just the smell of old paper makes my pulse speed up.

  ‘The village hall – is that the place down by the quay?’

  She nodded, but she was looking at me strangely, frowning and squinting slightly. Maybe, I thought, it was the fact that it was so dim in the church. Maybe she was short-sighted, and had left her glasses back in the vicarage. ‘Are you sure that the letter is for number seven?’ she asked. ‘It’s just that I was expecting…’

  ‘It’s definitely for number seven,’ I said, filling the gap after her voice trailed off into silence. ‘You know,’ I went on when it became clear she wasn’t going to say anything else, ‘I saw some very expensive-looking cars parked outside the village hall. It’s obviously an exclusive area around here. I’m guessing there’ll be some great bargains on the tables.’

  She laughed, although it sounded more like a cough. ‘Ah, those cars belong to visitors,’ she said. ‘People come from a long way away to see what’s on offer.’ She hesitated again. ‘Are you sure you’re in the right place? Some of the things on offer are very… specialised. You won’t find the usual chutneys and jams and knitted tea cosies, you know?’

  ‘What about old books?’

  She nodded slowly. I might have been mistaken, but I thought a look of disappointment crossed her face. ‘Oh yes, they certainly have old books. Some very old books.’ Her hand caressed the Bible on the lectern in front of her. ‘Even older than this,’ she said sadly.

  ‘But nowhere near as important or influential,’ I said, trying to cheer her up.

  ‘I thought so,’ she replied, ‘when I first arrived here.’

  I had been going to ask if I could take a look at the Saxon apse, but she didn’t seem to want to come down from the pulpit to show me, and I got the impression that she would rather be left in peace. The following silence grew longer, until I said: ‘Well, I’d better go and drop this letter off, then. Am I okay leaving my scooter outside, or would you like me to move it?’

  ‘Please, feel free to leave it,’ she said. ‘It will be perfectly safe.’

  Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think she may have emphasised the word ‘It’ very slightly, but at the time I didn’t notice. I just nodded to her, took a few steps backwards and then turned to walk towards the door.

  I left the church behind me and walked back along Vicarage Close to what I supposed I had to call the main road. Certainly not the high street. Once or twice I thought I saw the grey curtains in the windows of the houses I passed twitch slightly, but I put it down to cats jumping down from the window sills, spooked by my presence.

  At the junction I turned left and headed towards the coast, and the village hall. The pall of mist was still hanging overhead. I looked in vain for a tea shop or a café where I could get something to drink, and a bite to eat. Even a fish and chip shop would do. The drive had given me an appetite. Strangely, there was nothing. It used to be that English villages grew up around the local tavern and the local duck pond, but nowadays the heart of every one seems to be a delicatessen serving designer coffee with a variety of syrups, along with local fudge and hand-made soaps. More often than not it’s situated next to a Chinese takeaway. With a bit of luck, I thought, there might be someone serving strong tea and flapjacks from a hatch in the village hall.

  Before going inside I stopped at the top of the jetty and stared out to sea. The horizon was shrouded from view by the mist, but I could make out dark bulks of fishing boats bobbing up and down, their masts rising like the trunks of the trees in the woodland I had driven through, only thinner and straighter. Beyond them I thought I could see the shadowy outline of a string of rocks, almost invisible in the gloom. They looked like the half-submerged back of a prehistoric skeleton.

  The expensive cars were still there, in the car park. Several of them were hire cars, I noticed – white paint jobs, a complete lack of clutter inside
, and little barcodes attached to the dashboard that could be scanned by a clerk when they were booked in or out. What, I wondered, would so many hire cars be doing in a small, isolated village like Winterbourne Abase? I knew that the vicar had mentioned that the bring-and-buy sale dealt in ‘specialised’ items, but were those items unusual enough, and potentially worth so much, that people would be lured from far enough away that they would hire a car for the journey rather than take the bus? It occurred to me that perhaps the drivers had even flown in to Heathrow or Gatwick and picked up their hire cars there. I patted the pocket of my jacket to which I had returned the envelope when I left the church. There were American stamps on the front, after all. Maybe this bring-and-buy sale did have an international dimension – dealing in antiquities so particular that collectors would be prepared to travel long distances for them. I thought eBay had democratised and simplified the process of buying almost anything, these days.

  I remembered the strange vegetables that I had seen lining the track into the village and in the churchyard. Perhaps they were some rare species that grew only in this area, and were prized by gourmets everywhere for their exquisite taste. They had to have something going for them – they were ugly things.

  The door to the hall was closed, and I pushed it open against stiff and squeaking hinges.

  Inside there were four rows of tables running down the length of the hall: one on each side with their vendors standing between the tables and the walls and two in the middle, with a space running down between them. There seemed to be more vendors than potential buyers – which, to be honest, was pretty much my experience of jumble sales and craft fairs across the south-west of England. The atmosphere was slightly hazy, which I put down to the mist outside creeping in through an open window, and it was hot enough that I felt a sweat break out across my forehead and scalp. I slipped my jacket off and held it over my arm as I moved forward to the nearest row.

  The first table was covered in small statuettes. They had been carved from stone of various types and colours. I was used to craft fairs in particular having several stalls selling brightly painted cold-cast resin or porcelain dragons to people of the New Age persuasion, and for a moment I thought these were something similar, but as I looked at them more closely I realised that they were old, weather-beaten and chipped. They were also representing things that were considerably uglier than the usual dragons. Some of them were strange figures that mixed simian and octopoid characteristics, some looked like the opposite of mermaids – creatures with gaping fish-like heads and thick, stubby legs – and some had no recognisable shape at all, but were formed from ribbons of stone which twisted around and through each other.

  The man behind the table noticed my approach and smiled at me. He was shorter than average, but he had a very wide mouth. His eyes were magnified by the pebble-like lenses of his glasses, and he didn’t seem to blink.

  ‘You see anything you like?’ he asked.

  I smiled. ‘They’re all very interesting,’ I replied. ‘How much are they? I can’t see any prices.’

  He stared at me with a disappointed expression on his face. ‘What do you think they are worth?’

  I wasn’t sure what to make of the question. ‘I’m sure to some people they are beyond price,’ I replied.

  He nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘Beyond price, yes. Beyond gold or rubies. Beyond life itself.’

  I nodded, and moved away.

  ‘If you have anything similar,’ he called after me, ‘then an exchange could be arranged. I would be happy to assess anything you might possess.’

  The next stall also had stone shapes on it, but these were not figurines. These were more like tablets – irregular blocks with writing carved into them. I presumed that the carvings were some kind of runes, based on the fact that I didn’t recognise them as any language that I knew. Having said that, I’d seen stalls in other places selling things which had phrases carved into them in J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented Elvish language or Star Trek’s Klingon. There was always someone who would buy an expensive knick-knack if it was associated with some fantasy or science fiction franchise.

  A man was standing on my side of the table, holding one of the stone tablets. He wore a long black raincoat, despite the heat, and a black hat of the same kind that the author Terry Pratchett used to wear in interviews and at signings. His hands, which I almost expected to be gloved, were startlingly white, and his fingers were long and thin, like a pianist’s. He turned his head slightly to acknowledge me, and smiled. His eyes were shielded by round glasses with dark lenses, reminding me of pictures I’d seen of John Lennon. He nodded his head. I nodded back.

  Out of politeness more than anything else I picked up one of the blocks to examine it. The thing was heavier than I expected. The stone had a soapy texture to it, and it felt warm. Maybe, I thought, lots of people had been handling it, or maybe the stone was just picking up the heat in the hall.

  I moved on to the next table. This one, I was excited to see, was stacked with books. Eagerly I picked up the first one. It was old – very old – bound in cracked black leather and held closed with iron hasps. It was the kind of thing that, if you’d found it in the British Museum, would have been readable only if you were wearing white cotton gloves and with the book held on a special stand, but here it was just lying around so that anybody could hold it and read it with no protection.

  I opened it up and scanned the title page. It was in German, printed in blocky type. It appeared to be called Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, which I translated as ‘On Nameless Cults’, or possibly ‘On Unspeakable Cults’. My German is shaky. The author was one Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, and the publisher was a company I had never heard of in Düsseldorf. Reluctantly and carefully I put it down and moved to the next item – a pamphlet of faded paper bound in cardboard bearing the title: ‘On the Sending of the Soul’. No author was listed.

  There were so many antique items here that I had never seen before, never even heard of, that I felt dizzy. The heat wasn’t helping. Visiting jumble sales and suchlike I was more used to riffling through piles of autobiographies of minor sports stars and faded celebrities in search of the unusual. Here they were stacked in abundance.

  Scanning the table I saw, in quick succession, An Investigation into Myth-Patterns of Latter-Day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R’lyeh Text by Professor Laban Shrewsbury, Clavis Alchemiae by Robert Fludd (which, in the unlikely event that it was an original copy, was nearly five hundred years old) and Otto Dostmann’s Remnants of Lost Empires. In amongst the old, cracked and dusty tomes I noticed a more recent book and a particular favourite of mine, one that I had in my own collection: Off the Map by Alastair Bonnett, which was subtitled Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places and What They Tell Us About the World.

  Sitting on one side was a maverick copy of Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road. I can only presume that it had crept in by accident, although I’d seen the same book in my local surgery and two coffee shops near my house, as well as every single second-hand bookshop that I’d ever been in. I’ve suspected for a while that the damn thing is stalking me. Either that or the publishers had printed way too many copies and had dumped them on the charity market.

  I glanced around the hall. There were several other tables there with books on, and even at a distance I could tell that they were old books. Very old books. With the exception of the Bonnett volume, and a few others that I noticed – including the Binchy – this place could have furnished the stock for an antiquarian bookshop that would have become legendary across the world – and yet the books were just stacked willy-nilly on folding tables. Unpriced.

  Stunned, I turned back to the table that was pressing against my legs, and my gaze fell on a rust-red and ivory paper wrapper with tiny tears along the top edge. It was wrapped around a hardback book half-hidden beneath a yellowing 1930s magazine with the splendid title Tales That Should Never Be Told. I recognised the colour scheme immediately �
� it was one of the forty-six volumes of Pevsner’s Buildings of England. More importantly, it was one of the Penguin first editions. I wondered which one it was – I had them all, of course, but some of them were in pretty poor condition and I liked to upgrade them whenever I could.

  I slipped it out from beneath the magazine, and I could suddenly feel the hairs on the back of my neck and on my arms prickle, even before I saw the title. When I did see the title, I could suddenly feel my heartbeat thudding in my neck and my temples.

  Buildings That Are Lost, and Buildings That Should Never Be Found was the title. I opened it cautiously, reverently, and saw the words Volume 47 on the inside front page.

  There was no Volume 47 of Pevsner’s Buildings of England. There never had been.

  The smell of old paper rose up like some exotic perfume to make my nostrils tingle. Carefully I looked through the pages. From what I could see the text was authentically Pevsner, rather than one of the other writers who had written the Gloucestershire and Kent volumes and who had extended the series to include Buildings of Scotland, Buildings of Wales and Buildings of Ireland. The buildings actually described were, however, not ones that I knew – obscure chapels dedicated to unknown saints, castles that I’d never heard of, otherwise ordinary houses in which terrible things had occurred. The thought occurred to me that this might have been a proof copy of a volume that had never been printed, or perhaps a special limited edition of a few hundred copies. I checked the front pages, but there was no indication that the one I held was Copy X of Y, or that it had been signed by Nikolaus Pevsner himself.