Dead Letters Anthology

by Conrad Williams

  I realised I was breathing heavily, and I needed to sit down. At the end of the row of tables I saw a small area with three round tables covered in cloth and set in a little group. Each table had several chairs around it. Nearby was a hatch in the wall, just as I had imagined, and old ladies were on the other side, serving teas and coffees. I put the book down, hiding it beneath the magazine again so nobody else could find it easily, and I quickly made my way in that direction, passing as I did so a table of strange little clocks and another table of fossil pendants on chains and leather thongs. I ordered a tea in a shaky voice from an elderly lady wearing too much lipstick and sat down.

  I had to have that book. Or at least I had to make every reasonable attempt to get it.

  I glanced around the hall, trying to work out how people were managing to buy things if there were no prices and none of the vendors – based on my limited experience, anyway – were inclined to talk about how much their wares cost. I noticed that the people there were an interesting cross-section of humanity – some were men in suits with silk ties and gold cufflinks, some were women in suits with silk scarves around their necks, some were obviously well-to-do locals in cardigans and corduroy trousers, or twinsets and pearls. There was also a smattering of children, and a few people who looked like beach bums or vagrants who had wandered in because of the cheap tea. I took a sip and realised that cheapness was the only thing the tea had going for it – the liquid was foul, with an oily, slightly rank aftertaste. Maybe the milk had gone off.

  Looking around the hall again, trying to rub the taste off my teeth with my tongue, I noticed two things that had passed me by before. The first was that everybody there treated every item on the stalls with reverence – picking them up carefully and examining them with the eyes of experts. The second was that, on occasion, the potential buyers would put the items down, retrieve something wrapped in tissue paper from about their person – be it from an inside pocket, a briefcase or a Lidl carrier bag – and hold the item out to the vendors behind the stalls, who would unwrap it and take a careful, appraising look. Sometimes the vendors would shake their heads and hand the item back to the crestfallen customers, sometimes they took them happily as an exchange, but on occasions, when it looked as if some disagreement might flare up concerning the relative values of the things, the stall-holders would scurry out from behind their stalls and take both items across to the corner of the hall opposite where I was sitting, just behind a stall selling what, at a distance, looked like toiletries and perfumes in ornate glass bottles. A door there gave access to another room, attached to the hall. They would hand the items through a beaded screen to someone just inside the doorway, then wait for a few moments. The items would be handed back, and they would rush back to their stalls. The customers would stare intently at them, and they would either nod or shake their heads. If they nodded then an exchange took place and everyone was happy. If they shook their head then there was no appeal – the customers walked off, sadly, still clutching the items they had brought with them.

  This wasn’t a ‘bring-and-buy’ sale; this was a ‘swap-meet’. There was no currency changing hands – it was entirely a system of barter, and someone in that side room was evaluating the items and authorising the deals.

  And I had nothing to barter.

  Or did I? Remembering the letter in my pocket, I slipped it out and stared at the stained envelope. Someone in America had sent it across the Atlantic to this village, to coincide with one of these gatherings. Was it too much to assume that they might not have been able to make it in person, but were attempting a remote bid via some agent they knew in the village? Either there was something in the envelope they were willing to exchange, or there was a description of something they could have shipped across, if the deal was acceptable to the experts in the side room. Maybe even photographs.

  I knew I shouldn’t do what I was thinking of doing. I knew I should just ask someone to point me in the direction of Mr and Mrs Cheadler of 7 Vicarage Close and hand the letter across. The trouble was that I’d just found a book that I had never even known existed, and I had to have it. And to have it, I needed something to swap.

  I retrieved the key to my scooter from my pocket and slipped it through the gap between the flap and the rest of the envelope. With a quick movement I slid the key along the edge of the flap, breaking the bond between the adhesive and the paper. I may have been considering theft, but at least I was going to do it neatly.

  The flap came open, and I slipped out the letter inside. It had been folded twice. When I carefully opened it up, I saw that several fragments of old parchment were held between the folds. Each one was in its own transparent plastic envelope. The fragments had brown ink markings on them, and I got the distinct impression that they were parts of a larger drawing.

  My stomach chose just that moment to decide that it didn’t like the tea I’d drunk any more than my taste buds had, and I felt a distinct sensation of nausea. I had to swallow several times to avoid throwing up. My hands were clammy with sweat.

  I didn’t read the letter. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that if I did then I would be personalising both the writer and the intended recipient. I needed them to be anonymous to quell my guilt. I tucked it back inside my jacket.

  I stood up and walked back to the bookstall. Sliding the magazine to one side I retrieved the volume of Pevsner – the unknown volume of Pevsner – and held it up. The stall-holder – another little man with pebble-lensed glasses who could have been a brother of the first stall-holder I’d seen – stared at me. I held up the plastic envelopes in my other hand. The light in the hall seemed to glint suddenly off his lenses. He stepped forward, reached out across the haphazard pile of books and took them carefully from me. He held them up to the light and examined them. I held my breath. The heat and the humidity in the hall were causing me to sweat: I could feel drops trickling down my ribs and prickling in the small of my back.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked. His tongue moistened his lips.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I bluffed. ‘It’s obvious, surely?’

  ‘And the rest? You have the rest of this document?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sadly, no. This is all I have.’

  He thought for a moment, glanced at the parchment fragments again, and eventually made a small side-to-side motion with his head. ‘I need to take guidance on this,’ he said. ‘I am not an expert in this area. Please, come with me.’

  We crossed the hall diagonally, past the stall of liquids in ornate multi-coloured bottles, and up to the beaded curtain. I was about to walk through when he pulled me back, a hand clamping on my elbow. ‘That is not the way we do things here,’ he cautioned. ‘There is a line we do not cross.’

  He coughed loudly. A hand emerged through the curtain. There was something wrong with the skin, but I didn’t have enough time to work out what it was before the bookseller handed the Pevsner volume over and it withdrew. Seconds later the hand was back, and the fragments of parchment in their plastic envelopes were snatched away.

  We stood there, not making eye contact, waiting for the evaluation to take place. I glanced around the hall, trying to equate the relative normality of the people – well, some of the people – with the strange things they were handling.

  I noticed, as I glanced around, that a couple of people were approaching us from the stall near to the tea hatch. I thought I recognised the woman in front as one of the stall-holders. She was holding an old wooden clock, but when I looked at it I saw that it had five hands, and the numbers had been replaced with odd symbols, irregularly spaced apart. The well-dressed man following her – obviously her customer – was steering a small child across the floor, but I couldn’t immediately see what it was that he was proposing to tender in exchange for the clock. The kid looked completely bored – the way that children always looked when they were at craft fairs and antique fairs. He couldn’t see the attraction. No stalls of toys or old computer games to look at.
Judging by the colour of his hair and the shape of his face he was the man’s son. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old.

  The three of them got to us. I nodded to the man, and my bookseller nodded to the woman. She made the same coughing sound as he had, a few minutes before, and the hand appeared through the beaded curtain again. In the brief moment I saw it again I realised that the thing that had bothered me was that it was swollen and white, and it glistened as if it was wet. She handed the clock across. The man stepped forward. He seemed nervous. The hand appeared through the curtain again and gestured impatiently.

  The man pushed the kid forward. He grimaced, and shot an irritated glance at the man.

  The white hand lunged, revealing a length of equally odd forearm emerging from the folds of a black sleeve. It grabbed the kid by the shoulder and pulled him through the curtain. He squealed, but the sound was choked off suddenly.

  Despite the heat and the humidity in the hall, I felt a chill run right down my spine. My hands clenched. Surely the man couldn’t be intending to exchange his own son for the clock? That would be madness!

  I looked around the hall. Nobody was reacting. Nobody even seemed to have noticed. I glanced at the two stall-holders, but they were standing there like solitary passengers waiting for a bus, just staring into space.

  I had to stop this.

  Before anyone could stop me, I swept the bead curtain out of the way with my arm and I stepped through.

  I was looking for the kid, and I found him just inside the doorway. I barely had time to look around as I grabbed him and pulled him back, but I saw enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.

  The room was relatively small, with chairs stacked up against two walls. Five or six people were stood together in a group, but there was something very strange about them. They were wearing long robes with hoods. They were shorter and yet wider than they should have been, and what I could see of their bodies through the gaps in the robes made them all look bow-legged. Their skins – at least, the bits I could see – were dead white, puffy and moist, like maggots. They were all staring at me out of eyes encased in swollen white flesh with the same shock and horror that must have been on my face.

  That wasn’t the worst, however. The worst was what was implied, rather than obvious. The centre of the room had a hole in it, large enough for a man to fall into… or climb up from. The hole was ragged around the edge, and the tiles of the floor had been pushed up, as if something from below had emerged into the room. Things like thick albino tree trunks, cracked with age, had emerged from the far side of the hole and covered the floor between it and the far wall. There I saw a cluster of the cauliflower-like vegetables, all piled up, but they were the size of pumpkins and the shape of squashed heads.

  And they had eyes.

  I know that what I saw had to have been a trick of the light – just areas of dirt or mould on the rough white surface – but it really did look like those things had eyes and were looking at me.

  The worst thing was, they weren’t staring in anger, or horror, or fear. The expression in those eyes was incurious. Uncaring. And yet, malign.

  The kid was stiff with terror, staring at things that he really didn’t understand. I grabbed him, snatched the plastic-covered fragments of parchment back from the hand of the nearest robed figure, and pulled them both back through the bead curtain, into the village hall.

  Turning, I realised that the stall-holders had all left their tables and were heading towards me – all except for one who had grabbed a bell from somewhere and was ringing it furiously. It sounded discordant, as if it was cracked. Some of the approaching villagers were holding knives, some were swinging heavy sticks that they must have had stashed beneath their tables. Their customers were heading for the main door, their faces creased in worry and uncertainty.

  I thrust the kid back at his father, who was already backing away. ‘Take him and get out!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t ever come back!’ He took his son’s shoulders automatically and pulled him close. His mouth moved, trying to form words, but either he couldn’t find them or I couldn’t hear them over the clanging of the bell and the growing shouts of the villagers.

  The doorway was filled with retreating customers. I knew I’d never make it in time. Instead I turned and raced towards the serving hatch in the far corner. Jumping onto one of the chairs, I leaped through the hatch and into the kitchen, skidding and falling on the slippery tiled floor. The elderly servers were all clustered on one side, by a tea urn, but they had knives and cleavers in their hands and their expressions were changing from worried to outraged as I got to my feet.

  There was a door on the other side of the kitchen. There had to be, otherwise nobody would have been able to get in and out of the kitchen. I ran for it, hauled it open, and bolted across a grassy path to the line of trees that marked the edge of the woods surrounding Winterbourne Abase.

  Night had fallen. The vegetation clutched at my feet as I ran. My breath rasped in my throat, and I could feel my chest burning. From behind I heard the sounds of pursuit as scores of stall-holders and other villagers thrashed their way past bushes and chopped at obstructing twigs and branches with their weapons in order to catch up with me.

  If they did, they would kill me. It was clear from their eyes, and their faces. I hoped it would be quick. I didn’t like to consider what they might do to keep me alive, and in agony, as a punishment for the heresy I had unwittingly inflicted on them.

  I didn’t even know what I had intruded upon – that was the worst thing. I knew that some unnatural force had taken over the village, that things were being exchanged there for dark purposes, that the villagers – both the ones on the surface and the ones I suspected were living beneath the ground, and maybe beneath the waves as well – were amassing ancient knowledge that, like uranium or plutonium, was incredibly dangerous if it was stored in one place or one mind. But I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what it all meant.

  Passing a clump of bushes I swerved left, heading towards the church. I hoped that my pursuers would keep on going in a straight line.

  Surprised animals scattered in the undergrowth as I crashed through it. Maybe they were foxes and badgers, maybe they were something else. I couldn’t see, and I didn’t want to think about it.

  Up ahead I caught sight of the ancient church walls through the trees, studded with the blunt ends of iron spikes. I veered towards where I knew the main door was located. Emerging into the open ground that surrounded the building I glanced left and right, looking for anyone who might have guessed where I was heading and taken the quicker road route, but there was nobody there.

  I burst through the door and into the main body of the church. The vicar was still there, still in the pulpit, and she glanced up as I staggered down the aisle.

  ‘Please – I need sanctuary!’ I cried.

  She shook her head sadly. ‘You have come to the wrong place. There is no sanctuary for you here.’

  ‘You’re not part of this! You can help me!’ I was approaching the pulpit as I shouted this, ready to pull her out and demand that she call the police, or confront the villagers in the name of God with a Bible in her hand, or something. Anything.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ she said. As I came around the side of the pulpit and started to climb the few steps that led up to where she was standing, I saw why.

  Thick white stems, glistening with moisture, had broken up through the flagstones at some stage in the past. They curled up the back of the stone platform on which the pulpit stood, twisting around the sides and pushing through any gap. They vanished beneath her cassock. As she turned her upper body to face me, her expression compassionate but sad, the cassock rode up and I saw that her feet, her ankles, her legs were all encased in the roots. No, not encased. I saw the way the cassock clung to her lower body, and I knew that everything from her hips down had been… overgrown. Replaced.

  Absorbed.

  ‘What happened?’ I cried.


  Incredibly, she smiled. ‘There are things we are taught, in the seminary, that we never talk about to parishioners, and never preach about,’ she said quietly. ‘We say that God created Satan as an angel but that he was allowed to rebel against God’s authority, and that daemons are either fallen angels or Satan’s attempts at creating angels in his own image, but that’s not what we believe. Not really. We are taught that there are older things than angels, and that there are things that God did not create. This village has fallen under their sway. I tried to help them find the Light, but they had fallen prey to the blandishments of the Old Gods. They had accepted the bargain that was offered without consideration of the ultimate price.’

  ‘You… you should have left,’ I said. ‘You should have told someone!’

  She shook her head. ‘It creeps up on you, and by the time you are trapped it is too late. There was a time I could have bargained my way out. That letter you have – the one you said was for number 7 Vicarage Close? I think you’ll find that the ‘7’ is actually a ‘1’, clumsily written. A friend of mine in America said he would send me something that I could use to make a deal, to assure my safety, but that was three months ago. The letter never arrived.’

  ‘I only got it today,’ I whispered, appalled.

  ‘Nothing is accidental,’ she said, smiling sadly. ‘Everything happens for a reason. I was never meant to get out of here, but you are.’

  ‘I tried!’ I held up the plastic envelopes with the fragments of parchment inside. ‘They weren’t enough to exchange for a single book,’ I shouted, ‘let alone for my safety – or yours.’

  Instead of answering, the vicar opened her Bible to a place which I saw was marked with a plastic envelope the size of a sheet of paper. She pulled it out from where it was caught in the Bible’s spine.