Moist watched a laden coach roll out of the yard, and then movement up above caught his eye.
He had got used to the clacks towers now. Sometimes it seemed as though every roof sprouted one. Most were the new shutter boxes installed by the Grand Trunk Company, but old-fashioned arm semaphores and even signal flags were still well in evidence. Those, though, only worked slowly and by line-of-sight, and there was precious little space for that in the thrusting forest of towers. If you wanted more than the basic service, you went to one of the little clacks companies, and rented a small shutter tower with resident gargoyle to spot incoming messages and access to the bounce towers and, if you were really rich, a trained operator as well. And you paid. Moist had no grasp of or interest in technology, but as he understood it the price was something like an arm or a leg or both.
But these observations orbited his brain, as it were, like planetary thoughts around one central, solar thought: why the hell have we got a tower?
It was definitely on the roof. He could see it and he could hear the distant rattle of the shutters. And he was sure he’d seen a head, before it ducked out of sight.
Why have we got a tower up there, and who is using it?
He ran back inside. He’d never spotted a staircase to the roof, but then, who knew what was hidden behind some pile of letters at the end of some blocked corridor . . .
He squeezed his way along yet another passage lined with mail sacks, and came out into a space where big, bolted double doors led back to the yard. There were stairs there, leading upwards. Little safety lamps bled little pools of light into the blackness above. That was the Post Office for you, Moist thought – the Regulations said the stairs must be lit and lit they were, decades after anyone ever used them except for Stanley, the lamplighter.
There was an old freight elevator here, too, one of those dangerous ones that worked by pumping water in and out of a big rainwater tank on the roof, but he couldn’t work out how to make it go and wouldn’t have trusted it if he could. Groat had said it was broken.
At the foot of the stairs, scuffed but still recognizable, was a chalk outline. The arms and legs were not in comfortable positions.
Moist swallowed, but gripped the banister.
He climbed.
There was a door on the first floor. It opened easily. It burst open at the mere touch of the handle, spilling pent-up mail out into the stairwell like some leaping monster. Moist swayed and whimpered as the letters slithered past him, shoal after shoal, and cascaded down the stairs.
Woodenly, he climbed up another flight, and found another dimly lit door, but this time he stood to one side as he opened it. The force of the letters still rammed it against his legs, and the noise of the dead letters was a dry whispering as they poured away into the gloom. Like bats, perhaps. This whole building full of dead letters, whispering to one another in the dark as a man fell to his death—
Any more of this and he’d end up like Groat, mad as a spoon. But there was more to this place. Somewhere there had to be a door—
His head was all over the wall . . .
Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.
But, with its usual treachery, it went on working. He’d never, ever, laid a finger on anyone. He’d always run rather than fight. And murder, now, surely murder was an absolute? You couldn’t commit 0.021 of a murder, could you? But Pump seemed to think you could murder with a ruler. Okay, perhaps somewhere downstream people were . . . inconvenienced by a crime, but . . . what about bankers, landlords, even barmen? ‘Here’s your double brandy, sir, and I’ve 0.0003 killed you’? Everything everyone did affected everyone, sooner or later.
Besides, a lot of his crimes weren’t even crimes. Take the ring trick, now. He never said it was a diamond ring. Besides, it was depressing how quickly honest citizens warmed to an opportunity to take advantage of a poor benighted traveller. It could ruin a man’s faith in human nature, if he had one. Besides . . .
The third floor yielded another avalanche of letters, but when they subsided there was still a wall of paper plugging the corridor beyond. One or two rustling envelopes fell out, threatening a further fall as Moist advanced.
In fact it was retreat that was at the top of his mind, but the stairs were now layered with sliding envelopes and this was not the time to learn dry-slope skiing.
Well, the fifth floor would have to be clear, wouldn’t it? How else could Sideburn have got to the stairs in order to meet his appointment with eternity? And, yes, there was still a piece of black and yellow rope on the fourth-floor landing, on a drift of letters. The Watch had been here. Nevertheless, Moist opened the door with care, as a watchman must have done.
One or two letters fell out, but the main slide had already taken place. A few feet beyond there was the familiar wall of letters, packed as tight as rock strata. A watchman had been in here, too. Someone had tried to break through the wordface, and Moist could see the hole. They’d put in their arm, full length, just as Moist was doing. Just like his, their fingertips had brushed against yet more compacted envelopes.
No one had got on to the stairs here. They would have had to walk through a wall of envelopes at least six feet thick . . .
There was one more flight. Moist climbed the stairs, cautiously, and was halfway up when he heard the slide begin, below him.
He must have disturbed the wall of letters on the floor below, somehow. It was emerging from the corridor with the unstoppability of a glacier. As the leading edge reached the stairwell, chunks of mail broke off and plunged into the depths. Far below, wood creaked and snapped. The stairway shivered.
Moist ran up the last few steps to the fifth floor, grabbed the door there, pulled it open and hung on as another mailslide poured past him. Everything was shaking now. There was a sudden crack as the rest of the staircase gave way and left Moist swinging from the handle, letters brushing past.
He swung there, eyes shut, until the noise and movement had more or less died away, although there was still the occasional creak from below.
The stairs had gone.
With great care, Moist brought his feet up until he could feel the edge of the new corridor. Without doing anything so provocative as breathing, he changed his grip on the door so that now he had hold of the handle on both sides. Slowly, he walked his heels through the drift of letters on the corridor floor, thus pulling the door closed, while at the same time getting both hands on to the inner handle.
Then he took a deep breath of the stale, dry air, scrabbled madly with his feet, bent his body like a hooked salmon and ended up with just enough of himself on the corridor floor to prevent a fall through sixty feet of letters and broken woodwork.
Barely thinking, he unhooked the lamp from the doorpost and turned to survey the task ahead.
The corridor was brightly lit, richly carpeted and completely free of mail. Moist stared.
There had been letters in there, wedged tight from floor to ceiling. He’d seen them, and felt them fall past him into the stairwell. They hadn’t been a hallucination; they’d been solid, musty, dusty and real. To believe anything else now would be madness.
He turned back to look at the wreckage of the stairs and saw no doorway, no stairs. The carpeted floor extended all the way to the far wall.
Moist realized that there had to be an explanation for this, but the only one he could think of now was: it’s strange. He reached down gingerly to touch the carpet where the stairwell should be, and felt a chill on his fingertips as they passed through it.
And he wondered: did one of the other new postmasters stand here, just where I am? And did he walk out over what looked like solid floor and end up rolling down five flights of pain?
Moist inched his way along the corridor in the opposite direction, and sound began to grow. It was vague and generalized, the noise of a big building hard at work, shouts, conversations, the rattle of machinery, the crowded susurrus of a thousand voices and wheels and footfalls and stampings and scribblings and slammings all woven together in a huge space to become the pure audible texture of commerce.