‘But I am supposed to make it work again as it used to, Mr Groat.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said the old man. ‘You just come along with me, then, Postmaster. I reckon there’s one or two things you ain’t bin tole!’
He led the way out, back into the dingy main hall, a little trail of yellow powder leaking from his boots.
‘My dad used to bring me here when I were a lad,’ he said. ‘A lot of families were Post Office families in those days. They had them big glass drippy tinkling things up in the ceiling, right? For lights?’
‘Chandeliers?’ Moist suggested.
‘Yep, prob’ly,’ said Groat. ‘Two of ‘em. And there was brass an’ copper everywhere, polished up like gold. There was balconies, sir, all round the big hall on every floor, made of iron, like lace! And all the counters was made of rare wood, my dad said. And people? This place was packed! The doors never stopped swinging! Even at night . . . oh, at night, sir, out in the big back yard, you should’ve been there! The lights! The coaches, coming and going, the horses steamin ‘. . . oh, sir, you should’ve seen it, sir! The men running the teams out . . . they had this thing, sir, this device, you could get a coach in and out of the yard in one minute, sir, one minute! The bustle, sir, the bustle and fuss! They said you could come here from Dolly Sisters or even down in the Shambles, and post a letter to yourself, and you’d have to run like the blazes, sir, the very blazes, sir, to beat the postman to your door! And the uniforms, sir, royal blue with brass buttons! You should’ve seen them! And—’
Moist looked over the babbling man’s shoulder to the nearest mountain of pigeon guano, where Mr Pump had paused in his digging. The golem had been prodding at the fetid horrible mess and, as Moist watched him, he straightened up and headed towards them with something in his hand.
‘—and when the big coaches came in, sir, all the way from the mountains, you could hear the horns miles away! You should’ve heard them, sir! And if any bandits tried anything, there was men we had, who went out and—’
‘Yes, Mr Pump?’ said Moist, halting Groat in mid-history.
‘A Surprising Discovery, Postmaster. The Mounds Are Not, As I Surmised, Made Of Pigeon Dung. No Pigeons Could Achieve That Amount In Thousands Of Years, Sir.’
‘Well, what are they made of, then?’
‘Letters, Sir,’ said the golem.
Moist looked down at Groat, who shifted uneasily.
‘Ah, yes,’ said the old man. ‘1 was coming to that.’
Letters . . .
. . . there was no end to them. They filled every room of the building and spilled out into the corridors. It was, technically, true that the postmaster’s office was unusable because of the state of the floor: it was twelve feet deep in letters. Whole corridors were blocked off with them. Cupboards had been stuffed full of them; to open a door in-cautiously was to be buried in an avalanche of yellowing envelopes. Floorboards bulged suspiciously upwards. Through cracks in the sagging ceiling plaster, paper protruded.
The sorting room, almost as big as the main hall, had drifts reaching to twenty feet in places. Here and there, filing cabinets rose out of the paper sea like icebergs.
After half an hour of exploration Moist wanted a bath. It was like walking through desert tombs. He felt he was choking on the smell of old paper, as though his throat was filled with yellow dust.
‘I was told I had an apartment here,’ he croaked.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Groat. ‘Me and the lad had a look for it the other day. I heard that it was the other side of your office. So the lad went in on the end of a rope, sir. He said he felt a door, sir, but he’d sunk six feet under the mail by then and he was suffering, sir, suffering . . . so I pulled him out.’
‘The whole place is full of undelivered mail?’
They were back in the locker room. Groat had topped up the black kettle from a pan of water, and it was steaming. At the far end of the room, sitting at his neat little table, Stanley was counting his pins.
‘Pretty much, sir, except in the basement and the stables,’ said the old man, washing a couple of tin mugs in a bowl of not very clean water.
‘You mean even the postm— my office is full of old mail but they never filled the basement? Where’s the sense in that?’
‘Oh, you couldn’t use the basement, sir, oh, not the basement,’ said Groat, looking shocked. ‘It’s far too damp down here. The letters’d be destroyed in no time.’
‘Destroyed,’ said Moist flatly.
‘Nothing like damp for destroying things, sir,’ said Groat, nodding sagely.
‘Destroying mail from dead people to dead people,’ said Moist, in the same flat voice.
‘We don’t know that, sir,’ said the old man. ‘I mean, we’ve got no actual proof.’
‘Well, no. After all, some of those envelopes are only a hundred years old!’ said Moist. He had a headache from the dust and a sore throat from the dryness, and there was something about the old man that was grating on his raw nerves. He was keeping something back. ‘That’s no time at all to some people. I bet the zombie and vampire population are still waiting by the letter box every day, right?’
‘No need to be like that, sir,’ said Groat levelly, ‘no need to be like that. You can’t destroy the letters. You just can’t do it, sir. That’s Tampering with the Mail, sir. That’s not just a crime, sir. That’s, a, a—’
‘Sin?’ said Moist.
‘Oh, worse’n a sin,’ said Groat, almost sneering. ‘For sins you’re only in trouble with a god, but in my day if you interfered with the mail you’d be up against Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow. Hah! And there’s a big difference. Gods forgive’.
Moist sought for sanity in the wrinkled face opposite him. The unkempt beard was streaked with different colours, either of dirt, tea or random celestial pigment. Like some hermit, he thought. Only a hermit could wear a wig like that.
‘Sorry?’ he said. ‘And you mean that shoving someone’s letter under the floorboards for a hundred years isn’t tampering with it?’
Groat suddenly looked wretched. The beard quivered. Then he started to cough, great hacking, wooden, crackling lumps of cough, that made the jars shake and caused a yellow mist to rise from his trouser bottoms, “scuse me a moment, sir,’ he wheezed, between hacks, and he fumbled in his pocket for a scratched and battered tin. ‘You suck at all, sir?’ he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. He proffered the tin to Moist. ‘They’re Number Threes, sir. Very mild. I make ‘em meself, sir. Nat’ral remedies from nat’ral ingredients, that’s my style, sir. Got to keep the tubes clear, sir, otherwise they turn against you.’
Moist took a large, violet lozenge from the box and sniffed it. It smelled faintly of aniseed.
‘Thank you, Mr Groat,’ he said, but in case this counted as an attempt at bribery, he added sternly: ‘The mail, Mr Groat? Sticking undelivered mail wherever there’s a space isn’t tampering with it?’
‘That’s more . . . delaying the mail, sir. Just, er . . . slowing it down. A bit. It’s not like there’s any intention of never delivering it, sir.’
Moist stared at Groat’s worried expression. He felt that sense of shifting ground you experience when you realize that you’re dealing with someone whose world is connected with your own only by their fingertips. Not a hermit, he thought, more like a shipwrecked mariner, living in this dry desert island of a building while the world outside moves on and all sanity evaporates.
‘Mr Groat, I don’t want to, you know, upset you or anything, but there’s thousands of letters out there under a thick layer of pigeon guano . . .’ he said slowly.
‘Actually, on that score, sir, things aren’t as bad as they seem,’ Groat said, and paused to suck noisily on his natural cough lozenge. ‘It’s very dry stuff, pigeon doings, and forms quite a hard protective crust on the envelopes . . .’
‘Why are they all here, Mr Groat?’ said Moist. People skills, he remembered. You’re not allowed to shake him.
The Junior Postman avoided his gaze. ‘Well, you know how it is . . .’ he tried.
‘No, Mr Groat. I don’t think I do.’
‘Well . . . maybe a man’s busy, got a full round, maybe it’s Hogswatch, lots of cards, see, and the inspector is after him about his timekeeping, and so maybe he just shoves half a bag of letters somewhere safe . . . but he will deliver ‘em, right? I mean, it’s not his fault if they keeps pushing, sir, pushing him all the time. Then it’s tomorrow and he’s got an even bigger bag, ‘cos they’re pushing all the time, so he reckons, I’ll just drop a few off today, too, ‘cos it’s my day off on Thursday and I can catch up then, but you see by Thursday he’s behind by more’n a day’s work because they keeps on pushing, and he’s tired anyway, tired as a dog, so he says to himself, got some leave coming up soon, but he gets his leave and by then – well, it all got very nasty towards the end. There was . . . unpleasantness. We’d gone too far, sir, that’s what it was, we’d tried too hard. Sometimes things smash so bad it’s better to leave it alone than try to pick up the pieces. I mean, where would you start?’