Going Postal (4 page)

“He’s a good lad,” said Groat when they were gone. “Just a bit cup-and-plate in the head. Leave him alone with his pins and he’s no trouble at all. Gets a bit…intense at times, that’s all. Oh, and on that subject, there’s the third member of our jolly little team, sir—”

A large black-and-white cat had walked into the room. It paid no attention to Moist or Groat, but progressed slowly across the floor toward a battered and unraveling basket. Moist was in the way. The cat continued until its head butted gently against Moist’s leg, and stopped.

“That’s Mr. Tiddles, sir,” said Groat.

“
Tiddles?
” said Moist. “You mean that really is a cat’s name? I thought it was just a joke.”

“Not so much a name, sir, more of a description,” said Groat. “You’d better move, sir, otherwise he’ll just stand there all day. Twenty years old, he is, and a bit set in his ways.”

Moist stepped aside. Unperturbed, the cat continued to the basket, where it curled up.

“Is he blind?” said Moist.

“No, sir. He has his routine and he sticks to it, sir, sticks to it to the very second. Very patient, for a cat. Doesn’t like the furniture being moved. You’ll get used to him.”

Not knowing what to say, but feeling that he should say something, Moist nodded toward the array of bottles on Groat’s desk.

“You dabble in alchemy, Mr. Groat?” he said.

“Nossir! I practice nat’ral medicine!” said Groat proudly. “Don’t believe in doctors, sir! Never a day’s illness in my life, sir!” He thumped his chest, making a
thlap
noise not normally associated with living tissue. “Flannelette, goose grease, and hot bread puddin’, sir! Nothing like it for protecting your tubes against the noxious effluviences! I puts a fresh layer on ever week, sir, and you won’t find a sneeze passing my nose, sir. Very healthful, very natural!”

“Er…good,” said Moist.

“Worst of ’em all is soap, sir,” said Groat, lowering his voice. “Terrible stuff, sir, washes away the beneficent humors. Leave things be, I say! Keep the tubes running, put sulfur in your socks, and pay attention to your chest protector, and you can laugh at anything! Now, sir, I’m sure a young man like yourself will be worrying about the state of his—”

“What’s this do?” said Moist hurriedly, picking up a pot of greenish goo.

“That, sir? Wart cure. Wonderful stuff. Very natural, not like the stuff a doctor’d give you.”

Moist sniffed at the pot. “What’s it made of?”

“Arsenic, sir,” said Groat calmly.

“
Arsenic?
”

“Very natural, sir,” said Groat. “And green.”

So
, Moist thought, as he put the pot back with extreme care,
inside the Post Office normality clearly does not have
a one-to-one relationship with the outside world. I might miss the cues
. He decided that the role of keen but bewildered manager was the one to play here. Besides, apart from the “keen” aspect, it didn’t need any effort.

“Can you help me, Mr. Groat?” he said. “I don’t know
anything
about the post!”

“Well, sir…what did you used to do?”

Rob. Trick. Forge. Embezzle. But never—and this was important—using any kind of violence. Never. Moist had always been very careful about that. He tried not to sneak, either, if he could avoid it. Being caught at one
A.M.
in a bank’s deposit vault while wearing a black suit with lots of little pockets in it could be considered suspicious, so why do it? With careful planning, the right suit, the right papers, and, above all, the right manner, you could walk into the place at midday, and the manager would hold the door open for you when you left. Palming rings and exploiting the cupidity of the rural stupid was just a way of keeping his hand in
.

It was the face, that was what it was. He had an honest face. And he loved those people who looked him firmly in the eye to see his inner self, because he had a whole set of inner selves, one for every occasion. As for firm handshakes, practice had given him one to which you could moor boats. It was people skills, that was what it was
. Special
people skills. Before you could sell glass as diamonds you had to make people really
want
to see diamonds. That was THE trick, the trick of all tricks. You changed the way people saw the world. You let them see it the way THEY wanted it to be…

How the hell had Vetinari known his name? The man had cracked von Lipwig like an egg! And the Watch here were…demonic! As for setting a golem on a man…

“I was a clerk,” said Moist.

“What, paperwork, that sort of thing?” said Groat, looking at him intently.

“Yes, pretty much all paperwork.” That was honest, if you included playing cards, checks, letters of accreditation, bank drafts, and deeds.

“Oh, another one,” said Groat. “Well, there’s not a lot to do. We can shove up and make room for you in here, no problem.”

“But I am supposed to make it work again like it used to, Mr. Groat.”

“Yeah, right,” said the old man. “You just come along with me, then, Mr. Lipwig. I reckon there’s one or two thing 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 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 backyard, 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 shoulders 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 toward 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’d go out and—”

“Yes, Mr. Pump?” said Moist, halting Groat in midhistory.

“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. “I was coming to that.”

L
ETTERS
…

…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 incautiously 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, he felt 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 a neat little table by the stove, Stanley was counting his pins.

“Pretty much, sir, except in the basements 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 basements? Where’s the sense in that?”

“Oh, you couldn’t use the basements, sir, oh, not the basements,” 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’re 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 letterbox every day, right?”

“No need to be like that, sir,” said Groat levelly. “No need to be like that. You can’t
destroy
the mails. 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 searched for sanity in the wrinkled face opposite him. The unkempt beard was streaked with different colors, 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 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 the 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,
but 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,” said Groat, and paused to suck noisily on his natural cough lozenge. “It’s very dry stuff, pigeon doins, 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 then he says to himself, got some leave coming up soon, but he gets his leave and by then—well, it all got very nasty toward 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?”