Going Postal (5 page)

“I think I get the picture,” said Moist.
You’re lying, Mr. Groat. You’re lying by omission. You’re not telling me everything. And what you’re not telling me is very important, isn’t it? I’ve turned lying into an art, Mr. Groat, and you’re just a talented amateur
.

Groat’s face, unaware of the internal monologue, managed a smile.

“But the trouble is—what’s your first name, Mr. Groat?” Moist asked.

“Tolliver, sir.”

“Nice name…the thing
is
, Tolliver, that the picture I see in your description is what I might refer to for the purposes of the analogy a
cameo
, whereas all
this
”—Moist waved his hand to include the building and everything it contained—“is a full-sized triptych showing scenes from history, the creation of the world, and the disposition of the gods, with a matching chapel ceiling portraying the glorious firmament and a sketch of a lady with a weird smile thrown in for good measure! Tolliver, I think you are not being frank with me.”

“Sorry about that, sir,” said Groat, eyeing him with a sort of nervous defiance.

“I could have you sacked, you know,” said Moist, knowing that this was a stupid thing to say.

“You could, sir, you could try doin’ that,” said Groat quietly and slowly. “But I’m all you got, apart from the lad. And you don’t know nuffin’ about the Post Office, sir. You don’t know nuffin’ about the Regulations, neither. I’m the only one that knows what needs doing around here. You wouldn’t last five minutes without me, sir. You wouldn’t even see that the inkwells get filled every day!”

“Inkwells? Filling inkwells?” said Moist. “This is just an old building full of, of, of dead paper! We have
no customers
!”

“Got to keep the inkwells filled, sir. Post Office Regulations,” said Groat in a steely voice. “Got to follow Regulations, sir.”

“For what? It appears we don’t accept any mail or deliver any mail! We just sit here!”

“No, sir, we don’t just sit here,” said Groat patiently. “We follow the Post Office Regulations. Fill the inkwells, polish the brass—”

“You don’t sweep up the pigeon shit!”

“Oddly enough, that’s not in the Regulations, sir,” said the old man. “Truth is, sir, no one wants us anymore. It’s all the clacks now, the damn clacks, clack, clack, clack. Everyone’s got a clacks tower now, sir. That’s the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It’s got no soul, sir, no heart. I hates ’em. But we’re ready, sir. If there was any mail, we’d deal with it, sir. We’d spring into action, sir,
spring
into action. But there ain’t.”

“Of course there isn’t! It’s clearly sunk into this town long ago that you might as well throw your letters away as give them to the Post Office!”

“No, sir, wrong again. They’re all kept, sir. That’s what we do, sir. We keep things as they are. We try not to disturb things, sir,” said Groat quietly. “We try not to disturb
anything
.”

The way he said it made Moist hesitate.

“What kind of anything?” he said.

“Oh, nothing, sir. We just…go carefully.”

Moist looked around the room. Did it appear smaller? Did the shadows deepen and lengthen? Was there a sudden cold sensation in the air?

No, there wasn’t. But an opportunity had definitely been missed, Moist felt. The hairs on the back of his neck were rising. Moist had heard that this was because men had been made out of monkeys, and it meant that there was a tiger behind you.

In fact Mr. Pump was behind him, just standing there, eyes burning more brightly than any tiger had ever managed. This was worse. Tigers couldn’t follow you across the sea, and they had to sleep.

He gave up. Mr. Groat was in some strange, musty little world of his own.

“Do you call this a life?” he said.

For the first time in this conversation. Mr. Groat looked him squarely in the eye.

“Much better than a death, sir,” he said.

M
R.
P
UMP
followed Moist across the main hall and out of the main doors, at which point Moist turned on him.

“All right, what are the rules here?” he demanded. “Are you going to follow me
everywhere
? You know I can’t run!”

“You Are Allowed Autonomous Movement Within The City And Environs,” the golem rumbled. “But Until You Are Settled In, I Am Also Instructed To Accompany You For Your Own Protection.”

“Against who? Someone annoyed that their great-grandaddy’s mail didn’t turn up?”

“I Couldn’t Say, Sir.”

“I need some fresh air. What happened in there? Why is it so…creepy? What
happened
to the Post Office?”

“I Couldn’t Say, Sir,” said Mr. Pump placidly.

“You don’t know? But it’s
your
city,” said Moist sarcastically. “Have you been stuck at the bottom of a hole in the ground for the last hundred years?”

“No, Mr. Lipvig,” said the golem.

“Well, why can’t—” Moist began.

“It Was Two Hundred And Forty Years, Mr. Lipvig,” said the golem.

“What was?”

“The Time I Spent At The Bottom Of The Hole In The Ground, Mr. Lipvig.”

“What are you
talking
about?” said Moist.

“Why, The Time I Spent At The Bottom Of The Hole In The Ground, Mr. Lipvig. Pump Is Not My Name, Mr. Lipvig. It Is My Description. Pump. Pump 19, To Be Precise. I Stood In The Bottom Of A Hole A Hundred Feet Deep And Pumped Water. For Two Hundred And Forty Years, Mr. Lipvig. But Now I Am Ambulating In The Sunlight. This Is Better, Mr. Lipvig. This Is Better!”

T
HAT NIGHT
, Moist lay staring at the ceiling. It was three feet from him. Hanging from it, a little distance away, was a candle in a safety lantern. Stanley had been insistent about that, and no wonder. This place would go up like a bomb. It was the boy who’d showed him up here; Groat was sulking somewhere. He’d been right, damn him. He needed Groat. Groat practically
was
the Post Office.

It had been a long day, and Moist hadn’t slept well last night, what with being upside down over Mr. Pump’s shoulder and occasionally kicked by the frantic horse.

He didn’t want to sleep here, either, heavens knew, but he didn’t have lodgings he could use anymore, and they were at a premium in this hive of a city in any case. The locker room did not appeal, no, not at all. So he’d simply scrambled onto the pile of dead letters in what was, in theory, his office. It was no great hardship. A man of affairs such as he had to learn to sleep in all kinds of situations, often while mobs were looking for him a wall’s thickness away. At least the heaps of letters were dry and warm and weren’t carrying edged weapons.

Paper crackled underneath him as he tried to get comfortable. Idly, he picked up a letter at random; it was addressed to someone called Antimony Parker at 1 Lobbin Clout, and on the back, in capitals, it said S.W.A.L.K. He eased it open with a fingernail; the paper inside all but crumbled at his touch.

My Very Dearest Timony
,

Yes! Why should a Woman, Sensible to the Great Honour that a Man is Doing her, play the Coy Minx at such a time!! I know you have spoken to Papa, and of course I consent to becoming the Wife of the Kindest, Most Wonderful—

Moist glanced at the date on the letter. It had been written forty-one years ago.

He was not, as a rule, given to introspection, it being a major drawback in his line of work, but he couldn’t help wondering if—he glanced back at the letter—“Your loving Agnathea” had ever married Antimony, or whether the romance had died right here, in this graveyard of paper.

He shivered and tucked the envelope into his jacket. He’d have to ask Groat what S.W.A.L.K. meant.

“Mr. Pump!” he shouted.

There was a faint rumble from the corner of the room where the golem stood, waist-deep in mail.

“Yes, Mr. Lipvig?”

“Is there no way you can shut your eyes? I can’t sleep with two red glowing eyes watching me. It’s a…well, it’s a childhood thing.”

“Sorry, Mr. Lipvig. I Could Turn My Back.”

“That won’t work. I’d still know they’re there. Anyway, the glow reflects off the wall. Look, where would I run to?”

The golem gave this some thought.

“I Will Go And Stand In The Corridor, Mr. Lipvig,” he decided, and began to wade toward the door.

“You do that,” said Moist. “And in the morning I want you to find my bedroom, okay? Some of the offices still have space near the ceiling, you can move the letters into there.”

“Mr. Groat Does Not Like The Mail To Be Moved, Mr. Lipvig,” the golem rumbled.

“Mr. Groat is not the postmaster, Mr. Pump. I am.”

Good gods, the madness is catching
, Moist thought as the glow of the golem’s eyes disappeared into darkness outside.
I’m
not
the postmaster, I’m some poor bastard who’s the victim of some stupid…experiment. What a place! What a situation! What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter
.

He tried to find the angle, the way out…but all the time a conversation kept bouncing off the insides of his brain.

Imagine a hole, a hundred feet deep and full of water.

Imagine the darkness. Imagine, at the bottom of the hole, a figure roughly of human shape, turning in that swirling darkness a massive handle once every eight seconds.

Pump…Pump…Pump…

For two hundred and forty years
.

“You didn’t mind?” Moist had asked
.

“
You Mean Did I Harbor Resentment, Mr. Lipvig? But I Was Doing Useful And Necessary Work! Besides, There Was Much For Me To Think About
.”

“
At the bottom of a hundred feet of dirty water? What the hell did you find to think about?
”

“
Pumping, Mr. Lipvig
.”

And then, the golem said, had come cessation, and dim light, a lowering of levels, a locking of chains, movement upwards, emergence into a world of light and color…and other golems.

Moist knew
something
about golems. They used to be baked out of clay, thousands of years ago, and brought to life by some kind of scroll put inside their heads, and they never wore out and they worked, all the time. You saw them pushing brooms, or doing heavy work in timber yards and foundries. Most of them you never saw at all. They made the hidden wheels go round, down in the dark. And that was more or less the limit of his interest in them. They were, almost by definition, honest.

But now the golems were freeing themselves. It was the quietest, most socially responsible revolution in history. They were property, and so they saved up and
bought
themselves.

Mr. Pump was buying his freedom by seriously limiting the freedom of Moist. A man could get quite upset about that. Surely that wasn’t how freedom was supposed to work?

Ye gods
, thought Moist, back in the here-and-now,
no wonder Groat sucked cough sweets all the time, the dust in this place could choke you!

He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out the diamond-shaped cough lozenge the old man had given him. It looked harmless enough.

One minute later, after Mr. Pump had lurched into the room and slapped him heavily on the back, the steaming lozenge was stuck to the wall on the far side of the room, where, by morning, it had dissolved quite a lot of the plaster.

M
R.
G
ROAT
took a measured spoonful of tincture of rhubarb and cayenne pepper, to keep the tubes open, and checked that he still had the dead mole around his neck, to ward off any sudden attack of doctors. Everyone knew doctors made you ill, it stood to reason. Nature’s remedies were the trick every time, not some hellish potion made of gods knew what.

He smacked his lips appreciatively. He’d put fresh sulfur in his socks tonight, too, and he could feel it doing him good.

Two candle lanterns glowed in the velvet, papery darkness of the main sorting office. The light was shining through the outer glass, filled with water so that the candle would go out if it was dropped; it made the lanterns look like the lights of some abyssal fish from the squidy, iron-hard depths.

There was a little glugging noise in the dark. Groat corked his bottle of elixir and got on with business.

“Be the inkwells filled, Apprentice Postman Stanley?” Groat intoned.

“Aye, Junior Postman Groat, full to a depth of one-third of one inch from the top as per Post Office Counter Regulations, Daily Observances, Rule C18,” said Stanley.

There was a rustle as Groat turned the pages of a huge book on the lectern in front of him.

“Can I see the picture, Mr. Groat?” said Stanley eagerly.

Groat smiled. It had become part of the ceremony, and he gave the reply he gave every time.

“Very well, but this is the last time. It’s not good to look too often on the face of a god,” he said. “Or any other part.”

“But you said there used to be a gold statue of him in the big hall, Mr. Groat. People must’ve looked on it all the time.”

Groat hesitated. But Stanley was a growing lad. He’d have to know sooner or later.

“Mind you, I don’t reckon people used to look at the face much,” he said. “They looked more at the…wings.”

“On his hat and his ankles,” said Stanley. “So he could fly the messages at the speed of…messages.”

A little bead of sweat dripped off Groat’s forehead.

“Mostly on his hat and ankles, yes,” he said. “Er…but not
only
there.”

Stanley peered at the picture.

“Oh yes, I never noticed them before. He’s got wings on—”

“The fig leaf,” said Groat quickly. “That’s what we call it.”

“Why’s he got a leaf there?” said Stanley.

“Oh, they all had ’em in the olden days, ’cos of being Classical,” said Groat, relieved to be shifting away from the heart of the matter. “It’s a fig leaf. Off a fig tree.”

“Har har, the joke’s on them, there’s no fig trees round here!” said Stanley in the manner of one exposing the flaw in a long-held dogma.