Read Dead Letters Anthology Online
Authors: Conrad Williams
Dead Letters Anthology
Also available from Conrad Williams and Titan Books
Dust and Desire
Sonata of the Dead
Hell is Empty
(November 2016)
Dead Letters
Print edition ISBN: 9781783294503
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783294510
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: April 2016
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“Introduction” © Copyright 2015 by Conrad Williams
“The Green Letter” Copyright © 2015 by Steven Hall
“Over to You” Copyright © 2015 by Michael Marshall Smith
“In Memoriam” Copyright © 2015 by Joanne Harris
“Ausland” Copyright © 2015 by Alison Moore
“Wonders to Come” Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Fowler
“Cancer Dancer” Copyright © 2015 by Pat Cadigan
“The Wrong Game” Copyright © 2015 by Ramsey Campbell
“Is-and” Copyright © 2015 by Claire Dean
“Buyer’s Remorse” Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Lane
“Gone Away” Copyright © 2015 by Muriel Gray
“Astray” Copyright © 2015 by Nina Allan
“The Days of Our Lives” Copyright © 2015 by Adam LG Nevill
“The Hungry Hotel” Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Tuttle
“LONDON” Copyright © 2015 by Nicholas Royle
“Change Management” Copyright © 2015 by Angela Slatter
“Ledge Bants” Copyright © 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley & China Miéville
“And We, Spectators Always, Everywhere” Copyright © 2015 by Kirsten Kaschock
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
To the memory of Joel Lane
(1963–2013)
OVER TO YOU
Michael Marshall Smith
WONDERS TO COME
Christopher Fowler
THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES
Adam LG Nevill
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Angela Slatter
LEDGE BANTS
Maria Dahvana Headley & China Miéville
AND WE, SPECTATORS ALWAYS, EVERYWHERE
Kirsten Kaschock
There are many different ways, these days, of getting your message across. Quick tweet. Fire off an email. Too busy for words? Click on the thumbs-up button. As the world gets smaller so do our missives. I’ve yet to receive a
kthxbai
, but I’ve seen them out there. The steady dismantling of considered inked pages. A Boolean transmogrification of Dear/Yours into so many (or rather, so few) 0s and 1s.
But everyone likes receiving mail, don’t they? Physical mail, that is. I know I do. And I love writing it too. Long, meandering mind-burps committed to textured paper with a fountain pen. A handwritten letter complete with smudges and creases and crossings out. You can appraise the effort that has gone into such a thing without reading a single word. Maybe a parcel, if you’re lucky. Books, perhaps. An item of clothing. You can forgive any brief note that accompanies such things –
I saw this and I thought of you
– because the subtext speaks volumes.
You might detect, in the breath of air that rises from the unsealed flap, notes from the room in which it was penned, or the person who held the pen. It’s a tangible memorial. A palpable moment that can be held and read and referred to in the way that the ephemeral email or tweet cannot. In time all of that will be lost.
And yet… we’ve all sent things in the post that never arrived. We’ve all been promised items that were never delivered. The price we pay for eschewing digital postboxes is the risk of undeliverables.
In the UK, lost or misdirected post ends up at a massive warehouse, the Royal Mail’s national return centre in Belfast. If these items haven’t reached their intended location within four months much of it is put up for auction. Some things take an age to arrive. Some things never make it.
I recently received a parcel that had been sent to me from America. It had been dispatched, erroneously, to an old address. Then it had been returned to sender. Eventually it found its way to my door. But it had taken a year to get here. What dark corners had shrouded it in the meantime? How many hands had held it? How many chances did it get to become truly lost, to slip into the netherworld where so many millions of other items have passed? Such thoughts inspired the book you now hold in your hands.
But I thought there was the opportunity to play around with the theme a little bit and actually make the idea of misdirected/lost/returned mail a physical part of how the writers would put together their stories. So instead of just asking for submissions dealing with lost post, I sent the writers an actual parcel that was constructed to look like an item of mail that had done the rounds and accidentally landed on their doorstep. Inside was the prompt they would then use as a trigger for their own story. The one stipulation was that they incorporate the concept of dead letters, however tangential, into their fiction.
They all delivered.
CONRAD WILLIAMS
Manchester, September 2015
Conrad Williams is the author of the novels
Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire
and, forthcoming,
Sonata of the Dead
and
Hell is Empty
. He has also written four novellas,
Rain, The Scalding Rooms, Game
and
Nearly People
, and has two collections of short stories to his name:
Use Once then Destroy
and
Born with Teeth
. His work has won the British Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His previous anthology,
Gutshot
, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He lives in Manchester with his wife, three sons and a Maine Coon. For more information, visit
www.conradwilliams.net
, or follow him on Twitter
@salavaria
.
STEVEN HALL
The green letter always arrives between 10.25 a.m. and 10.27 a.m. It’s true that a small percentage of the recipients believe that theirs arrived later, as late as 3 p.m. in one instance, but Research and Analysis have attributed these anomalies to the letter simply having gone unnoticed until that point. Likewise, the previously puzzling fact that some recipients claim to have received the letter as part of a regular postal delivery is now entirely dismissible, as in every case analysis of postal data shows that a standard delivery also occurred in or around the 10.25 a.m.–10.27 a.m. window, making it appear as if the green letter had been delivered with the regular mail. In fact, the green letter always arrives alone. From available CCTV data – which at this point is considerable – we may now add a further assertion, incredible as it might seem – the green letter is not delivered at all.
To be clear, this means that not only is there no footage of a green letter being posted to a recipient, it means the green letters have no poster in any conventional sense. CCTV shows empty streets, unopened garden gates, no one whatsoever approaching, and nothing whatsoever passing into the letterbox during the 10.25 a.m.–10.27 a.m. window when the green letter will inevitably land (it does land, there are audio recordings of the letter falling, and – even more curiously – the sounds of the letterbox opening internally, even as it remains undisturbed externally) on the recipient’s porch or hallway floor.
In line with protocol, Research and Analysis have proposed the full spectrum of explanations to account for this disparity. These range from the mundane but highly improbable (hoaxing, or some persistent, somehow unrecognised fault in our data-gathering processes and systems) to a range of wild, yet apparently more statistically likely causes (temporal displacement, a many worlds/quantum reality anomaly or communication attempt, a data error/smoking gun which may prove the simulation hypothesis). At present, analysis indicates that the letter does drop through the recipient’s letterbox internally, despite nothing being posted into the same letterbox externally at that time, though we are no closer to being able to select a ‘why’ from the several exotic options identified by Research and Analysis (and – as Dr Blakeson, head of R&A has postulated – from an unknown number of additional exotic options as yet unidentified by science). In the face of this, we must simply note this disparity and move forward. The green letter phenomenon is of unparalleled scientific interest, but we must also accept that we are woefully unequipped at the present time to draw even the most rudimentary conclusions.
Outwardly – and certainly by comparison to the process of its arrival and other attributes (see later) – the green letter is a fairly mundane object. The envelope is unusual, though by no means remarkable. At 216mm across it is the perfect width to accommodate a standard A4 paper sheet, but it is not very tall, with a height of only 78mm – about the height one might expect for the envelope of a small Christmas card. The envelope then, is best suited to posting perhaps one or two sheets of A4 paper that have been folded top to bottom many times. Its usefulness beyond this seems very limited. It’s fair, I think, to say it is an odd shape. It’s also bright green.
The envelope is always addressed to ‘Ethan’, the word handwritten with a sharp, B2 pencil according to R&A. Below and to the right of this name, ‘NO ADDRESS’ is written and underlined in black permanent marker. In the top right corner, the words ‘Postage unpaid’ appear in a hand-drawn circle, again in B2 pencil. All three sections of text appear to have been written by the same individual. On the reverse, in fountain pen, and the same handwriting – ‘no return address’.
So far, we have identified 674 green envelopes and their recipients through police and government referral over the last four years, and through other means, though we must imagine that the true number is significantly higher than this.
This brings us to the second phenomena: they are all the same.
We have 176 surviving green envelopes and they are all exactly the same. Actually, this statement is somewhat inaccurate. Let me be more specific, by quoting Dr Blakeson directly: ‘…these are not 176 very similar green envelopes as was initially supposed, but 176 instances of the exact same envelope’.
Not only does the handwritten text match perfectly across all the specimens, but all display identical postal damage and wear and tear. This includes what R&A refer to as ‘the anchor rip’, a small, curved, T-shaped tear on the front left of every envelope, and the same number and random pattern of white ‘rub marks’ along the envelope’s bottom edge, where the green printing has given way to the white paper stock beneath. To be clear, each envelope also contains unique damage, but this can almost always be shown to have derived from the recipient’s opening and subsequent treatment of their iteration of the envelope. At the present time, our team feel confident in stating that, at the time of arrival, every green envelope looked exactly the same because, somehow, they are all the same envelope. Research and Analysis have extracted robust data on many fronts – paper stock, inks, dyes, fibre identification and fibre displacement in the various reoccurring rips, etc. – and concluded that all specimens must somehow be one and the same specimen, or that an original was somehow copied and reproduced at a molecular level many times, to create this series of perfect ‘clones’. Again, for now we can only note this remarkable information and proceed, in the hope that our future investigations may reveal insights into how and why this should be the case.
