Chapter 132: The Sixty-Second Letter

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 132: The Sixty-Second Letter

It arrived nine days later.

Denny called Dana's number at twenty past eight in the morning, which meant he had walked into his own back office, seen an envelope, and rung a woman he'd met once rather than opening it.

"It's here."

"Don't touch it."

"I've already touched it. It was on the mat, what was I meant to do, leave it?" A pause. "It's thicker than the others."

They were in Gessen by two.

It was three sheets, which was three times anything he had ever sent, and it was not addressed to the sorting code.

It was addressed to The young man who read the drawer.

You put them back in order.

I have been posting into that room for nineteen years and nobody has ever been through it and put it back in order, and I would like to say that I noticed, and that it was a courtesy, and that I have not had one of those in some time.

I am going to tell you four things. Then I am going to stop writing letters, because I have been doing it out of habit rather than duty since about 2015 and there is no longer anybody at the other end who reads them.

One. I am not what you have decided I am.

I have never taken a person. I do not have the ability to and I would not have it if it were offered. I clear houses. I have cleared eleven hundred and forty of them and in each one I was looking for objects, and when I found what was wanted I reported it, and when I did not find it I reported that.

Whatever happened afterwards to the people in those houses happened because somebody else read my report. That is not an excuse. It is a description of the mechanism, and I have known for a very long time exactly how thin the difference is.

Two. I was not recruited.

I was here first. The organisation that writes to me now is the fourth to do so, and each of them inherited the arrangement from the last, and not one of them has ever asked me how it began.

They assume I am staff. It has suited me to let them.

Three. Wellhurst.

I looked twice and found nothing and I wrote that down, and both times it was true, and I want to set out what I did not write down, which is that I did not look very hard.

I knew the man who lived there. He was not clever and he was not strong and he did a thing I have watched perhaps four people do in four hundred years, which is work out what was happening and then remove himself from it in a way that cost him everything and protected two children he was not able to say goodbye to.

I did not look under the boiler. I could have. I am very good at this and a taped key is not a difficult thing.

You have it now, which means you have been to the storage unit, which means you have the newspapers and the photographs of your own neck.

I would like you to know that he asked me once, in 2014, whether I would look after his boy if it came to it, and I said no, because I do not do that, and because I did not want him to hope.

This book was originally published on NovelPhoenix. Check it out there for the real experience.

I have thought about that answer more than I have thought about anything else in this century.

Four. I am stopping.

Not out of conscience. I want to be accurate: I am not having a change of heart at four hundred years, I am simply too tired to keep being useful to people I do not respect.

There is nobody to hand it to. That is not a hint. There is genuinely nobody — the arrangement dies with me and the organisation will not notice for some years, because the last person who read my letters stopped in 2015 and no one has asked why the reports kept coming.

If you want to find me you will not, and it is not worth the weeks you would spend.

If you want to ask me something, put a lamp in a window. I will see it. I have been seeing them for thirty years and I have never once gone to one, and I would like, before I stop, to go to one.

Nobody spoke for a while.

Aldric was holding the third sheet with both hands and had not turned it over.

"Four hundred years," Reeve said. "He just — says it. In a letter. Like it's his age."

"It is his age," Vesper said.

"Yeah, I know, but he says it in passing. In a list. Point two." Reeve was pacing the back office of a carpet showroom in a way that was making Denny visibly anxious. "I've been rehearsing what I'd do if somebody told me that and it turns out the answer is nothing, because he didn't announce it, he mentioned it, and you can't be shocked at somebody who isn't performing."

"That's the trick of it," Aldric said quietly.

"It's not a trick. That's the point. It's not a—"

"I know." Aldric finally set the sheet down. "I've spent forty-one years around people who perform their age. Marguerite does it in every sentence. Voss makes a room wait. And here's a man putting the correct stamp on an envelope."

Dana was the one who found the thing they'd all read past.

"The last person who read my letters stopped in 2015."

"So?"

"So he's been reporting into an empty room for eleven years and nobody noticed." She had the pages spread out. "The Choir stopped reading its own clearance reports in 2015 and never told him and never replaced whoever it was. That's not a conspiracy. That's an organisation with a hole in it."

Aldric looked up.

"2015," he said.

"What?"

"That's the year the welfare folders stopped coming to me twice a year and started coming three times." He set the sheet down. "I thought somebody upstairs had got more diligent. It never once occurred to me that somebody upstairs had died, and that the work had been redistributed, and that nobody had checked what fell off the edge."

Cole did not say very much for the rest of the afternoon.

He read the letter four times. On the fourth he stopped at the same six words he had stopped at on the second and third, and this time Vesper was watching him and saw exactly which line it was.

whether I would look after his boy.

"Cole."

"I'm fine."

"You've read that sentence three times."

"I know how many times I've read it," Cole said, without any edge, and handed her the sheet, and went and stood in the car park of a carpet showroom for eleven minutes.

Nobody followed him out.

That night, at home, Mia asked the practical question.

"Do we light it?"

"It's been lit for thirty-nine days."

"For Dorrie. That was a different thing." Mia had her arms folded. "This is a man who says he's four hundred years old and has cleared eleven hundred houses and doesn't want anything, and if you leave that lamp on he might come here. To the flat. Where we live."

"Yes."

"And you're going to leave it on."

"Yes."

"Say why."

Cole looked at the lamp — sixty watts, yellow shade, a brass base his father had rewired by hand.

"Because he asked my dad a question in 2014 and said no," he said, "and he's spent eleven years thinking about it, and he's going to stop existing soon, and I'd like him to get to the end of it having gone to one lamp."

Mia was quiet.

"That's not a strategy," she said.

"No."

"It's not even close to a strategy. Thessaly's going to have a stroke."

"Probably."

"And if he's lying about all of it — if the whole letter's a very good piece of work by somebody who knew exactly which six words you'd stop at — then we've invited him up three flights of stairs."

Cole thought about that properly, which Mia noticed, because he did not do it quickly.

"Then he's the best I've ever come across," he said, "and I'd rather find that out in my own kitchen than in six months in somebody's garden."

"Okay." She went to get her coat off the hook, because she was going out, and stopped at the door. "For the record I think it's a bad idea and I'm not going to argue about it, and those are two separate positions and you don't get to collapse them."

He waited up.

Nobody came that night, or the next.

On the third night the buzzer went at ten past two, and Cole was already awake, and already standing, and he got to the intercom before it went a second time.

[End of Chapter 132]