Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [15]
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