Going Postal - Terry Pratchett [51]
Moist tried to scream, but envelopes filled his mouth.
And then a hand closed on his leg and he was in the air and upside down.
“Ah, Mr. Lipvig!” boomed the voice of Mr. Pump. “You Have Been Exploring! Welcome To Your New Office!”
Moist spat out paper and sucked air into stinging lungs.
“They’re…alive!” he gasped. “They’re all alive! And angry! They talk! It was not a hallucination! I’ve had hallucinations and they don’t hurt! I know how the others died!”
“I Am Happy For You, Mr. Lipvig,” said Pump, turning him the right way up and wading waist-deep across the room, while behind them more mail trickled through a hole in the ceiling.
“You don’t understand! They talk! They want…” Moist hesitated. He could still hear the whispering in his head. He said, as much to himself as for the benefit of the golem, “It’s as though they want to be…read.”
“That Is The Function Of A Letter,” said Pump calmly. “You Will See That I Have Almost Cleared Your Apartment.”
“Listen, they’re just paper! And they talked!”
“Yes,” rumbled the golem ponderously. “This Place Is A Tomb Of Unheard Words. They Strive To Be Heard.”
“Oh, come on! Letters are just paper, they can’t speak!”
“I Am Just Clay, And I Listen,” said Pump, with the same infuriating calm.
“Yes, but you’ve got added mumbo-jumbo—”
The red fire rose behind Pump’s eyes as he turned to stare at Moist.
“I went…backwards in time, I think,” Moist mumbled, backing away. “In…my head. That’s how Sideburn died! He fell down stairs that weren’t there in the past! And Mr. Ignavia died of fright! I’m sure of it! But I was inside the letters! And there must have been a…a hole in the floor, or something, and that…I fell, and I…” He stopped. “This place needs a priest, or a wizard. Someone who understands this kind of stuff. Not me!”
The golem scooped up two armfuls of the mail that had so recently entombed his client.
“You Are The Postmaster, Mr. Lipvig,” he said.
“That’s just Vetinari’s trick! I’m no postman, I’m just a fraud—”
“Mr. Lipwig?” said a nervous voice from the doorway behind him. He turned and saw the boy Stanley, who flinched at his expression.
“Yes?” snapped Moist. “What the hell do you—what do you want, Stanley? I’m a little busy right now.”
“There’s some men,” said Stanley, grinning uncertainly. “They’re downstairs. Some men.”
Moist glared at him, but Stanley seemed to have finished for now.
“And these men want—?” he prompted.
“They want you, Mr. Lipwig,” said Stanley. “They said they want to see the man who wants to be postmaster.”
“I don’t want to be—” Moist began, but gave up. There was no point in taking it out on the boy.
“Excuse Me, Postmaster,” said the golem behind him. “I Wish To Complete My Assigned Task.”
Moist stood aside as the clay man walked out into the corridor, the old boards groaning under his enormous feet. Outside, you could see how he’d managed to clean out the office. The walls of other rooms were bowed out almost to the point of exploding. When a golem pushes things into a room, they stay pushed.
The sight of the plodding figure calmed him down a little. There was something intensely…well, down-to-earth about Mr. Pump.
What he needed now was normal things, normal people to talk to, normal things to do to drive the voices out of his head. He brushed fragments of paper off his increasingly greasy suit.
“All right,” he said, trying to find his tie, which had ended up hanging down his back. “I shall see what they want.”
THEY WERE WAITING on the half-landing on the big staircase. They were old men, thin and bowed, like slightly older copies of Groat. They wore the same ancient uniforms, but there was something odd about them.
Each man had the skeleton of a pigeon wired onto the top of his peaked hat.
“Be you the Unfranked Man?” growled one of them,