Dead Letters Anthology by Conrad Williams

Author:Conrad Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

MURIEL GRAY

Muriel Gray is a broadcaster and author of three horror novels, plus many short stories. She is chair of the board of Glasgow School of Art and a board member of The British Museum. She lives in Glasgow.

ASTRAY

NINA ALLAN

Here is something I remember: me and my friend Lynsey in the apartment in Wiesbaden, scaring ourselves senseless watching a video of a horror movie called And Soon the Darkness. We were ten years old, and we were watching it because it had Michele Dotrice in, who we both knew as Betty Spencer from Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. We had no idea beforehand that it was a horror film. The movie was about two friends who go on a cycling holiday through northern France. The woman played by Michele Dotrice ends up being murdered by a local policeman. Not the kind of thing our parents would have wanted us watching, Lynsey’s parents especially, but we were alone in the apartment and no one even knew we had the video. What frightened me most about the movie was the music, a French pop song they kept playing. It was so catchy, so happy-sounding. The music fooled you into thinking everything was going to be all right in the end, only it wasn’t. I can see Michele Dotrice’s bicycle lying on its side in the grass with its wheel spinning, even now.

* * *

It’s an offence to open an item of mail that isn’t addressed to you, did you know that? Even junk mail – credit card offers and mail order catalogues, the unsolicited nuisance letters that keep being delivered long after the person who they are addressed to has moved on. Most people just throw them away, I suppose – they’re probably not aware that it’s illegal to open them. I’ve sometimes wondered if anyone has ever been prosecuted for perusing a copy of the Next directory that wasn’t addressed to them. It’s unlikely, though it is theoretically possible. You’re supposed to send them on, those dead letters, or mark them ‘return to sender’ and feed them back into the postal system without checking their contents.

The term ‘dead letter office’ was actually coined by the United States Postal Service in 1825. In the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, all undeliverable mail – that’s unaddressed mail, letters directed to an address that no longer exists, or with an address that has become indecipherable – ends up at the National Returns Centre in Belfast. Why Belfast, I have no idea. National Returns Centre is an ugly, obfuscatory term that could only have been invented by British bureaucracy. Dead letter office is semantically more accurate, and a lot more poetic.

* * *

I bought this flat because it is close to a bus stop, because it still has its original 1930s parquet floors and because the garden is enclosed by walls and completely private. Buses stop frequently – there is one every fifteen minutes or so – and reach the city centre in under twenty minutes.

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