One First Thing: 1937

When he had returned from his drifting and was hired as a cook in one of Atlanta’s biggest hotels, he would sit in the sunlit lobby and try to read the newspapers without seeing signs that the world was coming apart. It never worked. In New Jersey the Hindenburg had recently imploded into flames; for most of the previous decade the Nazis had been gathering power, terrorizing and silencing the Jews, and were now preparing to occupy Poland; in the East, both sides of the Chinese Civil War had paused in their fighting to join forces in a nervous united front against a looming Japanese invasion. Lines everywhere were being drawn, allies and uneasy confederates were assembling on one front or another, and it was clear to him that another Great War was on its way.

His hair was receding now, his body still mostly shoulders, knees and elbows. He would take off his glasses and rub at his eyes. It would never end, he knew. Never.

Sometimes the Chef, as he was called in the kitchens, would sneak a piece of key lime pie or coconut cake to the young lady who had recently started working nights at the front desk. Employees at the hotel were forbidden to eat from the kitchens; the new owners had been cracking down on “worker pilfering,” as they called it. But the new girl was wide-eyed and underfed, so he would bring the treat out hidden behind his back under a folded cloth napkin, tented just so to not spoil the meringue. With a magician’s flourish he would uncover it, and the girl would clap a hand over her mouth and laugh at his wickedness. He would hide the treat with a fork under the front desk and put a finger to his lips and say “Sssshhhhhhhh …”

In another violation of hotel policy, he had taken to spending much of his off-time on the roof of the building, mainly since the magpies were bringing him trinkets again and hadn’t yet stopped. The shiny baubles (a marble, a polished creekstone, a woman’s gaudy earring) had begun to pile up, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw them away. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful to the generosity of the birds, even if they would never find out. And besides, how could he be sure they wouldn’t?

Later, he would retire to his room in the upper floors of the hotel, to wash up and lie in the bed and try to ignore the auguries in the cracks in the ceiling. Maybe some song would be playing faintly through the walls—Fats Waller, or Artie Shaw, and reluctantly his mind would return to the fires. As the hours ticked on and the hotel went to sleep, his thoughts would shuffle along the hallways of regret, down the corridors of grief, to his unpaid debt.

Sometimes the debt felt like a guillotine above him waiting to fall; sometimes it felt less sinister, like the arrival of one of those clammy-fisted kitchen equipment salesmen who slumped through the lobby’s front doors, briefcase in hand, silhouetted with the sun at their backs. Usually in silhouette. Usually with the sun at their backs. You couldn’t see their faces, even when they’d come to sell something rather than take it from you.

Lately he’d begun thinking of writing it all down. He thought it might help shut the door on all those shadowy hallways and lonely corridors. And also he wanted others to know what had happened; to bear witness. Which presented the problem: there were people who wanted to keep things quiet.

That wouldn’t stop him from doing it, of course. Their need for obscurity and his need for peace was just the way it was.

It would always be this way. Always.

Chapter One: The Purloined Book

Max first learned about the weird books at the post office in the midsummer of 1904. He was fifteen years old, and had started less than a week before, but hadn’t been able to do much because it had rained for four days and his deliveries had all been put off. During the time indoors (sweeping, sorting, listening to the showers pelting and popping on the old house’s tin roof) he’d settled into an easy rhythm with the postmaster and his wife. This was unexpected, because he’d been dead certain the job was going to be terrible: it was his first reluctant wading into the Great American Workforce and all the wretchedness that came with it. But instead he found the Georgia sweat of it oddly agreeable, and the warmth of the Postmaster and his wife, a pair of older Scots who shared the same high giggle and an annoying satisfaction with small things, made the bad parts a little better. Because of this, and because he was distracted from the trouble at home, the weird books, and the weird room that contained them, came upon him with the startled wonder of a first forbidden kiss.

The day was busy because the sun had come out. Customers tramped in with muddy feet, packages and letters were traded, sorted and sacked. For most of the day Max swept and mopped, and later, with a Back in Ten Minutes sign on the front door, he and the Postmaster took their lunch at the counter. They perched on stools opposite each other as the old man studied from some kind of book (Apollo and His Sons and Daughters, the spine said), taking huge, distracted bites from his two sandwiches, eating from one and then the other without finishing the first. Occasionally he slid the book away to mark in a ledger.

The Postmaster was unlike anyone the boy had ever met in tiny Selleford, Georgia. His crooked old man’s nose surged like a promontory; his face was mostly hidden under a salt and pepper beard which roamed up almost to his eyes, two dark pebbles stamped under heavy brows, and all of it topped by a dashing flip of silver hair that whooshed straight back. He looked more like a character from an adventure tale—a Civil War general maybe, or a mad hot air balloonist—than a career-minded civil servant. But that was part of why Max was fascinated: he was learning that these people, and this place, held surprises.

The old man suddenly stood and slid around the counter and headed across the room, and Max was free to take a sideways peek at the ledger. In his bare twig handwriting the Postmaster had scribbled, “assembly? retaliation? censure?” Below that was a series of six or seven Latin phrases the boy had never seen before (he recognized the contours of the language from his Global Cyclopedia at home) and the words, “visions and visitations. mere intention can and does kill—claude bernard, paul bart, louis pasteur … ” Then the old man was coming back and Max glanced away, dry swallowing the rest of his own sandwich.

Addie Sylvester, the Postmaster’s wife, stepped in from the kitchen. “Time for you to head home, young man,” she said in her Scottish brogue. She sounded more like a bonnie lass from the highlands than a Post Office clerk in the small-town South. “You’ll be workin’ plenty when you get older, trust me.”

When you get older. Max made a face to himself and put his food away. He’d turned fifteen a month and a half ago and was already feeling elderly.

“But first,” the Postmaster said. “I wonder, sonny, if you could move those up into Dead Letter? That would help.” He nodded toward a stack of unmarked boxes over by the window.

The Selleford, Georgia Post Office was an old house that had been converted from a private home to a place of business. To create the large bottom chamber, the walls had been taken out and the load-bearing columns left standing, and now there were shelves and countertops sprouting with papers, train schedules, advertisements, ripped-out Farmer’s Almanac pages tacked to the walls, maps, most-wanted posters with dead-eyed men staring back. In the far corner of the room, a lonely staircase sloped up into shadow. The first day he’d started working there, Max had asked Peter Sylvester what was upstairs. “Oh, we use it for a thing or two—storage, meetings, dead letter,” the old man told him. “I’ll show you sometime.” That had been the last of it.

Now Max went over and hefted one of the boxes. It wasn’t big but it was heavy, one of the flaps hanging open to show a stack of pamphlets as stark and bland as church hymnals. There were six boxes in all, and as he started up the stairs, the Postmaster said, “Second floor bathroom, in with the papers. You’ll find it.”

Max came up to the second floor. A dim corridor, bare walls, half-drawn windows allowing a little sun inside. Down the hall was an open lavatory, with stacks and piles of unopened letters, old faded tracts, water-damaged pamphlets and periodicals mounded up almost to the ceiling. A toilet crouched in the corner, closed and weighed down by a load of tattered booklets on top. Yellowed newspapers gone brittle and dry in the clawfoot tub.

So this was it: Dead Letter. An unused bathroom. One of the tracts was called “The Seer and Celestial Reformer,” written in fancy cursive above a stylized drawing of a pyramid in the desert. It reminded Max a little of his worn-out copy of One Thousand and One Nights, with its stark sketches of desert palaces and camels cresting long, sandy hills. He was a sucker for anything with deserts.

He put the box in the tub and was headed out to get the others when he stopped. Down the hall was another lonely door. Another open doorway.

On a different day he might have let it go. But just now had sat across from the Postmaster as he wrote about things like visions and visitations, and other things that can and do kill. Weirdness like that practically begged Max to learn more. So he edged down the corridor and peeked inside. A bigger room, also dim, with bars of bleached sunlight slanting across a deep red rug. A dozen or so chairs huddled in a semi-circle around a scarred communion table. In the far corner a bookcase sagging against the wall, overloaded with unsteady stacks of books.

Max’s own overstuffed library in his room was best part of that big, bleak house. He read and reread his favorite books with the dreamy desperation of a death-row prisoner. And whenever he found himself at someone else’s home, he made a point to explore their own bookshelf; it told more about a person than they knew. He slipped inside and went around the chairs straight to the books.

The haphazard stacks on top seemed ready to collapse, and on his touch several did come down in a bird-flap of pages. He caught one of them, and turned it over: The Moon In Her Sleep. He opened it randomly to find a diagram of the human eye, with hand-drawn charts and knotty glyphs he couldn’t identify. This language was something different, not Latin, with curvy, spindly, crookbacked characters he’d never seen before. He flipped through more pages, and toward the end found a blurry photograph of people gathered around a circular mirror placed flat on a table. The male is not so easily developed into seership as the female, someone had written in English off to the side, but becomes exceedingly powerful when they are so. Virgins see best. Next to them are widows.

He slipped the book into the shelf. Most of the others were slender and faded and old, and had odd titles written in antique script—The Book of Memory and Fear. Der Ablehnung. The Worm at the Heart: A Methodology of Arabic Summoning. He removed this last one. There was something new and strange in it—in this book, in all these books. They weren’t the kind you found at the public library, boring guides on histories and statutes and statistics and all that. These had a weird gravity to them, a secret hidden life all their own. Max had heard about this sort of thing, of course; spiritualism seemed always popular among the jaded parlor set, though he had never wasted much time thinking about such claptrap silliness. He liked biology and botany and things you could touch and hold, things as firm and real as the bark on a tree. But these books were something else—they looked intricate and grand and unconcerned with trifles like whether you believed them or not.

He glanced up. A gloomy melancholy had settled into the room, or maybe had been there the whole time; stale air, curtained windows, empty doorway. Footstep prints tracing a path in the fabric of the rug. It was the same feeling as some of the ones in his own big house—a failed cheer, a lonely promise, too much space for too few people. Nobody home.

He opened the first few pages—

And just then, footsteps in the hall. He closed the book and stuffed it in the back of his pants. He crouched to gather the others, and in a moment Addie Sylvester’s formidable frame filled the doorway.

“You okay, honey?” she said, looking at him over her glasses. “Peter asked me to come up and see if you needed help.”

“No ma’am, I’m sorry. I heard these fall over.”

Addie went to the window and heaved the curtains back, and the chamber brightened. Some of the shadows went away, but not all. “They never do a good job of putting these things back, do they? Use ‘em and forget about ‘em, that’s how men operate.” She came over, and Max saw there was something wavering behind her eyes. Maybe it was about whether he had gotten a good look at the bookshelf. “Why don’t you let me take care of these while you get the rest of the boxes? In the bathroom down the hall, if you please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The book was stiff and cold against the small of his back. He had never stolen a thing in his life; this rash move was not like him at all, but he certainly wasn’t going to put it back now. Desperately hoping it didn’t show, he left the room.

:: ::

Max hadn’t wanted a job at the Post Office, but he had to take it because it was the only way he could think of to get out of working for Sig.

Sig was his mother’s second husband, a radium tonic salesman who jounced around town in a converted ice wagon with a crudely painted logo on the side that said “Jonathan ‘Sig’ Sigfried and Associates—Tonic’s the Ticket!” Max’s real father had died years ago (heart attack, hardwood floor, workmen banging at the door of a locked room), and after Sig and Max’s mother Lora had married, the big man took them grandly into his house. It wasn’t exactly glowing with good will. The place was cold and oppressive, even in May, and Max claimed the empty room at the top of the stairs more than anything because it offered the quickest egress out from under Sig’s fickle moods.

All through the spring and summer, Sig had ominously and persistently been circling around the idea of the boy working for him to deliver the radium tonic. A terrible idea. For some reason these days the big man’s temper was flaring more and more; maybe some bills were due, maybe an arrangement collapsed, no one could say. But the previous week, when the two of them were riding together in the ice wagon, the big man had slammed Max several times in the head with his sharp rock of an elbow, once so hard in the temple that zephyrs and daystars bloomed like flowers in the air. A roaring headache banged in the boy’s skull for the rest of the night. He still didn’t know why.

But he did know one thing: he had to fix it. Running away wasn’t the answer. He was too nervous, too shy; he would be eaten alive out there. He had to find another way to get out of the house, and get away from Sig. And so, by the next morning the broad outlines of a plan were already in place, and by 10 a.m. he was in his only suit, an oversized sackcoat he’d inherited from one of his mother’s friends, down the tree-raftered lane into town, fussing with his collar and practicing a speech he’d come up with that morning over breakfast.

It was a horrible day. Shopkeeper after shopkeeper turned him down, even after long and well-argued (at least Max thought so) appeals. The Breakaway Plan, as he had started thinking of it, wasn’t working so well. But toward the long end of the afternoon, when the cicadas were ratcheting up their evening song and his worry was cresting like a wave, he found himself on the far side of town, at the Post Office. He knew nothing about mail, or parcel post, but the older Scottish couple who ran the place seemed oddly pleased when he came upon them in the yard. Almost ready for him. The woman’s smile was vague, but the Postmaster stared hard at the boy—unblinking, unaware of his surroundings, like an entomologist considering a rare insect.

“A job,” the old man said, tasting the word. The two of them had been leaving to go somewhere, and were loading up their mudwagon in the Post Office’s bare patch of lawn. “Come here, sonny.”

Max stepped closer. “Yessir?”

“Young man like you. How old are you?”

Max met his gaze and pushed his shoulders back. “Old enough to work, sir.”

The Postmaster gave a grunt of disapproval. “You don’t need a job, boy, you need to be out in the fields and rivers. Studying the similarities of trees to capillaries. Fluid dynamics, phyllotaxis spiral patterns, flowers and shells. You need to learn how the trout swim near the waterfall but not into it. Which way the ivy grows in the morning and which way it grows in the afternoon. Why the lady fern spreads in such curious little echoes of herself, down down down into infinity. That’s what a kid with your talents need to be doing, not trying to make a dollar in some windowless room somewhere.”

“Yessir.” Max wiped his palms on his pants. A kid with his talents? He wasn’t sure what that meant. “And I have been. But I—” He stopped, reluctant to tell them about his stepfather, about the temper and the violent elbows and the threat of working side by side with him everyday. The whole situation pedaled out in front him like a nightmare cyclorama. “I need to find work. I don’t think I can go home until I find some today.”

The Postmaster looked up at the darkening sky. The clouds, fat and bulbous, were beginning to turn violet. It would rain that night, and the rest of the week, too. “What kinda world do we have where a boy your age needs work?” the old man said to no one in particular.

But Max was just getting started. “I need to find a place—any place, if I don’t, I’ll be—my, my stepfather—”

Just then a motorcar, one of the newer models, sped by, bleating its horn at a muddy brougham that had paused in the middle of the road. The Postmaster’s draft horses stamped nervously as the drivers of the car and the carriage cursed at each other.

“We live in a strange time, sonny,” the old man said when the commotion had died down. “Electric light and gas lamps fending off the darkness. Modern medicine and ancient tales studied side by side. Horse-drawn carriages and gasoline-powered autocars colliding in the middle of the street. It makes no sense to me. We are lost and we need help, and I may have a situation for you. The pay’s not what it should be, but there’s work to be done, if you’re up to doing it.” Max didn’t answer, or even move. A small fluttering of hope had woken up inside of him and he didn’t want to mess it up. “We’re startin’ one of the state’s first rural free delivery routes, and that’s taken one of us out of the office for at least half a day, everyday. We’re in need of someone to help with local correspondence.”

“A delivery boy.”

“A desk boy, light deliveries. A janny. Right now, my wife here clerks in the afternoons. She’s movin’ to rural free delivery and I have no one to help me in the office.”

Rural free delivery. The term sounded weird—functional and idyllic at the same time. The woman, Addie, stood grinning on the far side of the wagon, her eyes bright despite the approaching storm. Maybe Max wouldn’t be going back home to face another clap on the head after all.

“But it’s not just cleaning the lavvy. Sometimes the wife steps in and helps me, which is how one usually comes to understand the operation. It’s a training, if you will, for the Post Office itself.”

“I—I don’t know much about all that.”

“It’s not what you know, young sir, it’s how hard you work. I suspect even you can accomplish quite a bit when you put your mind to things.” The street was a good ways off, but the Postmaster leaned down to whisper anyway: “And never tell an employer what you don’t know how to do, sonny. Always tell them what you can do. There’ll be time to learn later.” He winked at his wife.

“Now, I believe you know how to ride a bicycle,” the old man went on. “You have your own?” Max nodded. He didn’t have a bike but he could get one. Sig wouldn’t like it, but he and his mother and he could handle it on the quiet from her own small private cache of money. There was a wad of bills Sig didn’t know about stuffed in her dresser. She’d told her son where it was stashed, in the case of my rapid decline, she’d said.

“Not one of those dreadful penny farthings, mind you. Those enormous wheels cause more problems than they solve. Lord knows we’ve seen many a smashed skull and a broken wrist from those things. I’m talking about a standard two-wheeled, pneumatic safety bicycle.”

“Not a problem,” Max assured him.

The Postmaster straightened up. “Well, let’s call it settled.” He turned to his wife and laughed: it was the sound of new beginnings, and relief. A mysterious machinery worked behind their eyes, behind every word they said. “Thanks to the four corners of the globe—earth, air, fire and water! Thanks to the courage of Thoth and Hermes! I am pleased, Mrs. Addie. Are you pleased?”

Addie’s hair fluttered in the wind. She wasn’t like the other middle-aged women Max had met. There was something more lively about her—more spirited and odd, but still kind. “He’s a good kid,” she agreed. “A good good good kid.”

:: ::

Surprisingly, Lora and Sig were happy Max had found a job, particularly with such a respectable line of business. “Good inside work,” Sig said, before he wondered about the prospect of postal discounts for shipping his radium tonic. They were sitting at the dinner table in the dining room, which was all polished oak and cedar paneling. To Max it felt like a cave. “We spend almost six dollars a month on freight alone.”

Sig was a big man with the round head and square shoulders of a wooden nutcracker, but his features were soft and buttery and limp, as if they had been left too long out in the rain. A glistening bite of rib roast quivered on his fork. “Now, if we could get that down to two or three, there’s something in it for you, Bucko.” Sig laughed in Lora’s direction and chewed the fatty bite with relish.

The boy and his mother traded nervous glances. Another episode, another outburst averted. Max felt his heart thrumming and realized that he’d been almost as worried to tell Sig about the job as he was in looking for it in the first place.

No one knew much about Peter and Addie Sylvester. They were from Scotland, Sig had heard somewhere or other, and for the last several years they’d run a small mercantile on the western edge of town, with their postal duty being only a side effort until it began to take up more of their time. This was common, Sig said; store owners operating as postmen could count on a decent number of customers stopping by just to get their mail.

“Genius! Like a spider pointin’ a fly right to the web,” the big man bellowed. His forearms were perched on the table and his fists clenched a knife and a fork like weapons—he needed only a gladiator’s shield to finish the picture. “I gotta figure a way to put that towards the tonic.” But that was where Sig’s knowledge of the Scots ended. The old man was respected and had done a decent job as postmaster, but no one he knew had spent any time with them, not even to invite them over for dinner. Around town the Sylvesters were familiar, but unusually private.

Max was about to excuse himself to go upstairs to his room and inspect that weird Arabic Summoning book a little closer when Lora said, “How was your day, Max?”

He felt Sig’s gaze crawling all over him. When Sig studied you, you knew it. “Um. Alright. I got to deliver, uh … lots of things.”

“Things,” Sig said. “What kinda things?”

“Just—stuff. I don’t know. We haven’t done much with all the rain.”

“That postal’s a big place. What else they got in there?”

Before Max could answer, Lora broke into a phlegmy, chesty cough. The mucous in her lungs splattered audibly into smaller pellets, like wet sand. This was a depressingly common affair in their house: Lora was sick, and had been so for some time. In half a decade Max had watched her dissolve from a relatively attractive, graceful woman to a ragged castaway, a flesh-sack of hollow clavicles and haunted eyes. The stress of her condition had been a constant presence for so long it had become part of the hiss and hum of their daily lives.

The big man put a plump fist on her back and waited for her to finish. He reached for a medicinal green bottle there on the table—he kept one within arm’s length for her, almost all the time—and he poured a good slug of it into her glass. “Wash it down,” he said.

“I don’t want it.” Lora’s voice was a croak.

“We do what’s right whether we want it or not. Take it.”

The tonic was Uranithor—uranium water, a commercial variety Sig had acquired the sole rights to distribute in their little mountain town. Sig had built a modest business selling it locally, though he was having trouble matching the bulk prices available down in the bigger towns like Gainesville and Atlanta. Despite his enthusiasm for the stuff, whatever had afflicted Lora showed no signs of backing down. Physicians in several cities had considered and rejected various conditions and diseases—consumption, pleurisy, bad blood, biliousness, anemia, dropsy, wasting, phthisis, puerperal fever, domestic illness, milk fever, hectic fever, trench fever, ship fever, winter fever, putrid fever—all of these and more. Nobody could fix her, and she sank deeper and deeper down in a hole.

“Here,” Sig said, “show her how to do it,” and handed the bottle to Max. The boy had tasted it before, of course, but to appease Sig he looked at it again. Uranithor, Tonic for Perpetual Health! the label said. Below that were the words Just a tiny bottle of apparently lifeless, colorless and tasteless water is all that the eye can see or the tongue can detect. Yet in this bottle there reposes the greatest therapeutic force known to man: Radioactivity! At the bottom was a stylized drawing of a snake wrapped around a Tesla coil with lightning bolts shooting off from either side.

“Drink it,” Sig said. Max uncapped the top and sniffed. It had no scent, but he didn’t want to anyway. “Drink it,” Sig hissed, and when Max hesitated he snatched it away. “Taste the goddamn stuff, this is how you do it.” He upended the bottle and downed a gurgle or two. He passed the bottle back to Max, who put it to his lips and made himself take a tentative sip: plain distilled liquid, with a slightly metallic tinge, like water from bad pipes. There was also a vaguely familiar sulphuric taste, which made Max wonder darkly if Sig had been putting it into their maid’s cooking broth without telling them.

“Uranium! Good for you, good for the lymph, good for the blood!” Sig barked. In the absence of any real interests or hobbies or pursuits of passion, pushing the tonic had become his only obsession. “Got people all over going crazy for this stuff!”

As Max and Sig watched, Lora took her glass in her bony fingers and raised it to her lips and slowly drank, grimacing as if she had swallowed a bug. When she finished she set it down, and, hands in her lap, sat staring expressionless at the table. She looked terrible, maybe worse than ever.

Sig broke the silence. “So. Post office. What’s up there?”

“What?” It took Max a moment to reorient himself.

“You can tell me, Max. I’m not as dumb as you think.” He licked a pink bit of pork juice from the side of his thumb. “You know that. So one more time, one smart guy to another, what do they do with the upper floor?”

Sig was right, Max did know that. The big man had made sure of it many times. For a brief time in his life it looked like Sig would be the first in his family to attend college and get a degree from the university down in Athens. But something had gone wrong (his father had gotten himself killed in some kind of accident, a drowning or a crushing or some workplace mishap or other) and Sig was forced to quit and go to work for the family. He’d kept a hot grudge about it ever since. In response to this lack of education, he’d done his best to seem schooled, to lose the small town cadences of his speech, the lazy vowels and dropped “g’s” of farm talk. But when he got angry—which was often, practically everyday—his natural mountain dialect edged itself back in.

“Oh, God,” Lora said in a tired voice.

“Just let him answer the question, Lora. What’s up top?”

Max swirled the water in his glass. ““Uh. Nothing much, I guess. I don’t know.”

“There’s gotta be somethin’ up there.”

Honestly, Max didn’t know what was up there. Dead letter. A crowded bathroom. A chamber with chairs and some very odd books. A chapel, or a meeting room of some sort. Whatever it was, it was dim and spooky, and he knew he didn’t want to share it with anyone, not yet, least of all Sig. He felt like a dog guarding its bone. For now the weird room upstairs at the Post Office was his own and no one else’s, and it would stay that way.

The big man was taking another fatty bite; his temples and his jaw pulsed in and out as he chewed. “What’s up there?” Max said. He lifted his eyes, forced himself to meet Sig’s gaze. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

END CHAPTER