Posy Mallow and the Midnight Post

The Crookedest House in Mossgrove

The van smelled of crisps and cardboard, and Posy Mallow had decided, somewhere around the third roundabout, that she was not going to like Mossgrove one bit.

She had counted the roundabouts on purpose, because counting was something to do with your eyes that wasn't crying. One: a petrol station and a field of sheep that looked, frankly, bored. Two: a sign that said WELCOME TO MOSSGROVE in chipped gold letters, with a duck painted on it. An actual duck. Three: nothing at all, which seemed about right.

"There," said Mum, in her bright voice. Mum had two voices now. There was her real one, which Posy hardly heard any more, and there was the bright one, which she wore like a coat that didn't fit. "Isn't it pretty?"

It was pretty. That was the worst of it. Stone cottages leaned their shoulders together along a green so green it might have been coloured in. There was a duck pond with real ducks on it, not just the painted one, and a horse chestnut tree fat with summer, and a war memorial, and a bakery with the lights on. Everything was small and golden and exactly where it had always been.

And on the green, under the chestnut tree, there were children.

Four of them, maybe five. They had a football and a dog and a bag of something sticky, and one of them — a boy with hair like a haystack and grass stains up both knees — was laughing so hard at something that he had to sit down on the grass to do it properly. As the van rattled past he looked up. He looked right at Posy, framed in her smeared window with a cardboard box on her lap, and he lifted one hand.

A wave. An ordinary, friendly wave, the kind you give to absolutely anyone.

Posy looked at the floor of the van, where a single chip had been ground into the rubber mat by somebody's heel, and she did not wave back.

There was no point. That was the thing nobody seemed to understand. They were not moving to Mossgrove. They were only here to tidy up a dead woman's house — Great-Aunt Esme, who Posy had met exactly once when she was four and remembered only as a smell of peppermints and a coat that scratched — and to paint the walls a colour called Estate Agent White, and to sell it by autumn so the money could go toward Somewhere Sensible. Mum had said all this in the car, in the bright voice, as if it were a holiday. Just till autumn, Pose. A little adventure.

You did not make friends for a little adventure. You did not wave back. You kept your boxes packed in your heart where the next move couldn't get at them.

"Kettle Lane," said Mum, swinging the van down a turning so narrow the hedges squeaked along both wing mirrors at once. "Number one. Should be — oh."

She stopped the van. She turned off the engine. In the sudden quiet they both looked up, and up, and up.

Tallow House did not so much stand on Kettle Lane as lean over it, the way a tall person leans into a low doorway.

It was thin. That was the first thing. It was as thin and tall as a chimney, three storeys squeezed into the width of one ordinary house, with a roof that came to a point like a witch's hat and windows that did not line up with one another, so that the whole front of it looked as though it had been built by someone making it up as they went along and then surprised to find it had worked. It was a sort of toffee colour. Ivy held it together at the corners. The front door was green and round-topped and so low that Mum, who was not tall, had to duck.

Inside, it was worse, and better.

It smelled. Not a bad smell — Posy stood in the narrow hall and breathed it in before she could stop herself. Beeswax. Old paper. Something dry and warm underneath, like the inside of a wooden box that has held something precious for a long time. It was the smell of a house that had been busy, once, for years and years, with someone who never threw anything away.

And Great-Aunt Esme had thrown nothing away.

There were buttons. There were buttons in jars and buttons in tins and buttons in a chipped teapot on the windowsill, thousands of them, horn and pearl and brass and bone. There were books up every staircase, two steps deep, so you climbed between cliffs of them. There were maps rolled in a copper urn. There were clocks, most of them stopped, all at different times, so the whole house disagreed with itself about when it was. There were drawers that, when you opened them — and Posy opened one, just one, to see — held nothing but feathers, sorted by size.

"Well," said Mum, in a voice that for one second was almost her real one. "She kept herself busy."

They carried the boxes in until their arms shook. The bedrooms ran out before the boxes did, and that was how Posy came to climb the last staircase of all — a twisty wooden ladder of a thing, behind a door she'd assumed was a cupboard — and put her head up into the attic, and decide, on the spot, that it would do.

The attic ran the whole long thin length of the house under the point of the roof. It had one round window like a porthole, set in the gable end, looking out over the rooftops of Mossgrove to the dark line of hills beyond. The ceiling sloped down on both sides to meet the floor, so that the only place a grown-up could stand straight was the middle, but Posy was ten and not tall, and to Posy it felt exactly the right size. There was a brick chimney breast running up through one end of it, warm to the touch from the kitchen range below. There was dust in the slanting evening light, turning slow somersaults, in no hurry at all.

"You don't have to sleep all the way up here," said Mum, arriving pink and out of breath with the last of the bedding. "There's the blue room on the second floor —"

"I like it," said Posy, and was surprised to find it was true.

She found the tin while she was supposed to be unpacking.

It was a button tin, like a hundred others in the house, dented at one corner, with a faded picture of a seaside on the lid. She had only picked it up to move it off the chair she wanted. But it didn't rattle like buttons. It rattled wrong — one small, heavy, lonely rattle — and so of course she had to open it.

Inside, on a nest of cotton wool gone the colour of weak tea, lay two things.

The first was a key.

It was the smallest key Posy had ever seen. It was brass, dull-bright where her thumb rubbed it, and it was not shaped like an ordinary key at all but like a thimble — a tiny dimpled thimble, the sort you'd push onto the end of one finger to sew with — except that where the closed top of a thimble should be, there grew a little stem and a key's teeth, fine as the teeth of a comb. She turned it over. She held it up to the porthole light. There was no lock in all of Tallow House, she was fairly sure, that a key like this could open. It was far too small. It would be too small for a doll's house, even. It would be too small for a mouse.

The second thing was a photograph.

It was old, and brown, and crinkled at the edges, and it showed a girl. Not a grown woman — a girl, perhaps fifteen, with two plaits and a gap in her teeth, grinning at the camera as though she had just got away with something tremendous. It took Posy a moment to understand that the girl was Great-Aunt Esme. There was the same long nose Mum had pointed out at the funeral. But this Esme was young and laughing and lit up from inside, and slung across her shoulder, on a worn strap, was a satchel.

It was an odd satchel. That was the only word for it. It was leather, soft and dark and rubbed pale at the corners, and it was the wrong shape — not a school bag, not a handbag, but something built for a purpose Posy couldn't name, with rows of little buckled pockets all down the front, far too many of them, far too small. On the flap, stamped or stitched, was a shape she couldn't quite make out in the brown old light. A flame, perhaps. Or a star. Or the wick of a candle.

Posy looked at the laughing girl, and the strange bag, for a long time.

Then she put the photograph back, and she put the tin on the windowsill where she could see it, and — without quite deciding to — she kept the little brass key in her closed hand, where it sat warm and secret against her palm, all the rest of that long first evening.

Night came down over Mossgrove the way it never had over the flat.

In the city the night had always been orange and busy, full of engines and the bluish flicker of other people's televisions through other people's curtains. Here it came all at once and complete, a great soft black thing that swallowed the hills and then the rooftops and then the lane, until there was nothing out the porthole window but a sky absolutely furious with stars and, low over the chestnut tree on the green, a fat lopsided moon.

It was very quiet. It was so quiet that Posy could hear the house settling around her, tick and creak, like an old dog turning round before it sleeps.

She got into bed in her unfamiliar bed in the unfamiliar dark, and she did the thing she always did, the thing she had told no one and would die before telling anyone, the thing that lived in the bottom of the cardboard box of her heart.

She took out her torch and her writing pad and she wrote a letter.

Dear Frankie, she wrote.

Frankie had been her best friend since they were both four. Frankie had a laugh like a drain and could do the splits and had cried at the school gate on the last day, properly cried, in front of everyone, which Posy had not been able to do at all. They had promised to write. They had promised. And Posy had written — oh, she had written and written, every place they'd stopped on the long sad way here, a whole fat stack of letters folded small in the side pocket of her rucksack.

She had just never sent any of them.

That was the secret. You couldn't send a letter, because if you sent it, then it might not be answered, and an unanswered letter was a worse and lonelier thing than no letter at all. Far better to keep them. Far better to write Dear Frankie, you wouldn't believe this house, it's like something out of a book, there are buttons EVERYWHERE and Dear Frankie, there are real ducks here, you'd love them and Dear Frankie, I miss you so much it's like a stone I swallowed — and then fold it up small, and add it to the stack, and keep it safe, and never, ever post it.

She wrote until the torch made her eyes ache. Dear Frankie. There's a boy here who waved at me and I didn't wave back and now I think about it I don't know why I didn't. She crossed that last bit out. Then she folded the letter small, the way she always did, and slid it under her pillow with the others, and turned off the torch, and lay in the enormous dark of the crookedest house in Mossgrove, feeling about the size of one of Great-Aunt Esme's smallest buttons.

She was nearly asleep — that warm grey place where your thoughts go soft and start to wander on their own — when her eye caught on something it hadn't caught on before.

Down at the foot of the sloping wall, where the slant of the roof came almost all the way to the floorboards, just to the side of the warm brick chimney breast, there was a door.

A little door.

It was no taller than a teacup. Posy lay very still and looked at it. The whole rest of the wall was rough whitewashed plaster, but here, low and tucked half behind the chimney where no grown-up would ever crouch to look, was a panel of old wood, arched at the top like the front door downstairs, painted over so many times that its edges had near vanished into the wall. A door for nothing. A door for no one. A door the size of a mousehole, except that mouseholes did not have a frame, and a tiny arched top, and — when she squinted, when she truly looked — one round keyhole, low down on the right, no bigger than a freckle.

Her hand, all by itself, closed tighter round the little brass key.

Don't be silly, Posy told herself. Doors that small don't go anywhere. Go to sleep.

She closed her eyes. She turned over. She was tired right down to her bones, and tomorrow there would be painting, and Estate Agent White, and a whole long summer of being the new girl who wouldn't stay. She breathed slow. She nearly, nearly slept.

And then, somewhere below them all, a clock that had been stopped for fifty years gathered itself, and struck twelve.

At midnight a keyhole no bigger than a freckle began to glow warm gold in the dark — and behind it came the clatter of tiny stamps and a small, fretful voice: "Oh, oh, we'll never be caught up by morning."

The Door No Taller Than a Teacup

Posy knelt before the little door with the brass key warming in her palm, and told herself, very firmly, that brave people did not get back into bed.

The trouble was, she was not at all sure she was a brave person. She was a new person, which is a different thing. New the way the third roundabout had been new, and the duck pond, and the whole sleepy hush of Mossgrove. New the way this attic was new — beeswax and old paper and somebody else's dust, all of it belonging to a great-aunt she had never met and a house that would be sold by autumn anyway, so why bother learning to love it. New the way a girl is new when not one single person in a whole town is expecting anything from her at all.

But the keyhole was glowing.

No bigger than a freckle. Set into a door no taller than a teacup, behind the lean of the chimney where the wall went crooked and the paint had cracked. It shone a warm, steady gold, the gold of a kitchen lamp left burning for somebody walking home late.

And behind it, very faint, a voice.

Oh, oh, we'll never be caught up by morning.

Somebody on the other side of the wall was worried. Somebody in the dead middle of the night, in the dead middle of a wall, was fussing about being caught up by morning — and Posy Mallow, who had spent her entire first night in Tallow House quite sure that nobody anywhere needed her for anything, found she could not leave a worried voice alone. She never had been able to. It was, her mum said, going to get her into trouble one day.

She lifted the key to the keyhole.

It was a funny thing, that key — shaped like a thimble, the brass gone soft and brown with handling, far too small for any lock a person could walk through. She had turned it over in the button tin until her fingers knew it by heart. Now it slid into the freckle of gold as though it had been filed for that one hole and no other in all the world.

She turned it.

Click.

Small as a cricket's cough. Final as a full stop.

The door swung in, and out came the light.

It poured over her hands and up her arms, busy and gold and warm as bathwater, and it carried a smell with it — ink, and candle-smoke, and toast, and the green papery smell of a thousand envelopes all breathing at once. Posy leaned in to look, the way you lean toward a fire on a cold day. The way you lean toward a lit window with somebody you love behind the glass.

And the attic let go of her.

There is no kind way to describe getting smaller. The nearest Posy could ever come was that it felt exactly like the moment your foot misses the bottom stair — except the missing went on and on, gently, while the whole world swelled up enormous and polite around her. The teacup door stretched into a barn door. The bent nail beside it became a fallen tree. Her nightie billowed like a tent in a gale; her bare toes scrabbled at floorboards gone wide as ploughed fields — and then there was no floor, and she was through, and tumbling, head over heels over elbows, down a soft and rustling slope.

She landed in a drift of letters.

Posy sat up. Spat out a corner of envelope. Pushed her hair from her eyes. Looked.

Oh.

She was no bigger than a mouse, in a room that went up and up and up. A great warm cavern, snug as a fist, fitted into the in-between of the world — and she understood at once, the way you understand things in dreams, that this was a place that lived in the thickness of walls, in the gap behind the fireplace, in the dusty hush under the stairs where a house keeps the things it isn't telling you. Lanterns swung from hooks. Rope bridges crossed from ledge to ledge, hung with little flags. And everywhere, on long tables worn shiny and brown as toffee, lay letters — stacked, fanned, toppling, bundled in string, some no bigger than a postage stamp and some, to her now, as broad as bedroom doors.

Brass scales tipped and swung all on their own. Stamps came down somewhere out of sight, tk-tk-tk, busy as rain on a skylight. A whole wall of pigeon-holes climbed up into the dark, each one labelled in a spidery, careful hand: UNDERHILL. THE FENS. THE POND, FAR SIDE OF. THE POND, NEAR SIDE OF — WHICH IS WORSE.

But it was the far wall that took the breath clean out of her.

Doors. Hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps — small doors of every shape and colour, round ones and arched ones and pointed ones and one no taller than a matchbox, climbing the great curved wall from the floor to the dizzy dark of the ceiling. Each had its own little knocker. Its own little number. Its own little draught of somewhere-else leaking round the edges, so the whole wall breathed at once: hay and river-mud and pine and warm bread. Some doors stood open onto starlight. Some onto a green field, some onto a wet bank, some onto a glow as red and low as a banked grate.

And some — Posy counted three before she stopped wanting to — were sealed over flat with a dull grey wax, like a window bricked up from the inside. No light came round those. No draught. No smell. Nothing at all.

Above the whole wall, carved deep into a great beam and rubbed gold by years and years of lantern-light, ran a line of words.

NO LETTER GOES UNLOVED, AND NO DOOR GOES UNANSWERED.

Posy read it twice. She did not yet know that she would one day say it back like a vow, in a high cold place at the top of everything, with her heart in her mouth. She only knew that the words made her throat go tight, the way certain sentences do, for no reason you can ever explain to a grown-up.

And in the middle of it all, on a stone table that stood by itself, burned the Light.

It was a lantern. Only a lantern — the plain brass sort that hangs in a porch — with a single flame inside. But the flame was not behaving the way flames behave. It leaned. It reached. As Posy watched, a small busy somebody she couldn't see properly set a fresh letter down on the table near it, and the flame stretched toward that letter, taller and brighter and gold, as if it had caught the scent of a thing it loved — and then sighed back down, and burned low again. Lower, she thought, than a flame that size had any business burning. Thin as a buttercup. Bent at the waist, as if it were very tired and trying not to show it.

Posy stood up in the drift of letters and brushed herself down.

"Excuse me," she said, because her mum had raised her to say it. "I think I might be — lost."

The effect was remarkable.

Something behind the nearest tower of letters went EEP. A whole stack of envelopes came down in a soft white avalanche. A pair of spectacles flew up over the top, followed by a small round person all over prickles — a hedgehog, in a waistcoat with far too many pockets, clutching a list of paper that unrolled longer than he was tall. He took one look at Posy, went the exact colour of cold porridge, and tried to hide behind a single quill.

"A human," he whispered. "A human. In the Post. After everything. Oh — oh, this is not on the list, this is the precise opposite of on the list —"

"I'm very small," said Posy, helpfully.

"You're a very small human," he wailed, "which is the worst kind there is! A small human can fit places!"

A second voice swooped in over the top of him, bright and looping.

"Oh, leave off, Bristlewick. She's tiny as a tealeaf." And down out of the lantern-light came a moth.

Not a flappy little curtain-moth. A great soft dust-grey moth, with wings like two pieces of velvet curtain and eyes like two black beads, and she came down in a showy spiral — round the Light and round it again, close enough to the flame that Posy's stomach lurched right up into her ears — before pulling up short an inch from Posy's nose. She hung there in the air, upside down, grinning, if a moth can be said to grin.

"Cinder," she said. "Carrier. Best one in the Post, whatever the hedgehog tells you about it." She rolled lazily over, the wrong way up, then the right way up. "You came through the wall, tealeaf. Through a door no one's so much as breathed on in — Bristlewick, how long has that one been shut?"

But the hedgehog had stopped fussing.

He had crept closer over the letters, peering up at Posy over the porridge-coloured spectacles, and his voice had gone thin and frightened in a wholly new way.

"Which door," he said quietly. "Which door did you come through, child. Show me."

Posy pointed up — and up, and up — to a small painted door, set high on the wall and a little apart from all the rest, with her own faint attic-light still leaking gold around its edges.

Bristlewick made a sound like a kettle taken off the heat too soon.

Then he gathered himself, the way a frightened person does when there is simply too much to be frightened of and one has to choose. "Never mind that. Never mind that." He hauled his list up in front of him like a shield. "We've troubles enough tonight without — look. Look at it all."

He swept a paw at the tables, and now that Posy truly looked, she saw it wasn't only busy. It was drowning. Letters heaped up past sorting, past collecting, sliding off the table-edges in slow white landslides onto the floor.

"Three more routes gone dark since sundown," he said. "The Marsh Door. The Hollow Oak. Little Quill's whole round — sealed cold, every door of it." He swallowed. "We can't carry what we can't reach. And every single night there's another."

"Sealed," said Posy. "The grey ones. With the wax."

"Wax," said Cinder, and for once she did not loop. She came down and landed on the table beside Posy, light as a falling leaf, and dropped her bright voice low. "Cold grey wax. He sends it creeping under the doors in the dark, and it sets hard, and then that's that — no knock answers, no key turns, no carrier gets in or out." She tilted one antenna up at the thin, bent flame on its table. "Vesper."

The name went round the room, and the lanterns seemed to lean away from it.

"The Nightwarden," whispered Bristlewick. His prickles lay flat. "He means to shut us. All of us. Every door in the Post, for good and for ever." He looked at the guttering flame, and something in him sagged. "I have run this floor forty years, child. I have seen that Light burn clean up to the rafters on a night of good news — births, and homecomings, and forgivenesses. I have never once seen it as low as it is tonight."

"But why?" said Posy. "Why would anybody want to shut a post office?"

For a moment nobody answered. Cinder opened her mouth — and Bristlewick said, sharp as a snapped pencil, "That's not for tonight," in the particular voice grown-ups keep for things too sad to hand a small person after midnight. And far off across the room, past a low and cobwebbed door whose faded sign read DEAD LETTERS — DO NOT, a single envelope seemed to give off, just for one heartbeat, the faintest gold thread of light. Posy turned her head toward it. By the time she looked, it had gone dark again, the same as all the rest.

"There's a moon coming," Cinder said, very quietly, and she did not loop at all. "A pale one. Cold as a thumbprint and twice as old. When it's full and high, they say, he can do it all at once — every door, in one single breath, no carrier left to stop him." She would not meet the hedgehog's eye. "We're racing a moon, tealeaf. And the moon is winning."

Bristlewick had gone still again. He was looking at Posy in a way that made her want to glance behind herself to see what was there.

"You came through that door," he said, slowly, as though laying each word down with tweezers. "With a key. A little brass key. Thimble-shaped." It was not a question. "Show me your hands, child."

Posy opened her hand. The key lay there, brown and small and altogether ordinary, still faintly warm.

The hedgehog sat down very suddenly on a stack of letters, as if his legs had stopped agreeing to hold him.

"Fifty years," he said, to nobody. "Fifty years that key hung beside the Keeper's Door, and not a hand in the world fit it but hers. And when she stopped coming — when the door went quiet — we thought the line had ended. We thought we were the last of it." He took off the porridge-coloured spectacles. Wiped them on his waistcoat. Put them carefully back on, and looked at Posy as though she were a letter he was almost too afraid to open. "The Keeper's Door opens only to the Keeper's own kin. Her blood. That is the law of the Post, and it is older than I am." A pause, very small. "Who are you, child? Whose are you?"

"Posy," she said. "Posy Mallow. My great-aunt left us her house, up the lane. Esme. Esme Tovey."

And the name dropped into the room like a stone into a still pond.

Cinder's wings went quiet. Bristlewick's mouth opened, and shut, and opened. And the Light, on its high stone table, did the strangest thing of all — it stood up. Just for a single breath: a hand taller and a shade warmer and gold all through, the way a sleeping creature lifts its head at a footstep it has been waiting and waiting to hear. Then it settled, and burned thin again.

"Esme's," Bristlewick breathed. "You're Esme's."

He got to his feet. He picked up his enormous list — and then he set it down again without looking at it, which Posy would learn, in time, was the most extraordinary thing she ever saw the hedgehog do.

"I daren't," he muttered, pressing his small paws together. "I daren't hope it. A child. Tonight, of all the nights in forty years, when we are falling — a child comes through the Keeper's Door with the Keeper's own key in her fist." He looked up at her, small and prickled and terrified, and underneath the terror was a hope so raw it was almost worse to see. "We've lost half the crew to fright, Miss Mallow, and the other half to the wax. We need carriers. We need someone the doors themselves will answer to. A carrier no door can refuse." He drew a shaky breath. "And there is only one kind the Keeper's Door has ever, ever opened for. Her kind. Yours."

Posy thought about her bed — six floorboards and one whole enormous world away. She thought of the green that afternoon, and the children who had not been hers, and the FOR SALE that would go up by autumn, and the small folded letters in the bottom of her case that she wrote and wrote and never, ever dared to send. Too small to matter, she had written, more or less, in every one of them. Too new. Why bother trying.

And then she thought of a worried voice in a wall, fretting that it would never be caught up by morning.

"What do I have to do?" she said.

Bristlewick's whole face crumpled — half relief, half fresh terror, in exactly equal parts. He bustled, for he was above all things a great bustler, off down the length of the nearest table, muttering and lifting letters and putting them down, until at last he found one. A small one. He carried it back cupped in both paws, as carefully as if it might go off.

Then Bristlewick pressed a single envelope into her hands — a postage stamp to him, a bedsheet to her. "Tomorrow midnight, then," he quavered. "Heaven help us. And heaven help you."