Doug opened the door and stepped outside. The smell hit him immediately, a rancid fetid odor of rot and decay. Through the ripped corner of one of the packages nearest him he saw a bunch of moldy grapes. The package was addressed to Tritia, obviously one of her Fruit-of-the-Month Club deliveries. Next to that was an irregularly shaped, awkwardly wrapped object covered with postage stamps that could only have been a cat. Blood had soaked through the brown butcher paper. It too was addressed to Tritia.

Doug surveyed his property, a feeling of dread settling over him. Obviously his plan wasn’t working. The whole town was supposed to be ignoring their mail, sending and receiving nothing, and according to Mike, everyone was complying. Yet still the mailman had enough power to do this, to manufacture or gather together hundreds of packages of perversities and within the space of a single night arrange them over his entire property. How could they even hope to fight a being who could pull off something of this magnitude?

But maybe that was the point. Maybe that was why this whole scene had been staged. Maybe that’s what the mailman wanted them to think. Maybe the mailman was scared and on the ropes, using everything he had, trotting out his big guns in an effort to demoralize them and bully them into submission.

Or maybe, Doug thought, his disposal of the envelopes yesterday had given the mailman an energy boost. It was possible that any action involving mail, even its disposal, empowered the mailman to a certain extent.

He immediately retreated into the house, threw on his clothes, grabbed his keys, and drove into town to talk to Mike. He asked the policeman to have his men tell everyone that, no matter what happened, they were to leave their mail untouched, not burn it, not throw it away, not do anything with it. Let it pile up if they had to, but don’t touch it.

Doug practiced what he preached, leaving the packages in his own yard and spending the night at the hospital with Tritia and Billy. When he returned home the next afternoon, the yard had been cleared. All of the packages were gone and nothing had been left to take their place.

Doug smiled. That, he was certain, had been a tactical error on the mailman’s part. The stench and the disease accompanying the rotting fruit, animals, and whatever else had been in the bundles would have eventually forced him to clean his yard, thereby granting the mailman more power. Instead, the mailman had been forced to expend power in order to remove the packages.

The signs were subtle, but they were there.

The mailman was getting scared. He was getting sloppy.

He was slipping.

They just had to wait him out.

50

The days were long. The nights were longer.