He glared at Doug from the rubble. Or, rather, it glared at him. For the mailman now appeared only vaguely human. His body had shrunk, become thin and twisted and malformed like that of some giant insect. The red hair on top of his head, now blondish pink, had grown out tremendously and hung down in thick irregular tufts. His teeth looked overlarge in his caved-in head and sharp, as though they had been filed. Around him the desks and shelves, machines and bins, canvas bags and postal paraphernalia, were littered in a jumbled chaotic mess.

Behind Doug the door slammed shut.

The mailman laughed, a rasping chuckle that sent a shiver of primal fear down Doug’s spine. The air was filled with a strange heaviness, a crackling eddying current of power that felt like charged electricity.

In the shifting emphasis of light caused by the closed door, Doug saw for the first time that he and the mailman were not alone in the room. In the far corner, against the wall, almost hidden by the shadow of a vertically overturned table, was an unmoving figure with wildly uncombed hair. The figure whimpered pitiably. Doug stepped forward until he could see a face.

Giselle Brennan.

His breath caught within him. Giselle was wrapped, mummylike, in brown packaging paper. One arm had broken free from the covering and was twisted at an unnatural angle, affixed to her side with rubber bands and encased in layers of folded orange and blue Express Mail envelopes. Blood had seeped through the wrapping in innumerable spots and had blackened and dried in even, regular stripes. Giselle’s face, her neck and chin and cheeks, were crisscrossed with paper cuts, straight intersecting lines that sliced through skin and formed a field of squares, rectangles, parallelograms. Paper cuts also scored her lips, making it appear as though they had been sewn shut. One ear was torn off.

“Giselle,” Doug said, moving forward.

She moaned.

It was then that he saw on the white skin of her forehead several wavy lines of black ink protruding from a circle filled with writing.

The mark of cancellation.

From under her hairline he saw an even row of pasted stamps.

He turned on the mailman. “What is this?” he demanded. “What happened? What the hell have you done to her?”

The mailman laughed again, the rasping sound as grating as that of fingernails scraping across a chalkboard. “Mail accident,” he said. His voice was a low whisper, barely recognizable.

“You bastard,” Doug breathed. He suddenly realized what the mailman had done. He had turned her into a package. A fucking package ready to be mailed.