c/o Mr. Makepeace by Peter Phillips (F&SF, February 1954) opens with a Captain Makepeace receiving a letter addressed to an E. Grabcheek, Esq. at his address—but no one of that name lives there. When Makepeace tries to return the letter the postman refuses, and says he has delivered other such letters previously.
Makepeace later attempts to send the letters back to the Post Office, and then the Postmaster General, only to have them returned. Eventually he decides to open one of two letters delivered and finds a sheet of blank paper inside. After he angrily tears it up he goes to get the other letter, only to find it has disappeared. Then, when he goes back to dispose of the one he has torn up, he finds that has gone too.
Up until this point the story has an intriguing fantasy set-up, but it slowly turns into more of a psychological piece. This begins when we see a worried Makepeace at a nearby public house, where his mind starts wandering, and we pick up hints of an altercation with his father years before. Then we learn of Makepeace’s mental problems after a shell burst near him during the war, and of his eventual medical pension.
This psychological darkness becomes considerably more pronounced when he waits for the postman one morning and rushes out into the garden when he sees him:
He waited until the postman was about to open his front garden gate, then hurried to meet him.
E. Grabcheek, Esq.,
c/o Tristram Makepeace,
36, Acacia Avenue.
Makepeace was aware of the cold morning air, the gravel underfoot, a blackbird singing from the laurel bushes, milk bottles clinking together somewhere nearby, the postman’s stupid unshaven face; and, faintly, from a neighboring house, “This is the B.B.C. Home Service. Here is the eight o’clock news. . . .”
“Found out who he is yet?” asked the postman.
“No.”
Tristram Makepeace turned back along the path towards his house. It was waiting for him. The door into the everdusty hallway was open. It was the mouth of the house, and it was open.
The eyes of the house, asymmetrical windows, were blazing, yellow and hungry in the early sun.
He wanted to run after the postman and talk with him; or go up the road to the milkman and ask him about his wife and children, talking and talking to reassert this life and his living of it.
But they would think he was mad; and he was not mad. The cold began to strike through his thin slippers and dressing gown, so he walked slowly back up the gravel pathway into the mouth of the house, and closed the door behind him.
He opened the envelope, took out the blank sheet, tore it through. The equal halves fluttered to the floor. He tried to keep his brain as blank as the sheet of paper. It would be nice, came the sudden thought, if he could take his brain out and wash it blank and white and clean under clear running water.
A dark, itching foulness compounded of a million uninvited pictures was trying to force its way into his mind . . . strike your god, your father, see him stand surprised with the red marks of your fingers on his cheek . . . and your lovely virgin mother. . . . pp. 105-106 (The Dark Mind, edited by Damon Knight, 1965)
The steady stream of letters (spoiler) eventually leads to Makepeace’s breakdown and his admission to an asylum, where he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. He spends his time writing to Grabcheek and eventually, one day, receives a letter to Grabcheek c/o him at the asylum. The doctors can’t work out how Makepeace managed to post the letter to himself, but one doctor posits that his dissociated personality has an “objective existence”. Later on, however, when no-one is around, the letter floats into mid-air and disappears. Someone laughs.
This is an interesting character piece—the account of Makepeace’s psychological breakdown and his troubled past are pretty well done—but it’s not a particularly satisfactory fantasy story (even given the hints that the dead father may be revenging himself on the son). Phillips only wrote another three stories after this one—I wonder if he was beginning to find SF or fantasy too limiting.
** (Average). 3,650 words.