Clive Barker
 Great Secret Show
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  PART ONE:
  THE MESSENGER
  
  I
  Homer opened the door.
  "Come on in, Randolph. "
  Jaffe hated the way he said Randolph, with the faintest trace of contempt in the word, 
as though he knew every damn crime Jaffe had ever committed, right from the first, the 
littlest.
  "What are you waiting for?" Homer said, seeing Jaffe linger. "You've got work to do. 
The sooner it's started, the sooner I can find you more. "
  Randolph stepped into the room. It was large, painted the same bilious yellow and 
battleship gray as every other office and corridor in the Omaha Central Post Office. Not 
that much of the walls was visible. Piled higher than head-height on every side was mail. 
Sacks, satchels, boxes and carts of it, spilling out onto the cold concrete floor.
  "Dead letters, " Homer said. "Stuff even the good ol' U.S. Post Office can't deliver. 
Quite a sight, huh?"
  Jaffe was agog, but he made sure not to show it. He made sure to show nothing, 
especially to wise guys like Homer.
  "This is all yours, Randolph, " his superior said. "Your little corner of heaven. "
  "What am I supposed to do with it?" Jaffe said.
  "Sort it. Open it, look for any important stuff so we don't end up putting good money 
in the furnace. "
  "There's money in them?"
  "Some of "em," Homer said with a smirk. "Maybe. But most of it's just junk-mail. Stuff 
people don't want and just put back in the system. Some of it's had the wrong address put 
on and it's been flying backwards and forwards till it ends up in Nebraska. Don't ask me 
why, but whenever they don't know what to do with this shit they send it to Omaha."
  "It's the middle of the country," Jaffe observed. "Gateway to the West. Or East. 
Depending on which way you're facing."
  "Ain't the dead center," Homer countered. "But we still end up with all the crap. And 
it's all got to get sorted. By band. By you."
  "All of it?" Jaffe said. What was in front of him was two weeks', three weeks', four 
weeks' work.
  "ALL of it," said Homer, and didn't make any attempt to conceal his satisfaction. "All 
yours. You'll soon get the hang of it. If the envelope's got some kind of government 
marking, put it in the burn pile. Don't even bother to open it. Fuck 'em, right? But the 
rest, open. You never know what we're going to find." He grinned conspiratorially. "And 
what we find, we share," he said.
  Jaffe had been working for the U.S. Post Office only nine days, but that was long 
enough, easily long enough, to know that a lot of mail was intercepted by its hired 
deliverers. Packets were razored open and their contents filched, checks were cashed, 
love-letters were laughed over.
  "I'm going to be coming back in here on a regular basis," Homer warned. "So don't you 
try hiding anything from me. I got a nose for stuff. I know when there's bills in an 
envelope, and I know when there's a thief on the team. Hear me? I got a sixth sense. So 
don't you try anything clever, bud, 'cause me and the boys don't take kindly to that. And 
you want to be one of the team, don't you?" He put a wide, heavy hand on Jaffe's 
shoulder. "Share and share alike, right?"
  "I hear," Jaffe said.
  "Good," Homer replied. "So-" He opened his arms to the spectacle of piled sacks. "It's 
all yours." He sniffed, grinned and took his leave.
  One of the team, Jaffe thought as the door clicked closed, was what he'd never be. Not 
that he was about to tell Homer that. He'd let the man patronize him; play the willing 
slave. But in his heart? In his heart, he had other plans, other ambitions. Problem was, 
he wasn't any closer to realizing those ambitions than he'd been at twenty. Now he was 
thirty-seven, going on thirty-eight. Not the kind of man women looked at more than once. 
Not the kind of character folks found exactly charismatic. Losing his hair the way his 
father had. Bald at forty, most likely. Bald, and wifeless, and not more than beer-change 
in his pocket because he'd never been able to hold down a job for more than a year, 
eighteen months at the outside, so he'd never risen higher than private in the ranks.
  He tried not to think about it too hard, because when he did he began to get really 
itchy to do some harm, and a lot of the time it was harm done to himself. It would be so 
easy. A gun in the mouth, tickling the back of his throat. Over and done with. No note. 
No explanation. What would he write anyway? I'm killing myself because I didn't get to be 
King of the World? Ridiculous.
  But...that was what he wanted to be. He'd never known how, he'd never even had a sniff 
of the way, but that was the ambition that had nagged him from the first. Other men rose 
from nothing, didn't they? Messiahs, presidents, movie stars. They pulled themselves up 
out of the mud the way the fishes had when they'd decided to go for a walk. Grown legs, 
breathed air, become more than what they'd been. If fucking fishes could do it, why 
couldn't he? But it had to be soon. Before he was forty. Before he was bald. Before he 
was dead, and gone, and no one to even remember him, except maybe as a nameless asshole 
who'd spent three weeks in the winter of 1969 in a room full of dead letters, opening 
orphaned mail looking for dollar bills. Some epitaph.
  He sat down and looked at the task heaped before him.
  "Fuck you," he said. Meaning Homer. Meaning the sheer volume of crap in front of him. 
But most of all, meaning himself.
  At first, it was drudgery. Pure hell, day after day, going through the sacks.
  The piles didn't seem to diminish. Indeed they were several times fed by a leering 
Homer, who led a trail of peons in with further satchels to swell the number.
  First Jaffe sorted the interesting envelopes (bulky; rattling; perfumed) from dull; 
then the private correspondence from official, and the scrawl from the Palmer method. 
Those decisions made, he began opening the envelopes, in the first week with his fingers, 
till his fingers became calloused, thereafter with a short-bladed knife he bought 
especially for the purpose, digging out the contents like a pearl-fisher in search of a 
pearl, most of the time finding nothing, sometimes, as Homer had promised, finding money 
or a check, which he dutifully declared to his boss.
  "You're good at this," Homer said after the second week. "You're really good. Maybe I