The Chain Letter

The Chain Letter

What a gorgeous Sunday morning! Birds singing, spring flowers, blue sky, sunshine. The neighborhood was quiet, cars parked in driveways or along the curbs of Umbarger Lane. I pulled four days of post from the mailbox and closed the door.

I winnowed the business envelopes from the junk and held six pieces of mail. Credit card offer – junk. Political campaign donation – junk. I dropped each into the bin until only one remained. The address was penned in neatly written cursive. A woman’s hand by the look of it. Double-stamped – one inverted, the other tilted. Why the postage overkill? It had a local post mark from two days prior. I tore it open. Inside was a single page, written in the same hand as the envelope.

Dear Mister Clutterbuck,

I received this chain letter from the previous person in the chain. You must now select two people to continue the chain, selected at random from a phone book. Write your letters by hand – exact copies of this letter – with changes to only the salutation and signature lines. Finally, mail your two letters and burn this one. All of this must occur within 24 hours of reading this letter, or terrible things will happen!

If you destroy or discard this letter before continuing the chain, be warned – misfortune and calamity will befall you! If you continue the chain, however, you will feel peace and contentment, and something wonderful will happen to you in the coming week.

Sincerely,

Miss Humblebee

How weird was that? I’d heard of chain letters, and the warnings to not continue them. I thought there might be a law against it, too, to avoid clogging the postal delivery chain with nonsense. Whatever.

“Misfortunes and calamities be damned!” I said, as I crinkled the letter into a tight ball and dropped it into the bin with the rest of it.

Something thudded loudly against the front door. I hurried over and opened it. Then the impossible.

My neighborhood was gone. In its place, a wasteland of immense, crumbling, half-burnt-out buildings continued to the horizon. Dozens of black smoke columns rose and merged into a layer of brown clouds, composed, no doubt, of the soot, ash, and chemical fumes from combustion. What a dim, forbidding landscape. I stepped beyond the threshold and smelled noxious chemical fumes. My car sat in the driveway, but it was a scorched wreck, its windows smashed out.

The temperature was over a hundred degrees, and winds howled and whistled among the towering, wrecked buildings. My home's exterior was now covered in soot and pitted with bullet strikes. The metal-tined garden rake was just where I'd left it, though the flower beds were gone.

Clicking noises came from somewhere, growing louder. From behind a wrecked battle tank, its turret blown free and lying nearby, a huge, shiny black object, no, a creature, trundled toward me. Looked like it was ten feet long, with long, whip-like antenna, huge bulbous eyes, and a series of spine-covered legs. My heart pounded, and I was stricken with horror.

It looked like some kind of monster cockroach. The beast’s immense mandibles were opening and closing, as if preparing to devour me. I grabbed the metal garden rake, retreated inside, slammed and locked the door, leaned my back against it. Then I waited for the massive roach to smash through the door and enter my house.

Nothing happened. Silence, except for the ticking of my wall-mounted cuckoo clock. I jumped when the refrigerator turned on. Frozen in fear, I stood with my back to the door for perhaps five minutes, then went to the parlor window. Gathering my courage, I threw back the drapes to view the desolate landscape, and –

Everything was normal! The Hendersons were piling into their minivan on their way to church, and the bright sun shown in a clear blue sky! I unlocked the window and lifted the sash. As I did so, a hot, noxious wind blew in. The view through the open window was of the same hellish, destroyed cityscape I had seen through the front door. I slammed the sash shut and locked it. Again, the view outside showed only my idyllic, peaceful neighborhood.

I took inventory of my situation. The electric was on, as was the water. I flicked on the TV. Normal. All the usual TV shows as I flipped through the channels. I did the same with the radio. Music stations, talk radio, news, weather – normal. One last thing to check.

I grabbed the phone, held it to my ear. Oh, that sweet, blessed dial tone! I could still contact the outside world! Without delay, I dialed my friend Mitch. My fingers fumbled with the dialer, and it took me three times to get it right, but at last it was ringing.

“Hello?”

Mitch! My God, he was still alive! I had to enlist Mitch’s unwitting help. But I had to do it carefully, or he’d think I was off my rocker.

“Hey, you been outside your house at all this morning?”

“No. Just been watching some kids play soccer in the street while I drink coffee.”

“You only live a half mile away, right? I’m wondering if anything smells or sounds weird outside your place, like it does here. Can you step outside the door? See if you notice anything?”

“Henry, you okay? You sound kind’a nervous.”

“Just humor me, pal. Please?”

“Ummm… Sure. Hang on.”

I heard the clunk of the phone on the table, and, a few seconds later, the opening of a door. I heard no screams or shouts, and, a half minute later, Mitch returned.

“Beautiful out there, buddy. Perfect spring morning. All I smell in the air is spring flowers”

After doing my best to reassure Mitch I wasn’t crazy, we hung up. Then it hit me. I was completely isolated in my own house. I dare not venture outside, lest I be devoured by giant cockroaches. And what of the chemical fumes? Had there been a nuclear war? Had I already been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation? For all I knew, I might already be what nuclear scientists call a dead man walking!

What about food? And work? How could I get to the lab to work five days a week through that Apocalypse? How would I even find my workplace? I presumed the world as I knew it was still out there, somewhere. Did a facsimile of my work campus exist in this alternate version of reality, and, if so, could I reach it?

"Calm down, Henry. Just calm down. Let’s think this through."

Was this some grand illusion, or was I viewing my neighborhood sometime in the far future? Perhaps this was a time warp. If this were my present-day neighborhood as seen in the far future, that would make sense. More and more development is the norm in urban areas, such that outlying suburban regions eventually get subsumed by the city. But that would mean some terrible war or alien invasion would occur. One that would decimate civilization as I knew it. Would this happen in two years, or two hundred?

I inventoried my food supply as calmly as I could, though I felt a worsening dread as time went on. I’d recently restocked the meat freezer and pantry, so I was good on food for the next couple months. As long as the water and electricity stayed on, I could cook and drink water for a few more weeks after the food ran out. Then, certain death.

Unless…

Unless someone could bring me supplies. And money. If doctors came here for house calls, I could live here, out of a job, and keep in touch with the outside world. And I’d have to do all my own indoor home repairs. If someone else entered my house, could they leave again, or would they be trapped inside this weird reality warp with me?

I had enough money from my trust fund, along with all my savings, to live here permanently. Especially if I got financial experts to invest the money and grow my nest egg. Folks could deliver things to my front door and leave with nothing amiss. But I could not let anyone inside the house, lest they be trapped here with me. I’d have to meet friends or a visiting doctor outside, in that toxic wasteland. To them, everything would appear normal, while I would be dodging all manner of dangers.

What would others think of my strange insistence on having things brought to my house and left just outside my door, while I lived as a shut-in? Would they contact mental health services and have me committed?

It was time for an all-critical test. I dialed the number for Ned’s fish and chips and placed an order for delivery. Then I stood at my front window as life outside went on in perfect normalcy. There was Gladys weeding her flower beds. Ted mowing his lawn. Eventually, a car capped with the plastic Ned’s logo pulled up to my curb, and I rushed to the front door.

As I opened it, I confronted that hot, stinking wind again. A massive aircraft of some sort – saucer shaped and firing blinding blue light rays at something on the ground, hovered a few miles away. Was that an alien spacecraft? Invaders? At my scorched, pocked curb sat the delivery car, looking quite normal. Soon, Salim, the usual delivery guy, approached me with a grease-stained bag. I stepped just over the threshold to accept it, being careful that he remained completely outside. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, he returned to his car while I closed the door. I hurried to the window and watched him climb into his car and drive away.

It worked! I opened the bag, and there was a perfect batch of Ned’s signature greasy fish and chips! I sat down in front of the main window and feasted while relishing the normalcy of life throughout the neighborhood – at least from here. A lump formed in my throat - I felt so grateful that the world outside was still intact and that Salim wasn’t harmed.

I calmed as I ate, and my mind turned to the bigger question I’d been ignoring thus far. Why had this happened in the first place? What had I done to deserve this calamity, this threat to my very survival? Was there some huge karmic debt I had to re—

The chain letter! That had to be it! It said that if I destroyed or discarded the letter or broke the chain, misfortune and calamity would follow! I rushed to the bin and removed the tight ball of paper. I gingerly flattened it out, as best I could, and fetched paper and pen. The phone book wasn’t where I’d thought it was, and I undertook a frenetic search through my parlor and kitchen until I found it on the microwave in the kitchen. I’d never been so happy to hold a phone book!

I picked two names at random – Nathan Cunningham and Betty Harrigan. An hour later, both letters were written and signed. I re-read both of them, over and over, making sure they were faithful copies of the original. I had three remaining envelopes in the drawer, so I filled out the addresses on two of them.

Stamps! I rummaged through one drawer after another. I found one sheet of holiday greeting stamps with a single stamp remaining - precious as gold. I affixed it to the first envelope. On and on I searched, getting more frantic until I found a full book of stamps I’d forgotten about, in the top desk drawer in my study. Done!

I finished my fish and chips and considered how I might find a mailbox. Postal delivery staff refused to take outgoing mail from the mailbox, so I'd have to do this myself. But how? My heart sank with a new fear - that I might be doomed no matter what I did. After all, I'd originally discarded the letter.

No - if I wanted to live, I had to mail these letters and burn the original in the belief that the world would return to normal. The instructions said I had to burn the original after mailing the two new letters, so I folded up the original and placed it into my pocket, along with a butane lighter that was nearly full. Then I put on my fishing vest. I slung binoculars around my neck, grabbed the metal-tined rake as a self-defense weapon, and tucked the new letters into the breast compartment of my vest.

After a few deep breaths, I opened the door, letting in the hot wind and the sun’s hazy glare. I trained my binocs on the terrain before me, in the hope that post boxes still exist in the far future.

There was a battle going on over the city. Two enormous craft hovered in the sky. From what I could discern through the haze, they appeared gray and tan in color. Both of them fired those bright blue rays. Follow-on explosions echoed among the buildings, taking perhaps a half minute to reach my ears with ground shaking thunder.

I knew of a mailbox at Linganore and Bethfield streets. That was two blocks away – a right onto the sidewalk in front of my house, then one block, then a left at Bethfield, and one more block. With the door shut behind me, I set off along my street, Umbarger, the rake in hand as I glanced about in every direction for trouble.

The old neighborhood streets were still here, though a tall, narrow building, its glass exterior smashed away, stood at the corner of Umbarger and Bethfield. I made the left and trained my binoculars toward the next intersection. I shouted with joy as the image came into focus.

A filthy, battered, old post box stood where I remembered it! I took off running. Four hundred feet. Three hundred. I heard those strange clicking sounds again, and my blood ran cold. Several of the enormous cockroaches had caught my scent, or felt my footfalls, or whatever, and they were now marching toward me from both sides! I reached the mailbox, pulled out the envelopes. The nearest roach was fifty feet away!

Jammed the envelopes in. Re-opened the lid to make sure they’d slid down. I pulled out the original letter. Forty feet away. The beast was hissing, its mandibles clicking. Fumbled in my pocket for the lighter. Started flicking the knob. Again. Again. Thirty feet. A flame sprang up, and the letter ignited. I held the page to spread the flames as quickly as possible. The whole page was being consumed, turning black. Twenty feet. I smelled a rotten stench from the huge beast and closed my eyes.

Silence...

The air felt suddenly cool. A pleasant breeze from my right. Birds sang. I opened my eyes and beheld my old neighborhood, just as I remembered it. A young woman with ear buds jogged past. She glanced at me like I was a weirdo. The metal rake was at my feet, and I wore oddly mismatched clothes beneath with my fishing vest, the binoculars around my neck.

“Yeah, I’m weird,” I felt like telling her, but didn’t...