Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Lindenstrasse ·
The Doorbell at Lindenstrasse
A retired postman in Lindenstrasse hears his own doorbell ring every night at ten past nine, and when he opens the door, the step is empty, but a parcel addressed to his late wife is waiting on the mat, sealed with the same string he used to tie her letters.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Frank Lowell, retired postman
I delivered post on the Lindenstrasse round for twenty-seven years, and I know every door on the street. I knew which dogs bit and which ones wagged. I knew the old lady at number fourteen who always had the kettle on, and the young couple at twenty-two who kept a parrot that swore in three languages. When I retired, the round was given to a lad from the depot, and I took my pension and my bicycle and my old canvas bag, and I stayed in my house at number seven, with my wife Peggy, and I was happy.
Peggy died in the March of the year after I retired. It was her heart, quick and quiet, in the kitchen with the radio on. I found her by the sink. I sat with her till the ambulance came, and afterward I could not bring myself to go into the kitchen for weeks.
The doorbell rang on the first night in April, at ten past nine. It is an old bell, the kind with a brass push and a long wire, and it has a sharp, metallic note that I had heard every day of my married life. I was in the front room with the lamp on. I put down my tea and went to the hall, and opened the door.
Nobody was on the step. The street was dark and still, the lamps lit along both sides, the parked cars silver with dew. I looked up and down the pavement and saw nobody.
Then I looked down.
There was a parcel on the mat. A brown paper package, tied neatly with string, the knots tucked under in the way I always tied the string on the bundles of letters I used to carry. It was addressed in ink, in a hand I knew better than my own. *Mrs. P. Lowell, 7 Lindenstrasse.* There was a postmark, but it was smudged, and it looked like an old one, the kind of stamp they stopped using before the decimal coinage.
I picked it up. It was light, and it smelled of her: lavender water, and the soap she used to wash her hair, and the faint sweetness of the sugar she always kept in the cupboard. I did not open it. I put it on the hall table and went to bed.
The next night the bell rang again, at ten past nine. There was another parcel on the mat. Same string, same ink, same smell. Addressed to her, from me.
I went to the depot. The lad who had the round now was a sensible young man named Dave, and he sat me down in the staff room and asked whether I was sleeping. I told him about the parcels. He went very quiet. Then he said that a bundle of letters for number seven had come through the sorting office the week before Peggy died, and that they had been returned unopened, with the note *Addressee deceased*, and that nobody had ever found them.
He went to the store and came back with the bundle. It was tied with the same string. The top letter was from me, in my own hand, addressed to Peggy, dated the day before she died. It said: *Don't forget the sugar. I'll be home by six.*
I have never opened the parcels. I keep them on the hall table in a row, twelve of them now, one for each night since the bell first rang. Each one is addressed to her and each one, I am certain, is from me. On the first of every month I walk to the depot with a fresh bundle of letters tied in string, and I leave them on the counter, unstamped, for the lad to sort. He never asks where they go. He just takes them, and signs the book, and says, very gently, that the round is in good order.