Page 46 of Grim
“So,” I continue, “what you need, milady, is a proper drink. Let’s go find you something to wash down that bitter taste I can see swirling around in your mouth.”
I offer Rue my arm and begin to scan the room for a libation station that could accommodate Rue’s mortal tastes.
We don’t make it far. A cold gust brushes over us, though there’s no wind. And they appear—the Weaver Sisters—whose gazes snake their way over every inch of Rue’s body.
They do more than simply tower over Rue as they take her in. They hover and undulate. Their limbs weightless and bending at angles that ignore the laws of flesh and gravity. Their silhouettes blur at the edges, like half-drawn ink sketches that never fully dried.
“There she is, sis,” Fate sings to Time, her icy eyes slicing Rue in half. “Oh, look at that little dress, what do you think?”
“Not much to think about it honestly,” Time cuts, causing a prickling sensation in my neck. “She can only work with what she has I suppose—which is very little.”
“I certainly don’t see what Kane seems to.” Fate doubles down.
Rue catches my eye, perhaps wondering if I’ve said anything to them.
I meet her eyes, trying to tell her without speaking, No, I haven’t said anything.
“All I see is a meddlesome little brat,” Time hums, “ who thinks she’s entitled to tinker with the very seams of the universe.”
Rue speaks up for the first time. “I’m sorry. Have I done something to upset you?”
The Sisters cackle with derisive laughter.
“Upset? Hardly.” Fate scoffs.
“A little speck like you can’t upset us. You have, however, become a bit of a rough edge in desperate need of smoothing out,” Time continues. “After all, we do not care much for you awakening old cases and finding new endings to stories we finished writing ages ago.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Rue’s confusion is evident.
“We are the authors of mortal tales, miss,” Fate says, voice like a blade unsheathing. “Not you.”
“When we write The End ,” Time adds, “it stays ended.”
“Not an invitation for you to come along and pen some bleeding-heart epilogue.”
“Lost souls are not meant to be found, Rue.”
Awareness dawns on Rue’s face. Her lips part as she quietly says, “Claire Simone.”
Fate smiles like a shark. “Exactly, Rue.”
“She made her choice,” Time snaps. “She wanted to stay. Those decisions are final.”
Rue bristles before raising her chin, defiant as ever. “Everyone deserves a second chance.”
Their laughter returns—harsher this time. Less amused, more unkind. “No, my pet ,” Fate sneers, “they do not. That’s not how life or death works.”
“Everyone must play by the same rules, mortal,” Time echoes.
“Our rules.”
“Or everything descends into madness.”
“And we can’t have that. That’s far too messy.”
I see it then. The fire behind Rue’s mask. It licks up the back of her spine and curls around her fists. I know what comes next, and I have to stop her.
I say, warning her softly, “Rue.”
Before any of the women can say any more, the herald’s voice rings loudly off the walls of the ballroom. “ Souls of the OtherWorld, it is time. Cease your carousing and bring your attention to the center of the room.”
The stillness is absolute. Even the shadows seem to hush. A hundred masked faces pivot as one, all eyes on the herald.
“The Send-Off commences,” he intones. “Make way for Death and the Parade of the Pathetic.”
Rue mumbles, barely audible, “He really does like his alliterations.”
I would smile if not for what I know is coming.
Big D appears at the far side of the room.
He drags behind him a massive chain that loops around his broad shoulder like some ceremonial sash—except the sash hisses and groans under its weight.
At the end of it, a tangle of grey souls, bound at the limbs, necks, and torsos.
Shackled to one another by memories they were never able to release.
They move like ghosts underwater, sluggish and resigned. They know what this is. They’ve seen it before. Some of them have probably watched from the sidelines during past Send-Offs, hoping they would never join the chain.
Big D walks theatrically, like a man headed for the podium at his own award ceremony.
He rounds the crowd and leads his condemned into the clearing. The herald’s hand lifts, gloved fingers stiff, and just like that, every sound in the ballroom dies.
No final note from the quartet. No rustling of gowns or murmured gossip behind masks. No scrape of shoes on marble or glass on tray. Just absence.
Thick, unnatural, and cloying.
The kind of quiet that only arrives when something terrible is about to happen—and everyone knows it.
“Now we await the proclamation and decree from the ruler of Death’s Door, LLC” the herald announces, drawing everyone’s attention to Big D with a flourishing wave of his hand. “The crowd listens for your judgment.”
A tremor moves through Rue’s fingers, which remain locked around my arm, small and trembling and too human for this place. She doesn’t say anything, but I feel the change in her. I feel the stillness coil inside her rib cage, like a spring pulled too tight .
And I know, without looking, that her eyes are on the chain.
Big D stands at the center of the ballroom like a war general surveying a battlefield carved from marble and smoke.
Draped over one broad shoulder, a dark tether stretches behind him—shifting, alive, like smoke trapped in glass.
It binds the condemned to him like the strings of a marionette.
They shuffle after him like well-worn puppets, stumbling forward in jerks and spasms. Some are barefoot, others in the remnants of uniforms or gowns, all greyed out, muted by time and shame.
They are spectral shells, each one collapsed in on itself.
No longer screaming. Just breathing. Just waiting.
Like they already know they are moments from obliteration, and the worst part is not the fear, but the understanding.
They were never going to make it.
Big D clears his throat and delivers the same speech many here have heard countless times before. Rue, however, has not, and she hangs on every word.
“Denizens of Death’s Door, A Limited Liability Corporation …”
His tone is syrupy. “You have failed me.”
Rue’s hand tightens on my forearm so hard it takes me by surprise. She doesn’t look away, doesn’t even blink.
“You have failed our system. Your inability to complete the tasks assigned to you is a direct result of your inability to let go of the past and focus on the present.”
He pauses in front of a small grey woman, hunched beneath the weight of the chain.
“Memories,” Big D spits, “of your former lives—your failures, your regrets, your insignificant longings—have corrupted your thoughts. Distracted you. Kept you tethered to a world that is no longer yours.”
One of the souls falls to their knees. A broken, heaving sound escapes them—low and dry and void of any hope. Another tries to speak, but their mouth moves without sound.
“You crossed over,” he says with sacred reverence. “And a new world opened before you. But you chose to turn around. To remain obsessed with what came before. And for that weakness, for that core-deep failure … ”
He spreads his hands.
“We now leave you to The Nothing.”
The silence that follows cracks and splinters. It holds the sound of hearts breaking open and lives ending. A murmur rises—begging, pleading, promises strung together. But they’re too little, too late.
“I didn’t know—please—let me try again—”
“There’s still something in me—”
“I remember my daughter’s laugh—please don’t take it—don’t take it—”
Big D ignores their weak protestations and raises his hands in front of his face. Staring at the center of the room through the gap between his fingers, Big D grins as he slowly stretches his hands, and with a slow, parting motion, he pulls.
The ballroom floor groans. The chains writhe and flex like boa constrictors around each of the punished.
The grey souls panic. One tries to flee, but the chain pulls taut and yanks them back with a bone-snapping force.
Another begins to scream in nonsensical agony, but then the sound is swallowed whole by the chain’s grip around his spectral throat.
A fracture rips through the center of the marble like a scream splitting a mouth wide open, and then the ground yawns apart like an earthquake contained inside a snow globe.
The room around the middle remains eerily still as the bottom of the floor opens to the void below.
The space created beneath the chasm has no features, no curves, no discernible markings of any kind.
It is white, long, and flat. It is depthless. It is endless.
One by one, the so-called Pathetics descend into that haunting mundanity, released from their interconnected metallic yokes.
The furious struggling from moments before gives way to a disturbing calmness as the souls cross over to their final destination.
They move to their ultimate end of their own accord, a final stab at their tattered dignity.
Rue can’t breathe beside me. She whispers, “Where are they going? Why isn’t there fire or volcanos or something?”
“This is worse. This is pure Nothing.”
“Nothing? ”
“The opposite of pleasure is not pain, Mayday. It’s boredom. Soul-crushing emptiness.”
I watch realization dawn behind her eyes as she takes in the final moments of this spiritual massacre. This mass exodus to the waiting room with no end.
And then the floor closes back up, neat and seamless. As though it never happened.
The chains that hovered above the hole crash to the floor as it slams shut, and the heavy metal ignites and disintegrates in a puff of fire, like so much flash paper.
Ash floats in the air like confetti. It lands on my coat sleeve. On Rue’s mask. On the hem of her dress. We both just stare at it, watching the memories fall like grey rain.
Big D claps a single sound that rattles. Those crystalline flecks in the air tinkling audibly.