Page 153 of Grim

“And don’t you fucking forget it.”

“I won’t.” She smiles. “There’s no rule anywhere that says that the act of death can’t be a merciful one. There is no time limit on forgiveness and understanding. Compassion over convenience. Think about it.”

“I will.” Then, after a beat, “No promises.”

“I’d never want you to make a promise you couldn’t keep.”

She stops speaking, and I wish she wouldn’t. The band crescendoes as she makes her way back out the door.

“Merc,” I say, stopping her. “Where are you going? When will I see you again?”

“When Time and Fate allow.”

She laughs at her own joke; I do not. I don’t speak, waiting for her to give me a real answer to those questions.

“I’ll see you around, D,” she says instead and walks out of my bathhouse and into a new kind of darkness than the one she was immersed in on the Moonless Mountains.

I stare at the ceiling, and feel the weight of every choice I’ve ever made pressing down on my chest.

“Well,” I whisper to the empty room, “this is going to be a disaster.”

ClimbingtheALPs

Sometime After That …

Where am I?

It’s not a poetic question. It’s not rhetorical. I genuinely have no idea where I am.

I’ve looked around at least fifty times now, each scan as fruitless as the last, though that hasn’t stopped me from repeating the motions like a nervous tic. The room is vast with rows of chairs that stretch in both directions like a pair of infinity mirrors. Every chair is filled, but no one’s talking. Not in a frightened way, more in that deadened, post-waiting-room-eternity way. There’s a vacancy in all the eyes here.

Across the room is a long row of desks, like a Department of Motor Vehicles designed by someone with a real flair for the mundane. Behind each steel station, workers in stiff charcoal uniforms shuffle papers, stamp forms, and speak just loud enough to be irritating without being intelligible.

How long have I been here?

I check the window for the fifth? Seventh? Twentieth time? Hard to say. The outside looks identical to the inside—same dull shades of grey and purple. There’s a sliver of a moon suspended in the sky, hanging there like an old fridge magnet. Every time I glance at it, it seemsa fraction larger than it was before, but if I stare at it to witness its waxing or waning, it doesn’t move at all.

I cannot quite figure out if I have been sitting here for a matter of moments or many hours. I am somehow no longer connected to time in a way I am familiar with. I cannot feel it. Its passage does not resonate anywhere in or around me. I do not seem to be accumulating the memory of each minute, and so they do not seem to exist. Like each second is the only second, and they all paradoxically hold the magnitude of everything and the weightlessness of nothing in each of them. It is difficult to describe. It is disorienting.

What is this place?

The line at each station never diminishes. One by one, souls are processed, papers are stamped, badges assigned, and then herded off through one of the glass doors behind the desks. I haven’t seen anyone come back. No one looks confused, nor do they protest. They just accept it.

I cross my arms over my chest and stare at the nearest clerk, who doesn’t look up. I consider grabbing a pen or something and throwing it to get their attention. But I have no pen, no paper, nothing at all.

I try not to fidget, but it’s hard when you don’t have a sense of whether you’re supposed to be fidgeting. Maybe this is all part of the test. Or maybe they’re waiting for me to crack. I’m not sure what they want from me, but I’m starting to think I’m the only one here who didn’t attend orientation.

Before I have an opportunity to begin to unpack any of these mysteries, I hear my name called from one of the desks. I stand and look around, unable to discern exactly where the sound is coming from. On the third intonation of my name, I spot the source of the sound and move toward the tiny, bespectacled woman sitting behind mountains of paperwork.

“Rue Chamberlain?” Her round eyes peek over the rim of her glasses as she looks up from her paper at my approach.

“Yes,” I say, not remembering the last time I spoke.

“Sit down.” Her clipped tone offers no room for discussion, so I slide into the seat opposite her desk.

“Where am I?”

She sighs the sigh of a person who’s been asked the same question too many times to count. A dull exhale, followed by the same answer she’s clearly given over and over again. “Welcome to the OtherWorld. This is AfterLife Processing. My name is Zandra, and I will be your ALPer.”