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In about the time it takes a living human to exhale, the white boulders beneath John and Mabel break apart. The sands of the

Californian Pacific shore rise and swirl around them until rock and sand are indistinguishable.

A dizzying shift as the world spins and blurs.

A navy quiet.

And then they’re shooting through water, dark and dimly lit by some unknown source of light from far above.

It’s all vaguely familiar. John catches glimpses of some things they pass, though it hardly makes sense because judging by the speed at which they rush forward, it shouldn’t be possible for anything to be more than a blur, yet there they are: a dark carriage with emerald curtains that float through broken windows like sheeted phantoms.

.. a colossal statue of a man with the head of a bird.

.. a computer the size of a small house.

.. a pristine charcoal-and-red-hulled ocean liner. ..

The Ocean of Memories.

As soon as he realizes this, the Ocean is gone.

They’ve crossed through.

6

Emerald grass

stone arch

dirt road.

John and Mabel stand beneath a billowy-clouded sky beside a broken stone wall before the ruins of a grey-bricked two-story

building. Half of the house gapes open, the edges around the missing bricks of the facade blackened from the fire. There are

vestiges of a large garden, and John remembers there were many rosebushes there, once. Piles of brick lie scattered in the

dark green, overgrown grass.

The orphanage. The Grey House.

“It makes sense if you think about it,” Mabel says, “traveling through memories. We go through life bouncing from one to another.

Where we put the car keys, what we’re supposed to pick up from the supermarket...”

“It’s fast, I’ll say that.”

He leaves Mabel to approach the house and stops just before the wide steps that lead to the dilapidated door. “I loved this

place. I felt so safe. Until those boys came.”

“And yet the thought of what happened in the outside world scared you even more. The orphanage was certainly the lesser of

two evils. But after dying, you also came here to hide. From yourself.”

John flinches at the sharpness of truth. It’s still difficult to come to terms with himself, with who he was.

“The Grey Man feeds off decay and fear. Stagnation, which is a kind of death. He was always in that house. Probably somewhere down in the depths of it, dormant when you were ignorant of the truth. But he made his appearance when you began to consciously remember, which would inevitably lead to pain.”

“You make it sound as if he were trying to save me.”

She does not reply.

“So what now? I go in there. Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

John stares at the door. Half the orphanage is exposed, yet the door looks firm enough. Strange. “I have a choice?”

“We always have choices.”

“But if I went back to Los Angeles, hugged Persephone and Ruben, told Hannah I changed my mind, well, I’d probably fade away

to nothing, or become invisible, forget everything... right?”

Mabel stares back at him with that unbothered expression of hers.

He can’t help but get the sense that doing anything but moving forward through that door would be going backward. “I don’t

know if I’m ready, now that I’m here.”

“So much of what we think we want, we don’t really. I used to think I wanted to be born. After several hundred years—or maybe

it was a thousand, can’t be sure—I just kept waiting to be born. I thought that was the goal, something I was supposed to

be working toward or maybe just something that was going to eventually happen. And then somewhere along the way I thought

What are you going to do if you are born? What if you forget everything you’ve seen? I started thinking maybe I didn’t want that. I’ve seen some amazing things. Anyway, I don’t know what I want anymore. But

I do know that yearning makes us live in the future, live in the past, spend our time thinking about what we don’t have and

what we aren’t. We make ourselves one moment at a time. And one moment is all we’ve got.”

He focuses on this moment and what he wants to do with it, what he wants to make of himself.

John places a foot on the first step. Pauses. Takes another step. He turns quickly.

Mabel still stands where he left her, looking up at him. “You don’t have to go in there, John.”

“To face down the Grey Man, you mean.”

“The Grey Man isn’t a man. But you know that.”

He suspected it.

“The Grey Man is the Grey House is you. And here you are.”

John turns to face the door. Mabel is wrong. He does have to go in there. Beneath his fear he wants to, because he knows that

he belongs somewhere, in some time, some space, that exists someplace beyond here.

“Persephone and Ruben,” he calls over his shoulder as he inches toward the door, “they’re going to be all right?”

“Yes, John.”

“It’s just that I caught a hint of something developing, but Persephone can be quite hard, and I worry for Ruben, but you

know he isn’t as na?ve as I once thought and I think he’s got a few things to show her.” And he realizes he has to know: “Is

Persephone really going to go back to ballet? Will she be happy?”

He puts his hand on the green, oxidized doorknob.

He can feel it! In all its cold, rough glory.

“Will Ruben be happy?” He whips around. “I want to—”

John is alone.

He sweeps his gaze over the partial stone wall and across the verdant knolls and knows he’s seen Mabel for the last time.

At least, he has on this side of things.

He turns back to the door.

The Grey Man isn’t a man.

The Grey Man is the Grey House is you.

7

In another world, this ruin of an orphanage is a Grey House sitting in the middle of an ocean of memories that spans time and space and for the greater part of John’s Dead Years, John roamed aimlessly, wanting to forget and wanting to be forgotten.

He’d put himself there. And then he’d inadvertently put himself out.

And now he wants to be wherever is next.

He thinks he is ready, or rather, he hopes so.

John twists the doorknob, which slides round with an ease that belies its decrepit state. He steps through the door and into

a study of decay. There’s a crumbling staircase, straining to reach the second floor and just managing to make it before it

despairs. Empty glass bottles and wrinkled plastic wrappers litter the floorboards. Spray-painted in red on the exposed brick

of the far left wall: haunted! Underlined three times in case anyone fails to get the message. A pungent tang hits John’s nostrils—urine. Loads. He scrunches

his nose, but he grins because there could be feces dashed against the walls for all he cares— I can smell again. The scent of rotted wood and cigarettes and the soft give of the old floorboards beneath his feet—the senses he’s been robbed

of return in a rush—

A low rumble and the floor vibrates.

Spilling over the edge of the top floor is a grounded storm cloud. There’s a moan, a grumbling, as the grey tumbles down.

And there he—no, it —is, coalescing from the plumes.

The Grey Man.

The thing that is not separate from John at all but a part of the past, a part of his present that he’s kept alive in his

sorrow and isolation. He accepted what it was before, had dared to stare it in the face.

But he couldn’t defeat it. Why?

His gut clenches, his arms tense.

The Grey Man isn’t a man. The Grey Man is the Grey House is you.

John takes a breath and relaxes into resignation of all that cannot be undone.

All this time John has believed himself to be an echo of the living man he once was, but it is the Grey Man who is an echo,

an echo of John’s fear, of his guilt, of his pain. John can never truly fix what he’s done, because in some cases there can

be no full recompense. There is only moving forward. It is not selfish to acknowledge this, rather it is simply acknowledgment.

Acceptance.

He accepts who he was, who he is, where he is now.

No guilt.

No baggage.

No weight.

He’s a fog , John had mused before. How do you fight that?

You don’t.

8

The Grey Man rises and advances but hesitates when John doesn’t back away but instead takes a step forward. And another step

and another.

For a flash of a moment the Grey Man’s features sharpen, and it’s as if John faces a grey-tinted mirror. The creature stretches

out an arm and John’s steps falter as he is struck with the realization that the Grey Man is not reaching out to destroy him

but reaching out . It was what he was doing just before John had fallen out of his House, reaching out to keep John in the House, to keep John

in hiding. It was what he was doing when he reached into John and began the process of his fading, so he could not wander

invisibly through the living world, but eventually fade back into the Grey House... into forgetfulness.

The Grey Man repeats this now because pain and guilt and fear do not go willingly.

John’s hesitation during this epiphany lasts only a moment, and then he rushes forward to meet his leaden creation directly.

John braces himself and takes the final steps until he stands within it.

The air is clear.

There is no Grey Man, but a circle of fog rolling gently in the near distance. John turns slowly in place. The Grey Man is

nowhere to be seen.

Meeting him was like walking into any fog: from a distance, seemingly impenetrable and perhaps ominous, but upon entering,

one realizes one is alone, and whatever fiends thought to be lurking there were of one’s own making.

9

The House rumbles and the walls waver. The exposed bricks beneath haunted! lift away from one another, crumbles of mortar raining to the floorboards, which themselves bend and twist, sending the floor

into swells. To the right, just a few feet away, bits of wallpaper tear soundlessly and float gently through the air like

ash. Something shifts and John reels back. His feet slap water. It must be rising up from the cellar; he used to hide there

from the others. And it’s rising quickly, already covering the bottom portion of his leather trainers, which, curiously, darken

upon contact.

A crossroads of the physical and metaphysical worlds.

The house drops a half meter or so to one side, and water floods through two windows. John rushes toward one of them.

The cumulous clouds, the partial stone wall, the grass, the hills in the distance... all have been replaced by a void for

sky and, below it, the Ocean of Memories, which surrounds the House, as it always has.

John has slipped completely out of the world of the living.

Panic rises faster than the water at his feet as an early-twentieth-century telephone and a slim bookcase come over the window

ledge turned waterfall. A black-lacquered box rushes past. Is he supposed to run somewhere? Is there some talisman he’s supposed

to find hidden in the walls? A wireless speaker floats by. Finding some special thing doesn’t seem right. Mabel looked so

patient, standing before the ruined orphanage. She just waited for him to either make his move forward or turn back. She’d

waited.

The Grey Man is gone. The Grey House is nothing to fear. And John has done what he’s set out to do, what he’d set out to do

the moment after he took his last breath. Now there is only to wait for the unknown thing. This, too, he accepts.

John wades through water to the ramshackle staircase, which is no longer a staircase at all but a series of wood slats suspended

in midair. He sits on the third, and is reminded of sitting in the Hollywood O beside Persephone.

As they looked out at the expanse of lights across Los Angeles, so now he looks out at the lamps and side tables and books that float through the room, which look like so much debris floating on the surface after some tragedy. Say, the crashing of an airliner.

John smiles to himself. It’s like one of Ruben’s perfectly circular glazed donuts: full circle.

The house falls another meter or two and the ocean cascades from all sides and the house begins to sink.

John steadies himself, knowing this is the right thing yet unable to fully relax into it. Transitions can be frightening.

It’ll be seconds before the entire house is engulfed by water, before it is all over.

The scenario is a familiar one, only this time, he is awake.

10

The house ceases to move.

The water no longer pours in through the windows. But it’s there, just outside. The house is submerged but the unnaturally

dark water stops short as if buffered by invisible windowpanes.

Silence.

John isn’t dead—or rather, he is, but... he isn’t deader, he supposes.

He walks carefully to the window nearest the front door. He looks up but there is no light shining down through the water

from some otherworldly sun. Why the house is suddenly dry and hasn’t been thrown into complete darkness is beyond him, but

John just goes with it.

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what state he’s truly in. He doesn’t know if he’s in some other place he’s created

for himself or if he’s in a realm so many people expect to visit afterward. He doesn’t know if he’s alone or if there are

other people out there, other ghosts, or if perhaps—and maybe this is a stretch (or is it?)—he’s seconds away from being reincarnated

or the like, or if this is something so far out it’s something he’s never even heard of.

John doesn’t know.

But he wants to.

And so he walks to the door, which somehow withstands the pressure of trillions of tons of otherworld-water. He takes hold

of the doorknob.

He shuts his eyes and braces himself just before inching the door back a fraction. He pauses.

There is no rush of water.

And he smiles because though his eyes are closed, he knows he stands on the precipice of something new, on that sliver of

space between all that has happened before and all that shall happen next.

John opens his eyes, pulls open the door fully, and steps through...

and it begins with a bright white light.