They were all there at the end, even if it did make the room very crowded. On the bed the dying woman wheezed slightly, her closed eyes flickering open just for a second. They were standing four and five people deep, and not everyone saw. But they all felt the sigh of nervousness that rippled outwards from the bed at the movement, what might have been a sign of consciousness. After all that, she only closed her eyes again and wheezed her slow breaths out.

“What happens?” someone asked in a hushed voice, embarrassed to be breaking what seemed to be a reverent and sepulchral silence. “I mean, when she…” There was no immediate response, as they shifted amongst themselves and tried not to be antagonized by the question. It was, after all, one that several of them had been thinking.

“They go to heaven, or so they say.” A faintly cultured accent from some western European country could be heard speaking above the thick silence in the room. There might have been more to it but he thought better of it.

The first speaker felt the need to clarify, in any case. “No, I mean, to us…”

“Oh.” The cultured man’s voice didn’t have an answer for her, and neither did the others gathered in the room.

The woman on the bed wheezed in an exceptionally loud breath, then coughed it out again. “Daniel… are you there?” Her voice wouldn’t have carried a foot beyond her pillow, but they heard her anyway. It wasn’t her lungs that gave her voice to them.

A man stepped forward, and the crowd parted to let him through out of automatic deference. None of them thought to question it. He knelt down by the dying woman’s bedside and patted her hand with a delicacy that highlighted how thin she looked, paper skin over fragile bones. “I’m here, love. We’re all here.”

She smiled a little, still not opening her eyes. “I know. I can feel you there.” Her chuckle had a raspy and rattling quality to it. “I can feel you all there. But you’re not as loud as you usually are. Cat got your tongue?” And she chuckled quietly again.

Some of the group smiled, and some chuckled to themselves, quietly out of respect for the dying but with clear and more relaxed humor. Some frowned slightly, thinking the joke in poor taste, and perhaps it was., but they’d never say so. Not even the most vocal of them would have raised their objections now. Daniel stroked his fingertips over the back of her hand and smiled. “Cat’s here too, you know.”

“Of course she would be.”

The old woman did not speak again. It was another hour, perhaps two, before she died, and her people kept their uneasy and frightened vigil the whole time. She never woke again, not even enough to speak to them. The man she had called Daniel held her hand until she died, then folded her hands over the blankets and stood without disturbing the bed.

“So.”

“So that’s that, then,” a voice said through the crowd, anonymous in that clumsy way that voices speaking out of crowds could be.

“So now what happens?” The first woman added her voice to the other’s, and there were murmurs through the crowd of people who wanted to know.

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Daniel said, quiet but firm. “Whatever happens, it’s out of our hands now.”

They all stared at the dead woman as though she had the answers, but of course she no longer did. If he had been less mindful of their uncertain fear, Daniel might have pointed out that she had never really had any of the answers in the first place. They had always had the answers to all her questions, and theirs as well. She was just the one who wrote them down.

The day nurse came and recorded the time of death, phoning the hospital and the family. There was no inquiry, not when she had been ill for long enough for her family to realize that she was dying. There were no doctors, the day nurse was certified for what needed to be done.

They shifted about the rest of the house for some time, alone with the shell of drying meat that used to be their friend, unsure of what to do next. Sometime through the day a few of them got lost, and this made the rest look at each other with uneasy sideways glances, fearing that they, too, would be next. Many of them stayed in or near her room, out of a need for reassurance or a sense of protective affection. Daniel took charge of the youngest ones, herding them like cats and making sure that they stayed away from the more hysterical and loud speculations. No need to create more unrest than there was already. No need for alarm.

He’d been waiting for this for some time, talking privately with her about what would happen when the day came. She hadn’t had any more of an idea than they had, but they had reassured each other that she would do her best to see them taken care of. Daniel knew the truth of this, better than anyone else and perhaps even including her. He was the oldest of them, after all.

After a few hours the family arrived to take charge of ‘the effects.’ Daniel rather thought that this was a silly turn of phrase; weren’t they, after all, the effects? Them, and the house and her quirks and collections of oddities, all the other things the family seemed to be concerned with. They were all the effects of what she had done over sixty some-odd years. So, he reconsidered, perhaps the term was correct after all.

They began to pack up her computer, her piles and piles of notebooks and notes, all the while remarking on how old-fashioned she had been. Reams and reams of paper weren’t the usual thing anymore, but she had had at least two entire walls devoted to all the hand-scrawled notes she’d taken over the course of her lifetime. She’d never thrown any of her notes away, even the ones scribbled down on napkins and copied three times over in meticulous handwriting. Always, something would be different, and it was that difference she was trying to collect.

Daniel had always thought it very silly and inefficient, but it was one of the secret parts of her he had loved most of all. Not that he’d ever tell anyone.

“Don’t touch those, Meg. That’s hard-copy, and it’s not very durable.”

That would be her mother, Daniel thought. She spoke with the absent-minded tone of someone who is used to being obeyed because what she says is correct, of course. Meg ignored her with the usual air of an adolescent who is sure that she knows best.

“Ooohhh!” Meg squealed with delight, which made several of the others look up sharply. Some of them were already beginning to look faded around the edges. Any loud noise could set them off. “Look!” The girl ran over to her parents and thrust the book at them, open to a page she evidently very much wanted them to read. “It’s all the notes for Maelstrom!”

The father blinked a bit. “Aren’t you a little young to be reading Maelstrom?” he asked. It seemed to be an old debate.

“Oh, horseshit.” Daniel looked sharply at the speaker, although Meg hadn’t seemed to have heard. “Well, it is. She was writing things more graphic than Maelstrom when she was at least as old as Meg.” Daniel hushed the woman and turned his attention back to the room.

“Look…” Meg said, holding up several computer disks. “I found these, too. Stuck between the pages. They’ve been there a while,” she added, although by the creases on the paper it wasn’t necessary.

“Hmm. I wonder what’s on them.” The mother started the computer up again and put the first disk in as soon as it had reached the menu screen. She didn’t seem to be hoping for much of interest, Daniel noted, although he had no idea what would have been of interest to her. The expression on her face suggested that she was only humoring her daughter. Her eyes changed from tolerance to startlement as she opened the first folder.

“What is it, Momma…” Meg leaned over her mother’s shoulder. Her father leaned over the other shoulder, quieter than the teenaged girl but no less curious. “Let me see.”

“Oh my…”

“That crazy old bat,” the father said, fumbling to put on his glasses. “That deranged, wonderful, amazing old… It’s all here! All of it! Fifteen, sixteen… no, eighteen versions before she finally wrote ‘the end’ and went on to something else!”

Daniel breathed a sigh of relief he hadn’t known he’d been holding in and slumped backwards into a chair. Then he landed on the floor with a thump because the chair had faded about an hour before. Meg did turn around at that sound, and Daniel hastily glared around the room until it was quiet. She didn’t seem to see them yet. Best not to invite trouble before they knew what they were getting into with her.

Next to Meg, her father went on chattering. “It’s all in here… character descriptions that read like some kind of psychological profile, story outlines, notes about the worlds she was creating… she wrote everything down! Everything! I don’t think she tossed any of it! Look, you can barely follow this, I think this is something she came up with in the shower…”

“Dear, shouldn’t we keep this private, maybe erase the disks?”

“Are you kidding? This is … this is incredible! And it’s all so neatly archived…” Meg walked very quietly, almost tiptoeing, into the other room while her parents bickered back and forth. From what Daniel had seen of her son and his wife, he’d win the argument anyway, and their daughter seemed to know it. Her daughter-in-law could never be bothered to get enthusiastic about a good book or a well-acted play, although to give the poor woman credit she did try. But Meg seemed to have inherited the family curiosity, and was now looking around intent on finding out what that thump in the other room had been.

The young girl squinted around the bedroom, her eyes adjusting to the dim light. “I know you’re in there,” she said softly so as not to alarm her parents. “I heard you.”

Selene stepped forward, to the shocked and terrified (and some covertly approving) glances of everyone in the room. “Shouldn’t you be with your parents?” she asked the girl gently.

Meg’s eyes widened. Daniel sighed; not only could she hear them she could definitely see them now. “I know you,” she said softly. “You’re Selene of the Bear Clan.” Selene nodded. “You’re in the Outcasts of Deep Glen trilogy.” Selene nodded again, and Meg’s eyes grew even wider. “But.. what are you doing here?”

“We’re all here,” she said, gesturing around the room as it expanded to fit everyone. “We came to say goodbye to her.”

Meg looked as though she wasn’t sure that made sense, but she didn’t ask any more questions. “So… you’ve said goodbye. What happens to you now?”

Daniel stood, sighing heavily. “Well, that’s the real question we’ve all been asking. See, the thing is, we don’t really know. Our best guess is that if we’re not remembered, if our memories died with her, we just fade away. That won’t happen, of course, for those of us who’ve been written. Or at least, not for a while. But there’s at least two, three times as many of us as people know. They’re the ones who’ll go first.”

“It has already begun,” said one young man Meg didn’t recognize.

Meg’s eyes widened. She looked almost afraid. “But… but you’re all so… that’s not fair!”

There was a soft chuckle from several corners of the room. “That happens a lot,” one man said, tall, blonde, and almost elfin.

“I mean it,” she said with the sort of righteous indigence only a fourteen year old girl could muster, although she did glance at the speaker and blush when she realized she had his full attention. “It’s not…”

The echo of her grandmother, Daniel thought, exchanging an amused glance with the blonde.

Meg seemed to think of something while they were trying to decide what to do, and she looked back to where her father was busily packing up disks and notebooks. “But the notes… you’re all in there. And I bet some of you that didn’t get... well, you’re all in there.”

“Well, yes.” Daniel agreed. “More than you might believe. But if they don’t ever get read, no one will know about them.”

Meg looked furious. “Well, that’s just…” She stalked into the other room and grabbed the box of disks from her father’s startled hands. She was also still talking to them, despite the fact that her parents clearly couldn’t see them. “That’s just… stupid!”

“Meg, honey… it’s what she wrote,” her father said, utterly confused.

“No, not that… oh, never mind,” she told her father in a tone of deep exasperation, and stalked back into the room with the box clutched to her tiny chest. “I’ll write. I’ll write and I’ll write and I’ll write. And somehow, I’ll make it all work out.”

Daniel stared at Meg, torn between disbelief and amusement. Almost everyone else was staring at them both, waiting for him to make up his mind about her. If she won his approval, they might have hope. Nebulous, and with uncertain implications, but it was still a hope.

After a long silence he began to chuckle. Then he began to laugh. And then he was leaning back against the wall and sinking to the floor, howling with laughter, with some of the others joining in as they saw the joke and others just staring at the rest of them as though they’d all gone mad. “Sorry,” he said finally, when he could speak again. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you sound so much like your grandmother.”

The poor girl had been looking at him as though scared of what she was getting into, but with those words her face changed to stubborn resolve and a familiar irritated gleam in her eyes. “I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you,” Meg half-snapped, although she was blushing a little.

Daniel managed to stop laughing after a moment, if only to keep from scaring the poor girl any further. “It was a compliment,” he said, sliding an arm around her shoulders to reassure her. And perhaps to reassure the others as well, re-establishing his place in the new order of things. La reine est mort, after all, he thought to himself. Vive la petite reine.

“And, you know something? I think you’ll do just fine.”

Go to the top! For you have reached the bottom.