I. The Gingerbread Mansion

When Grandma Jane died, relatives came from every corner of the United States to attend the funeral and of course, to raid her home for antique pepper mills and authentic flapper costumes and plastic-wrapped cubes of Life magazines.

I know that once this house is passed down to one of you, it will legally be yours to do with as you see fit. However, while I still have my wits, I would like to state for the record that this house belongs in our family, and it would distress me greatly if it were to be sold. The eyes of the dead may not blink, but they have been known to wander.

Grandma's will was clear and unsettling. The problem was, nobody needed the house. Great-granddaughter Ellen was twenty-one, in college, and the only relative who even lived in the same state as Grandma Jane. Everyone else had homes and jobs and lives elsewhere, from Oregon to Florida to New York, that they were not willing to uproot. A large portion of the family -- the majority, in fact -- thought the will was ridiculous, and were convinced that they should sell the house and split the money they got from the sale. However, Grandma Jane's only daughter Rachel, a sixty-six year old cattle rancher in Texas, refused to simply dismiss her mother's wishes, and decided that everyone needed to go home and cool their greedy fingers for a while before any decisions were made. Rachel Goldman's will would not bend, the relations knew, so they trickled away from the controversy over the house on Lost River Lane.

Before she went back to her ranch, Granny Rachel pulled Ellen aside.

"I don't know what's going to happen to the house, hon," she said, "but I think Mom would like it if you helped get it shipshape again. And maybe stay there a while, at least until we figure out what to do with it."

"Granny, I've got an apartment here already," Ellen explained, "and I don't know what I'm doing after graduation. It depends on where I can find a job. I'd be happy to clean the place up, though.

"Mom's house is much bigger and prettier than those sardine cans you kids call 'apartments'. That house needs to be lived in. I just can't bear to think of it empty. Do it as a favor for me, perhaps?"

"I'll have to find someone to take over my lease."

"Will that be a problem?"

"Not really, I guess. School's starting soon so there are bound to be a few last-minute apartment hunters."

Ellen and Granny Rachel went to lunch at a diner; then Ellen drove Granny to the airport.

On the way home, Ellen thought about Grandma Jane. She'd seen pictures of her great grandmother as a young girl; Jane had been quite beautiful, and seemed to peer out from the now-yellowing black-and-white photographs with an intense curiosity about the future. It seemed unfair and wrong that Grandma Jane had become so frail at the end. She had been so passionate and full of laughter, despite the untimely death of her husband when Granny Rachel was only a year old. Ellen had, of course, never known her great grandfather, but she got the impression that Grandma Jane had been in love with him right until the day she died. Ellen did not like thinking about death; it gave her a falling sensation, like she was being shoved along a tunnel toward oblivion. She had always been a little morbid; at the age of twelve she'd sat down with a calculator and figured out how many minutes of life she was likely to have left.

It was a large number, to be sure, but Ellen did not like thinking of her life as being quantized. It made her feel weak and sad, and only when she could distract herself with games and classes and work and her boyfriend David was she able to truly enjoy being human.

Ellen squashed these thoughts and turned her mind to more practical matters, like telling her roommate that she was going to be moving out.

"So what you're saying is, you just inherited an entire house?" Ellen's roommate Crystal gasped in disbelief.

"Sort of. I mean, it's not necessarily mine forever, but Granny Rachel wants me to fix the place up. I have school and everything, but I can cut back on my hours at work a bit since I won't be paying rent anymore. I haven't filled out papers or anything, so technically the house isn't mine at all, but I'm going to stay there for a while."

"All by yourself? How many bedrooms are in that place, anyway?"

"Six. Yeah I know it's way too big for one person. I was thinking I'd ask Dave to stay with me, I mean, if he doesn't think it's too weird or anything."

"Ha ha, I bet your parents will love that! Moving in with your boyfriend?"

"They're going to be pissed," admitted Ellen, "especially since they really wanted to sell the place. I can just imagine what my dad's going to say: 'WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, MAKING SOME KIND OF SEX DEN OUT OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S HOME?'"

"Geez, does he actually say stuff like 'sex den'?"

"Yeah, unfortunately."

"Don't you think it's a little bit weird moving into a house where somebody died?"

"Well yeah it's creepy. But Grandma didn't want the house to be empty, and neither does Granny Rachel. It's almost like I don't really have a choice. I mean, I live in town anyway. It's such a ridiculous situation: like something out of a book, maybe, or a dream."

"Well, you better find a decent person to finish up your lease. Don't stick me with any psycho bitches."

Ellen was, after a few informal interviews, able to find Crystal a new roommate: a tiny, extremely talkative girl named Ling. Ling was high-energy but managed to avoid being outright obnoxious, and had good references. Ellen spoke with David about the potential move to Grandma Jane's, and it took all of five seconds to convince him. David wasn't the superstitious type.

There was very little furniture left in Grandma Jane's house: all but a few pieces had been strapped to SUVs and loaded into pickup trucks, and taken to relatives' homes where they were likely to look homesick and out-of-place. David and Ellen's cheap, mismatched student furniture looked small and wrong and pathetic in the ornately paneled living room and vast master-bedroom. Their bed was a full-size that had been David's; it consisted simply of a boxspring and mattress -- no frame. Both David and Ellen possessed a few closet's worth of obsolete computer equipment (they were both on the nerdy side and had pack-rat tendencies). Ellen had a childish obsession with Hello Kitty accessories, and displayed them prominently in the bedroom, but David drew the line at the Sanrio bedsheets. "They're scary!" he insisted.

None of the outlets in the house were of the three-pronged type, not even the one in the kitchen that the refrigerator (whose plug had three prongs) had been plugged into. Apparently, some relative had decided to take the cheater plug that had been there before, which Ellen found kind of pathetic. She and David spent several hours replacing the outlets so they could plug in their computers and television set and microwave. They spent a few days engaged in these mundane fix-it tasks, anime soundtrack music blaring in the background. They rented a steam-cleaner for the rugs, and even waxed the hardwood floors. Slowly, Grandma Jane's house was becoming beautiful.

II. The Attic

"This just seems too good to be true," remarked Dave as he switched off the Gamecube. I mean, we're two college kids who basically have our own mansion."

"I guess I've just gotten used to it now. I mean, it's not too strange to have a great-grandmother with a big old house. And besides, part of the reason I went to school here was so I could help Grandma out."

Dave nodded; he'd been to several quiet, strange dinners with Ellen here before Grandma Jane had gone into the hospital a few months ago. Grandma had been spry and relatively able to care for herself up until the age of ninety-three; after that, she began to burn her food more often, and to fall while trying to climb the stairs. For the last few months she spent in her own home, Grandma Jane had moved only between the living room, the one tiny downstairs bedroom, and the bathroom. Ellen had tried to spend as much time with her as possible, but often found herself making guilty excuses to avoid staying very long: it was depressing. Ellen had been in class taking a test the day Grandma had fallen and broken her hip; Grandma explained later that she had been trying to straighten a picture on the living room wall. The break would not heal, and after a month in the hospital, Grandma had just stopped eating. Her death came as no surprise to Ellen, but it was still a painful reminder that people you love can and do die, and that eventually everyone and everything will get old.

"Well, I think we've done enough cleaning for today," said Dave hopefully, knowing that Ellen could be something of a workaholic.

"Yeah, we'll probably want to get dinner soon. But I was thinking, we haven't even been up to the attic yet. It's cooled off now, so it shouldn't be too bad up there. Maybe we'll find something my crazy relatives missed."

"Cool. I'll just follow you." Dave got up out of his beanbag chair and stretched.

"It's actually more like an entire third floor than an attic," explained Ellen as they reached the end of a dingy white upstairs hallway. "There are stairs going up and everything," -- she paused to open a narrow door -- "not just one of those lame pull-down ladders."

The stairs to the attic were steep and dark and creaky. Ellen reached above her head and pulled the brittle string attached to a light bulb in the ceiling, once they reached the summit of the stairs. The attic was much larger and more open than that of most modern homes. The ceiling was very high, almost cathedral-like, and formed of stout dark beams that looked as if they'd last through World War III. It smelled like warmth and wood and age, as if the sun were being held for ransom by a pack of elderly dust bunnies. Dave and Ellen were standing in the large main room of the attic, which was fairly empty.

"Well, it looks like someone came up here and grabbed all the easily accessible stuff. Look at those clean squares on the floor; there were a bunch of boxes or something up here until recently." observed Dave.

"There's another little room off to the side there, but the door always sticks. I used to play up here as a little kid. I doubt there's anything in there, but we can look. And there's a bathroom off to the left, but you can't use it; there's no plumbing up here anymore."

Ellen opened the creaky door to the tiny "water closet"; there was, remarkably, an old toilet. It looked very small and round, and the seat was made of unfinished wood. It was bone-dry and decorated lacily with cobwebs. "Nope, definitely out of order."

Dave was already fiddling with the latch on the door leading to the other attic room. "It doesn't have a lock on it, but I think what happened is, it's got paint stuck in the hinges."

Ellen jogged over. "Weird. Looks like this door's been painted several times since it was shut; it's all sticky in the crack between it and the doorway."

Dave took out his pocket knife and began scraping away at the paint that was gumming up the little door. The floor was soon littered with flakes. "I bet this isn't lead-free paint," remarked Dave.

Ellen stuck her tongue out at him. "Well, don't eat it then!"

Suddenly, there was a cracking noise. Dave's scraping had apparently been sufficient, because when he pulled on the handle, the little door snapped open. Ellen and Dave went into a brief coughing spasm as dust swirled around them; it had apparently been a very long time since this door had last been opened.

It was very dark in the little room. "I can't feel a switch," complained Ellen. "And I don't have a flashlight."

Dave simply walked straight into the room, seemingly unconcerned by the lack of illumination. "Dave, where are you going?" called Ellen. "Dave?" No answer. Come to think of it, Ellen could not even hear Dave's footsteps anymore. She had not heard him fall, so he must be standing still. She went in after him, and it was as if a thick black blanket had swallowed her. She knew nothing more.

When light returned, it was harsh and glaring. Whatever Ellen was lying on was very soft, so soft she could not even feel it. She felt...wonderful. However, when she tried to sit up, she realized that she could not feel any part of her body. That was why it seemed soft: she was totally numb. She was able to open her eyes, though, and glance about.

"David!" she croaked, her voice feeling like she hadn't used it in years. No answer; it seemed that Ellen was alone here. It's getting cold, she thought, and realized with some relief that the sensation of cold meant that feeling was returning to her limp body. She raised her head, wondering frantically for a second if it was going to fall off. The room did not look like it belonged in a Victorian house. It looked like a waiting room for a Gothic dentist. The floor was carpeted in black, and there were a number of red velvet chairs arranged in a neat square around the room's perimeter. Ellen could not see the door she'd come in from where she lay, but she had the unsettling notion that she was no longer in her grandmother's attic.

"Do not worry about your friend, he is safe for the time being," came a rather chilly feminine voice from out of sight. Ellen heard a click, and found she could suddenly move. Her instinct was to flee, but where to? She decided that she had best examine her surroundings before doing anything drastic, so she pulled herself up onto one of the chairs.

Her visitor came into view from around a corner Ellen hadn't seen before. This room was apparently adjacent to a hallway of some sort. The voice had indeed been feminine, but the person (was it a person?) who had walked in looked androgynous. He/She was very tall and slender with sharp, delicate features on a pale, beardless face. The person's hair was black, straight, and bluntly cut. "You may call me Mr. Nightingale", he said.

Like Florence Nightingale? thought Ellen, as she filed the visitor under "male".

"I can understand your disorientation, Ellen, and I apologize for the rough nature of your welcome here."

"Where's David?"

"David is currently in your great-grandmother's attic, sleeping peacefully. When he awakens, if all goes well, you will be right beside him, telling him that he's taken a nasty knock to the head."

"What do you mean?"

"That door in the attic. Your great-grandmother dropped something in that little room, a long time ago. She tore the house apart looking for it."

"Whoah, slow down here a second. First of all, how do you know Grandma Jane? And second of all, where exactly am I?

Mr. Nightingale smiled. "Suffice it for now to say that you are here. Your mind is not able to accept the truth of your situation quite yet."

Mr. Nightingale reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a needle. "Hey, you're not going to drug me again, are you?" exclaimed Ellen, jumping out of her chair.

"This is not a drug, my dear, it is simply a memory."

Click. Ellen slumped to the floor then; apparently there was some sort of paralysis-inducing device (she surmised) indicated by the short, sharp click. So she hadn't been drugged at all, at least not yet.

Mr. Nightingale leaned over and said softly, "You will understand once you absorb the memory. Ignorance, I'm afraid, is simply not an option."

The needle came down into her neck painlessly.

III. The Memory

"It is clear here that this cannot go on," came a weary, baritone male voice. Ellen looked around with a start; she was sitting in a hard, high-backed chair made of some glossy black wood. Around her arched a domed stone ceiling; this room was perfectly round, windowless, and cool. In front of her was a large table constructed of the same wood as the chairs; it was so large that Ellen could barely make out the face of the man speaking at the other end. She went to rub an itchy eye, and discovered that she was wearing glasses. She did not wear glasses normally. She looked at her hands; her skin was now extremely pale, her fingers much thinner than they had been previously. Her hair, rather than being short and blonde, was deep auburn and fell in soft waves about her shoulders.

Apparently, Ellen (was she still Ellen?) was alone in the room with the man. She stood up. The ground seemed further away than usual; she was wearing shiny black leather boots that made resonant clicking sounds as she walked down toward the head of the table.

"Jane is your name, correct?" The man's eyes scanned her vertically, lingering perhaps a mite too long on her chest. "Yes, that's right." Ellen stifled a gasp: what had just come out of her mouth? She realized now what Mr. Nightingale had meant when he said he was going to give her a memory.

Her words came effortlessly, and Ellen-within-Jane found that she could observe with her own, separate consciousness while Jane's body and voice moved in appropriate, unalterable motions. This had already happened.

"The last ship leaves tomorrow. Our time here is over; the sunset of our people is long overdue, and it is an -- abomination for us to stay any longer. We have earned our place in the lore and legends of these people, and it is inappropriate for us to continue using them."

"I do not wish to use them, Elder One. I simply want to live out the rest of my days here, as one of them. This is the only home I've ever known."

"We no longer need this world, dear girl," said the Elder One. "Our science is advanced far beyond theirs. We need to let them develop, and perhaps in time they will rejoin us. But the way things stand now, the relations between our two peoples are like a bad marriage that has gone on far too long."

Jane felt her cheeks grow hot at the mention of the word "marriage". "My husband needs me here."

"Ah yes, your human husband. He will forget you, in time." The Elder One looked down his nose at Jane, with some distaste.

"If I were to stay, I would become...like him," said Jane softly. "I will not use him. You have my word."

"Without the drug, you will eventually die, Jane. Is that what you really want? Without the drug, you must use these people or wither and grow old."

"If I can grow old with the one I love, then I will achieve immortality each moment we are together. Life is a function of quality, rather than quantity."

The Elder One looked at Jane. He could see in her eyes the absolute conviction that accompanies one so deeply in love that everything they say is a sort of primal poetry. He reached into his robes and produced a small object that looked a bit like a metallic seed. "Put this in a dark place, Jane. If we ever decide to return, for any reason, it will allow us to find you."

The meeting hall melted away, then, and Ellen/Jane was standing in a field of long, silken grass. She was dressed in gray velvet, and clutching the arm of a handsome, dark-haired young man with eyes the color of emeralds. A mighty roar sounded around them, and Jane's skirts billowed in the sudden wind, swirling around her like a whirlpool of molten silver. A massive object rose before the young couple; it was vaguely oblong, gray, and apparently seamless. It shot straight up into the sky above the vast grassland, and then seemed to wink out of sight. Jane sighed deeply, and helped ease her very young, very overwhelmed husband to the ground. She stroked his forehead with her hand, and sat with him a while. When he awakened an hour later, she teased him a bit for falling asleep in the shade after their picnic.

Her eye had a crinkle in the corner that would not fade, despite the creams applied religiously before bedtime. And was that silver beginning to creep across her temple? She was only thirty! Her love for her husband had not faded since the honeymoon, but recently she had become aware of an emptiness in her future, as if she were creeping ever closer to an abyss. Was this mortality? The knowledge that living is dying, that someday she would stop observing, that all the details of being alive would decay as her brain broke down into rot? The sustaining drug was fully gone from her system now; but there was a way...no! Her husband was already asleep, bare-chested in the warm summer evening. She could see his veins laced intricately through his skin: a work of art. Veins branched into smaller vessels; the circulatory system was a truly marvellous thing, a fractal life-engine mapped over an intricate framework of bone and muscle. He loved her; perhaps if she explained the situation to him, he would give her the gift of forever? She felt an aching tightness in her jaw and clamped her mouth shut; she realized that in order to keep the thirst from overcoming her, she'd need to practice the meditations daily. As a child she had learned to change when the opportunity to feed presented itself. Now, it had become reflex, and she needed to consciously stop it from happening. She breathed deeply and felt her mouth relax. Gently, she covered her husband with a sheet, turned off the light, and climbed into bed.

Jane was crying, then, crying on a white eiderdown rumpled across a bed far too large for her alone. Her daughter was asleep in the little bedroom downstairs; the four other bedrooms in the big, beautiful house would remain empty. Her young husband had fallen while working in the new factory, and would be buried the next day. She vowed never to remarry. Part of her wanted to move away, far away, to take her daughter and live a smaller life in a smaller house. But she had lost something. Put it in a dark place, the Elder One had said. So she had. It was somewhere in the house...but where? Now that her reason for staying was gone, she longed to join her people, wherever they were. Why had she not made the locator seed into a locket, or something similar she could keep with her at all times? How could she have been so careless?

IV. Seed

"So you see, Ellen," Mr. Nightingale's girlish voice faded in, as if the volume were slowly being turned up on Ellen's perceptions. "Jane was trapped on Earth. If we had returned, we would have been able to detect the seed from orbit. However, until she died, we had no reason to return."

Ellen felt herself twitch; it was as if she had fallen a long distance and somehow landed painlessly. Her mind was whirling; suddenly, much of her life up to this point seemed unimportant and absurd. How could she ever have been concerned with homework and housecleaning? Human minds normally operate within the confines of a sphere called Earth. Ellen now felt as if she moved in a much more expansive space, and an elongated stretch of time.

She blinked several times, and found that she could move freely once again. She picked herself up off the floor, welcoming the familiar feeling of being in her own short, slightly plump body. She ran her fingers through her boyish yellow hair, so that it stood slightly on end. One question was nagging her, so she asked it. "How could you possibly have gotten hold of Grandma's memories?"

"They were within you, Ellen. You were closest to your great-grandmother in the years before she died. The 'needle' I used on you was simply a device to bring Jane's memories to the forefront of your consciousness. Memory is simply a pattern, and one of the attributes of our -- your great-grandmother's -- race is a keen ability to project patterns. That is precisely the reason we are here now, suspended above your world: no member of our race has died in several thousand years. All of us are patterns, in essence no different from the memories we form. Our lives are like strands of wire, curled and folded and stretched through spacetime. If a single pattern abruptly ends, it is as if a thread in a tapestry has suddenly been cut. Do you understand?"

"I think so," said Ellen. "But then what did you need the seed thing for? Couldn't you just...beam down or something?"

"The mechanism of the locator seed is to amplify an individual's pattern. It allows us to fix coordinates on a location so that we can transport them here. Jane could have used the seed to contact us after your great-grandfather died, but she could not find it and therefore could not operate it. Your David actually stepped on the seed when he walked into the attic room, activating its emergency function. We brought you both here, but when we realized David was not a relative, we sent him back. It is dangerous for him here; my people have not been around a genuine human being in a long time. The old hungers might return, despite our efforts to socialize these...behaviors out of existence."

Ellen began to laugh. Vampires from space? This HAD to be a dream. She began to giggle so hard she could barely breathe. "So...does that mean I'm a vampire too?" she snorted.

Mr. Nightingale seemed annoyed. "This is not a dream, and this is not a laughing matter. You must treat this information responsibly."

Ellen figured she must have cracked. "Gee, I could really go for a rare steak right about now!"

Mr. Nightingale looked very hurt. "Do you want me to turn on the paralysis field again? If you cannot deal appropriately with this information, I will not allow you to return. If you persist in believing this is a dream, the dream will never end."

Ellen straightened up and was suddenly embarrased. This was a lot to deal with; her mind was spinning, but she no longer felt like laughing. "Why are you telling me this?"

"We needed to know what happened to Jane. Leaving her here was something of an experiment. The only way to find out was to tap her memory, or that of a female relative. Without Jane's memories, our race would be incomplete. We would like nothing more than to take this experience from you as well, so that you could go on living your simple human life. However, your biology makes that impossible."

"Well...couldn't you just smack me on the head or something?"

"That is a most distasteful, unscientific, and unreliable method."

"I was just kidding. Look Mr. Nightingale, or whatever it is you call yourself. My day couldn't possibly get any more weird. What could I possibly do with this information? If I told anyone, they'd just stick me in the mental ward. I'm happy with David, and I'm happy with my 'mundane existence'. So just send me back."

There was a flash then, and Ellen found herself crouching on the attic floor, hovering over a still-unconscious Dave. "Geez, he could have warned me he was going to do that," she muttered under her breath.

Back on the ship, Mr. Nightingale sauntered confidently into his boss's office. "The girl has been returned to Earth."

The Boss, a muscular woman with vaguely Indian features, jumped out of her chair. "What did you just say, Nightingale? Because it sounded like you just said you sent her back."

"Oh, don't worry, she has assured me she will use her new knowledge responsibly. She was a very nice young lady." Nightingale looked very pleased with himself.

"It wasn't supposed to happen that way." sighed The Boss. "Do you realize you may have just undone the past sixty years of progress?"

"We are hunters, Prani, and it is not progress to deny what we are. I have given this girl a gift beyond measure: the knowledge that she can be immortal."

"You're insane, Nightingale." Prani stated flatly. "But it's possible you may have done the right thing. The sustaining drug is not turning out to be the panacea it seemed."

Dave began to mumble and fidget. "Shhh," soothed Ellen. "You've hit your head. Just sleep now." He looked so handsome, lying there on the floor. And he loved her so much. She leaned over and found his lips. They were sweet and smooth. Dave smiled; he was waking up now. He pulled her down on top of him and returned the kiss. Ellen felt a strange tightness in her jaw, then, and her head began to inexplicably move toward his neck. It was a reflex action. "That feels nice," he mumbled. She opened her mouth, and Ellen knew, then, that she had changed. Something about a meditation danced vaguely through her mind, but a much more powerful longing for youth and beauty consumed her. She was not equipped to resist. Just a little bit, she told herself. I don't want to kill him. I promise, I'll only take a little bit...