Van Elliott was in his early thirties, a widower and quiet man. My mother said he’d been lucky not to be home when the fire swallowed everything he owned in the middle of the night. She had smelled the smoke drifting in through her own window in her sleep, and was the one who’d called the fire emergency.
I lifted my gaze just long enough to wave at Amelia behind the desk before dipping back into the screen, asking if they’d identified the cause of the fire. Her response wasno, and she was just heading back home after giving her statement to the police.
As I read that, another notification blinked onto the top of my screen.
Thrax
No, I didn’t delete it.
I froze between two shelves, my eyes widening as I fixed them on the message. All these while, I thought he’d snuck into my room and deleted that photo of him craning his neck up my window. He hadn’t deleted it. The one I had snapped of him from my room the first night I arrived in Nimorran.
Me
Then what? It just…vanished
on its own?
I hit send, pulling a book similar to the last one I read. I didn’t know if I should give up on using the Soulless Man as my thesis. There was no record of him anywhere, and the only new thing I could write down was what he’d tell me himself. Which was a no because I told him I wasn’t trying to get any fuck-ass information out of him or turn his life into an academic scavenger hunt. Doing that would be going against my words.
But what could I even write? I met him in Nimorran and lived with him for a month? Anyone would laugh me out of the room. It still didn’t feel real even to me. Everything I put on paper would read like a fever dream because no one—no one—had been able to track him down. Not historians, not desperate truth-seekers who made their living out of chasing ghosts and chucking people who went missing for years back into their homes. No one knew a thing.
They didn’t even know that he cast no shadow.
My phone vibrated against my palm.
Thrax
There are a lot of things that come
with having a soul.
My lips pressed together, brows furrowing.
Me
So you can’t be caught on camera…
because you don’t have one?
Same reason why he cast no shadow—he didn’t have a soul. I’d mentioned it before, but he was actually a dead man. A ghost.
Me
But I saw the photo right after I
took it. It only disappeared later,
when I checked again.
Thrax
Proof that I exist and don’t exist
at the same time.
A sigh escaped me, half frustration, half awe. My thumbs hovered above the keyboard, words rushing to the edge of my thought but never making it through. The more I learned about him, the harder it became to look at him without wanting to dismantle every secret he carried.
But what good would knowing do? He’d lived over a thousand years. What fraction of his story could I possibly learn before I, too, disappeared from this place?
