The Little Man Who Wasn't There นิยาย & เรื่องราว

It was then she noticed him. A man stood perfectly still near the terminal gates, as if untouched by the chaos around him. He wore a long gray coat that seemed out of place in the sticky Lagos humidity. While others shifted, gestured, and grumbled at bus conductors, he didn’t move. His head tilted slightly, eyes hidden beneath the brim of a dark hat. At first, Elena thought nothing of it. Lagos was full of strangers, after all—faces that blurred, lives that brushed briefly against hers before vanishing forever. But something about his stillness made her pause. She felt his gaze, though she couldn’t see his eyes.

Her body convulsed once, twice, then exploded into dust. Gone. Just like that. The sound that came out of me wasn’t even human. I slapped my hand over my mouth, squeezing my eyes shut, but it didn’t matter. The image burned behind my eyelids—her vanishing mid-step, her clothes disintegrating before they even hit the ground. The Game Master chuckled. “Precision, my dears,” it let out. “Precision is everything.” The next name flickered. “Number 0449.” A man this time. Big, broad-shouldered, maybe in his thirties. He muttered something under his breath and stepped up.

He was past that. The tablet screen had gone dim while we chatted. I tapped it back to life. The man on the gurney came back, frozen mid-spasm. His mouth was half-open, his eyes white. It could have been real. It might have been. I had no way of knowing from a pixelated frame and a file written by people who liked their reality staged. “Who are this poor people?” I asked quietly. “Do you know their names?” Lucia hesitated. It was small, but it was there.

"That statue... you see the resemblance, right?" I nodded. "Yeah. I do." "No chance it's coincidence." "None at all." But the Green Man didn’t move. Just stood there. As if posing. As if daring us to figure it out. Then, he was gone. Not vanished dramatically. Just... not there anymore. Farther down the road, we saw a man curled on his front porch. Face pressed to the boards, body trembling. Jonie started to move toward him, but Schnell reached out and stopped her.

Dark hair. Silver eyes. Simple black clothing. Nothing remarkable. Nothing terrifying. Nothing ancient. Yet the moment he appeared, every instinct screamed danger. Not because of what he was. Because of what he wasn't. He felt wrong. Like a sentence with missing words. Like a memory half-erased. Like reality itself had forgotten how to describe him. The man smiled warmly. "Hello." Silence. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The man glanced around. Taking in the group. The city.

The small steady presence of a man who had spent ten months learning the precise shape of when to ask and when not to ask, and who was, right now, not asking. "I told her I'd write back and I meant it," I said. "I told her to tell me about the small kindnesses. The ones that don't get written down anywhere." He held my eyes. "Why the small ones?" he said. "Because the large ones are documented. The Council knows about the compulsion and the assassination attempts and the exile. The small ones are what she actually is when no one's watching." I picked up my pen. "I want to know what she is when no one's watching."

Aside from his expensive, empty belongings, there was no trace of us anywhere. It was so clean it suffocated him. While sorting through Nora's desk, Marcus's fingers touched something hard caught in the gap of the drawer. He pulled it out. It was a forgotten diary. On the cover, written in childish letters, were the words: My Mister. Marcus's fingers began to shake violently. He opened the first page. [Date: My asthma hurt so much. Daddy went to hold Jacey because she was scared of the dark. Mommy covered my eyes and told me to call him Mister.]

"Thank Ms. Ellison for her kindness on my behalf, but my life isn't meant to clean up after her." I hung up and looked out at the busy traffic below. The collapse of that project had come even faster than I expected. A faint smile spread across my lips.

My eyes widened at what i just did, even the strange man and Ziyah seemed surprised. In the blink of an eye, the strange man disappeared leaving only a speck of dust on the ground as proof of his existence. And not another moment passed, the street lights went back on and everywhere was back to normal. It was as if nothing happened, at all. Even the music that stopped playing the moment the strange man appeared resumed playing.