"The missing are not gone. They are simply somewhere you cannot reach."
based on an original concept by Salaar Irfan
***
December arrived the way it always did in London — not dramatically, not with fanfare, just a gradual tightening of the cold and a shortening of the light until one morning you woke up and it was dark before five and the coffee shops had put their Christmas menus in the windows and the city had made its annual quiet decision to become a different version of itself.
Silas noticed it on the first Monday of the month.
He was walking to school, hands deep in his coat pockets, breath fogging, and the street had Christmas lights strung between the lamp posts — small white ones, modest, the kind that suggested rather than announced. The off-licence had a cardboard reindeer in the window. The coffee shop on the corner had a chalkboard outside with Gingerbread Latte Season written on it in the careful handwriting of someone who took the chalkboard seriously.
He walked through it and felt, unexpectedly, something that was almost normal. Almost just a person in a city in December, on their way somewhere, with somewhere to be.
The feeling lasted approximately thirty seconds before the archive hummed and the gold eye pulsed once behind its closed door, and the weight settled back around his shoulders like a coat he couldn't take off.
But thirty seconds was something.
He was learning to count the thirty seconds.
The E. Voss letters were still in the kitchen drawer.
He looked at the drawer every morning at breakfast and every evening when he came in, and every time he made the same decision — not yet — and every time the decision felt slightly less like a choice and slightly more like avoidance, which were different things, and he was aware of the difference.
He had told himself, after finding the name DON'T on the wardrobe mirror, that he would look into Elias Voss properly. That he owed it to himself, to the situation, to whatever was happening in this flat with its wiped shelf and its arranged objects and its yellow book with no title on the spine. He owed it to E. Voss, too, maybe — to know who they were rather than just the shape of their absence.
He'd been saying this to himself for two weeks.
On the second Tuesday of December, sitting at his desk with his homework finished and the flat quiet and his mother asleep, he finally opened his laptop and typed a name into the search bar.
Elias Voss, London.
He pressed enter.
He sat back and looked at the results.
There were not many.
This was, itself, information — most people left more traces than this. A social media account here, a mention in a local article there, the ordinary accumulated digital residue of existing in the twenty-first century. Elias Voss had almost none of it. Either he'd been very private, or he'd been very young, or the traces had been cleaned up by someone at some point — and the archive, humming in its quiet place, offered no clarification because the archive gave him truth, not internet search results, and it had already given him as much of Elias Voss as it was going to give without hitting the wall.
The first result was a university page — a student profile for an undergraduate in philosophy at a London university, updated three years ago. The photo was small and slightly blurred, the way university profile photos often were, but he leaned forward and looked at it carefully.
Dark hair. Slight build. A face that was younger than twenty-six — this was probably from his first or second year — with the particular quality Silas had half-seen in the archive's impression: someone who spent a great deal of time in their own head. The eyes in the photo were looking slightly off-camera, as if something in the middle distance had caught his attention at the exact moment the shutter clicked.
Silas looked at the photo for a long time.
Then he scrolled.
The second result was a missing persons notice.
Not on a police website — on a community forum, the kind where neighbours post about lost cats and suspicious vans and local events. It had been posted nine months ago by someone named marieV, and it was short:
Looking for any information about Elias Voss, 26, last seen in the East London area approximately one month ago. If you have seen him or have any information, please contact— and then provide a phone number.
One month ago from nine months ago. Eight months before Silas had moved in. The same timeframe that the archive had given him for E. Voss's departure. The same gap between vacancy and their arrival that the letting agency had been odd about.
Last seen.
Not moved away. Not relocated. Last seen.
He stared at the screen.
He scrolled further. No other results of substance — a few name mentions that were clearly different people, nothing that connected to a person who had lived at his address, nothing that suggested Elias Voss had shown up somewhere after the forum post and been found and was fine.
He went back to the forum post. marieV. The username suggested a first name and a last initial — M. Voss, maybe. A sister, or a mother, or someone who shared the name. Someone who had been looking for him nine months ago had left a phone number.
He looked at the phone number for a long time.
Then he copied it into his phone's notes app and closed his laptop and sat in his room in the December dark with his hands flat on the desk, not moving.
Last seen.
Elias Voss, twenty-six, philosophy student, dark hair, slight build, the quality of someone who spent time in their own head — had lived in this flat for seven months with a yellow book on his shelf and had been last seen eight months ago and had not been found.
The flood without the anchor, the King had said.
Silas sat very still.
Outside the window, the December night was doing its December thing — the orange glow of streetlights, the particular quality of cold air pressing against glass, the distant background noise of a city that never fully stopped. Somewhere down the street, someone was playing Christmas music at a volume that was just barely socially acceptable.
He thought about Elias Voss reading the book. Sitting in this room, on this floor, with the same yellow cover and the same thick pages and the same ornate typeface on the first page. Reaching for the door when the flood came. Finding nothing on the other side of the reach.
He thought about DON'T scratched into the wardrobe door with something sharp, pressed hard enough to last through months of vacancy.
He thought about the groove in the plaster beside the book — the evidence of someone reaching for it repeatedly, changing their mind, reaching again, the physical record of a three-week argument with himself that Silas had also had, and that Elias Voss had also lost.
He opened the kitchen drawer.
He looked at the two envelopes.
He took the older one — the one that had been there since the first day, the one from before they'd moved in, the one that had been waiting on the mat when his mother opened the door — and he sat at the kitchen table and looked at it.
E. Voss. Flat 4B.
He turned it over. Still sealed. Still just a letter.
He put it back in the drawer.
He went to bed.
He lay in the dark for a long time, the gold eye dim on the ceiling, and thought about what it meant to be last seen, and what it meant to not be found, and whether Elias Voss was somewhere or nowhere, and which of those was worse.
He did not dream.
He didn't tell Nora immediately.
This was partly because he hadn't worked out how to say it — I found out the previous tenant of my flat went missing eight months ago, and I think he read the same book I read, and it killed him, which was not a sentence that had a clean entry point. And partly because the information was still settling in him, finding its shape, and he'd learned that things he talked about before they'd settled tended to come out wrong — incomplete, or more alarming than they needed to be, or less alarming than they should be.
But he was aware, over the first two weeks of December, that he was carrying something new and that carrying it was changing the texture of things in a way that Nora, who noticed everything, was going to pick up on eventually.
She picked up on it on a Thursday.
Library day, their usual table, the December light already going grey outside the windows by half three in the afternoon. She'd brought tea — she always brought tea now, it had become an unacknowledged ritual, one of the many unacknowledged things between them that they treated as simply how things were. He'd come in with his philosophy book and his notebook and the weight of Elias Voss's missing persons notice sitting somewhere in the middle of his chest.
They'd been working in silence for forty minutes when she said, without looking up: "Something's different."
"Lots of things are always different."
"Something specific." She turned a page. "You've been carrying something for about two weeks, and you've been deciding not to tell me, and I've been waiting for you to decide to, but you haven't."
He looked at the side of her book.
"You could just ask," he said.
"I could." She looked up. "I'm telling you I've noticed instead. Those are different things."
He met her gaze. She was right — they were different things. Asking put the pressure on him to answer. Telling him she'd noticed, just put the information in the room and left the decision where it had always been.
He closed his philosophy book.
"The previous tenant," he said. "I looked him up."
Nora set her pen down. "And?"
"His name was Elias Voss. Twenty-six. Philosophy student." He paused. "He went missing eight months ago. There's a missing persons post on a community forum from someone called marieV — probably a relative. No follow-up. No found-him post. Just the original notice and nothing after."
Nora was very still.
"He read the book," Silas said. "I know he did. The scratch on the wall, the shelf being wiped, the DON'T on the mirror — he was in this flat with the same book, and he read it and—" He stopped. "The King said vessels don't usually survive. Said the flood ends them. He didn't have an anchor."
The library was quiet around them. Outside, the December afternoon was fully dark now, the windows showing nothing but the reflection of the room.
"How long have you known this?" Nora said.
"Two weeks."
Something moved in her expression. "Silas."
"I know."
"Two weeks." Her voice was careful in the way it got when she was being precise about something that mattered. "You've known for two weeks that the person who lived in your flat before you went missing, probably because of the same thing that happened to you, and you didn't tell me."
"I was still working out what it—"
"I'm not angry," she said. Which was interesting, because she sounded slightly angry. "I just—" She stopped. Picked up her pen. Put it down again. "I thought we were past that."
"Past what?"
"The thing where you carry everything alone until it's already too heavy, and then you hand me the weight after it's cost you something." She looked at him directly. "The café was five weeks ago. I thought—" She stopped again.
He looked at her. The thing she'd cut herself off from saying was visible in the set of her jaw, in the particular quality of restraint that meant she was choosing words very carefully.
"I know," he said quietly. "You're right."
"I'm not trying to—"
"You're right," he said again. "I should have told you. I didn't because I hadn't finished thinking about it, and I didn't want to hand you something half-formed. But that's—" He paused. "That's the same habit dressed up in a different justification."
She looked at him for a moment. Then the tension in her jaw eased, very slightly.
"Yeah," she said. "It is."
The library held them in its quiet. Someone at the far end of the room turned a page. Outside, a bus went past, its headlights briefly sweeping the window.
"The letters are still in the drawer," he said. "Both of them. I haven't opened them."
"Why not?"
"Because whatever's in them is—" He searched for the right word. "Final. Once I open them, I can't know what they say. And right now I'm still—"
"Building yourself up to it."
"Yeah."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, in a different register — quieter, more careful: "Do you want to open them together?"
He looked at her.
"Not now," she said quickly. "Not if you're not ready. But — when you are. If you want someone there."
He held her gaze. The gold eye and the brown eye, both of them on her, and she held it without looking away, without the slight self-consciousness that eye contact with the gold eye sometimes produced in people who weren't used to it. She just looked at him, steadily, offering the thing she was offering and leaving the decision where it belonged.
"Yeah," he said. "I'd want that."
She nodded once. Then she picked up her pen and opened her book again, and he opened his, and they sat in the library until it closed at five, and neither of them said anything else about it.
But something had shifted again — not the small shift of the park, but something larger, something that had weight to it, the particular weight of two people who have had their first real argument, if you could call it an argument, and come through it to somewhere more honest than where they'd started.
The almost-argument had happened on a Wednesday, he realised later. They had their library on Thursdays. On Friday, they sat together at lunch with Priya and Marcus and Jess, and Nora was the same as always — precise, dry, funnier than she let on — and so was he, or tried to be, and nobody mentioned anything.
But Priya, sitting beside him, said very quietly while the others were distracted by something Jess was saying: "Whatever you two sorted out this week — good."
He looked at her.
"Don't," she said, still quietly. "Just — good." She went back to her food.
He went back to his.
He thought about what good meant in Priya's register — which was usually several things at once, compressed into the most efficient possible word — and decided it meant something like: I've been watching this for two months and it's about time you figured out how to be honest with each other and also I'm not going to say more than this but I wanted you to know I noticed.
He ate his lunch and thought about the word honest and what it meant in the context of everything he was still withholding — not from Nora specifically, but from the situation, from himself. The letters in the drawer. The phone number is in his notes app. The groove in the plaster and the word on the mirror and the archive's wall where both their futures should have been.
He was getting closer to something.
He could feel it the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue — the shape of it, the weight of it, the almost-thereness of it. Something that all the pieces were pointing toward, something that the King was watching him approach with the patient attention of something that had been waiting a very long time.
He ate his lunch and let the feeling sit.
On the Friday evening, his mother called him into the kitchen.
She was sitting at the table rather than cooking, which was unusual for a Friday. A cup of tea in front of her, hands around it, the specific posture of someone who has been thinking and has decided to stop thinking and start saying.
"I contacted the letting agency," she said.
He sat down slowly. "When?"
"This week. After our conversation about the previous tenant." She looked at her tea. "I asked about the flat history. About what the difficulty was that they'd mentioned."
He waited.
"They were evasive," she said. "Which told me more than if they'd answered directly." She paused. "Eventually, the woman I spoke to said that the previous tenant had experienced a — she called it a mental health crisis. That he'd been found in the flat in a state of acute distress and taken to the hospital. That the family had terminated the tenancy on his behalf." She looked up. "She said he'd recovered and been discharged. But she said it in the way people say things they've been told to say."
Silas was quiet.
"His name was Elias Voss," his mother said. It wasn't a question. "You already knew."
"Yes."
She looked at him for a long moment. "How bad was it? What happened to him?"
He thought about the flood without the anchor. About the third depth. About the thing that had no name because nothing had ever gotten close enough to name it, and what it would mean to touch it without getting out in time.
"I think he went further than I did," he said. "I think he went somewhere he couldn't come back from properly."
His mother's hands tightened on the mug.
"But he's alive," Silas said. "The agency said he recovered."
"They said he was discharged," she said. "That's not the same thing."
He looked at her. She was right. It wasn't the same thing.
"His family put up a missing persons notice," he said. "Nine months ago. No follow-up."
His mother was very still for a very long time. Then she said, in a very controlled voice: "I wish I hadn't found this flat."
"I know."
"I wish the agency hadn't called us out of nowhere with a flat at the right price in the right location." Her voice stayed controlled, but he could hear what it was costing. "I wish we hadn't moved here."
"I know," he said.
"But we did," she said. "And you read it. And you—" She stopped. She looked at him — the white hair, the gold eye, the face underneath that was still her son's face — with an expression that he didn't have a word for. Something between grief and love and fury and a mother's particular brand of determination that things are going to be all right, whether they want to be or not. "You're still here," she said.
"I'm still here," he said.
She reached across the table and took his hand — both hands, holding his in both of hers, which she hadn't done since he was small.
"Because of Nora," she said. Not a question.
He looked at her. "How did you—"
"You talk about her," she said simply. "Not a lot. But the way you do — it's not the way you talk about school or places or things. It's different." She looked at their hands. "Whatever she is to you, whatever you are to each other — she's the reason you held on. Isn't she?"
He thought about the white space and the flood and the terrible, vast pressure of everything the universe had ever known, and the single specific thing he'd grabbed on the way down.
"Yes," he said.
His mother nodded, once, with the particular nod of someone filing something important.
"Then," she said, "I'm very glad she exists."
She let go of his hands and stood up and went to put the kettle on, and the ordinary Friday evening resumed around them, and he sat at the kitchen table and thought about anchors and about glad and about the two envelopes in the drawer three feet from where he was sitting.
He did not open the drawer.
But he looked at it differently now.
Saturday. The Victoria Street library, which was open on weekends and had become a second library day by unspoken agreement — Nora showed up at eleven, he showed up at eleven, the good table by the window was always available as if it had been reserved for them specifically, which it hadn't, but which felt, increasingly, like it should have been.
She was there when he arrived, coat on, coffee from the machine in the entrance, already reading. She looked up when he came in, and the look she gave him was the assessment as usual, but with something added to it — the particular quality of attention that had developed since Thursday, since the almost-argument and the coming through it. Something that was paying attention not just to whether he was okay but to something more specific, something that was about him rather than just about his state.
He sat down. He took out his book.
"I found a missing persons notice," he said, without preamble. "Nine months ago. Posted by someone called marieV. Probably family." He put his phone on the table between them, the screenshot of the forum post open. "There's a phone number."
Nora looked at the phone. Then at him. "Are you going to call it?"
"I don't know what I'd say."
"You'd say you live at his old address and you found something of his, and you wanted to make sure it got to the right people." She paused. "The letters in the drawer. That's true."
He looked at her.
"It's also true that you want to know what happened to him," she said. "But you don't have to lead with that."
He picked up his phone. He looked at the number. He thought about Elias Voss, twenty-six, dark hair, slight build, the quality of someone who spent time in their own head — last seen eight months ago, found in the flat in a state of acute distress, discharged from hospital, not found again.
"Not today," he said.
"Okay."
"But soon."
"Okay," she said again, with the patience she had for things that needed time. She picked up her coffee. "Do you want to tell me more about him? What you found."
So he did.
He told her about the university profile, the philosophy degree, and the slightly blurred photo with the off-camera eyes. He told her about the forum post and the phone number and what his mother had found out from the letting agency — the acute distress, the hospital, the family terminating the tenancy. He told her about the archive, giving him the name and the impression of a face, and then the same wall where the future should be.
She listened the way she always listened — completely, without interrupting, her eyes on him rather than anywhere else.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then: "He was twenty-six."
"Yes."
"Studying philosophy."
"Yes."
"And he wrote DON'T on your wardrobe mirror."
"Yes."
She looked at the library table between them. "Don't what, do you think?"
"I've been trying to work that out." He paused. "Don't read it is the obvious answer. But he'd already read it — he was already on the other side of it. So maybe—" He stopped. "Don't go deeper. Don't try to look for things the archive keeps locked. Don't—" He stopped again. "Don't be alone with it."
Nora looked at him. "That last one."
"Yeah."
She held his gaze. "He didn't have anyone."
"No."
"And you do."
He looked at her across the library table, in the December afternoon light, with the coffee going cold and the philosophy book unread and the missing persons notice screenshot still open on his phone.
"Yes," he said. "I do."
The particular quality of the silence that followed was something he didn't try to name. He just let it be what it was — the library around them, the afternoon outside, Nora across from him with her hands around her coffee cup and her eyes on his face, steady and present and not going anywhere.
Then she picked up her book.
"Read," she said. "You're three chapters behind."
He picked up his book.
He read.
Outside the window, December continued its patient work of making the world colder and darker and somehow, despite all of it, more like itself — the lights and the cold and the particular warmth of being indoors with someone, which was its own kind of anchor, which was perhaps what December had always been for.
That night, he opened his notebook.
Elias Voss, he wrote. Philosophy student. Twenty-six. Last seen eight months ago. Mum found out: acute distress, hospital, family terminated tenancy. The missing persons notice is still up with no follow-up.
He paused. Then:
He went too deep. Or the flood came, and there was nothing to hold onto. Or both. I don't know which yet. I might not know until I open the letters.
He paused again.
The phone number is in my notes app. I'm going to call it. Not today. Soon.
Then, after a long pause:
Told Nora about the missing persons notice today. She asked the right questions. She always asks the right questions.
He stopped. Looked at what he'd written. Then, in the small writing at the bottom of the page:
She said, "You do" — you have someone — and she said it like a fact, not a question. Like it was already settled. Like it had been settled for a while, and she was just saying it out loud for the first time.
I think it has been settled for a while.
I think I've known that for a while.
He closed the notebook.
He turned off the lamp.
The gold eye faintly lit the ceiling — steadier now than it had been, more constant, as if the changes in him were settling into something permanent rather than provisional. The archive hummed. The flat was quiet.
In the kitchen drawer, two letters waited with the patience of things that had nowhere else to be.
He fell asleep thinking about the phone number, and about what he would say when someone answered, and whether he was ready to hear what they would say back.
He thought he might be.
Almost.
End of Chapter Five.
Etched Oblivion — Chapter Five An original concept by Salaar Irfan