Beyond Reality : the beginning of the end : Ethan path

The rain had been falling for two hours when the envelope arrived at the private detective’s Ethan cole office.

He hadn’t heard a knock.

He hadn’t seen anyone enter.

It was only when he lifted his head from the papers of one of his cases that he noticed a brown envelope carefully placed on the edge of his desk.

He paused.

For a moment, he simply stared at it.

The office was locked. The windows were shut. There wasn’t a sound coming from the hallway.

He stood, locked the door, and returned to his desk.

Strange cases were nothing new to him.

Missing persons, affairs, blackmail, and problems the police preferred to ignore because they weren’t worth wasting their time on.

But this envelope was different.

There was no sender’s name.

No address.

Not even a postage stamp.

He opened it carefully.

Inside was a large sum of money and a thick black file.

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On top of the file was a single sheet of paper.

He read the message:

“I want you to find this man.”

Beneath the sentence was a photograph.

A homeless man standing in front of a closed store.

A long coat.

Gray hair.

An ordinary face—so ordinary that it was difficult to remember.

There was nothing particularly distinctive about his features.

He turned the photograph over.

There was a date and a location.

No name.

No description.

No explanation.

He returned to the file.

He began turning through the pages one by one.

Surveillance photographs.

Short reports.

Dates.

Different locations.

The man appeared at a train station, then on a street several kilometers away, then outside a hospital, and later in another part of the city.

At first, nothing seemed strange.

Until he noticed the timestamps.

He stopped turning the pages.

He went back to one of the photographs.

Then to the next.

Then compared them again.

The man appeared in two different locations...

At exactly the same time.

He slowly raised his head.

He checked the records again.

Then muttered:

— Impossible.

He placed the photographs side by side.

Eight kilometers separated the two locations.

Yet the timestamps on both recordings were identical.

Not a minute apart.

Not even a second.

He turned to the final page.

There, he found a name written by hand:

The Man Who Belongs Nowhere.

He stared at the words.

He didn’t understand the reason behind the name.

But something else caught his attention.

Almost every photograph had been taken within the past month.

Except one.

It was old.

Very old.

Seventeen years old.

He lifted the photograph.

Then froze.

The man was standing in almost the exact same place.

The same face.

The same gray hair.

The same long coat.

Even the small watch hanging from his hand...

was the same.

He slowly lowered the photograph.

Seventeen years.

He hadn’t changed.

He moved closer to the lamp and held the photograph up to the light, as if searching for some hidden trick in the paper.

There was nothing.

Just a man standing in front of a camera...

as though he hadn’t aged a single day.

For the first time in years, the detective felt that the case in front of him might be far bigger than a simple missing-person investigation.

But there was something he didn’t know.

The person who had sent the money and the file wasn’t watching his investigation from a distance.

He already knew the detective would accept the case.

More than that, he knew exactly where every clue would lead him.

Elsewhere in the city...

inside a room drowned in darkness, a man sat alone at a small table.

There was nothing in the room except the faint light reflecting off an old pocket watch.

He placed it in front of him.

Opened the lid.

The hands began to move slowly.

Then he started turning them backward.

The second hand stopped.

Time itself seemed to retreat.

The man smiled.

Then whispered:

— It has begun again.

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