“After countless people risked their lives exploring every kind of cave, they reached a single conclusion. The olm is extinct.”
The man said it calmly as he closed the book. The boy cried out as if he had been wronged.
“Then what’s that? If that isn’t an olm, what is it?”
The boy was pointing at a tiny amphibian barely large enough to sit on his palm.
Its skin gleamed pitch-black, as though it had been painted with freshly ground ink. Yet its neatly clustered toes, which branched into three prongs, the tip of its long tail, and its thin gills all shimmered with a faint golden light. The brightest gold of all came from its small, round eyes.
According to the description in the book, olms were generally pale-skinned and eyeless. The creature’s proudly displayed coloring and its two clearly set eyes matched none of those passages. Its size and shape, however, were entirely consistent with the description.
“No matter what you see, there is no olm. It’s extinct. Even if you can see it, I can’t. I want to believe only in what I can see.”
The man picked up a newspaper instead of the book. He no longer seemed interested in persuading the boy or even willing to argue. Between the furrows of his brow, stained by worry, only reality fit neatly into place.
“I wish I couldn’t see it either.”
The boy’s voice sank as low as it could go. And no wonder. Only the boy could see the olm. He had been able to see it ever since it first appeared before his eyes.
The man seemed unaware that the olm was sitting right in front of him, atop the ashtray.
Unconcerned, the olm moved forward, alternating its legs as if splashing through water. It continued in the same direction for more than a minute, yet could not leave the tiny ashtray. There was no need to explain how slow it was.
“Abel, I understand completely. At your age, it’s not unusual to get caught up in some ridiculous superstition once or twice. I understand a hundred times over. There are plenty of people in this world who say crazy things even after they’ve become adults.”
The man casually tapped his cigarette over the ashtray. The ash passed straight through the olm’s body. From its back to its belly, from its head to its chin. Then it settled atop the little mound of ash.
The boy named Abel merely watched the scene with perfect composure. He had reached his conclusion long ago. The olm could not be caught or touched. So it was impossible to stop it, either.
He had reached out countless times before, trying to touch the olm, but every time it slipped right through his hand. Just like the cigarette ash the man had shaken loose.
It was the same with a fountain pen, a fork, or any sharp object he held against it. The olm could not be stabbed. It simply let everything that touched its body pass through, like water or air.
“Jerome isn’t even old enough to hit puberty yet, and he says I’m right. He says it really is an olm.”
The newspaper spread wide rebuffed Abel’s shout. Only the man’s mocking voice came from behind it.
“When I was young, I had an older brother who followed me around just like my son does. Goya Royce. He was practically immortal, that man… but in the end, he left you and your mother behind and went ahead of us. Please don’t give Jerome the same kind of loss.”
Whenever Abel heard the name Goya, he felt as though one side of his chest had been hollowed out. A man he remembered only vaguely as someone he had once called Father. A man whose face had grown indistinct even in his memory.
Shaking off his thoughts, Abel reached a hand out for no particular reason toward the irritating olm. The man, who happened to catch sight of it over the top of his newspaper, swiftly snatched away the ashtray the olm had been standing on and said,
“Now, now. No smoking until you’re all grown up.”
The sudden movement of its footing seemed to make the olm lose its balance. It dropped onto the tabletop with a soft thud, and perhaps from the impact, flattened itself against the surface, belly pressed tightly to the wood.
Abel found the olm even more infuriating. Wasn’t it supposed to pass through the table, too? Why did it pretend to have a physical form at times like this? Why did it only collide with things when it wanted to, and appear only to people it wanted to be seen by?
“What is ruling the people right now, Abel? …Abel? Are you listening?”
Abel was so absorbed in glaring at the olm as it continued its leisurely walk that he only realized much later that the man had spoken to him.
There was no need to summon the name of some royal family said to have existed in the distant past to answer what was ruling the people now. Nor was the name of any religious leader, or the god that religion worshiped, the correct answer. What came from Abel’s mouth was a clear and concise abbreviation.
“Uh, um… OLM.”
“Right. The cave olm, too, is spelled the same way. ‘Our Lives Matter.’ Around the time a single vast system unified the world, a species bearing the same name conveniently disappeared all at once. From the caves across the lands that had once been their natural habitat.”
Irritation colored the man’s voice. He sounded as though he were scolding Abel for making him tell the same story he had already read aloud countless times.
“Some imaginative adult like you once said that perhaps we were being ruled by those tiny amphibians.”
As the man continued, the irritation in his voice gradually faded, replaced by a trace of scorn.
“A king who exists only as a concept, a god who hides its form, a prophet who descended from some distant star along the Cloudway. Countless explorers and scholars attached whatever theories they pleased and did all sorts of things in an attempt to uncover OLM’s true identity. More than a few people even wandered around searching for the extinct olm. But a claim that you’ve already found it? That’s a new one.”
The man stared blankly at the wall, which was about as far away as anything in the house could be. On it shimmered the back of some father who resembled his son.
Abel was also gazing at the wall, bare of even a single picture frame, when a voice as sharp as a knife suddenly flew at them.
“Stop talking nonsense and get ready for bed already.”
Abel and the man turned their heads at the same time toward the source of the voice. The woman who had been sitting beside Jerome, who was sleeping peacefully while clutching his blanket in the darkened room, was its owner.
She glared in turn at her husband and her son’s friend.
Though he was young, Abel knew enough to distinguish a threat to his life when he saw one. He also had the sense to know when he was not the primary target of that threat. He was an altruistic boy who knew when to apply the brakes and retreat on his own. It was because of that nature that he hurried out of his friend’s house.
The cold air of midnight brushed his cheeks. The olm hurried after him on its four short legs, following the especially lonely figure of someone who nonetheless had company.
After turning through the familiar alleys a few times, an open field spread out before him. This empty stretch, situated along the road to and from Jerome’s house, was always the most boring part of the journey.
Across the world, the mysterious OLM was known by different nicknames. Usually, people compared it to the greatest forms of nature, which served as both their cradles and their graves. For example, the Mitigor people, who had settled beneath Galleria, the giant tree that filled the sky, called OLM the “Shade Lord.”
Abel looked down at the tiny creature that shared the exact same name as the being the villagers revered as the “Ridge Lord.”
“Why can only I see you?”
“Why do you keep following me?”
His voice, thick with frustration, scattered pointlessly across the grassland.
The creature lay still, blinking its tiny golden eyes as it looked up at Abel. There was no emotion to be read in them. No remorse, no malice, nothing at all.
As Abel climbed the shallow hill, pushing through lush weeds that had grown far taller than the olm’s body, a long wall eventually came into view. Bathed in moonlight, the pale stone wall gave off a gentle glow as it indifferently divided the places where humans could settle from those where they could not.
The massive barrier, as tall as two grown men standing one atop the other, stretched endlessly along the ridge of the grassland. It was the spectacular sight the people of Melzia proudly showed off. By the time it came into view, home was close. A little farther down the hill, a small cottage appeared.
“I’m home.”
As always at this hour, the house was quiet. Wooden walls, a wooden table, a wooden floor. Like the olm, the things inside that could not speak gave off only a sour wooden smell in reply.
Abel suddenly remembered something his mother had told him about his father, Goya. Before becoming an explorer, he had been a carpenter. Had he built this house, too? Abel did not know. He had never asked. Goya had hastened his own death before his son was old enough to wonder about such things.
The wall clock was nearing midnight. His mother, Beline, was probably still busy serving customers at the tavern.
Those who had returned alive from Perem, beyond the wall, would have gone there today as well. Abel stopped on his way to the second-floor bedroom and changed direction. They might believe him. People who chased romance instead of the newspaper’s dense columns might.
A short walk down the hill from the house stood a tavern on the sloping foothills. Abel slowly made his way toward it, smoke puffing from its chimney even in the middle of the night. The closer he got, the louder the boisterous voices became. The moment he shoved open the old door, they burst over him along with a wave of heat.
Unlike the house, where only a chilly silence hung in the air, the tavern was packed with the heavy smell of people.
The old wooden pillars supporting the ceiling creaked and groaned without pause under the heavy footsteps of customers moving between the floors. On the wall beyond the noisy common room hung a map of Perem, roughly drawn by someone who had picked up fragments of explorers’ tales. Dark stains had dried here and there across it, impossible to tell whether they were splashes of blood or spilled bar snacks.
Once, a drunk had pointed to those stains and bragged that they marked the location of buried treasure. Naturally, it had been nonsense accompanied by the rank smell of stale liquor.
No one paid any attention to the tavernkeeper’s son when he suddenly walked into the establishment. Abel watched the adults, who were too busy raising their voices at one another, then waited for a lull in the commotion and quietly uttered the word. But before he could even finish, derisive laughter erupted from all around him, making his expectations meaningless.
“Hahaha! This little squirt’s got more imagination than the rest of us! An olm? If I’d found one of those, I’d be filthy rich by now!”
When one of the men shouted and slammed down his cup, the heat in the common room rose to an even more vulgar pitch. Abel’s ears burned like the cast-iron pot in the kitchen that had been simmering meat stew all night to fill their hungry stomachs.
“Sure, kid. Before you go on about olms, let me ask you one thing. What do you think of Perem? I figure the olm is hiding somewhere in Perem.”
A man who looked especially drunk among the group approached and perched his butt precariously on a chair. Noticeably small and pale among the thick-boned explorers who had weathered every hardship imaginable, he was a botanist who joined the expeditions to study Perem’s ecology.
The scholar had approached to speak with Abel in hopes of rescuing the innocent boy from the group, but to Abel, even those words sounded like nothing more than another grumble. What followed was indeed a complaint.
“I can’t say much when you ask how something so small could survive Perem’s harsh environment, but is it really right to search only half a world—the half that excludes Perem—and conclude that it isn’t there…?”
“Hey! Not that half-world nonsense again. Cut the crap and get lost.”
The leader of the group interrupted the scholar by setting down his heavy mug. When the scholar flinched and closed his mouth, the others snickered as if they had been waiting for it.
Without the scholar’s vast knowledge, the explorers would never have been able to distinguish Perem’s poisonous herbs from its valuable rare plants. It would be no exaggeration to say that he had contributed enormously to the expedition’s survival rate. Even so, immediately after a blood-soaked expedition, the tavern belonged exclusively to the explorers.
The scholar drained the last of the hard liquor in his cup and lowered his head. A despair even greater than the one he had felt in Perem weighed him down. He had wanted to use the alcohol, even if only for once, to pour out his long-standing complaints about the poor treatment he had received. But the scholar was not the only one who had gotten drunk. Before long, the men’s pent-up energy was exploding all around the room.
“Fight!”
“Hit him properly!”
The scholar struggled through the muscular men who broke into fistfights whenever they got the chance and quietly slipped out of the tavern.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of the commotion, the leader picked something up from a dish and held it in front of Abel’s eyes.
“Rumella. It only grows in Perem. Looks disgusting, but it tastes good.”
Its pale, thinly sliced cross-section looked like a plant root, with delicate veins resembling dragonfly wings shimmering inside it.
The leader grinned and stuck two pieces of Rumella to his palms. Then he covered Abel’s eyes with his large hands, sealing them shut so tightly that not a single ray of light could slip through.
That was when Rumella’s true value revealed itself in the darkness. Fluorescent light rippled along the patterns in its translucent cross-section, sketching out living dragonfly wings.
One minute, no, three minutes, no, five. Only when Abel had lost all sense of time did the leader finally pull his hands away.
As expected, the fluorescence vanished beneath the tavern’s lights. But every time Abel blinked, afterimages of fluorescent dragonflies remained, fluttering in his vision.
Abel blinked repeatedly with a dazed expression, chasing the traces of Rumella. He had forgotten both the shame that had heated his cheeks only minutes earlier and what had caused it.
“What a prank. This boy needs to sleep now, too. Abel, hurry home and go to bed. Abel?”
Unfortunately, Abel was in no state to hear his mother Beline. He merely kept blinking, unaware that the leader was gently stroking her backside.
“So even this remote little Melzia has something as precious as Rumella.”
Beline lightly laughed at the leader’s joke and played along.
“It can’t be easy to harvest. Look, even our dear scholar has already left.”
“You’re a poisonous herb yourself.”
The leader snorted and replied in a low voice. Then he leaned in, pressed his lips close to Beline’s ear, and whispered.
“Let me tell you something interesting. They say if you eat enough Rumella root, your blood starts to glow, too. Especially in places where the blood pools.”
The leader took Beline by the wrist. Guided by him, her fingertips slowly slid down along the front of his trousers. When her hand reached a place radiating heat, Beline raised one eyebrow slightly and glanced at him.
“I suppose we won’t need to turn on the light in my room tonight.”
At Beline’s words, the tavern once again erupted in laughter.
As the adults’ jokes grew more heated, the dragonfly-wing afterimages suspended in the air began to fade. Coming back to himself, Abel quietly slipped out through the tavern’s back door.
A few steps up a narrow path stood a lone zelkova tree on a nearby hill. Abel headed there with familiar footsteps.
Beneath that tree, wrapped in the cold air of midnight, was Abel’s refuge. He slept more soundly lying there than when he was alone in the desolate house.
[Step, step.]
Woken by sudden footsteps, Abel looked down the hill. A silhouette moving stealthily with its back bent low faintly entered his view.
Abel narrowed his eyes and examined the silhouette more closely. It was the very scholar who had said the olm might be in Perem.
The scholar had not once touched the Rumella the whole group had shared. That was why no light escaped from him as he hurried through the darkness of the deep night. Only the faint moonlight dimly illuminated his outline instead.
A small knife was in the scholar’s hand. His stride was straight and swift, with none of the drunkenness from two hours earlier, and his eyes were clear. Had he been pretending to be drunk from the beginning? Just as the thought occurred to Abel, he finally realized that those eyes, fierce and sharp with anger, were headed straight toward his house.
[Rustle, rustle.]
Something moved quickly through the grass somewhere below. It was the olm. The creature was following the man, moving at a speed incomparable to the way it usually followed Abel.
Abel squeezed his eyes shut. He had a premonition that something terrible was about to happen, but he could do nothing.
There was no way to stop it. Not by shouting, nor by running over to intervene. That was why his body would not move rashly. Crushed beneath his fear, Abel was rooted in the ground like a Rumella root.
Stop. Don’t hurt the scholar. No matter how desperately he shouted the words, what good was it to shout only inside his mind?
Abel shut his eyes tight. Then, just as he had in the tavern, he pictured the afterimage of Rumella. He imagined himself flying through the night sky, fluorescent dragonfly wings fluttering from both shoulders.
The next day, a rumor spread through Melzia that someone had gone missing.
A search to uncover the truth continued for several days, but in the end, neither a trace nor a body was found. According to the others’ testimony, the missing man had last been seen at Beline’s tavern.
On his way back from running an errand for his mother, Abel saw adults gathered in small groups. Every one of them was talking about the incident, and the same expression always followed.
“This time, too.”
As always, Abel looked down at the creature following close at his feet and asked quietly,
“…Did you eat him this time, too?”
As expected, no answer came. Abel paused, considering his next question, then spoke again.
“…Was he tasty?”
He thought it was a fairly fitting question for this utterly incomprehensible creature—but
There was still no answer.
One day, a pitch-black creature appeared and began circling around a boy. From around that time, people in Melzia would occasionally disappear without a trace.
The reason a boy of only nine desperately tried to tell the world about that presence was not because of premature puberty. It was unmistakably because he was afraid.