The Ghostwriter
The rain had not stopped in two days, and neither had Sept Hunter’s excitement.
Twenty-three, underpaid, and pathologically obsessed writer, Sept had moved to a decaying town in the hills of Northern Italy to shadow the man he thought of as "the last genius on Earth." That man was Aldo Verrani, a mathematician, painter, quantum philosopher, and to Sept, the closest thing to God.
Aldo lived in a house older than time, its walls were filled with cryptic sketches, shelves of dusty manuscripts, and secrets. Secrets Sept longed to unravel.
Sept's plan, which he succeeded at, was pretty straightforward. Get close to Verrani, earn his trust, and write the definitive biography. A passionate work of art, a biography that showed the living, breathing image of brilliance he saw and loved in his muse. Sept kept a brown leather-bound notebook on him at all times, scribbling every word Aldo said, every flick of his paintbrush, every stare that lingered too long.
Then the accident came. The unexpected happened.
A rain-slicked curve on the mountainside road. A deer. A second too slow. Sept's car flipped, danced a ballet of shadow and light, and came to rest upside down among the olive trees. He felt no pain. Just a flutter. Then silence.
He was dead. Sept Hunter was gone.
But death was not the end.
Sept opened his eyes to a world slightly out of focus, like a memory seen through fogged glass. His body lay crushed and lifeless beneath the crumpled car. Yet here he stood.
He should've panicked. Screamed. Instead, he felt... the weight of purpose.
He drifted back to Verrani’s villa. The front door opened before he touched it. Walls whispered to him now. Time unspooled like ribbon. Verrani, unaware of his new shadow, continued his routines: lectures over wine, secret meetings in the cellar, sexual escapades, tearful late-night phone calls to a woman named Clara.
And Sept watched. Documented. The ghostwriting began.
In death, he saw more than he ever could alive. Verrani's layers peeled away like wet bark. An affair with a student in Paris, an illegal AI weapon project funded in Bitcoin, his quiet guilt over a plagiarized theorem that made him famous.
Sept chronicled it all, his spectral fingers scrawling across pages that existed only in his mind. He read the notes aloud to the empty attic at night. The house listened. Sometimes, he swore, it approved.
The years passed. Verrani aged. His body weakened, but his mind remained sharp, nearly cruel in its precision. Then, on a gray morning thick with mist, Verrani slumped over his desk, heart silenced forever mid-equation.
Sept stood beside him, eyes hollow with grief. But as Verrani's soul escaped its shell, Sept felt something new. He felt release. The manuscript was done.
Or so he thought.
He drifted.
Across clouds. Through decades. Then into a delivery room.
A cry. Light. Cold.
Reborn.
His name was Luca now. Son of violinists in Vienna. Yet even as a newborn, he remembered the feel of a fountain pen, the scent of Aldo's tobacco, the exact rhythm of rain against the old villa. He remembered everything!
His mother's face swam before him, and he blinked.
There was work yet to do.
End.
