"Gone?" Vanessa took a moment to react, then widened her eyes. "Did you find the place, with everything around it completely unchanged, but the ruins themselves were gone, as if you'd remembered wrong, without a single trace?"
"Exactly!"
Eleanor spoke excitedly. She had explained this to many people, but Vanessa was the first who truly understood what had happened. Then she, too, realized something. "Could it be..."
"Yes, I've seen something like that." Vanessa lowered her voice and told Eleanor about the Ratway and Daydream Bookshop. Eleanor was utterly stunned. Had anyone else told her such a thing, she would never have believed it, but this was Vanessa, and she had experienced it once herself...
"Erased... history changed...!" Eleanor drew a sharp breath. "Could it be... history really has more than one layer?" "One layer? What does that mean?"
"When I came to the Night Watch Bureau, Inspector Luke once alluded to it. He noticed the [It] inside me, so I asked him for help getting rid of [It]."
"He told me not to worry, because-"
"[It] was no longer in this layer of history."
Vanessa still looked utterly puzzled. History was her field of study, yet she had never heard anything like this.
"Did that inspector explain it to you?"
"No. No matter how much I asked afterward, he refused to say anything, and even hinted that I shouldn't ask too many questions. I thought it was some sort of taboo related to the Supernatural, so I let the matter drop."
Eleanor bit her lip, but still voiced the conjecture that even she found absurd:
"Could it be... history has more than one layer, and that's why it can be altered, why things disappear... They didn't hide themselves away, but truly never existed in this stretch of our history?"