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Days pass by in a gray blur. All of Wisburg is drab and dirty, a colorless affair; not black, not mourning colors, just the color of sickness and misery.
Thomas pays it no mind. His world is devoid of color, of life. He is in mourning, but it feels like a sickness rather than an emotion. An abscess, a rot, gnawing away at his insides, poisoning them and turning them to diseased muck.
Somehow he still wakes every morning. Forced to go through the motions of daily life. He feeds Greta and tends to her, the highlight of his day, and then he dresses in rumpled clothes that have begun to smell, and walks out into the streets that still reek of death and shit.
What a cruel jape at his expense, for life to carry on as though the world didn't end New Year's day, 1839. For him to be forced to turn in for work day in and day out.
It feels more like a performance of life now, all of them miserable alongside each other, repeating the life they lived before the plague — before Orlok — even though the work is drying up. Nobody wants to come to Wisburg. The few who still reside there, who made it through the apocalypse, all want to leave it.
There are days Thomas wants to leave it. Long stretches where he is out on the walk from his apartment to the firm — not Knock's, but a competitor, the only competitor left, the sole survivor, hobbling along — or from the firm to a client or back, or from the firm to his home and some part of him dreams of collecting Greta and purchasing a horse and riding off down the road that took him from Ellen in the first place.
No destination in mind. Just somewhere far away.
Maybe an abandoned castle in the mountains of a distant country. One full of superstition and superstitious people. The kind of folk who would believe him when he wept over his beloved, who gave herself to a monster to save him and all others it had not yet slain.
He doesn't have the money to travel though; he barely has the money to survive.
Somewhere in Transylvania there is a satchel full of his things and a small bag of gold coins, enough to live comfortably for the rest of his — Greta's — life. Except his stomach churns at the thought of seeing the cursed things again, letting alone spending weeks to go and retrieve them and remake his life somewhere else.
Thomas doesn't think he could do it, even if he had the means without that damned pouch. It would only put too much distance between him and what remains of Ellen besides Greta.
Their home, for however brief it might have been. The shops they frequented, the sights they saw, the plot of dirt where she lays buried.
Better to remain and let the sickness fester in him, the grief that feels like disease. All he needs is to live as long as Greta. After that…well, there will be no one left to mourn him. He will have given life after Ellen its chance, as stillborn as it might have been.
This is not life, it is limbo, a purgatory though the faith of his childhood denounced such doctrine.
Thomas has become the walking corpse.